A Sum of Lies

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Hutt Space – Y’Toub System – Nal Hutta – Nar Shaddaa[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]05:27:045 – SHT – New Vertica[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]Six Days On[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was to be a virtual blue milk run. Easy in setup and execution, Guenyvhar promised. And Stenwulf, snidely, that it wouldn’t task his precious ‘morals’ too greatly. Seroth bade his silence but nodded to his mother, while they and some fifty other warriors kept seated around a holo-slab table. The air was spitting with speeder grit and engine refuse, acrid with so many chemical stenches. It was like standing in a classroom, forced to breathe in the stench of bromine, sodium, carbon, with tinges of metallic flakes from magnesium. He and some twenty other Sayda, them dressed in the dark browns, dirty-whites, and blacks of the Sayda uniform, he in ordinary tunic and slacks, stood upon a stretch of upraised avenue. A speeder canyon, some four kilometers deep, yawned open before them, packed with dirtied aircars rocketing by. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They kept watch upon a limousine. It was a piano-black ingot, windowless and hovering upon anti-grav repulsors gilded with platinum and gold. A thoroughly elegant machine, near soundless, ominous like a techno-organic monolith. He’d seen the driver: a figure that had been cut away and replaced almost entirely with exo-skeletal artificial musculature and framing, eyes just a blank bar of grey that was polished and fitted with what must have been a laser-writ family crest. It said nothing. Just walked past them on steel heels and toes, opened a sliding door to the driver’s seat, sat in, and disappeared behind the black polished vehicle finish. Seroth looked to Stenwulf, who was busily lost in thought. He was not so dissimilar, what, with his old but well maintained exo-skeleton attached directly to neural sheathes beneath his skin, to plates screwed in against the bone. The skeletal strength-amplifier could be removed with a bit of drilling and folded for storage. The flesh-plugs and attachment sockets would remain as blemishes on his flesh, however. The bastard looked weirdly vulnerable in that moment, regarding the price one paid for an edge over competition. Seroth viewed him shudder and turn away, hoisting up his old, burlap hood and cape.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The platform was attached to a downtown estate, kept guarded by roaming contingents of armed aerial droids. They were round, oblong things, as black as the aircar limousine and spiked with transmission antenna and sensorial equipment. Anti-air cannons lay pronged like tusks underneath their belly-carriage. The estate itself was a towering, three sided pyramid that stretched for what must have been a hundred or so floors. Seroth reckoned it couldn’t simply be a ‘family house’, given that everything looked like it would easily belong to an octane enterprising business. And compared to the relative drab of surrounding tower-suites and downtown New Vertica hab-blocks, it seemed constructed to convey an unspoken message as much as anything. This was moneyed property. It could afford the best in amenities and service, house hundreds if not a square thousand bodies, all in perfect comfort. It was a scion of war-time industry, plying wares to whomever had the coin to afford their wares or consultation. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“’We are rich…’” Seroth murmured to himself. So much wealth, he thought. It seemed to him, the more money someone acquired, the less and less they could do with it. Why slave, construct a monument towards greed and pride? He’d never know and had little desire to. Seroth knew where his greatest treasures laid. In Rosa, in his body, his skills, and weaponry. And in exactly that order.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Figures approached. Doors oscillated open across the landing platform, beneath a crystalline canopy etched with glassy circuitry, and out strode Guenyvhar, ten house-guards resplendent in polished plate, plumed helmets, sharp rifles chased with gold, and the virtually underdressed Sayda that walked with a killers ease. In their midst beside Guen, who too was kitted in combat gear and looking fiercer than vaapad, was their client. She was a woman who’s age and beauty made it damnably difficult to place an age upon her, looking as if she had always been and always will. A rare creature of timeless look and poise. The boy could feel the guttural tense from Stenwulf across the landing pad, who appraised her with unabashed masculine intent. Her name was Yennefer Bine, Lieutenant-CEO of Binery-Plate Incorporated, beneath her mother. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Yennefer Bine was not dressed for Nar Shaddaan weather. Swathed in a low-rise transparent sari, atop a sleeveless choli, the colours of white steel and studded with diamonds pleated amidst the sheer fabric. Her denuded belly was sinuous with a snake’s tattoo, where it writhed before descending to devour its own tail. A mystic’s metaphor for the intertwine relation between life and death: self consumption, turning over and over again. Or perhaps of greed, being a self-fulfilling paradox. One feeds but is never satisfied. On and on it goes, hollow with vapid hunger, striving to collect even the stars overhead, until at death bed when realization crashes down with lightning and the fall of the scythe.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seydon. Sten.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The two fell into step behind Guen and ducked beneath the aircar roofing, sitting in against plush seats of Matalorn leather that began to automatically heat their rumps. Sten whistled at the decadence, the interior decoration that kept a constant glow of cool, bluish light behind Ms. Bine’s head. It haloed, lending an ethereal visage to her already shapely face. Seroth kept his tongue, looking to the woman and seeing her as such. Seeing as he saw himself. Fleshly, prone to fault and failure. She was beautiful but she was rich and when the rich hired out his mother, it was for less than altruistic purposes. The entry door whirred closed. Soothing music began to play at a steady 60 BPM.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Miss Byne…” Stenwulf said in introduction, trying to smooth his roughened timbre and accent over. Guen rolled her eyes out of sight. Smitten. Though it never took much.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ma’am,” Seroth nodded curtly. “How can we help you?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Yennefer Bine smiled slightly. Her teeth were pearlescent and edged in silver. She nodded to Guen. “To the point, this one.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“A little too often,” Guen remarked glibly. Mother and son stared a moment, before the commander turned back to the businesswoman. “Shall I go over the specifics, Miss Bine, or would you prefer to inform them?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth had tried to deny his mother’s summons for the undertaking. Shev instead twisted his arm, asking that he go along with it, try and give his mother a fighting chance to make any relationship between them workable. They needed it, he argued. The boy, for he never had a mother and rare figures of strength to help guide him through his tumult of young adulthood. And for the mother, who’d become sunken into a rut of work and was now a hardened soldier, who needed a chance to experience what was likewise robbed from her. So Seroth swallowed his misgivings, put on a brave smile that mirrored Guen’s, and came with her to Nar Shaddaa. …Her and fifty fighters sharpening blades and cleaning gunnery. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Its simple bodyguard work,” Guen said. “A client has contacted us for an extra facet of personal protection. We’re just guarding a life this time around, no dirty cult politics. You won’t have to get yourself twisted up over the details.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It didn’t lessen the sensation of living a hypocrite’s life. Seroth sometimes made it a snide point to call mercenaries and soldiers of fortune ‘whores.’ They cheapened life for the sake of coin, killing as they did with little thought to conscience or consequence. Here he was, in the back seat of an expensive aircar limousine, in the company and bankroll of two aged killers. And he had already earned his blood money on Commenor. On Terminus. And now Nar Shaddaa, paid to protect someone and kill on their say so. It galled. He’d ran from the Republic to avoid the stigmata of being a glorified Force soldier in service to Senatorial interests, rather than spiritual growth and independent venture. Ran, into the wilds, hunting beasts of strange, unnatural make to protect distant communities. And now run straight into the arms of the very opposite of his personal code. He was betrayed, and compromised. What would wise @[member="Boolon Murr"] have to comment, living this double-life? What would @[member="Rosa Mazhar"] think, knowing her lover was neck deep in affairs he should have had no part of?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The specifics are quite simple, my friends,” Ms. Bine said. “I require personal protection, of which you and your keeper here are now furnishing. Fighters, marksmen, and the like. I’m in the midst of a delicate business venture and I must have it go through with utmost smoothness.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Y’ere afraed uv owtsid interrrferences,” Stenwulf piped up.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Essentially,” Ms. Bine nodded. “I’ve been put under a great deal of pressure by a separate community to see this arrangement through. If I can do so successfully, I’m promised advancement for both myself and Binery-Plate. An opportunity like this comes only so often. And I have competitors. The door is open for them as well and they will not hesitate to stoop to sabotage.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Who is this community?” Seroth asked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ms. Bine hesitated, but nodded, cocking her head slightly. Her smile was almost too bright by her pearlescent and silver teeth. “A kind of… family.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And in this family, I’ll find my apt place in life. I can’t afford to die or be foiled this evening. That’s where you, Sayda, come in. We’ll be going to the Sapkowski Yards and overseeing the delivery of a shipment and then a transfer of pay. It will be on your fighters to maintain your segments of security. And if there is interference… To rectify it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ice balled in the boy’s stomach. Already, whispers from the lattices of Force energy peaking around warned that this would be a terrible night. In instinct, his right palm rested over the T-cross of his holstered tomahawk, the other upon the nestled sheathes of his hanger-sword and parrying knife. Stenwulf just smiled wolfishly. Guen didn’t hold much expression at all. Her green eyes stared frigidly out her passenger side window, contemplating. Despite his company, and Ms. Bine’s occasionally flirtatious small talk… Seroth felt alone.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Something had gone awry. They were three klicks out from the Sapkowski Yards, when Seroth felt something like blood prick at the back of his mind. Whispers. Flitting with difficult to garner cadence that rendered every syllable strange, and ghostly. Guen perked up when she noticed the subtle change in her child’s posture. He sat straighter, head tilted just slightly. His hands had fallen to his waist-harness and were fingering the catches of his weaponry. Stenwulf was motionless, bored with the drive, still with a restless energy. She was about to ask Seroth what the matter was when he turned to her of his own accord, flint-eyes bright with an unknowable energy. He said nothing. His glance looked to the comm. piece lying idly by Miss Bine’s firm thigh. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes?” The Lieutenant-CEO said a moment later, picking the piece to her ear when it began to rumble. “…Well, what’s the matter, man, speak up? …What do you mean?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Awwhh, ‘ere we goh…” Stenwulf muttered and clamped his hands to the sheathed blade laid across his knees.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Have you contacted the captain…? …What about couriers? …Damn it. I’m there in less that five,” The comm. piece snapped quiet. Miss Bine sat up straighter, looking to three combatants waiting anxiously on her word. “We’ve run into an issue. My cargo is not yet on the ground. The Rite of Law, our hired out freighter, is refusing to discharge her berths and communications have ceased. Which means one of several scenarios. Firstly, it could simply be a grand technical issue. Secondly, the Captain wants to haggle me for an extra greasing of her palm, to say that she wants more creds. Which, if so, I have a perfect response in mind. And thirdly? …I’ve lost control of the shipment to a third party, who’s hijacked these entire proceedings and are preparing to plough me without tallow.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seroth, Sten,” Guen looked to the pair across. “When we land, I want you both to be hitting the ground running. Stenwulf, see to the perimeter squads and keep an eye for any incoming competitors. Seroth, I want you in the yards and at the Rite in less than five.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Negotiate?” Seroth asked. His mum shook her head, pulling on her camo-hood.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Infiltrate. Ask for entry first. If you’re denied or attacked, respond with as much force as you find applicable.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth paled. Killing for coin… Who was the whore now, he asked himself? Their shared limousine swung around an emptied container bay, where a score of waiting guards and gunmen milled in tight formation. They were akin to the Sayda, the lad noted, an equal dividing of both sexes that seemed to draw out a more easy relation between the shooters. The stretched aircar landed on a hiss of air, undercarriage bright with anti-grav glow, seamless doors swinging aside as the occupants discharged. The aircar pulled away to run a holding pattern a half-kilometer from the Sapkowski yards. It would wait until summoned by their Mistress and the come barreling in for an assigned extraction. Stenwulf was already quickly picking out Sayda from the gunmen, gathering them close into a brief huddle as he relayed curt instruction. Guen was looking to the gunners, addressing each squad in turn though they looked loathe to take instruction from someone outside of ‘the Firm’, as they liked to say.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The boy was now across the muster point, faced with high walls of massed cargo containers. He waited, listening to the drawls of disconnected chatter. And then Guen turned, stilled him with the chill of her green-on-ice eyes… and nodded. Her son was then gone. By habit, rather than simply vaulting with a compress of Force energy, he leaped and scaled the container-wall with all the fluidity of a practiced climber. He was atop a bare handful of seconds later, faced with a durasteel and triluminum jungle of crane cabling, container towers, long stretches of ordered columns washed yellow under nearby, arching flood lamps. Across the yards were the landing bays, where great commercial haulers brought their swollen berth-bellies down to set out their cargo for picking, collecting, and organizing. It was a straight five kilometer hurdle to where the Rite laid hung up in supporting maintenance scaffolds and bracers.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He ran, finding freedom in the whisks of chilled night air stagnant with breathless pollution. Air whipped at his face, sent a feeling of raw exposure through his pores, his eyes and nose, his teeth. Seroth’s frame had lost its usual tense ‘spring’ every time he broke into a sprint. Belying his increased bulk, he maneuvered with unseemly grace and enviable fluidity, seemingly knowing precisely when and where his feet would fall. He jumped, propelled up by a short stack of lain welding kit, climbing atop a container and continuing. His column ended abruptly in a long drop, before an empty, second muster bay that was lined with corded lengths of synthetic heath-rope and steel clamps and hauling claws. Seroth turned to his left and spanned the distance of a ten meter vault with a single, easy leap. He’d never been talented in the arenas of ‘mind tricks’ and the like. But he’d practiced Art of Movement drills in the forestry surrounding the Tython compound since before he was seven. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]From column to column he ventured, ascending and descending in equal venture. His feet were a quickened blur of leather knee-boots that refused to relent their momentum. Gloved hands gripped and tore him up almost naked faces of ominous container walls, ascending with cool speed before breaking again into his furious run. He switched out, leaping across artificial chasms while keeping clutched to handy cabling and lift-hooks left idle beneath massive, overhead hauling cranes. Seroth was a blur of cloak and shadow. Just a half-and-half mirage that sped beneath flood lamps and rejoined with the crisp shadows that fell from hunched hab-blocks surrounding the yards. A half-kilometer from the Rite, he slowed and crouched over the edge of an especially lengthy tower of perfectly balanced cargo tanks.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Rite of Law, please respond,” He murmured into a wrist-cuff commlink. …Dead air. “Rite of Law, come in, if you will.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A long minute followed the pause behind his comm.-blips, before a gruff and sour voice replied over the secured channel. “Who’s this? Caller, please respond.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Retainer, for Binery-Plate. On behalf of a Miss Yennefer Bine,” Seroth said. “We require you to discharge your cargo for inspection and transfer of ownership. Miss Bine has the money you require.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sorry,” Came the reply curtly. “But we’re affecting our own terms of transfer. If Miss Bine’s so eager to get her goods, then she can come to the negotiation table. Tell her that.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I cannot,” Seroth said quietly. “I know what she will say. She will not acquiesce to your greed. Why do you feel a need for more? Has she not offered enough?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…The feth asked you, damned fool!?” The channel went dead with a blare of grey static.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I asked,” He said to himself. “Because money is strange, and awful, and makes good people act contrary to their kind natures…”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Like so often on Nar Shaddaa, it began to rain. Baleful sheets of blackened water fell in close walls that began to smudge visibility and pray on both heightened nerves and paranoia. Thunder shook the water from Seroth’s shoulders, blitzed him with a sub-sonic roll of flattened drizzle. The first crack of lightning sounded when he closed comms. with the Rite of Law, the fat-bellied cargo hauler laying away from him by only twenty meters in maintenance scaffolding and discharge clamps. The Rite cut through the gloom with activated flood-lamps, mowing coned beams of light against pockets of intensifying precipitation. Patrol grav-skiffs ejected from side-berths recessed into the Rite’s bloated flanks, crewed by five crewmen apiece. They had armed with anti-boarding rifles, polearms, crate-axes, nightvision goggles clamped across faces sweating moisture from the sudden, incessant water fall. The skiffs turned into a tight rotary formation, under-slung lamps trying to peer through clouds of bitter murkiness.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Approach by stealth was a difficult prospect. Her Captain, in a moment of simple brilliance, had cranked the sensor gain of the Rite to maximum, flooding most of the whole of the yards and surrounding walled hab-blocks in a wash of infrared, electronic, and motion detection. Seroth was made. The upper cabins could detect his too-close physical signature and sent a pair of skiffs to deal with his presence. Seroth watched one careen overhead in a wail of engine-sound, polearms swiping at his brow. The second flanked, firing off board-rifles, plinking the corrugated canister beneath his feet with shredding tracer rounds. He hadn’t his shotgun nor pistol to deal with the nuisances from long-range. Instead, he sprinted off back over his right shoulder, clambering up a crane-mast as the skiffs wheeled around for a second pass. Harried by swinging crate-axes, polearms stabbing and clanking against support bars, the lad gauged the fall and the time it would cost to make a proper landing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then he let go. Emptiness opened up beneath for a brief, terrifyingly exhilarating second as Seroth fell. The second skiff had come beneath the crane-stem, trying to bead a cone of fire that would have lashed upward at the boy’s exposed flank. Instead, the massed crewmen gave a cry as something dark and heavy fell amidst the cramped quarters of the open skiff-cabin. Seroth kicked one over the hand-railing, elbowed a second into his face and shattered his teeth, whipping around to take him by the shoulders and heave him over too. The second and third couldn’t swing their lengthy cutting axes or polearms around in time. Seroth took one in the throat with his longknife, the other with a severing cut of his tomahawk. The driver wailed and swung the skiff around in an upside down corkscrew. His opponent hung on gamely even as his world spun in a sickening whirl of flashing flood-lamps and grazing rain.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Finally, enough was enough. Stomach threatening to disgorge the contents of his grey, freeze-dried breakfast, Seroth slammed his boots forward. Just right, his heels cracked into the base of the driver’s skull and disconnected his head entirely from the float of his throat. Limp, arms dangling in difficult angles, the man fell and skittered past the open stairs welded to the rump of the skiff. Righting the controls, Seroth swung back on the altitude yoke. The difficult machine rammed down through a narrow culvert of packed containers, blistering sheets of white-hot sparks from the grinding rail-guards and grav-plates. The lad gritted his teeth, fighting the old and sticking control panel. With a curse, the skiff-machine accepted his command to ascend altitude and rose upwards in a grating shriek of steel on wrought-plating. The comm. piece upon his belt shivered with miniscule voices, someone growling ‘Contact, contact!’ and others asking for clarification on the situation. Seroth hadn’t time to answer.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The encircling interference ring keeping a surround of the Rite turned as one. Seven skiffs banked and came hurtling towards the boy, baying gunfire and hurling polearms like hooked lances. Seroth swung up and high, passing overhead as ionized buck-shot pellets ripped into his ride’s undercarriage. There was an awful cough of splitting metal, of something imploding and bursting the foot-decking four meters behind. His skuff was chugging strangling whines of fading engine power, vibrating intensely beneath his palms and wrists. Attitude was virtually non-existent. Axe-in-hand, Seroth waited for a closing skiff to come whooshing past on the left flank. His boots caught into the dented railing, propelling him out into emptiness once more as the skiff-guards gave a cry. Then the shadow was amongst them and spilling them over the safety guard-rails, ripped and rent through torso and throat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth could hear his own conscience bleating in condemnation. Was this exercise in mercenary life such a necessary byproduct of trying to re-attach closeness to his distant, estranged mother? How much of his soul was going out with every unnecessary kill? Were they unnecessary? He did not wish to die, nor turn tail and humiliate himself or his mother. But he would remember the terrified faces of the massed skiff-crews, ordinary men and women, humanoids of differing make, screaming up at him as slew them in half an eye’s blink.