Private A Geometry of Heresies

[Ruzril Tov]

"The turnout's phenomenal", beamed Felis. "It's a tremendous success, simply tremendous. How could you hide from us for so long?"

Felis Rabé was the gallerist who had organised the first exhibition of Ruzril Tov's works on Naboo. And indeed it was quite the crowd that had gathered in the premier gallery of Theed and was now scrimmaging before the artworks hung on the wall, liberally spaced apart to support a cluster of people in front of each of them reminiscent in arrangement of the grapes found on a vine.

"I wasn’t hiding, Felis. I was fermenting."

The artist certainly didn't look like he had undergone a process of fermentation. He was dressed all in black, in a simple tunic closed with a belt and cloth trousers. His clothes were chosen to be subtly elegant, but unobtrusive: they were merely a backdrop to his his vibrant red skin and piercing green eyes, the main actors in his appearance to whom the stage belonged.

"Well, whatever you were doing"—Felis gestured vaguely at the walls—"it’s left us speechless. Half the room thinks it’s alchemy. The other half thinks it’s fraud. No one’s sure which would be more impressive."

What was on display was what had been described by critics as Tov's 'crystal paintings'. He approved of the term, or at least did not object to it, but would correct anyone who mistakenly called them mosaics, for that, they were decidedly not. The works were thin sheets of colourful crystals grown in various shapes, which as a whole came together and through the edges between crystals and the changes in colour depicted a scene—in this case, various cityscapes of cities in the Core and Inner Rim. The crystals were not set together, they abutted directly on an atomic level and must have grown in place. The works had been copiously analysed with all manner of scanners, and no material scientist had been able to infer exactly the method of production. How the artist so precisely guided the growth of the crystals was a well-kept secret—and that fact was part of what made them as works of art.

"Let them wonder. Wonder is a sign of life, Felis. To be taken by the incomprehensible—to be frightened by it. These crystals—they are born where logic breaks its back. I don't make them. I seduce the laws of nature until they forget themselves."

"Is that what you tell to physicists?"

"I don't speak to physicists. They don't listen and apologise too much."

Felis gave a snicker. Ruzril paused, and his tone softened as he spoke again with an unnerving intimacy.

"But you—you listen. That’s why you’re dangerous."

Felis blinked. "Dangerous?"

Ruzril smiled enigmatically. "You sense what this work is really about. Not medium. Not technique. It’s about corruption. Of rules. Of time. Of perception." He whispered: "And corruption, when done artfully, becomes sacred." He was speaking as if he were initiating the other man to a deep secret, and now Felis strained under the burden of having to pretend to be understanding that which he did absolutely not. But Ruzril knew how to put on the performance that was expected of him.

His gaze drifted over Felis' shoulder into the crowd and as though by chance fell on a woman of exceptional beauty among the attendees.

He gave Felis' speechlessness a moment, and then relieved him. "If you'll excuse me, Felis. I must savour the fruits of my labour." Some of the grapes on these vines looked delicious.

Ala Quin​

 

[Ala Quin]

The light hit the walls like prayer.

Ala Quin stepped silently into the premier gallery hall beneath Theed's golden dome, the muffled hush of footfalls and murmured fascination greeting her like incense in a temple. The air shimmered with reverence—tinged, faintly, with something else. A tension she couldn’t quite name. Something behind the eyes of those gathered here. Something watching back.

She wore a simple gown of navy silk embroidered with silver thread, chosen for modesty, not mystery. And yet, as she moved, there was something almost spectral in the way the fabric caught the ambient gleam of the crystal art. Her saber was left at the door. A gesture of peace. But the Force did not rest—it hummed around her like breath behind glass.

She stopped before the first piece.

It did not depict a place. Nor a person. Nor even a form she could name. It was a riot of angles and edges, each crystal sliver shifting from azure to bone-white as one moved past it, and somewhere within the refractions she saw—judgment. Not passed down, but rising. From below. A reckoning clawing its way toward the surface, slow and impersonal. A justice too old for mercy. Her breath caught.

Beside her, a gentleman in an olive coat leaned forward with his chin tilted. “It looks like… a cathedral,” he murmured. “Falling.”

Ala didn’t answer him. She simply tilted her head. Or maybe being built, in reverse. She wasn't sure which thought troubled her more.

