Private A Line Thought Broken

[Meri Vale]

The archive terminal was older than the rest of the library, its casing bearing the softened wear of long use and an interface far less polished than the newer systems. It had been built in a time when permanence mattered more than elegance, a relic that most students ignored in favor of faster public networks and search engines that delivered shallow answers with immediate convenience. This machine required patience, demanding exact terms and layered requests from anyone willing to sift through records that had not been touched in years, and for that reason, Meri preferred it immediately.

She sat alone in a recessed alcove where the light was lower, and foot traffic rarely passed, shielded by the shadows. A narrow lamp cast a pale illumination across the terminal screen and the small datapad beside her, where she had already begun making notes in a tight, careful script. Her satchel rested against her chair, kept closed but within reach, a habit of proximity she never broke. The room around her remained quiet but not empty; the sound of pages turning in distant stacks and a soft cough two rows over drifted through the air, while the climate systems exhaled at measured intervals through vents hidden in the ceiling.

None of it held her attention.

For several minutes, she had stared at a single line on the screen without entering a word, watching the cursor blink patiently as it asked for something simple while demanding something far more difficult: a name. Her fingers rested on the keys without moving, and though she might have looked merely thoughtful to any passerby, the truth sat tighter beneath the surface. Her breathing was too controlled, and her shoulders held more stillness than comfort, for even now, after years of living under a false identity, some part of her expected the walls to answer when certain words were spoken aloud.

She reminded herself that no one knew her here, and after drawing a slow breath in through her nose, she finally began to type.

T I R A V E L.

Her hand stopped there, hovering over the keys. This was not Meri Vale, the name she used to rent rooms or keep herself forgettable, but the real one. She stared at the letters for a long moment before adding the qualifiers that would narrow the void: House Tiravel, Panatha, Archive lineage, Noble registry, Historical records. Then, after another heavy pause, she added the final term: Purge.

The search ran, though results did not appear immediately. Instead, the terminal processed through deeper networks and old municipal caches, sifting through fragmented mirrors and sealed repositories with permissions half-forgotten by the systems guarding them. The screen flickered twice before file headers began to populate, and Meri leaned forward, her gray eyes narrowing as she scanned the list. There were scattered genealogical references, shipping manifests, and academic citations attached to Tiravel star charts, alongside a redacted legal notice and several records flagged as inaccessible.

Her pulse quickened as she opened one file after another, skimming through dates, names, and partial seals. While some were useless or contradicted each other, and others had clearly been altered, something remained beneath the corruption and omissions. Her family had existed loudly enough that history had not fully erased them, a realization that struck her harder than she had expected.

Her fingers moved faster now as she opened cross-references and built timelines, comparing registry numbers to trace where records abruptly stopped and where other names seemed to benefit from their disappearance. Notes accumulated across her datapad in relentless lines, so consuming her focus that she did not notice when the terminal momentarily paused. She failed to see the brief lockup of the cursor or the secondary process running silently behind the visible search.

Somewhere beyond the library, beyond the planet, and beyond even the system, an old security protocol attached to dormant Panathan noble archives received an unauthorized access marker tied to a dead house name. A signal routed itself through forgotten channels, awakening one sealed relay and then another.

In the alcove, Meri only frowned at the delay, tapping the screen once with restrained irritation. "Come on," she murmured under her breath. The terminal resumed its work as if nothing had happened, and more files opened before her. But far away, something else had done the same.

Darth Carnifex

 

[Darth Carnifex]

They'd been dispatched as soon as the signal was connected.

Three transports blasted away from the gargantuan space station, buzzing through the empty void before jumping to hyperspace one after the other. When they reemerged halfway across the galaxy, they were little more than static anomalies to local sensors, brief glitches that disappeared as quickly as they were detected. As they descended through the atmosphere, the teams inside each transport were checking their weapons and gear. Each one was Epicanthix in sleek black armor, veterans of two dozen galactic conflicts.

Touchdown was quick, the bay doors sliding open and the soldiers swiftly filing out with weapons drawn. Each carried an energy rifle in their hands and a blaster pistol at their hip. They swept towards the signal's origin in calm, calculated maneuvers, well rehearsed actions that had by now become second nature; as mundane as breathing was. The soldiers switched from standard optics to thermals as a strategically placed charged overloaded the building's electrical field, the soldiers moving now in total darkness.

