this is Salem, a land filled with magic and maladies. It is a place where witches and their elemental familiars gather, a home to legend and
lore that predates time itself. Yet of all the wicked and wonderful stories the past can tell us of, the most magical are the ones yet to happen.
This is Salem - this is the start of your very own journey. Welcome to starfall
Starfall is an animaga witch roleplay set in mostly modern times. Members play as witches in a world plagued by monsters, where the only safe spots are walled cities. Starfall strives to be a character-driven roleplay with expansive lore and a highly interactive plotline. We want to allow members to
create and look back on a magical journey, and mold the site and its plot as their characters grow.
[attr="class","diag"]The boy slips out and very far away from the dance floor. Eleanor has half a mind to follow after him, from a distance, to make sure he gets into no more trouble. She watches him go instead, as the now smaller group of dancers rearranges itself to make up for the loss of some members. After all, the woman may be worried about the young soul, but she hadn't fulfilled her quota of swing for the night. Seconds tick by, and he appears to have found a new distraction in the raffle being held. Fundraising for better security, they say. It is no charity case, but Eleanor makes a mental note to buy a couple of tickets later.
Finding a new partner doesn't prove to be a hard task. With most unwilling dancers now out of the field, it is those that do enjoy the activity and do want to keep dancing that are left for her to partner with. They also happen to be pretty good at it, unsurprisingly. Eleanor is left to keep up with swirls and jumps and slides—the Lindy Turn, the Anchor Step, the Jumpin' Joe, and an variety of new moves she hasn't seen since she left Sundial for the comfort of anonymity.
It's fun. Physically taxing? Perhaps. Though Eleanor was by no means old, she wasn't exactly in the prime of her youth either. She's still laughing at a younger dancer's crazy creativity with moves when she's twirled in a new partner's direction. She's immediately aware of the more robust complexion of this new partner's body; and, somehow, it feels familiar. Which is quite strange, you see, because her husband was not attending this party, and his face was a lot grumpier, if not a lot less intimidating than a black eyepatch, and she wonders what terrible accident could have done such a cruel thing to him, until her eyes land on the man's unveiled one, the same pale blue of a clear sky, and then the blonde tresses dancing over it to the same rhythm of their swing.
Eleanor freezes. More accurate, perhaps, would be to say her movements slow down to a complete still. It can't be, screams the terrified half of her mind. It is, screams the other. Not terrified, not this one, but anxious like no other. She feels her knees will give up any minute now, but she steadies herself. She needs to steady herself. It must be the sight of someone so integral to her past, someone she never expected to see again, but most likely the memories that it stirs and makes aflutter, that give her strength.
"What happened to you?" The answer is pretty clear: there really was little else to do other than cover his wound. There is more to her question, however. Eleanor doesn't mean only the eyepatch; she speaks of the entirety of his appearance. "You've let your hair grow," she continues, trying to add a lighter tone to what undoubtedly could be heard as the beginning of an interrogation. She tries to smile, but it comes sadder than intended. Gone was the softness around his eyes, as well as what little semblance of order her constant offers to cut his hair attempted.
There is still, however kindness and cheer in his eyes, for which she is grateful. The situation was as awkward as one may expect after their mission and six years apart, but at least they didn't manage to take everything from him. Regret, though? Regret always lingers.
Hugo slips out of the dance for long enough to head to the counter and buy tickets for the raffle. He has been pointedly avoided a crowd of familiar faces the whole of the night, and he wonders how long it will take before he is able to face his ex-colleagues from the Helios Knights again with a straight face. Disappearing of six years meant out of mind, but he wasn't out of sight as often as he'd like to be. Thankfully no one had approached him yet.
Instead, he had spent the night entertaining dance partners and enjoying the gentle sway of the music. Even while buying tickets, his feet were tapping against the floor and waiting eagerly for their next go at the madness. He was clearly lost in his own thoughts because he jerked his head when he suddenly felt familiar hands tug him into the crowd again.
One of his favorite partners from the dances prior had dragged him back into the crowd, and his expression of surprise melted into one of vague happiness as they began dancing a familiar dance. They exchanged a few kind words as much as the dance would permit, and smiled before their hands slipped and Hugo spun to the left, catching the dakr-skinned arms of his next dancer.
He blinked, feeling as though he was hallucinating the familiarity of her touch, wondering if maybe sentiments from his last partner had caught on to this one as well. The laughter rings even though the expression itself has faded from her face, and he's caught in a trance as soon as her eyes wander to his face.
