All Welcome promise something good for me;

he’d returned to the cliffs, finding something intriguing about the tall, naturally towering stone, and the way that the ocean still managed to wend its way through it all. Not travelling far, remembering how long it had taken her to get back down from the high vantage where she’d met Cress, she stops at the first suitable place, and looks out across the wide, endless breadth of the sea.

The sun is a golden ripple along its surface that occasionally is lightened into mercurial tones by the dance and waver of the waves. She watches this magical alteration from gilded to silvered with a passive eye, her mind actively playing through the difficult truths that had suddenly become her life.

She still had not found any trace of her family in this world, though it seemed that there were many from Helovia, dwelling in the peace to be found here in Novus. She had Evangeline, at least, but her old tutor was not the same as Maude remembered her; twisted and changed by the death and destruction that had impended their arrival here, miss Eva was not a young woman, ready for change, as Tilney’s daughter was. She was a woman set in her ways, at one with routine. Maude, however, didn’t truly understand this; it left her feeling as if Evangeline would rather her not be around, and so she had done just that, and slipped away from her one, steady tie to home early that morning, to be alone, as seemed her new fate.

She was mentally chiding herself for being so pessimistic when a gentle, masculine voice breaks her chain of thoughts. Looking over a the source of the sound to discover the kind, bay gentleman she had seen at the meeting in the tower, her smile is tentative, but warm.

“It is beautiful,” she answers, taking a step aside, to allow the man room alongside her, if he so desired. She, like her new company, rarely thinks about the more vile natures of men. “Do you come here to think and pray, too?”

@Asterion

She smiles at his remark that this is his first time at the cliffs; remembering her first visit here, she giggles softly.

“Be cautious which edge you approach,” she smiles, recalling how both she and Cress had been startled by the surprising sea, “sometimes, it hits the stone hard enough that it, like, blasts into the air. It pretty much knocked this girl I know out of the sky the last time I was here, and sure surprised me.”

Leaning slightly over the edge, and looking at the eddy and sway of the distant sea about the spade-like shape of the cliff below, Maude’s face becomes one of sincere pondering, before smiling with (what she assumes, anyway) a sage nod towards Asterion.

“I don’t think it can get us here, though,” surmises the youth aloud, “this cliff-face is much different than that one was.”

When he joins her, the girl does her best to look at him, without staring. She’s not always good at it, often getting preoccupied with thoughts about this, or that, but as she gets older, she grows more adept at moving her eyes about, even when she’s deep in thought about something other than what she currently looks upon. Moving between the stranger and the sea, her pale green gaze is kind, and inquisitive.

That is, until he mentions Gods, as more than a passing thought; her joy suddenly crumbles away, becoming a face of sorrow which gazes far, far out over the sea.

“More Gods that probably don’t hear the prayers offered them,” she solemnly says, doing her best to keep her tears barred behind the flimsy guise of satisfaction she’d managed to piece together in the quiet peace of Novus, “I don’t know of any others to pray to, though.”

She finds that her eyes slowly wander down, to where the flimsy tufts of grass drift lazily in the wind, or dangle over the precipice, and how her hooves are embedded neatly among their autumn-withered bodies. She wonders, while she looks at the shadows of the grass play across her ankles and creamy hooves, if she and the stranger are right, at all; maybe they can hear her. Maybe the Earth is still there, beneath her, if she wants him to be; maybe the wind caressing her cheeks is her Goddess, after all.

The tears she’d struggled to hold back fall, regardless, one and then another, slow and steady down her cheeks. With a sniffle, she disregards her heavy emotions, trying her best to smile and force what tears threaten to follow the two traitors behind that warm expression, and her earnest desire to not feel as if the world was a place in which she would forever be tragically alone, and cut off from the sense of belonging that had once defined her every day existence.

“I’m Maude,” she manages, her smile becoming a slight wince as she (somewhat) admits to having become caught up in talking to Miss Eva, rather than listening to what was being talked about, “I think we were at the court meeting together. I… I admit I didn’t catch your name. I get distracted sometimes.”

@Asterion

ot quite as delighted by the appearance of the wave, seemingly drawn from the ocean by her mention of it, the girl does smile, despite her melancholy, inward mood. The pleasure of the gentleman alongside her is infectious, after all, and she is the sort of girl who adores the playfulness of fate, as much as it had also caused her the pain she presently endures. Feeling the kiss of the mist left behind as the waters fall back to the sea below, the maiden also allows herself to feel as the sun draws the chilly dampness away from her cheeks and neck with its radiant warmth.

“Me too,” she answers, no laughter wreathing her cheerful grin as it does stranger’s, “it’d be awful cold, this time of year.”

She implies, of course, that she wouldn’t truly mind being hit by the wave all that much, so long as it wasn’t cool or cold, as it was presently. A warm day was actually the right sort of day, if you asked Maude; nothing beat cool water when the sun seemed intent on baking you right into the ground, and made even the shady forests unbearably humid. Today, however, was the sort of day that a dousing might leave you sick, if not worse, and though the light spritzing she had received from the jettisoning wave was pleasant, she was sure more than that would be quite awful, indeed.

The distraction of the pleasantry of the sun upon her was short lived, however, for the girl could not bask in the glory of things which reminded her of her forever lost home for very long. Her tears are slow, and too obvious – the sudden tenseness of bay assures her of this. Though he tries to reassure her with what he says, it only makes it worse, and the tears flow freely, becoming a pained sob when he gently touches her shoulder.

Though they were real, they were also dead! She refrains from shouting. Her head collapses downwards, her eyes squeezing shut, and the hot tears which brimmed within them are forced out in thick, wavering treks down her face. The sun no longer feels comforting, and the sound of the sea merely wavers in-between, rather than soothing her with the steadiness of its rhythm. Though it feels as if she cries and dwells within herself for hours, it is truly only a minute or so before her crying quiets, and, very, very quietly, she murmurs:

“I – I’m sorry,” mumbles the girl, her nose shaking to and fro very slowly, her words warbling nearly incoherently with her emotions, “I… well, h-home… they…”

A heavy sigh slips through the air.

“They’re dead,” quietly continues Maude with greater composure, glancing very quickly away from the sea to the stallion, but then again seeming to lose herself in the bob and sway of the sea beyond, “so I am not sure if they are still Gods at all.”

Staring out at the ocean, she silently cries, at least until the conversation moves towards names, and the meeting. Glad that the man has forgiven her for being less than studious in a situation she probably would have been better served to have been, the cremello darling smiles and nods, finding she agrees with Asterion quite fully. Even if she’d been inside a building like that before, and hadn’t had friends about, the news that had been delivered was the sort that changed kingdoms.

Remembering when King Tembovu gave his position to Miss Lyanna, the girl wonders if the changes about the Dusk court will be similar – mostly positive, albeit strange, for a time. She certainly hopes so.

“I guess it was a worthy meeting, then,” tries to more cheerfully converse Maude, her smile faintly appearing on her still tear-dampened face as she remembers other meetings that were far, far less eventful than the previous two she’d thought about, “I’ve been to a few that were really hard to stay awake through.”

@Asterion eeee thank you <3 Asterion is very charming himself :D