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The remaining skiffs, seven all told, converged on his newly acquired floater’s tail and began harrying him with sustained, ripping fire. Seroth tilted the skiff forward and let the undercarriage catch the brunt of the shot, clamping down the accelerator until the yards below fainted into a blur of rain and distended coloration. The Rite of Law loomed ahead like a sleeping leviathan, bulbous and wreathed in running lights from nose to stern. Weaponless, all it could do in retaliation from the approaching, stolen skiff was flash the whole of its flood lamps up into Seroth’s face. The lad screwed his eyes shut, listening to the whistle of air and judging distance by the way his temples began to pound in blistering panic. The Force turned its whisper into a scream behind his ear. Seroth shunted off the speed, slowing to a wrenching halt, twisting right and down as the undercarriage scraped off the hauler’s dorsal plating.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Down and down, to the vessel’s midriff, where the skiff-hold bays were kept opened for their inevitable and presumably triumphant return. Comm. piece upon his hip rippling with reports of troop movements, support incoming as Stenwulf led the charge with Guenyvhar’s Sayda, the boy maneuvered into the small hold bay and released himself from his careening ride. Maintenance screws scattered in roaring panic, watching as a smoking rectangle of perforated metal and glowing grav-plates smashed into the back wall. Scaffolds tumbled, weld-arc manipulator arms falling in disarray as the skiff punched a hole through the plated walling. Moments later, something had crossed incorrectly. Seroth kept his head down as a plume of white-on-red fire exited in a screaming ball of conflagration. Those skiffs that kept too close to his tail found their crews incinerated, crisped to ash.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He picked himself up from the greased floor deck and began to stride, passing terrified mechanics that watched this pony-tailed maniac stroll with strange, frightening physical presence and killing grace. Seroth could only offer them a small, sad smile, glad for a change his lightsabers were not kept clipped to his belting. He turned and opened a portcullis, stepping into a parts bay where a freight turbolift awaited. At his insistence, the lift doors swung open and admitted his ride down to the lower cargo berths. This damned cargo would be recovered, gifted back to Miss Bine and the whole now-messy affair concluded. Excuses rattled his conscience. If only the Captain had given to greed. If only Ms. Bine was not so motivated to see this black deal completed. If only, if only…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…If only he hadn’t compromised.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]“He’s on board!” A ship-speaker shrilled with black panic. “Deck four, larboard! Sealing all entries and turbolifts! If anyone of you listless gits has the gonads to grab a gun and deal with this problem, now would be the time to find your fethin’ courage!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Despite her age, the Rite of Law was a tidy vessel with a set template plan for most of the floors. At least Seroth could gauge as much from a local terminal inset against a wall recess, before the Captain had the savvy to lock out any unauthorized access. There were abilities known to Jedi and Sith alike, that could bend the steel of machine over to whatever a practitioner desired. It was difficult knowledge, hard to learn, hard to exercise, and almost… a degree unnatural. Seroth felt himself grow still at the lecture detailing such ways, a studious examiner bubbly with endless mirth about the vivacity of her subject matter. He’d been thirteen, but he swore off to never practice anything beyond his own conscience’s remit. That promise had been put to the test in thrice circumstance: on Commenor, on Terminus, and now on Nar Shaddaa.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Crewmen came ‘round a far, arched corner. They lifted the nozzles of stubby boarding rifles and flicked off the safety-catches, ready to thrum the narrow hallway with wrenching lacerate-shot. Seroth brought his weapons, easing into a quick roll that settled him to a knee and foot, hands braced out before him. A wall of psychokinetic energy hurled forward and smashed unseen into the midst of the some dozen crew-fighters. Seroth took one through his chest and noggin with two hacks to his ribs and gouge through his temples with his blade. Another he turned on, slashed their throat and slammed them back against the bulkhead, easing open some footwork to lay in against the rest with thrashing knuckle-strikes and forearm blows. They fell poleaxed, beaten but unconscious.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We’re owed our take, boy!” The Captain sounded of the vessel speakers. “We’re owed what we think is fair! If you’re boss believes she’s in the right to undercut us, then we’re in the right to withhold and take our wares to someone more appreciative of the costs we’ve paid to get this far!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The boy wasn’t listening. The turbolifts were cordoned off by thick duranium slabs sheeting down over the autodoors. Maglocks stuck them firmly in place, and Seroth’s physical attempts to budge it with his own strength proved quickly futile. He gauged the lift and the emergency maintenance ladder hatchway that was similarly locked. The hatchway only opened in case of dire emergency, such as fire and rapid depressurization, or even in the case of an enemy boarding action. Above, by the sets of glowing strip-lamps laid against the ceiling in lambent clusters, laid small, opaque but polished glasteel sensor swatches keeping an avid eye on the surrounding deck temperature. Any sudden peaks, extreme heat and so on, would provoke automated containment responses. The hall would fill with choking foam in an attempt to douse nearby flames.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth reached and tore off a strip of cloth from the fabric girded around his left elbow. Grasping one of the unconscious crewman’s flask, he doused it thoroughly in some rank fluid that was probably equal parts alcohol, anti-freeze, and jet-fuel. He tied it round the butt of his tomahawk haft, grabbing a sharpening stone from his waist-belt pouch and his parrying blade. Sparks flew as the knife’s edge glided along the tempered whetstone, catching into the wetted cloth, sending it up into a bright, furious haze of licking flame. He stood, held the burning item close to a nearby ceiling sensor, and crossed his fingers. Decidedly ‘nothing’ happened for approximately thirty seconds.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]And then a stark klaxon began whooping, followed close by a blitzing hurl of stinking anti-conflagration foam. Clouds of the stuff descended with a belying, hissing weight that began to consume any space to breathe. Seroth clenched down on his teeth and lips, stoppered his nostrils, and stepped forward through a tingling embankment of flooding cream. One knuckle cracked against a hatch-rung that hadn’t been there previously. Further emergency measures had been tripped, briefly overriding the Captain’s computer authority to keep the deck sealed from either entry or exit. The lad grasped the rung and shunted the hatch aside, gripping the lip of the short entry box, swinging his legs in first while ducking back his chin and throat. There was a dizzying split second of general weightlessness, flying forward into the tightly pressed space of the cross-sectioning tunnel. His toes struck forward, snatching purchase upon a rubber-gripped ladder rung, hands following in swift suit. Fifty meters of empty drop awaited him if his grasp failed, both above and below. The lad cursed at his efforts to secure a cargo that was doubtlessly illegal in nature, to favour a businesswoman that was doubtlessly unscrupulous, to please a mother that had doubtlessly voided her conscience for credits.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Intruders! Incoming rocket-fi ~” The announcement cut off with a blaring siss. Seroth held tight to the ladder, feeling the vessel rock as something with obnoxious firepower impacted with the outer-hulling. Guenyvhar and Stenwulf were mounting a counter-action. While their man worked his way to create havoc in the vessel’s innards and guts, they went about tearing off a stripe or three from the vessels expensive plating. With luck, they’d blow their way in to the cargo holds. If not, then the Captain was kept busied. Seroth swiftly clambered down, descending by almost three rungs at a time. Risky, but he had to assume time was his foe, and therefore couldn’t afford being tentative for his own well-being.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The cargo holds made up decks 2, 3, and 4, bunched snugly up at the vessel’s fore sectioning, where higher on the command decks laid nestled over the Rite’s thick snub-nose. It was a massed warehouse, fat enough to take the girth of a half-dozen freighter transports with enough room to spare. Walkways laced the bulkhead walling, consignment cranes stuck to the ceiling in a grid of precise rails that could lift and transplant any vessel container with relative ease. They were still for now, while armed crewmen in the dozens weaved in the walkways above and cargo mazes below. Emergency lighting had tripped, rendering visual acuity down to a quarter of ordinary levels. Cautionary yellowed lamps bled sick light over the berth flooring, reddened light-globes rotating in constant alarm. Those armed with torch-faceted rifles activated their cones of illumination and began whisking them to and fro in tightened beam-cones. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Conscience and caution told to waylay an outright walkway brawl. The lad kept ducked and scurrying almost along by the hooks of his fingers and toes. A reduced profile kept his shadowed profile from being immediately spotted, as he descended from walkway to walkway by way of simply leaping down past the guard-railing. He cursed his weight caused such a dull jangle against the underfoot meshing. There were methods of feather-falling, by weight of TK Force application, but he was neither knowledgeable nor willing to test the principle concepts so late now into the field. …Perhaps it was as simple as learning how to land more silently, without the crutch of ethereal energy. Regardless, with little harry or hassle, the lad reached an appropriate strip of suspended bridging that led to an observing control room. The walkway was crewed by at least three guarding gunners, jittery with guns nearly floating in their palms.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was a sick crunch of bone against meat. The second and third guards turned, lights flashing, highlighting their comrade laid out prostrate, face stuck against the floor meshing. Something like the shape of a man skittered on its toes, running over the railing, sharpened edges flashing as it pounced from its crouch. The second guard fell over, winded by a strike to her diaphragm, bowled over by a half-blow across her occipital bone and rendered nonsensical. Seroth wished the third wasn’t raising its gun. Wished he hadn’t loosed the knife from his grasp in a snap-throw. Wished the guard didn’t look so beleaguered and wondering why its throat stung, struck through by a longknife, and its chest washed hot with heated blood spill. Seroth loomed over, closing down its wide, panicked eyes and giving it back a measure of dignity. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The observation room was kept crewed by a second trio: one console operator and two guards keeping watch over the banked autodoors stuck on either side of the wide, glassed chamber. Something clattered in a far corner, rustling with a grate of metal against metal. The larboard guard paused to glance over and bring his gun up to bead, too late to hear or notice the hiss of his assigned autodoor opening wide. Seroth crunched him down with a cluster of aimed knuckle-strikes, across his kidneys, ribs, and an arcing elbow butt to the top of his wavering skull. The lad caught his falling gun, squeezing tight to the trigger. The opposite guard was turned around in a three-shot burst. One exploded the meat off his shoulders, the second his belly, before the lad ended him with a blast that puffed his chest into broken bone and exposed lungs. The operator, quivering in his seat, looked up in abject sentiment as the intruder tossed away the used firearm.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Please leave,” Seroth murmured. The operator obliged him. He then watched as the far cargo bay doors began to swing wide. Blaster and rocket fire whizzed in, impacting across the walkways and flooring in showering balls of explosive firepower. Guen was at the lead of the Sayda charge, Stenwulf not far behind, enacting the last leg of their raid upon the Rite. The lad just breathed out gently through his nose, and went to see to the man he had perforated with gunfire.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He lacked a face. There were remnants of the upper jaw attached to a shattered skull, throat open as blood oozed from a ripped esophagus. He’d been wearing a standard issue weather jacket, worn from long years of use across who knew how many berths and docks with inclement weather. Seroth relieved him of the clothing article, laying it down across the wrecked torso and gored skull. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I am sorry…” He whispered, hoping to hear some confirmation of forgiveness. Nothing… Just a long quiet broken up with scattered pitches of fighting and blaster fire. There was no one to absolve him and nothing to make the evening feel like a justified exercise. All that was left was to finger the obsidian ring hanging from his throat… Wondering if the foul luck that found Rosa at Roche had found him too…[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]It took a half hour of cleansing vessel breaches, at the Miss Bine’s direction, before the Rite of Law was deemed safe worthy to conduct further reclamation operations. Initially, holed up in the higher decks, engines gutted and disabled by surgical Sayda teams, the crew was going to be left to whatever fates the galaxy saw fit to sow. Then the Lieutenant-CEO’s voice came on the channels. She had been slighted, disrespected. If anyone was still alive aboard in the upper decks, the Captain herself especially, then the Sayda would be facing a 15% bonus if they were eradicated in the next half hour. Seroth called for a cease of hostilities. Guenyvhar simply ignored him and ordered for her son to attend close by, while she set her war-mutt Stenwulf on the task. The maniac kept his comm.-channel open, so Miss Bine would be able to relish in the scores of deathly cries.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The containers that Binery-Plate Ltd sought were snuggled beneath tarp awnings stitched with roughly cut half-meter squares. Reports came back from observing Sayda of strange moans and scattered wails issuing from the 50 by 20 meter crates. The lad saw for himself their odd-make: stacks of cheap aluminum vent-columns rose from the dorsal line, and stuck through with thousands upon thousands of perforated holes across the siding. It reminded one of a massed cattle intermodal container, converted over to probably store some illegal fauna that doubtlessly had Republic law granting them protection from ‘poaching’. As if Binery-Plate cared. As if Miss Bine cared, or the strange, faceless benefactors that had pushed for her to handle this shipping matter.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]But then, as the cranes floated the corrugated crates overhead, Seroth could hear with searing plainness that the reported cries were being spoken between Huttese, Basic, Bocce, Pak Pak, and Shyriiwook. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Is this how I earn my keep from my mother?” He asked with acidic tones when he caught up with Guenyvhar at the mouth of the berth-hold tongue-ramp. “We have just aided in slavery.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I prefer the term voluntary indentured service, to be honest,” She muttered through her lho-stick, dragging back a cloud of yellowed smoke that gusted out through her singed nostrils. “And so what? Technically, we’ve liberated them from a Captain that was going to wring them out for whatever further credits she thought she was owed. Who knows how long they’d have stayed cramped in there.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You speak as if we have done them a favour. We have not,” Seroth bit back. “I am putting a stop to this.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen laid the haft of her axe across her son’s sternum as he tried to stride past. “You’ll do no such thing.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I cannot let these people simple go into forced service!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The commando stowed away her lho-stick in a vacu-sealed micro-cannister and stood up straighter to regard her child. “The Sayda don’t exist to wade through social dogma or argue morality. We are here to perform a job, no more, no less. In the end, what we care for is that our employers maintain their end of the paying bargain. Then, and only then, do we give in to a sense of self-righteousness. Those are just strangers – “ She gestured to an overhead crate that was scooped up by an outside out-rigged crane. “ – Whom you’re not responsible for. You’re responsible to me and that is all, son, that you should be worried about.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I am worried,” He said, voice raised in steely timbre. “When my mother tries to halt me from doing what is otherwise a right course of action.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What action?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Getting them free,” Seroth pointed to[/SIZE][SIZE=10pt]another umpteenth crate that was threaded by overhead. “Getting them home.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And how would you do that?” Guenyvhar sighed. “Hmn? Where would you house them? How would you feed them? How would you see to getting them transportation home?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The authorities – “[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh grow up, child!” Guen growled. “This is Nar Shaddaa! We’re just a skip and a beat from the heart of Hutt space! Up there, bloated like a rotten fruit, you see it? Nal Hutta. Hutt space lives and breathes on the flesh economy. Nothing will be done, because nothing can be done!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And how would you know, mother?!” Seroth’s face snarled just an inch off from her own. “For every argument I put forth that what you do is wrong, you shove back into my hand weak excuses of coin. You do not know if my wanted course will work, because you have never tried to do so yourself!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’m not in the business of crusading! Survival, Seydon! That is all that matters! And to survive, you need coin and people are willing to put down a great deal of platinum to see their enemies dead! It’s on their conscience if whether or not they’ve done right, not mine!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So you will allow evil to unfurl, because you cannot be bothered to care.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Life’s more complicated than you give it credit for, Seydon,” Guen said stiffly. “I’d have thought being in service with me would have taught you as much.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It has taught me that money makes whores of us all,” Seroth replied quietly, stepping away. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…That what you think of me?” Guen asked, just as softly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It is difficult not to, when you are willing to allow hundreds of people be pressed into servitude against their will!” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So tell me what their lives were like before the press-gangs rounded them up! Tell me, Seydon, because I’ve seen it for myself! Don’t give me this shid of being on a higher plain of morality! They come from mud-holes and war-dens. Fethed up lives, Seydon! This is as good as it’ll get for many! Work, shelter, food, security!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You do not know that!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And neither do you! It’s too big, Seydon! …Far too big for me or my fighters to bother grappling with. You start this fight, you’ll open yourself up to a hundred more. It just escalates. It’ll never be enough. And you’ll die shot through the heart, because you let something as petty as morality and conscience get in the way.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So I should not fight for what is a just action because it will become too hard?” Seroth’s face twisted into a very rare, cruel grimace. “…Tell me… Mother. When did my family abandon courage for timidity?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The slap wrought across his cheek could be heard plain across the Sapkowski Yards, through the pitches of machine squeal and rain fall. “I’ve fought for twenty years and more to keep my band alive and in line. Made decisions that I am neither proud of nor at liberty to divulge to someone as snotty as you. I’m done wasting my time trying to rectify this puerile Jedi fashion of thinking for now. We’ve survived. That is all at matters.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“At the expense of who, mother?” Seroth questioned, flint eyes glaring hot with frustrated emotion. “You are making me stand by and watch innocents be taken away and put to labour that will kill them just as surely if I came up to them and emptied a pistol round through their brain matter.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen seemed to blanch pale at his verbal illustration. “…We do as we must to survive, Seydon.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I cannot accept that. …I know my father could not,” Seroth murmured.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…The hell does that mean?” Guen cracked sharply.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Nothing,” Seroth sighed in reply and began to stroll away for the far yard landing bays. His mother’s steel fingers clamped to his shoulder, spinning him back around to face a pair of incensed, green eyes. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I asked you a question, boy, the hell does that mean??”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It does not mean anything.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…What are you not telling me? …What did Shev tell you?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Like very many, Shev has told me nothing,” Seroth rebuked with more venom than intended. “…He took me to the Fears.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“He what!?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I went inside the caves. I was treated to too many horrors. But I braved them, and I found the way to the other side. Not before father came to speak to me. He showed me how he did on Tund, mother.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…What happened?” Guen had quieted, hanging on her child’s every word.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“He was betrayed,” Seroth said in a softened tone, leaned close to her ear so only Guen would be the recipient of his revelations. “I was with him. Friends came to him and asked that I be left alone, so that they could make their escape more easily. Father refused to. So one of them came close and killed him. …I know that Stenwulf was there to witness it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Their eyes followed the burly outline of the sword-in-hand warrior, tugging on the shawl of his burlap hood whilst he shouted orders to both Sayda and Binery-Plate sec-guards alike.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Did you see who it was that did the deed,” Guen asked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No. Everything was obscure. I could not make out detail, save that they had a hidden hold-out gun,” He explained. “But Sten… I think he would know. …There were ten, mother. Ten witnesses. They all made the argument that I should have been left to die. And I believe each would have tried to kill father if they had not been beaten to the action.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“They told me he had decided to stay behind…” The commando murmured distraughtly. “I couldn’t go back for him. They wouldn’t let me. So we left. …And I thought you were dead for twenty years with him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We… We will speak of this later,” Guen waived her child silent. “I’m… tired out, from all this insipid argument. The slaves are out of our hands. I’m not listening to another word on the matter. Now come. There’s a great deal left to be done now…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth fell into step, silent in his own contemplation. Guenyvhar, as she had sounded, had been led to believe a lie fabricated by the faceless ten betrayers that had saw her husband die. One of them being her close lieutenant, that wretched lover of hers, Stenwulf. What had motivated him to stay in her company, Seroth didn’t know and didn’t feel compelled to truly question. Maybe the slaying of Dathan Gunn had worked in his favour beyond a simple change in leadership. Rivalries amongst men for the attentions of a single lover wasn’t uncommon. He reached, wiped rainwater from his brow, kept up the pace as they approached the monolithic piano-black speeder-limo where Mistress Bine waited for counsel. She would be told all was well. Her ‘cargo’ was being faithfully loaded, and would see delivery. She would smile, delighted. And Seroth would die a little more as his stomach roiled with nausea….