Private A Dreadful Rebirth

[Kascalion Giedfield]

The Grim Lady ​

The sands of this world were - according to his closest approximation - like the sediments of an ocean floor. It was wispy and seemed to float in the air when disturbed like it would in water. but there was no water. And there was no greenery and there were no fish. No cephalopodic monstrosities either. Not even sun rays, for the sun itself was hidden behind great black clouds that only allowed a dusky sheen of light to illuminate this barren earth.

He had not a name for it, nor did his ship's registry. This planet simply was, in a system far from civilization in the exotic reaches of the Galaxy. He had come here to find enlightenment, away from the Empire. Away from the New Imperial Order. Away from the Jedi. Away from the Bryn. Away from it all.

He wanted a moment of peace, to recollect himself. He stood here, upon this rock in the middle of this desert, for days. Weeks perhaps. No food. No drink. Just waiting. Gawking. Craving something to come to him and tell him that he was not annihilated in spirit, that he did not need to fix anything, that merely having his old body and his old potential for power was all that he required. That is what he desired yet nothing reached out to him. Nothing came. Not a hallucination or a fantasy or a person or a figment of his imagination. Just the silent winds of a dead world with a dying atmosphere that clotted his electric blood and make his skinless mandibles chatter.

He eventually sighed - dejected and unwanted - as the next forgotten hour of the sunless sky passed and he finally leaped down from the rock, the sand rising to his purplish shoulders before floating back down. He marked a location on those dusty, rocky plains and walked towards the horizon, his feet thudding against the ground with a continuous series of low concussions. Nothing was in his mind as he wandered and he could not even think to himself nor words to speak to himself. Even his sockets were empty of the white orbs that acted as manifestations of his eyesight. Worse still, his ship was far in the South - or was it the West - and it would take days to walk there and he did not want to walk there. He wanted the answers that would not come to him.

Soon, he came upon a pit, deep and round like a dented colorless sphere. He stood upon its edge and peered into and could not see the bottom. There was no bottom. There was nothing in it at all, as with the planet as a whole, but it was there at the very least. A landmark in an oppositely featureless world. Maybe it was formed by a vast worm once upon a time that went extinct when the planet died. Or maybe it was tectonic instability. Or maybe it had always been here, a piece of history on a world without a story. He could not tell nor did he care to find out.

He finally had a thought when he sat down at the edge, his golden grinning skull somehow solemn and dark. What was his purpose? The same inquiry that he had rush through his empty cranium when he had faced that Jedi on Anzat. A question built on the memories of his youth, when he was king and a warlord. He had someone he loved and who loved him until the end of his first life. And now it was all gone. Now he was tossed around from enemy to enemy, broken down and beaten over and over again, made without purpose, turned into a dreg who could not dare to call himself Sith as he did millennia ago.

What even was he if not a Sith?

If not a warrior?

If not Kavar?

 

[The Grim Lady]

res·ti·tu·tion
D R E A D M O T H E R
wastelands,
unknown

​

What was it that had drawn her to this world? Was it the desolation? The brokeness of it? Perhaps the isolation? What was it that drew her to any world she ventured, beyond the ever-present voice rocking her bones and crushing against the interior of her cranium? Where she was willed to venture, she went forth without the slightest consideration to hesitate. Her god had not led her astray yet. Yet, try as she may scavenge for the reason of her being willed here, she struggled. Never, though, would she question the will of the one who had guided her. It was not faith she held in him, but trust. Each light-footed stride across the chalked earth felt as though she were passing over Death's doorstep, yet when she glanced for his familiar touch, he was long absent. Whatever had happened to this world, however many eons ago, it was something remarkable. A pity, Sinead considered to herself, that she had missed it. ​

​

The priestess caught herself in a strange place, between the scattered stones of dreaming and awake. A mild, slumber, where she was not quite lucid enough for conscious thought, but not entirely under to be unaware of her surroundings. A trance-like state in which the silvered orbs of her eyes had rolled into her skull- seized by the force grasping her in his clutches, as he took the initiative to drive her onward to the goal he had found for her. For them. For the galaxy, perhaps. Had she the ability to feel pain, no doubt she would have felt the bloody blisters boiling in her boots. Would that she had breathed, she would have felt razors raking down the insides of her lungs. Hours had fluttered by, slipping betwixt her slender fingers to pass her by amidst her haze. And when she finally came to, a dot loomed on the horizon- barely visible against the erroneous grey painting this scape in indistinguishable hues.​

With dutiful silence, The Grim Lady gathered up the dusted hem of her inky robes and scurried across the dune.​

When her space had bled into his, a grand sense of unease would have announced her arrival long before blackened lips ever parted to wet and draw words together. It was a sickening, nauseating feeling perpetuated by a much more complex layer of dread built in the core, and structured upon a powerful foundation. She said nothing for a moment, merely allowing her creaky bones to settle in place against the dust. The winds disturbed her statue, fluttering the garb she concealed her tenuous frame beneath and unsettling those raven locks situated around her jarringly slender face to expose the razor's edge of her cheekbones. ​

Clouded, opal eyes flicked down towards the sitting one, casting some unspoken judgment. ​

"What a tragedy." She goaded, offering only three words in the void where he had desperately yearned for more.​

Kascalion Giedfield​

​

 

[Kascalion Giedfield]

The Grim Lady

​

The words came into his mind absent cause and reason, at least none that he could identify in the brief moments it took him to process the voice and swing to his feet, a feral snarl of shock escaping his lipless mouth. Clumps of dust from the pit's edge sprang into the air from his violent motion and shrouded him in a putrid gray. The once absent orbs in his vacant sockets sprang into existence as well as blazing luminous pulsars, the pin-point pupils set upon this new figure in the fallow earth. Terror and wonder gripped his blackened core for he had not felt this one approach - not even sensed a mite of their aura.

He could have been executed had they wished it, pierced through the spine with whatever weapon they possed, and tossed into the bottomless abyss like the cadaver he tried not to be. But they had not done that. They had merely spoken, goading him perhaps now that the tone they had used resonated in his temporal lobe. His purplish palms became slick with a greasy sweat as he stood there, gawking at this figure like some frightened insect - something he had not done for as long as he could remember.

He had to speak to them, find out who they were and why they were here. Perhaps inquire as to what happened to this world if they were somehow a surviving native.

But before he spoke in turn, a guttural furious sound as it was, he looked upon her with a Sith's inquisitiveness and momentarily cocked his head in intrigue. A gust of glassy wind passed by in haste and partially revealed the visage of this figure for a few moments. They were like a thin, dead tree in an equally lifeless orchard. Absent lushness and vitality. A skeleton, like he was, but more so, as if they had embraced death to become it. The fury he felt at her sudden appearance had also re-awoken the Force within him from its stupefied silence, allowing her sickening - nauseating and grotesque - energy to needle into his like it wanted to drain his blood. The sensation of undeath reminded him of something, something he had once used to its fullest potential but had now forgotten in his years-long despair.

"Who are you?" he asked plainly, the ethereal voice echoing around them. Obsidian nails began digging into the flesh of his hands and drawing out electric blood that slowly dripped onto the colorless sands beneath their feet. "Why are you here? Do you wish to kill me?"