She moved to the second.

This one pulsed. Not visibly, but in sensation—like the rhythm of breath when one wakes from a nightmare and isn’t yet sure it was a dream. The crystals here bled from pale amethyst to ink-black, their edges impossibly smooth, the transitions so subtle that one had to squint to see where one ended and the next began. It was not a picture. It was a wound. Open and glimmering.

“It makes me… nauseous,” whispered a younger woman nearby, her voice both awed and afraid. “Like it knows something I’ve forgotten.”

Ala’s throat tightened. She stepped on.

The third piece towered vertically, a narrow monolith mounted like a blade against the wall. The light caught its surface in ways that felt intentional, as though the piece itself was choosing what to reveal. And what it revealed was choice. Fractured, multitudinous. An illusion of freedom across countless paths, each veering slightly off the next like slices of a life imagined, not lived. She felt a dull ache behind her eyes. So many possible selves—and none that were whole.

The last one almost made her turn away.

It was quiet, unassuming, smaller than the rest—but her stomach dropped the moment she laid eyes on it. The colour of it was difficult to define. Not blue. Not red. Not light or dark. Something in between. The edges bent toward one another in a way that suggested collapse. Or intimacy. Or both. It reminded her of the moment before an embrace. Before a confession. Before a fall. She realized she’d placed her hand on her chest without thinking.

A voice behind her spoke—an older man with laugh lines and tired eyes. “That one makes me think of grief.”

Ala didn’t look at him. “No,” she whispered, her voice softer than the gallery light. “It’s the moment before grief. When you know it’s coming. When you haven't let go yet.”

He was quiet after that.

She lingered there, arms gently folded, and let herself feel it. All of it. The wonder. The wrongness. The hunger the crystals seemed to feed—not for answers, but for the unanswered. For things that resisted knowing.

There was power here. Not the kind that corrupted. Not yet. But the kind that called.

And Ala had spent a long time learning not to ignore the call.

| Tag: Ruzril Tov |​

 

[Ruzril Tov]

He had arrived in Theed last night and had already had supper with the managing director of Mosslight Conservancy Group, breakfast with the chairman of the Opaline Trust, and lunch with the finance director of Theed Hangars.

Mosslight was looking for investors, and somehow that information had made its way to Coruscant, where one of Ruzril's friends, or should he call them allies, had asked that the should hear them out to see if it was worthwhile and whether foreign investment was even a possibility. The Naboo had a reputation for being quite protectionist. Mosslight was in the business of what they called Ecological Infrastructure and Aquatic Resource Management. In essence, they were developing terraforming technology, centred specifically around aquatic systems, drawing on Naboo and Gungan knowledge. It all sounded very pretty, but at this stage, they were just a consultancy for environmental topics. They didn't exactly have a technology, just a plan for its development. And you couldn't trust these people to aggressively monetise it in the end, because they liked their scenic lakes too much and thought everyone should have them. If something other than pretty lakes was requested, they would not be so eager to adjust their technology to supply it. Ruzril had remained rather unconvinced, but not let it on, and had taken away a datachip with information back to take back to Coruscant.

The Opaline Trust had got some of its assets frozen in some forceforsaken bank at the other end of the galaxy, supposedly as a consequence of Naboo's recent expansionist posture, but Ruzril thought that that had to be either purely pretextual or, more likely even, simply an imagination born of a Nabooan persecution complex. These people were quite clueless, and that eliminated also the possibility of a reciprocal arrangement in which this Nabooan trust would help Ruzril solve his problem. After what he had heard, however, he was surprised that they had contacted him, and feigned confusion and ignorance when it came to the question of whether his contacts might be able to assist to smooth things over. Whatever had given them the idea that they could?

And the Theed Hangars man was looking for a way to circumvent the export restrictions and sell to places and people he wasn't supposed to. Finally someone sensible. A problem worthwhile solving, and a problem that had solutions. He was going to need someone who could plausibly place a bulk order large enough that a few extras would not raise eyebrows, and who could then lose those for a fee. It was a pity these people weren't in the habit of putting weapons on their ships—this sort of operation was so much easier with small planetary defence forces strapped for funds.

