Private A Loss of Shade

[Jorus Q. Merrill]

"Nothing, in truth, can ever replace a lost companion. Old comrades cannot be manufactured. There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories, so many bad times endured together, so many quarrels, reconciliations, heartfelt impulses...One by one our comrades deprive us of their shade, and within our mourning we always feel now the secret grief of growing old."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939​

GOLG, KORRIBAN
SHORTLY AFTER THE KORRIBAN BREAKNECK PODRACE


Noise and sociality squeezed Jorus out like a pip between finger and thumb, shot him out toward the refuge of being decently alone. With a utility speeder and a few gallons of water, he followed instinct around a sandstorm's edge until he couldn't keep ahead of its fury. Sand choked the engine irreparably.

Thus we find Old Man Merrill stumbling through the Grand Necropolis with a water-laden pole across his shoulders and red sand caking his beard. Even tuk'ata hid from a sandstorm this rabid.

The Force had suggested this direction. Shelter, maybe. Better to tough it out and see where instinct led than to cram himself into the nearest pelko hive.

Korriban. What a shitty world.


Seydon of Arda

 

[Seydon of Arda]

"What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies."
- Aristotle, Attributed
​

The Golgan valley's necropolitan pedigree was lost on Seydon.

It'd appeared out of the wastes like a heat-haze apparition, with its opulent and reinforced vaulted adobe bulwarks and wind-chewed gargoyles hunched over concentric palisades and multi-metre thick defense walling surrounding a gutted city settlement. A once grand township arranged around the broken castle parapets of an esteemed fortress, festooned with score-marked crenellations and combat-shattered battlements. Vast craters of blackened, heat-contorted and semi-glassed sand dotted the interior settlement and portions of the stubborn castle. The central donjon was still erect, painfully defiant against age, erosion, and palpable structural damage that'd bitten wide chunks out of the foundation and had cracked open most of the encircling defense towers.

The Golgan Necropolis was empty and withered when Seydon wound his way through a breakage wrought through the outer walling. Inclement, periodic sandstorms had buried the interior city in the eastern reaches in dune drifts nearly reaching the height of the defense walls. The remaining commerce and urban boroughs westward had been scavenger-stripped. Most constructions had been gutted of precious materials, from copper-alloy plumbing to savaged holo-fi router networks, the foodstuff distribution centres wholly despoiled. He'd uncovered undignified scav-soldier burial plots, where dead raiders and opportunistic rummager's had been pitched into mass graves and subsequently buried under garbage and reused refuse.

There were occasional hazards. Hssiss reptilian tribes that staked claims to certain unlit basements in the hollows of the distribute hubs, lone terentatek prowlers haunting the back alleys and private, sand festooned gardens of once opulent upper-class Sith administrators. Next to HK-droid packs sauntering on inspite of degrading hardware and damaged hydraulics, and Sithspawn super-soldiers dumbed down to obey and execute simplistic orders while shouldering failing pnuematic armour. Seydon avoided most, leaving the beasts to graze in their favoured shadows. The droids were less genial, and were destroyed under Razorlight's flashing, cleaving edge, the Sithspawn bipedal hybrids sundered through combinations of adroit swordplay and concussive, shattering Force-power. Seydon still committed some of the dead to brief rites of burial, whispering little Dunaan prayers of tranquility to appease the recently dead 'spawn-things and hopefully prop them towards a more fruitful rebirth.

Everywhere, especially where he discovered partially sand-buried town-squares, there was despotic iconography. Statues, bass-reliefs, blinking holo-triptych depicting false imperial majesty. He uncovered either Kaine's media-chiselled likeness or that of his neophyte, the unreal handsomeness of Darth Prazutis on boastful display. Icons of personality-cult, directing local populations how to offer up their work and life's energies to their ultimate, darkly benevolent and ultimately ersatz demagogues. Seydon once ran Razorlight through the basalt angles of one still-erect Prazitus statue, knocking its face into a low drift of mica-sand and fieldspar sludge.

In time, he'd adopted the former Dark Lord bedchambers as a temporary safe house. Salvaged generator banks hauled up from the township were installed along walling previously hosting barbarous armoire. A meditation chamber was stripped, replaced with a crude kitchenette of bent tin, hammered iron, and rough gas-burners, the bath-chambers rerouted to take advantage of still functional reservoirs not yet penetrated by scav-raiders. Each facet was temporary, non-committal. Seydon prowled the horizon with a scavenged assault-rifle monocular, watching for the next scav-shuttle would make landfall to try their luck harrowing the Golg Necropolis.

