"Where brilliance is good and madness is better..."
Helovia Info
Helovia opened in February 2012! We are an active fantasy equine RPG
Where once the world narrowed into naught but gray dust and desolation, the gods called for life. Wielding the elements of fire and light, dark and wind, earth and water, spark and time, they have created Helovia. The realm is set within the mythical globe of Loorien, a planet rich with all variety of creatures and blessed with all manner of magic. Originally populated by nomadic, tribal characters, they've since grown into massive empires saturated with culture and history. Separated into four distinct segments of Helovia, called "The Regions," each band of horse strong enough and capable enough, took up the power and responsibility of leadership. Unicorns, old, wise and mysterious, took to the north, hidden in forests of mists and shadows and rarely making themselves known beyond their cliffs of the World's Edge. Equines, vast, organized and militaristic, split into two, one group went north to the Windtossed Foothills and the other group went south to the Dragon's Throat. Pegasus remained nomadic, making their homes in various parts of The Wilds in a migratory manner. For many generations, the land was peaceful and calm, but peace was never the way of the gods. With a clash of argument, war and bloodshed massacred Helovia, and in the aftermath, the realm was eerily quiet. Now, as newcomers sweep into this land, they are met with the lingering bitterness of the gods and the struggle to reclaim what was lost. Nothing remains safe or certain while sorcerers and soldiers alike brood and bide their time for revenge, honor and glory.
Site Wide Plots
Kaos :: The Beginning of the End ☼ - 6/2017 - Kaos placed Helovia in a time-bubble for a short period of time, but the Helovian gods are fighting back. But Kaos is powerful- far more powerful than anyone thought. This may be the beginning of the end of Helovia as we know it.
Kisamoa :: A New Kind of Kaos ☼ - 3/2017 - Kisamoa asks Helovians to help him restore the Spectral Marsh. Which side will you choose?
Invasions :: All Out War ☼ - 5/2/16 - New layout and the brand new invasion rules are up! Thank you for your patience and we look forward to getting started with this new adventure.
The Rift :: Gods Do Die ☼ - 8/2015 - Helovia Gods are saving the Rift from corrupt gods! Can Helovians band together against these foreign deities?
The Literal Ship ☼ - 2/8/15 - Oh no! You have to pair up for Valentine's day!
Sky Island :: Murder ☼ - 10/25/14 - Vesta has been found dead on the island, and the gods have called to you to solve the murder!
Sky Island :: Peace ☼ - 7/7/14 - An island has appeared in the sky! Clouds carry Helovians from the Veins to the sky.
Restoration :: We Welcome the Dawn ☼ - 9/21/13 - The sun has finally risen on this day, giving the land new light, but the Time God and the Sun God have yet to be seen.
Endless Night :: Broken Magic Plot ☼ - 8/30/13 - The earth god has returned and is walking across Helovia to heal the land. Every area can now be considered lush and prosperous, but the sun has still not risen.
☼ - 7/19/13 - The moon has risen in the sky, heralding the return of the Goddess of the moon. Lamp trees which light the paths have grown brighter, moon flowers which grow in dark places have begun to grow and prosper and the world is brighter, filled with a new hope.
Endless Night :: Dead Magic Plot ☼ - 6/22/13 - The gods of Helovia, in order to protect the world, have disappeared into the rift, leaving the world sunless, moonless and magic-less in their absence. Only the herdlands have a source of light, but lamp-trees with glowing leaves and branches sporadically line the popular roads and paths from place to place.
Doppleganger Plot ☼ - 6/20/13 - The God of Time is still struggling to close the rift though which the dopplegangers have come. He has requested that his brothers and sister assist in closing this hole, but without knowing why it opened, the task is proving difficult. Magic still remains faulty and hard to control, but the herdlands continue to be places of refuge for those who are fortunate enough to call these lands home.
ORANGEMOON cools off the lands with a a viscious force. Colder than normal, a sign of things to come during Frostfall, Helovia is bathed in a rich tropical lushness - albiet a cold one. The coastlines of the Dragon's Throat are pelted constantly by tidal waves, and the desert climate is humid but chilly. Ice begins to form early in the Aurora Basin leaving the winding trails slick and dangerous. The mists of the World's Edge coat everything in a glistening crystalline shine which encourages mould to grow everywhere. The Spectral Marsh is the only area which remains fertile, blissfully temperature and lush.