He had not yet made progress on finding a solution for the other matter his associates had an interest in. The charitable project.

The exhibition was a distraction, but also an amusement, and Ruzril was at this moment perfectly ready to indulge in it. He considered the inability to be entertained and enjoy oneself one of the gravest flaws a personality could possibly possess.

He sauntered over in the woman's general direction, but not directly towards her, with his hands resting behind his back. Just as he was about to pass her, he stopped and turned his head to look at her as though a thought had just occurred to him.

"Would it be impertinent of me to ask to tell me you how this"—he pointed at the artwork only with his eyes and ever so slight a nod—"makes you feel?" He did not feel an introduction was necessary at this point. He looked at her directly in a disarmingly attentive way. His gaze was steady, unflinching, and yet there was a certain, if not warmth, then genuine, lively interest in it. His stature was not imposing and his face, while quite angular, had a strange kind of softness to its features, but it was his gift that one look into his eyes was enough for anyone to see that they were dealing with an intensely alive individual and a forceful personality.

And somewhere underneath it all, deeply, deeply, buried, lay the hardness of a man who was not used to being denied the answer he wanted.

Ala Quin​

 

[Ala Quin]

She had almost brought Isla.

The thought made her lips twitch—half-smile, half-guilt. No, she concluded firmly, as her eyes remained locked on the asymmetrical marvel hanging before her. Too soon. Too much. The girl was already full of questions, full of ache and awe. This would tilt her. Off-center. Like it had Ala.

The piece refused balance. It pulled at the mind and the eye like an unsolvable equation, always almost making sense. One moment it gleamed in subtle rust and shadowed copper, the next it refracted into teals and smoke-gray violets. There was a suggestion of form, like something once known had collapsed in on itself—but only halfway. It looped impossibly, like a Mobius strip folded into a prism and shattered just slightly out of phase.

Ala tilted her head again, as if that might help.

When the voice came, she smiled instinctively, as she always did—shoulders soft, hands gently folded, eyes glittering with wonder as she turned toward him. He was disarming without trying. Alive in a way that made her sense the pressure of his attention like heat through glass.

But as their gazes met—his, unwavering and alive, hers, wide and bright—her smile faltered. Not in offense, but thought. A veil passed through her expression, and when she spoke again, her voice was warm, but edged with a careful honesty.

She cleared her throat softly and turned her gaze back to the piece.

“It makes me feel… unstable,” she said quietly. “Unmoored. As if the ground beneath me is shifting—but not in any direction I can follow. Like gravity is trying to remember how to behave, but keeps second-guessing itself.”

She paused.

“It reminds me of the feeling just before something breaks. Not violently. Not with a sound. But that stretch—when a truth or a belief has been pulled so taut, so thin, that it must give. That moment before you know who you’ll be when it snaps.”

She grew silent again. She drew in a breath, slow and steady, as if grounding herself.

“And yet… I can’t look away. Because part of me wonders what’s on the other side.”

She glanced at him, not fully turning, but enough that he could see the earnest curiosity in her face.

“Is that how it’s meant to feel?”

Tag: Ruzril Tov |​

 

[Ruzril Tov]

Ruzril had not needed to hear her speak to form an image of the woman. Much was apparent in her appearance. She was a very warm person, and the feeling sort: she would engage with the world first through how it made her feel and then thought about it, as opposed those people whose first approach to any encounter was intellectual.

More than warm, perhaps. Like with stars, size did not mean temperature. Something small could be quite, quite hot. There was a hidden power inside her, she would not be swept here and there by the currents of life like a seed in the wind—if she was set on a path, she would burn right through anything in her way. Ruzril liked playing with fire.

Unaccountably, his mind abandoned that line of associations and, of all the things it could have compared her with, settled on one of those springy rubber balls—small, full of energy, and if you were careless in handling them, they could hit you in the face. That struck him as in rather poor taste, but suffering one's thoughts at times to take turns in absurd and uncalled-for directions unbidden was part of the price to pay for creativity. And his mind was attuned in a professional capacity to contemplating materials. Even such inelegant ones as rubber.

Her response to his question only confirmed his impression of her. Her engagement with his work was not mediated through a level of conceptual analysis. That was mildly unusual among the kind of people who frequented his exhibitions. He was sure that she was not truly a native member of this city's artsy set.

