A Sum of Lies

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The portion of firearms training began less than surreptitiously, though Shev had proven to be a master of understatement with about as much grasp for subtlety as a tram-van through the living room. Three mornings following another three week course familiarizing, studying, and all but walloping the warclub that had survived the coot’s youth, Seroth rose, dressed in his weight suit, and sauntered down through a well trodden grated stairwell. The morning’s heat wafted up into his nose, hints of salt, grit, and a curious trace of grease and fyceline. Shev waited by the opened portcullis, gazing over a familiar stretch of wispy dune and flatlands. By his ankles rested a haggard shotgun, fitted with a polished bayonet.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Here,” He said unceremoniously and tossed it to Seroth. “Take it and run with it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…How?” Seroth asked after a moment’s hesitation. Shev sighed, rolled his wide, wet eyes, and adjusted the gun’s ride. The lad could charge off up and down the dune hills with the gun in one of two positions. The High Port, gun held off the chest in a diagonal, down right to up left. Or the Low Spear, hand held over the barrel with the base of the palm pressed close to the trigger guard, the bayonet kept pointed off left from the knee and over the sand. The boy was told to vary his hand hold, and then pushed off to go about his run.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Such was the beginning of the lad’s tutelage in the ‘finer’ points of marksmanship. Firstly the morning run, hands gripped like iron stockades to the rifle lest it slip and become stranded in the sand. Shev’s threat of ten lashes by way of war club thrashing was not an idle promise. The sky-blue length of gunstock-shaped wood was kept close to his side as he eyed the morning process. To Seroth’s credit, he kept from dropping his gun, though he cringed at the inner glare his younger, inner self was sending his way. Inelegant, crude, excessively damaging, a weapon unbecoming of someone learned in the Force arts. He reasoned that by now, he had enough know how to put five fighters to death with only a two inch pearing knife. ‘Inelegant, crude, excessively damaging’ was more or less his order of the day.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Firing practice was held for half an hour following the end of weapons proficiency. Shooting itself was kept to the outside quarters. Shev groaned at a mistake once, teaching a young Sayda initiate, when the girl decided to try out a few test shots on a set of unsuspecting fight-dummies. The clamour that grew from the fifteen seconds of partially sustained fire woke the rock compound and had Guenyvhar herself scurrying down in naught but her drawers and tomahawk. That the initiate survived her keeper’s wrath, Guen’s ire, and that of the entire clan was a testament to collective patience. Shev moved the test targets out of compound, to a stretch of hilly solid-sand hills. Seroth grimaced, steeled his nerves, feeling more out of his element than he’d been with anything prior.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Look,” Shev assured him. “From experience? This shid, yeah, it’s terrifying. But it’s no different from riding a speeder-bike. You saddle on, grip the control bars, and it comes back to you. For us to get to that point, we’re gonna need some work. Here… Just… Hold the butt of the stock close, close up here against your shoulder. …Right up. There. Don’t hold it any lower. If you do, the recoil might shatter your shoulder.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The coot tried not to look pleased with Seroth’s decidedly nonplussed expression. The lad adjusted the stock up a touch higher, aimed down the barrel at a target thirty meters out and braced. “Fire!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It kicked in his hands like a bantha, the roar filling his ears despite the stuffed protection that he had molded over his auditory canal. By dint of his grown physicality and hellacious grip, he kept the gun from soaring right out of his hands. The target, another gelatin bust, shivered, perforated by a cloud of aimed buckshot. Shev whistled as Seroth set the barrel low and thumbed on the safety. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Huh. Not too bad. Not too bad. …Do it again.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth eased out his breath and raised the stock and barrel. And so it went. Mid-evening ‘till the first cold drafts of desert air that came down from the western cantons, reaving the warmth from his frame. Between reloads, Seroth feeding shot into the pumping chamber, Shev went over basic lecture on firing theory, his own dry blend of advice and experience, and a few off-the-cuff remarks tuned to run the boy’s blood hot and add a little spiteful vigor to his performance. While the venom failed to catch hold, the regularized routine began to ease the awkward turtleduck into more comfortable territories. Shev often had him switching out between shoulders, firing right and left handedly respectively.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Trust me, there will be any fethin’ number of scenarios that will askew your regular ‘zone’ in a gunfight,” Shev said, taking a smooth cloth and running it down the empty barrel, oiling the greaves. “If you want to make it up as you go, you’ve gotta have the steadiest hold on the bare basics. You can’t improvise what you don’t know. Now… We’re doing this shid one handed.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What!?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His excuse was in the eventuality that Seroth would be suffering from a shattered hand, a broken wrist, a split ulna and radius or whatever would potentially occur. In that trying hour, in need of venting firepower but lacking a second appendage to prime the chamber and reload, he’d require every inch of dexterity his good hand could require. The results were horrible, thoroughly discouraging, despite the lad’s tenacious approach. Control was nigh impossible. Energized buckshot scattered like pepper. Out of eighteen tries in one half hour, only three shots managed to land with satisfaction. Shev touched to the boy’s arm one eve, cleaning up the chambering.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It’s not about shooting worth a damn. You know how to fire, pump out the last shell, reload, settle up the butt, and fire again with just your pinky at this rate,” He said. “That’s more than most. It ain’t about turning you into an Supercommando badass, son, it’s ‘bout giving you and yours a fighting chance. …In the event all hell breaks loose. Which it can. And will. Not tomorrow… I’ll get you set on sticking fools with the pointy end.”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Mechanics pertaining to the art of modern firearms was a lost art on the boy. So much the better, Shev mused. The boy needn’t understand every facet when it came to the difference between energy, slug, laser, and blaster-tech that varied the open… and un-open market. He lectured him anyway, advising to clean his firearms after every exchange. Whether on the practice fields or in the aftermath of a tense shootout. How long a slug-arm could operate without a clean was dependent on the brand, make, and model. Some slug-shotguns could last out ‘till about one-thousand to two-thousand rounds, though the coot advised darkly against that. Clean your gun. Maintain the mechanisms. Practice reloading. Assembly, re-assembly, three times over before he fell asleep.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was another set of responsibilities on what were now packed days. Running and cardio, strength training and general calisthenics, knife, knife and tomahawk, knife and sword, the war-club, and now general firearms. ‘Always keep your frame at a forty degree angle off the target,’ was one mark. The butt raised snug, tight to the shoulder, high enough for the cheek to rest on the stock to sight down the barrel, was a second. The difference between buck-shot and slug rounds, a third. And a fourth being to keep the gun itself pushed away slightly from the chest. Abruptly squeeze the trigger finger, clench in the firing mechanism, and brace for the recoil. Pump the fore-end, eject the spent casing, and then reload further shells into the magazine tube. Lather, rinse, repeat, until motion became physical mechanic memory.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Finessing the damnable contraption was another set of hindrances. Like with his melee-specific exercises, Shev had a habit of keeping the lad blindfolded. It nursed a closer sense of balance, touch, equilibrium. ‘Reading the ground’ was one phrase he was fond of spawning. With an application of Force amplification to his remaining senses, Seroth could have easily operated by sound and touch alone. It was frighteningly vulnerable, forced to strain to sense footstep tremors, hear out the barely perceptible footfalls. Yet, again, Shev had a lesson to bear in. Forcebreaker grenades were becoming a nuisance. Tactics to defeat Force ability were making the rounds. It seemed any common smuggler, thug, or bounty hunter with a bit of wit and coin could potentially outdo a trained Jedi Master of some decades with as little as a gun and utility belt. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Which means, boy, your repertoire is gonna benefit from a permanent expansion,” Shev said. “I ain’t saying you shouldn’t ever fall back on a few tricks y’learned. Be pretty handy to shove in walls with a blink. But ya gotta have more than magic an’ luck in your toolbox, y’know?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Run-and-fire acts were a secondary norm. Shev made the belated warning that firing from a mobile position more oft than not made you stray your shots and miss outright horribly. Unless, he grumbled reluctantly, you were so augmented that you could make such tracing hits. UI helms, synced weapon aims, firing solution algorithms, the stuff that made a majority of for-hire mercenaries so damned effective. Tech could make up for the deficiencies in talent. …So he threw the boy in his weight-suit, forced him to chug back what electrolyte washes he could muster without vomiting, and set him to running through the hot evenings as he strived to blow apart moving targets. It took three days before Seroth managed to tag three targets in a row, cycling between shoulder-and-hand grips as holo-markers rose and bobbed about the uneven desert slopes.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It became difficult to fall asleep. No matter how thoroughly he washed, there was always a slight malodorous smell of gunpowder. His ears gently rang. And phantom kicks, simulating recoil, juddered his hands at inopportune moments. He told Shev. The coot stared at him for a lengthened beat, sighing with a little nod. It was a common enough affliction. Time and practice, comfort with his new gear, would help erase the upset. Better here, he argued, then forced to learn overnight midst bombardment runs. The lad should be so lucky he had a mentor with a cold heart of gold. A sentiment that earned a quiet snort and a short nod from his student. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Sayda preferred the use of trenching-guns. The slowed firing rate could be rectified with quick hands, sure aim, and the shortened barrel allowed a modicum of increased maneuverability. His mother Guen ran a swiftly mobile unit; the idea of being kept cramped in one spot with munitions and bulky gunnery was fiercely unappealing. Though they could fight in siege scenarios, Sayda warriors were in their element as independent fighting squads, weaving through defenses like unstoppable shadow and laying in with silent axe-blows. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Where does she go?” Seroth asked one day, pausing after a sprinting drill.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hmn?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I rarely see my mother. Since I have been here, we have spoken to one another only once. You have come to know me better than she has.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Just the way its been, kid,” Shev said. “Tryin’ to make up for lost time the only way she knows how.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“By putting me through this?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeah! One day, I’d heard after that some foul business had gone down on Tund. When your mother came home with Dathan dead, and you lost, all she had was the work left over. Woman threw herself into it and never looked back. …Think she figures the only way you two will ever spend a decent hour is out in the field. Hence, why we’re bustin’ you.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth paused a moment, flicking the grit from the bristles of his cleaning brush. “…I had been here?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Huh?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“When I was a child…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Huh, yeah…” Shev grunted, taking the bore-stock from the lad’s hands, fixing a greased clamp near the nozzle. “Was hanging ‘round when you were delivered. Pretty quiet for a kid, though you smiled a damn lot. Apple o’ your mother’s eye, did she have some plans for you. Sten showed up not long after you popped out.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Stenwulf?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeah. Distant cousin to your pappy’s. Knew his way ‘round a blade, could fight with his exo-suit, so your grandfather – Shid me, getting ahead of myself. Don’t you have some reassembling or feth all to do, kid?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth took his cue, retrieving his cleaned rifle chambers and departing for his upstairs stone cell. Pawing soft-soled boots echoed dryly up through dim tunnels hewn by hand and by cutter, though nothing thudded as loudly as the disconcerted thoughts plaguing his tired mind. Shev Rayer was privy to far more details than he ever dared to let on. His guard had slipped, just marginally, and painted a brief picture of a young battling family happy to be with child. An unnamed grandsire had inducted Stenwulf, the grinning bastard with a meaner grimace and hollow eyes. And his father… Dathan. Who’d been lost on Tund. And whose memory the Sayda seemed adamant to never speak of…[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]“Prior to the wonders of las and blastech, we foolish meatbags had to make due with carbon and gunpowder,” Shev said one day, handing off a trench-gun fitted tight with a bayonet lengthened roughly to the span of Seroth’s forearm. “In the reality that you missed every other shot and were still under orders to charge a fethin’ position, your one and only backup was the bayonet.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It’d been another three week set of long, hot days following the lad’s first firing session. He slept and woke to the stench of mechanical oils still stuck pungently to his nostrils, lending an acrid taste to every early breakfast he stole into his gullet before the morning’s run. It’d fade, Shev said. And usually, the old man was right. By now, Seroth was comfortable enough to assemble a slug-gun blindfolded and then run positions firing whilst mobile. It was habit to clean and disassemble after every two hours on the outside ranges, careful to keep the bore and inner hammer mechanisms shielded from sand grit. Shev mentioned on occasion something to do with rifle ‘parrying’, but seemed content instead to keep him focused upon gunning down imaginary torso frames.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The taskmaster loosed a ragged instruction booklet from a densely packed thigh-pouch. Its front cover had been lost, torn off and discarded. Seroth noted the umpteenth measure of dog-eared passages, with smaller, fine print notes woven into the margins. Shev waived him off as he leaned to garner a closer look. There were poses drawn out in deep black and brightened cyan ink, labeled and annotated. Together, they moved up to a higher cropping of dune-sand, this one oddly flattened by what felt like stone beneath their boots. The taskmaster wore his usual desert garbs. Seroth, in his weight suit, which offered him little contest save a constant pressure across his limbs and torso. Shev held his hand for a moment’s quiet, then began.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Right,” He said. “Fighting with a bladed weapon is something of a snafu. We got books on it but as I tell ya, theory only goes so far. The pressure cooks on, you fall back on what you know and practiced. We’ll start with the sheer basics: the Guard, High Port, Whirl, and Thrust.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They faced off. Seroth was motioned to lead with his left boot and take a swift, short step, keeping his toes lateral and facing his opponent: Shev. Bent gently at the knees, he inclined his shoulders and demeanor forward, hips as level as he could manage. The shotgun was thrown forward but caught, the bayonet point fixed squarely for the soft of Shev’s belly and diaphragm. Seroth went into a quick repeat, snapping into the ‘Guard’ as briefly often as he thought necessary. The movements were somewhat static. No one stayed still in an up and up confrontation. Shev waylaid his worries that ‘manual’ and ‘practice’ would be different sorts to contend with altogether.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]From the Guard they moved to the gripping. Right hand clenched on the stock, behind the trigger guard and firmly secured. The left hand held out over the barrel, tucking the butt-stock back over the right hip. Shev’s weathered manual put an extra note of emphasis over a loosened, relaxed demeanor. Tense muscles led to fatigue, slowness – “Yadda, yadda, easier said than done when you got the fear in you. I don’t mean that jolt when you freeze up as violence approaches. When you’re in the midst of a brawl… You’ve never been in this deep of shid before. This could be it. You might die. You’re nervous and scared out of your smarts and you’re trying to remember everything you can so you don’t get wasted. And you feel stiff as timber. …That’s not easy to coax out of.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They began the basics of actual physical confrontation, beginning with the simple, elegant thrust and the follow up withdrawal. There was, as with his axe and swordsmanship, a heightened emphasis on proper footwork. Leverage, spearing strength, and overall speed were dependent on understanding the mechanics of the battle profile. Standing too far opted Seroth out of an aggressive role and placed him upon the defensive. Too far forward and he was over-extended, vulnerable to a dodging enemy to move in and counter. Shev bruised several reminders into his ribs with the under-slung clubs of his shotgun, rolling the boy over as he fell to the sand. The short-thrust and several withdrawal scenarios were covered, Rayner promising that each lesson would be repeated in quadruplicate until it swirled in his dreams. …Alongside the rest of the lessons hammered and whipped into his weathered skin.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Practical tutelage always started, for every subject, when the sparring rounds began. Shev waded in with Seroth, initiating a breathless lecture midst his demonstrations of slashing techniques, vertical and horizontal butt-strokes, mixed with his idiosyncratic flavours that made sense only to his aesthetics. Every weapon and supported techniques were laid down in eight categories: attack, block, parry, counter, disarm, throw, trip, and grapple. A thousand permutations ran from each facet. The taskmaster emphasized that there was no manual of ‘combat canon’. Attacks could morph into defensive blocks and then mounted into a counter or disarm, throwing or grappling in a follow up. No two fights ran with the sequencing. Discipline walked hand in hand with improvisation. The rifle was just as much a blunt-force weapon as a ranged slugger, as much a stabbing, gutting, slashing, tripping tool as the knife, the sword, the ‘hawk, the club.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Prior techniques honed on the Log and Comb, the Pendulum and Windmill, were utilized to extract every sort of possible advantage. Seroth was pressing himself against an opponent twice his years, who’d doubtless faced a thousand men and women, each far more talented in the killing arts himself. The boy too could be a deathly creature when the mode took him: an uncharacteristic whirlwind of rage and steel. No fight was fair. Either he or Shev would hold the advantage, each working to either take or maintain the upper-hand. Shev would lay in with clubbing tactics, seeking a grapple, trying to throw Seroth from his footing. The lad wheeled around with impeccable footwork, slashing, hacking in with false strokes, feinting before laying in with his brute strength, speed, and precision. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then one eve, fighting atop the dune with the liquid-carmine suns setting to their west, they had it out for one more sessions. Shev, wily and ever too cunning, working his bayonet in through the tightening gaps of the boy’s defenses. He scratched and cut through the weight-plates of the lads left thigh and hip, seeking to draw first blood with the edged tip and blade. Seroth refused to humour the chance of a loss. He laid over a mental scripting: ‘street kung’ – win and go home. A rifle-butt stroked in and cracked Shev’s balding pate. Then again, across his eyes, his jaw, and slapping up beneath his throat. Shev fell back, rolling to dodge a trio of stabs into the sand, coming to his feet and guarding. He ran through a fast parry and threw Seroth forward, aiming a diagonal slash across his shoulders. The boy threw his rifle-barrel down across his spine and deflected, gripping the stock-comb and swinging wide, fast. The flat of his bayonet caught and slapped Shev across the throat, gagging him for breath.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The old coot felt the rifle ripped from his hands. Seroth’s knees hammered up into his belly, folding him in. Shev fell in against a bed of soft sand and held his hands up to catch the bayonet sword before it threatened to pierce his throat. …Too late. He found the tip tickling his Adam’s apple. The boy hadn’t even begun breathing hard. Shev grinned wide. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We’re done.”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]“We’ve one last thing…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It would be a fortnight before the sand-submerged fort that housed the pair, Guen, Stenwulf and her Sayda would see a bolster of bodies. The woman was busied plying her trade through the contested borders of Mandalorian and Sith space, cutting blood for coin. Seroth held little love for either belligerents but it was difficult to gauge the make of an ‘enemy’. Did he have enemies? Did he count the Sith amongst them? Seroth was wholly unsure. The Vagrants welcomed some of their number and they proved to be studious, hard working, more oft generous with their time than some Jedi Masters the lad could name. Hate and loathe were heady, strong poisons. Seroth had never endeavored to venture out as a killer of anything more than niche-less monsters. Now… Now he felt more readied to lay his blades into hearts and spines then ever.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Was that what his mother wished? For him to lose himself, get caught up in the mindset of mercenary, cheapening life? Seroth wished dearly he’d sent word for Rosa… He needed her motes of calmed wisdom, now so than he ever thought possible. His hands would tremble, eager for hot gore spill. And every time Shev or Guen or Stenwulf entered the bottom, hollowed out chambers, he was already taking on the notion of how to swiftly hack them down. Was his youthful training so quick to abandon him? He remembered his lover… His friends and their expectations… And tried again with all his damnedest to be a companion to remain proud of. …Not an embarrassment.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Where are we headed?” He asked, accompanying Shev to the Sayda’s motor pool. They’d taken to a third floor of the hidden keep, where scents of machine oil, fuel, and grease were powerfully malodorous. Banks of desert-proofed skip-bikes and speeder cars, tarps draped across their snub-noses, waited for them. It was close to strolling into a mechanical wolves den, stared down coldly by unfeeling beasts that sat with coiled power. Shev undid the binds of one speeder and threw aside a dusty, tan tarp shawl.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Show you when we get there, boy,” Was all Shev bothered in reply. Tarp stowed, engines gunned and hot beneath the thin hood-plating, the speeder rose on polished anti-grav buffers and sped out through a narrow culvert-like entry and exit bore. Twin-sun heat began to bake across their naked throats and brows. Seroth threw over his old, worn tunic hood. Shev paused to adjust an old, partially deconstructed Tusken mask. A rebreather feed added haggard, hollow notes to his breathing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Surface navigation across the face of Tatooine’s southern reaches was a risky undertaking. Stark heat and heavy light reflected off the mica and quartz dust prevalent in every half handful of sand. An electro-magnetic field thrown up close in the overhead troposphere rendered fine-tuned ground positioning a tricky prospect. Shev’s assured handling and knowing glances kept the boy’s worries at bay. They hadn’t packed for a lengthy excursion. If the speeder failed out in the deep dunes, they had enough for three days easy water and rations. Twelve if they went into preservative fasting. Seroth kept close glances on the horizon and peripheral sand oceans. Bantha herds kept company, strolling in slow, meandering lines. These were Sand People territories. Clans and warbands that fought and dominated one another rather than bother with the paltry communities in the north.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Grew up a lil’ round here,” Shev said quietly over the speeder’s grav-hum. “…Some of it’s sure familiar.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Eventually, six hours on driving around and between narrow gullys hollowed out by wind between the mega-dunes, there came an odd sight. A scar of ragged blemishes stretched in a machine-perfect line for a straight three kilometer, a collection of giant, hazardous glass-bubbles that had blackened then burst, leaving behind razor formations. Shev clenched the control bars tightly and maneuvered them a yawning ravine run like a slit-wound through the formations center. It was a backwoods of towering, crystalline jags. Air ceased to drag across their snub hood, making every sound clatter like a rifle crack as the side-long nacelles broke off brittle black-glass boughs. Ahead, the ravine angled to ramp downward. Seroth toggled the speeder’s flood lamps. They had run into an impenetrable gloom of sooty, inky shadow.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Shev told that there was no Basic equivalent for what the Sand People named this lost slash of darkness and razor-trees. Their script conveyed in a breath history, culture, tradition, and soul where it took a few flowery sentences to come up with a rough, similar approximation. But Shev called it the Razorbleme, and said it was a site of ‘holiness’ and sanctity for the Sand People for as long as their memorial recollections and memories gave allowance for. He’d only braved the Razorbleme once, when he was barely twenty one and seeking direction to his angst-ridden prayers. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The ravine ended into a whorl of opened earth. Shev cranked the speeder to a startled break and eased its landing struts to the packed sand and roughened glass. They disembarked, torches in hand, Seroth following close as he tried to attune to the surroundings. Overhead, the cliff faces had edged in and slotted out the skies. There wasn’t a trace of wind or sound. As quiet as a graveyard and twice as cold. Shev led him the edge of the whorl, taking his lamp-pack and replacing it with a petrol soaked rag attached atop a cut of sourwood. His voice filled the immediacy hanging between them in the grave silence.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sand People don’t like this place. It’s sorta both sacred and abhorrent,” He whispered. It felt like they could be heard miles around. “The healers and the wiser chieftains say you can come here to meet the dead. But you can’t go down the hole. It’s a tunnel to the underworld, where life and death intersect. You see… things. Hear them too. They can take you if you’re not careful.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Did you go in?” Seroth asked. Shev nodded, barely.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Once. No idea if the caves end or open up anywhere. I never got that far. Came running out screaming murder. I bring those I think’re worthy to face it. Maybe they’ll solve its riddles, reach the other side. No one has so far. Last one to try was your grandmother, forty years ago. She’d been carrying Guenyvhar. Came running out just like me. Never spoke to me what she saw. …Begged I never take her girl or her lover or children or anyone down it.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It’s not a place for the sinful to weather,” Shev murmured, unable to face the sudden, flinty stare Seroth struck him with. “…Guen begged me to take her out to try. Never did. She went with your Pa, Dathan, found this place. I found out ‘cause they came in real silent, real scared one night. Said to me when I asked that they didn’t feel like real Gunns ‘lest they braved the Fears. S’what they called it. I figure if Guen wants you ready… You’ll have to brave them too. Take this.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth palmed the comm. link handed over to his keeping. With a flint and slide of rough glass, he chipped a shower of sparks and bloomed his torch into a bouquet of twisting, crackling light. “Gimme a call… If you reach the other side,” Shev said.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then the boy was gone. He took a step down into the first footholds of the yawning whorl and seemingly vanished after a handful of steps. His footfalls continued to echo with dry beats, until those too fell quiet. Shev tugged his robes closer and laid his war club down in his lap. The Razorbleme kept its empty, grinning stare trained upon the lonely old man. ‘Till all that he could sense was the tug of blood in his ears as air rushed through the combs in his lungs. Tatooine nights were long…[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]It was if he’d taken a step inside a fractal. Seroth paused, glancing back up along the ridged slope that’d carried him down by a ten meter drop. There was no sign of the entrance. In here, the walls of heat-blasted sand-glass had rippled together close like flaps of fattened skin. The consistency was disconcerting and odd against his skin. Clear as diamond crystal yet rough, caught in a canal of barabel sand-paper. The lad kept his torch high, watching for irregularities amidst the glassy walling that might trip him into a pitfall. Sound was caught in an echo circuit, spiraling forward to fade further down the singular, strangely rived tunnel. Seroth looked to his reflection in one smoothened patch of walling and saw a thousand ‘he’s’ staring back in black-light kaleidoscope. One of them began to curl up its lips in a toying smile. The boy staggered away, hand to his belt harness and hurrying to venture further in.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Shev allowed a scant handful of tools to go with the boy in his descent to where the dead and living met and comingled. They hung from the lad’s belt in leather catches: his knife and tomahawk, sharpened to split down through durasteel. Their presence did little to ease on a veneer of comfort. Seroth wondered at the fact that his taskmaster had even allowed weaponry to begin with. If this were simply a metaphorical journey, facing off with hidden fears and insecurities where the shadows grew deepest and coldest, who had need of combat gear? …What had brought gorging terror to the old man? His mother and father? Exactly what had they needed to prove and yet failed to do so? Seroth felt as if he were standing outside a Master’s study, wrought with difficult questions that could not be narrowly answered.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I can’t feel, Master.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad spun at the sound, axe and knife in hand and in a fast stance, startled. It couldn’t have been his thoughts ringing too loud in his head. There’d been a sound, a boy’s voice. His voice. …But nothing. Only the shut in ceiling and sand-glass walls that glowed with a strange, phosphorescent inner shine. …Footsteps! He turned, too late. Nothing, save a cool echo of pattering leather boots on scruffy ground. The sensation of wrongness that had been gently wringing the skin of his stomach grew. The boy drew up his torch and kept his axe gripped firmly. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Every chamber and winding corridor was like the inside of an emptied cyst. Irregular bumps, grooves, striations, augured channels, and geode facets made simple navigation underfoot a secondary trial. They caught sound and light in odd habits, reflecting and rebounding both in uncertain patterns. One moment it appeared the ceiling dipped too close as the ground rode up too high. Yet, passing through, Seroth could stand as tall as he pleased. A thought gnawed at him: had he missed something? Seroth looked back along the passage but found only a face of soot blackness walling off even the plucky glimmers of his sparking torch. But had he missed anything? A secret side passage that was the true way? A hidden alcove? Some stairway to a grand gallery, where the graves of all the Sand People imaginable laid in wreaths of preternatural mist? The boy shook his head, steeled his nerves and strode on.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]If he’d made a costly mistake, the boy was already dead.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was an hour in, by the turn of his chronowatch, when the sensation of hair-standing-on-end began to increase with exponential ferocity. Seroth had turned left into a shivering hall of glass-sand colon. One step and he nearly went in for a fall. The ground ‘neath his boots was slicked over with an oily, frosty residue. Odorous, like fruit rot, it broke and churned into a flesh-pink, gluey paste over the course of his every step. It lined the walls, the ceiling in frozen, jagged shards of blinkered, pellucid crystal formations. Seroth reached up, breaking off a piece to examine in his gloved palm. The ‘glue-frost’ briefly shimmered and began melting. Heat reactant? Maybe… The boy was certainly not an expert in any given field, specially not dealing with something that felt like liquidized and flash-frozen skin. He tried to hurry on, through the colon-corridor and into a wider set of linked caverns. The crunched formations hissed underfoot. Seroth swore one crystal melted overhead before he walked up, lashing… a tongue… over his widows peak.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The feeling of antagonism never ceased. Seroth felt the walls had relinquished their impassivity and glared at him with barely hooded hostility. Every footfall gave away… everything. He glided on surely, carefully, remembering Shev’s lessons on shadowed tactics. Hug the walls, step toe first, become as impassive as shadow itself. His torch had been abandoned. The walls kept up a consistent glow that even stretches of half-light were agreeable to navigate. His axe never left his hand. The heft of the longknife was a comfort. On came a collection of sound, slapping ahead in a tall, rectangular slit of hallway…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…Where cold water rained down into motionless pools. Clouds wafted and writhed against the irregular ceiling. Then he noticed: the water was plopping upwards. The bottomless collections of placid calcium and peat idly spat threads of side-long trailing rain. Seroth stepped through, leaping from foothold to foothold. The rain fell upwards harder now, lashing up across his pants. Miniature cracks of whip-thunder started and reaved collected banks of darkening cloud-fog. The lad wiped clinging moisture off his chin, shouldering through a cramped exit portcullis. Snatches of disconnected sound tickled grossly close by his ears. Seroth focused to shut out the directionless snippets: they sounded too close to guttural phrases and hoarse bawls he had heard shouted over the dune-heads. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The singular passage began to twist and corkscrew in, shepherding Seroth further downward. Conveniently impossible, the faceted flooring chopped into stair steps. A few were like grate, offering a brief peer into an oblivious chasm lit below by a single light source of cold, cyan light. Seroth knew he saw something there in the black. Translucent, a threadbare skeletal wisp of moving shadow. He kept up his indomitable pace when the moving shadow turned to stare back at him. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Keeping a track of time was out of the question. Seroth had glanced to check his chronometer. It read two hundred years back and four months on, blinked off then switched alight again, showcasing the year 3,459 ABY, seventh day of the Coruscanti week. He discarded the device entirely when the holofeed grew into the face of a leering Tusken Raider, breath mask morphing into a digitally salivating maw-hole of needle-fangs. The passage kept winding down, sections of randomly generated walling never seeming to repeat itself. It was abridging the dream world of the living with the frightening sleep of the ancient departed. Soon, it was only the sound of his own boot-falls that kept the boy company. Voices. Ranging from whispers just barely pressed to the edges of his hearing to clamorous snippets of argument and shouting. The words were warped, the speakers unfamiliar. Once, Seroth paused and called out…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hello!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The chatter ceased. …The lad hissed as a scratch of itching fire lanced across his cheek. And then stilled as a wailing moan shredded into a mangled scream. It lasted for a second but hung in empty cadence for what felt for too long… [/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The further ventured, the worse the glamours. One section of uneven tunnel transformed into a phantasmagoria. Eyeless, smooth-browed skulls lined the walling. They chattered, flashing needle teeth. A vibration of clattering bone rose like the dry beat of beetle wings, rustling incessantly. It jarred the tensed muscle corralling in steely bunches up the nape of his throat. A blink. And they were gone. The lad ran his palm over roughened volcanic glass, wondering how well his mental fortitude was withstanding each oncoming vision. Seroth remembered a handful of stories. Cautionary things. Ecstasy and madness driven into the brain by lances of untamed spiritual energy. Fallen men and women who tried to wrestle with the Force and cosmos by extension, to watch their perceptions of reality plummet into a screaming pit.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There came a stench of death. Seroth steadied and waited a moment at the lip of a rough-fashioned portcullis opening into a length of expanded corridor. It was sickly and not unlike the smell of melting sugar. Beneath was a further odorous scent of grave-rot. Marrow decay. The lad tied a loose tract of stoved cloth across his mouth and nose, trying to peer forward. A gloom harried his sight, casting barely lit palls of shadowed mist. He took a step forward, down and off the portcullis lip, and was rewarded with the startling snap of a radioulnar joint. Unearthed skeletons in their dozens laid in repose, piled haphazardly and bleached white as snow. Yet, each was eyeless, fleshless face was stuck staring upwards in the same spot. Seroth turned to follow their gazes, where their tendon-less forearms raised to grasp. …Nothing. A broken section of rippling, porous rock backlit by crystal phosphor. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth looked back, and found himself alone. Each skeleton, human and… otherwise… had been replaced with orderly grave rows. A meandering pathway, well worn under leather bound soles, wove in hazard between lightless trenches. Brassy, shallow bowled cups stuck atop azure and topaz stems laid beside each grave-header. They smoked burning sagebrush and white sticks of slow-smoking incense. By the light of the ambient crystalline walls, the boy could make out portions of faded names. Kaelen. Xander. Wilmina. Anderzej. Jacques. Abnett. Cryssa. Lizbeth. Ola. Each bearing ‘Gunn’ as a shared surname. Seroth blinked and tried to gingerly step about each hollowed interment. He dared to glance down. Saturnine faces caught in endless frowns stared up from the cloth of moth-eaten burial dresses.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One grave was curiously empty. Seroth paused his tepid hike and, keeping his off-hand blade readied, peered down the trench a little closer. It was curiously inclined, ending with a flat bed of sweat and grime dirtied black cotton. Empty clothes, bearing an uncanny resemblance to his usual wild-wearied dress, were laid out in immaculate display. Washed. Pressed. Laced with violet rose petals and a small, iron plaque. A three-masted Man O’ War had been formed in metal relief and was plying through empty sky. Seroth smiled gently at the allusion to voyaging, taking the last, great journey to discover what lay beyond the silver veil. His smile waned as he glanced aside to the tombstone. Its face was bare and smooth, constructed of marble veined with crimson skeins. It impressed an image of bleeding rock, weeping vitae that had become stuck and crystallized. The lad started as the header began to shiver, knocking loose dirt down into the empty trench. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]An intangible quill appeared from nowhere. The lad froze, frightened and mesmerized, and watched it begin to script the bare stone. S. E. Y. D. O. N.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon… Seydon Gunn. Seroth’s birth-name from his mother. Before he could collect his steeled wits, a hand lacking in skin but caked in rotten ligaments and wriggling horn-beetles clenched over his throat. Seroth whirled and hacked, catching the bone with his tomahawk and snapping the forearm off. A man had risen from his neighboring plot. He bore only a daring assemblage of facial features, worn taut and stiff by time spent in an airless crypt. Teeth clacked down as a wick of tongue slithered behind. The man spoke, uttering a guttural collection of phonetic snarls that twisted over his jaw. Seroth had only ever heard that speech from the evening wails of passing Sand People clans. Wide, grey eyes snapped to the man’s grave header: Dathan Gunn.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His father.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Nothing could have caught up to his sprinting backside. Seroth rose and dashed, carried by pulses of energy throbbing down into his calves. Too much! Too much and too little! He ran on deeper, carried by a blind determination to see this awful episode of hell and ghosts through. On, through passages constructed of nothing but solid mist, up stairs carved from portions of a giant, writhing spine. As if sensing the bolt of haggard will emanating from the lad’s soul, apparitions began to claw from the walls. Rosa in a bridle shawl, screaming in the Sand tongue, slashing at Seroth’s ducking face. Jaxton, staring grimly through a snarl bound up in deathly rictus. Ben, doleful and aghast, raising a hand in solemn warning. Darron, steely and vengeful, pointed down condemnation. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]On came a scent of sulphur. Heatless fire crawled up from partings in the black glass flooring. It licked, dancing up to the walls and slinking with convulsing wriggles onto the ceiling. What glamours that did step out incorporeally from smoky, thin air were drenched head to toe in flame. They were vague dolls, milling arms wracked with cosmic agony. Toothless, gum-less maws opened and spat ectoplasmic balls. One landed and dissipated over the cross of Seroth’s collarbone. It was enough to pause and upset his balance, tripping over into a puddle of lit waters. His reflection was framed against a backdrop of iron, thorny trees and storming, overcast skies. Thousands upon then thousands clans of the Tatooine deserts watched from behind black goggle eye-stalks and tinted visors. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]From their midst, parting a pair of deep desert raiders, came his father. Striding in soot-washed clothes, axe and knife in hand. …But his face badly burned, missing peels of flesh and muscle, his skull cracked open. Dathan Gunn parted his scalded lips and started to speak.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Son…” He said. “I’m broken. Look what they did. Look what they did to me. Come on… Come see what you can, boy.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The apparitions faded. When the lad came to, he shivered and rose from his cheek-down prone against a shallow cup of icy, bracken water. Warmth was pooling back into his limbs, despite his chest’s constriction. Shev Rayner, gods damn his caked over soul, hadn’t been wrong. With a more empathetic Sensitive he may have been able to tell the exact make of this strange, godless passage of unending hallucinations. Was it a nexus? Where Force energy poured out slowly from a wound in reality? Or had the collective will of the Sand People become stuck to this representation of striating physical pain? Seroth couldn’t tell. And never would. But yet ahead laid a lingering light, and the scent of fresher air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…And a tumult of raised voices. [/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Ahead, the way was misted. Seroth climbed hand over foot up a steepening incline that offered little gripping. He snarled, punching fingertips through weakened patches of thinning rock. A short climb wouldn’t be what did him in. Days spent humping too many kilos across his spine and chest, hands near blistering with blood as he pressed steel and iron weights. All for naught if he couldn’t force a solution across something nature had intended impassable. Short minutes swelled to long hours. It couldn’t have been a truly lengthy span of time. The clutch of icy dew and wafting fog, his mind tried and sore from too many inexplicable horrors, lent a cloak of lead weight to even his eyelashes. The cone of off-blue light kept up its glimmer. The accompanying voices too. A brisk wind began to howl down the shoot of rock, that grew into a gale of ash and mica-salt. Seroth felt a strange, tingling sensation of metallic tastes across his mouth.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]With a final muster, he breached the ascent lip and crawled onto a flat plain of ash. The cave had disappeared into an arching vision of dirty grey skies bleached by the pale of a sickly, distant sun. He’d risen into the midst of a holocaust sand storm, clouds of glittering flechette shards whizzing round in a constant, angered hum. Dead pine-balls trees, stuck through like twisted boarcupines, stood at a nil sway against the wind’s ferocity. An old sign painted in lead green, scripted in aurebesh, clattered and finally snapped free from a rusted screw. Seroth ducked beneath when the sign caught in a whirl of rotating air, slicing down overhead. Ahead in squalor sat sectioned off high, anti-rad tents glowing with lamp light. Seroth froze. Either his exhausted mind had fallen prey to its own memories. …Or he was caught up in a necessary vision.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Figures dressed in radiation gowns and closed helmets emerged. Ten, with an eleventh following holding tight to a smaller figure’s hand. Seroth strode in closer, fighting the suction of greasy sand preying at his heels. Faces obscured, the eleven figures rounded and were gesturing with sullen motion. The child in a too large anti-rad gown stood off to the side, holding himself and shivering. Heightened emotions were palpable. As were the echoed voices shouting through opened helm-mics.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“He can’t be left here!” Cried one voice, male and deeply baritone.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh and he can come along with us? There’s no room for children in this next leg, Nat, we can’t keep affording to play nurse with the brat!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“He cannot be left here!” The man insisted, nearly striking the third figure to his right off their feet. “Gods damn the lot of you, I’ll sit and wait here myself!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Wait for what, capture? They won’t exclude you from a truth serum regime, Nat. If they learn even a mote of what’s locked up in that skull, our keep is already burned and the Sayda dead. If not completely scattered. We don’t want that!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“But apparently you wanted coin! Enough to bust the bank at Denon! Stupid enough idea, but one you all managed to convince me of! Now my son has to take a fall for your idiocy!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The packed arguers slowly, surely, began to span out into a rough semi-circle. Hands were laid across utility belts weighed rife with kit and axe. Some were uneasily stroking their palms across holstered pistols, glancing side to side. ‘Nat’ was obstinate. With his posture, he kept the child behind him shielded from view. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shid ‘appens, Nat,” Said one familiar voice. “Y’can’t be goin’ in to blame the lot o’ us fer it. Juss’ leave the lad. He’ll find sum quarter. Republic’s a lil’ merciful like tha’ with any kits they recover. Mayhap won day, we’ll grab ‘im back. Or you’ll maek anodder, same diff.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“If he opens his mouth again,” ‘Nat’ said to a figure closest to him. “I’m gutting him where he stands.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The familiar speaker bridled, wrenching a hand down over a vibro longsword.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And you’re all forgetting something. You came into this outfit at my selection, my leading. The Sayda are my inheritance! What, did you forget? Is your greed all you feel answerable to you now? I shouldn’t have to be explaining this, not to any of you!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It’s your mistake he was brought along at all,” Said another.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes,” Nat spat with acid sarcasm. “Because Mos Eisley’s a damned fine place to leave a five year old!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Nat. Be reasonable,” Another figure closed in and laid a steady hand over his trembling shoulder. “He’s only a child. You think the Republic so heartless they’ll just throw him to the lions? He’ll survive. He’ll live. And then we can take him back.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Honestly, I didn’t think you so vapid,” Nat grunted. “And when would that be, hmmmn? A year, six years, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Nat…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“When!?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It is never too late to begin anew.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Feth you. Feth you and your coin and your bastard insubordination and everything you ever gave me! Get the hell out of my sight! As if we can just replace a child! He is my son, Gods-damnit!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The man with a familiar accent glanced to a wrist-comp strapped across the sleeving of his arm. “…They’re coming. Fast.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Nat!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He shook his helmet, drew his tomahawk and aimed with a heavy pistol clenched tight in his off-hand. “Over my corpse. And any of yours. You wanna leave, g’won. But the boy needs me, needs us. That is the end all, be all.”[/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]The murderers faded into pillars of salt, wind shattering them into clouds of wafting white sheets. They fled up into the eye of dirty carmine; the glazed storm center throbbing with sub-sonic howls. Seroth chugged through the sopping ash and earth, coming to his father’s breathless corpse. Its illusion offered a temporary, firm tactile sensation, as he lifted the almost weightless body to his lap. He’d been told his parents fell on Tund. Dead, rad suits ripped open from within, suicides that denied the long reach of Republic authority. Who had lied to him? Why? He looked to the vision of his boyhood, staring wide as he tried to howl over the wind-shriek.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Why!? Why didn’t you do something!?” He roared at himself. The little boy shook his head and sat down atop a sand pile, crying over the helm mic. His wampa doll fell from his rubbery grip. It struck the earth, dissipated, leaving just a pile of ashen fibers.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Daddy!”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Shev found him. Through a day and two nights, he kept up a dutiful guard by the yawning hell-hole. He refused to acknowledge any phenomena: not the deep groans of strange, mechanical sound emanating from behind the rock, nor the flickering glimmers of half-formed spirits keening through the glass and rock branches. Rancor aid and smelling, yellow-paged combat manuals made sure his attentions kept from straying into worry and paranoia. The boy was trained in body; strong, so damned strong, hands quicker than lightning and eyes grey as sharp flint. But he had made little accounting for his heart and soul. Were both steeled? Could he stand up to what the Fears had to rake him through? Shev hadn’t been waxing poetic when he told the Fears suffered no one sinful. If the boy was compromised in conscience…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The comm. link sounded. Not an audio message, but a strained clatter of beeps and electronic flakes of white noise. Shev was fast into his borrowed speeder, attuning the instrumentation to track back along the comm. feed. He was gone. And for as long as he was alive, swore never to return to the deep wound that time and ghosts had slashed into Tatooine’s sands. Up. Up and out through groves of petrified rock formations, split through with volcanic glass and patches of obsidian. Out into the glare of baking morning suns. The sands were already fast simmering. Moisture caught between the microscopic grain-pores was already evaporating into grand fields of brief, flickering fogs. Shev cut a swathe through, tacking north than west. Instrumentation told that the reciprocating signal was emanating from somewhere sixty kilometers past a low field of hinterland sand rolls.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A man was kneeling midst a hollowed pit of sandstone. His calloused hands held a rock across his knees, an opened comm. bleating incessantly. Shev closed in, speeder kicking a high trail of sandy backwash. It broke into a fast, cutting turn, clouding to a stop as the Taskmaster killed the ignition. He propped his aging frame over the door-catch and sped in. There was a low lip of outcropped stone that rose out of a partially collapsed dune. …The exit from the cavern system. The lad scaled it! Beaten the Fears! So he hoped. Shev fell to all-fours and scurried to his student’s flank. Seroth had placed aside his axe and knife over a swept slate of chipped clay. Grey eyes, hollow and wet, looked off into nothing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Boy?” Shev hesitantly called.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Light flashed into Seroth’s gaze. He started, sucking in air through his nose, turning over to find Shev little more than a meter away. “…Sir?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You all with me?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He nodded. “I am here. Though I am amazed.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Amazed at what?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth sighed, shaking his head, scratching crusted sweat off his brow and cheek. Shev nodded absently and stole in closer, throwing a shawl across the boy’s sun-burnt shoulders and skull. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s… The Fears aren’t kind. No two visions are the same for whoever tries to brave them. …Did you see anythin’?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Yes.” The boy nodded. “But I do not know the truth of it. I saw other things as well. They could only have been a hallucination.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Mayhap, mayhap not,” Shev shrugged. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…What now?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We go home and go back to the exercises. What else is there?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Roughened palms clamped onto Seroth’s forearm and dragged him up off his sanded haunches. The boy nodded, flexing the slicks of muscular steel roiling beneath his tanned flesh. Together, mounting into the seats, the speeder rose with a kick of crescendo engine-roars. They departed back towards the east, tacking north through a more languid set of vales worn down through the mega-dunes. These were the Sand People trails; single formation lines, with bantha beasts-of-burden shepherded along slicks of footsteps lightly dug against the ground. For a short half day, neither student or taskmaster gave up much for conversation. Seroth was distracted, unnerved by the sheer veracity of what the caves had shown him. Shev was with worry, gnawing on a chewed lip. Guen would be home… And she would take her boy away.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They swooped in on the long evening dusk. Rolls of violet sandstorm clouds rose off to the south, pained with strokes of hot magenta and cool, bruised reds. The speeder rose up on a steep ascent, up and up to a slit-mouth in the rock face that gave way to carved out maintenance bays. There was still a faint, throaty echo of their engine-sound when Shev released the ignition press. But little else. The nameless fastness was predictably quiet. Seroth and Shev paced towards the exit hallway, bore out and down from some long lost toothed-auger. Down, through the living quarters and muster points, between hoarding chambers, the weapon smithies, bathing chambers and sophisticated communication centers. To the primitive gymnasia, stinking of putrid physical odour and blood excretion. Where the Sayda tempered their little known legends into fighting biomechanical machines.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth took up the sword and longknife, settling into a brief assault drill with an invisible opponent. Shev said nothing of any instruction for it: the boy went about it from his own gumption. But… There was a noticeable tension in his motion. The lad had adopted Shev’s ‘brawler’ doctrines, a simultaneous sear of blurring quickness and ferocious physicality. But he seemed coiled, tensing like an adder. Eventually, an hour’s worth of drilling under his belt, Seroth gave a cry and loosed out his weapon-hand. The sword sailed true as a hurled lance, sticking in almost to the crossguard after its impact with the far wall.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“How did he die?” Seroth said pointedly to Shev.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Don’t know what you mean,” The taskmaster lied.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ice knotted swiftly into a twisted ball in the old man’s gullet as the lad’s taller shadow fell across his shoulders. He turned, glanced off, unable to take the weight of a hard, flinty stare. “…What?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“How did he die?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I don’t know.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You are lying, teacher.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So what if I am?” Shev spat in sudden venom. “I don’t know who ‘he’ is!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“My father.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh spast me…” Shev groaned. “…What did the Fears show you?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“My father, alone against ten masked men and women. One of them stepped forward and ended him, in betrayal. His life was spattered across the face plate of a little boy who was watching. Me. And then they dissipated and left the boy alone to die.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aww shid…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Stenwulf was there.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“’Course he was, the cagey feth,” Shev grimaced. “Every time there’s something to upset the Sayda, he’s hangin’ around. Was he the one who…??”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No. It was someone else. A man, I think.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You didn’t see?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I could not… They wore rad-suits and plate-helms. Everything was either hidden or obscured. Helmet speakers warped their speech. The Fears would only grant me so much to know.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Alright…” Shev sighed, running a palm over his greasy, spiked hairline. “Given that you’ve been a good sport? …Might be able to fill in a few blanks.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Please…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Now listen close, ‘cause this discussion is officially ‘not happening’. Your mother forbade it. …Goes like this. After you were born, we Sayda were running on hard times. Mercenary work was hard to come by. It wasn’t anything new, we’ve weathered it before. S’not hard. But we didn’t have Sten in the crew then either. Fether even when was just a runt. He goes to your Ma and Pa and cajoles them into his idea. ‘Stead of waiting for the credits to come to them, they’d be more proactive. Bigger the better. ‘Nat hated the notion, but your Ma was thinking otherwise. She brought Dathan ‘round and the score was on.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Kept it real pocketed. Eleven man crew, rest of the Sayda were uninvolved. Best of what our little battle-clan had to offer, and swayed by Stenwulf’s greed. They go to Denon, raided the holdings of a CEC exec. Just like that, eight billion in untraceable credits siphoned off, rerouted to hidden accounts. Then they ran. CEC appealed to the Senate for intervention, and so the hunt went on. For a time, we couldn’t even lay low on Tatooine. But we had cash, Sten argued, and it’d be enough to survive. …That was around the same time rumours started swirling ‘bout him and your Mother. Never found any truth to it, but it liked to persist. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So the Republic closes in an inch nearer every day. Eventually, the Eleven were run to ground on Tund. You know better what happened there than I do, but Dathan was dead, son lost, and Guen inconsolable. The Eleven became Ten, then just Eight. Guen exiled them from the Clan. They disappeared, and took their loot with ‘em. Stenwulf hung around. For nothing better than keeping things ‘interesting’, he said. Tried talkin’ to Guen about it but she’s refused any mention for… Hell, sixteen, seventeen years on now. …And now you’re saying you saw what fell over your father.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Someone came up to him. Someone he trusted. And they gunned him down,” Seroth murmured. Shev saw his jaw, set in a tight crag, eyes gently hooded with pained, hard thoughts. “…They took him away from me for the sake of money.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Probably more complicated than that,” Shev said softly. “But that’s my side of things. …G’won, get to bed now. Guen’ll be here soon. She’ll have you starting real work then.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Shev?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The coot turned, collecting discarded training sabers off the ground. “Yeah?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…I will want their names one day.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Shev froze. The notion of his student, young Seroth with his quiet stare, lowly smile, and intense dedication, speaking in tones of vengeance… It dared a fright in the old man’s chest, ‘till it threatened constriction. He turned to look but the boy had taken his leave. He was alone in the gymnasia hall, banked with strips of glow-lamp light. Was it in his student’s right, to know? Surely. …But vengeance led a person down lightless corridors and unknowable pathways. And he knew for a grim fact that the child wrestled with the morals of killing. Shev Rayner sighed, threw the collected tools held across his chest back down across the training mats, and slunk away to drown himself in a high bottle of Rancor Aid.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Guenyvhar Gunn, Stenwulf, and their hardened entourage of virtually expressionless fighters arrived home at midday, four days on. Shev had taken to waking the boy an hour earlier than his norm. The halls were frigid. Stone underfoot was as icy as frosted durasteel. The old coot explained that the fortress was more or less carved out to partially mimic a grand wind-watch. Some chambers heretofore unmentioned and unseen, the pantries and freezers, didn’t operate through electric turbines or generators for power. The daily winds shrieked down narrow culverts, rivulets, and shallow, thin slots. Round and round in a patterned circlet. The Sayda could render water into ice and snow, so long as insulation was kept up. The rest of the halls meandered in such a fashion to encourage a cool down over night. The moderate temperatures would linger a little longer come the mornings.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth dressed. Not in his workout finery. Just his old, worn red trail tunic and black slacks, a hand-me-down harness belt, poked through gloves, half-calve boots, and a tattered duster-cloak. They came down to the gymnasia. Strolled from chamber to chamber, then down to where the hollowed portcullis opened to sun-less night. There would be no Pole-Run. Instead, the lad set his musty, salt-crusted weight-suit down into a depression dug out from the sand. Sticks of flint-bark lined the edging like a pyre. It was ritualistic in its way. Shev handed the boy a small, tin lighter. Nodding, kneeling down in the grit, Seroth took a moment for soft thought and then depressed the activator plate. The lighter burned a tiny flame. Enough for the flint-bark to catch. Up it went and took the weight-suit with it. Formed rubber and layers of barely breathable leather and sweat catches melted down to warped slag. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“She’ll be here past noon,” Shev murmured suddenly. He looked up. Licks of orange and burnt umber coloured his leathery complexion. “Then she’ll take you and off y’all will go.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You are not coming with me?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Can’t. Guen needs someone always lookin’ after base, and no one’s up for it. ‘Sides, I ain’t got the taste for what she commits anymore.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What do you mean?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Never forget, kid,” Shev said, reverting to his older habit of brusque distance. “What your mom does, she does out of need for coin. It’s all she’s had for consolation these years, since she lost you. …Maybe you can steer her back, maybe not. But be. On. Your. Guard. Remember everything I’ve taught you.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes, sir.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Let’s go topside. Oh,” He paused and peeked over his flank. “And don’t trust Sten.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I never have.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A blunt shuttle looking like a piece of discarded relic hurtled down from the sun’s glare later past lunch. There was little fanfare, vessel lurching with practiced, roughened ease into a set of jangling overhead clamps. The shuttle, nicknamed ‘Blue Squall’ was a lengthened piece of sharpened durasteel fitted with breezy nacelles and folded solar-sails. It juddered under the clamping teeth-grips, settling. Whistling engine whines tuned down to a hoarse roaring spin of clocking out systems. The Squall was being left to rest, a belly ramp opening and sliding down to bang unceremoniously against the decking. Down came the Sayda, in their dirty white shirts and brown slacks, black sashes adorned with closed-distance weaponry. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]At their fore came Guenyvhar, and Stenwulf sauntering up and disrobing his ragged cloak. They eyed the boy now and his teacher. Seroth was indeed a sight different. Before, he had been more lean, wiry, high on tall legs and a compacted frame. Now he sported a touch more burliness. Still lean, but dense, fitted now with tightened packs of muscle that told of increased musculature, strength, stamina, and a widened degree of dexterity. Guen decided to test it post haste. Her hand flicked, toyed with a throwing dagger and spinning it high and idly, throwing it down with keening accuracy. Her son caught it with deceptive sureness, motion akin to water laced with charged lightning. He spun the grip and shot his forearm down, thudding the steel in the plating ‘twixt his mother’s ankles. Guen raised an eye.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shev?” She called to her taskmaster.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“He’s been through the weights and the runs, climbing, falling, tumbling. He can press a thousand pounds and make the twenty meter climb in under five seconds. He’s been given my lessons in the knife, the tomahawk, the sword, war club, and bayonet. He can run, punch, hack and chop. The lad can climb, hide, all but fly if he’s got the momentum. I wager he can outfight any of the lot of you.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Doubt it,” Stenwulf chuckled and patted his favoured vibro broadsword. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Coulda taken you, Stenny, even without the hell I’ve run him through,” Shev said, lashing spittle down at the man’s worn boots.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Wha’s so special, aye?” Stenwulf spat back, strolling to regard the silent boy. “So he’s taken ah few o’ wha’ever licks ya head to mete out. S’what? Rest of us ‘ave.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Guen, dear?” Shev looked to his commander. “If he doesn’t seriously shut up, I will wear his scalp for a hat in fifteen seconds.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Enough,” Guen said. She hadn’t any need to raise her voice. The motor-pool quieted. A blade of a woman, Guenyvhar took a step and regarding her kin. They were a strange mirror, mother and son. An exact replica of build for build, save for the heft of her proud, tanned bust and capped, shorter hair. Green eyes for grey, woman for a man. Stenwulf and Shev wondered how they ever managed doubts of their genetic lineage. One glove reached and touched to the boy’s cheek, turning his expression side to side. “The difference is, Sten, is that this lad is my son. If I can whoop you broken with a hand tied by my ankle, how much less d’you think he can inflict?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That’s sorely fethin’ untried, ma’arm,” Sten muttered.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes. But he’s my blood and Dathan’s. The talent is there. And you’re forgetting. Shev’s taught him to fight like a mortal. But he can lay in like only Jedi can. That is supremely interesting…” She murmured. “…You’re a little better now, boy.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Thank you,” Seroth said simply.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“But Sten’s right. You’ve not been tested in ways that I’ve seen,” She said. “You’re not Sayda ‘till I say so. Just an honourary passenger, if and when I bring you along. If I do, I have strictures.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What are your terms?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The woman raised a thick eyebrow. “Just like that?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes.” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…You’ll do as I say. To the end and to the letter. My instructions will not be disobeyed or questioned.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Because you know better.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“He always like that?” Guen looked to Shev. The old coot shrugged but nodded and stared off into the ceiling. Stenwulf simply laid on an ill-pleased expression and kept his cool glances on the lad. “Yes. Because I know better. Get your rest, child. We’ll see how much mettle you have yet.”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Rachuck Sector – Commenor Sub-Sector – Commenor[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]16:45:12 – Anteluma City – Padna District[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Anteluma, on Commenor, bathed in the glow of a thousand overhead vessel impulse-drives, was the hub for all major sporting activities within the Sector. The art and spirit of celebrated competition was the grandest facet of day to day life. There wasn’t an hour passed when some major tournament event wasn’t being conducted in one of the many fifty enclosed arenas. Revenue was generated from fan patronage, ten thousand throngs of packed bodies squealed tight to watch as Olympiads brawled, raced, and outplayed one another. Grav-ball was an enamored fan favourite. Seroth remembered @[member="Jaxton Ravos"] recounting his exploits in the Cryss-Hall Memorial, playing the Serenno Vipers in a close game for the Jaderhine Cup. Suffice to say, it had the Zeltron’s name engraved to the ornate copper plaque. Cryss-Hall rose in a great, globed monolith of polished white-stone and chrome-steel supports that stuck out like odd quills. The boy stood against one such girder, shadowed from a warm, late afternoon sun.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Padna District was a five hundred meter ring of massed bazaar and merchandise stalls, surrounding Cryss-Hall. Shade was effected by titan curtains of red-tarp stretched taut as hammock skeins, strung high over the streets and clogged avenues. Every few years, the tarps required replacing. Something close to four tons of scale-bird excrement piled and caked over the topside swells. Chit-Sails, the players called them. And today, outside the Hall as joust-bikes fought and slammed through derby obstacles, Padna District was busy. A solid wall of massed bodies jostled for line space. Seroth couldn’t begin to piece together just who was who precisely. Hundreds of differing species, humanoid and otherwise, swayed with almost hypnotic rhythm. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A woman stepped close beside the lad in the stanchion-shade . Guenyvhar. She pulled back a short running hood and teased her sweat-slicked hair. “Report.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Five players, three men and two women, came through this way,” The lad gestured slightly. “They went into that crowd, there. I do not believe they have left. I see their faces. They are loitering. I believe they know they are compromised.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Damn it,” Guen murmured. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Sayda had been contracted out by Commenor’s PSS to manage a difficult scenario. With a constant influx of starship traffic, the PSS anticipated that smuggler dens and potential pirate activities would begin to surface in civilian reports. The extent of their operations was difficult to fathom, given their resources were already stretched thin. Sports in Anteluma was a source of pride, contention, and pig-headedness. Ferocious rivalries often stoked opposing crowds during games to riot in the aftermaths. Police crack downs were not unheard, swarming to stem the tide of property destruction, assault, and other more heinous acts when emotion ran high. And so Anteluma was something of a safer den for pirates and their ilk to peruse. This operation that Guen had underway was simply one in a long, long string of previous stings.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Padna was a noted hotspot. Pirates gilded in sporting fineries were unafraid to brandish open weapons. A dozen stall operators reported being shake downs; two-faced protection rackets were rooting into the business community. Faced with violence and unable to enact their own counter-measures, Padna appealed to the authorities. Who then appealed to discrete channels to contact Miss Gunn. So Seroth had taken up an easy patrol of one sliced portion of the bazaar ring, instructed to observe, shop, purchase, but make no ulterior moves against any noted targets. It’d been difficult to oblige. Seroth stayed awake guilty for a night and day, remembering a man forced to watch his son get his arms broken when the father refused to pay out a demanded stipend. Now, the letches were out again, staking down their chosen territory. Seroth nodded when there was the shine of a bright, polished scabbard glinting midst the crowd.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“There is one.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“He’s gotta be keeping company close,” Guen muttered. “…And he’s tooled with a gun. Damn it. Alright. Listen close. You keep here to this vantage point and watch for the rooftop up there. When you see a blue flag wave, get into the crowd and spook up those skavs. Disable one of them, get the other four to run. Play this true the way I have us figured, boy, and this den is shut down before the half-hour’s out.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I do not see any speeder traffic,” Seroth noted. “They arrived on foot. Their hideaway must be close.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Good boy,” Guen nodded in slight approval. “When they get scared up, you’ll be closest. Give chase as hard as you can and run them to ground. Me and Shev will be flanking in case of any stragglers. You’ll have support on your heels as soon as the flag raises. Boy? Don’t pussyfoot around this.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A slight code-of-tongue between mother and son for the boy not to get himself killed. Guen disappeared. She wrapped her hood up over her brow and hid her eyes behind the red-trimmed brim. A single turn behind the stanchion and she ceased to utter even a solitary breath. Gone as moonlight at dawn, swiftly taking to the darkened alleyways that were littered with meters high piles of merchandise refuse. Seroth kept his attentions seemingly busied as he pulled out a year’s almanac from his shoulder rucksack. He flew through player statistics, match scores and notable stories. None of which held much meaning, save for a fleeting mention of Corellia, Jaxton Ravos, the Jaderhine Cup, and a slather of controversy.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The blue flag fluttered high.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth stoved the book, crossing a fifteen meter gap before he was forced to part through the wall of packed backsides. One of the Sayda operatives at briefing warned that the worst dangers would come when caught up in the frenzied crowds bustling for line privileges. The boy’s peripherals swarmed with unkempt motion. Faces and descriptions blurred together into a haze of sensation. All he had for defense was a vibro-longknife stowed over his stomach beneath a worn jacket. Anything more apparent would give the Sayda away entirely. Guen ran the operation with an old-fashioned sense of bare resources. No communicators, no heavy arms, armour, or kit. She likened them to slipping in like a glass dagger through oil: undetectable. Seroth was pressing to pantomime interest in a collection of player bobble-heads when he saw it.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was a reflection. A tall case of polished plastic shimmered with a tall figure wading in behind him. A long, polished scabbard that glinted with organic luster. Darkened skin, bald with a single row of dyed curls, tattooed over his bare chest with barely discernible ink. One lip was rowed with golden rings. An ear pierced high with a diamond stud. And hard, tired brown eyes that looked ahead at something only he could perceive. A score of eyes watched the coming confrontation. The pirate stepped in beside Seroth and gave his shoulder a rough palm-shunt. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Move it,” He growled, surly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Wordlessly, the boy regarded the taller human. The pirate looked up from his wares inspection and scrutinized the boy. He puffed his chest, beating over his pecks, posturing with threat. “What? You want some? You want this? Get the feth outta my face, I got a cred to spend. Little fethin’ fool.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He was taken apart in a blink. Seroth ducked and smashed his knee with a crossing heel-sweep. His longknife flashed and severed the scabbard belt clean from the man’s waist. A jack-hammer blitz of crunching stomach blows bruised the foe’s belly, broke three ribs and cracked his sternum wide. Seroth made sure he’d stayed permanently felled, hand clenched round his knife-handle as he drove his knuckles twixt the goon’s eyes. Skin ruptured in a hot, pink mist, the pirate tumbling back a hard three meters, unconscious. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Break!” Someone shouted. Bodies began to hurry up the avenue, crushing through shoppers and fans alike. An eagle cry sounded. The Sayda took up the chase, following swift on Seroth’s beating heels as he maneuvered with blithe nimbleness, sprinting up a stack of staggered boxing to race high on the solid-mesh awnings of the four score stalls lining the roadway. As Guen had predicted. By late evening, the den would be rousted and the fighting clan doled out their second pay increment. [/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The pirates were running with practiced rehearsal fluency. Where a cut right down a steep back alley may have bottled them but sent them speeding quick onto a busied thoroughfare, they went left, up a portion of walling and to the roofs. They could be sighted from at least a kilometer away with the right vantage. If Guen had time to pick apart their escape route, gunners would have been waiting behind stacked laundry piles and blocks of old, disused crating that formed somewhat effective heat-shields. Seroth visualized the alternative, close on the pirates’ heals by a five meter span. Dark shapes popping up from behind cover at the roof edging. Long-rifles clapped to shoulders, bucking with shot. One. Two. Three. Three fifths of the flying runners downed by blast-fire that could burn and blow open their torsos. One of them, a thin man with a round face, looked back over his shoulder and loosed a panicked cry. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A second pirate loosed a heavy blaster from its hip catch and leaned out her arm. Wild shots whizzed and scrammed lightning-hot past the boy’s ears. She couldn’t draw a bead. Her hurried steps, forced to keep a constant eye on just where she was running. And the boy was a shiver of motion. Feinting a right jog, coming hard on their left flank, legs a hard beating blur. Shots burned and spat into the terracotta roofing beneath his footing, over his hunched shoulders into the plaster walls of second or third floor terraces. Seroth dove forward and tumbled into a somersault. His toes caught into the drainage at the end of his roof, propelling him forward and high into the air. The pirate smirked. It was a fifteen meter span from his drainage-spit to the next leg of flat roofing. The chasing idiot would fall to a splat below. …Seroth’s momentum didn’t cease. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Mouths agape, the pirates paused momentarily. The youth was carried forward with a spurt of speed and wind that made him seem to fly. His toes fell onto the waiting roofing below and within a blink, he’d crossed nine of the fifteen meters that kept a chased buffer between he and the pirate runners. Squawking, they picked up their run and tried to put further distance between themselves and their implacable pursuer.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Behind ran Guen and at her side Stenwulf, great legs pounding under the thrust of his exo-skeletal aids. With them was the Sayda contingent, roughly two dozen fighters sprinting close in behind their lead. Time and again, Guen tried shouting for her son to slow and let the bulk of the clan catch up. But air drag and distance stifled her speech. Seroth was a sliver of dark colour that ran with preternatural speed. She realized he could have overtaken the fleeing raiders, but discipline stayed his ambition. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The pirates were run to ground like a den of worried foxes, pushed at their dogged heels by black-sash wolves. Ahead loomed a once stately manor that had fallen into somewhat disrepair. It was the once probable estate of a has-been player. Anteluma was host to a growing contingent of the once-famed and flash-in-the-pan idols that had spent fast, lived hard, and left in debt palaces in their wake. The pirates had adopted this former bastion of extravagance and converted it into a smuggling hold. Guards, for the patrollers on the upper balcony’s and front lawn couldn’t be mistaken for anything else, started when they discovered the approaching chasers.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A verbal alarm was sounded, then an actual klaxon. Seroth, at the fore, was singled out for counter-raiding measures: repeater rifles and disruptor guns. Terracotta and cheap building plaster-ferrocrete exploded in washing gouts around his feet. He slid out his longknife, thumbing the activator pad beneath his palm. A vibro-sheen of bright gold-yellow filmed over the polished durasteel blade. Unable to halt his speed or arrest momentum, the boy drew on Shev’s lessons and moved. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He jarred right, leaping a nine meter street chasm, catching his toes to the opposite roof and making a harried beeline for the manor grounds. Cones of repeater fire forced him to drop. He fell with intention on a second leap, landing on an iron-railed balcony and racing through the apartment hab it was attached to. A pair of undressed Trandoshans looked up with a yell from their bedding and drew up covers across their nudity. The boy paid them no heed, turned left into their living room and made an arrow-dive straight through a tall window and its framing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Out through the window, straight as a lance… Over and over… And down onto the decked perimeter walling that spanned the pirate manor grounds in a rough oval. A guard came up to him, having waited behind a sheet of shield-coated metal that had been hastily erected for cover. Seroth deflected his rifle butt hit, taking his momentum and shoving him over his hip onto the grated decking. The boy’s falling elbow clocked his skull pate, rendering him harshly nonsensical. Spits of disruptor fire chewed into the plasteel railing. The manor grounds were filling with outpours of armed raiders. Seroth stole an electro-truncheon from his dazed victim and leapt, falling like a killing eagle onto a pair of hapless marauders. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Over the guard-wall came Guenyvhar, war cry loosing from her thrumming lips, vibro-tomahawk and dagger in hand. The gates, led to by bricked soft-stone pathways, disintegrated in a hail of grenade fire. Stenwulf came striding through, firing languidly off his hip with a cycling heavy-pistol. Over his shoulder gleamed his prized longsword, swinging down and catching an approaching pirate defender through their sternum and ribs. Seroth laid in with truncheon and longknife, whacking aside one defender, felling a second with a sure stab that pierced their diaphragm and laid them out. The rest of the Sayda came in as they always did: silent, weapons gleaming, breathing through their nostrils as they cut down into the packed pirate brawlers.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seydon!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth slashed open the armoured belly of one barabel, catching their bulk against his lowered shoulder and flipping them up and over. The lizard fell with a whump of flattened grass and air. Tuning, he saw Guen’s raised hand. Armoured shutters were beginning to lower over the windows, the entry doors. A foot thick, doubtlessly treated metals and alloys meant to stall cutting torches, gleaming with skeins of shielding. An added feature to the pilfered manor household. Seroth knew his mother’s call.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Bursts of psychosomatic energy writhed into his calve and thigh muscles, reinforcing the lattice of his bones and cartilage. The Force propelled the boy forward. Around him the world seemingly slowed, motion crawling. A pirate came in, vibro-cutlass cutting in with a backhand strike. Seroth raised his forearms against the opposing wrist, gripped the foes arm in one palm and flashed down with a pick-grip blow. His longknife pierced into the meat between the throat and shoulder, severing arterial veins, esophagus, and windpipe. The pirate was dying even as he reached for the wound. Slowly… Too slowly…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was a half-meter’s worth of space between a window’s sill and a falling armour shutter. Seroth dove into a front-lip handstand, leaping upwards feet first. He cleared five meters worth of empty air before his braced feet smashed through heavy wroshyr-wood framing and shards of lancing glass. Cut lightly across his cheeks in a dozen spots, Seroth fell to a knelt grind against laid rugs and shagged carpeting. Behind him clattered the shutter. His role in the operation was now intensely simple: disable the manor’s defenses. [/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The pilfered manor was divided into two living wings and an anchoring central building, each decked with four floors. The lighting had been dimmed to emergency levels. Seroth stalked down a long corridor lined with the opulence of one Twi-lek’s lucrative racing career: platinum trophies, holo-portraits and oil paintings, souvenirs from three score worlds that collected dust and idle attention. Some display cases had been savaged, looted. There was a keepsake of a bent control-stick, laying below a framed pict of a devastatingly wrecked speeder. Heavy foot-falls echoed everywhere in the close gloom, shafts of outside light pouring through tall portholes lain in close against the ceiling. Everything was aglow with egg-shell white and curtains of patterned red. The footfalls loomed closer. Seroth broke into a sprint and met an investigative squad of some five pirate gunners round the corridor bend.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Shev emphasized economy of motion, combined with the boy’s raw strength and agile dexterity. Despite their arms and armour, they simply could not draw a bead on the flash of movement that wove against them. Seroth took his longknife, cutting and slapping aside raised blaster-guns so their aim was spoiled, shots juddering into the floor, walling, and ceiling. Plaster and faux-wood paneling blew apart in sprits of showering debris. Seroth drove his heel down across one pirate’s knee and snapped the patella bone. The foe fell, screeching, turned about in the lad’s gripping fingers as the knife’s edge stroked across his throat. The motion was brutally swift, tossing the corpse over into a broken pile by the baseboard.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The rest struggled to unsheathe their vibro-dirks from clamped harness holsters, guns falling idle and useless by their feet. Seroth gripped and smashed up with his right hand, splitting a head up through the soft of the under-jaw and palate, ripping forward through the jaw, nose, and skull in torrid gouts of facial gore. A stab came in for his belly. His knife flashed in, parrying before launching into a sudden riposte. The dirk was arrested and then kept aside in the boy’s off hand, the knife burning in through ribs to pierce a lung. He jerked right, off-hand gripping into the now bloodied harness and shirting, cutting into sections of heart valves and pumping chambers. Wounded mortally, falling as blood bubbled past thick, rubbery lips, the goon tossed forward and landed into a welling pool of deep, staining carmine. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The final pair edged in with lancing blade strikes, wielding ridiculously large khukuri that offered them little peripheral action. Instead of locking off in a backstep, the boy strode in at a half turn. His motion swung out one arm and loosed the longknife. Stuck in the hallway like a gunnery shooting range, there was little space to side-step. The boy’s knife thudded with a meaty slap into the left-most goons throat and took him off his feet. The second let his overhead chop fall with too much telegraphing. Seroth stepped again, the bent machete whistling past his nape. It was now a swift matter to get into the correct positioning… Legs bent slightly, spaced shoulder length, back squared to the victim, gripping the wrist and tricep and folding inward.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His opponent, a rather thick set male of some furred race that had an elongated snout, went flying overhead. Landing on his back, he briefly felt the lightening sensation of his lungs being squeezed dry of air. …And then the poleaxing blow of a falling knee to his cranium. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]In organization, it was rare spectacle to see pirates massed with any directive sense of discipline. There was no order of battle. Friends simply joined with friends and listened to the squall of radio chatter. They’d lost the fight on the lawn. A hellion woman had massacred them to a fighter, her, the man in the exo-skeleton, and the strange warriors bearing simple hatches, axex, tomahawks, and knives. The front doors, though shuttered, would fall soon. Some laughed in a matter of hours: plenty of time for reinforcement to arrive. Most were too busy to notice a creeping shadow race past their unguarded flanks. Shev had told that stealth was a faceted art. Sound, light, movement, positioning. The boy had a grasp for the basics but it would be some years before he had yet become anything close to a master. For now, it was enough to elude the hall patrols and slip from yawning shadow to shadow.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The security center was a secured bedroom that had been gutted of gilded finery. Seroth felled a pair of guards, using his knife and a ‘borrowed’ dirk, who stood listlessly outside. He caught their falling cadavers and laid them out soundlessly, snatching off a keycard and queuing the auto-door open. Trios of operators stationed at gleaming holo-consoles tapped idly at hard-light keys, biting down over their lips. Hired on for tech-support, virtual prisoners of the pirate gang, they could only hope that they would weather this debacle, survive. Each was armed with a small hold-out pistol pocketed close against their waist on utility belts. They didn’t hear the boy stealing up to one operator, snagging a pistol free in a single, fluid pull. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt] Screams of blaster-fire echoed in the hot confines. Seroth had thumbed the pistol to a full killing mode and fired off a handful of shots into an occupied console. The computer was slagged instantly, burning up in a plume of electrical fire and raking sparks. An operator fell back across the floor, tumbling off his chair, utterly surprised. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Release the shutter catches,” Seroth said. Guen had coached him, briefly, on how to put a tone of authority to his wording. The operators glanced to one another: none was a fighter. None wished to die. Still… There was a hesitating sense of self-preservation. Motes of warning drifted in from the Force, whispering across the back of his mind. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Now,” He insisted. One operator sighed, rose with a shrug, and slapped his three-clawed hand across a white button-square. There came a distant whirr of servo-motors retracting the fallen window-shielding. A second, more deeper screech told the front doors were being relieved of the armour slabs. Cries arose, windows shattering as Sayda came barreling through almost every and any entry. The front entrance came away as Stenwulf laughed and threw in his compliment of thermal detonators. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Please hide,” Seroth said quietly to the shivering operators, who were quick to relock the auto-door as Seroth took his cue. He exited into running fights that lanced blaster fire across the foyer galleries and long apartment hallways. And armed only with his longknife, wits, and training, he waded in. He checked his killing blows, disarming with hook-cuts that knocked aside weaponry, slashing tendons and connective tissues, leaving those he could alive but disabled. The lad was a blur of liquid steel flashing through one conflagration. He headbutt and struck, utilizing every inch of his physicality to break through raised defenses and overwhelm the outmatched pirates. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One approached him, a lieutenant armed with paired vibro-scimitars that flashed in a challenging flourish. Seroth held his knife easy in a pick-grip and waited on the woman’s leisure. She struck in, with familiar Jar’Kai patterns and slashing vectors that were both cunning and seasoned in training. The lieutenant was no fool. She held an exacting plan to gut the lad and lace their defeat with some sense of revenge. Seroth had only fifteen centimeters of blade to work with. Guen came in, paired with Stenwulf, observing the challenge. Combat ceased within the foyer as the two circled one another. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]Step, half-turn, slash, guard, pirouette, riposte, hack![/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guard, parry, side-step, back-step, duck and half turn, riposte and hack![/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The boy couldn’t be touched. His openings were traps that forced his opponent to redouble their guard and waste their stamina. Though the woman had reach and more edge to bring a cut or strike in, it was a tenuous advantage at best. Seroth pressed in, gripping one wrist with his off hand while keeping his knife laid back across his forearm in a guard. She could not bring her blades down for a dismembering chop, nor maneuver her arms in to cross-guard. He butted his brow forward, clocking her eyes and nose. Stunned, defenses lowered for a brief instance, the lad took the opening. The first slash opened the skin of her left knuckles and forced the sword to drop. The second gouged into her right palm, similarly disarming. A snap-kick shunted her back off her feet. She fell, skittering to a sharp stop on the checkered tiling.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hmn,” Guen hummed in approval.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Stenwulf shrugged past Seroth, smirking. “Huh. Wasn’t bad.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The boy opened his mouth to speak… But promptly lost his track of thought, watching Sten. He simply approached the defeated swordswoman, planted his armoured boot to her chest, and ended her with a shivering pistol-shot to her cranium.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]A knife-blow struck the barrel from Stenwulf’s pistol and snapped it out of his hands. He turned and was nearly pushed off his feet by a paired palm-strike that thudded into his chest. Breathing stung for a moment, looking down into the tightened expression of Guen’s son. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye, whas your problem, then!?” He cried down, reaching down to heft up his ruined blaster.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“She was disarmed and defeated!” Seroth replied.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So? Nothin’ sayin’ that she wouldn’ta got back to ‘er feet.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The boy blinked at Stenwulf’s casual dismissal. “She was in surrender.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Didn’t hear nothin’ ‘bout that. Look, we’re makin’ a mountain outta mole-hill – “[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sten, Seydon, enough,” Geun called from across the foyer. She was aiding several fighters in dragging the ripped corpses of several ruined pirates out onto the front lawn. Anteluma authorities would be harkening in to inspect the min-warzone and take appraisal of the raid. Further in the manor housing, sporadic firefights and melees were still breaking out. Pockets of piratical resistance still refused to surrender to the waiting officers and courts. Fine by the take of the Sayda. They laid in with hatchet and blade, whipping out snub-pistols that took on deadly effect in the close-quarters.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sten?” Guen called again.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yah?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“A little more decorum next time.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Fine,” He spat and glared evilly down to the still tight-faced boy. “Wha’ever ya want to make yer brat a lil’ more at home~ Don’t see anyone else twistin’ hairs up their arses for ‘is kill-count.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“She did not have to die,” Seroth said quietly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh whouldja lissen to yerself!” Stenwulf grunted in high dungeon.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sten – “Guen said as she approached close to his impending rant.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No! You lissen here, child! Ya fethin’ child! I dun need to be takin’ a lecture from some Repub pup that thinks he’s go’ the yuunivarse figured! Ya got a code, feth your code! This is killin’ work and there aren’t any rules to eht! Get that in your skull~ Oh, on that matter?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He leaned close enough for Seroth to nearly taste the sour-corn in the man’s spittle. “Stay outta mah way. …Stupid fethin’ hypocrite.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guenyvhar loosed a sigh of long-suffering and patted down the mortar dust and plaster stuck like pitch to the man’s shoulders. Her son observed her swiftly whisper something up close by the corner of his mouth. …Something that brought a feral gleam to his muddy brown eyes. Stenwulf snaked a smug glance back to the lad, snorting. Seroth was then left alone to pick through the rubble and cloy stench of mounting corpse rigor-mortis. It was the habit of the Sayda to pick and loot equipment they found beneficial from the bodies of those slain under their axe-falls. The dead had little use blasters, swords, what-have-you, so the looting doctrine went. …Seroth simply felt cold in his stomach, turning away to find his way back to the control room.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A trio of Sayda shouldered past as he mounted a stairwell and came up to the second floor. Further fighting had pitted and gouged the walling, collapsing portions of the ceiling down in rubble piles. Halogen-lights flickered with guttered sparks of light. The control room was only a further handful of meters down. It was time to escort the console operators out to the front lawn…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…Seroth paused at an autodoor that had been sheared through by the force of a hefting vibro-weapon. …In all probability a longsword, something with a custom battery and cutting edge that could decimate common steels and alloys. Wafting pitches of stanched odour struck the lad’s noses. There was no gentle vibration of life emanating from within. Chilled with hesitancy, Seroth pressed in. His boots were caught in a stiffening pool of mixed blood that had now run black. The operators laid in a corner, feet outspread. Their uniforms were sullied with fore. Bone and rib poked through rents cut through the meat of their chests and hips. Each was staring up in wide, glassed over expressions. Syrupy spittle, tinged red, ran down the corner’s of their stiffened lips.