The peace that formerly reigned in Terra Nova has eroded, now little more than a memory. War ravages the continent. Disputes divide kingdoms; ideals divide families. The quest for power consumes absolutely and indiscriminately. None are immune to its allure.
Who will rise and who will fall? Only time—and ambition—will tell.
UPDATES
05.26.2023
2 month character creation hold for all existing members begins 6/5/2023. Ended 8/5/2023.
10.29.2023
Change in how times flows. Was 4 IC seasons, now only 2 IC seasons per 1 OOC year.
5 whole years of Heir Apparent goodness! When I started the site, I knew I was hunkering down for the long haul, but I never could have predicted the numerous twists and turns this roleplay site has seen. Hundreds of plots, characters, and members have come and gone, all leaving marks on the site. I am so very thankful for those who have invested. Because you keep coming back, keep getting on, and keep writing, Heir Apparent has the legacy it does today. Three cheers to us!
Citra listened to his answer to her question, sifting through the mess to collect the useful bits of information and discard the rest. The state of Elderkeep’s soil meant little to her, and their value was the reason she saved the seeds of whatever fruit she managed to trade for from the merchants. But the knowledge that plant dyrs couldn’t manipulate every existing plant? That caught her attention. “What do you mean it depends on the plant?”
He had his own questions about the element she claimed to wield, and she found herself falling back on the observations she’d made while watching actual fire wielders use their power. “My mom’s fire,” Citra said, the lie existing in the tense but not the element itself. It had taken time to break that habit. “Have you ever made a plant do something you didn’t mean to?” A rebuttal to his questions, hers was asked in a tone that implied that perfecting the use of her element had obviously been accompanied by accidents. “And yes. I can.”
Citra had picked up on the one part of Rhidian's statement that had been, well, somewhat of an outright lie. In truth, those who controlled plants could change them into whatever they liked. The issue was in the effort. "I don't like this girl. She asks too many questions." Cypha said, looking up at Rhidian.
I'm asking her questions, too, Cypha.
"And her dyr is rude. He won't talk to me. Who just ignores someone like that? They're both rude."
"Well, see, some plants are just harder to work with than others," he explained the comment away as best he knew how. "More...complicated, I guess, so it's real tiring and it's easier to find other ways around it or whatever." Rhidi only really knew as much as Cypha told him. The lack of intuitive feeling between the two of them might not have been apparent from the outside, but both avoided sharing feelings as much as possible.
She wasn't nearly as open with her answers as Rhidi was with his, and Cypha noticed this, but figured Rhidi talked too much anyway. It wasn't surprising to her that most Dresmondi would keep to themselves while her dumb human gave up everything about himself. "I wish we could use fire," he said with a sigh. "Would be better than being cold all the time."
Her next question, though, had him blinking, and looking down at the raccoon in his shirt. "I don't think so. Cypha?"
"There was that one time, when I was sleeping..."
"Oh, yeah!" He laughed suddenly, making the raccoon glare up at him, her little hands covering her ears. "One time, in her sleep, Cypha made these vines go into the wagon next to ours and steal all of their food. It was almost like, um, sleep walking? Don't think that's ever happened again, though." He shrugged. "Can't think of anything else, though."
There was one other thing, one other time, but both he and Cypha had forgotten it.
Citra eyed Rhidian as she weighed his explanation. So it wasn’t that they couldn’t manipulate every plant as much as it was they didn’t want to. Judging by the size of the raccoon in his shirt, she didn’t think Cypha wanted to do much other than eat and sleep, not that Citra, who often went with too little of both, could blame her. Little else in Elderkeep was as harmless as those activities, and even then, neither eating nor sleeping were necessarily safe. Food attracted those who wanted to steal it, and if wariness didn’t keep Citra awake, the nightmares did.
But she didn’t think about those.