"Meaning", he said, slowly, as if weighing the word. "Intent. A curious thing, isn't it? Audiences crave it—demand it, even. As though knowing what I meant to do will tell them how to feel. Isn't it strange how they aim to please me?" It was an inversion of the naïve expectation about the relationship between an artist and his audience, but it was a familiar notion to Ruzril. The beings in his vicinity instinctively sought his approval. When he spoke, they wanted to agree with him. When he commanded, they desired to obey. His words brought delight and despair. Only a few had the strength of will to resist him entirely against his wishes.

"But art..." He looked at the crystals again, the fractured, glinting geometry that made up his cityscapes. "Art is not a window into the artist. It is a hall of mirrors. Every interpretation reflects the viewer’s shape. Every insight bends around their edges."

Indeed, art rarely had the intention of provoking any one particular emotion. One did not start a piece with the intention to provoke a specific effect. The artist noticed an interesting medium or means of creation which he was intrigued by and expected to have some kind of effect. In his case, that had been the apparent physical and chemical impossibility of his creations, and their consequent alienness, both of which were bound to have an effect on people—but he had no particular designs for what that effect should be.

He loved what he had provoked in this instance. It spoke to a certain experience. An experience of life as a sequence of catastrophes. There was wisdom in this. Life was a permanent catastrophe.

Ala Quin​

 

[Ala Quin]

There was a subtle shift in Ala’s posture.

Not dramatic. Just enough. The soft set of her shoulders adjusted, and the light in her eyes turned from wonder to something quieter. Not suspicion—awareness. As though a name had surfaced in the still pond of her thoughts and settled there with certainty. Of course he was the artist.

She didn’t say so. She didn’t need to.

Her gaze lingered on the piece—its impossible folds, its shifting palette, the slow-motion paradox of its shape—and when she spoke again, it was not in the tone of a woman giving praise, but of one measuring the silence between words.

“I don’t think the mirror ever reflects the shape of the viewer. Not really,” she said, voice calm, but deep as carved stone. “I think it reflects the part of them they’ve forgotten. Or the part they’re too afraid to name.”

She turned to look at him then, head slightly tilted, expression unreadable except for the faint furrow in her brow.

“And if someone finds something in that mirror they didn’t know they were carrying—something that wasn’t in them when they walked in—what then? Is that the mirror’s shape, or the artist’s? Or does it mean the piece reached through them and found something they didn’t know was possible to feel?”

Her smile returned, but it no longer sparkled. It steadied.

“I’m not trying to please you. I’m not even sure I’m talking to you. I’m speaking to what your work did to me—and that’s not the same thing.”

She offered a small thoughtful pause, merely a breath.

“I believe you when you say you don’t create with intent. That it’s about what the medium does, not what it says. But even that choice—to step back and leave meaning to the observer—that’s still a kind of authorship. A kind of power. You may not tell me what to feel, but you set the trap.”

Her eyes drifted back to the piece, then narrowed slightly.

“And yes. Life feels like a catastrophe sometimes. Beautiful things collapsing at a pace too slow to stop, too fast to understand. But we still build. We still love. We still look.”

She reached up and brushed a curl from her temple—absent-minded, reflective.

“Maybe we’re just not trying to escape the disaster anymore. Maybe we’re just learning to live inside it.”

She turned fully toward him then—not challenging, but immovable. Like a branch in a flood that refuses to break.

“And maybe that’s where meaning lives. Not in what the artist intended. Not in what the viewer saw. But in the space between—where we’re both left staring, wondering if we’re being understood or just reflected.”

| Ruzril Tov |​

 

[Ruzril Tov]

A smile grew on Ruzril's face, slowly, as he listened. A twinkle in his eyes showed amusement, but not of the scornful kind. It was delight, enjoyment. He was satisfied more than impressed. Would he have accepted everything she said? Perhaps not. But he found it beneath him to argue. Arguing was not the point. He was simply pretending that she agreed with him. And if it seemed otherwise to her, it was because she hadn't rightly understood him.

He never let her out of his eyes. He let her speak. He was in no hurry to get a word in. He very rarely interrupted anyone.

Oh, how bright that little star burnt!