Today, an hour before high noon-hour, he was tracking the far south horizon-line of toothy picks when a touch of motion in the south-central township-square caught his eye. Seydon cantered and recentered his monocular. Followed a singular outline, a man hunched under the weight of a water pole weighted with sloshing canisters. Then a blasted red-sand tempest began blowing a gale through the Golgan valley. The monocular's resolution was scratched, flawed with digital artefacts, but there was something in the man's bearding and personal bearing that was... awfully, hauntingly familiar. A Levantine? Out here? Impossible, Seydon thought, they were a defunct breed long relegated to a well-earned retirement, pasturing in the mid-rim where he'd spent considerable fortunes dug out out the Sanctum's private reserves to establish comfortable retirements.

But he knew that face, beside the bristling facial hair and threadbare woolen cap. Seydon jerked a salvaged, high-yield flash-strobe. His thumb clicked briskly on the power-on nipple. If the singular figure down below hustling out of the sandstorm gale saw it, they'd note a tri-bright flash of Morse-code lighting from a high battlement window, blinking an old Levantine message within a series of obtuse dits and dahs. [Speak – Friend – And – Enter]

Seydon pulled away from the crashed window, out of the howl of sand and gale, blasting grit out of his nose. ...Praying. To any and all friendly gods and ghosts that still favoured the Path. He swigged briefly from a repurposed purse transformed into a leather wineskin. The last of his three-day water supply. He'd have to venture into the dungeon sub-basements to activate the pumps again. Seydon couldn't repress a shudder; a watcher lurked in the long cavities burrowed into the mantle, with an avidly demonstrated appetite for flesh. He laid Winterfang over his lap and risked a peak over the window sill, wondering if his instinct had been correct. He swore, he knew that face! But from where?

 

[Jorus Q. Merrill]

Levantine blink-code, a light through the sandstorm, brought Jorus to a halt. His center of mass, anyway: the water-carrying pole torqued on his shoulders as the wind fought to spin him around.

Rationality and good judgment suggested an overwhelming probability that the blinking light was a bog-standard Korriban hallucination designed to lead him to his death. Jorus dropped to one knee in a reddish dune and laid down the water containers. He needed to center himself, calm his mind and heart, and really listen. The only reason he'd lived so long on such strange roads, or no roads at all, was self-trusting intuition. In substance this situation was no different than a hyperlane under construction.

Well, except that deep space was home turf and Korriban emphatically was not.

He lingered, uncertain, trying for clarity.

Seydon of Arda

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Seydon tried the code twice again, leaning half out the window with a hand on the jamb and a boot-heel anchored to the sill. But the sandstorm rallied and smashed a wall of blood-hued dust between the fortress battlements and the township boulevards snaking up against its outer bulwarks. The day's fitful, anemic light from Korriban's swollen sun went dark. Seydon spat into the gale, cursing, slamming down the storm shutter and hurrying about the royal apartments to secure the remaining apertures. For a moment, he was stranded in pitch blackness; then his cat-eyes swelled wide and bands of articulate lowlight and infrared waves painted the chambers in exacting detail. He went to the generator bank, checking the linkages between the mobile stations were secured before depressing a heavy plastic switch. There was a gurgle of churning turbines, ozone scent blended with grain-diesel, then the squat bank of ugly machines purred on and provided lamplight. He had to blink against the sudden brightness, blinking aside his nightvision.

Razorlight and Winterfang waited with infinite patience beside the smashed remnants of a once vaulting bed frame. He went to them, swinging off a still erect bed pole, and began buckling the blades and their scabbards to his torso. His thoughts were a whirlwind clash; the man humping the water-pole over his shoulder in the half-buried avenues below, the queer start of vague recognition in his belly, the signal, the instinct to use said signal, and the harrowing little note of hope sweeping a chill note up through his gut. Seydon tested the leather-webbing anchoring his swords, was satisfied, and next looped his wolfshead medallion about his throat and wrapped a rescued shemagh scarf around his face and brow. The rest of his attire were loose, baggy pants that ballooned at the knees and were tightly strapped to a pair of cramped workmen boots, an equally ratty tunic and jacket prepared 'desert-fashion', and an aged stormcoat with its backside ripped to allow his blades to ride through comfortably.