Is that---
No. That's unnecessary to answer. If not from his own conviction, he can be certain by the feelings her sapphire eyes convey to him. After all, they mirror his own. For a brief moment, they are caught in a flurry of memories both good and horrible, but then Hugo makes a noise similar to a mixture of a snort and a sigh.
He opened his mouth but closed it. What did happen to him? How could he possible answer that question this fleeting moment, or express anything at all to the woman he had left behind, along with the other one he'd called his best friend? His eyes flickered to the stray hair that always seemed to threaten to gouge it, and he smiled. "Well I didn't have you to cut it for me, did I?"
"Though I never did let you go through with that, did I?" The light-hearted air passes by them like a breeze, and suddenly the song is too slow, or maybe it's because they seem to be moving in slow-motion. "I...a lot happened, Ele." His eyes twinkled involuntarily, as though showing a speck of regret that he didnt have the chance to share all those experiences with her and Dismas. "I wandered through Salem for too long. I met people. Who ever said you can't teach an old dog new tricks? Hahaha...Though in the end, Sundial did end up pulling me back."
He pursed his lips and swallowed. The dance, it seemed, was wearing him down. "And you?"
[attr="class","diag"]She laughs. Involuntary, spontaneous: that's how the laughter comes out. It is how things usually went when she was with Hugo and Dizzy. "That's right," she concedes, "You always found a way to escape my scissors," and for a moment it's like they're back to being twenty-something, young and careless and feeling like the world belonged to them because they were Knights and they would shape the future of Sundial. She mentally winces at the naïvety of her youth.
The illusion is short-lived. They were both past their thirties now, and Dizzy was nowhere to be found. Three letters are enough to break that thin layer of resolve she'd been fighting to keep up. Already she can feel her eyes watering up. She'd always been the emotional one, hadn't she? She fights the tears off by with a few light blinks, while Hugo summarizes the events of his last six years. Sparing me the details, it seems. Eleanor isn't sure if she's glad of this or not.
There are so many things she wants to say, so many things she needs to ask, and words feel insufficient. In the end, she can only manage to offer a soft "Yes, I imagine so." There is a knot at the bottom of her throat that makes it impossible to talk, but she does anyway, picking at all the words left unsaid with a spoon. "I'm sure you managed just fine, with that terrible charisma of yours. Will you tell me more about it next time?" She has little hope of there being a next time—if not because of him, likely because of her—but how could she go about saying that to someone who knew her too well?
The old her, that is, as she helpfully reminds herself.
"Did you ever pass by Eclipse Town in your travels?" She fervently hopes the answer will be no. "That's where I've spent most of the last few years." She completely leaves out any mention of her new coven, or her new interests. Those weren't topics of conversation for a reunion. Or for any meeting, really.
Most days, she doesn't think about them anymore. Most days, she's happy. Guilt-free, regret-free, as happy as one can be with a heart full of frustrations for a future she and her friends were negated. One she negated Dizzy, as well, in retrospect. Did Hugo blame himself for it, too? She can only imagine what he must have gone through. Not only the things he was not mentioning in his retelling, or mentioning only in passing, but what he must have gone through emotionally.
A long sigh escapes her lips. She supposes the question's been a long time coming.
"Have you..." Eleanor clears her throat. She needs to, but in a sense she's also buying her time. "Have you seen Dizzy, in all this time? Heard of him?"
Eleanor wonders if he had someone to support him, during these six years. If either of them had. She'd always been the lucky one, in that regard, and it kills her still to know she left her best friends despite it.
"Who knew what I'd have to go through for that?" He asked, but then the gravity of what he said came tumbling down and now more melancholy than ever, he began to dance the familiar and slow-paced dance with Ele, unaware of his surroundings.
His relfections on the past can't really come to light becuase there is simply so much to say. And the shadows whose cover underwhich they had made their depatures from eachother's lives still hung to them and the air around them, preventing the light from seeping in. "Of course," he said, but he was already beginning to feel weak. It felt like this was just a dream, a rare crisscrossing of people that wasn't meant to happen, like they had somehow defied destiny to be here again.
What were their intentions on that day? Had they ever meant to meet eachother again? What truth had they tried to seek in this world?