A shadow flitted across his face, almost imperceptibly, for the briefest of moments, when it was as though she had read his mind: she spoke about life and its catastrophes, she had taken up the thought he had had, but not spoken aloud. A mere coincidence or a deeper confluence of minds?

He recovered presently.

"A trap, you say?" He laughed gently. "I should be proud to be the hunter to have set it. It appears to have caught something marvellous!"

He looked at her—he seemed to be beaming even as his facial features had only moved very slightly from their neutral configuration. His eyes seemed to be capable of his expressing his feelings almost on their own. Or maybe it was that his feelings simply made themselves known without the assistance of his body altogether.

"Very incisive. Very well put! I must snatch you from Felis' claws before he hears of this and enlists you to write those little booklets of his", he said with a sudden playfulness, and yet still that same intensity.

He looked at her intently for some moments, and then—it was as though he released her from a spell. He bowed in a manner that, while not exactly exaggerated, was still theatrical. "Ruzril Tov—the creator." The introduction was, of course, superfluous. But it was a matter of form—and he did seem to want to use that word in particular. Creator. "With whom do I have the pleasure?"

Ala Quin​

 

[Ala Quin]

There was a moment—just after he bowed, just before she spoke—where Ala did nothing at all.

No smile. No gracious nod. Just the soft flicker of her eyes.

She could feel it now, the slow encroachment of something unnameable. This conversation was turning into something it had no right to be. Not flirtation. Not danger. Not yet. But there was a gravity here. Something pulling at the threads of her awareness, too calculated to be chance and too artful to dismiss. And it came from him.

Ruzril Tov. Creator.

Of course he was.

She let her weight shift back, a quiet, deliberate motion—less receptive now, less exposed. Not closing herself, but grounding. As if to remind both of them that she would not be lured anywhere she didn’t choose to go.

“You enjoy hearing your name,” she observed softly, not as a criticism but as a contour. “Not for validation. For resonance. As if it echoes just right when said in the right place.”

She tilted her head again, eyes narrowing slightly—not with judgment, but assessment. His self-satisfaction was unmistakable. Almost unbearable. And yet… there was something in it that fascinated her. Not charm. Shape. As if the man had spent years sculpting his own identity like his crystalline paradoxes—intended to unsettle, impossible to ignore.

Ala took in a slow breath, then offered a small smile. It was the smile of someone who had just decided something.

“I’m Seris Vale.”

The lie passed her lips like water over glass. Effortless. Clean.

No twitch of hesitation. No blink to give her away. If anything, there was a glint behind her eyes—a shimmer of challenge.

It wasn’t about deception. It was about control. About keeping something of herself in reserve, just as he had done so far. He had offered her mirrors. She had chosen to remain in silhouette.

“A pleasure,” she added—genuinely, and yet with edges.

Let him wonder why.

| Ruzril Tov |​

 

[Ruzril Tov]

Ruzril met her remark about the resonance of his name with an innocent smile. Her sudden feistiness amused him. She had no idea how right she was, but that was no topic for this conversation. Ever since he had introduced himself, his presence had become somehow lighter. He had made his point, she had felt it, and there was no need to go beyond the measure required. In fact, it was frequently harmful. Ruzril had to admit to himself that he had, indeed, tripped over himself, or tripped himself up, in that way more than once. What initially caught interest could, upon prolonged exposure, easily lead to fright. He did not want her to close up further.

"A pleasure."

"Is it, now?" He gave a chuckle, and then added with a wry smile: "Not everyone would agree, as I'm sure you imagine." It was a light-hearted remark of self-awareness without excuse or justification. "It is the curse that comes with my blessings."

His attention, once focused entirely on her, now expanded and he briefly followed the shifting crowd of murmuring patrons, turning his head. It was a calculated momentary withdrawal.

He had taken note of her reluctance to reveal more about herself as a person in the galaxy. Perhaps he had gone too far already. Who knew if the name she had given was real—it didn't matter. If it was not, that was something he could respect. He had done the same on many occasions. No, what he was missing was this: he was a creator, an artist—what was she?

From the corner of his eye, he caught a man in elegant, flowing robes looking at him with some apprehension, as though waiting for the right moment to approach. Ruzril did not know him. But he would change that, or rather, allow it to change, not out of some personal curiosity, but as a matter of practiced principle. Meeting wealthy and well-connected people was what these events really were for.