He commented about fire and warmth, perhaps merely being wishful or perhaps searching for an offer of assistance, but as it was, they were both forced to rely on Ermir for heat and food. Citra had nothing to say except, “Well, it’ll be warmer in Aestas,” and move the conversation along, away from her alleged dyr’s alleged element. Judging by the sudden laughter, it worked, and the brief story Rhidian told had a small smile creeping onto her lips despite herself. The teenager didn’t remember much of Dresmond before Coheed attacked - though, to be fair, she didn’t really try - but she imagined vines winding their way from one wagon to the next, stealing fruits and vegetables and meats. Citra eyed the raccoon in his shirt, somewhat skeptical. “You’re sure she was asleep?” Stealing food seemed like a complex thing to do in one’s sleep, but then, perhaps that was how he knew Cypha had been asleep: she would never have put in the effort while conscious.
Citra couldn’t imagine a life like that, where she could refuse to do something simply because it took too much work, and she couldn’t imagine having access to elemental magic and then simply not using it. Having the ability to grow her own food rather than relying on others to do it for her would have been life-changing. Having another set of eyes and ears to keep a lookout for danger, too, would have made all the difference. Speaking of— Citra glanced around the tavern again and noted that it only seemed to have grown more crowded. Evidently they were not the only ones who had fled the chill of the early morning air and decided to remain longer than strictly necessary. “So,” She said, turning her attention back to Rhidian. “What happened when they found out about the stolen food?”
Rhidian's laugh only lingered, a chuckle here and there as he spoke. He hadn't thought of that night in so long. He didn't remember the fun times. Maybe because there were so few for him, or because everything that had happened more recently had just taken over. Survival had taken over. But was it ever really different for he and Cypha? Weren't they always doing that; just surviving, and nothing more? "Definitely. If she woulda been awake, she probably woulda made me go out and get the food. Yanno, cause you'd have to like -- um cause the sooner the vines are gone, the less likely the others are to figure out who done it."
He reached up and scratched his at a scab on his shoulder where Cypha had scratched him a few days ago. "So, anyway, I guess cause she's asleep, she wasn't paying any attention to being sneaky. She was taking the food, but she was knocking stuff down all around the place and the vines were having a hard time keeping grip on the round stuff like the lemons and tangerines, right?" He was giggling like mad now, patting his stomach as it began to ache. Cypha was grumbling, and ducked her head back into the sweater to sulk.
"So just as she's about done, one of the vines knocks over a bucket of water. Dumps right on the guys head, and he screams like a little girl. Scares everyone in the nearby wagons. We all wake up out of a dead sleep and climb out the wagons and look around, and there's a trail of stolen food leading right up to us. I mean, there was an onion right by my foot. But all that noise, and Cypha never woke up. We followed one of the vines into the wagon and found the rest of the food piled around her, and she's snorin."
He shook his head, wiping the tears from his eyes that'd been formed by his pained laughter. "Anyhow, they weren't too happy, but we all saw it, she was asleep! So they let us off the hook since we returned everything. I nabbed that apple, though."
Rhidian continued his story, and the ghost of a smile remained fixed on Citra’s lips as she picture the chaos. Food flung everywhere, vines winding through the air as if they had a mind of their own, and at the center of it all, a snoring raccoon. That they faced no consequences for their actions was utterly unfathomable; there was no way such behavior would be so easily forgiven in Elderkeep. The food would have been taken back, and they would have found themselves freshly beaten, if not dead.
In a way, all of it was hard to believe, but it wasn’t as if Rhidian had any reason to lie to her - or, more importantly, as if she had anything to lose if he was. A story about the past had no effect on the present.
These days, laughter was as foreign to Citra as the emotions that caused it. Watching Rhidian wipe tears of joy from his eyes, she briefly tried and failed to think of something that would garner the same reaction from her. It wasn’t a particularly concerning observation. It simply was. Citra moved on. “Do you do everything your dyr says?”
How she wasn't laughing hysterically at his story, he didn't know. Maybe you had to be there. Some of the Dresmondi in the caravan hadn't laughed, either. They'd been all upset about being woken up in the middle of the night, but at least Citra had smiled somewhat.
Her next question was one that had his head tilting to the side, and he thought about it. "Well, no, not exactly," he said at first, but then had to correct himself. "Okay, mostly, yeah, but don't you? Cypha's a lot smarter than I am and she can get real mad about stuff sometimes. I just figure it's easier to do as she asks than to make her mad. She can hold a grudge for days, I tell ya."