He pocketed the strobe-light, girded his lightened wineskin, and set off from the bed chambers. Passed through the interior castle bowels, along high-arched passageways and barrel-ceiling vaults, innumerable side corridors leading to further aristo-apartments, into the lower, empty galleries darkened by the sandstorm's passing. Vermin skittered out of his way. The smell of micca and sand-quartz grew thicker, until he reached a vast, dust-swamped nave forming the central aisle of the castle's darkly extravagant foyer. Tattered banners blaring the faded livery of House Zambrano flapped ungainly where shrill fingers of wind lanced in through the great, broken entrance. Seydon brought his strobe-light up and thumbed its lamp on, stalking out into the storm. The sands that'd previously been up to his knees now accosted him waist-high. Motes danced in the arc of the flashlight, like snow whipped in a blizzard. He knotted the shemagh closer round his nostrils and slid a set of rescued welder goggles over his eyes. Now, he thought, the water-bearer. He'd been sloshing heavy gallon jugs on that awning pole, hadn't he? Which way? Nor'east? Yes, because the royal apartments preferred to face the Golgan ranges that jutted close to the throat of the horizon and that was nor'east and you saw him climbing down the avenues toward the outer palisades.

Seydon swung his feet out of the loose drift and managed to catch better purchase on a trail of not-yet buried flagstone. Jogged nor'east, his flashlight bobbing like a fae in the blood-warm walls of whirring sand.

Jorus Q. Merrill

 

[Jorus Q. Merrill]

A great secret that shouldn't be secret: better than half the time, the 'guidance of the Force' boiled down to your own instincts, confirmation bias, regurgitation of the input you chose to dump into your brain. More often than not, the Force held its peace.

And yet you could still ask and receive something real. Absent evidence one way or another, the proof came from acting on the impression: a tangible test. Replicable even, as long as you came at it with the intellectual honesty to try to eliminate your own biases.

Like, say, your bias against trusting anything on this gorram planet. Or your bias against being eaten alive by a pelko swarm as spectres gloated overhead.

Jorus grimaced and got up to put the water back across his shoulders. In the end his gut said 'forget what Should Be and what you Should Do, and get out of the karking sandstorm.'

He started walking — wading, really — through the chewy abrasive wind. The water containers torqued against their straps but he kept his mass moving in a straight line toward the place where he'd seen the signal light, be it real or not.

Was that a flashlight?

He set down the water again and fumbled in his jacket. A length of recent salvage spat out a red lightsaber blade, a mistakable signal.

He flicked it off and on: a Levantine dit-dah signal of his own.

A distress call.


Seydon of Arda

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Ahead, through veils of storm-gloom. A red stab of harsh light. Seydon halted, now on the balls of his feet in a fight-stance, arm swept back to grasp under Razorlight's crossguard while his off-hand played his torchlight against the sandstorm fog. He wiped the back of his wrist against grit slowly shelving up his goggles.

The flash guttered out. Then sparked on. A sequential dit-dah, code. General Levant cipher, indicating emergency. Mayday call. He remembered the flashlight in his own grasp and rapidly blazed a coded reply. Single phrase, based on Atrisian ideograms, where a single character could hold a sentence's worth of meaning. He waited. The opposite flash blazed again, repeating the Mayday. Twice they exchanged, until Seydon was satisfied. Something in his throat. Like a threnody, elegiac, a feeling. It lessened the sawing friction in his clothing where the sand had squirrelled in. He was suddenly light, walking virtually on his toes, wanting to disbelieve because Korriban possessed a spiteful air and tormented the living with vampiric phantoms. Then the wind hurtled down and whipped a fresh hail down the boulevard, forcing him to steady forward against the gale. He shouldered forward into the squall, following the arc of the flashlight.

An apparition, the outline of a hunched man, putting his weight against tired knees, coalesced out of the currents of sand. Twelve metres out, Seydon counted, taking a pair of steps, now ten, now five. Details crystallized. A well-worn spacer's coat, stained overalls looped and belted with micro-tools, a repaired, hollow aluminum awning pole bent with the weight of several water jugs, a greyed, trimmed beard and moustache married to an age-lined face affixed with a woollen cap. The Dunaan started, struggling to see through his scuffed goggles. Look up, he thought, damn you, look up! Look me in the eye!