Each soldier conversed only when need to, speaking in a clipped Epicant dialect meticulously crafted to convey information quickly. Combined with hand signals and body language, they could move and act as silently and efficiently as possible as they tightened the noose.

Meri Vale ​

 

[Meri Vale]

The terminal had not locked her out, an anomaly that kept her pinned in place with quiet, growing unease.

Meri sat very still in the dim archive room, the console's pale glow painting her hands in uneven light as lines of data scrolled across the screen. The system was old, older than most of the structures she had passed through to reach it, yet it held together with a stubborn integrity. Fragmented directories and broken indexing paths littered the display, and while entire sections had been deliberately obscured or erased, enough remained to suggest that what had once been stored here was of immense significance.

She had not intended to search for it, and that was the part that unsettled her most. Her fingers hovered just above the interface, hesitating to enter another command as if the next input would make the moment irreversible. The name sat in the search field, clean and complete: Tiravel.

The system responded with a sluggish heaviness, pulling from disconnected nodes and cross-referencing records that should not have been accessible from a terminal like this. The delay felt less like a technical lag and more like resistance, as though the archive itself had been built to hesitate before acknowledging that name. Then, the fragments began to surface: a partially intact lineage marker, trade logs referencing encrypted transfers, and a list of academic contributions stripped of authorship yet carrying her family's familiar structural notation.

Finally, a sealed record appeared, flagged for restricted access. It was not deleted or corrupted, but intentionally entombed. Meri leaned forward, her breath slowing as she realized the implications. "That is not standard archival practice," she murmured, recognizing that someone had not wanted this erased, but merely hidden.

Her hand lowered to the interface at last, fingers moving with careful precision as she began to probe the lock. She did not use force, instead choosing to observe the way permissions had been layered and the redundancies built into the logic. Because it had been designed to be understood, it could eventually be opened. She adjusted her approach, mapping the system's architecture piece by piece as her stylus tapped a rhythmic cadence against the edge of the console.

Meri remained unaware of anything beyond the quiet of the room, filled only by the soft hum of aging circuitry and the steady resolution of data. "…you were not removed," she said softly, her voice barely a breath as she studied the restricted file. "You were preserved. But why?"

The question was not directed at the system, yet she continued her work, intent on unraveling the logic before her, unaware of anything beyond the archive walls.

Darth Carnifex

 

[Darth Carnifex]

One of the teams neared the door to the archive, deploying a small reconnaissance drone to map the interior. The spherical probe silently maneuvered through the air, its single photoreceptor recording everything in multiple visual spectrums. Its visual feed was thus transmitted back to the drone operator, who linked in the other members of their squad through their HUD. Upon visual confirmation of the target, the squad's communications officer activated a jammer, silencing frequencies that were not Kainate in origin.

Placing a breech charge against the door, the fireteam took up position.

And detonated it.

The doors blew inwards, accompanied by a roar of fire and smoke as the explosion created a miniature vacuum that collapsed in on itself as quickly as it was made. The team made their move, swooping in with weapons raised. They already knew the position of the fugitive, the drone still hovering above and transmitting her position to them. It wouldn't be long until they close in. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on one's point of view, they had orders to take her in alive.

And so their weapons were set to stun.

Meri Vale ​

 

[Meri Vale]

The archive erupted into violence so suddenly that Meri's thoughts never fully caught up to the sound of the explosion.

One moment, she sat hunched over the terminal, surrounded by the familiar dim lighting and the soft mechanical pulse of the ancient vault systems. Next, the doors detonated inward in a deafening roar of fire and collapsing metal, sending a brutal shockwave that hammered through the chamber, hurling papers, dust, and shattered durasteel fragments across the room.

Meri jerked violently upright from the terminal, her chair scraping backward across the floor as instinct completely overtook thought. Smoke rolled inward through the ruined doorway while alarms triggered warning lights to strobe erratically overhead, transforming the archive into a chaotic blur of red glare, drifting debris, and moving silhouettes.