[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Outer Rim Territories – Centrality – Tund System – Tund[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]46:53:18 – CSMT – The Plains of Maggedon – Two and a half weeks on~[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was no local forecast program but word spread of a brief period of respite from the oncoming rad and ash storms that constantly hissed down from the south-eastern slag-peaks. Seven days whole, five if they were unlucky, nine if the fates smiled. But for a few brief days, hours counted by the fall of sand grains, there would be no overcast. The sun would glare with the loathe despair of a jaundiced eye and the skies at night would be bright, clear, and viciously cold. Whoever or whatever was left alive atop Tund’s ashen wastelands would be gifted with a sterling view of what remained when the End of the World came and passed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth hadn’t set eyes on the Maggedon plains since his youth, being a boy no older than four or so. He knew by vague recollection but not by detail. It was three hundred square kilometers of flattened desolation. Guen told him that, according to ancillary records, it’d been a proud, gleaming salt lake, bright as cyan and jade. The Toong brought their young here to try their hands at simple sailing and rowing exercises. Now, it was a resting place for a billion souls consigned to oblivion. The lake bed was scattered with massed piles of malformed bone, stripped naked of flesh, and laid as high as twenty meters in some spots. A path had been cleared atop. Laid grav-boats connected by a simple system of rope bridges, for foot traffic and patrols to access a supply depot that was otherwise only accessible via air travel.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sith space is a bloated monster. They had an Empress just recently but she had about as much effective staying power as a cold. Now, they’ve gone through a black council and a fat, floating man. Then there’s this new droll bastard acting in place as their de facto ruler. He had a woman with him, so I believe, but she’s faded into aether. Seems whatever fire was lit beneath their britches has long died out. With any luck, we’ll get some hires going for whenever they need competitors dealt with that, naturally, they can’t be bothered to get their hands dirtied,” Guenyvhar had said, midst readying preparations in a dingy Mos Eisley port-hanger.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“At whose stead are we making journey for Tund, then?” Seroth in turn asked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Our own. We’ve need of supplies like anyone else. And proclamations echoing from the Holonet spell Tund as having been a world swallowed up by the Sith war machine. Tiny fething place that it is. Naturally, it’s bound to have a garrison or three, with some supply depots set up between,” She explained. Her incisors gleamed in anticipation, smiling without a hint of warmth. “So we’re going to do a raiding exercise. Foodstuffs, medicines, munitions, resources. Hell, if we’re lucky? Recruits.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“From the Sith army?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“There’s a thousand deserts shipping out for OP space every day. The only thing keeping the Empire’s armies in check is fear. There are some able warriors, just waiting for a chance at something beyond being fodder for psychopaths.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]And so they voyaged. It was an estimated seven days travel through back hyperspace lanes and disused smuggler routes, plying their old freight hauler through CiS and Black Sun territories. The latter of which brought a laugh out of Stenwulf. As he recalled, in his favourite tales of the dead arch-vigo, the Falleen Prince-in-Exile Xizor, Black Sun in those days had an influence spanning from Coruscant to every imaginable reach in the known Galaxy. They were rightly feared, but were now reduced to secured holdings across Hutt space, hanging by a thread for survival as their power and prestige dwindled hourly. It’d been on Nal Hutta, he bragged, acting as hired muscle for a favoured Vigo, that he was swayed into Dathan’s services. And where he had first set eyes on the quite beautiful but viciously strong and formidable Guenyvhar. It was difficult for the boy to keep from putting pay to the man’s obnoxious lechery, and his brags of martial skill.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Cood kill a ‘unnerd o’ yuu,” He said during one lunch in the mess hall. “’Fore Ah even hit brekfist~”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Tund was waiting, woefully unguarded. Some grav-mines had been laced across the poles and a handful of patrolling corvettes kept a steady run round the small realm’s equator, but they paid little heed as Guen’s pilots danced hexes around their sensor screens. Thrust trace dampers and an old, just barely spitting gravitic modulator thwarted any close inspections of their bare heat signature. No one looked when a small piece of light fell across the most South-Eastern continent, barreling fast and hot through thinning skeins of irradiated atmosphere. The hauler dodged behind some lowly cantons given shadow by petrified ball-trees and settled in the ruins of what’d been a town square. Glancing out the portholes revealed a strange vision of monochromatic desolation. Down to the atom, ash, dust, and cracked earth looked leached of color.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen had them wait half a fortnight, then woke them one lightless morning and told to set up their gear. Braving Tund in only their dark slacks and jackets was ill-advised in the extreme. A half minute’s exposure could leave them with 30 sieverts or more radioactive dosing. Even with treatment, they’d suffer a prolonged end marked with pained lesions, cancerous growths, neurovascular disorders, fever and gastrointestinal issues, and a sense of the flesh slowly giving out. They slid into shielded bodygloves, belted at the waist and shoulders with oxygen exchange tanks hooked into rebreather masks anchored across their faces. An extra anti-rad gown was thrown across their frames, though little more than camouflaged ponchos fitted with an extra length of hooding. They clasped axes, knives, swords, and trench guns, checking the barrels of their slug-pistols neatly holstered across their thighs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They went for a walk at dawn. One depot lay resting in a dried lake that was now festooned with the remains of many gathered Toong. The Sith hadn’t bothered to scorch the bones to slag but didn’t feel much compulsion for even digging massed graves. It seemed they gathered the cracked skeletons and deposited them in whatever ravines and gullies nature’s ruin had left behind, unceremoniously committing their memory to hurried cleanups. But one Commander, it seemed, graced with a morbid sense of design, took a vessel cannon and burned out a rough patch of seared earth and cooked bone to lay his depot. Surrounded high on all sides by 10 meter plus walls of grinning, triangular skulls filled with too-small, blocked teeth, an encircled enclosure of some nine pre-fab buildings and a small barracks mounted round a central communication post laid in bored, restless ignorance. Two score pairs of shielded eyes watched, noting patrol patterns, the numbers of apparent soldiers versus non-combat staff, armaments and vehicles. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Jus’ won patrol,” Stenwulf remarked over comms. “Discipline’s lackin’.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Tund’s on the route to nowhere,” Guen said. “…Save maybe Styx.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Styx’s ah ghost storeh.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Maybe, but one with credence amongst the paranoid communities,” Guenyvhar chuckled. “Everyone, get into positions. On my mark, we descend and pick this place apart. Cleanly. Quietly.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She waited for a long beat as silent footfalls scaled the forty or so fighters across the bone-pit’s edge, overlooking the oblivious depot. When her ear piece blipped with confirmation sound offs, she opened the appropriate comm. range. “On my mark…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Mark~”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Soldiers on station thought Tund to be a refuse point, where the Empire now dumped its dullest, slowest, and more irritating elements of its vast, lumbering war machine. They were right and wrong in equal measures. Tund was a kind of early warning outpost, where if an invading force tried taking the Empire by surprise through its most Galactic Southern flank, should Tund be felled in the first exchange of might, Dromuund Kaas would be given word. That word would send shivers of action through the near endless killers wearing the sterling white and silver of the Sith armour standard. Would push machines and guns forward, necessitating further production. Arms-keepers and manufacturers would taste the sweet tang of steel and profits in the air, but only if Tund was taken. For now, it was a spec of ignored property that they’d taken for the sake of expansionist policies.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The single patrol coming in along the polar north died soundlessly. Guen led her Sayda down a low escarpment of cracked Toong skulls, managing through a touch of skill, footwork and weight distribution, and no small amount of luck, to guide her killers in without rustling a single noise. Her son kept in close, axe and knife in hand, the sounds of his own breathing suddenly too loud within the enclosed catch system inside his helmet. A skein of night-vision plates helped his visual range, though it was stuck in a narrow field. Seroth, Guen, and three others held still behind a bone embankment, then flushed out as the patrol walked into a ‘dead zone’ between the perimeter lamp posts. The patrol was struck from behind, virtually simultaneously. Knives were buried up to hilt through their napes, axes swung and crunched through shoulder-blades, slicing clean through plate, rib, and heart meat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Stenwulf and his own able crew stole down up from the south. Their target was the pre-fabricated long-huts that served as the outpost’s make-shift barracks. Spike-tunnelers demolished the autodoors keeping a seal over the air-lock chambers, committing technical murder that silenced latent alarm protocols that could have forewarned the sleeping soldiers. Stenwulf and his Sayda fighters stole in on a gust of ashen wind and a metallic tang of radioactive contamination. They could have simply left the doors open while the thin atmosphere cycled in and either poisoned or choked the troopers to death. Not satisfactory enough. Stenwulf argued they needed to be sure. But those who’d been around long enough to survive the some twenty odd years of his tenure as clan commando knew better. There was something very thirsty in his smiles whenever he drew his favoured high-frequency longsword. Very thirsty indeed, as he put a square sixty resting combatants to death in their dreams. Shev Rayner would have gutted him, if not for his sense of fairness then for the dishonor of such reckless butchery. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]So they stole from one portion of the outpost, through darkened side-alleys between supply silos and motorpool depots, taking guards off their feet and dragging them back out of sight. Guenyvhar hadn’t been incorrect. This supposedly flighty encampment was chocked to the hilt with surplus shielded crates piled high outside of too-stuffed sheds, storage dens and cellars, ammunition, foodstuffs, forge materials, fuel cells. An army’s lifeblood, packed away willy-nilly by bored commanders and their lieutenants, too lazy and too jaded to give a damn for legion protocols. Stenwulf commed in his progresses: southern reaches were virtually cleared save for NCP’s, barracks neutralized, and making headway to the command post.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The command post was the only sterling feature, a tall four story spire of gleaming white duranium peaked with radio-spikes and subspace antenna protrusions. It was like a bone-quill, stuck fast in the epicenter of an actual bone-yard, blinking with a high shine from floodlamps swiveling from the high masts. Entry was only gained through a thickset airlock, kept with a guard of rather bulked soldiers resplendent in washed plate. Energy fields glowed round their enhanced frames, gloved hands set against hefty carbine lasguns. Guen hissed over the comms and set to figuring a method for outmaneuvering the… four, so it seemed, by a stern headcount. …Then the lad perked up. Communicating with a brusque gesture for her to simply give him a second, Seroth wove his hands through the woman’s harness pouches and produced what he needed: a handful of steel needle-slivers.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He stole out onto the avenue running a procession round the posts fat perimeter. If his concept proved correct, then he would have to be swifter than the Devil and thrice as sure. Seroth flicked his wrists, lancing the needles with unnerving precision, never halting his low stalking pace. Ball-cameras gummed into place upon rail-fencing and lampposts juddered, lenses shattered by striking miniscule spikes. He slipped in amidst a collection of munitions boxes and caught onto the command post walling, hauling himself up top onto a thin outcropping some ten meters above. Guen whistled to herself, still at a marvel that her child could scurry up a sheer face with no more bother than walking over a sidewalk. Seroth had borrowed a secondary blade and tomahawk. The lad stood as still as a waiting eagle, settled on the airlock entrance alcove. Four giants in gleaming silver armour and black, insulated lycra breathed loudly from the vents of their backpack oxygen exchangers.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Nothing felt amiss, despite a flash of shadow that fell with a hawk’s vengeance. The back pair died with their helms and skulls stoved in by knife and axe. Seroth snapped his hands to his harness belting, gripping his own tools, flashing a killing stroke through the left-hand guard’s throat while smashing his tomahawk through the faceplate of the right flank soldier. Shuddering, dying, they fell and dropped their heavy carbines with a denting clatter upon the upraised platform. Seroth milled a hand, urging his mother and their apportioned crew of some score killers to come join him at the airlocks. He bent, retrieving a micro-key from a severed belt.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“A fast gambit,” Guen said, approaching up the steps, Sayda fanning out behind her. Stenwulf was approaching round the perimeter southward, flanked by his own fighters. “You’re lucky it paid off.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I am,” Seroth admitted, nodding slightly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…You never brag, do you?” Guen asked, and her helm shook from side to side. Her child felt a sudden, cool well of… poignancy, heartbreak? “…Come on, get the doors cycling.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye,” Came Stenwulf’s ragged accent over the comms as he emphatically rubbed at the insulated sleeving across his thick arms, bulged with the exo-skeletal framing of his ‘man maker’. “Nigh’s fethin’ cold an’ we go’ a lodda crates t’git stackin’ when all’s said and thruugh.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A pilfered micro-key opened the way. An entry foyer, where a singularly bored and distracted secretary kept up her distraction of puff-corn, a tankard of charde, and some rather dumbing holo-vid of pornography. Then she noticed those swarming the entryway and ascending stairs were not her mates from outside, stepping in for a spot of caff. Guen felled her with a stinging, flat-hand swipe between her eyes, breaking the skin in a hot blood burst as the woman crumpled to the decking. Pushed aside with a hard toe, the nonsensical girl groaned painfully while her feller swiftly cycled up a set of floor plan schematics, downloading to a wrist-comp and transmitting an upload to their shared datapool. Seroth watched an AR overlay approximate a floor map in the upper right-hand corner, with a tally of patrollers still on their evening rounds.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Six floors on, they found the outpost commander. She was laid back in a tall chair of patterned ochre and emerald, not having a grand care as to who or what intruded upon her offices. Seroth was startled, noting the Empire enforced powerful strictures of discipline upon those in the officer’s core, which spread down into the grunt killers themselves. Perhaps it was a sign. Their glory days were past, gone into death with their grand Empress, that Flash-in-the-Pan Varanin. A fat bastard with calcified ambition took sway, followed by a dark council of ineffectual that could not control the baying packs of ravenous animals that needed a guided outlet of destruction. Soon, they would be out. Replaced. So it would go on, as this Commander clearly thought.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She was neck-deep into a drugged stupor, one arm rolled high with an IV drip instilled against a raised length of capillary veining. Her recreation of choice was some bright red-on-red fluid that glistened like crystal. Her blue eyes shivered bright and she smiled with a sickening sincerity as Guen approached and pressed the barrel of her pistol tight against her skull.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Mother,” Seroth said.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She turned, noted the stare behind his helm-visor, slowly shaking. “…What? You want her spared or summat?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Please,” He said again, in that always soft timbre. “We have been cruel enough. I have been cruel enough. Stenwulf moreso.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oi!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Maybe,” Guen murmured. “But she’ll be in crueler world when she awakes from the IV and finds her depot raided and men slaughtered. Questions will be asked, punishments meted out. What do you think happens to a woman in the army, Seydon? …Believe me, this is a mercy.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth started. “Stop!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen gripped and hammered on the pistol trigger.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Silence rode down the halls in the aftermath. Across five floors, Guenyvhar’s outfit of strange but tacit fighters had their way with an unprepared and overwhelmed enemy. Facing a full Sith battalion in open combat was a risky venture even for hardened Supercommandos, but these were just boys and girls. They’d signed up for the only thing they felt talented at, outside of causing vandalism, trouble, petty crimes, and the odd robbery across the ten thousand worlds of Sith space. Past basic, past their first commission, they’d been filed away to Tund, and told to behave. So they did, waiting on paychecks and a chance to transfer out, restless as their toolboxes of personal skills rusted shut. The Sayda found them in a state of calcified apathy, and slew them little regard for their terrified cries.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen watched her son kneel down by one soldier, choking on his own blood while clutching at a ragged wound cut through his ruined breastplate. He was holding tight to one gloved hand, a strangely comforting presence as the boy with a face that hadn’t seen its first shave twisted in pain. Stenwulf happened to stroll by. The man tsked, eased the high-powered gun off his hip and shunted Seroth aside. Helpless, shrieking a broken curse up at his killer’s face, Stenwulf merely laughed and spent his blaster until the barrel glowed like white magma. Finished, he tried turning. A grip like a crushguant fell on his shoulder and turned him around to face a pulverizing collection of knuckles. Stenwulf loosed a pained roar as Seroth’s blow buckled in the metal of his face plate and shattered in his nose, lifting him off his feet and sending him sprawling for a solid three meters across the carpeted floors. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Feth’s wrong wit yuu!?” Stenwulf coughed, snapping off the broken helm. He met a second slug that robbed him of two teeth, a third whipped into his solar plexus and drove every breath clear from his lips. The killer never saw the strikes. Seroth moved too quick. The boy’s elbow dropped into the square of his armoured spine and dropped him to the ground once more. “Aaugh!!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seydon!” Guen called in all sternness. It was an ordinarily frigid tone, one that brooked not a word of argument from any Sayda who knew better. But her son whirled on her and wiped Stenwulf’s blood from his insulated hands.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Do not tell me,” Seroth bit out. “That I do not deserve to press every kind of punishment on that man.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“He did the boy a favour!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes, a favour!” Seroth railed back. “By turning every piece of meat in his torso to char! The boy was dying and the least he was owed was one soul giving him back a sense of dignity!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Lissen t’yeself…~” Stenwulf grumbled, clamouring back to his feet. “Di’nity… This… Is a fethin’… Job! Noh’ ah day aht thah tournahmahnt! Ya owe nuttin’ to yah’ enemies, boi!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You owe them a swift strike and a clean death,” He argued, uncommon righteous venom to his wording. “Cruelty, sadism, has no place in this kind of… life. If that is what you are all so determined to call this.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The boy looked around, to the forty paired eyes watching the trio growl openly in dissenting debate. “…I have wanted to ask what has been done to me, but I know better that I let it happen.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Once a Jeedai, alwiss a Jeedai, huh?” Stenwulf spat down at the lad’s boots.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I do not know,” Seroth answered coolly. “But I do know when I belong and when I do not.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen’s loud sigh interrupted all thought. She strode forward at her only child, wiping blood-grit off her axe and sword, checking with easy, machined habit the bore of her well used pistol-gun and replacing it into its waiting hip catch. His mother stood at a slight lean, arms akimbo after they eased off the insulating gown and hood that shielded her helm. That too came away, revealing a softly wet face drying of sweat, exerted by the closed space of the anti-rad suit. Cold, green eyes looked over into a pale, grey, flinty stare. She managed just a hint of a smile. “Y’know… Dathan said as much, morn after our wedding. I asked him if he felt like he belonged now. With me. With his Ma and Grandfather. With the Sayda and his inheritance. He said he knew when he did and didn’t, and that for the moment, life was good. You don’t know how sad I was when I lost him.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth held his piece, downcast as he fought to recall any vestige of a craggy, hard face that he had only seen in the caves of the Fears. Guen went on, “Or when I lost you. Imagine… Something like maybe twenty years now, thinking that you were probably gone. And if not, then some face in a crowd I’d never find. You’d have a different name, friends of your own, maybe a girl or a guy, depending, you know how it is, maybe even a child of your own somewhere in that scenario. …I made my peace with either idea. But then one day I saw you come down the ramp of your ship and I swear, it was Dathan Gunn come back to haunt me. …Had no idea what to do with you. But I couldn’t just let you slip away and let your family name just die.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…So I kidnapped you and gave you a kinder ultimatum than most,” She said, chuckling with an odd frankness. “Be my son… Work with me through this. Or, simply die. …I’m not sure if I truly got what I wanted out of your answer.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“There was not much of one to give, mother.