"Eclipse Town?" Hugo asked briefly, as though only to make sure. "Of course. The people are really rather fascinating there. Remember the stories we used to hear about the whole place being haunted?" And an odd thing happened to his expression, as he tried to peer into her eyes, as though he's onto something and has a question he wants to ask but can't. Remember when the things outside of Sundial were still strangers to us?
"Dizzy." His mind flashed to the day they had left, three Knight's Crests sitting peacefully in a bunch where their friend had passed out. "I don't know..." Hugo admitted, the one regret in all his life coming back to catch up to him and pin him against the ground. His closest friend. What happened since then? "Sometimes I think of him, I want to go to him...and then someone just takes all the courage out of my legs and I forget all the directions," he said, speaking fast and fast with each word like he was trying to catch on to a fleeting idea. "Do you know what I mean?" he asked, and that part about him had not changed after all.
He'd never been able to say exactly what he felt, clarity lost in favor of sweeping and uncontrollable emotion. And yet that had never stopped him from expressing himself to his closer friends, in anyway that he could manage. And it had never prevented them from understanding, whether in silence or in laughter.
But what had changed, and what hadn't? Who was he to tell?
[attr="class","diag"]Had the younger, twenty-six years old Eleanor been told that the day would come in which meeting Hugo would be both awkward and painful, she would have laughed it off as a really bad joke. In that context, such a revelation made no sense. The trio was closer than ever and there was nothing that could stop them. Not until the fateful mission. Nine years later, that small sense of security she relied so much on would be broken and proven woefully wrong.
Here they were, dancing around a topic they were still too sensitive to discuss in full. Probably just as badly as they were dancing their swing, too. Eleanor really couldn't put her mind to the task, instead allowing instinct to take over however it managed. The dark depths of her pupils seek his own, while her hand squeezes his just a little bit tighter. She acknowledges the darker meaning behind his words without braving another answer. A shallow form of comfort, no doubt.
Eleanor nods at Hugo's response. Despite her conflicting sentiments regarding a new meeting, it's relieving to hear his confirmation.
Her eyes widen for a moment. She really had not thought about the rumors going around Sundial during their youth, in literal decades. "I'm surprised you remember that," she laughs. Not only the ghosts of all those who died in the forest surrounding it were said to haunt Eclipse Town, but also humanoid wolves and ten-feet bats and all sorts of demons. Brushing past exaggerations, most of it was true in the Forest of Percival. "Our eyes have really been opened wide since then, eh?"
The answers she was hoping to get are source of even more regret now. He hasn't seen him, either. He does blame himself constantly. Everything she wondered about but did not want to hear had come to pass. "Do you know what I mean?" he asks—typical Hugo—and she's tempted to say yes, she does, he's not alone. It's not true, though. Eleanor does not in fact know what he means, because while Hugo was brave enough to consider going back to their old friend, Eleanor was not. She's been happy to pretend nothing happened, even in those restless nights full of nightmares.
Oh, how things had changed.
"I do," she lies, and there is bile rising from the bottom of her stomach, growling to be let free. She lies because she knows Hugo needs it. She lies because accepting they are not the same people anymore hurts. It squeezes that treacherous organ beating faster and faster inside her ribcage. "I do," she repeats. Whether it is to convince him or herself, she does not know.
Silence reigns for a few ticks of the clock. After a twirl and what feels like an eternity, she asks, "Do you ever wonder what would have happened if things had gone differently? If we had been more alert, if we'd been sent anywhere but there, if Dizzy hadn't been hurt, if your eye..." She almost chokes on the beginning of a sob, and suddenly she can't do this anymore. She closes her eyes, lets a single tear fall down her cheek, hides her face and her shame where Hugo can't see either of them.
Her face is still buried somewhere between his collar and his chest. Even with five-inch heels on, Hugo's taller than her. That, at least, hasn't changed. The runaway tear has been brushed off with one of her fingers, black polish neatly applied to each fingernail, and she whispers a soft "If I had been better prepared."
Staying like that would have been all too easy. The comfort of a half-hug was easy. It wasn't all the pair needed, though. Far from it, in fact. But she does relish in it. She'd had plenty of hugs in the past six years, but none from someone who was actually involved in the reason for her pain. None from someone who understood because they'd been with her then. "I do. I wonder about the what-ifs a lot. Now, I'm not saying what we did was good, not at all—but we did what we had to. We grew because of it. That place wasn't our home anymore, but you know him." At this, she finally goes out of hiding. Her eyes burn with a determination she doesn't truly feel but hopes will convince Hugo. "Dizzy was strong. I'm sure he pulled through."