Armed silhouettes.

The fireteam entered with frightening efficiency, spreading through the room in practiced formation while a reconnaissance drone hovered silently overhead, its photoreceptor fixed directly on her. Tactical lights swept across the archive shelves and terminals in precise arcs, and through the haze, Meri immediately recognized the unmistakable posture of trained soldiers advancing on a known target. They weren't scavengers or opportunists; they had come for her specifically.

That realization settled coldly into her chest even as she staggered another half-step backward away from the terminal, her pulse thundering painfully in her ears. Her gaze flicked instinctively toward the console equipment before she stopped herself. Even if she had possessed a functioning comm unit to try to reach anyone, the sudden static hissing through the room made it obvious the frequencies were already being jammed. There was nobody to call, and nobody coming.

The drone shifted slightly overhead, tracking her movements with mechanical precision while the soldiers closed in around her. Their rifles remained raised the entire time, their blue stun emitters glowing faintly beneath the shifting emergency lights.

Alive, then. They wanted her alive.

The thought should have comforted her, but instead, it only made the entire operation feel far more deliberate.

Meri slowly raised her hands away from her sides, not in surrender so much as recognition. There were too many of them, too coordinated, and the archive offered no meaningful route of escape she could identify quickly enough through the smoke and confusion. Survival, she had long since learned, often depended on understanding when resistance stopped being rational.

Still breathing hard from the shock of the breach, she looked between the advancing soldiers with a flash of visible disbelief lingering beneath her remaining composure.

"You appear to have prepared extensively for someone sitting at a terminal," she managed breathlessly.

The dry observation barely left her mouth before one of the operatives fired.

The stun blast struck her squarely in the chest with violent force, flooding through her nervous system in a blinding surge of blue light and crushing electricity. Meri gasped sharply as the current seized every muscle at once, the sensation less like pain and more like a catastrophic physical overload. Her legs gave out instantly beneath her, sending her collapsing hard against the archive floor as the world fractured into static and disjointed flashes of light.

For several seconds, she remained only dimly aware of the movement around her through the heavy haze of the stun charge still burning through her body. She registered boots crossing the floor, voices muffled beneath the ringing in her ears, and the rough sensation of someone wrenching her arms behind her back as restraints locked into place around her wrists. Nearby, the terminal screen still glowed through her blurred vision, its fragmented records flickering faintly beneath layers of untranslated text.

Then a gloved hand seized her shoulder and hauled her upright before the lingering paralysis had fully faded, forcing her unsteadily toward the ruined doorway while smoke and dust continued drifting through the shattered archive.

Meri did not struggle. It wasn't because she was unafraid, but because the sheer precision of the operation had already made one thing terrifyingly clear. Whoever these people were, they had expected her.

Darth Carnifex

 

[Darth Carnifex]

The soldiers escorted Meri out of the building before stuffing her into the holding bay of their transport, waiting only about a minute before the last members of the strike team emerged and joined them. As the transport pulled up into the sky and began to bank away, the entire structure was engulfed by a series of powerful explosions that eventually consumed everything in fire and smoke.

It was only after they were safely in orbit that the soldier removed their headgear. Distinct Epicanthix features looked back at Meri, scarred and weathered from dozens of fights and battles. When they conversed, they did so in Epicant, though their conversations were minimal. Meri would be offered only the barest of amenities, enough to keep the journey from being totally agonizing. About halfway through the journey, they affixed an electro-collar around her neck and tested it once to ensure that it was functional.

As they reached their destination, the captain of the soldiers turned to address Meri in Epicant. "Our Lord wishes to meet with you. A word of warning to remember your place, His Excellency's patience is not infinite." Then the soldiers, save the captain, put on their headgear and stood. The transport landed and they escorted Meri out into a humid jungle, barely more than an encampment cut into the foliage. Whatever this place was, it was clear that it was in the early stages of development.

A large tent sat at the center of the camp, and only the captain accompanied Meri inside. Seated on the floor was a towering warrior, His upper chest bare and fully adorned with ritualistic black tattoos. He drank solemnly from an earthenware cup, and had His eyes cast down towards the floor as they approached. The captain forced Meri onto her knees before the warrior, but did not kneel himself. After several agonizing seconds, the warrior finally looked up.