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Maybe. But you grew in Shev’s hands, that much I know. Saw that he’s taught you a few things that he never imparted to me, or your father. You can fight like the Devil and outrun Him like a hellhound. A Sayda’s training but with a Jedi’s temperament, discipline. …I should have known that mixture wouldn’t have spelled much good my way, but I went on as I had to. …You’ve done me proud, Seydon.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth’s brow quirked. His mother had an odd choice of past-tense wording to her language. She had started to pace and slowly stroll around his frame. “…Have?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“But you keep tainting my pride with this moralistic tripe that keeps clouding from accepting a very simple, very gratifying life. …You care, child, and in the Sayda, we can’t be bothered to care. It’s a weakness that bungles with a person’s survival mentality. The Gunn’s have been survivors, Seydon, it’s always been about trudging on to see better days. …Don’t think you’ve got that bit down in your blood. Maybe not just yet…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I understand a little better than you think, Mother,” Seroth replied quietly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen stared across to him. “…So as it stands, you’ll only work to serve us by being a greater and greater burr against our foot soles. An irritation that we invited into our midst and I can’t have that. Survival, Seydon. That’s all it’s ever been. So for the good of my fighters, that I’m sore to see you not inherit…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…You’re fired.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Her left arm snapped upwards, the wrist-cuff sealant having been loosened as the woman walked, with something mechanical rocketing a hold-out gun from a forearm spring into Guen’s waiting palm. Strong fingers wrung around the gripping and unguarded trigger, thumb switching off the safety. Seroth stared across into the snub, lightless barrel, feeling a sensation of total ice grip him from his feet up. Not from fear, but from a sickening, crippling realization…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One figure shivered with a grieved sigh, striding forward with murderous intent. Their sleeving blew open, smashing a hold-out assassin gun into the waiting palm. “Forgive me.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Nat could be seen blinking behind his visor, eyes wet. “…Why?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]And then he was dead. One shot blasted into his helm and blew bloodied skull and charred gore out in a puffed, pink cloud. Splashes of arterial spray glazed over the shocked face-plate of the watching child. He stood immobile, clutching a little thread-bare wampa doll in too-large gloves. None could see through the tint of his view-plating, what expressions were playing out across his small face. The assassin pocketed their gun and turned to the semi-circle.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“This is done. Let’s go.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth hadn’t realized how wet his eyes had welled. Stenwulf was somewhere behind, laughing raucously, bleats of chuckling air gusting like filed iron over his teeth and tongue. Heavy, coarse palms slapped sympathetically over his tightened shoulders. Guen, eyes steeled and wearing a most determined expression, kept her gun leveled towards his cheek and nose. The lad stuttered over his wording, as the ice in his frame melted into a cauldron of rage. The floor lighting flickered as a surge of angered Force power writhed about invisibly, cascading brief dances of false electrical arcs and corposant from lamp fixture to fixture.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt] “Steady, son,” Guen warned icily.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No…” He muttered through clenched teeth, lips trembling as he cried with an anger more fierce than he’d ever known. “No. Bad enough that this son of a queen you share your bed with you was there!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He leaned out, striking a finger across to a smugly grinning Stenwulf, before returning a measure of his rage to his progenitor. “But you speak of my father with such fondness, when you are the one who stole him from me. Stole away our family. Left me to die here, twenty years ago, because you could not own up to the seed you had sown. You told a naked lie to the face of the boy whose father you killed in cold blood.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Not cold blood…” Guen whispered. “You don’t know how hard that was. Your father wouldn’t see reason or rhyme, same as you won’t. The one damned thing I prayed you hadn’t taken after in his stead.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Maybe not, ‘Mother’,” Seroth gritted. “But it did not take you very long to pull the trigger.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Damn Shev and damn those stupid, buggering caves!” She grunted and hocked a spit to the side in his name. “And damn you for going! Godsdammnit, Seydon, why couldn’t you have just gone with us!?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Because I am not a whore!” He cried back. “You take life for money and think nothing of the consequences you enact. You steal freely for parties that will only bring about further pain, further suffering. But you cannot be bothered because there is not enough of a cut in it for you!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The Galaxy doesn’t give back to you because you’ve got a working conscience, idiot!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I do not need it to. I have never needed it to. And I am sure as the death staring at me right now, that my father did not need it to either…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The bright, cold light behind Guenyvhar’s always too frozen eyes blinked, shattered, and coalesced into something hard, violent, and animalistic. Her lips curled up in a growing snarl as the hold-out gun in her grasp swung down. Seroth could only blink as white heat blossomed above his belly. It vented out through behind his back, casting curls of flavoured smoke up against his nostrils. Strength, balancing in his legs began to buckle. White heat transfixed and then transfigured into a wordless pain. Seroth didn’t scream. He could not find his voice. The boy toppled forward, shot point-blank through his torso, bleeding from the torn and burned flesh of the entry and exit wounds. Coughing, fighting for air, he clawed a hand down and raised his eyes up to his killer.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guenyvhar Gunn replaced her hold-out pistol away, staring at her wounded child. She wore on her vacant expression a ghost of a frozen smile. “…That’s two men in this family I’ve had to put down. Forgive me, Seydon. Or not.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“This is done,” She said to her Sayda, who were already filing out of the floor with what loot they could carry. Some chortled, passing Seroth on the floor. Stenwulf made sure to give his ribs a good, petty crack with his armoured boot, washing his cheek with a hock of spit. Guen was the last depart. Her son was lying idle in a stiffening pool of crimson that was staining into her boots and knees. Ice-water tears pattered on his brow, as gloved hands ran through his widow’s peak and dark hair. Guen granted Seroth her only truly motherly gesture: a bitter kiss on his agonized brow, before she disappeared entirely from his hazed, fading vision.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Hey…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He didn’t wish to wake. The tender of his belly ached something extremely awful, and there was this ragged sensation of pain that rent through him, just below his ribs. Breathing was an agony and motion refused to come to his limbs. Prone, bleary in eye and mind, he couldn’t regard his speaker. There wasn’t a wish to. Dueling sensations of cold and warmth wrapped his arms and stapled his legs. An epoch of anger still surged somewhere in his muddled brain. Someone had hurt him, left him like this, but… he felt deserved of his aches. What had he said, shouting at someone? He… wanted to blame them, but he knew that blame rested squarely… on… himself. It was a sobering remembrance, but it didn’t account for the warm hand he felt tracing the lines of his tired face.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Hey, come on, wake up, dunderhead…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Rrhh…” Seroth slurred, and then gave his faculties a slap that managed to jolt into enough regularity. “Rrh-ruh-Rosa…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Yes, now come on, I’ve made you breakfast! Aren’t you hungry?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There she was, as best as he could recall her. Still dressed in her pink nightgown, her hair untouched from the moment she waked, chuckling as she watched his hands slip against the sticky floor. Sticky…? With what? Scents of stringent iron and plasma, emptied hemoglobin floating about with randominity, swishing about beneath his rubber-sheathed fingers. Some sort of… suit, an overlay across his ordinary clothes. It was damnably hot, so much so he finally took care to notice the acrid sweat pooling down where the helmet seals met with the throat collar of his insulation gown. Now… Now he was beginning to remember…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Rosa… Are you… Here…?” He asked. His mind was in between recognition of stark reality, and following this vision of total loveliness smiling across the office floor. She nodded, and then gestured at him a little impatiently.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Well if I’m not, than that means you’re either still asleep, my dear… Or in a worse state than when you fell asleep. You really ought to not be so… generous with yourself. I don’t need you to give the heaves and earth so I can feel happy and pleased, man.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Rosa…” Seroth coughed and retched blood onto his helm visor, struggling with the neck clamps as he managed to right himself onto his knees. “I… I think… I am… I am shot…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Are you? Let’s take a look… Oh my word, what did you do to yourself to earn that?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’ve… I haveve managed… HUURGH!” He gusted in a great effort, snapping off the helm and inhaling the scrubbed, sterilized compound air. The effort twisted his torso about, ground down on the piercing wound below his ribs. Seroth couldn’t help the following cry that ripped from his throat. “Aaaaurrgghhh!!!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Easy, love. I told you, you just push and push and push yourself. Let me an allowance of work for a change, alright? Now, c’mon… Seems your dreams laid you in for a rough night. And after all that work I did to make sure you’d be happily passed out, haha~[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth grinned involuntarily. This was it. He must have passed away while choking on his own blood on the floor of the upper compound, shot and betrayed by his father’s murderer. His mother. Guenyvhar Gunn. Except… Wasn’t the afterlife supposed to be free from aches and pains? Why was he still stuck with this dingy suit that was now compromised? Why was everything still doubled over in bleeding pain that edged his sight in darkened veins? The last events of some six months and more came ripping back into his conscience in a roar of realization, sound, image, and emotional states. The emptiness after Commenor, the horror following Terminus, the guilt and loathing in Nar Shaddaa’s aftermath. Shev Rayner barking for another drill. Stenwulf laughing and belittling his upbringing, his heritage and abilities, his personal code and sentiment. …Guenyvhar smiling coldly, hiding behind her eyes a thousand truths that were gilded over by a hundred honeyed lies. And then shooting him in the space between his chest and hip.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I… Rosa…” He tried speaking, choking over his gagging sentences.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]I know, love. You need a shower, a meal, and a fast run on the beach. But we’re a few floors up, so let’s get you downstairs. Alright? Hey… Don’t blink out on me. Just come this way, I’ll grab you if you fall.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The walk to the emergency stairwells off the usual facility turbolifts were a long walk through a dizzying pattern of maze-like office suites, emptied and mugged with thickened dust sheens. Unlit consoles and stainless holoboards waited the touch of eventual personnel to arrive, to man the stations while the Sith continued on their war path. A mustering point for soldiers, materiel, vessels, and commanders to keep secret their impromptu stratagems. Seroth staggered about on his lonesome, trailing an alarming degree of blood in his wake. Rosa, flickering at the edges of his vision and prodding him on, tsked in slight alarm.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ahh dear. You’ve really managed to get yourself wrecked, my dear. Haven’t you…?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeah…” Seroth groaned, mounting the stairwell and managing to take a bold three step leap with every jump. He had strength. He damn well knew he had power of body. If he could only tap in what was remaining of his constitution… Surely there was a Force ability. Surely. But the Force wasn’t with him, and all he could depend upon were his reserves of unflinching will. “I did not mean… For events to turn… As they did…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Surely none of us do, but they happen anyhow. I didn’t mean for much of what happened to me. But… I survived, no thanks to some, when I was needing their support more than ever…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Am I hearing a little bitterness in your voice, Rosa…?” The lad chuckled, leaning up against the autodoor opening to the lobby floor, catching a measure of his breath. There was pain… It hurt to motivate his legs to action, but he was crossed with memories of the beaches of Spira. He wished to return there, one day, and ask Rosa what she thought of wearing a certain ring he’d managed to recover… Blooded fingers closed around the open obsidian keepsake that hung from his throat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Perhaps a touch too much, I admit. That’s behind me. I’m better than that, and I’m better than them now. …Well, go along, you’ll miss breakfast at this rate, dawdling.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes, ma’am…” He wheezed and clutched at his unstaunched wound to try and arrest the loss of blood. Somewhere… Somewhere in the damnable lobby of too bright overhead spin-lamps, white plasteel walls and glaring dark marble beneath his feet, somewhere, there had to be a room dedicated to emergency responses. Inside would contain spare anti-rad suits, first-aid kits and further medical supplies. Somewhere… There. He could tell off a doorway marked with a differing Aurebesh brand, bright pink with reddened accents, denoting it’s first response status. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Lurching, teeth gritted while hallucinations of his beloved flitted past his vision and smiled, sometimes clothed, other times not, teasing and catching him with conversaion, Seroth ploughed on as his off-hand began to clench tight. Unlike the past year, the majority in fact, there was a glow of purpose. It felt right, justified, and oddly pure. The Sayda may have once been a band of fighters dedicated to simply aiding disparate colonies across the Outer Rim and Unknown Regions. Once. Now they were mercenaries, more concerned with timely payments than the “minutiae” of their actions. Something Dathan Gunn, his father, recognized in himself and in them. Too late. But not for his single child. His hands would find and break Stenwulf’s neck. And he would find and put to death the one woman he’d thought to call mother.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Guen….” He grunted, and palmed open the emergency chamber door.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The boy came out emerged in what was a reserved anti-rad gown and sealant suit that hugged too tightly to his frame. It was a pea-soup green affair on white, shielded lycra, tugged around with oxygen exchange tanks, an arched rebreather mask, bearing the cognizant seal of the Empire of the Black Dawn. Or simply, the Sith Empire, for those less dramatic. What supplies he could cannibalize, Seroth stowed into a spare rucksack and kept it fitted over one shoulder. From the harness belt, next to a few general soldiering tools, rested his tomahawk and parrying knife, the only items he’d come away feeling a sense of pride over knowing their make and use. They were Shev’s tools, his told himself. That crusty old tart with constant halitosis and body odour. Seroth had come into their tutelage under his rheumy, wet eyes and grew to know a measure of satisfaction from surviving a hard day’s work. With some luck… Perhaps their partnership could survive the coming ‘debate’ that was inevitable between child and mother.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Escape became rapidly marred. Limping downstairs, favouring his side-wound that was now staunchly bandaged with sterile cloth and a slathered dose of bacta, Seroth could hear someone tersely shredding out orders over the helm comm. Gunboat Z-99, on route from the southern wasteland tracts, was coming to investigate the cease of communication from Outpost Gamma. The lad looked about the offices as he descended floor by floor, gutted of equipment and spare surplus crating that’d been crammed tight with idling supplies. Looked at the stiffened bodies in broken stormtrooper armour. Guen had wanted each floor secured. So they were secured, with prejudice against any remaining guard units that had so far remained deathly oblivious to what was occurring both outside the command compound and the outpost at large. The commed ETA was holding to an approximate fifteen minutes. Seroth counted that the Gunboat and her compliment of reinforcements could be arriving in as soon as five. Gritting his teeth, tasting blood and ash, Seroth shouldered through the agonies of having to twist his torso with motion and hurried down the emergency stairwell. One hand automatically unhooked the haft of his tomahawk and held it tightly fisted. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Outside was still a world of apocalypse. That brief interregnum of cleared, icy skies and blinking stars had disappeared with unaccounted swiftness. Cloud cover had returned, swirling brackish hues of oily brown and cadaverous ash, constantly churning like a sea hung upside down over the world. The lad could feel the cold lashing at him through the insulation of his anti-rad suit and thrown over poncho-gown. Micro-debris plinked and scratched off his visor, dust collecting on the edges where his gloving could quite clean them off. Save for the flaps of tarpaulin swinging vigorously from the domed roofing of nearby, emptied storage sheds, the outpost looked for all intents and purposes as still as a graveyard. Seroth was alone as he maneuvered into the out-housing, trying to keep ducked and out of sight. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Gunboat appeared some minutes later. It was an SFS Acturus model, angular and fierce, like a galvanized hawk that circled overhead relentlessly, and thankfully small compared to its larger cousins hoarded across the fleets of the Empire’s foes. Seroth couldn’t rightly tell how many bodies could be spared for transport, but he breathed slowly behind the clutch of rubber over his mouth and eased behind a stacked pile of forgotten fuel cell canisters. He was standing at a chanced ten meters out from an empty muster point and landing pad, the Gunboat coming down to settle in the provided space arched between the outlying shed-posts and the now massacred barracks hall. A side-door recessed and slid aside. Gleaming troopers in polished armour, carbines in hand, visor-plates dark and lightless, stepped out into smooth, practiced formation. Four… Just four.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Swear, if Judeil is spaced out of her mind, that’ll be it,” One said over comms. Seroth managed to effect a silent intrusion, noting that his rad-suit and helm-rebreather were tuned to channel broadcasts. “It’ll be her command and her ass. Commandant’s out of options for covering for her.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Nah,” Said another. “Judeil’s fine. We’ll probably make an excuse that some piece of sensitive kit or summat got frigged by the local sand grit, caused a brief period of dark spot.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeah, but how many times can we make that excuse?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Many times as we have to, look. This is… We’re lucky we just have Judeil to handle half the time. If we had anyone else besides her, we’d be having our ass ridden like no one’s business. Judeil’s on the backburner, she knows that. Knows we are too. She makes things easy. I’d like to see her kept around a bit longer.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Word’s on that strange happenings are out happening in the Outer Rim. Might be a sign of tensions getting ramped up. Be nice if we could get the Lieutenant sobered up so we could get a plan working.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Working for what?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“In case whatever strangeness that’s happening past Elrood finds its way here.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Jaysas, this is Tund. Nothing’s coming this way, because there’s nothing for – Oh wait, hold on.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hold on what…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Getting… That can’t be right. Stacks!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sir!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Get inside the barracks and tell me what you see!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The trooper took off into an obedient lope, swiftly speeding with sure regularity around familiar twists and turns of the encampment. Unfortunately, his ordinarily randomized bee-line was taking him closer and closer to a prone figure breathing haggardly behind a fuel cell crate stack. Medication was only dulling the suffering in his side by so much, the agony causing him to sweat out between clenched hisses of breath. Seroth hadn’t the stomach for murdering otherwise hapless service men. If they were true bastards, than his course would be firmer… But they sounded bored, inept, and just wanting to return to base for a spot of Rancor Aid and a few downloaded holotalkies. So he revered his grip, choked up on the haft and switched the axe-head so it rested beneath his hand. The trooper approached, ducking aside and leaning out slightly to keep his balance.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth rose as his last step trudged through ash silt and rock, swinging. The axe-haft cracked over the back of his helm, dealing a poleaxing blow. Knocked out, he could hear the man loose a pained groan, flailing forward onto the ground. The comm woke up with sudden, exacerbated chatter.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Stacks?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hell’s teeth, you heard that? Stacks!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Form up, safeties off! I want whatever’s fething with us dead the nanosecond it shows its head!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They passed him by on their swift hurry to tend to their fallen comrade. Seroth was swift to limp in behind a second fuel cell stack, praying that the residual wafts of heat from the warm-to-the-touch canisters would lend his heat signature virtually invisible to whatever infrared scanners that were doubtlessly installed in their helm-visors. The lad noted that, in the taste of fear, the remaining three had snapped into a sterner formation, motioning with crisp, assured sweeps of their carbine barrels. They passed him by, giving Seroth a moment to brace his constitution, ignore his agonies, and limp for the gunboat. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He ran out an eastern circuit skirting the landing pad, dodging between storage outhouses and using the disconnected tarpaulin flaps to disguise the brief flits of dark motion. The Gunboat idled on a thruster cool down cycle, still venting heat from primed engines that were readied to raise its durasteel bulk from off the scorched, glassy ash and baked stone. Black dust storms continued to swirl in the high atmosphere, growing close overhead till it shared the oppressiveness of its gloom with anyone about for a square five hundred kilometers. As times, churls of ash and sand gusted down the aisles between the sheds, blinding Seroth for precious seconds until it cleared. His hands ached to take a clutch of the obsidian ring hanging snug below his neck. Rosa’s keepsake, a family heirloom. A small piece of faraway happiness. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]When this strange, bloodied saga saw its end, he wryly noted that that the woman would be owed a very exhaustive letter…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Gunboat crew drew sharp gasps when the side-door swung open. He was a stranger, leaning oddly over his left hip, knife and axe in hand as he pointed both towards the cockpit stations. His pained grunt of command wasn’t questioned as he loomed with intimidating physical presence.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Keep your flight suits on. Grab or share any rad gowns you have for emergency. And then get out,” He growled.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It took a hurried five minutes, seconds straggling by his reckoning. The four dressed, clapped on rebreather helms and rad-cloaks, hands held up in placation against the armed stranger. Seroth was glad for the hiss of the autodoor sliding into place, slapping down on the locking key and cycling the servo-motors off from allowing any further entry. He breathed recycled air from the vent scrubbers, casting off his garb, sliding into a pilot seat. Controls fell into place under familiar hands. Thrusters, attitude read outs, oxygen levels, fuel cell levels, reactor output. The Gunboat gently climbed, dorsal turrets stiffly wobbling as the lad grew used to the ungainly secondary maneuvering jet-cones.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It would be a long wait before he dared to step a foot down to Tund again. Seroth stared on into rushing clouds of scattering fallout grit, ‘till his vision blinked and he saw a lovely sight: the vastness of emptied space. He killed the lights of the cabin and operated solely by reflexive muscle memory, keying the navicomp for a drift through Hyperspace. But just before, darkened with only the ambient light of ancient stars, he saw the whole of known creation span out before him in a milky bow of endless light. Somewhere, his friends, his love, were out there. And amidst them, Guen the Viper. The childlike wonder so wet and fresh in his eyes grew to ice, hardened. The Gunboat jumped to transit, flashing out of sight as it made due course for Arkanis Sector, and the waiting sandball Tatooine.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Outer Rim Territories – Confederacy Space – Arkanis Sector – Tatoo System – Tatooine[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]18:52:36 – TSMT – Eight Days On[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He returned to the compound readied for a brief, spastic war. The lad, however, only had the distant herd groans of sauntering bantha’s to greet him as his pilfered gunboat came in for a low assault run. Seroth kept the cannons and turrets primed, target solutions lined red across the western face, where he knew a small slit of space would exit any number of small atmospheric fighters. But nothing mobilized. Scanners picked up only the slow motion of undulating dunes below. Seroth bit down on his rampant imagination and emptied out thought for cool calculation. There may very well have been traps set, despite the ‘all-clear’ of what the gunboat’s sensor sweeps told in reply after a moment. The vessel glided in at a slow gait, ducking through the narrow entry slit with just barely enough overhead clearance.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The motorpool and surrounding hangar space was emptied. Fuel lines lay in haphazard falls, gently leaking remnants of exhausted fuel supplies. There was ample space to maneuver the sized bulk of his vessel, parking down simply in the midst of the deck flooring. The lad racked a pilfered breach-shotgun taken from a spare rack at the back of the cabin, easing out through the side-door and down a tongue-ramp into the ambient heat. A skein of sand rose and blew across the greased decking, patching at his leggings. The only sand was the constant breeze-hum that exuded from the deep desert and echoed through the whole of the small rock compound. Seroth sniffed traces of grease and ozone, the scent of chemical churners and impact sifters. A massed exodus. The compound had been abandoned, seemingly. The lad slowly stalked on, skin prickling with a heightened, unseen sheen as his physical senses became amplified with a touch of Force prescience.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ante-chambers and storage dens had been sacked. There was only faint impressions of boxed outlines against the stone floor, where sand had accumulated against the box siding before hands had lifted and carried them off. Signs of heavy, hurried foot traffic were everywhere. Boot prints muddied with grease and hydraulic oil ran dedicated circuits between the upper hanger floors and into the main, rock-domed atrium that had served as a general public space. Earth-hewn seats propped against steppe floors were demolished. The torture stage was left as it was. Seroth glanced to the hanging shackles still wracked with dried blood. His blood. No one took to cleaning the iron binders. Stenwulf had probably left a command to leave them as they were. Pain and blood. One small sentiment of the Sayda’s legacy.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The dormitories were likewise scuttled. Bunks and bed frames had been scavenged of pillowing and mattresses, leaving only behind the undesirable, creaking, coiled undercarriages that were the cause of many sore backs in the morning. The chambers Shev kept reserved for his student were vandalized. The lad balked at the crude aurebesh letterings carved into the walling with stone and axe, with dips of lead paint. Most vividly was a grainy mural of a skull cracked open with the falling bite of an axe. Beneath read in mocking homage: ‘Student/Whoreson’. His old weight-suit was a hacked mess of lycra, leather, and rubber. Had the others, whom he’d never held a minute’s worth of ordinary conversation, truly revile him? A hanging sense of antagonistic mischief still clung to the lambent energy.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then came dread on the approach to the sub-basement. The training caverns. Because, rounding a corner to descend the iron-girded stairwells, splashes of gored blood spill and specks of brain matter glazed the ground and portions of the mesh well-steps. An impression of a body, throat hacked wide and chest destroyed by means of vicious slashes, pricked at the blunt edge across his mental acuity. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shev?” Seroth called out of instinct, running down the stairwell three steps at a time, shotgun keeping a bead down his lead. “Shev!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]More stains of gore matter and bodily spills. No corpses had been left to aid in reconstructing what was a mounting scene of action, injury, and death. Shattered vibro-axes were scattered across the floor, broken parrying knives and strips of torn, black sash. The sub-chambers had been likewise gutted of equipment. Wall-racks had been torn from their bolting. Valued training weapons had been collected, run off to waiting transport carts upstairs. More foot traffic, more hurried steps. Disparate clangs of steel upon steel, guttural roars and cries of vengeance… Seroth felt his soul shiver, wondering at the hints of messy violence. Had Shev been attacked? Or had he struck out? He was old, surely, but his mind was a steel trap that could have clamped down and trapped even the likes of Guenyvhar or Stenwulf.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shev!” Seroth yelled again. His voice reverberated off the smoothed dome walls, back up through the entry stairwells.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He found his friend, after a turn towards where he knew his taskmaster kept his private chambers. One durasteel autodoor hung crazily off its servo-motor rails, slapped with bloodied hand prints and scores from lashing vibrosword cuts. Stenwulf’s churlish laughter echoed. With trepidation, pushing with the point of his shotgun, Seroth eased in.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Oh Shev,” Seroth murmured.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ancient, platinum hair greased over a ruddy and tanned brow, wrinkled eyes closed and his mouth lightly lolling midst a small catch of loose jowels, Shev Rayner, Taskmaster and eldest of the Sayda by a decent stretch of memory, sat still against a weather beaten high chair. Dead. A stasis-field powered by a nearby portable generator kept the condition of his venerable corpse pristine, with one stiffed fist clenched over an activation keypad. Seroth reached to touch at the stern face that had always been fast with a word of advice, piece of instruction, or coarse joke. His fingers were repulsed by a smoky blue field of shivering energy. The stasis field wouldn’t give. …One wizened hand pointed to a powered console that hadn’t been yet touched. All around, the flooring was dried with washes of crusted entrails and blood-spill.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Hesitating, reaching over his mentor, Seroth pressed in a blinking key. Juddering, lacing sputters of hot sparks from the plugged adaptor winding around its dented casement round its backside, the console powered on. A holoscreen lit the gloomy air, prompting for a command. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]‘Play Back Message?’[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth nodded to himself, and keyed ‘Yes.’ A visage of a heavily wounded, sagging Shev filled the air, ghostly and yellowed by the console projector. It was an old model that couldn’t show off the true-colour holofields so readily enjoyed by the majority of inner-rim inhabitants. Shev wiped a bead of crimson spittle from his scraggly lips and chin, and stared ahead. Stared to whomever was viewing his last words.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Auuggh… Kid? If it’s you who gets this, and I pray t’alotta Gods that it is, then… Had a bad day. Had a very bad day.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Guen came home, you see. They all did, save for you. From Tund. I asked after why you weren’t home… Guen told me that she’d ensured the Sayda wouldn’t be compromised. Didn’t – HHAUCK – Ahem… Didn’t like that sound o’ that. Sten started laughin’ and I knew. I knew. Summat happened to you and it weren’t at all good. Again, says I, ‘Guen, where’s the fethin’ boy?!’ …She tells me you’d been shot through. Left to die, bleed out. I says ‘Nah, not m’boy. No fethin’ shot coulda touched m’boy. Didn’t put him through ‘is paces just for that.’ …And then it all came crashing in. Like an avalanche in my mind, I couldn’t stop it, boy.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“They done you in. Thought it was Sten who tried to do the deed, so I came at him. Don’t let that fether fool you. He can scare. He can scare good. I scared him. ‘Cause he knew he’d die if he lied. So he told a truth. Guen shot you. I… Feth me and forgive me, boy, but HAAKUUKK – Gods DAMN these hurts! …Ahem… Mmmmnn… But I believed him. Yer’mother’d never been the same after that first visit to Tund. Somethin’ never felt right. The way your Pa, ‘Nat, died. And Guen paid me honours by sayin’ ‘Yeah.’ Yeah… She’d shot you. ‘Cause you left her without recourse. And that she’d never been more sorry for it.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sorry for it… Feth her. Shootin’ your own child, son o’ yer loins, apple ‘o yer eye. Shootin’ a good kid. Looked ‘round at all the others. Fighters I’ve trained, raised, sorta like you, but… Just shook my head. Said aloud ‘An’ you let ‘er!?’ Sten said summat about them knowing their place, and that I should know mine. …Started exchangin’ some coarse oaths. Fethin’ whoreson. He don’t know. He don’t. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So they start packin’ for a move and your mother asks me t’get things in gear. Feth that, says I. Feth the whole lotta it. Been our home hear, nigh on four ‘unnerd years, she wants to pack up, lock, stock, and gun. Tell her she can’t do that. Says her, that she can do as she needs to. Does the woman even fethin’ know what the means these days, innymore!?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Was all happenin’ so fast, boy. So fast. Made me damned sad. An[/SIZE][SIZE=10pt]d angry. Every hour, minute, gettin’ more and more angry. Couldn’t take it. Saw what they did to your room. Same Sayda came down, to get the kit for training. Told ‘em to Feth off. One gave me lip. Annnn’ I killed ‘im. …Just like that. One swift snap o’ muh mind. Was convincing meself the whole while that you couldn’t be dead. Not like that. So ‘is friends came on and I killed ‘em too. ‘Nother twenty came stormin’ down and we had ourselves a day.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Was glad for it, boy. Glad for killin’ ‘em. Boys an’ girls, helped shape up and turn out for life in th’ band. Turned in a self-righteous lotta killers. Thieves. Fethin’ murderers tha’ lost sight o’ what the Sayda were supposed t’be. Boys an’ girls tha’ I all knew. All knew… Put ‘em to death, for letting my best, my brightest… Get slagged and left to fethin’ die. Wanted revenge. I… I got ‘er, I suppose. Me and Sten even had it out, when he came down. Said I was outta mah mind.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Must have been. Aye, I was. Fethin’ raging, grieving, pissed at him, yer Ma, fer turnin’ us all into bastards along wit’ ‘em. He got me, th’ bastard. Finally got me. But I got ‘im, boy. You’da loved it. Got ‘im good. He’ll need more tech to make up fer wha’ he’s missin’ now. One thing Sten’s afraid o’ most is losing himself to steel. Remember that. …AUCK, yeah, yeah, he got me. Oooohhh… Can’t tell what’s mah blood and what isn’t innymore. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So this is it. Dyin’ here, pouring out mah’ guts o’ the whole affair to this dumb-tard thingie. …Seroth…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The boy’s eyes snapped up with especial attention.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Y’ain’t dead. I know that. Not yet. You’ll die, sure, but not to her. Seroth, you got unfinished business. You gotta put paid to this, boy. Ya gotta. Nothin’ else for it, and damned if it’s the last thing ya do. Did I never tell you? …Sayda weren’t mercenaries, not t’begin with. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Back when the Gulag was fethin’ everythin’ up left, right, and center, we… Family started out, back in the Unknowns. Yer ancestors put this together, so they could defend their homes from monsters. Evil things. Twisted by the virus, by the darkness it brought. Aye. Sayda… Was the name of an old, lost Goddess, same name as ona yer pro – pre – pro-gen-it-ors, tha’ how ya say it. Great matriarch. Left the ground work. We still try an’ follow it. We don’t hunt men or women, boy. We go after monsters… Even if they wear guises that make ‘em look like folk. It ain’t just beasts that need ta be put down, son.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Way was lost somewhere, prolly’ wit’ this generation, ah bet. Sayda take coin fer their work, aye, bu’… Monsters, Seroth. Beasts o’ evil. These’re things yer were supposed to be huntin’. Things got fethed out there fer ya, didn’t they? Seemed always hurtin’ in yer heart, when ya came home. Musta did some wrong, that ya weren’t happy wit’. Ya gotta make peace that ya made mistakes, boy. Make peace wit’ it, move on. Accept wha’ever responsibilities ya have to. Yer man enough for it, I’ll be that. But…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“But ya can’t let this juss… fade. The Sayda gotta die. Mayhap start it over, I dunno. Nothin’ lasts forever. But ya gotta find the ones wearing the black sash and stop ‘em. It’s just coin now. They’ll kill for anythin’, fer anyone. That ain’t right. Y’know it. I know it. And yer owed, boy. Nat…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Yer father was betrayed. Same as you were. For his sake too, ya gotta find ‘em. Sten. Guen. The others. Put ‘em into graves, ‘cause those bastards ain’t nothin’ more now than Woebringers. Yer owed a measure of wrath, child. There’s… There’s a box, summat about ‘ere. Hidden compartment, down by the flooring, in the wall. My stuff. Notes and the lot. It’s… Auchgg, it’s yours if ya can find it. It’s got names. Names of ‘bout… Eight others that were there for Tund, twenny years ago. Left us fast after. Guen said you saw ‘em all, circling your Pa in sum vision. In the Fears. They… They can’t get away either. …Oh, ‘fore I pass out from bleedin’ ‘ere…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Nat… He left ya somethin’ too, somewheres. Left me some of th’ details when y’were born. …Huh. Back in that far, far day, yah? It’s… It’s an inheritance cache. His… most treasured stuff. Jus’ fer you. Ain’t that somethin’, boy? Ain’t it? Coulda had it all… Sayda coulda been yours, boy. Coulda brought us to some great places. But… It’s all just idears now… Just… Thoughts. Memories… Like drops… In blood… C-C-Commenor, child… Get yerself… To Commenor…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The old man was gritting for breath, fighting to put a voice to his tongue as it worked behind stained teeth. “Commenor, boy. Guen… Mentioned, ‘fore this all went to hell… That she an’ the others… Hired out… To put down… Rebels in the… The… Local… Populace. They’re… They’re gunnin’ down pure patriots, boy, one’s th’ Republic left to rot… Rebels’ is the only ones who can take away the old system, mayhap replace wit’ somethin’ less… Less… Eager… To choke throats. G-Get to Commenor, boy. …Find yer mum. Ya… Ya know what to do…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes,” Seroth whispered in the deathly quiet, long moments after the recording fell silent. “…I do.”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Mid-Rim – Truum Sector – Contruum Sector – Contruum[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]17:43:62 – SCT/-5- Breston – One Month On[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Opinions differed horrendously over the failed Galactic Republican ‘intervention’ action over a year prior. Governmental authorities likened it to a failed invasion, touting their plucky might in the face of bureaucratic war machine. The Republic had come, seeking to out what was little more than a paramilitary dictatorship, and by dint of colossal ineptitude, the Republic had failed. The system of things endured, and did so with such a spiteful contempt. Daring some other great power to try and uproot their ingrained roots of authority. Meanwhile, patriots and rebels dedicated to resuming former democratic venues of authority viewed the sundered military action as the grand explosion that burst defiance for the government out into the open. Despite crackdowns, despite raids and kidnappings, despite military police and soldiers manning the corners of the greater cities across Contruum, voices were being howled in the universities and colleges. Across the holonet and underground broadcast channels. Even proponents within the dictatorship itself were growing leery of spending excesses, and the private debaucheries of ‘party’ members that were no longer so private. Sabotages were growing increasingly common. The air-tight privacy enjoyed by the party-flavoured Bureau of Civilian Intelligence was constantly and consistently fraught with growing compromises. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]So sweating colonels and frightened generals reacted in a starkly predictable manner. Soldiers were mobilized. Officers of the law were allowed expressed abilities that had long been kept mandated under an ancient constitution. An injunction by the authorities slipped an amendment, virtually stripping any common person of their rights to legal consultation or considerations for personal safety, personal dignity. There was a pogrom out for anyone not paying lip service to ‘the beneficial protectors of Contruum’s autonomy and sovereignty’. Granted, mutinous sentiments within the military service itself prevented a total throttle of the resistance. The government saw it as a granted excuse to consult the private sector. So it was not altogether uncommon to see mercenary outfits striding in tandem alongside soldiery and police in uniform. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Breston was an epicenter. Media blackouts suffocated proper coverage of the massed protests that walked down the grander avenues and put torch and fire to administrative buildings. A hundred soldiers, thirty officers, and nine mercenaries had died in the last two weeks in clashes against writhing bulwarks of seething bodies, simply bludgeoned, stabbed, or shot to death with smuggled weaponry. …Nine hundred civilians, mostly students, were lost to brutal reprisals raised in the aftermath. The Walkok-Spainyer Collegiate, gutted from firebombs, was cordoned and chained off. Wannabe graduates could no longer attend the Greater University of Breston. Cordons were raised, anti-personnel fields that rebuffed entry with juddering kicks of too much electro-shock. Setting foot in the midtown markets was taking ones life into their own hands. Downtown was a warzone, though authorities refused to recognize it as so. Six highrises and three business towers saw fantastic cosmetic damages, as cells of perturbed freedom-fighters fought running gun-battles against patrolling gunboats and crack-squads of anti-terrorist divisions.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Shev Rayner had told from beyond the grave that Guenyvhar Gunn, she and Stenwulf and all the Sayda that could be assembled, had flown to Contruum to seek out fortune with a fat government contract. One that simply said to root out dissidents and deal with them in some permanent fashion. Perfect simplicity. Something that spoke to her streak of brutality, giving her leave to operate as she wished. Which was, candidly, a system of precise violence. So it went, rumour told that so-called insurrectionists loathed the ‘black sashes’. The Sayda brutalized them in a systemic program of conditioning fear. Amateur gunners were found ravaged, scalped. Others too broken to be salvaged and put to mercy killings. Hospital wards were bottlenecks that saw wounded rebels captured on a regular schedule, rounded up by disguised ‘doctors’ and ‘nurses’. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Breston was an unmitigated epicenter of chaotic violence, heroism and villainy on either end of the spectrum. Few gave heed to a young man in a bundled coat, cap swiveled down over his eyes and growing a heft of scruff of a scarred chin. He held no ident-markers or holo-wafers granting him immunity to police inspections, yet he simply skirted the edges of confirmed ‘war zones’, flint-eyes searching out crowds of horrified onlookers that watched dissenter and soldiery alike carted away on repulsor-beds. Each prone form was wrapped taut in white sealant bags. Ambulances rose up silently. It was against the law to sound sirens when transporting the dead. The lad mingled midst the throng, standing beside a woman who was beginning to grey, crying into a torn handkerchief. Young folk, men and women of disparate species, stood on hot feet, grinding their teeth or mandibles, swearing beneath their breath. Someone could be heard muttering too loudly ‘black sash.’ The lad perked up. He shouldered forward ‘till he found a vantage point between two bruised commoners nursing hurts from the lash of stun-rods. There… Along the street now cordoned off and wet with both washed snow and blood, standing against a lean-to constructed for field commanders, stood a pair of fighters. Man and woman, in brown overcoats and vests and slacks, girded with a black sash running beneath harness belts. …And vibro-axes in hand. Tomahawks. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Sayda.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth Ur-Rahn observed them spend words with a commander given to bouts of verbose vitriol. Some matter of crossed lines of authority. Disrespect. The Sayda spat in his face and walked off. They mounted a pair of idling speeder-bikes and rose to gust over the low buildings of the Anderzej district. In their wake came a sudden flurry of snow fall. Civilians dispersed, the bloody spectacle finished, seeking out dens of warmth. Seroth kept his spot amidst the slowly piling fluff. Three days spent on foot, wandering like an illicit footpad, eyes sharp for the glint of longknives and polished axes. Guenyvhar was here. Stenwulf too. All their killers and murderers that cheapened the experience of life. The lad turned up his collar to the cold and damp, walking away.