"You really must excuse me. I refuse to give Felis the satisfaction of catching me in dereliction of duty. He is a dangerous man, you see."

Some gallerists and art dealers really were dangerous people—through their connections with the crime lords whose money they laundered. But that was not, to his knowledge, true of this one, and he liked to think that he’d have known if it were. These things were extremely useful to know.

He was almost turning away already when he seemingly stopped himself as though he had reconsidered something, or perhaps been struck by a whim.

"Shall I have the pleasure of dining with you after the last critic has escaped?"

In truth, he would be escaping the critics, but the sound of the reverse seemed more amusing to him.

His offer was made with the easy confidence of a man accustomed to being obliged. It was clear that a refusal would not wound him—merely disappoint.

Ala Quin​

 

[Ala Quin]

She watched him shift—effortlessly rejoining the room’s rhythm as if the spotlight he carried could be flicked off at will. And yet he lingered, like a final note suspended too long in the air.

Dinner.

It was framed as amusement, perhaps even gallantry, but Ala heard the shape of the invitation. She had seen it before. The artist pretending to be harmless. The man pretending not to be dangerous. The shadow behind the smile.

She turned her gaze back to the asymmetrical piece on the wall. The one that changed color when she wasn't looking directly at it.

He hasn’t actually said anything wrong. And yet I feel like I’m being read like scripture. Or measured like pigment.

He wasn’t predatory. He wasn’t even particularly threatening. If anything, he was just… self-certain. Ornately so. The kind of man who sculpted the room with his sentences and waited to see who blinked first. She had met politicians like him. Oracles. Cult leaders. Half the Jedi Council.

But they didn’t usually make her wonder what she’d see if she let the silence stretch.

She inhaled slowly. If he was dangerous, she would know before the appetizer. And if he wasn’t? Then he was just another man performing himself into a myth. She’d survived worse than dinner with a myth.

Her smile was soft—just enough to be polite, but not enough to be charmed.

“I suppose I’m curious,” she said, turning back to him. “That’s not the same as agreeing, you understand. But it’s close enough to yes for now.”

There was a flicker of steel behind her words—an edge wrapped in velvet.

A beat passed as she examined his reaction.

“And curiosity, as you know, is its own kind of trap.”

She didn’t look away this time. Not until he did.

| Ruzril Tov |​

 

[Ruzril Tov]

She said she wasn't agreeing, but she was. It was a strange sort of game people played with each other, and more importantly with themselves. Especially humans. Especially the women.

"Some enthusiasm would be in order", he admonished her softly. It was not wounded pride that was speaking. He was merely letting her know that he was not taking her reluctance seriously. If there was anything he was reproaching her for, it was her own lack of candour to herself and confidence in her decision.

"41 Berylli Lane, seven o'clock." Of course he knew a suitable restaurant. Several, in fact. Such inquiries were always part of the small talk he made with business contacts upon arrival in a new place—people enjoyed displaying their sophistication and sharing their local expertise with a helpless off-worlder, even when they knew that he wasn't as helpless as all that.

With that, Ruzril turned away to stroll off into the crowd, not directly towards the man who had been waiting, but giving him an opening to approach of his own accord.

—​

Ruzril made his way uphill through the narrower streets of Theed in the rosé-yellow light of the early evening. The air was mild and fragrant. The song of birds mixed with the droning of repulsorlifts from the larger roads behind the buildings. The soundscape was much mellower than what could be heard outside on Coruscant with its dense swarms of ships and speeders constantly in the air. But one really was outside on Coruscant to begin with. The Naboo's stone architecture and the way it nestled into its natural surroundings was nothing if not picturesque—but in Ruzril's opinion, no more than that. It was uninspired and uninspiring. He preferred the towering skyscrapers of the developed Core worlds. They reflected the greatness of the thinking mind—mastery over and transformation of its environment.

He had pondered for some time the question of whether to arrive early or late. He had been in no position to have a reservation made and there was a good chance that they wouldn't have a free table. Merely a minor obstacle, of course, overcome easily enough—it was practically routine to him. What exercised him, however, was the riddle of what impression such a casual display of his convincingness would make on the woman he was to meet. In the end, he had decided to err on the side of caution.