Bright crimson eyes, wreathed in inky darkness, stared into Meri's own. "So, your kind yet persists. Not entirely unexpected, but amusing nonetheless. What is it that you call yourself?"

Meri Vale ​

 

[Meri Vale]

The journey had left Meri with considerably more questions than answers, a fact that weighed on her far more than the physical discomfort of the restraint around her neck. The total destruction of the archive disturbed her most of all; hours of irreplaceable records, context, and history had vanished beneath explosives before she had even been permitted to understand why they mattered. As she knelt on the floor of the tent, she quietly tried to reconcile the massive scale of the military effort involved in capturing her with the absolute lack of explanation that had accompanied it.

When the towering warrior finally addressed her, Meri met his gaze respectfully despite the captain's efforts to force her head lower. The crimson eyes were deeply unsettling, carrying the immense weight of someone entirely certain of his absolute authority. However, his choice of words immediately derailed her focus, her brow furrowing slightly as she tried to process the statement with her usual academic detachment.

"I am afraid that may require clarification," she replied softly, speaking in polite, measured Epicant. "Several categories could reasonably apply. Whether you mean an Epicanthix, an archaeologist, a student, or simply a prisoner. I am genuinely uncertain which classification you refer to."

Only then did she address his direct inquiry, keeping her tone subdued and even. "Meri Vale. That is the name I go by. Though if I may ask, I remain confused as to why an entire extraction team was deemed necessary to locate a student."

Darth Carnifex

 

[Darth Carnifex]

"Tiravel."

That single word cut through everything, the brief silence in the wake of its uttering soon swallowed up by the sounds of the jungle. The man's gaze remained fixed on the woman calling herself Meri Vale, neither wavering nor diminishing in its intensity. Whoever He was, it was clear that He knew a great deal of knowledge. Knowledge about her lineage, especially, but undoubtedly other things as well.

"I had almost given up on the snare we had set. It had been so many years. But my diligence rewards itself, for here you are - trapped in my net." He rose in that instance, and the sheer gulf between her statue and His became immediately apparent. He was almost an entire meter taller than her, and His body well-suited for combat. Lithe, corded muscle hidden beneath tattooed flesh.

"My name is Darth Carnifex. I destroyed House Tiravel."

Meri Vale ​

 

[Meri Vale]

The world seemed to stop.

For one impossible heartbeat, Meri simply stared at him. The sounds of the jungle dissolved into a distant blur as a single word echoed through her mind.

Tiravel.

Almost no one knew that name anymore.

She had buried it beneath years of introductions, new schools, and careful habits until Meri Vale had become easier to answer to than the name she had been born with. Yet this stranger had spoken it without hesitation, without uncertainty, as though he had been expecting her all along.

Then came the second revelation—"I destroyed House Tiravel." Her breath caught as the words settled, sharp and undeniable, and the distinction struck her with sudden clarity: not Panatha, not the distant catastrophe recorded in histories, but Tiravel, her home, her family.

The distinction struck her with almost physical force. Panatha had become something historians wrote about, a catastrophe measured in campaigns, casualty reports, refugee accounts, and the slow collapse of a world. House Tiravel had been home. It had been her family, the halls she had wandered as a little girl, the familiar voices she had fallen asleep hearing through open doors, the people whose faces she could still remember even when some of their names had begun to blur with time.

Without realizing it, her left hand drifted across her body until her fingertips found the old scar on her right forearm. They pressed unconsciously against the pale skin beneath the sleeve of her robe. She had not touched it in months. She had not even noticed she was doing it now. Somewhere deep inside her mind, beyond conscious thought, she could almost smell smoke again. She could almost feel heat against her skin. Her body remembered what she had spent years trying not to.

For so long she had searched for explanations. She had read military reports, fragmented intelligence briefings, refugee testimonies, and archaeological surveys, hoping that somewhere among the dates, fleet movements, and casualty estimates she would finally understand what had happened. Every account spoke in distances. Armies. Governments. Political decisions. Entire worlds reduced to neat paragraphs that suggested no single person could ever truly bear responsibility.