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was against Jedi stricture to seek out paths of vengeance. It led down poisonous avenues and brought a person to a boil of hate. In there, so he was warned again and again as a child, laid a trap of self-vindication. Seroth kept on his walk, heading east to districts not yet rife with chemical fires and burns of ozone. Where the two Sayda had ridden off to some appropriated den. Strolling down an emptied perimeter street, an empty sidewalk on one hand and fields of snow spanning out into the lowland prairies and rolling forest hills on the other, he contemplated his course. He felt justified for every iota of quieted anger that kept his blood warm in Contruum’s wintry season. Kidnapped and brutalized, paced through a regime that would have broken most, put through into work that savaged his conscience and left him feeling more vulnerable and compromised since the Battle of Cato Neimoidia. And then betrayed… Shot through and left to die. His closest friend and ally throughout the entire ordeal likewise murdered.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He tried to keep up his conviction that Guenyvhar Gunn deserved an answer of justice. Stenwulf, likewise. They had taken his father’s inheritance and dragged it down a steepening slope of profit over principle. On Terminus, they’d given back a black artifact that should have been destroyed, gifted into the hands of an enemy that would only see the furthering of suffering. On Nar Shaddaa, they aided a duplicitous business venture, collecting crates and crates of packed in slaves. Just for coin. Because as Guen had said, anything outside her scope of morality was not her war to wage. Despite that she should have. They should have. He should have. Shev told that the Sayda had been banded together to fight monsters, both of animals and individuals. How far had they come to betray that very simple mandate. Over coin. Over something as damned as wealth. With Guen and Stenwulf enabled by two score accomplices that legitimized their every break with code.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Perhaps Seroth was acting in a very un-Jedi like fashion. Mayhap he ought to have let it go. Yet, he couldn’t. If he was branded a heretic, a hypocrite, putting down the Sayda like the monsters they were, then so be it. His conscience egged him, begged that all his pains and tribulations not be proof of his commitment to inaction. Seroth begged for Rosa’s forgiveness. For Boolon’s understanding. For Darron’s compassion, Ben’s wisdom, Jaxton’s spirit. Then he steeled his soul and walked towards a tavern where a pair of familiar speeder-bikes were parked outside…[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The bikes he disabled. He approached and slid out a long knife, ravaging the basic navi-comp console and shredding the ignition wires. The fuselage’s beneath were hacked off, fuel cells snapped from their feed lines and tossed into the dirty street. It looked to snow hard for the evening and Seroth was glad to spend a quick minute in warm light. He shouldered through the tavern doorway, into a dimly lit bar with a too low ceiling swinging with floating fans, neon holo-adverts glazing shines of too-pink and too-blue colours across undulating dancers performing in a lowered pit. It stank of grain liquor and obscura, iho-smoke wafting overhead in smoky grey fogs, twisting to and fro in the fan blades.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Two Sayda, relaxing at the counter, tightened their belting and black sashes, ignoring his entrance as they joked over shared drinks. Successes in rooting out dissident cells had made them a little cocky. Each possessed a modicum of Shev Rayners grueling training regime, with further years spent honed under Guenyvhar’s careful watch. Together, they could weather an assault from two score their number and not break a sweat. There was little to worry about from a young man wearing a scraggly tuft of whiskers over his mouth and chin, sitting down at a table just behind. A waiter approached, some being with four eye stalks and hairless, cyan skin, asking the lad for his poison. Just a rancor aid, he ordered. Shev’s old preference. His drink was brought at the exact moment one of the pair glanced around, and took note of his face.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…But you’re dead.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad ducked back and slammed his palms up beneath the table. By his luck, the polished durasteel furniture took the brunt of a trio of screaming hold-out gunshots, plinking and denting the metal and blowing squibs of debris from the ceiling as the bolts ricocheted upwards. Hefting the table by its singular stem-leg, he hefted the weight forward and slammed the solid piece of metal. It cracked them, slamming the Sayda’s backs against the bar counter. Seroth spun his axe and knife free, slashing. Though their hands were protected by meshes of armour-weave gloving, the stinging force slapped their guns free and broke the tender bones of their palm. One handed, grieved with pain, they ducked aside into a pincer attack and struck in with their own parrying blades.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth blocked one with his axe haft and shunted it high, kicking the offender in the bone of their sternum. Something cracked, painfully, and they fell back. The second tried dodging a weaving cut up in beneath his axe-arm. The blow was caught in a deft riposte, halted in momentum before a blur of liquid steel buried into her throat. Patrons sobered by the sudden violence both hissed and grew wan, observing while the woman slapped her good hand across her neck and pitched forward, dead. One man swallowed back on his liquor swill as Seroth strode forward, hefted his tomahawk, and chopped down through the second Sayda’s cranium.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Spast!” Someone swore.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Looking up, flecked over his cheeks with spits of blood, Seroth tugged off his cap and stared to the small crowd of bystanders. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Some of you I am sure have children and family, or friends, caught up in fighting a hard regime,” He said. “I am very sure of that. Eyes are on Breston as it burns. Your government has hired out others to come and kill them, since they cannot trust their own soldiers to act as ordered. These two belong to an outfit that has seen and committed evil, badness. They are here, now, hunting your friends, your families. It is not enough that they will try and bring them pain. They will seek to instill horror. …It is my responsibility, to find them and end them. So if you see anyone wearing a black sash, with an axe in hand and a knife on their belt, approach them. Tell them… Their days are numbered.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]-[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]~One Week On – 22:12:59 SCT/-5 – Breston[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]Five students fought to keep the screams bubbling in their sore throats from venting. None of them were elder enough to have seen their twenty first year, five young humans with blood-soaked university uniforms gripping onto cold rifles. They were stolen carbines, picked from corpses left for autopsy at the nearby San-Haiyne Charity Hospital. Together, they pieced together clucks of bravery and joined with a dissenting unit holed up in Breston’s war torn downtown district. Estimates for their survival were low but no one was in a position to deny their request to aid. They were given some armour, spare ammunition clips, satchel charges, a map with laid in route, and specific instructions. ‘Go and destroy this refueling depot.’ Each knew the spot. It was a civilian joint, where aircars and speeders spun in recharge fuel cells or restock emptying fuselage tanks. The enemy was using it to service patrol cars. The asset had to be denied.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]But things had gone terribly wrong. Now they were all holed up behind the cashier counters inside the paying kiosk. Flechette rounds boomed. Stacked packets of candies and junk food burst open, spraying clouds of sweets and vacudried salt and vinegar laced chips that were pulped by follow up shots. Two bands of strange fighters, dressed in dusters with black sashes, appeared seemingly from nowhere. They catcalled, threatening to mail the skin of their brows back to their scared families. Shots were opened. One of them was wounded by the opening salvo, flesh burst and flayed open across his thigh and hip. Someone screamed for his cries to be shuttered, over the ripping shrieks of duraluminum roofing coming apart in bursts of shrapnel. A student yelled, cut across his nape by falling debris. This was their first and only stand. They were about to die, cold and bloodied.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The shooting stopped. Yells rang from outside. Tentatively, one head poked up and wiped a scatter of gore from off her eyes, blinking. She swore and hauled one of her compatriots up, pointing frantically. A third head joined, as the fourth was still knelt down as she tried to staunch her friend’s bleeding with salvaged bandages. In the gassing courtyard, eight fighters were trying to subdue a flash whirl of steel that was cutting down their numbers with brutal swiftness and stunning savagery. A Sayda fell, gutted, before losing his head in a tomahawk slice. Hacks and chops were blocked, parried aside, windpipes severed and spraying spurt-gouts of arterial blood onto the black pavement and sterling white snow. One lost their hand, then forearm, then the bicep with a blow to their shoulders, thrown aside to bleed out and die. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Blinking, one student rose and began to very slowly pace to the brawl as it was dying down. Three remained, then two as one of them caught a blow to their stomach, chest, and the nape as he doubled over. The fighter who was methodically decimating them ducked beneath a stab and took the hand, accelerating the attached axe-head forward into his partner’s face. He ran his off-hand parrying blade in a smooth stroke through the last Sayda’s ribs, stabbing into the rapidly palpitating meat of his heart. The student was just a handful of meters away, watching his wish-to-be slayer fall to his knees, chucking blood from the slim incision in his torso. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Are you alright?” His rescuer asked. He was naught but a boy roughly their age, with a spare year or two upon his young face, dressed like a shoreman. Dark hair hung off his brow beneath a weather cap, chin scruffy with a build of whiskers. The student nodded, hefting his rifle. …He hadn’t fired a shot yet.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeh-Yeah… Think so…” He looked around, awed by the physical decimation. “You… Killed them all, huh…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes. I did,” The man nodded gravely, as he knelt and reached to close a pair of dull, glassy eyes. “They were going to kill you. I did not wish to see that happen. They had to be stopped, though, for more than just your potential murder.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Don’t… Don’t know what that means, but… Whatever, eh?” The boy loosed a nervous chuckle, tension loosing from his aching spine. “I mean, we’re all alive, so – “[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What are you here for?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Wha-What?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I can smell something. Like gas, but metallic. You have explosives.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeh-yeah…!” The student nodded. “Yeah, but… How did you…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Are you destroying this refueling depot?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We were asked to… By… By a cell here, in Breston, in the downtown…” He swallowed on acrid spite that was collecting in his cheeks. “Sshp~! Told us to come here, at such and such a time, lay the charges, set the primers to go off, and run. We got here… And then these fethers showed up!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The man stopped him from kicking at a flaccid corpse. “Do not.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Why the feth not!?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“They are dead and there is nothing here to house something for you to engage your anger upon. Be kind to the dead.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeah… Yeah, whatever…” He sniffled. “Gods… I thought we were dead. Hey… Where… Where you going?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth turned over his shoulder, looping his axe and knife back into their holster loops by his hips. “I finished what I set out to accomplish. You should do so as well. You have a very long fight ahead.” And then, with a flurry of snow wafting down from an overarching building roof lip, he was gone.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]~Three Weeks On – 17:28:39 SCT/-5 – Breston – Hardgrave District[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]He made a grave error, though it wouldn’t be known to him ‘till the moment of hot, white fire flashing into his eyes, rolls of condensed air slamming into his chest and carrying him out through a window and over a snowed in yard. Across the days, spending looted coin taken from the emptied pockets of slain axe-wielders, Seroth had been diligently, slowly, ridding Contruum of one mercenary band in particular. He caught the Sayda in a rare moment of lowered guard. It wasn’t unheard of for paid killers to hold certain arrogance, if not outright dismissal, of both civilians and professional rivals. Guenyvhar had worked years to instill an innate confidence in her fighters which would translate to assured fighting ability as they let go of one final, personal leash: fear. So they didn’t think of much to fear when a boy with a familiar face, wearing the clothes of a longshoreman and cap, approached them from seemingly nowhere.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]But then their numbers began to dwindle in a stark fall. Patrols wouldn’t return from their cycled routes. Kill teams disappeared and were discovered, hours on, buried beneath shivering blankets of ice borne down from the constant snow fall. Firstly, it was suspected a competitor with an axe to grind had taken it upon themselves to winnow the chaff. Yet, every possible suspect within their gated ‘brotherhood’ did not fit the mode of operation exhibited in the corpses. They were slashed, hacked to pieces in some literal cases, all with one paired set of edged weapons. An axe. And a long knife. One rumour that ran swift and rife was that it was perhaps the revenge of Dathan Gunn, taking physical form to hunt them down soul by soul, and drag them off screaming into whatever hell he’d been tossed into.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Beyond their woes still laid Breston and her troubles. A vocal opponent for the plutocracy, once verbose before the failed invasion so many months prior, had emerged from a self-imposed scholarly exile to lent her voice in what media would broadcast her. She was Aiesha Abnett, twice celebrated political science professor at the now chained and cordoned Greater University of Breston, married to a retired bio-engineer and had previously mothered three children. Her presence lent a legitimacy to a struggle that had, ‘till her reversal of silence, been increasingly seen as Contruum’s last defiant gasp before it succumbed to the mediocrity of bowed, political slavery. Loved and hated, in equal measures. Though Seroth had little in the way of comprehensive insurgent training, he recalled one iota of wisdom spat from the thin lips of old Shev Rayner.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ya give folk a figurehead, they’ll rally. But if that poor sumbitch has enemies, then they’d better get a damn sight of some decent security. Or they’re already dead.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]So, upon a weekend that was seeing an unusual rise of warmth and a flash of flooding rains, the boy ventured to the Hardgrave District of modest income families. He needn’t outright offer his services to help keep her guard: doubtless the local resistance cells were busily constructing defenses for Ms. Abnett in that regard. Still, with some luck, perhaps Guenyvhar would be so bold to send a kill-team to silence her scandal and lecture. In the aftermath of her assassination, the rebels would possess a martyr, fight just that much harder, and above all else, necessitate an extension in their agreed accomplishment. All Seroth could depend upon in anticipating his mother’s actions was this: profit.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Yet… Pricks of forewarning goaded at the lad’s sense of caution. He’d been on the approach to a sloped, two-story household modestly decorated with a shoveled yard and a pair of parked speeders. Fixed casement windows lined the front outer walling. Black shingles tapered down into small rivulet furrows, guiding rainfall into cleared storm-gutters. Water lapped at his heels. Seroth walked up the driveway, along a paved walkway through hip-high drifts of snow that were solidifying into coated lumps of tall ice from the rain fall. …The front entrance door was just slightly ajar. The lad cussed, noting the smoking electro mag-lock. Someone with a spike tunneler had shunted through the security mechanism and forced an entry. Seroth unhooked his axe and guardedly pushed the door a smidge wider…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Detail turned to a glow of after-image in his eyes. A split of roaring air slammed into his senses, swiftly followed on its heels by a reverberating wallop of roiling, coiled fire. Something had been tripped. A micro-filament wire, motion detectors, heat sensors, some device or another. What mattered was its detection of an intruding body into the premises. Enacted protocol had to be followed. So a split nano-second signal was fed into a tunneled line of wiring hastily installed beneath the flooring that very morning. Small containers no larger than ordinary humanoid shoeboxes felt the trigger. Priming agents mixed into clay-caches of plastic explosives. They went off with a near killing force from behind the coat-room within the doorway, hurling a light, heat, and too-large shards of building material in a funneled cone outwards.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth was lifted from his feet and smashed back through the cabin windows and roofing of one idling family speeder. His senses were toasted, vision stinging with too much ocular abuse. Pain saw to it that his faculties began to shut down with rapid if frustrating intuition. But before all went to black, faintly in the din of splitting ear rings, Seroth could just make out the hurried footfalls of boots clacking on rain washed pavement…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]-[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“G’won. Get the bastard to his feet.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He couldn’t see. Not well, at least. Blood had fallen to his eyes and stung their sensitivity. The ground where he rested, cheek down, was blurred into brackish mires of cobble-grey and mud dark as pitch. Trying to turn over off the pain that wracked his left side, rows of nearby tall shops were no better but blocky impressions. Hazy windows, choppy doorways, frightened witnesses peering from beneath awning rain catchers. Rain… The lad lifted his chin off the cobble. It was pouring for the day, forecasted to last through ‘till the next weekend. Droplets the size of swollen marbles stung his brow and temples. Tremulously, he tried pushing off the ground to stand.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He saw the motion too late. A steel-toed boot cracked into his jaw, exploding pain behind eyes. It caught and turned him over onto his back with a muddy splash. Blood flecked his teeth, and the boy counted himself lucky he hadn’t accidentally bitten off his tongue. Churlish laughter sounded. To right, down. Down by his ankle. He tried sweeping the laughing man off his feet but was too slow. Too inebriated with hurt. The boot sole found his shin and pushed back his effort, then wound up and thudded hard into the small of his back. More pain. More lights bursting in the back of his mind. It was enough for him to loose a gruff whimper, sagging limply. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Lookit ‘im. Still tryin’ to stand and give a go, eh? Huh…!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was true. The lad sucked in wet air and came over onto his knees and palms, expression grit in concerted effort. Before any further progress could be done, blows fell on his back and skull harder than the slapping rain. Axe-handles cracked his shoulders, as dagger pommels worked into the meat of his spine and backbone. Fists followed, slugging across his kidneys, boots then that drove the breath from his lungs. Dazed, vision spinning, it was all he could do avoiding the inclination to violently hurl. There was no difference between which was mud-water and which was his blood. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Huh, enuff o’ that. She’ll be wanting to see him now, I think. Up he goes.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Gruff, calloused hands latched around his arms and tugged him free of the muck-mire. The lad could see now: a long avenue lined with cheap ferrocrete cobble beneath his boots, buildings of wood, steel, and stained glass panes that rose high as old crags. The way was lit by tall posts of twisted pig-iron, strip-lamps the colour of sodium. Every doorway and alley seemed lined by tall figures cast in tar-shadows, eyes white and blinking. Wide, white, blinking, undeterred by examples of violence. The boy blinked back, dragged along, boot toes catching in uneven cobble-bricks and deceptive rain puddles.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ahead was a civilian square, patterned in perfect symmetry. Two hundred broad meters in any direction, criss-crossed with foot traffic streets and avenues that led off to neighborhoods and mercantile quarters. This morning, it’d been emptied. Save for a small crowd of tall men and women dressed in gang-colours: off-white, leather brown, sashes of satin black, and silver caps. Each was armed, with vibro-axe and long dirks, holstered with pistols at the hip. They stared impassively at the bleeding boy being hurried along, man-handled, and tossed to puddles by their boots. He was shivering now; water had soaked him through to the bone and chills wracked him. Lacking the talents to warm himself by esoteric means, all he was want to do was push it from his mind. It took a moment, the gang-crowd watching, the boy staggering to his legs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He came face to face with their ‘Ring-Leader’. Shaggy-face, bearded, mopped with an unkempt crop of brown hair framing piercing black eyes. The man’s frame was adorned with plating, ‘cross the chest and shoulders, down the sweep of his back, connecting via an ancient exo-skeletal system that was rigged directly to feeding off his biometric data. Polished induction ports, framed by inflamed skin, dotted his throat and naked arms. One hand idly toyed with a micro-edged vibrosword. The other, a length of double-edged damascene steel, some modification of the old katar template. It was a man the boy knew and should have expected to encounter, but found himself disappointed all the same. He knew his face but it was not the one he sought.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“She asked me ta deal wit’ ‘is,” He said, voice gruff, sonorous. “I told her I coulda done thah ages ago, but fer sum reasin, ya gave ‘er cause ta hesitate.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Stenwulf…” The lad grunted.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ya jus’ had to mind your business,” Stenwulf cut him off. “Wasn’t none uv yours firstly, but then agin, kin’s a funny thin’.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Where is… Where is she…?” The boy spluttered, lips dripping rainfall.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Gone off, none o’ your concern innymore.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The unlit cutting-edge of his polished blade rose, tweaked the lad’s chin up a few degree’s higher. The sword swept back and came on, slapping him across his nose with the dull flat. “Ya only need ta worry ‘bout me and us ‘ere now. Killed off a few of us. More’n a’few. Killed off some I’d trade a unnerd o’ you back fer, boy. Had no right ta slayin’ ‘em.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I… Disagree…” The lad replied in turn, spitting blood from his tongue, nose-bridge reddened and stinging. “You think that… Somehow… That camaraderie excuses you… From justice? Between… The two of us… I am not the worse idiot here…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shut it,” Stenwulf growled. The gang keeping to his flanks spread out into an even circle of some thirty bodies, impassive still though they brimmed with an unspoken, ire-laced contempt. “Fer yer grief against us…? Fer puttin’ Guen on the run? I’m givin’ you a chance ta die on yer feet. ‘Least in someways, tha’ might make ‘er proud. Fer once.