And then the old man found his eyes through the worn goggles.

A beat.

He almost dropped the torchlight. Seydon tore the goggles away, tore the shemagh wrapping and freed his white-hair to the wind. Bright cat-eyes glared against the miserable murk. The note in his throat sang up into the flesh of his eyes and suddenly, inexplicably, a fullness threatened to overwhelm him. Seydon blinked, against the sand, against his senses, knowing the kindly but weary, overworked eyes, the wry face with its penchant for ironic humour. His jaw worked wordlessly for a moment, until his voice caught up and he drove its timbre against the windshear.

"Captain Merrill??"

Jorus Q. Merrill

 

[Jorus Q. Merrill]

Jorus' breath caught in his throat. He spat out sand and pulled his collar up over his mouth to draw a clear breath. The agitation, the fear — that was how Korriban had aimed to lead him astray, not some illusion. By making him doubt his gut and the evidence of his own eyes. He struggled back to his feet, leaving the water containers on the ground.

"...Seroth? Seroth! Seydon!"

He lurched forward into a seismic bear hug. They'd both put on years and weight. The storm had no respect for the moment: if anything it drove harder than before, battering against Jorus and getting into his coat and clothes.

"You were dead," he said at arm's length. "Or close enough."

Bad memories flooded back: his own brief involuntary visit to the Netherworld, 844 ABY, the Second Akala Crisis. He'd barely escaped with sanity and soul intact. By all the stories he'd collected, Seydon had found himself led into, and abandoned in, a phase or realm that made Jorus' experiences look tame.

"How long you been alive? You have a place to get out of the wind?"


Seydon of Arda

 

[Seydon of Arda]

"I don't know," Seydon said against the wind-squall. He knelt and clutched Jorus' water-pole out of a deepening sand-pocket and hoisted it easily over his shoulder. Its metal clanged and jostled enviously with his sword hilts. "I've only been realside - " He paused and counted silently. "Ten days? Maybe two weeks? Inside the Nether? That I don't know. But come on, this way. I've salvaged the perfect bolthole!"

Together, they threaded their way back up the broad boulevard lanes, easing across the first of several sequential moat bridges linking walled-off courtyards braced close to the great keep's outer battlements. Across the bridges, over twenty-metre armoured gates that'd been cleaved and ripped from their reinforced jambs, on until the main castle bulwarks layered under the glower of the central donjon hulked high over their heads and sucked them into its shadows.

He took Jorus around the donjon perimeter, following a scattered if reliable path broken through a handful of once-gaudy atrium courts. Gaudy in the bleakest sense, where House Zambrano's dire and mirthless sense of decorum had designed the savage architecture with almost comically grim occultist overtones and stark, ugly brutalism. They slinked through the 'west end' portal, down the long nave aisle flanked by lightless, skull-like upper galleries. From there, into even deeper wells of darkness. Seydon's touch steered Jorus against refuse piles and low, heat-scored rubble heaps, cat-eyes glinting. Occasionally, he stopped their progress, head canted as he listened and tasted and felt hidden things on the air and in the flagstones. And just as suddenly, he had them loping forward, albeit with a subtle trepid note in his stride. The Zambrano keep was militaristic and laybrinthian, no feasible way for him to cover the thousand untold entrances blasted into the fortress during the Empire's final hours. Seydon remembered his first night in the imperial chambers, half-asleep, the other half waiting on the mass of a hound-'spawn that'd tracked him through the apartments. He woke before the creature attacked, pounded through brief combat, and threw its severed head out one of the broken glasteel panes.

"Up here," Seydon said, unintentionally whispering. They were along a last stretch of a high-vaulted stairwell. Certainly, there was probably a hidden turbolift shaft that led directly into the private chambers but they were undoubtedly inoperable. Seydon led forward to a pair of heavy, salvaged doors roughly anchored into the angled jamb. Light poured from cracks underneath. The original armoured blast-doors had been pried apart by heavy industrial plasma cutters and, most tellingly, lightsabers. Seydon hefted the water-pole and pressed Jorus into the ransacked royal apartments and swiftly closed, bolted and rebolted the doors. They stood in fitful light, provided by bare bulbs mounted in adaptor-sockets from the walling. The odious ceiling frescoes were lost to dimness.