Now one stood directly before her, towering more than eight feet tall, wrapped in ritual tattoos and absolute certainty. He was not an army, not a government, but a man.

Kneeling, she barely reached the height of his waist. Looking up forced her neck back until it ached, crimson eyes staring down from what felt like an impossible height. He knew her true name. The one she had hidden. The one she had convinced herself no longer mattered. Somehow, impossibly, he knew exactly who she was.

Fear arrived all at once.

Not the distant apprehension she felt before entering forgotten ruins or opening another sealed chamber. Not the cautious respect she held for dangerous places whose histories she wished to understand. This was immediate, instinctive, overwhelming. Every part of her wanted to move, yet none of them obeyed. She had spent years studying the aftermath of violence. She had never imagined standing face to face with the man who had created one of those layers of history. Let alone her own history.

When she finally found her voice, it was scarcely louder than a whisper, the words slipping out as if she were still trying to understand them herself rather than confront him with them.

"...You destroyed my family."

They did not carry accusation so much as fragile recognition, the first truth she had managed to piece together from everything he had said, and after a brief, uncertain pause, another question followed, softer still, shaped more by confusion than anything else.

"...Why?"

Darth Carnifex

 

[Darth Carnifex]

"Because I could."

The words struck like a thunderclap, resounding in their finality. It might not have been what the young girl had anticipated, an answer so simple and yet so flippant in its utterance that it might have sounded like mockery had it not been spoken with such severity. In this man was bound all that had wrought her an her family harm and hardship, every calamity brought down upon her life done so as if on a whim.

"Because I had the power to do so, because I asked of them what they were unwilling to part with. For that, I laid low their house. I was their Lord, I was their King, and they refused to give me what was already mine by right. So I instructed them in the folly of their defiance, so that others might learn." The Tiravel were not the first, but they were certainly among the last of the noble houses to stand against the Dark Lord. It became evident that those who would bar the path of the Butcher King did so at the peril of their whole bloodline.

He watched her closely, like a predator sizing up its prey. "The Tiravel are gone, for the most part. Panatha itself has gone as well. The kingdom of the Epicanthix is but a fading memory. Only my dominion exists now. So that begs the question as to what to do with you."

Meri Vale ​

 

[Meri Vale]

For several long moments, Meri could not make herself answer. She had spent years believing history was complicated. Every book she had read, every military report she had painstakingly pieced together, every refugee account preserved in fading ink had taught her that catastrophes were born from countless decisions layered one upon another until no single hand could truly be held responsible. There had always been campaigns, alliances, betrayals, shortages, politics, fear. She had searched those pages hoping that somewhere, hidden beneath enough evidence, she would finally discover an explanation that made sense of the emptiness left behind. Instead, the answer had arrived in three impossibly simple words. Because I could. It hollowed something out inside her. There had been no hatred in his voice, no satisfaction, no lingering anger. Her family, her home, the people she had loved without ever imagining they could simply cease to exist, had been reduced to an example. A lesson. Nothing more than a demonstration of what happened to those who refused him.

Her eyes burned before she even realized tears had gathered there. She blinked rapidly, willing them away, but they refused to disappear, clinging stubbornly to her lashes until the world beyond them blurred. She lowered her gaze, not because he had commanded it, but because she could no longer bear the sight of him standing above her. Everything about him seemed impossibly immense, his shadow, his voice, the certainty with which he spoke of ending entire bloodlines. Against that enormity she felt painfully small, a frightened sixteen-year-old kneeling on earth while the man responsible for every nightmare she had carried since childhood regarded her with detached curiosity. When she finally managed to speak, her voice trembled despite every desperate effort to steady it. "...I wasn't part of that." The words scarcely carried beyond the space between them. "I was a child." She swallowed against the tightness in her throat. "I had nothing to do with the choices my family made."

Silence settled again, broken only by the distant sounds of the jungle beyond the tent. Meri remained where she was, unable to stop the questions from forming despite the fear twisting tightly in her heart and gut. They came as naturally as breathing. They always had. Curiosity had carried her into forgotten ruins, beneath collapsed temples, through abandoned archives where everyone else had seen only dust. Now that same relentless need to understand reached into the darkest moment of her life, refusing to be silenced even as every instinct begged her to remain quiet. She lifted her eyes only a fraction, never quite meeting his again. "If you destroyed everyone..." The words faltered as though she already dreaded the answer. "...why am I still here?"