Cotm
Character of the Month for
June, 2017
WEAVER, Corporal of the Aurora Basin, is a relatively recent addition to Helovia and has taken it by storm. Branded with the seal of Death on her chest, intrigue and interest follow both her past and present. Though she is assuredly beautiful, her sometimes sharp personality reveals that there is more to this uni-peg hybrid than meets the eye. Proving herself able on the battlefield in the Basin’s warrior ranks, we can’t wait to see her test her mettle against the looming Kaos happenings! Congratulations!
Helovia RPG was created by Tamme and Blu and coded by Tamme also known as Schwartze. All coding, palettes and imagery are copyrighted to the website and are not for use outside of Helovia. Thank you to our ServerMaster for hosting Helovia. A special thanks goes to Neo for all of her coding help and fixing Tamme's errors, Boom, for her loyal service and creation of the Time God, and to Ali for her consistent contributions and dedication.
07-08-2015, 02:11 PM (This post was last modified: 07-08-2015, 06:05 PM by Knox.)
Just as he is sleeping, there is this: You never remember how alone you'll never be.
And then Knox wakes in the dark of the cave. Manhattan is elsewhere. His heart is heavy but his body feels light. The cavern is aglow: red, gold, fire. He is unsure of himself and his being.
He is this, he is that, he is a god in the making, he is entirely nothing at all.
Perhaps it is Manhattan being gone when he wakes, but he feels now more than ever the powerful aspect of his loneliness. But his abandonment--is it self enforced? The black stallion surveys and circles the column of lava and light, seeking himself in it as if it were a waterfall reflecting back sinister perfection.
He has orphaned himself of all family and friends. He has no connections, and so he walks now, in the evening after waking from a day he does not remember and several days before that he does not wish to. The irony of returning again and again to this sight of destruction, this moment when his life crumbled from what he knew and dissolved into unresolved ash, is not lost on him. But he is drawn to the warmth of this crime-scene.
Here, where he stands, he once marked his independence. He once had pride he carried like a flag, even when he was too youthful to have earned it. Now, he is a sellsword of the self, left by everyone he's ever cared for.
Even Manhattan, she is gone, now.
The ancestors have nothing to say. The voices he was born with speak only in short, quiet bursts when he is asleep and out of consciousness. But now he wanders in a different sleep, the waking kind where reality and dream collide and intertwine dangerously.
As he walks around that column, somewhere in the woods so far away, where he was born, he is trembling from cold winter with Manhattan sleeping, low beneath his shadow.
[[For Ali. This is a dream. Permission for the coming NPC to powerplay and have all of Knox's knowledge (IE, know of his forms and relationships, etc) as it is a figment of his dream. For any interested, the title of the thread is Gen. 3:11)]]
"Well, well, well." A voice purrs, deep and familiar to any and all that had the pleasure of coming into contact with her and her family. The voice, however, seems disembodied, like its floating somewhere between reality and dream. "Look what's finally made it back home to Helovia." Smoke, similar to what Knox uses to blind begins to roil and within it a form begins to take shape, sleek and black with grey eyes as hard and cold as steel. "Welcome home, Knox." The voice hisses from within the smoke. "My traitorous little brat." The smoke clears and reveals the black jaguar standing there, glaring maliciously at the stallion she had brought into the world. The one that had turned her most prized son against her. The one that had taken her life before she could fulfill her greatest wishes. "You disappoint me."
"."
ooc://
just to clarify, Mandrake is part of a dream :3
07-14-2015, 08:07 PM (This post was last modified: 07-14-2015, 08:08 PM by Knox.)
She, the ghost of his mother, is the last thing he has ever expected to see. But here she is, rising from ash or fire or smoke or hell knows what, right before his eyes.