He arrived a few minutes before the designated time. The place was nestled into a small street on the hillside. He asked for a reservation on his name, and was told that they had none, at which he feigned surprise. "Oh, that is most regrettable! It appears there has been a mistake." He did not elaborate whose mistake it was supposed to be—perhaps the restaurant's, or perhaps that of the person who was supposed to make it for him. Surely not his own—he was probably not the type of person to make his own reservations, or at least that was the impression he wanted the waiter to come away with. There was no true disappointment or dejection in his words or stance, nor did he give any sign of being about to turn away. This could not be lost on the man on at least a subconscious level.

"I'm afraid we are fully booked tonight."

As far as Ruzril was concerned, that was their problem, not his. And it wasn't a great problem in any event. Someone was often late or cancelled, and if not, they would have to improvise. Let them send someone else away on the grounds of a confusion.

"Now, now. Surely we can find a solution for this little mishap?"

The man hesitated for a moment, consulting with his instincts. "Let me see, Sir. I will be with you presently."

"Much appreciated", said Ruzril politely and inclined his head. He was acting as if the problem had already been solved, leaving no doubt of his expectation of success on the waiter's part in sorting out this minor inconvenience.

The waiter withdrew further into the restaurant and consulted with a colleague, then he disappeared out of sight for a moment. After a short while, he re-emerged and announced that a table had been found.

"What is your name, if I may ask?" asked Ruzril warmly.

"I'm Teren, Sir."

Ruzril nodded in acknowledgement and followed the waiter, who led him onto a terrace in the back of the building, which overlooked a canyon between the hills. It was a small place, positively intimate. Most of the tables were already occupied, but it was too early for anyone to be eating just yet. Ruzril was shown to a table by the balustrade. He briefly leaned over it and looked downward as though assessing it for some quality or other, raising an eyebrow, and then took his seat.

"I shall be awaiting someone."

"Very good, Sir", said the waiter with a nod of understanding, and withdrew.

Everything about Ruzril looked out of place—his skin tone, redder than a seaside sunset, clashed with the natural, earthy colours prevalent on Naboo, as did the stark black of his plain, unadorned clothes. Yet he held himself in a way that simply refused to acknowledge his own foreignness, as if he belonged right where he was. His gaze drifted towards the buildings on the other side of the canyon and upwards into the rosy sky.

Ala Quin​

 

[Ala Quin]

She had changed.

Not into anything dramatic—no statement dress or carefully chosen jewel to offset the Naboo moonlight. That wasn’t who she was. But she understood presentation. She wore a soft slate-gray gown that brushed just above her ankles, high-necked and sleeveless, with a gathered bodice and a smooth waist cinch that fell into gentle pleats. The fabric moved when she did, fluid and quiet. It did not command attention, but rewarded it. A silver clasp held her curls swept back to one side, exposing only one ear and the elegant curve of her neck.

Not armor. But not surrender, either.

The walk to the restaurant was longer than it needed to be. She had taken the back way, winding through a shaded corridor of stone homes and hanging lanterns. The twilight was Naboo’s kindest hour, and in it she found space to think.

She was already running the game again.

Ruzril wasn’t dangerous. At least, not in any obvious way. He was an artist who had fallen in love with his own performance. The danger wasn’t in what he would do—it was in what he could make others do. He was an agent of momentum. And Ala had spent too much of her life being pushed, pulled, and propelled by other people’s gravity.

Tonight, she would not be moved.

Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched from within, like standing in front of one of his crystal constructs. As if he already had a version of her tucked away in his mind. Not the real one. A shape. A symbol. And he was waiting to see if she would live up to the sculpture.

But Ala didn’t live up to images. She broke them.

Her steps were light as she arrived, her silhouette soft but composed. When the host brought her to the terrace, she paused only briefly to take in the scene.

The canyon. The light. The hum of low conversation.

And Ruzril.

He looked like a contradiction—something too bold for this place, too sharply drawn for the setting. But he didn’t seem to notice. Or if he did, he simply didn’t care. He wore himself like a fact of nature.

She exhaled, subtle and slow.

Alright, Creator. Let’s see what your masterpiece makes of me.

She stepped forward.

| Ruzril Tov |​