The Warrior's Reclamation

Azurine pressed her palm against the rock face, fingers finding the narrow ledge that would take her another arm's length higher. The cliffs outside to the east of Maladris were notorious, just like the rest of the terrain. Jagged scars of terracotta stone carved by acid storms over millennia, slick with mineral dust and treacherous to anyone fool enough to scale them without knowing the planet, or without the Force. However, Azzie refused herself the easy path. She knew these canyons, having had to spend years learning to fend for herself within them. Moreso than many Iridonians.

The muscles in her shoulders trembled as she hauled her weight upward, her prosthetic hand clamping onto a notch in the rock like a vice. The capital's low spires were distant below her, dimmed under the looming clouds. The air stung against her skin, sharp with the taste of acid on the wind. A hiss of wind shifted the storm front closer. Azzie spotted a shallow overhang, no larger than a hunting blind, and dragged herself into its shelter as the first drops sizzled on the stone. Acid rain streaked across the cliff face, smoke curling in rivulets that carried away fragments of rock. The sound of it was a harsh drumbeat, a thousand tiny hammers falling in unison. She pulled her cloak tighter around her and pressed her back to the wall.


Grabbing her shortened hair, Azzie pulled it and twisted into a small bun. The storm pressed on. Skin prickled where the droplets grazed her exposed arm, burning only faintly from the thickness of her skin evolved for this very reason. Her amethyst eyes settled out on the horizon as she listened to its ferocity.

Maladris had been rebuilt after liberation, its council halls restored. She had walked there in the days before her climb, asking questions, searching for names. The councilors had met her with deference she did not quite know how to wear. One of them, a wiry man with sharp horns lacquered for ceremony, had placed a hand to his chest and said, "You're a hero, it was you who fought and carried the banner of freedom. This planet owes you its respect and gratitude, Kath sha'zehn."

Azzie had shifted uncomfortably at the honorific, one she didn't believe she had earned, her arms crossed tight over her chest.


Grounding against the gnawing storm and the greater storm behind her eyes, Azzie crouched beneath the overhang. Coruscant lost along with the core. Millions gone. The faces she could not save. She tried to drive the images away, but they clung to her. She pressed her palms flat against the rock of her home world, as though anchoring herself there would keep everything from swallowing her whole.

When the storm finally broke hours later, leaving the air acrid and thin, she dragged herself out again. She tested the air before stepping back out onto the rock, now slick with dampened dust. The trail continued upward in a cruel zigzag that punished her calves and forced her hands to cling to handholds polished smooth by centuries of weather. She slipped once, knees scraping, but she pushed herself back up without hesitation.

She found him at dusk. The plateau was wide, windswept, and empty except for a man who sat cross-legged in its center, his Zhaboka resting across his knees. Vhon Tarsek was exactly as the council had described—towering, scarred, tattoos winding across every plane of his dark skin like a map of violence and survival. His horns, long and uneven, caught the fading orange sunlight. He wore no armor, only a sleeveless combat robe whose hem was embroidered with the sigils of Iridonia's oldest clans that even she recognized from childhood.

"Sev Tarsek."

His voice was like gravel pulled across stone, holding an accent much thicker than her own, "You made the climb without aid."

"Was I supposed to take the nearest shuttle?" Azzie wiped her brow with the back of her hand.

For a split second, she thought she saw the ghost of a smirk tug at the corner of his mouth. However, it vanished as quickly as it came, leaving her wondering before he spoke, "Many would not have reached this far during the storms."

"Yeah, well, many aren't me." She tried to make her voice sound lighter than it was, but it came out raw with her eyes shifting to the ground.

"You carry the Force. Yet you didn't use it." He studied her in silence long enough for the wind to shift between them. Eyes seemed to strip her bare, peeling back the layers of Jedi robes, battlefield scars, and stubborn façade

"You want my teaching." Vhon's words were not a question.

"Yes."

"You are Jedi."

Azzie hesitated before speaking again, holding her gaze despite feeling it slip towards the ground, "I am. I'm also Iridonian."

"You already wield blades, and more besides. Why come to me?"

Her throat worked. She had practiced the answer in her head a dozen times, but now it stuck like stone. "Because…" She clenched her fists, staring at the dust beneath her boots. "Because I never truly finished. My clan was slaughtered before I earned the right. I left this world desperate to help save it, to make the galaxy a better place and fight for those who couldn't do it themselves..." Azzie's voice cracked, unbidden. "I've been to hell and back, and I realized I don't really know who I am anymore. Not when I keep slipping again and again, staring at history as it repeats itself."

The galaxy feels like it's burning around me, if I don't do something, I'll be consumed by it...

Though her words spilled like blood from a wound she had held too long, Vhon did not answer right away. Instead, His clay-brown gaze bored into her. "You already carry Iridonia in your bones. But mastery is not about proving worth. You will fail. You will bleed. And you will rise again."

"Then let me fail in the attempt."

He tilted his head, the faintest edge of something almost like respect in the motion. "You would accept that."

"I've lived with far worse."

Silence stretched between them again. She held his gaze, unblinking, even as her lungs burned for steadier breath. Finally, Vhon rose to his full height, towering above her, his Zhaboka spinning once in his hand with effortless control. The weapon whistled through the air before he grounded one end of it against the stone. "Na'darek zen'tah. Tomorrow, we begin with a demonstration of your prior training."

Her surprise was sharp enough that she nearly laughed. Instead, she nodded, lowering her head again as a coiled tension unwound from her shoulders.

Vhon turned, his back to her now, as though the matter were finished. Yet, his voice carried low and commanding. "Rest tonight. You'll need it. As you well know, Zhaboka is not forgiving. Nor am I."

Azzie watched him disappear into his dojo, the words settling into her like embers in ash. The night wind tugged at her shortened hair, carrying the scent of scorched stone from the earlier storm.