"When I figured out where I was, what this place was, couldn't help myself," Seydon said. He was undoing the shemagh covering, removing the long coat and old mechanic gloves. The swords remained, still proud in their clawed and torn scabbards, their hilt-fittings needing polishing. He looked over at Jorus, unable to repress a cheeky grin. For a moment, he looked young. "Bow low, Captain. You stand where the perfumed asses of the greatest Sith Lords have sat and farted. Couldn't ask for a better lookout post. And better here than trying to bivouac out in the Dark Lord valleys. There's... There's food..."

As he spoke, he paced slightly, an energy in his frame. Seydon abruptly spun and stepped a pace closer to Jorus. "Jorus, please, tell me you've got a ship somewhere..."

Jorus Q. Merrill

 

[Jorus Q. Merrill]

Jorus collapsed on what might have been a concubine bed, a large footstool, and/or an alchemy altar. "You weren't kidding. Nice bolthole. It's almost as dark as it thinks it is."

As Seydon explained the amenities, Jorus dug out his comlink. A little multitool popped its panels. He blew sand out of the comlink, shook it, put it back together. The joys of solitude had lost their appeal for the day. He keyed in a Levantine dit-dah 'come-get-me' signal.

"The Gossamer. She's as big as this place, old bulk freighter parked outside Dreshdae. Saggy — you remember my droid? — he'll bring her over. I got turned around but I left a route plan. Won't take him long to find us, an hour at most. Once we're rested and all, you got a high place where we could get aboard?"

 

[Seydon of Arda]

"Hm. Five floor down, there's a kind of vast landing that might've been a type of poisonous garden," Seydon said, motioning Jorus closer to a shuttered window overlooking the eastern reaches of the empty Golgan vale. He eased the latch, pulled the shutter up by one palm, and shined his torchlight out through the dark of the night time sandstorm. In spite of the whip of grit and micca, they could just make the outline of a long, dagger-like embrasure ejecting from the girth of the Golg fortress proper. Like the shadow of a mountain spar, jutting out like a flat plateau, reaching out into empty air until its length was exhausted. Seydon drew the shutter back into place, nodding.

"We'll signal there when the Gossamer wheels in. It's clear enough." He returned to a little circle of tatty camping chairs surrounding a carbon-blackened fusion lamp. Atop the lamp, he'd attached a make-shift grill of bent iron taken from clothes racks down in the looted castle town. Seydon lit the lamp, pulled several hanks of dubious game meat, and left them to sizzle against the low heat. A thick, salty pong began filling the bed chambers. Seydon's face was white and haggard in the light. But he was smiling. Unabashedly happy. He reached out, touching Jorus at the shoulder, giving the bone a little squeeze.

"Spast," He swore. "You don't know how good it is to see you. ...And I was... 'dead'. I stayed behind in this den called the 'Dreaming Dark'. The Nether treats it as the gestalt dumping ground of the galaxy's nightmares. I can't describe it. You don't wanna know either. ...But that was Ashin's big excursion to rescue her wife and I've no idea how much real-time's passed between her success and the... and the now. ...What year is it, Captain Merrill? Where are we at?"

Jorus Q. Merrill

 

[Jorus Q. Merrill]

"it's, uh..."

Jorus squinted at a tiny date/local time bar in the top corner of his comlink's proportionately tiny display.

"874 now. That Spencer Varanin thing and the hellrescue made a bit of a splash in some circles three, maybe four years ago."

Jorus' face tightened with grim empathy and knee-soreness as he got up off the bed. He took a long drink from one of the water containers.

"So it doesn't map one-to-one, makes sense, it's a fairy tale. But are we talking 'gone four years and it felt like a week' or 'gone four years and it felt like a century?'"

 

[Seydon of Arda]

The brief joy in his expression dimmed.