Beneath his sweater, the raccoon grunted. He wasn't exactly wrong, so she couldn't retaliate, but she hadn't appreciated his tone. "Do you not do stuff that Solus tells you to do?"
Citra, as a matter of fact, did not do everything her nonexistent dyr told her to. Even if she’d had one to order her around like Cypha evidently did Rhidian, she didn’t think she would be quite as spineless as the man sitting across from her. Surely it wasn’t particularly flattering that a raccoon, even one that was a dyr, was smarter than a man was, but he didn’t seem to mind admitting it.
At the end of the day, though, what did she know? She remembered little of the years before Coheed and Elderkeep, where she would have witnessed a caravan’s worth of interactions between Dresmondi and their dyrs, so perhaps such a dynamic was normal. That was certainly how everything worked in Elderkeep.
“I listen to him sometimes,” Citra hedged. She hadn’t considered that he might return the question. “He’s not as demanding as it sounds like Cypha is. More… easy-going. And he doesn’t hold grudges.”
The relationship she had with her dyr sounded a lot cooler than the one he had with Cypha. Though he'd gotten used to their dynamic over the years, there were times when he wished she wouldn't bully him so much, especially when he was trying really hard to make her happy.
"Easy-going, huh?" Rhidian shook his head. "You're lucky. I mean, Cypha isn't the worst I've ever seen. I've seen some really mean dyrs. And the bigger they are, the meaner they can be!" He stated that as if he had any kind of proof, as if he'd done some kind of study. He hadn't, of course. A cow dyr had chased him away from her wagon once, nearly trampling Cypha in the process, and ever since then he'd disliked bigger sized dyrs.
"Anyway, all I'm saying is you should be glad you've got Solas. Plus, smaller dyrs are easier to take care of. I met this one girl, she has this little like...mouse thing. And it just eats grass. So that's easy, ya know? Some dyrs, like Cypha, they're like taking care of kids." Not that Rhidian actually knew anything about that, but he'd watched elders take care of them from afar plenty of times, when there was nothing else to do.
The bigger they were, the meaner they were? Citra looked at him skeptically. Renn’s dyr, Copper, had been a cow with long hair the color of rust, and he’d been one of the gentlest souls she’d ever met. Besides, Cypha was nowhere near his size, and she seemed a lot more unpleasant than Copper. Lazy, demanding, and temperamental, she seemed a lot more unpleasant than a lot of people. But maybe she was thinking about this wrong. Copper had been big, but not in the same way as the raccoon. “Is that why Cypha’s so big?”
It was gratifying to know that he had no doubts about the existence of Solus, though given his other statements, she wasn’t sure if that was due to her skill at lying or him being a little stupid. Still, she would play along. “I am glad I have Solus,” Citra agreed. “He’s easy to carry around and easy to look after.” Rhidian’s comparison had her pausing for a moment, and she eyed him before asking, “You’ve got kids?”
The question had the raccoon rolling about in his shirt. "What did she just say about me, the brat!?" She asked, trying to figure out which way was up and which way was done so she could climb her way out of his sweater and give Citra a piece of her mind. But Rhidian used both arms to grip both the bottom and top of the sweater, pressing them down tight against his body so she'd be trapped inside. It wasn't as if the lazy raccoon was going to use her element on the girl, but if she got out, she might take a swipe at her. That wasn't something Rhidian felt like mitigating.
"It's winter, so raccoons store up a lotta fat during winter to make it through to the summer, ya know? That's all." If she could get out and see Rhidian smirking, she'd take a swipe at him, too.
"I'll eat you both and store you up as fat if you don't let me out!" She said, claws grabbing the sweater from the inside.
No, you're just gonna start a fight and they can probably beat us, Rhidian reminded her.
The question about kids was one he answered quickly enough. "Nope, but I've stayed in wagons with them and stuff, shared a wagon with one of the elders of the Kushti who used to help take care of them. So I know what it's like."
