Ahhhh Tristi. Aka Amaryllis the avian and Tristi the phantom. Aka currently Seft. The little canary of the mines, who sat in her cage talking to an ‘imaginary’ friend that let her slip away into escapism dreams. Who starved phantoms through insomnia so she could lure them in and shred them for parts to fix her wings.
Some adventures and angst under the cut
Deep in a grotto, Prometheus spoke in a hoarse voice of his nightmares about loosing his children to selkie hunters. Cessation….didnt know what children were. Phantoms are ideas, full formed from conception. From this conversation, Cessation was armed with the knowledge that children were meant to be protected by parents, and sometimes weren’t. Often. Always. Because the lesson they encountered over and over in the server was in Prometheus and his slaughtered children, TRO’s stolen child, Tristi’s parents that locked her in a cage so she couldn’t run as the cave collapsed.
As Prometheus and Cessation talk of what it means to crawl out of stasis, be it depression or the null of an empty unfed soul knit into a corpse it could not escape, they remarked how company, life, beget change beget life beget change. Cessation realized to be alone again was to spiral once more into stasis, into the un-personhood that gripped them for ???? years. And so Cess began to experiment ways to keep Prometheus alive, some as simple as slowness potions to help him sleep at night, others…well. They’re still bubbling below the surface.
And so Cess began to build a special garden for Tristi. One she’d be safe to visit forever. One rife with the death that rest below their home, the one that eases phantom hunger.
Because the pale biome was spreading so much, Tristi decided to keep her pet axolotl, Amaryllis, in Díi's house. Cessation found out, and panicked due to remembering how Díi traumatized and manipulated Capri when holding his Cupert hostage. So they talked to Tristi about how poor the enclosure was, and how Amarillys was swimming in circles distressed because they were alone, and how they can't rest safely and wouldn't it be so much better for Amaryllis to join Cessation's new axolotl, Briony, in her enclosure? (Wouldn't Tristi be safer out of Díi's clutches and instead in Cessation's?). Tristi was very upset learning that Díi could be so nice and do something so mean to Capri, clearly revaluating her own parents. Prometheus and Cessation consoled her while finishing last touches on the axolotl house(/immediate water area so Prometheus can rehydrate from traveling through the nether, the actual intention of the build lmao).
There’s- honestly way too much to share about the incident where the server discovered the cage Tristi died in. But some pieces:
In suppressing her memories, Tristi got increasingly bad nightmares, which manifested as the pale forest biome infecting her house.
Cessation: What is a nightmare for? (Tristi couldn’t answer). I was a nightmare. It’s not to hurt you, it’s to give you a safe place to confront it. All of us came to help you be safe to look at it. Are you ready to face the nightmare?
The group confronted the cage, and helped explain to Tristi that she was dead. Sohr, an elytrian, in particular was very level headed and gave good advice. But the more Tristi talked of her memory and loving her parents, about being trapped in a cage when a phantom should’ve been able to phase through. None of which a phantom should’ve experience. Resulting in the realization a phantom wasn’t a singular entity, but ‘the connection between. The girl you’re grieving is in your head.’
Seft (Tristi’s new name; developed later w Sohr) asked Díi to summon Amaryllis using her name. But then the moment Díi tried- Seft simply vanished. Cessation warned Díi not to try that again, theorizing that destabilizing her soul too much could lead to Seft being trapped in stasis again, which could last far far longer than the lifespans of most origins present. Cess knows that better than anyone.
Scared at the thought of being alone, Seft asked Cess if they’d be there for her.
“I’d wait for you. Always.”
Deciding that the cage was no memorial for Amaryllis, Seft wished for a place high above with cinnamon wings to remember the avian. One that Cessation had already built. And so Cessation brought Seft to the garden to find peace and grieve while literally every other person on the server had a meeting about tracking down the modern community/descendants of the mining operation and slaughtering them in revenge.
And since Amaryllis' garden was there, and Seft's pet was there, and her house was currently infected, Seft found a new home in the Crown Mountains with Cessation. With their guidance, Seft made a memorial to the phantoms she'd killed.