Seydon sat away from the fusion lamp, the dark rafters of the long royal apartments complimenting his mood. A dozen expression sought purchase on his face, from confusion to distraction, disbelief, to anger, to a bloody rage that made the light of his eyes glow so hot he noticed Jorus gently push his camping seat away. He loosed a lows, minuscule breath and kneaded his palms against his eyes. The joy had dissolved. In the light of the fusion lamp, age and albinism had returned and the gaunt Dunaan mask settled into place. Predatory eyes locked onto Jorus.

"...I should've killed the both of them when I had the chance," He muttered, mostly to himself. Seydon rubbed the butt of a palm against his brow, sighed thickly, and tried to release decades worth of anger in a sigh. Tension weighted on his jaw. "...Doesn't matter. Never did, I guess. Just... It felt like a hundred lifetimes in there, Jorus. Just this endless melee against your worst nightmares. My worst nightmares. Thought that's what I wanted but it gave birth to something. So much rage. Didn't want to die, not for their sake, feth the both of 'em. Just wasn't done. Not yet."

Cat-eyes, lambent with a fell-glow that complimented his mutated pallor, glanced up from the fusion-lamp gleam. Seydon sat forward, light winking off his sharp incisors. "Just wanna go home. Wherever that is now. I need you, Captain Merrill. More than you'd believe."

Jorus Q. Merrill

 

[Jorus Q. Merrill]

"Killed the both of'em? The Varanins?" Jorus grimaced. "Yeah, I feel that. Hell, if I'd tossed'em into a star in the Vagrant Fleet days, how many thousands, maybe millions of folks in the Unknown Regions would the Lords of the Fringe never have wiped off the map? Can't believe I used to fly with those two. That's a thought that festers. Shavvit, you need a drink."

These containers had big cap-cups you could drink from. He poured Seydon some water and passed it over.

"Sounds to me like you need a place to heal. Lemme tell you a story.

"Maybe thirty years ago, Alna found a tropical water planet at the raggedy edge of the galaxy. Couple things about this waterworld: nobody knew about it except this Brodo Asogan social-engineering crew trying to build a secret paradise. Five million pre-technological folks, mostly human, almost completely pacifist. Oh, and the planet's crust has an incalculable fortune of aurodium. Extraordinarily vulnerable planet. Alna brought me on board and introduced me to the locals, we kicked out the Brodo Asogans. We got married there." He rolled up his sleeve to show a complex webbed tattoo cuff that Seydon had definitely seen before. "That's my wedding band, or close enough. That's where we raised Mara and where we helped her heal up after she went dark. We've kept this planet a secret from everyone, absolutely everyone, because it's hard to imagine somewhere more vulnerable. Nice place to rebuild yourself."

His eyes...twinkled. Merrily, even.

"And it even has monsters. Tentacular sharp-toothed critters, not evil but hungry. The locals know their business, but sometimes they can use a hand. I've got nowhere to be and the Gossamer has a big, big gas tank."

 

[Seydon of Arda]

"There was always a rumour you had a few backwaters hidden in your navicomp," Seydon chortled, accepting the cap-cup and slurping back a few brisk mouthfuls before leaning to refill from the squat jug. The sandstorm was still pulping its wrath against the donjon spires, whistling shrilly through gaps and parts in the battered shutter-jambs. He occasionally rose with a bent tin plate and a small hand-brush, combing little sand piles gathering at the metal baseboards beneath the window sills. Light from the little fusion stove was fitful, small, but it possessed the effect of shutting out the world. Seydon glanced at the shutters, imagining the black fury swirling about them. He sat, refilled the cup, swigged, and leaned away to stare at a point in the ceiling.

"Sandstorm should let up soon." Seydon said at length, blinking finally. "If the Gossamer's already spooled up, we'll leave quick. Then we'll go to this secret place. And then, I am going to sleep in a hammock with my feet up for a month straight. Afterward... I'll build a little home. Fill it with all the little things I need and you can help with that; got no ship of my own. Afterward... We'll see. Best I can tell, I dunno if Dunaan are needed anymore.

"But!" He cracked his knuckles and sat forward over his knees, wrestling away the maudlin. "One thing at time. Thank you, Jorus, for somehow stumbling all the way out here. And thank you, Jorus, for the water. And the company, and the grand idea. Seeing you makes me wish the Levant were still a thing."

Jorus Q. Merrill

 

[Jorus Q. Merrill]

The comlink beeped. Jorus tucked it away and got up despite the protests of his knees. "Ship's here."

