#hartfallen

Miss Athaeda Hartfell

Long speculated, it has been, amongst my newfound kin: The nature of our affliction with regards to its physical manifestations. The variety of visible alterations to the body is greater than that of every other magical suffusion we as a civilization have yet encountered. Which isn't to say that sufficient magical enrichment of other kinds cannot produce physiological changes, only that I have not observed such. Barring, of course, the Lightforged; whose metallic augmentation does not, by my mind, equate to the flesh and blood changes the Ren'dorei display.

So I must question, what is it the makes the void different? How does it interact with the body and mind that creates such violently differential results in those who have been made to harbor it? The answer, insofar as I can see it, must be madness. But madness is not an affliction of magic. Madness isn't something that can be corrected with humble potions, a healers stitch, or even the touch of a priest. Madness is emotional inherently and the void's connection to it, I speculate from observation of myself and my brothers and sisters, suggests that perhaps the nothing that creeps at the edges of reality is not nothing. It is feeling.

Consider, if you will, the stoic nature of the light. The forced peace maintained by the naaru, shattered after millennia in a void born transition of chaos and rage. Does this not reflect the emotional outbursts experienced by many when finally allowed to feel something they have previously been made to swallow? Consider the ways in which genuine emotion is often punished. Silence yourself. Patience, prudence, politeness. Don't be rash, we are often told.

What if the magic in your blood is inherently rash? What if it demands you make manifest the things you run from?

I have observed, in the years since the expedition, a multitude of mutations. In that observation I have begun to draw parallels and now put forward that the void does not, truly, change us. It simply makes us more of whatever we already were. It forces outward that which we kept within. The madness that lives in each of us. Our most extreme natures twisted into something we must contend with bodily.

A man who was enthralled with promiscuity, consumed by his lack of impulse control and failures in loyalty, developed additional eyes as a result of the blessing. There's a phrase I've heard spoken, "I only have eyes for you." The truth of his nature, the metaphorical parallel to his peril, made visible to all.

A woman who found her talent as a gossip. Unable to keep a single word of confidence before the affliction. She now possesses many more mouths. Across her limbs and core. They mutter without end. She's had to stitch them closed to keep them quiet. No one tells her secrets anymore.

Another, a social climber. A greed driven hanger-on. Desperate for wealth and renown, now sports more literal suckers across the palms and fingers. Left to much more literally cling to anything so unlucky as to be placed in their hands.

Someone with too much pride baring a musculature so swollen and overblown that no one draws near enough to feed their ego anymore.

Athaeda had come back to Ashenvale. This forest was a bittersweet place. She was born here, under the darkened canopy, in the back of a wagon and spent much of her early life among these trees. A strange, mostly high elven, girl with wild strawberry curls stood out against all the deeper shades of lavender. She had to laugh a little, her lips curling upwards into a sad smile at the thought, after the change she didn’t stand out in the same way. She carried a basket and a bottle of wine and had taken the bells out of her hair, something that almost never happened. “Grandmother...” She spoke in a soft tone as she approached the moonwell. “Grandmother, I need you.” Aeda knew that wisps didn’t have to stay in one place. She knew her grandmother’s ghost could be anywhere but she held hope close to her heart. 

((This is told from the perspective of Helna, a succubus who is part of what Athaeda refers to as her “Unusual Little Family”))  Helna watched as the figure of the gentleman, if you could still call him that after what she’d heard, departed into the shadows of Duskwood. Her hooves, heavy as they were, made little sound against the soft darkened grass. The shimmer of fel magic dissipated and she was no longer cloaked in invisibility, unconcerned with remaining hidden now that the male had left.

“Sweetling?.. Little Aeda-bell...?” She mustered her sweetest tone which lingered low and heady; she was still a succubus. She frowned-disgusted at a puddle of recent sick by the door and waved a hand at the sharply dressed imp as he went about trying to clean it. Dropping to a half kneel and careful not to dirty herself; she spoke to her fellow fiend, flat-questioning and stern. “She is still inside? And whole?”

how about #3 for the OC ask game?

((Hi there! 💜 Thank you so much and welcome to my little corner!

Athaeda's relationship with her childhood is complicated. So I'm going to break this up into a couple parts.~

If she could really, truly change something? Without limitation? She would make her mother a kinder person. Amaryl was a stone of a woman and deeply unforgiving of her daughter's sensitive nature.

Rhys was dead. He had been for years now. The mirror of herself. The reflection of her monster. The restless ship for whom she had served as lighthouse, and the lantern that had illuminated her own path forward. The man she had loved.

Athaeda sat in a desk chair, her legs pulled up to sit crisscross in the seat, void-silver orbs scanned the room around her before falling back on the open, blank page in front of her. This wasn't her journal. The ancient book that held not only her own memories but those of her ancestors going back for twelve generations of bastard daughters. This was his. All that was left of him. A book he had left in her possession, half filled with his personal research notes and musings on the void, the other half empty.

It felt as if the book was staring back at her, waiting, listening the way he used to. The pen in her hand felt heavy. She could feel the memory of his eyes on her, the way he used to search her for every hidden truth she wasn't yet prepared to unearth. Invasive, yes, but always gentle. Surgeon's hands. Careful.

The words flowed from her hand just as quiet tears from her eyes.

"Rhys,

You said I wouldn't lose you if I said no. I still believe you. I don't think you knew, when the carriage door closed and I watched you leave, that it was the last time you would ever lay eyes on me. It's a strange thing, isn't it? We decided that night that however much I loved you, and you me, it wasn't right. You wished me luck in finding him; a man whose approval I would seek in equal measure to his quest for my own, because you would never be him.

Light and shadows, forgive me, I wish you had been. I've tried to carry on, you understand. I think you would be pleased with some of the progress I've made. Prouder still that I accomplished it in your absence, without your encouragement, but as I sit alone I wonder what the point of any of it is. I spent my small years dreaming of love. I don't think I ever told you that, although you might've guessed. That I wanted to be different from my mother, and her mother, and her mother. That I wanted someone to stay. I thought love was the problem. Its absence. That I and my mother and back had all been children of passion rather than care.

But then you happened. And I felt love. And with it pain, confusion, fear. But still love. At the end of everything, always love. It still didn't matter. You still had to go.

I speak to others about you in the past tense now. I try to keep you out of my thoughts but sometimes it just doesn't work. Stars help me, I miss you. Even the parts that bothered me. The self righteous tone you would put on when you chastised my self flagellation. The smug little smirk you wore when arguing with your sister. I miss you. I miss you and I've been trying so hard to imagine that I don't because no one wants to deal with a weeping woman.

It's you I'm learning from. Even now. Your notes, your ideas, your experiments. I'm going to keep going. I promise.

It had happened. Awake and aware, eyes like stars looked towards the horizon. So much had changed. Memories lost and others found. A chain forged across generations had been sundered much as the world had been at its creation. But this newfound freedom... Is it to be taken alone? To what end? What is the purpose of wings if one takes to the sky in solitude? She had ever been wary of heights. The breaker of binds had done so only to leave her? Perhaps mother was right... All love is temporary. Even the kind which saves you.