Eleanor doesn't notice she's talking of him in past tense until after the words have exited her mouth. Neither does she make a point of implying either herself or Hugo have pulled through.
Seven years had been all the time that had passed. It had been seven long years of running, escaping and attempting to find something he didn't know he had lost- or perahps something that he had volunatrily run away from. It had been abandoning one family (like he had abandoned the first) in search of another. Had he found his refuge in Jester's Den? A coven to accept everyone. A coven he should have joined.
Did he really feel that though? Did he truly, from the bottom of his heart, regret joining the Helios Knights if only for a brief and wistful moment, to make his father proud?
Add that to the pile of questions that he did not have the answers to.
Like a phantom born from regret, his old would acts up again as Ele mentions it-- and she she starts to cry and Hugo feels the breath leave his lungs for a brief minute. How happy she must have been-- dancing here, unabashed and unbound by the worries of her past. Even as a grizzled hand makes it way to hold her head in place, he regrets ever deciding to dance. Guilt, he realizes.
He shouldn't have met her here again.
"It's not your fault..." he says, hs voice a whisper and yet a firm one- stable and strong like hickory. "There wasn't anything we could have done. Those witches, Ele. We were just lucky to make it out alive. And I'm glad for that, I really am."I'm glad I could meet you again like this. But do you feel the same?
Ele looks at her with a determination Hugo doesn't feel. He into her eyes with a look of soft and supressed helplessness. When she speaks, Hugo feels suddenly repelled, eyebrows lifting upwards, as though there is something within that makes him uneasy and uncertain. Why were they both...why were they both being so fatalistic? Was that really like them?
"He is strong," Hugo whispers, catching on to that fleeting mistake, but his eyes have since left hers and now they are impossible to read again, clouded by emotions that he hasn't sorted out in a very long time. "He is still strong. Ever after what happened...It took a whole bottle of sleeping drought to put him out of it, remember?" he asks, hands clutching onto Ele's a little harder at this as he began moving again to the beat of the song.
His eyes flicker back to Ele, less open and more guarded, weary. A part of him, the selfish part, wishes that they could have the old wounds closed. And for once, Helix is silent.
[attr="class","diag"]If Eleanor had been gifted with telepathy, or even if the dancing duo were sharing a team spirit link, her answer to Hugo's silent question would be no. She was glad to find that Hugo was alive and mostly, marginally, well, of course. She wasn't glad to meet him and be reminded of all her errors and faults and everything she left behind in her haste to escape the corruption and judging eyes of the coven she used to love. This is what hurts the most: to realize how selfish, how cruel, how traitorous she was being.
Eleanor involuntarily flinches at the mention of the other witches. The necromancers. She's close to calling them by what they were right there where they stood. She knows better, though. She knows better now.
"I'm so sorry," she says, and she's sorry for so many things that it's impossible to formulate a coherent sentence to follow. She wants to laugh when Hugo mentions the sleeping draught. The snort dies somewhere before it's born. Whose idea had it been? She doesn't remember anymore. She doesn't think she wants to remember. He's squeezing her hand back—perhaps comfortingly—but she doesn't feel it. She can't afford to feel anything at all when her mind is trapped somewhere far away.
In the nebulous corners of her mind: I'm sorry I let it happen. I'm sorry I couldn't do anything. I'm sorry I didn't stop you from leaving. I'm sorry for all these years apart. I'm sorry for everything you've gone through since then, for everything you've said and everything you don't want to say. I'm sorry for what I've become. I'm sorry I never tried looking for any of you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry for making you feel impotence. I'm crying now, making it look like I'm the victim when I'm just a sorry excuse of a friend.
Instead, when he looks at her, all she can do is brush all those feelings away, just as as she had her tears. If not as easily, at least as ruthlessly. "Yes. He is." For a moment, she's no longer sure if she's reassuring Hugo or herself. Perhaps a little bit of both.
Silence reigns until she decides to end it. Silence was way too uncharacteristic of them. "I got a tad emotional there, didn't I? Sorry," she offers, laughing a humorless laugh that isn't convincing even to her own ears. This exchange was anything but funny, after all. The cheer had to come from somewhere else. Finishing their dance was but the first thing to come to mind, what with it surrounding them both from all flanks. Praying for her voice not to break mid-sentence, she braves a "Why don't you show me some of the moves you've learned since we last met?"