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Sten,” Seroth whispered.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was a difference, he argued. A difference between a life or death brawl and affording a fallen opponent some dignity. His brief duel with the swordswoman was less desperation and more a formality of honour. Her work was coming unraveled. Men and women, fighting pirates she had perhaps known the whole of her life, were dying in droves around her. She was afforded a right to avenge her bereavement, so Seroth believed. Beaten, disarmed. Her fate was to be a matter for the courts to decide. …And then Stenwulf stamped his boot to her throat and exited her brains out with a gust of blaster-fire.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His conscience was fierce in it’s decry of the mercenary’s action. Yet… There was a conflict of conscience. Other pirates he had simply slain. Were they not too afforded a measure of consideration before their demise? At the moment, Seroth hadn’t cared. They were coming on to kill him, painfully, and instinct cried out to fight back. And so he did, fighting with brutal efficiency. So what was it that afforded him difference between himself and someone like Sten, someone like…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…His mother?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He held no joy for killing. Kneeling down to the pile of slaughtered operators, he reached and solemnly shut their wide, inattentive eyes. Stenwulf derived a sense of satisfaction from every kill added to his gross tally. His mother, smug sureness, a confirmation of her more elite status amongst the back-alley brawlers the galaxy preferred to ignore. Her son, their protégé… He couldn’t grant himself an excuse from the responsibility of his actions. He killed. He fought and killed well, had a talent and ability for breaking opponents in his hands, across his blades, renting them with buckshot fire if it came to it. He killed and did so with preternatural skill. In a wide galaxy, it was the singular that seemed to make any sense of his niche in life. Jedi training fixed him with a neutrality that killed his ability to hate.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It wasn’t out of addiction that he felt… comfortable or perhaps indifferent to hot blood-spill when the moment came upon him. …He wanted to survive. Live through whatever ferocious conflagration was occurring, go home, see his Rosa, and sleep naked against her belly. The lad stared a hard while at his reflection in the pooled vitae welling against his boots. …Where was his Jedi calling now…?[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Kallea Sector – Terminus System – Terminus[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]23:56:12 WCSM – The Dens of Quaille[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]Two Weeks On[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Rain fall on Terminus was a rarity, but when it did pour, reflective shawls and tarps fell across the avenues and causeways to shield from the acidic taint inherent to the water. The Dens of Quaille, a poorer sectioning of squatter neighborhoods and shanty town, was beneath a torrential system that had flooded the streets with eating puddles that only served to emphasize their squalor. Locals called the phenomena a ‘Monsoon Year’. Every few decades, when the skies became so oversaturated with chemical and industrial fog, the heavens would bear it no more. And so great embankments of storm systems ravaged from the northern poles down to the southern most trader cities. The skies would vent like this for roughly a year’s time. Then the skies would begin their soak, cycling on.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guenyvhar had business in the Quaille. Some manner of creature that called itself a ‘professorial interest’. Guen was apt to keep the details of this arrangement as close to chest as she dared. Her Sayda kept up the trust that she was leading them straight, towards another paycheck and easy credits to spend. They were all about a dingy neighborhood, where every building was host to nineteen dilapidated floors crawling with flesh-lice and cramped families. Everything seemed constructed of industrial plyboard, aluminum sheets, rotted planking, and reused girders. The men and women dressed in white shirts, brown slacks and black sashes blended into the detritus and rain smog. Chameleonic, traceless save for throbs of life energy, they waited and adjusted the curls of their anti-septic poncho hoods. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth kept the guard by a lime-lighted doorway, hood down and still beneath an of-repaired porch roof. Each were attached to a low ground saloon and ‘dancing’ parlour. He still kept his own dress, despite snide offers from Stenwulf to strip out to the Sayda colours. The commando was still red over the cheek the boy had displayed at Commenor, going out of his way to thrash the boy through whatever means of humiliation he could concoct. Seroth knew the man had never been fond of this child of Guen’s. So much so that he kept quarters next to the lad on every hyperspace flight… Where to the boy’s long-suffering constitution, he learned that he and his mother were both lovers. Due to their penchant for raucous, obnoxious love-making that could keep the whole of the vessel awake.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He put it out of his mind, focusing on the silent side-street that was seeing little foot traffic. By earn of merit, the comforting weight of both tomahawk and parrying knife hung off the clasps of his worn-torn harness belt. For his actions on Commenor, despite his disrespect for more senior authorities, Guen had granted him the privilege of wielding the Sayda’s most prized armament. The model was an after-market modify of an MCA tactical axe, the shaft slimmed down of oversized gripping and corded with dyed roping. It lacked the tenacity of vibrosonics, though the axe-head had been sharpened down so as to neatly split durasteel sheets cleanly in half. It was Seroth’s to own, to maintain, and as Shev had disciplined, to respect. The acid-rain kept falling, as behind in the shanty saloon, Guen and Stenwulf contested details for their contract.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]An hour’s time on, they emerged, fitting treated ponchos across their brows as a mist of acidic haze glanced off from the porch-roof corners. By the return home, their faces would be pinched and raw. Stenwulf shuffled on to walk through a curtain of spitting rain, disappearing down an alleyway across the street. Guen paused to feed her iho-stick addiction. Seroth weathered the acrid scent in his stoic way. He asked nothing; Guen would tell on her own good time just what was in store for the immediate future. The iho-stick whittled away with each progressive drag, vents of yellowed smoke breezing from the woman’s roasted nostrils.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Mmmmnn,” She hummed to herself. “…It’s going to be an ugly one.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“How so?” Seroth asked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen cocked a thumb to the swing-door behind them, where ill, scarlet light permeated the interior atmosphere above a blue haze of narcotic smoke. “Mister ‘Professorial Intent’ back there is a supposed collector. Gave us some reliable information pertaining to the location of an artifact or somesuch here on-world. Saves the Sayda the trouble of going on a pilgrimage to recover it from some damned, lost temple or other.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Did he mention where?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeah. …Not far off here, actually. Said it’s stocked away in an old hab-block, somewhere a few levels below the Quaille.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Someone hoarded it there.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen smiled slightly. “Yes. ‘Professorial Intent’ said it may still be under an opposing ‘party’s’ ownership. We’re going after it regardless.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We’re stealing it?” Seroth asked, furrowing his brow.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…That’s a harsh word, son. We’re ‘recovering’ it, just think of it that way,” Guen now grinned, amused at her son’s rankled morality.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I do not like this.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I know. But you’ll go with it anyway, or you can find your own way back home.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth was mystified to what counted as ‘home’. The Sayda made him feel no more welcome than a wolf-pack eyeing a hungry stray: another mouth to feed and compete against. Coruscant, Tython… They were no more warming, given his predilection for keeping independent of the pace of Galactic politics. He was divorced from the Republic… And almost by extension, the Jedi in turn. One didn’t function without the other… Despite his grievances that spirituality and Chancellery powers could not co-exist without a rending compromise. And politics was a poison that muddied ethics, morality, and saw good beings grow cynical, jaded, and corrupt. That was @[member="Ben Watts"]’ arena now to navigate. He should have tempted the man to come with him for a jaunt across the unknown. The venerable Grandmaster may have had a word or three, to tell him how to guide the moral quagmire of being comfortable with killing. Ben… Or dear Rosa. Rosa, who bore up under so much, too much. …And loved a strange boy smelling of pine and water, clay and earth, dumb to great mysteries while contemplating others. Rosa would know…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Then who is it we are ‘recovering’ the artifact from?” Seroth pressed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…You know where Terminus stands?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The edge of Omega Pyre territory. It will not be long before they settle a mercenary presence to control an outlet into the Unknown Regions,” Seroth answered. The idea perturbed him. Omega Pyre was a consolidated amalgamation of several private companies in the mercenary and arms business, including the much maligned Czerka. They preferred being titled as a Protectorate, working in tandem with local governments to keep the peace through the loaning of private armies. Yet, the ‘Pyre was a business. A massed business but a business regardless. They did not operate out of altruism and the reputation of the Lady Protector, her lackey CEO Cater, and the actions of a now rogue super-soldier slaughterer put him in the mindset that the ‘Pyre could not be trusted worth a damn.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Not that the Republic or now teetering Sith Empire was likewise any fairer. Business, government, and dictatorship were facets of conceptual power. Power corrupted, in time. The greater span of ability granted by law, edict, or force, the swifter moral codes eroded and arrogance, contempt, and amorality settled in. It was a Jedi’s test of character, to keep in mind just where it was they stood in the grander scheme of things. Seroth was just a little man standing under acid rain. Sharing space with a trillion more individuals all vying for love, attention, content, and a slice of happiness.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Indeed,” Guen went on. “And you know how the ‘Pyre cemented their mercenary reputation?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Fighting the Bando Gora.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Correct. They’ve been on the lam for a goodly while now, ever since the ‘Pyre’s begun expansionist actions. They are reviled and hunted down with little mercy. Mister ‘Professorial’ is telling that an off-shoot band-cult is what’s taken up residence in this disused hab-block below.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Bando Gora here?” Seroth said, voice dropping to a gentle whisper.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Most frightening sons-of-bitches you’ll ever fight. Think the Sith are weird, scary? Uh-uh. They’re crazy but with a method. …Bando Gora can’t be compartmentalized. Defined or labeled.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What do you mean?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen shrugged, keying the comm. piece by her throat-collar and relaying a crisp flow of instructions. They were diving now to Sub-Level 32-6c, block 7(E). In wait would be lying an esoteric cult of vicious slayers, with powers devoted to all sorts of inherent nastiness. There’d be no telling what precisely they would encounter, save that every Sayda needed to keep their minds in tact. Guenyvhar was not in the mood for affording mistakes this evening.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The way down to Sub-Level 32-6c was a convoluted stairwell system erected in the gutted remains of an acid-eaten water treatment facility. Guen had brought with her the lion’s share of her fighters: sixty men and women, kitted out for battle in the gloomy underground. Tomahawks. Longknifes. Sharpened sabers. And firearms. Seroth was similarly equipped, handed over a knuckle-guarded hanger swords resplendent with a green wrapped grip and a silvertine sheen, in addition to his parrying blade and personal ‘hawk. Along with an older variety of trenching shotgun, fitted tight with a gleaming bayonet featuring a serrated back-edge running from the small crossguard up to an inch off the peaked, wintry tip. With practiced ease, he fed in several heavy-buck shot shells into the stock’s magazine reservoir, chambering a round with a snap-pump. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then they voyaged down.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Poor and rotten, sickly, infirm, downcast, and forgotten. The heads of a thousand squatters turned to peak up through lean-to’s constructed off rusted aluminum siding and tarpaulin, fixed to the stone and concrete by pegs of iron. Filtration pools and sedimentary tanks had been converted into basements packed densely with crude, multi-level homes. Sodium lamps glowed from behind make-do sugar-glass windows. The treatment facility, by and large, was converted over every inch for inhabitation. Great pits and tanks once used for sewage processing were lined with rickety stairwells, entire homes hollowed out through solid feet of ferrocrete. Adjustable weirs had been dismantled, reused as thickened walkways over short falls acid rainfalls had chewed into the decking. The roofing was spottily patched, with scavenged, treated sections of carefully re-sewn tarpaulin. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen handed off a portable torch and fixed ear-vox to her son. The lamp attached to his belt harness, the vox against his ear shell and supple auditory canal. Short-range over approximately three hundred meters, they could keep up communication, despite the fixed interference of the long, rebar and concrete halls. Terminus lacked a sense of cohesive centrality. Government counted for whoever was calling shots topside. The idea of healthcare, public works, and general maintenance were concepts only the richer coreward realms seemed more apt to enjoy. With the ‘Monsoon Year’ on in full swing, a full month’s worth of washed out, biting water fall, folk simply hunkered in and drew their heads out of exposure. The poor, mostly strange refugee’s and immigrants from uncounted worlds from the Unknown Regions, flexed their shoulders. They bore the pains with remarkable stoicism. As if, Seroth ruminated, this had always been and would always be. Through the treatment plant, children of every stripe and physical make ran out before the procession of grim-eyed fighters. They called, shouted, playing in their way. Some wished to hold their weapons. How incredible would it be, to fire a gun!? Figures emerged from the squatter shanties, drawing the boys and girls aside. Some of the adults even offered murmurs of droning prayer. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Starman’s dirge,” Guen murmured into her collar-mic.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“A foreign custom?” Seroth answered back, just as softly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Kind of a common nursery fable, out past the Unknowns. It’s to bid those on their way to the underworld safe voyage.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad kept a hand to the swaying stock of his shotgun. “They know of the Bando Gora?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“They’d have to. This is their squatting grounds. Bando’s had to have come through here. Nothing happens in these levels without the poor knowing every detail. They just don’t commit it to paper or data-line. As if they’d disclose anything to folk with average income.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Every sub-level seemed composed of abandoned industrial labyrinths. From the water treatment wards, down through a crowded freight elevator, they kept descending. Next was a former smelting factory, an emptied den consisting of a titanic, nigh on hollowed warehouse frame. Great, weighted steel tubs hung from rusting girder-tracks bolted to ceiling runners. The flooring was still cluttered with remnants of salvaged electric phosphate furnaces, resplendent with mica-dust and sooty slicks of pitched, fiery staining. Corroded wares, ingots of forgotten metals, bars half-shaped and warped by the cold, settled motionless beneath the Saydas strides. They encountered a marrow rotted skeleton grinning at them from between leach tanks. He or she’d been an undersized creature of humanoid make, bone fitted with bulbous tumor swells typical of neurofibromatosis. Seroth paused and wondered.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Someone had come crawling in here, wracked with an incurable physical deformity, to die alone. The lad stepped away from the Sayda procession and leaned to lay a small credit-chit by the feet of the deceased. Payment for the Ferry Master, that great, pan-mythological figure that guided the deceased to where the underworld awaited.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The sub-basements and levels floating beneath the Quaille seemed to have belonged to an industrial landscape, some centuries prior. Broad delivery tunnels, shared mess halls, and even robbed living quarters forged an intricate system of interconnected tunneling that lead from treatment plants to smelting mills to assembly houses and more. Most machines laid in pristine condition save for a thick coating of dust. Dust which drifted into a looming cloud in their wake, as Guen kept guiding them on. Torch-lamps scythed cutting beams of too-bright light across the vast and hollow spaces, down into the cramping stairwell shafts that bent downwards for seemingly too long. There was as of yet no sign of their quarry. The Bando Gora, if they indeed had a presence this close to the upward shanty towns, kept it fiendishly well concealed. Seroth doubted that. He read the old on-hand accounts from the Coruscant Temple archives. Those library entries mentioned an obscene fascination with the macabre. The Bando Gora had little qualms about letting it be known just who was master of a certain domain.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth was kept at the fore of the forty or so fighters. Guen needed his extra-sensory perceptions, a kind of sounding-branch to inform her of anything out of the ordinary. The ‘Gora were a dark Force cult, first and foremost. Such manipulations and desecration of living energy would resound within any Sensitive. Especially for a Jedi, even with Seroth’s noted ‘bluntness’ in picking up emotional cues. Three hours on, passing beneath a bent archway that had been deformed as if by some great blow, some of the Sayda began to report nauseous spells roiling in their bellies. Its intensity would ebb and flow, mimicking the sloshes of indigestion and stomach sickness. And then, fifteen minutes on, the symptom halted. Guen looked to her son. His eyes, beneath a furrowed and gently sweating brow, were keen on piercing ahead in the gloom.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What?” She whispered, coming up to his side. He had taken several strides, now five meters on in the lead.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“There is an upset,” Seroth answered. “It is faint, but it is there.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Define an ‘upset’.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“A feeling of wrongness, mum,” He said. “Like… - !”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A grip like a crushgaunt clamped to Guen’s forearm, causing her a brief hiss of pain. But her son had stilled, completely motionless. In his off-hand rested his parrying longknife, still as dried blood. “We are under watch…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Where!?” Guen hissed beneath her breath, consulting a sensor-pad clipped to her chest harness. “I’m seeing nothing!