And though he is surprised, he feels a calm. He is not scared. He feels his eyes lock with hers, so steel and cold, so familiar, so enchanting. They're... comforting.... Knox thinks to his ancestors, turning as if to find them standing beside them. But they are quiet, and they are gone, and save for this feline ghost, he is alone.
"Helovia was never your home," he says, cooly. He steps closer to her. Will she be there if he reaches out to touch? He cannot remember when he last touched is mother--if he ever did.
But he realizes, then, as he looks up at that column of fire at her back, the exact time when he last touched her. When he killed her.
"Your home was with your family, wasn't it, Mandrake?" Knox walks around her, looking over her, trying to determine if she is real. He doesn't doubt her appearance. He's heard too many things, felt too many things for other minds, to ever doubt reality now. If she is before him, then she is real. She is dead, and in a way he knows this is a haunting, but she is real.
More real than anything his aching heart has ever felt in her long, cold, absence.
"I've left them. But you must know that," Knox offers. He gets the sense she is in some state of omniscience, now. Perhaps she is more a god to him than any who guards the shrines at the veins. She, at least, will always be immortal in memory. Her sons will never forget her--their sons, will never be free of her in the ghost stories their fathers will tell them. "Is that why you feel I've failed you? Even when I stand here, covered in fresh kills?"
And when he rolls his shoulders to step forward, he feels the weight of those murders. Four wings rest on his back, now: feathers brushing the ground, gold tracing the cave's stone floor and magenta splattered with the same deep red of dried blood. His bridle feels looser, his body smaller and lean as it once was in his first year, his heart slowed into a careful obedience. Is this, the appearance of the child he was when he still hung upon her every word and dripped with his father's blood, wrapped in a cape of stolen feathers, not something that will impress her?
Will anything?
[[@[*Ranjiri]--Mandrake is allowed to read all of Knox's thoughts. Knox now appears as a yearling, and is wearing Muriel's wings. Eek! So excited!]]
He is correct when he says that Helovia was never her home but for the moment she remains quiet and watches him as he steps toward her. Then he speaks again and she smiles, revealing her deadly pointed fangs. "It was." She purrs almost pleasantly. "But you took that away from me, didn't you? Such an ungrateful child. You had the world at your hooves and you screwed everything up." Her tail lashes and her claws extend to scratch at the rocks that she stands upon. "I could have made you stronger." She suddenly hisses, her eyes growing colder and more malevolent. "But you walk a path of weakness. Too weak then to fight me on your own and too weak now to do what needs to be done to bring our family to greatness."
"I've left them. But you must know that."
"Of course I know!" She hisses as Knox interrupts her. "I know everything you've done. There is nothing that you can hide from ME."
"Is that why you feel I've failed you? Even when I stand here, covered in fresh kills?"
"DON'T TALK TO ME ABOUT YOUR KILLS!" She shouts and the black jaguar explodes into a cloud of black smoke that roils like a living thing. "I know..." A voice hisses from inside the cloud of smoke. "You feel guilty." Out steps the true form of Mandrake, her dappled coat red with the blood of her family's kills. Blood she wore proudly. "Your guilt makes you weak. Your guilt makes you a disappointment."
There is something about Mandrake that warms him. He will never forget how she drowned him, choked him, and at the same time he will never fail to feel a sort of comfort in her presence. He killed her, he felt her bones snap under him, and now when her ghost is here (and then mist and not there) he is scared, again, like a child.
How has she diminished him to this?
The wings drop from his frame, landing with a thud on the earth in a flurry of white feathers. His face falls when she reappears as an equine. His large ears, ones he has no longer grown into, droop but not in the thinking way, no--in the crestfallen, defeated fear that he was once so familiar with.
He can hear so little. He can hardly understand what she is saying to him, what her intentions are, but he knows that she is disappointed. And he remembers that feeling of having disappointed his mother. As his figure grows smaller and he stands as a colt just a few months after birth, unaware of his own being, he feels his cheeks growing hot and remembers the shaking of his legs as a youth.
"What would you ask of me?" he cries out, his voice young and ill-determined, shuddering. This is not strength, it is submission. His child's tail lashes against his hind legs, his fore two spread to steady his shaking self. "I have tried! I tried to succeed with you and then I tried without you, and I have been left with nothing but my own failures! What would you ask of me now, mother?"