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Something was thrown off his left peripheral, skittering through clay troughs of soaked earth and broken ferrocrete cobble. Stenwulf backed off by a handful of paces, running his arms through a fluid warm-up. Sword and katar worked in a liquid figure-eight, scattering spats of water and light, as the man-bear that held them tightly braced for the coming contest. The boy glanced to the tools resting by his ankle: a durasteel tomahawk and a long-dagger fashioned from chipped smoothstone. Weapons with the aesthetics of tools, brutally elegant, simplistic and raw. The lad bent and gathered them into his cut hands, hucking a gust of wispy fog-breath. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Anythin’ ta say?” Stenwulf called.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…No,” And then the boy broke into a fast charge and hurtled on at the waiting killer.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth was already a spent boy by the time Stenwulf, fresh and blooded with hateful ire, tackled one another in a searing rip and clang of colliding weaponry. His elder braced, addressed overhead slashes down across the raised haft and reversed blade of a raised axe and knife, winding up the katar for a punching stab. Each blow was accented by the whirr of elbow cabs and sunken forearm plates. The ancient exo-skeleton braced, no, drilled to fit snugly through his flesh down into his bone, afforded Stenwulf a rare degree of outright physical dominance. He broke Seroth to his knees and then rammed the katar in to split through his teeth. Seroth sucked in air, rolling back and up to his feet, pivoting as he parried a second longblade stab and tried to follow in with a blinding slash to Stenwulf’s right wrist meat. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The man just laughed and receded with a crash. Steel-capped boots ground, tore through the slick flagstones underfoot, before kicking in and forwarding his weighted bulk. Stenwulf came flashing through the air, slamming both blade and katar down to crunch through the lad’s meager defenses. Seroth pivoted aside, working through spits of shivering pain running up his hip, pirouetting in a full spin as he cut with both axe and knife. Sten grunted, feeling first the tomahawk blade find purchase in the flesh across his kidneys while the smoothstone dagger wretched an inch’s worth of depth in a short cut below his nape. Right where a gap could be found between the reinforcing platelets and hydraulic pistons. He spun away, backhanding a keen slice that drew a wound across the boy’s sternum, following in with a machine-kick.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Surrounding observers, Sayda dressed in their long cloaks soaked through thoroughly with sheeting rain, simply smiled through in the gloom. It’d always been perhaps certain that any confrontation between their killer champion and the pariah son would be as mismatched between a wounded wolf and a starved bear. The child was being manhandled, swatted from side of the courtyard to the other. Seroth’s backside was skinned, clothing wrecked, crossing up his forearms across his chest to deflect some of the bashing weight thrown in behind Stenwulf’s kicks. They watched him lift high, spinning back twice over two meters of empty air, managing to turn a deft twist that landed him onto his toes. One came Stenwulf, addressing his dexterous defenses, working to try and level his axe and knife aside to drive either his sword or katar through for a critical if not mortal blow.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Already wounded, already dazed with a spinning faculty that refused to still and lend him clarity, Seroth did as Shev predicted: faced with crisis, he fell back on his degree of training. Stenwulf was too much, so much brawn and speed that without his own bursts of Force ability, he’d never match him. Not now. In a few years time, with further experience, then yes. He was only a lad still, fraught with inexperience in a Galaxy that had little patience or pity for someone only now coming into their own. Yet, in his pain dulled mind, he could see something. Every fighter worked to compensate their own shortcomings and weaknesses, some chink in the armour that rendered the whole of them exploitable. Sten was girded in duranium body-frames that lent him incredible physical power. Yet, why? Why did he need crunching limbs and felling strength? Seroth waded in, parried a katar slash and dodged in over a slash to his legs, feinting with the longknife. Stenwulf hesitated just a fraction and then burled in to chug the boy beneath his gnashing legs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The boy simply dodged aside on toes that had rediscovered their nimbleness, fast out of sight and reach. The burly man turned on a swift pivot. He eyed the boy, the bolstered confidence in those flinty eyes as those corded arms milled axe and knife in a distracting, defensive pattern. Stenwulf came on, so very determined to see the boy crack with a grain of fear as his death rushed in to claim him. Seroth swung and caught his katar aside under the beard of his tomahawk, retching it aside, up high, where he could slam the T-cross of the axe-head against Sten’s chin. All the while his longknife harried his hand shield of defenses. Despite the glisten of his longblade, a source of pride, joy, and personal identification, it faced a similar weakness Mandalorians took advantage of in lightsaber combat: it was ill suited for close quarters. His opponent’s longknife flashed, feinted left then came in away, burying up to the hilt in a gutting stab before receding. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It’d happened in less than the span of a bare split second. Stenwulf blinked, drawing back as he clutched his off-hand limb over the hurried bleeding in his gut. The boy circled around, keeping note of his foe’s wounded, paused state, noting the sudden tension rippling through the massed ranks of watching Sayda. That hadn’t been meant to happen. True, they anticipated a struggle, but short, sweet, and satisfying. Stenwulf would take his body and break him, and cast his jiggling corpse into a storm culvert as one final insult. That was the anticipation. Their burly man slapped a handful of sealant clay across the incised cut, snarling a throaty insult directed to the boy’s breeding, manhood, and father. Seroth simply kept on the wait.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Stenwulf led in with whirling strikes that flashed his sword about like a liquid blur of steel, mimicking feinting actions with the fisted katar, utilizing what his stamina could spare to keep up the effort of his overwhelming the boy with pure brawn and speed. The boy didn’t mean his strength. Instead, to his grief, he utilized it to turn back Sten’s momentum and wind him. Punch-stabs were dodged nimbly, slashes caught and swung out and wide so he had to flex his arms to bring the longsword up and around once more for a gamely follow up. Yet, the effort was wearing. An exo-skeletal system only augmented so much as the given body could muster. Stenwulf was still a humanoid, if hulking in frame. The weight of his augment was beginning to wear on his arms and legs, tighten hard across a chest hammering for air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth had seen it, marked Stenwulf for the brute he always knew him to be. His guile only translated so far into combat. He lacked finesse, technique, economy of motion, dexterity and poise. The man’s footing was sloppy and only just there, enough so he could brace properly and execute his swings or jabs. By virtue of crunching physicality, and having never truly met his match, had Stenwulf survived so long in a business that demanded a high degree of physical artistry. Seroth waited, watched. His mother’s lover flailed in, frustrating and agitation brewing poisons that wrecked proper delivery of his hacks. The haft of his tomahawk shivered, cracking slightly under the ferocious battery. His knife flashed, intercepting katar blows, harrying the naked skin of his knuckles and the soft of his forearm where not stretched over with exo-armour. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]And then Stenwulf over extended himself and missed a timed set of three blows that would have quartered Seroth’s torso into bloodied chunks. He made his attack, stepped forward to far and loosed a haggard breath. His muscles briefly locked, causing his exo-skeletal pistons to grind and halt up. Bright fear flashed in his eyes as the whole of his sudden predicament became stunningly aware. Huddled Sayda grunted short gasps. It was only a momentary setback that needed just a second to readdress and take over control. Seroth wasn’t in a frame of mind to allow him a luxury of mercy.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A chop landed between across his left shoulder blade and splintered bone into the flesh surrounding his heart and tender valves, the axe itself rending through flesh almost too deeply. The knife whisked in, driving a slash that opened up the skin of his right hip, followed close by an axe-cut higher up. A kidney burst, savaged. Stenwulf raised a hand in placation, soundlessly chewing over words of supplication. He subsequently lost the limb in a whipping hack that never slowed, butting in the brow by a poleaxing haft-smash. Seroth grunted, spinning the axe-head around. He drove the spiked butt in against the soft space between the burly man’s throat and collarbone, ripping down across his ribs and sternum. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Blood gouts hissed, splashing onto the cold flagstones. Stenwulf murmured a throaty whimper and began to fall forward, cracking cobble and ferrocrete beneath the plates of his juddering knees. Those Sayda not frozen with sick apprehension and realization gripped their axes and hold-out guns, giving a cry as scattered shots buzzed, whipped past Seroth’s face and shoulders as he stepped and gamely dodged. A grim twenty five bodies began to rush in as the lad stood over a prone, fallen Stenwulf, who muttered incoherently, staring at the ravaged stump of his right hand as he begun bleeding out atop a brackish puddle of snowy mud and rainwater. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]But as of the moment the first axe-falls and blade strikes wove in to reach their leader’s slayer, a curious development began to occur. Surrounding cottage doors and shop entryways burst open as dozens of plain clothed men and women hurried in an enveloping pincer. “Now! Now, now!” Someone was hoarsely roaring over the first barks of gunfire. The Sayda turned, bracing their ranks, trying to return killing shots as their numbers were scythed through by energized pellet shot. Rebels, Seroth realized, an ambush for an ambush. The Sayda would pay for the horrors and disgraces visited upon their plucky numbers. They’d only been waiting for a decisive blow between the two combatants. Seroth hissed and gently padded the wrecked flesh of his left ribs, side, and hip. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Now I have something to say,” He said over the screams of dying axe-fighters and howls of avenging rebels, kneeling down beside Stenwulf~[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Neural sheathes feeding biometric data to a small, waist-belt worn computer situated on a reinforced maglock square refused to transmit Stenwulf’s vacant mental commands. Pain, raw, bolstered hurt, muddled his train of thought. Blood wept between his shivering lips as he became all too aware of the surrounding cold. It was the wintering season upon Contruum. The rain from the brief, previous ‘warm spell’ was fading into cascading falls of sloshing sleet and snow. Flecks of ice fell to sting on his cheeks. Seroth was knelt over him, bathed in the same cold, looking too haggard for someone yet quite young. His face was stained brackish with smears of soot and dirt, cracked with cuts across his cheekbone, nose, and lips. Flinty grey eyes regarded his mother’s lover, exhausted for pity or mercy or consideration.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Fingers gripped the exo-skeletal bracing of Stenwulf’s chest piece and hauled his torso up off the ground. “Where is my mother?” Came the growl.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Stenwulf managed to laugh in his churlish, insipid fashion, tonguing blood from the inside of his cheeks. He spat up into the boy’s face, whispering. “Heh… Go… Go to hell…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Tell me where she is!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Boy… Yev gone an’ killed me… Feth do ah owe ta thah’, eh?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You are not dead. Nor will you die, Stenwulf,” Seroth assured him with steely tones. “I only disabled you.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Disabled me!?” Stenwulf barked in naked agitation, weakly bearing up his ruined right forearm. “Y’call this disabled!?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes. I am leaving you to the rebels, for imprisonment,” He explained, ducking under a barrage of shot-pellet that turned a howling Sayda fighter into flayed burger meat. “They will keep you to health until these troubles pass. Until law and order can be restored and you can face your date in court for the crimes you and your killers have visited upon them and the people of Contruum.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Healin’… Ain’t th’ same…” Stenwulf said, choking on blood and spit. “As fixin’, idgit…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Broken as I am leaving you, Stenwulf, I have no doubt you will find a method that will keep yourself a live,” Seroth replied, growing closer as a chilling whisper filled the defeated killer’s ears. “That is your specialty, is it not, Mister Stenwulf? Taking advantage of a situation to draw out as much advantage as you can? …You were there to watch as my father was murdered and did nothing. I heard your voice while you asked that I be the one sacrificed so your folly could be rectified. You and ten others. Twenty years on, I come and find you, my mother, working badness. Working evil, without any goad of conscience or morality.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Feth – “ He began to defiantly croak. Seroth’s brow slammed down and broke his nose in three places.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Be quiet! I have heard enough from you and your dull, stupid tongue!” Seroth roared down into his wide eyes. “You are a cretin, Stenwulf! So devoid of any habitable quality! Sentient suffering, blood, coin, these are the things your foulness has fed off these last twenty years! By your word, the Sayda became embroiled in a scheme that nearly saw their physical destruction! Was the money worth it, Stenwulf!? Were Denon’s coffers fat enough!?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I ‘unno, boy… Ya ‘ave ta tell me… Heh… Y’think… Ya goh’ me figered’, punk?” Stenwulf laughed. “Told yer ma… Ya know nothin’ and yer onleh too happy ta’ stay dumb…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Perhaps you are right in some way, Stenwulf,” Seroth nodded, though his small smile brought a fury to the burly man’s eyes. “But you have not said anything to refute my words. I did not break you today, Stenwulf. Only something of quality can be destroyed. Contempt is not becoming of a Jedi but you are human refuse, Sten.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Boy…?” He spat up between gore flecked teeth. “Ya know summtin’? …I’ll git’ ya. You. Yer friends. Family, whatever’s fethin’ left o’ thah’ lot. Jus’ fer talken’ ta me like thah’… I’ll kill ya. Git back mah hand… Mah health… I’ll rid meself o’ this lot and fin’ you… Then we’ll ‘ave a true reckoning, boy…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We shall see,” Seroth said. “I have no qualms about sooner seeing you dead in a prison cell then on some forsaken field of challenge.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His hand reached around and tightened into a gripping fist, snagging a dirty handful of bloodied, wet, mop-hair and twisting Stenwulf’s cranium back with a yank. “Now tell me where Guenyvhar Gunn has gone to ground!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Get fethed!” Sten managed a scream, revealing his penchant for being a tender head. Seroth gripped a hand to his throat and began to tug with increasing vehemence. “Aaaugh!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Where is Guenyvhar Gunn?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Feth you!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Where is Guenyvhar Gunn?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Feth you!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I do not owe you consideration, Stenwulf!” A rare curl of cruelty edged into the boy’s voice. “If you want to have enough of your health to come and try your hand at slaying me for a second time, you will tell me where my mother is!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A length of sharpened smoothstone flashed before the mercenaries water, blue eyes. “…Right. Right, fyne, fethin’ – I’ll kill ya, ya sumbitch, ya know thah’!?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Where!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Stenwulf bit down on his tongue, letting the tender agony awake his faculties enough to recall a specific sequence of memory. He cussed, fouled at his limitations of thought. Then he looked up to the boy, so sour in expression but echoing defeat in both his voice and eyes. “…In th’ mountahns’ ah’ Nihthelm. Place locals call ‘Coldfort’… ‘Ere’, on Contruum.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth released his grasp of greased hair and rose, strolling through a lolling crowd of rebels that stared down at his shattered frame with almost cheery harshness. All around lay the reaved bodies of slaughtered axe-fighters, Sayda that had one last moment to grasp glory in battle before too many barrels opened fire and broke them down. Stenwulf turned slightly, regarding each face constricted in a death mask of agony, of pain. When he next looked up, the boy was already gone. Seroth strolled along an avenue knee-high in snow drifts blowing in from overhead and high rooftops. The afternoon’s slush was rapidly freezing over into treacherous ice that was fast to betray his footing. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Somewhere waited a warm inn room and a bowl of vitamin broth. Somewhere… The lad had felt the beginning’s of a bleak, cold, dark idea coalesce in his mind’s eye as he forced a betrayal from Stenwulf’s battered lips. It was not enough that he’d face a second, more decisive bout with that brute, somehow and on some day. Stenwulf. Guenyvhar. …And eight others faceless souls that were there to bear witness on Dathan Gunn’s betrayal. The orchestrators that had tickled his parent’s ears and convinced them that straying to greed over duty, over aid to the helpless, was more beneficial. More worthy. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He owed them too. And swore to pay each a visit as he could find them from Shev Rayner’s tattered journals. A course of revenge was an antithesis for the state of a Jedi. Seroth wondered if his conscience was finally unraveling, the closer and closer he drew to Guenyvhar. Perhaps… Probably. …Doubtlessly, he could hear doubts murmur in his ear. He thought of aged Boolon Murr’s always apt advice. The potential of disappointment in Rosa’s eyes. He was approaching a deepening, sharp precipice that offered little other than a freefall into mystery and darkness. As a Jedi, it terrified him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…But as a man, he found a tinge of thrill. Seroth smiled as he did. Softly. Warmly. He thought of Rosa and nights on Spira’s beaches. This was a road of unknown, past his comfort zones of justifiable action and ironclad morality. He did not know how the next few days would play out. Only that he and Guenyvhar had accounts to settle. Ahead, past a strip-lamp guide post frosting with snow, laid a small, cheery inn that hadn’t yet been cratered by firefight. Seroth sauntered on, battered, bloodied, but looking forward to the warmth. As he ever and always were…[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Nihthelm referred to a vast and ancient span of towering crags that bordered along an arctic archipelago, far south to the bottom of Contruum’s deathly frigid southern pole. They were called the Teeth of Bears in some old accounts, rising as they did with grey stone capped silver, white, with bright glacial snows and ice that would never see a thaw. Natives of Contruum, back thousands of years prior, looked to Nihthelm as the greatest challenge the world could offer in testing the fiercest of her sons and daughters. The highest peak, simply called ‘the Blade’, stood at nine kilometers high. Five ascent attempts through traditional mountaineering techniques had ended in the failure of three, the death of the fourth expedition, before the fifth saw triumph and survived the scale down. The Blade was treacherous and past merely ‘deadly’. It was an old woman of a mountain, iron breasted and cold, bearded by coniferous forestry that sat in a permanent gloom of winter at her feet and shanks.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was two weeks on when Seroth arrived in the high hills. In those fourteen days, between resting through bacta treatments laced over his weary frame, the lad busied with preparation. In his stolen gunboat, following his trek to Tatooine, he salvaged what he could of deceased Shev Rayner’s personal armory. All it counted for was a chest hidden beneath his bedding and a second box nestled behind a set of false bricks in the walling. There was little in the way for advanced armour or any shielding bodygloves. So he strolled on along a path that’d been marked by local tri-horned deer and critters best described as the bastard children of badgers and wolves. Across his waist and hips laid his tomahawk and hanger sword, his long knife and provisions store in reinforced kevlar pouches. Upon his back, Shev’s own gunstock warclub, fitted with steel plating and a songsteel spear-head spike, rested comfortably affixed by a long thong of leather cord. Between gloved hands aching from the incessant chill, a trench shotgun fixed with a polished, sharpened bayonet. Seroth possessed enough shot in his coat pockets and tunic pouches to last through a small war if the need arose.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]By estimate, Guenyvhar was wintering in relative solitude. Her son couldn’t know precisely when she’d escaped into hiding. He guessed as when the first patrol he’d slain back in Breston turned up dead, hacked by a single opponent wielding the same tools and fielding exacting techniques, that her hackles of alarm rose. If his guess was even half correct, it meant that somewhere in the frigid fastness, treed so thickly with mighty pines and softwoods, Guen had several weeks to lay in wait and preparation. Seroth paused and wiped a ridge of sweat off his brow, fixing his food forward against an afternoon’s snowfall. Stenwulf, bleeding out and rife with bitterness and cheap hate, mentioned Coldfort. Breston records hinted at old accounts of a far trading post that had housed somewhere between five hundred and a thousand souls at its peak during the distant fur trade. It’d been long abandoned by the time of the first Great Sith Wars. When Exar Kun and Ulic Qel-Droma broke worlds beneath their boots.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Beneath his boots, under feet of snow that hadn’t known a melt in decades, snowfall began to give way to cobble. The path worn through by fauna and frozen sets of smaller boot steps morphed into a withered, shriveled set of marked, hewn stone. Ahead it wove through three kilometers of just barely cleared forestry. Once, the way had been widened enough to admit the passage of labour animals and cart-carriages bearing goods from some other, disconnected outpost down along the edge of frozen earth and sea that outlined the Teeh of Bears. Now, it was barely traversable. Ancient oaks frozen stiff as stone, tall pines unbent by the weight of solid snow barrels, each harried the way and reduced reliable sight down to only a gruff ten meters. Seroth kept feeling a sensation of something flitting on the edges of his peripherals. Of course, by all naturalness and fairness, nothing was there when he turned for a closer look. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Yet his teeth were set on edge. He cocked off the safety key for his bladed shotgun and shouldered on.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He found Coldfort a half hour into the deepening interior. It was a desiccated lot of fallen log walls and shattered gates that had been cracked and parted by way of thickening ice water. Guard towers still stood, righted by rickety foundation poles, bereft of climbing ladders that could aid one in easy ascent to the lookout posts. Coldfort seemed built upon a set of stone steppes, leveled out on three heights that peaked with what must have been a Commander’s fort and house. Seroth drew closer, wary for traps laid beneath the thickened snow embankments that had blown in overnight. The outpost welcomed him with a whistling breeze that flogged over the shivering entrance timbers.