The question lingered between them, fragile and impossibly small against the weight of the man before her. Her fingers tightened around the fabric pooled in her lap until her knuckles ached, searching for something solid to anchor herself against. She did not understand. She could not make the pieces fit together. If House Tiravel had been erased, if Panatha itself had been swallowed by history, why had he gone to such lengths to bring her here? Why had he remembered a name she herself had almost stopped answering to? Her voice had become little more than a whisper when she spoke again, fear and bewilderment woven inseparably together with the quiet determination that had always driven her to keep asking one more question. "What..." She paused, drawing a shaky breath she was not certain she could hold. "...what could I possibly have that you would still want?"

Darth Carnifex

 

[Darth Carnifex]

​

"There were many children that day," replied the Dark Lord, His voice rumbling through her bones. His meaning was devoid of ambiguity. No further explanation was necessary, anything else would have been gratuitous. The Dark Lord was not one prone to wasting words just for the sake of it. Many of His contemporaries might have fallen into that trap, more often than not enjoying the sound of their own voice over whatever meaning they could ascribe to what they were saying. But the Dark Lord found that actions conveyed intent more effectively than one's voice, and silence could be just as sharp as a blade if tended properly.

Her question as to why she was still breathing was an acute one, albeit pointless. "That you survived is an abnormality, but not an impossibility. Whether by purpose or happenstance, you did not die with them. Perhaps you survived that day only to die here, or perhaps you are meant for greater things." He did not expand on what He meant by greater things, thought assuredly His definition would be far removed from her own. Instead, He moved to stand almost immediately before her, forcing her to cast her gaze high if she wanted to look at Him.

"However, you ask the wrong question. It is not what I want from you, it is what you can offer to me."

Meri Vale ​

 

[Meri Vale]

The air itself seemed to thicken as he approached. Meri remained where she knelt, unable to tell whether it was fear or the sheer weight of his presence that kept her rooted to the ground beneath her knees. Every instinct cried out for her to move, to crawl backward, to put even a single step between herself and the towering figure standing over her. Yet her body refused to obey. It was as though the darkness surrounding him had reached out and wrapped around her, leaving her frozen where she was. Her heart pounded so violently that she could feel it against her chest, each uneven beat accompanied by a shallow breath that never seemed to draw enough air into her lungs. She had never felt so impossibly small. Before him, she was acutely aware of every tremor in her hands, every quickened breath, every frightened thought racing through her mind.

His words settled over her with an awful certainty. They were not a question. They were not even a proposition. They carried the unmistakable weight of someone stating a truth he already knew, one that existed regardless of whether she understood it or not. It is not what I want from you, it is what you can offer to me. The thought echoed through her mind, refusing to make sense. She searched desperately for some hidden meaning, some misunderstanding she could correct, but found none. How could there be anything someone like her could possibly offer someone like him? She was only a student. She spent her days buried in forgotten histories, sketching ruined temples and filling notebooks with questions that often had no answers. There was nothing extraordinary about her. Nothing powerful. Nothing worthy of the attention of the being standing before her.

She swallowed, the simple act feeling strangely difficult as her dry throat tightened. Her fingers interlaced on her thighs, more out of instinct than intent, though they did little to hide the trembling that refused to stop. When she finally found her voice, it emerged soft and uneven, betraying the fear she could neither hide nor master.

"I'm...I'm just a student."

The words were not meant as an argument. They were the only explanation she had. It felt impossible that he could be speaking about her. He had to be mistaken. He had to be.

Drawing in another unsteady breath, Meri forced herself to raise her eyes once more toward the darkness towering over her. Terror urged her to look away, but confusion proved just as powerful. If he believed there was something she could offer him, then he saw something she could not. The thought alone was almost as frightening as his presence.

"I...I don't understand, my lord." Her voice barely rose above a whisper, quivering despite her best efforts to steady it. "What could someone like me possibly offer you...my lord?"

Darth Carnifex