And he is pleading, and begging, and hoping for some words of truth. He seeks anything that will build him up, turn him from this child to something stronger. What was he then, again, in those early moments of his life? So different from what he's called himself now, the hunter. Ah yes, he remembers. Surely, she will too.
"What would I ask of you Little defective colt?" She asks her words as cold and biting as they were in life. "Don't fail! Since when was failure ever an option in our family, child?" She begins to circle Knox's shrinking form and does not bother to hide the disdain in her eyes as she takes in his appearance. "So weak." She says with distaste. "You let your feelings of remorse and guilt overwhelm you and that leads to your failures. You let love for that mutt cloud your judgement. You allow her to influence you as if she is the master and you the servant..." Mandrake stops and she faces the little defective colt. "Kill her." She says. "Crush her, beat her into submission, do whatever it takes but solidify your place as master."
She pauses and a wicked smile curls her mouth upward. "Or you can do the same to her that you did to your little friend." She says. "What was her name? Aylin?" And she laughs because she knows what Knox knows and what he thinks, but she also knows what his ancestors know because they are a part of him that he will never escape just as she is. "You think she wandered off, but you left her behind. You blinded her, attacked her, tasted her blood, and you left her there." She laughs again as she stares down at Knox. "You don't even realize how cruel you can be do you, Knox?" She asks, but she is thoroughly pleased what what he's done. "She's probably dead by now. No one that weak could ever make it back here alone..."
Though he doesn't know it, and though perhaps he may not remember until he awakens, she is nothing more than a figment. Mandrake is long dead, this ghost is just a haunting of his own creation. What he knows, she understands. What she speaks, he has already known for a very long time.
But in this moment he knows her only as a creature outside himself, forcing him to stand at the threshold of cold-hearted and broken, of murderer and friend. He could obey, and as he listens to her wicked commands some part of his heart, deeply buried, yearns to. But she has gone too far: he will never hurt Manhattan.
He will never hurt his island.
"She has never faltered!" the colt says, his voice booming, the tide of his figure rising until he stands tall as he should and towers over the old frailty of the bitch who raised him. "She has been beside me when you would put me down, and she will always be at my side, and I will never harm her! She has sacrificed everything for me!" His blue eyes are lit red by the column of fire, his heart beating nearly loud enough to wake him. And he realizes how true his outburst is, and how much Manhattan means.
"This, you cannot ask," he says with a snarl. But just as he is about to continue, she does. With her wicked tongue she spills what he wishes were lies and what he knows, somehow, are truths.
Aylin.
By all gods or goddesses, wicked as they are, forsaken as he is in their shadows, Aylin.
He has hurt her. He has hurt her more than he knows, and Mandrake's ghost has seen it all. In this dark cavern, she knows what the hunter has tried so hard to forget.
Knox is not scared of Mandrake, anymore. He walks towards her, not stopping, backing her closer to the fire, maybe even moving through her if she fails to alter her course. In that red column is a heat he has to feel, a flame that might wake him if he stands close enough.
It is whether she backs down, whether she steps aside, that will determine this.
And it is he, somehow, that decides her every move. Even as he speaks he feels her speaking, too--that dry raspiness of the throat of the dead, sitting somehow inside him. "The harm done to Aylin is my regret--my fault to fix. But you have no right to speak of it, not at all, not as if it were just another job well done, another son's trophy to place on the mantle. You are the foul creature that could do such a thing and feel no sort of pain for it," he says softly. He is powerful, perhaps even menacing, in his sincerity. She will not respect this, he expects. She will not consider his fondness for that mare and his companion to be anything but further weaknesses. But she will be wrong, and he will always know it. Even as he stands, drawing closer to the fire in hopes of abandoning her presence someday, even if it means death, he knows the many faults his mother bears and will never admit to: hubris, being the greatest of them all.
And he knows too, then, how he has hurt the one who loves him so. But the pain has always been there, and it has chased him from the Old Country back to the site of his birth. He has let it rule him, and now?
Now, he can only seek forgiveness. Now, he can only seek her.
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