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That is because we are on blooded ground now. I can… feel them. In the Force, Sensitive’s like me are as bright as bonfires. Though these are not of Jedi or Sith caliber. They feel… diseased. Rotted. Broken.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Can they regard you in turn?” Guen asked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes,” Her son nodded, trudging on now for a narrow rail-hallway that opened up after a far one hundred meter stroll. “There are ways to hide oneself from scrutiny, but I do not know them. I have never been granted tutelage. Sensitivity acts like a river with two opposing currents, one flowing down, the other up.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What you mean is, knowing they’re there more or less runs two ways. They know you’re here too.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And by extension, your Sayda.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Brilliant.” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Wait…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guenyvhar began to hear it too. Stenwulf loosed a gruff cry and spun his heavy pistol free from its chest-strap. A singular, high-pitched note had sounded out from nowhere. It was directionless, omnipresent, keening in the flesh of their ears with bone-grating intensity. It didn’t seem to be a sound capable of production by ordinary musical or electronic means. There was a secondary ‘pulse’ within the keen, like an off-base canter that was trying to form words. As soon as it begun, it withered and died away. Seroth had strolled on ahead, and was kneeling beside a strangely bleached pile of jetsam. Bleached, for his hand stroked dust off a precisely arranged pyramidal collection of cracked skulls. Above was planted an iron girder, a crude sign. The characters scrawled in rusted iron paint seemed to… move. Wriggle. If one stared too long, that is.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What’s tha’ say?” Stenwulf asked, coming up to the skull bones.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I do not know,” Seroth lied.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]They found the habitation blocks. It took another hour of increasingly eerie gloom before they broke into an open shaft. The habitation blocks were semi-suspended above an open pit that funneled downwards into a point of blackness. Piping, steel-sheathed cabling lines, and fat feed tubes lined the shafts walling above and below the windowed living apartments, backlit from within by strange glows. Entries and exits were formed by walkways burrowing into entryways and undercrofts. The whole, massive arrangement of high hundred floors would have looked perhaps cozy, in an inundated, reclusive impression. But outer paneling had been stripped off and exposed wiring sparked, like sheets of skin shaved away to reveal the pulse and wriggle of capillaries and musculature. The strange lamp-glows emanating from the score of lit windows were interrupted with occasional shadows. Murky frames… Tall and ghastly, moving almost too smoothly from room to room. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Sayda observed these details from across several alcoves that opened into the yawning, abysmal duct. A dozen of these shadowed galleries lined the shaft walling, providing a neat vantage point for Guen and her mercenary fighters to briefly convene. Seroth stuck by one alcove opening while his mother and Stenwulf consulted a miniature 3D construct of the surrounding spaces. They kept huddled, shielding the tell-tale light emanating from the red-on-white holo-grids. The boy pursed his mouth, shotgun in hand, attaching on a lengthy bayonet blade off the nozzle. One window across the chasm was now permanently shadowed by a faint, shivering outline. Seroth fancied his gaze could make out a bone-mask beaming with green pin-dot eye glows. The outline stayed motionless, doubtlessly watching the boy who observed it in turn.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen’s shake on his shoulder interrupted his observations. “Come.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“S’gonna be a fethin’ nightmare in thaar,” Grunted Stenwulf from a huddle of accompanying Sayda. “Urbin’ fightin’ and all. They got home-turf advantage, through an’ through. Boss…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We get the prize. The artifact,” She replied in all calm. “So we are paid, and so we will delivered.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Bu’ fethin’ Ban’ Gora, Boss…” Stenwulf sounded ill-at-ease. Tangling with ordinary bastard mercenary or otherwise nondescript security or military personnel didn’t phase the bear. His exo-skeletal framing afforded him gross strength and speed, his long vibrosword a lethal, shivering channel that hummed a siren lay of death in his hands. Because he knew, as a thing of flesh and bone, unadorned, he could outfight even a hardened Supercommando. Bando Gora were an altogether different arrangement of psychotics and killer brutes. They were not unadorned. They were akin to Guen’s witcher brat: infused with black energy.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Which is why, Sten,” Guen chuckled at his consternation. “That I brought our favoured son with us.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth paused, looking to his mother as her smile gleamed. It was cool, unfriendly. There was a piece of her mental strategy he knew he was going to be ill-prepared to like or accept. He kept on her flank regardless, maneuvering through twisting branches of maintenance hallways that eventually opened to a shattered colonnade. It wound up to a set of wrecked stone-steps, where atop rested shattered glasteel autodoors. Beyond, the hab block interior, glowed a violet-white light source that wafted sheets of illumination through thick dust-clouds. Something chattered, cawed, then fell silent.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That’s the entry floor,” Guen whispered. She took a whetstone to her tomahawk edge and spike. One more swift sharpening. “Up above are similar walkways.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Her son held his silence, waiting for her elaboration. “You proved on Commenor you can be comfortable with fighting on your lonesome. I’m going to need that prowess thrice-fold here and now. You mentioned you’re… particularly ‘bright’ to these freaks, was it?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We can use that. We can use that…” Guen muttered, mostly to herself. “We’ve no knowing where they keep any treasure troves. Sten has run a handful of preliminary scans and there seems to be a concentration of body heat up by the 92nd and 93rd floors. The rest is interspersed.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Do you know how many will be waiting?” Seroth asked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…More than we can afford to tangle in an outright firefight,” Guen sighed. Her lips then perked into a deathly, mischievous smile. “Which is why you’re going to be drawing attention to the lower floors.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“A decoy?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“More or less,” Guen shrugged. “Bando Gora are difficult to gauge. Cults are, by majority, inordinately disciplined, structured. They may close ranks and either make off with what we’ve come for, the artifact in question Mister Professorial seeks, or destroy it entirely. But… I’m willing to bet they have a blood-taste for someone like you, son.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Jedi’d make for a helluva ritual…” Stenwulf snickered, enjoying the range of icy expressions frosting over the boy’s face.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth took and racked the pump of his gun, checking the fix of its gleaming bayonet. “Distracting measures…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Just so,” Guen nodded.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Back up, mum?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’m going to need every spare body on the upper floors in case this attempted conflagration goes awry,” Guenyvhar shook her head, pausing to check the time upon her chronometer. “You don’t need to fight the lot of them simultaneously. Just get them running. You’ll be fine. You’ll hear from me on comms. when we’ve recovered Mister Professorial’s wanted relic.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad took a swift moment to check over the clasps of his armaments. His only projectile weapon was the aged shotgun that he hefted with increasingly comfortable familiarity. A simple hanger-sword swayed on his left hip, nestled by his longknife, while his tomahawk was clamped firmly against his right. He wished he could feel the weight of Shev’s old war club strapped over the broad of his shoulders. Such a weapon made due sureness that anyone struck by the gunstock head would not be simply rising back to their feet. The lad ran through a swift breath-control regiment… Recalled the image of a smiling Rosa tussling his hair in the dark of her kitchen… And began striding up the colonnade procession.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]An emptied reception hall yawned open. The strange off-violet glow from down the way had been extinguished. All light turned to gloom, impenetrable save for a handful of meters by the stubborn brightness of his attached torch-lamp. One step into the hab block reception brought the boy into an entirely altered realm. By his light-cone, he could make out in sterling detail the Bando Gora’s handiwork. The flooring had been ripped apart, tiling smashed to leave naked concrete. With painstaking effort, someone or some beast had taken a filing chisel and hammer, and writ out concentric rings of nigh indecipherable script. The symbols seemed gross, toxic, shifting and moving against the stonework.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The walls were just as desecrated. Old hand-prints, some large, others small, each different, smeared obscene symbols and gory murals. Seroth strode in further, footsteps purposefully too loud against the ground. Six meters on, he was on his own. The gloom swallowed in behind and blanketed his shoulders with chilling, frigid caresses. He could taste gritty ash on his tongue, carried by a sudden whorl of wind from an opened AC vent overhead. The dark side of the Force held a choking sway over every mote of air. The sensations and ghastly phenomena would only increase the longer he dwelled in the Bando Gora’s cursed den. He strolled right, up a hallway lined with laundromat chambers. Strange… things… skittered in the corners of his visions. Glamours that sneered. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…Then something actually did move. Seroth spun and fired off the hip. A creature wearing only a sullied loin-cloth, skin darkened as pitch and veined with skeins of sickly red, head like a fleshless goat skull, flew back in a pitch of pink mist and meat. It crashed and fell into its hidey-hole: a converted laundromat chamber, where fingerbones hung from the ceiling on threads of nothing and a small wood-stove glowed redder than hellfire. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The hab block woke up. Some beast high in the floors above uttered an undulating roar, voice gripped in a vice of contorted language. It stung to even listen. …Footfalls trampled in their scores, whisking down stairwells and through emptied turbolift shafts. Seroth murmured a prayer, swift and poignant. He asked forgiveness from any Gods listening, for his transgressions in unrighteous killings. And for Rosa Mazhar to be bequeathed with whatever blessings that had befallen on his own shoulders. Then he chambered a fresh round from the stock magazine and continued to wade through the first floor gloom. Footfalls had fallen silent. Guen and Stenwulf had by now relocated to the higher colonnade entry bridges, waiting for the lower floors to become filled with reeling screams and the echoes of shotgun roars. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Shapes like animal men fell from the ceiling behind. Three, that came hurtling on with pointed rebar weapons glowing phosphorescent cyan rather than metal-heated red. Seroth butchered one, slashing its chest open with the bayonet. The barrel stuck against its impaled torso, he jerked the twitching thing forward and squeezed the trigger. A hole the size of a dinner plate erupted out the back of the beastman, buckshot shredding through to the second beastial thing that howled and clattered behind. Seroth backstepped, ducked a stab coming in at his brow, and fired again. The third attacker fell dead with an emptied cranium, contents spattered to the ceiling above.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]And on he went, refreshing his stock magazine with further shot.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]There was always an emphasis of cost. To gain something, something else had to be given in equal exchange. It was a common enough law for bartering and selling, what guaranteed the gears of galactic economy kept spinning as they did. And what guaranteed that anything worth earning always came with a prerequisite of long effort and great pain. If something was easy to obtain, with little effort, then satisfaction would become vapid boredom. An emphasis of cost. The Force was a great equalizer in rendering all things equal. Though nowadays, the Dark Lords and Great Knights exercised their abilities with little thought of what may come to effect afterward. It was what kept Seroth on the straight and narrow, all too content to let the Force lay as it did. Not the Bando Gora. They believed they had found ‘truth’. And that truth led down a path of physical modification, mind-warping stimulants, black ‘magic’, and acts of violence and ritual so awful that it would churn the bellies of even the most stoic and laconic.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Bando Gora came rushing into view, swathed in their curtains of gloom and darkness. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They came charging down the maintenance stairwells and emptied turbolift shafts, pounding over desiccated flooring, some leaping from ground to wall, to ceiling, supported by talon-claws. Seroth wasn’t unused to fear or wonder. These… things, made in the image of sentient creatures, had wholly abandoned their veneers and cloaks of sane thought and conscience morality. They were half-naked, girded with loincloths stitched from shaved skins rendered oily, bloody. Some entire bodies were rendered black, caked with a sort of gangrenous stiffness, akin to too-aged mummies ill preserved. Corded sheathes of vile muscle roiled beneath skin barbed with implanted machine bolts and rungs of stuck razor wire. The Bando Gora bled as they charged, scenting the wafting Force power inherent to Seroth’s veins.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Each was pound for pound, limb for limb, as swift, agile, and strong as Seroth had worked so hard to be. So he braced and met their oncoming tide, fighting for his life. The first few minutes echoed with sustained shotgun fire, hands milling with precision motion, reloading a fresh shell-shot into the tube feed and pumping the shell for priming. He had fourteen shells to spare. Seroth emptied each into the massed tide of Bando Gora bodies until a small wall of dead had piled at the fore of their charged. Lakes of ichor and blood spread out, pooling into every crevice. The Bando Gora clawed and smashed their way through the burgeoning wall of corpses, spiked swords, clubs, spears, truncheons waving as they bayed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then Seroth ran out of shot. And he braced the catch of his untried bayonet. On came the Bando Gora, dark Force power rendering their motion a blur of inky limbs and flashing, blue-on-blue eyes. Combat was reduced to a tunnel of gored vision. As the first warriors reached the Jedi, more piled on, climbing over hunched shoulders and spines, until some were scraping against the ceilings on a wall of bodies now three high. Seroth hadn’t faced fighting as this. Shev had been right. The world was reduced to an arrhythmic staccato of bludgeoning stock blows and slashing, hacking cuts of the bayonet. His mind closed off, eyes snapping from detail to detail, selecting which creature deserved immediate attention. The bayonet struck, stabbing through eye-matter and out through a skull pate, reversing to address low incoming slices aimed to his knees. While the bayonet blocked and parried below, Seroth hefted the body of the barrel and butt-stock, caving in faces, crunching ribs and forearms.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Entrails and hacked bodies churned below at his feet. The lad hadn’t yet given an inch. His back strained, braced in, gun and bayonet a blur of death in his bloodied knuckles. Two fell with slashed throats, a third spiked up through his jaw and brain matter, a fourth disemboweled, a fifth and then sixth laid nonsensical with a crush-thrust of the gunstock. A cloying scent of iron, oil, vegetable rot, and dry, dusty rattle filled his stuffed nostrils. Seroth recalled Shev’s ruminations. No assault could keep up an infinite pressure. Soon, momentum would falter and he could begin addressing the massed psycho-killers on his own terms. And it did. The weight on his limbs and sternum began to soften. The ‘Gora were slipping over the low lip of bloodied dead that they trampled bruised underneath their naked feet. Their initial ferocity was faltering. Seroth snarled, rushing in with a sudden, gusty charge to make up for the sudden ebb of intensity. He gripped the gunstock, pirouetted, and took a pair of messed ‘things’ through the bone and gristle of their faces. Skull caps flew, brains halved and leaking arterial spurts of blackened ichor.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The mass of oncoming slayers drew back, and Seroth again recalled Shev’s warning of assault combat. If an enemy had the bodies to make up for a loss, then they would briefly retreat to gather stock. Like a fighter catching his breath before the next bout. Seroth swore he could almost hear a simultaneous suck of blood warmed air, a dozen twinkling eyes staring from the mouth of perpetual gloom. He hadn’t even breached the second floor. The comm. at his hip began breaking with hissing static.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“’Ey boy?” Came Stenwulf’s churlish voice, always washed with a note of contempt whenever he addressed Guen’s son. “Upper floors’ is emptyin’, we’re – “[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Mister Stenwulf, I do not care.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The comm. went dead at his palm slap. The Bando Gora came again, and began to die. Sheer strength and frenzied kill-lust could not overwhelm the boy’s steel willed discipline, the too-fast and ragged hacks of his bayonet as it slaughtered them now three at a time. He crunched in skulls with the stock, slashing with the long blade-edge. Every inch of his physicality was utilized to rob them of initial steam, all but brawling as he dug out eyes with knuckle gouges. Head-butting, kicking, kneeing, forearms clubbed and felled while his elbows broke in the meat and cartilage of snouts and soft faces. A hand gripped over his throat. Seroth swung his chin and bit, severing a thumb. The mad-thing howled and held its ruined extremity. And then it died, split up through its savaged groin. Scores became dozens, became tens and then half dozens. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A last fiend tripped in the slog of piled bodies. It thrashed, unable to do much save watch a heel stamp into its throat. Wind pipe crushed, neck dislocated if not broken. Seroth watched the fiend die with a long, puss and blood choked gasp. His gun and bayonet were ruined. Its blade was nicked in an off-hundred places, tip gone, snapped off and lost in some thing’s ribs. The barrel was nearly curled as a half-S and the wood of the shoulder-stock cracked and splintered. Seroth discarded it to the piled dead, loosing a canteen from his belt harness. A fast draught brought back his vigor. He keyed the comms.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“’Hatchet’ to ‘Axe’. Lower floor is clear. For now,” He murmured breathlessly. “Is the ‘item’ recovered?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No,” Came Guen’s curt reply. “It’s caged further in. Keep on your guard, boy.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes, mum…” Seroth keyed off the commlink, and wiped blood and mixed sweat off his gritted brow.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]They’d taken a common room on the second floor and made conversions to accommodate some noetic practices. Seroth found thirty of them, huddled on knees before a splintered alter lined with dirtied hypo-injectors swimming with unkempt, off-glowing liquid. One of them had died. She laid in quartered pieces and was slowly being devoured by a trio of converted youngsters. Each was dressed in stitched, greasy leathers, skin pierced in too many places by steel and bone. One of them stood, sternum bolted with polished, glistening rivets. It turned, regarded the stranger staring at the lot of them with uncomprehending incredulity. There was a constant scent of burnt paper and hot metal. It took a pilfered butcher’s cleaver off its sagging belt, licked the rusted edge, then screamed. With unnerving simultaneous motion, the other twenty nine rose, took rusted weaponry off their belt harnesses, and charged the doorway.