Citra might not have laughed as easily as Rhidian, but she was not without her own sense of humor. As reclusive as her hypothetical dyr, it only rarely made an appearance. Now, however, it crept onto her face in the ghost of a smirk as she watched the lump in the man’s sweater abruptly start to struggle. She had known exactly what she was implying with that innocently asked question.
If the matching expression on his face was any indication, Rhidian wasn’t overly upset by the joke at his dyr’s expense either. Citra nodded her understanding. “That makes sense,” She said in the same reasonable tone as before. “Bears do that, too, don’t they? Store up fat and sleep through the cold months.”
Citra, luckily, also had no children and no experience raising children, so she was forced to rely on Rhidian’s judgement. Of course, Elderkeep housed plenty of children - many of whom were half-Eldouir in nature - and from what she’d seen… “They seem like a lot of work.”
Though Cypha made a small cut in the fabric of the sweater, she had eventually given up the fight entirely. She rested now in a lump against his belly, catching her breath, though still grumbling. "Bears? Uh, yeah, I think so?" He shrugged. "Guess it's hard for them to find enough food when it's real cold out. Have you ever seen a bear dyr? I don't think I have. Hm." He hadn't given it much thought before. Raccoons didn't go to sleep all winter like bears did, but Cypha had always begun to hoard food when it got colder out, so he assumed it worked kind of the way same.
"Yeah, they are," he nodded, then shook his head, eyes widening a little as if to emphasis how much work. "They're like, nonstop. They eat a ton, and have a lot of energy and curiosity, so they get into everything. Especially stuff they're not supposed to have. So they could hurt themselves, and you gotta stop them from doing that 'cause I guess they don't understand it. You'd have to be crazy to have a kid here in Elderkeep. Least that's what I think, anyway."
Citra shook her head. “I’ve heard of them, though.” It didn’t seem like many people in Elderkeep had large dyrs, and as someone who thought quite often about the quickest way to dispatch a Dresmondi opponent, she thought she knew why: though physically difficult to overpower, larger dyrs like bears made for easy targets in the chaos of a battlefield. Ones like Cypha could hide in a shirt and be, if not less conspicuous, at least more protected.
The teenager listened as Rhidian described the effort necessary to raise children and slowly nodded. “I don’t know why anyone would want to have a kid here,” She agreed. Or have a kid anywhere, if she was honest. The children in Elderkeep, however, sometimes came with an added burden. Citra might have been young, but even she knew that not all of the city’s youngest inhabitants had been born through a mutual agreement to produce offspring.
He shrugged his shoulders about the dyr. Yeah, maybe someone could have a bear. But he didn't think they'd last very long. Not only were they bigger targets, but like children, they also needed a lot of food. They probably would have all starved off by now. Maybe that was why he didn't see the bigger ones very often.
"Yeah, me neither. Seems real irresponsible," Rhidian agreed. "Cause, ya know, hard enough to eat and keep warm just one person." Clearly the two who sat at the table could relate to that much. They had come for food and warmth, like everyone else packed into the place.
And, speaking of that...a tall, intimidating woman came over to the table and snatched up their bowls. "You've been here long enough. Make room for others, you're not the only hungry and cold, you know?" She gripped Rhidian by the sleeve, pulling him up out of his chair. He grunted, his free arm reaching down to grab Cypha and make sure she didn't fall out the bottom of his sweater. "You, too, kid. Sorry, but it's only fair," the woman spoke more kindly to Citra, but nodded her head toward the door.
"Okay, okay!" Rhidi said, following the woman. "Ahh, bye!" He yelled back to the girl he'd spent the morning with, until he was shoved out of the tavern into the waiting cold.
"Head to the fire," Cypha instructed him, still gladly curled in his sweater.
Yeah, the fire sounds good, he agreed, and turned toward a path that would lead him to the center of the chaos of wagons.
When the gruff woman appeared, grabbing onto Rhidian’s sleeve and lifting him out of his seat, Citra froze - but she was supposed to leave, too. With a quick nod, she rose from her own chair and made for the exit. Rhidian’s farewell was met with a brief wave before the teenager stepped back into the cold of Elderkeep.