#andais

She fell in love with a girl on fire.

Father.

He demands perfection of a child far too young to understand what what the word means. Instead, she learns to replace the term with others (obedience, compliance, silence) until he finds approval in something, anything, that she does.

This is not her world, she sighs, but he presses her firmly until her will to be anything but Arkadian breaks. This is not simply her birthright, but his, this blessing which he refuses to allow for her to squander.

Andais Artemisia Ambrosious

It was not a coincidence that her mother bestowed her with name which could only be described as an alliteration of his surname. Branding her as the daughter of a God for the world to see, she boasted of the birth of their child without any sense of shame. Regardless of the whispers of their neighbors, there existed a pride in the eyes of the woman whom had been chosen by Zeus, himself.

If anyone were to ask, this child would be Artemis incarnate. There was pride from the moment she was born. Hope and dreams poured into a single being. Pride and happiness, into a tiny delicate form, that is what this child was.

Bastard.

The bonuses for April 30, 2016 are:

Seafoam Primary, Guardian, Facet Gene.

Ahh…Andais and Sluagh. I’ve been slacking on writing this all out and figuring out the details. xD Longest answer ever, I am sorry. So much has happened o.O

Andais and Sluagh came together, Sluagh was one of the few that could understand her, and more than that…they had a shared interest. Neither one of them would shy away from the darker magics. Though I should note their relationship was never sexual or out of love—they nested simply in experimentation. How did magic passed down, could it be siphoned from the hatchlings, was there power in bloodlines… 

Sluagh was the more tempered of the two. Shadow magic, blood magic, necromancy…he wouldn’t exactly shy away from any of that, though he does understand that certain things have consequences and some things just shouldn’t be messed with. After unearthing a bit of information on the Shade and through distant studies, Sluagh decided to err on the side of caution: the Shade was the one force of potential power he would not touch. 

Andais, on the other hand, grew more interested. Her experiments fast turned toward the Shade, she just left Sluagh out of it. 

When Nox asked Sluagh to nest with her, she desperately wanted an heir because she was feeling her own mortality. She asked Sluagh out of friendship more than anything else. He did ask Andais if the coatl had any objections, but she said no. It’s doubtful she considered much at that point outside of her own experiments. Andais had slowly become power hungry, Sluagh though…with his body failing him more and more to his gembond and the fact that using his own magic was destroying him faster, drew back even more from their work. The chasm between them was already there, just like the friendship between Nox and Sluagh (they both suffer from an extreme case of gembond, and Sluagh has been trying to find a cure for both of them since his arrival in Nocturne). 

The final wedge between Sluagh and Andais came from a new arrival in Nocturne: Cassiel. A shade-beast from Saeva Renatus (@azunara). He’s the ‘son’ of an incredibly powerful plague matriarch, one Nocturne would rather not enrage.  Cassiel heard stories of Nocturne from Mellori and wanted to come, and Nox didn’t deny him…after all despite being shade-touched, he seems okay for now. Still, he’s heavily watched, but he was exactly what Andais wanted to experiment on. 

When forbidden to go anywhere near him, Andais made an attempt to kill Cassiel. Fearing war with Saeva Renatus and a possible outbreak of the Shade, Nox ordered her executed…especially when Andais’ other experiments were brought to light. When Andais then made an attempt on Nox’s life, she pretty much sealed her fate with all of Nocturne—including Sluagh. 

Mistral was actually the one to see to Andais’ execution (well, to public knowledge, it might have been Styx). 

 As for how Sluagh feels about his relationship now with Nox…in a lot of ways it’s growing. There’s definitely a romantic tension between them, but at the same time, there’s a lot of baggage still there.