The sandstorm took a breath — didn't end, but shuddered. Jorus' ears popped as a mile-long non-aerodynamic spacecraft skidded into position. The spaceframe sheared off a dozen spires and sent them tumbling. The afternoon light dimmed to the equivalent of dusk. At a guess, Saggy had steered the bulk freighter down to an altitude of maybe a hundred yards.

A force cylinder, an incorporeal temporary grav-chute, stabbed down to meet a nearby balcony.

"Y'know," Jorus said, opting to leave the containers for whoever holed up here next, "that passive voice was doing a lotta work. 'Are needed.' You know as well as I do that people, individuals, are always gonna need your kind of help."

 

[Seydon of Arda]

"Maybe all the more reason" Seydon said, taking Jorus' cue and keying off the generator bank, lifting the locking bar free of its anchors across the apartment entrance blastdoors. "To find a way back to the Path."

Together, they hurried down a long vault of partially lit stairwells and ducked left into a lenghty apartment passageway. It broadened before opening onto that aforementioned embrasure, where Seydon could see the Gossamer's projected grave-chute stabbing down onto an empty court amidst desiccated ferrocrete planters and upturned iron benches. Stormy winds shuttled about them, lacking its previous ferocity, digging grit and sand against their eyes and into the tears and seams of their clothing. He followed Jorus into the oscillating light, immediately feeling his mass negated by the anti-grav field gently if firmly hauling their weight up through the narrowed 'effect' well. His belly turned, unused to the weightless sensation. Seydon proffered a lingering farewell glance at Korriban's storming terrain, at the jagged teeth of distant peaks raised against the throat of the sky, the long avenues of sneering temples and over-wrought statues peering arrogantly across deadened landscape, at the Golgan valley depression left to home the Tuk'ata tribes claiming dominion. One day, Seydon knew, he'd be back. To harrow the long, now nameless necropolitan crypts of damned Dark Lords festering in their sepulchres. Winterfang, his sword, seemed to crow at the idea. Razorlight, his other blade, loosed a ferocious note in his soul, hungering for the cacophony of mortal combat. He left the dark of the lingering sandstorm, following Jorus up into the grav-chutes light, feeling more than hearing his boots eventually touching down on deck plating.

-

Later: the forward steerage decks, the amalgam bridge of the S.S. Gossamer. Seydon laid beside Jorus, cocooned by the helm, watching Captain Merrill's hands dance across the control banks, touching the panels with unconscious, paramount navigational skill. A grid of hard light washed over his face, sounds of a dozen navicomp computational banks thrumming in synchronized unison. He glanced at the reinforced glasteel viewscreens, at endless starry reaches blinking with motes of nebulae clouds and light-darts of young stars gleaming fiercely in the void.

Someone began calling out a lightspeed countdown. The vessel seemed to brace under his seat. Seydon couldn't find the energy to care, laying his head back against the chair's neck rest. The hyperdrive motivators synced, linked, matching output with navicomp coordinates to steer the Gossamer's bulk through lightspeed. A half-emptied bottle of grain-liqour lolled and knocked against his ankle on the decking. Somehow, he couldn't quite be sure how, he'd commandeered someone's stringtar. As strands of lightspeed filled his eyes through the forward viewscreens wrapping around the Gossamer's bridge, Seydon clutched his fingers down the stringstar neck with a little ditty of song, swimming in a half-aware sea that was a relief against the long, dayless hell that'd clutched him for so long.

Home was... wherever, he decided. Home was this hidden idyllic Jorus had advertised. Seydon let himself enjoy the simplicity of being alive, the war-spirits in his blades muting to an agreeable slumber. Briefly, he felt the echoes of missed, long extinguished halcyon days. The Levantine rangers hurling forward against the dangers of the distant Tingel Arm. Himself, still young, still in love. His fingers twisted on the stringtar chords, hoping the little tune wouldn't annoy Jorus or his crew. The lights of innumerable navigation and system display banks played rainbows of LED colour in his eyes. The grain-liquour tugged a little harder on his senses. Seydon loosed a little laugh, seeing Jorus Q. Merrill out the corner of his vision, pedalling the stringstar's volume just a little louder. Felt something hot in his eyes begin to burst and leak. Laughed, and cried, and played the stringtar notes as hyperspace blitzed around them.