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The outpost hadn’t died overnight. There was evidence of a slow leech of life as the years wore on and the fur trade became less and less profitable to sustain. Old barrels sealed tight by rusted iron remained where they were; stacks of unopened medicinal bottles were untouched blocks of glacial ice. Huts, houses, homesteads and shared, squat condos were at a loss for windows, doorways. In the haze of grey light from a strangled sun overhead, everything seemed decked with tight shadows leering with unforgotten memory. Wrecked tools, ancient flintlock rifles, battered and de-fanged axes, hammers, planes, bucksaws, rasps, vises, hammer-headed tenon, all laid in broken ruin that cracked loudly, toughly underneath his footfalls. A throwing knife that someone had tossed into the side of a tanning house was still caught erect against the petrified logging. …And with a note of disquiet, propped up between broken barrels emptied of rum and gin, laid a partially dressed skeleton decked in rags. Its raised, fleshless hand toasted a crisp hello, flask in hand, as Seroth passed by. The lad nodded to the forgotten person, hauling up closer to the Commander’s personal fort on the highest outpost steppe.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was a high window on the second floor. Seroth paused midst a glance. …Had he seen something just briefly shiver in the unlit pitch and black of the house interior? He didn’t slow his pacing. The boy hurried into a quickening jog, pitching the barrel of his shotgun up from his hip as he tried to keep an eye across each emptied window in the proud-faced log mansion face. Again, another shiver of motion-that-wasn’t-there. A second, a third. His heart began to roar as a chased window pane, caked with snow, shattered outward. Seroth halted and snapped up the rifle butt to his shoulder, roaring a gust of fire into the curtains trailing out in the snowy wind. Missed! A distraction! Slug fire echoed down from a window opposite the mansion face, rippling squibs of exploding snow in straightening line of oncoming bullets.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth threw himself to the side, behind a set of stacked jerky gone frozen, grunting as splinters of wood showered past his face. He knelt up and returned a gust of six shots that perforated through the shooter’s window vantage. Something, a shape swaddled in animal cloaks, was running from the east wing into the west. Seroth followed its progress and gave it choice to halt as he slammed buckshot through each open window. The shape paused, shattering the barrel beside Seroth’s right, revealing itself briefly in the grey, muddy light. …A sharp widows peak of black hair. Crisp, hard, beautiful features. Green eyes, more frozen then glaciers.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“GUEN!” Seroth shouted over a keen of rising wind, racking off three shots before putting time to reloading. He was on his feet, firing off at the house every time his thumb snapped up a shell into the magazine tube. There was an anticipated scent of blood on the air, for what began on Saijo was coming to an end at the foot of the Blade.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]He barreled into the Commander’s housing and into a room to room firefight. Guen had been waiting, swaddled in an insulated gown and body glove, offering nothing but her silence and gunfire to her son’s one shout. Wood paneling and tattered paintings were shredded in exchanges of energy-wreathed pellet shot. Seroth sprinted and rolled behind the cover of an old study chair, forcing Guen back behind a set of walling as he trained her every motion with his sights. The mother offered back blind fire, hissing off a spat of a two score shots from her hold out gun that fogged the air with whisking discharge. He kept his head down, curled, waiting for the covering shots to end. There was a sound of thudding footfalls. The lad sprinted on through a pair of parlour’s and a first floor dining room, sliding across the table and still set cutlery in his charge.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen managed a ten second delay at the head of the stairs, pausing her child’s progress. Blaster fire whistled down the steps, in a killing cone. Frigid carpet tinted blue and grey from millennia of exposure blew up as stray shots pitted into the wood carved steps. A beat. Something heavy thudded down the well three bounces at a time. The detonation timer for an undersized thermal detonator bleeped in dead-pan tonality. Washes of fire and concussive force turned a small portion of the interior, middling ring into a brief conflagration of set-aflame wooding and ceiling paper. Makeshift tapers burned hot as roman candles. Debris began settling in a strange flow of slowed time. Guenyvhar approached in a slow gait, sighing at the damage wrought. Coldfort had the potential for a second home to her displaced Sayda. She looked to the sundered stairwell, where nothing but ashen, half cooked timbers and broken, fire tipped steps laid in ruin. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then a shape with a cloak thrown across its face, caked in ash, hurled upwards. Seroth was strewn with burn-holes and flashes of streaked charcoal across his facial features and ripped clothing, though he was alive for his experience in barely dodging the wrath of a detonator explosion. Guen snapped up her pistol, firing off a round as he leaped and banked off the low ceiling. His raised rifle took the brunt across the stock, ricocheting the energy blast into the rug-strewn flooring and finally up into the face of a halted grandfather clock. The shotgun became embroiled between them as they fell into the first brawl. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They grunted, battling for control of the serrated bayonet snapped under-barrel. Seroth met her crunching knuckles in open plamed blocks, gripping her hand and breaking his forearm across her nose. Guen blocked, kneed him in the belly and jerked on the rifle. Her son went with the blow, falling back as he carried his mother off her footing. She fell in with him, feeling his boots piston up and crunch into her ribs. The woman went sailing overhead for a straight and true three meters on, coming to a stop as her spine and shoulders met a coffee table. She had not come to a rise yet when, blinking, the stock of her boy’s rifle slashed down and cracked into the skin of her crown. Thin flesh broke, splashing a well of blood down her ears. Guen gave a cry and snapped up her pistol. Seroth guffawed and side-stepped wildly, firing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]For three seconds, mother and son engaged in a blistering point blank swap of blaster bolts and energy-pellets. Guen’s right thigh was raked and Seroth suffered a shot through his hip. Receding behind opposite ends of the upstairs living room, they paused and began to rip through their individual health kits. Guen slammed a hypoderm to her throat, flooding her bloodstream with a sterile scented wash of morphine, killing the pain as she dug a handful of too-hot pellets from the punctured muscle of her leg. Seroth roughly swabbed a handful of gelatin bacta across the burned hole in his hip, lacing on a slap of sticky, sterile bandaging to keep the healing gel in place. Both were listening to the other breathe in not-so-gentle agony.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Six shots were what remained of the small munitions pile stuffed in his ripped pocketing. The air smelt of creeping ozone, himself stinking with sweat. Seroth slid off the parka, revealing his old faded red tunic robes and forest-green slacks that had carried him through from Tython to Terminus. He waited, listening, senses stretched as he became aware of his mother’s silent breathing. Her motion went wild as he heard her deliberately misaim. Covering shots snapped and splashed across his temporary place of shielding, patches of wall paper fluttering down across his lap. Guen could be heard retreating up a second set of stairs, to the third floor and breaking into a run. Seroth burned energy into his legs and sped up after her in closing pursuit. Wild fire kept him from straying too close. Guenyvhar was making for a window that overlooked a small ravine pathway behind the housing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Guen!” Seroth called again, peppering her receding backside with concentrated fire that emptied his ammunition reserves. His mother ran on regardless, giving a yell before plunging forward.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Cased glass, snow, and shattered icicles went spiraling out into empty air. Guen went disappearing into a sheeting wall of falling snow. Seroth could just make out the outline of her muscled frame curling in over her head, rolling through wafts of appallingly cold air currents. She impacted into a snow drift, casting back a last set of blaster fire. Her pistol cycled onto dry. The gun was thrown aside to melt and disappear into the ground. Guen continued receding into the open, shallow ravine and up into a small pathway edging along the feet of a secondary peak nestling beneath the edge of the tall Blade. Trees groaned, caught up in the wafts of hellacious and cold drafts.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth snapped off the serrated bayonet from the end of his wasted shotgun. He slipped it into the tight catch of his belt, bracing for a jump before leaping. The lad turned a four point landing, upon his hands, knee, and outstretched leg and toe behind. Guen was run to ground, retreating deeper and deeper into a wilderness from where there was no escape. He hefted the bayonet and his longknife in either hand, breaking off into a breathless sprint that carried him on like a wolf.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]They met again, soon. Seroth had hurried up the mountainside pathway, harried by gusts of wind slashing pieces of tiny snow like daggers into his exposed cheeks. Guen had been lost from sight, at least fifteen, twenty meters ahead as the path striated up into what would become an open, glacial plateau. Fifteen seconds was enough for her to scale up the mouth of a yawning rock and crystalline ice cave, waiting behind a float of pitched snow for her progeny to approach. Pitched warning sounded like siren knells in the back of his mind, behind the flesh of his ears. A cave system lit only by odd, lichen growths of phosphorescent, ice-like ‘moss’ patches was open to him, yet devoid of that innate sensation of presence. He looked up. Guen came swinging down with a cry, boots kicking into Seroth’s cheek and neck. The lad went hurling back into the cave interior, rolling across ice that would not give purchase.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Arresting his slide, coming to his feet, he met the feminine fury of his mother on equal terms. He had in hand her familiar, curled saber and a similar parrying knife. She waded in, exhibiting all the smooth control and precise flair that had been so expressly lacking in Stenwulf’s slugging motion. Her child brought up his salvaged bayonet and longknife, catching her strikes in a mill of parrying motions. A trip forced Seroth to a knee, giving Guenyvhar a chance to furiously work her advantage and pin him dead on the spot. Hands worked in impossible tandem, goading a barrage of blocking and attacking strikes that flailed Guen’s blades aside. Seroth steadily rose and came in. His blades hacked down, catching her sword and knife, opening her torso wide and exposing her face and throat. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His brow slammed forward, butting into her nose and teeth. Gore snorted from her nostrils, with Guen spinning aside and backpedaling towards the long, far exit to the continuation of the mountain path. Each step was an unchecked disaster waiting to befall either her or her oncoming son. Neither of them shared barbs of conversation, no taunts or jibes. Everything was a stark, silent exchange of clanging steel that ringed like a swan song. Seroth rolled forward and snapped an arm forward. The bayonet hurled true as a javelin, though missed and only opened a shallow cut over the heatgown of Guen’s right shoulder. He unsheathed his hangar sword, mirroring his mother’s addressing stance, giving to Djem So. Blades met, showering sparks of connect across the ceiling and icy ground. Blue ice-moss kept up a steady glow of illumination, painting them in ghostly tinges of cyan and violet.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Cold wind found the brace of their shoulders, backbones, as Seroth drove Guen back strike by slash by cut by stab and parrying. He worked the principles of basic Vaapad in tandem with the countering actor vectors of the fifth form; a steely hurricane of tandem defense and offense, striking whilst parrying, riposting from blocks and meeting snapping knee-blows with his own. Guenyvhar matched him cleft for rip, giving neither an inch nor a tinge of mercy. A dip in either’s defenses would spell a swift end and a dooming fall, cast into the forest tree peaks that swayed down far below. The woman hopped over an attack to her ankles and busily backpedaled, reaching into her belt for a mall, modular device fitted with a bright… red… button.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Not a step!” She called over the wind.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Mother!” Seroth cried back. “For my father! For myself! For what you took from us! Come here and meet me!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Only if you manage to swim through snow!” She sneered and depressed the trigger. Distantly, planted charges she had dug into the mountainside just that week prior detonated. A groaning moan of displaced snow and ice began to grow in a dull, bass throb.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth looked up to watch several hundred tons of falling mountainside charge down at them with increasing speed. What remained of the Gunn household hurried into a breathless sprint that saw them trying to outrun the coming avalanche. By a slim margin could they succeed and come out onto a series of bridged cliff out-ledges, and then further on to that raised plateau another twenty meters up the rock face. Footing became a trouble. The stone under their toes rocked, vibrated by the sheer tumble and roar of the oncoming barrage. A deluge of blitzed snow ran across them as vision faded. Seroth was only a hand’s breadth behind Guen’s backside as they gunned it. Then one last hurdle appeared. The pathway ended at the open space of a wrecked bridge-way. It was a seven meter cross to jump. In tandem, their boots caught into the edge of the precipice, making the leap. Time slowed as they both felt their hearts choke up into their throats. They soared, clearing four meters, five, six… Together, they curled in and rolled to a stop atop the out-rigging of snow and rock. Seroth reached snappish for his hanger blade… That had caught in the edging of the rock outcropping and went stumbling down into ignominy.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen noticed, grinned like a snow panther with a helpless kill, and drew her own saved sword and knife. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Not yet,” Seroth said. The gunstock war club came off his shoulder and arrested the fall of her blades.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Sharpened durasteel met with fire-hardened wroshyr wood. Despite its strange make, despite that it looked perfectly unwieldy, the club came alive under Seroth’s clutching knuckles. He ducked, blocked and clubbed aside strikes and followed in with gutsy counters that were forcing Guen off her comfortable footing. The warclub was the single tool Shev Rayner had never taught her, as in his stinging appraisal, she wasn’t gifted enough to appreciate the heft and weight of a proper weapon. Outside of her favoured sword and longknife. Her son made lift the gunstock in a high strike, eking a horizontal slash that came automatic from Guenyvhar’s muscle memory. She fell for the feint, as her sun rolled beneath and rose to a knee behind her waist, swinging. The sharpened inner catch of the ‘stock’ cut and bashed into her side. The woman nearly crumbled from the force of the blow, grunting through the pain. She swung about, kneeing into Seroth’s temple, performing a neat flip over his knelt head that saw her blade twisting a flick to sever his throat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Up came the warclub, bashing the edge away while jutting back. The ‘shoulder curl’ of the enlarged club-head impacted into her midriff. Guen was taken off her feet, thrown back as the air was brutally driven from her lungs. Coming to his feet, striding close, Seroth toed his foot out and kicked away her fallen scimitar. It clanked and clattered down its trip over the snowy mountain face, to rest lost, somewhere, caught in the boughs of an untouched pine.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Huh,” Guenyvhar grimaced, throwing a handful of snow up into Seroth’s eyes, sprinting on.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Finally, the running confrontation came to a head atop the high plateau both had been seeing in their peripheral since their first clash in the cavern. Day was falling. A high jet stream had turned a little more southern, catching the banks of furrowing snow-clouds that had kept a constant, grey cover over the near whole of their confrontation. Dry, crisp, clear sky began to open up behind Guen as she stood still. The first glimmers of bright moonlight from Contruum’s lunar twins edged over the far Antarctic peaks further south from the Teeth of Bears. Seroth saw the axe in his mother’s hand, dripping with blood from a cut across her shoulder he hadn’t know she received. He drove the spinal spear-tip of his warclub down into flue of risen ice clothed in frost, and reached for his belting.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Your father and I used to spar like this,” Came her voice, oddly wistful.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Her son hefted the comforting, solid weight of the tomahawk in his right hand, longknife in the other, staring ahead with grey and green eyes meeting in an invisible cascade. Seroth kept his silence, and waited…[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Familial violence was often far more terrifying to behold than the confrontations between strangers. When love was lost between siblings, parents, the hollow where affection should been held became filled with the most personal kind of anger, loathing, and purpose. Even hate. Seroth was just the boy who should have died. Guenyvhar the woman who should have loved. Lungs stinging, frames burning from the ferocity of their previous trades of blows, the two brought their axes and knives to bear and ran.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was not artistry. No grand maneuvers or fancy steps. They fell into the ways Shev Rayner had trained each, utilizing brisk, easy motions backed by punishing strength. Guen caught her son’s axe aside and ripped a slice into his ribs. Seroth reached and punched a blow into her throat, slamming in a follow up strike that shattered her nose even further and split her lip. Tomahawk hafts shuddered, blocking and parrying where there was room and motion to… Doing so otherwise against the scream of shredding arm and shoulder muscle. Knives flashed, banking strikes off their balanced, honed edges, seeking that telling opening in each other’s defenses.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A clash of tools and a physical shunt pushed each away from the other. Seroth and Guenyvhar began circling, biding for the next moment. Seroth was slashed across his brow and cheek, cut with deep wounds that had been rent over his chest. He was bleeding handily, though had slowed none of his motion to deal with the shivering, itching pain that rolled up his torso. Guenyvhar was likewise hurt. Flaps of flesh had been torn off her throat, her nose shattered and bent, hacked through with three wounds that had ruined her left breast and opened a gaping swathe across her belly. They breathed hard, hacking blood up and spitting to the ground. Guen reached and gave her nose a righting snap, gusting out catches of snotty gore from the wrecked nostrils so she could breathe. Seroth winced, rolling his shoulders as he gave his neck a readying crack. Tensions climbed. A spark traded between their eyes. Snow spun up from their legs, clashing axe haft to knife blade, locking limbs in a brutal contest of efficient, physical finesse and ability.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Each strike that found purchase in skin and bone, but failed to kill, was answered back in kind. There was every reason to batter and slaughter one another, even as their blood was shared and mixed in ways only the intimacy of a mother and child could know. Flaps of clothing and splashes of wounded vitae spread out across the ankle high snows. Moonlight from twin lunar orbs cast their battle in a strange light of ethereal beauty. Stars blinked, a hundred thousand million overhead, caught up in the galactic ribbon that could only be seen so clearly these deep into one of the arctic poles. Guen rolled and stabbed, piercing Seroth through his left thigh. But he caught her right wrist in his off-hand, driving his longknife down through her palm. The tomahawk fell, upended in the snows. His own drove down and stoved in through the bone of left her shoulder. The last telling blow, as it sundered her ability to even lift her arm.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Staggering, her right hand crippled and her left arm rendered useless from the bicep down, Guen managed to come to an unsteady stance. Her blade was still stuck in muscle of her son’s leg, where he left it as he limped gamely as she encircled him one last time. She was an alpha femme, still proud. She bore up a strange beauty and dignity, despite the ravages done to her. At her son’s hands no less. In that she was mirrored by Seroth. He was so like her Dathan, she decided. Unbowed, straight backed, covered in blood and hulked with tight muscle across his body, and gazing at her with the stare of a canis. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She watched her one child begin to approach while favouring the strength remaining in his good leg. Steady breezes off the arched brow of the Blade blew past them, freezing the hot blood caked across cloth and skin. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth shivered, cold, hurting… pained in a manner far more than just physical ailment. Frost was caught to the torn panting of his leggings, with one leg glistened bright with his own blood.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The ghosts of thirsting gods laughed on as the pair looked to each other and stared. Guenyvhar had grown pale and wan. Her breathing was coming to an erratic grunt as she clutched to her ripped chest. If her wounds did not bleed her out dry, then the dropping temperatures would squeeze her heart until it found not the will to beat. Seroth wondered what other ends she’d imagined. Running to meet death against a wall of oncoming fire? Stabbed in her sleep by someone trusted? Or old age, surrounded by friends and children she’d thought none would come to see her in her last hours? Or as this… Broken at the hands of her son, watching him pant in the cold as he eyed her with teary pity.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It wasn’t supposed to be like this.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen blinked, caught her breath, laid aside her hand. Seroth offered her a mercy in that his arm never waivered. The tomahawk rose and peaked like a glinting, steely star in the blanketed sky. It fell, a comet in hurtling flight… Finding the meat and bone of the flesh across her heart, cutting through a single hack. Her right hand reached and gripped Seroth’s shoulder in a death throe, eyes wide and crying with pain. She tried to say something… But blood coated her tongue. He listened to her falling breaths, fading too fast. His mind blankly searched for something, anything to say…! …All he could gift Guenyvhar Gunn as she left him was the embrace of his warm arms and his gentle silence. The whole of her frame went still. Her breath across his throat grew chilly… Then ceased entirely.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…Loneliness crept in, shredding the stillness of Seroth’s always stoic manner. It crushed him as his conscience caught up and screamed at his soul at what he’d just done. What had just occurred. He couldn’t give Guen a eulogy. Couldn’t find the words to say his goodbyes to his father. Instead, the Mount of the Blade listened quietly as renting howls not unlike a wolf’s broke the air and cried to the sky…[/SIZE]