Echoes the Present Cannot Silence

Amethyst blades sliced through the air, narrowly missing their mark as Balun Dashiell stepped aside the length of the greater shorter weapon and parried ground down against the length of the Sith's primary blade between the crossguard of his lightsaber, snarling loudly in exertion as he slammed his shoulder directly against the chest of Lady Falentra, causing her to recoil backwards on her feet.

For a split second, he felt as though he had stood in this place before, done exactly as he had done before, deja vu striking him to his core...-And distracting him as she lashed out, whipping one of her pincer ship talons that were an extension of her hairdress, long independent and deadly defiant in strength, striking him in the side of his face with enough force to send him turning sideways from his footing, shell shocked and stumbling to the floor as his crossguard lightsaber clattered out of hands reach.

Blood flowed from the deep gash across his cheekbone, smeared across the white of his robe as he wiped it away, using his legs to put some distance between them and calling for his lightsaber with his free hand whilst keeping his eyes upon Nouqai as she strode after him.

She had become the epitome of the Sith Order, but once, together, they had grown up within the New Jedi Order, starting out as Initiates, and she had even been granted an apprenticeship.
They had formed a lifelong friendship through a shared sense of feeling ostracised by the Galaxy, Balun abandoned to the life of the Jedi he had not chosen for himself, and she, an unidentifiable species who would later learn exactly what she was. A creature created by Sith alchemy and darkness.
But in this present moment, something about all of this was so very wrong. He should have had the sense to realise it. This very battle had already happened. They had been much younger back then. He had won, barely overcoming his own emotions to spare her life and letting her go, in turn keeping his son safely in his care...She had never returned.

Nouqai lunged forward, Balun rolling sideways just in time to avoid being impaled by the smaller shoto as it burned its way through the durasteel floor, his crossguard flaring to life once more as his left hand found the chassis and he turned the hilt in towards her, blocking another series of furious blows from her main weapon as she fought to push him onto the defensive.

"You shouldn't have come back, Nouqai!" Balun shouted as he drove his lightsaber against her own with all his strength, battering his weapon repeatedly down against hers until she was forced to relent against his superior strength. Between the two of them, he had always been stronger. Unfortunately, she had always been faster. She would capitalise then on using this to her advantage by ducking and rolling out of the way before Balun could take a sweeping strike for her shoulders, recalling her weapon and shoto both into her hands with the force and repositioning herself a few steps away from him.

The smirk that she offered him, teeth as sharp as knives, each as sinister as the words she would utter to him next by way of response; "Fear it as you do, Knecaetis is as much a part of me as he is you, Balun Dashiell. Who is to say that I ever truly left?".

Balun's eyes snapped open, and gravity suddenly returned at an alarming rate. He dropped to the floor of the meditation chamber with a heavy thud, the breath escaping him and leaving him heavily winded, cradling his chest and groaning within the centre of the empty room.

Thankfully, he was on Naboo. He was alone, so he was spared the embarrassment of someone having seen the display. Yet he felt disoriented and deeply disturbed by what had just happened. He lay there for a long while, trying to piece together how long he had been meditating for, when he had started, and why, at all times, would he have been pulled into such a vivid memory from such a time long ago. Most strange of all, the discrepancies in what he saw, in what he felt. How he perceived himself and how she had appeared compared to the last time he had encountered Kellan Dashiell's mother.

It all felt so....-Cold, and disturbing.