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth unhooked his tomahawk, hefted his parrying knife, and laid in. They died in clutches of twos and threes, weapons snagged from their hands before a flash of knife or axe cut and chopped into their chests, their craniums and throats. Fight with combination, Shev had taught. Fight with every inch of the tool you’ve got at hand. If his longknife caught a blow, parried, in followed the axe, cutting and hacking through the torso and limbs with shivering, ferocious speed. If the tomahawk blocked with the haft, in shot the longknife, burying into throat and ribs, slashing away with ripping effect. His hands worked through moments of synchronous tandem and then through perfectly independent motion. Habits remembered from his Jar’Kai upbringing and Darron Wraith’s swordsmanship tutelage.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guenyvhar and Stenwulf chimed in with off reports. Body trails were leading to several, previously undiscovered lofts, kept guarded by waiting vanguards of maddened blade-berserkers. Of course, Stenwulf bragged, they died and died hard. Guen was less enthused. The lofts were indeed storehouses, brimming with all kinds of ill collections of pieces… things… that gave off a horrifying sense of burning skin and fat. Liquid fell upwards to the ceiling, where puddles of glistening, silver mirrors shivered. Their canteens had gone putrid, the meals in their field foodstuffs spoiled. Everyone was suffering with a nosebleed. The keening note had returned. Guen reported they would search a little longer, but only insofar to confirm one detail: the artifact had been lifted. The hunt for it would go on, until the Sayda’s commander was satisfied every inch of hiding space had been inspected.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He took a staircase and ascended up to the third floor. The boy had an inkling where precisely the artifact might by lying. His mother and Sten, the men and women at her command, has slaughtered a vanguard. But not the one who had directed them. They were encountering only so much as whoever headed this deranged branch of cultists decided was pertinent. Snatches of dislocated sound, accompanied by scuttling sensations across his skin, echoed across his ears. What had been the third floor doorway was replaced by a literal wall of flesh. Skins, faces, had been transplanted and stapled to the durasteel. Its servo-motors had been disabled, arcing sparks from the shivering, chugging door frame corners. Each face had been slathered in lacquered viscosity. A preserving agent kept the stretched flesh from crusting and blackening with mummification rot. Seroth stepped in to brace and lift the fleshy auto-door. He paused. …He could have sworn one eye had turned, regarded him with a dilating pupil, and then blinked closed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ambushers waited in the hallway alcoves beyond. Still, statuesque, they laid perched high against the ceiling by the catch of their warped hands and toes. When the boy passed, they descended, announced with a pitch scream. Screams like the electronic whines of sonic feedback loops and white noise. Things ordinary vocal-chords could not reproduce. They were swift, too damned fast, and someone regular would have been eviscerated on the spot. Seroth was Jedi, with training by a cantankerous elder that emphasized his physical power over the Force. A combination of natural, honed reflexes and unearthly, preternatural warning turned him into a blur. The horrid creature-things fell to his feet in collapses of gushed ichor and shattered limbs, severed dead by a whirlwind of steel. Some shadows ahead retreated; too scared to tangle with the grey eyed boy washed red from cheek to shin.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One hallway arched sharply left, leading to an opened sectioning of building that been built out of the western face and to the opposite shaft wall. …A conservatory. Rather, a converted greenhouse that had been laid into something barren. Creeps of fog wafted in from the open doorway, lambent with violet light glistened with stabs of sick, sodium yellow. There came a sound of rain and the accompanying heavy moisture scent. Dew began to prick and lace the skin of his dirtied nape. Seroth strode closer, noting globs of dark shadow that just barely made a humanoid impression. Voices, muttering, familiar, ghosted into his ears. All around, the Dark Side throbbed with a cackle of laced energy. Beneath his boots were the cracks of a hundred shattered vanities. Reflections glared back, each with his face but… different. Some pale, light as a corpse, others sickly and grey, laced with black surface capillaries. Yellow-on-magma red eyes glared.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The steel framing holding together now destroyed glass panes had been tarnished into meaty red. The conservatory, its flooring, had been swept empty, troughs meant for the placement of small gardens hurled through curled holes punched through the walls. The floor was laid with a hardened, deep layer of mixed ashes and top-soil, black and grey like the static of an unturned broadcast. Here and there depressions had been sunken in, filled with bubbling pools of cherry-red substances that gurgled with sopping breaths. The sprinkler system activated when the lad stepped in… Where a horrid, unnatural chill turned the falling ice water into sludge, slurry, and finally snow. Time slowed and disappeared entirely. Seroth knew his perceptions were being altered, tricked. He was on his lonesome atop a frozen lake, beyond by half a click there rested a line of naked trees and a dark forest past. The puddles of shuffling blood remained. They steamed hot for some reason, where the ‘ice’ had been chopped through underfoot.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth paused, and looked ahead. …There was something akin to a man standing atop a sculpted pile of snow and ice. Great songsteel war-cleavers were held in hands caked thickly with splotched hoarfrost. He was tall… Or she was tall. It was a creature of butch androgyny, head masked behind a horned skull bleached whiter than the snows surrounding. An object was sewn to an exposed portion of ribbing, above a heart that beat so loudly it thumped against the bone of Seroth’s chest. The object was a spiked nonagon, protruding peaks of wet metal that writhed in tune to its owner’s heart pace. Corded arms rose and lifted the war-cleavers high.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It spoke to the boy in a voice from behind the grave. “Why are you come?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…To take that,” He replied, pointing to the geometric oddity twisting against its open chest wound.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And why?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth blinked. The cold was rending a killing chill through his limbs. Judging hallucination from reality was becoming a difficult task. “Because I was asked to.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The horned pale-thing nodded. “Then we are not so different.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Its head turned, regarding a pale sun which an overcast sky rendered dull. Like the sliver of an onset cataract. “One need not be a chamber to be haunted. One need not be a house. The mind has corridors surpassing material place.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You wish this inheritance?” It tried to gesture at the artifact stuck to its torso. “There’s a price to be had. …Your mind is so loud. Who is this ‘Rosa’, and why do you wish to see her?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The boy’s grey eyes went wide and wet. His hands snatched up knife and tomahawk. Enough. Enough of this damned task and whatever nightmare his mother and Stenwulf had unknowingly sent him treading into. The beast-thing undulated a shivering howl that rent the air, piercing soul and brain with a keening note that came from beyond normal sound. It took up an opposing charge, glad for the ‘little thing’ that came on rushing. Songsteel met the metal of his ‘hawk and blade, and red blood began to flash in slicks over the snow and ice.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The cultist looked like a child of devils, and so it fought like one. Its great stature and heavy war-cleavers belied the fiendish pace of its footwork, the whirling strokes of the meter and a half cleaver edges that could have taken a Gomorrian in two with one fell chop. Seroth could hear it breathing: sucking in ragged gasps of snow chilled air through the broken bone inlets of its sutured-on horn skull. The lad stepped, avoided a downward slice that crunched into the snow and ice and plumed thick arterial sprays of water-blood, hissing up where the crystalline surface had been cracked. A foetid stench of gore-decay and death swam on the ice-air currents. The illusion of time and space was virtually complete. Seroth had come strolling in to a conservatory layered with ash and blackened topsoil, transported then to a world constructed of blood, ice, and leafless forests surrounding the pit of a grand, frozen over lake.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Hulking, hooked machetes met the humble brawn of knife and axe. Seroth didn’t attempt to outright match the beast, pound for pound, in pure physicality. He resorted to gentle deflection, parrying the cleavers low, knocking them high, ducking in between the spaces of the beast’s arms and gashing weeping cuts through the leather skin of its belly and fat chest. The demon-thing was unperturbed. A swat of a cleaver-flat caught the boy in his shoulder, sailing him high. Seroth turned in an axial spin, landing on his toes and arresting his icy slide with his axe. On came the skull-cultist, moaning a series of incomprehensible phrases. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It brought its machete-strokes in to kill. One ragged chop would have severed the lad’s spine. Another would have sliced over his occiput, throat, and shoulder. Yet, it had found its match. Despite its hulking brutality, waving massive blades with seeming, easy abandon, despite its speed and mean footwork, it had not contended with a warrior of the lad’s upbringing. He moved in fluid dodges, snapping side to side with bursts of controlled energy, countering with axe chops and blade slashes where the over-extended reach of its whirling hooked blades left the creature open. Seroth caught one great sword with the following edge of his axe-bit, leading the blade out wide as he skipped over. His wrist twisted, flicking the axe-haft, bringing the spike-butt to bear. The lad poked a heavy stab in through the skin twixt the beast’s sternum and collarbone, tugging. It fell forward, spraying ichor in thickened slicks across the pearlescent ice and moon-white snow.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Yet it rose, turned to Seroth, and came on again. They fought in silence, beast-thing and ragged man, the quiet only broken by clanging arrests of songsteel meeting duranium and wrought iron. It should not have made mention of Rosa Mazhar’s name. Seroth was a sparing boy. But it had spoken her name in a kind of too-eerie curiosity. The Bando Gora were notorious for having a deceptively wide reach across all corners of the civilized core. They would have damned time finding someone as wily and intelligent as Ms. Mazhar. Seroth would not take that chance. There would be no rebuttals or revenge for this slaughtering outing that had neutered and crippled the occult cell. He parried an overhead chop and a deceptively feinting cleaver-slap that swung back, leaving room for the first to bang the dull peak-butt in against his chest. Seroth pirouetted round to the left and came out of the spin hacking.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A six-fingered, scaled hand came away from its wrist. Still clutched to its daemonic machete, the hand fell wetly as the weapon clattered upon ice. The beast made no sound. It poked the ragged shard of protruding radioulnar joint, slicing a torn flap of skin over the lad’s neck. The second arm whirled overhead. Bleeding down his chest from the tear of throat-flesh, Seroth ducked and rolled, rising with a smashing hack into the beast’s right-most hip and waist as he stayed knelt. The impact jarred, cutting into stinking, dark meat and musculature, puncturing kidney and snapping the lower spine. Loosing a strangled cry, the beast-man fell forward as its grip loosened and dropped the second songsteel machete. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth hadn’t finished and the daemon-thing would take its time dying. He rose, spinning, bringing the spiked butt of his tomahawk down over the creature’s throat. The spike bit in against its windpipe and arterial tubing and drew hard right. His off-hand keeping a crushing grip over the skull-head snapped left. Spinal gristle broke with a wet, vegetable crunch as thickened washes of blackened ichor gushed down over the beast’s swollen chest, its knees and the snowed ice. The ground swung up to meet its pitching brow as it toppled in on itself, broken, dead. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Now curious visages occurred. The land of ice and skeletal forestry began to shiver, milking in and out of sight with bursts of red-on-orange light laced with strange overlays of sketched chalk lines. Seroth held his breath and held tight to the skin of his brow. In its death-throes, his opponent’s semi-mystical glamours were falling apart. Snow melted into slurries of stinking mud and vitae. Writhing chalk outlines solidified into framing bars that spanned overhead and down in enclosing walls, like a glassed cage. Beneath his boots traces of ash and churned dirt reappeared, swallowing the stench of ancient blood and mud the colour of ripped skin. He was back in the conservatory, surrounded by trailing motes of white dust. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Grey eyes blinked shut. There’d been so little in Shev’s day in day out lessons that could have steeled him better for the horrors wrought by the presence of dark side energy. He’d heard from old accounts, notably Jacen Solo, that the Force was simply a multifaceted gem, with every side open to differing interpretations. And then he fell to hubris and arrogance, killed and crippled those in his way and nearly brought the then Galactic Alliance to the edge of civil war. All because he thought he was right in his darkness. No one could dissuade Seroth from believing the Force was a reflection of great, dark intent across its underbelly. These Bando Gora drew their strength from such soul-refuse. They took it, reshaped it, made their realm into whatever hellish mode they wished. The Force could rent reality and displace time, if one’s ability was strong enough. …Or massed enough. The boy came up to the still carcass of the capra cultist and knelt.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He couldn’t tell if it was an original species or some mutated alteration. The artifact stuck against the open cut over its now stilled heart had finally stopped palpitating. Seroth cut the tough, sinewy strings keeping it tied down. It leapt back into its strange trembling. The nonagon spikes pricked and gouged at his palms as he attempted to keep a steady grip. Finally dropping it, Seroth cut a makeshift bag from the loincloth of his dead and brief arch-adversary. The artifact was scooped in and tied off with the same gut-string that had kept it tied in against its former master. Contorting, writhing against the burlap, it gave off a stench of hot sulphur and crisped metal, resounding with echoes of distant brass knells. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Footfalls alerted Seroth to someone’s approach, though he felt them coming some twenty meters prior. Guenyvhar stepped into the conservatory while Stenwulf hanged back and saw to stitching up a ragged gash winding up one Sayda-fighter’s wounded forearm. She still had those chilled, hard green eyes. Mouth set in a permanent frown. Seemingly unimpressed with everything and everyone on a constant basis. She’d too been washed dirty with blood spill, as gritty and worn as the son who stood quietly with the palpitating bundle jumping in his hands. …Then she did something he hadn’t expected.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She smiled. “Hmph.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I found it,” Seroth murmured, passing the damned thing into her ownership.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So I can see. What do you think it is?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He shook his head, blinking, numb. “Something that should not be.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You did fine. We could hear the majority of what they counted for foot soldiers rushing down your way. You didn’t pick up comms. for a while. Stenwulf told that you were probably dead.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“An’ she was a lil’ more inclined ta believe me,” He called with a grunt, exo-skeleton whirring.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen glowered and silenced him with a look. “But here you are. And you killed this thing. You want the blades, the cleavers?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No, mum.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Most Sayda take trophies.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His flint eyes regarded her cool emeralds. “I am not those fighters.”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Mister Professorial Intent was a mannish creature with a sloped skull, a narrow face ending in a pitched angle and growing out into a too long, troll nose. Black teeth clacked together: fake prosthetics fitted over whatever had actually been growing from his yellow gums. He had hair. Somewhat. A bright crown of blue on white that faded into wispy straggling off the blunt bone of his occipital region. It kept dressed in a tightened belted coat fitted with a half-dozen bandoleers stuffed tightly with glassy vials begging question as to what their sloshing contents were. Medicae bags hung off hip loops, belted closed, tight. And long fingers with jaundiced nails, perfectly manicured, clipped together in eagerness.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth hadn’t met him, standing guard in the acid rain with a poncho hood thrown down over his brow. It’d been his mother, Guenyvhar and her partner, Stenwulf, who’d sat inside and haggled over contract specifics. He sat in the back of the seedy liquor den and dance parlour, watching with an appreciative gleam another mannish-humanoid with a woman’s bust and hips dance in nothing but her ochre skin. She turned, winked three eyes down at Seroth and bade him take a seat with a sultry toe of her long leg. The boy turned aside, bee-lining behind Guen. Stenwulf, however, settled in on a front fold out seat and chuckled bawdily. He could hear the man plinking chip-creds onto the stage.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Do you have it?” He asked forthright. His voice was like a crinkle of wet paper. A gnarled hand that looked too much like a rat’s paw hefted a credit wafer: their vouch for pay. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You tell me,” Guen replied. She easily tossed the wriggling bag onto the contractor’s lap. He slapped the wafer down and swiftly undid the gut-string binding, pulling out the shivering nonagon.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes…” He hissed, salivating over the hard rubber of his false teeth. ‘Professorial Intent’ wiped the beads of bracken sweat off his bald pate and impatiently nodded to the credit wafer. “Well go on, have at it. It’s what you worked so hard for. How many died?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen bristled. Seroth felt her ire at this creature’s impudence span the gamut of contempt and then cool control. “None of ours. And very many of theirs.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aaaahh...” He clucked. “Slaying a Bando Gora requires mettle beyond that of ordinary fellows. You must possess many extraordinary fellows. And the one who carried this…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Nodding, the boy took a step in beside his seated mother. “He is dead.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ahhhh, grand news, truly grand!” The cretin cackled and looked up at the lad, appraising him with bloodshot eyes. “…And it was you, boy, who did it in. I can tell. Or rather, I can tell so because I was told.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The damnable thing of strange, unnatural geometry glistened with pale moisture, bouncing against its newest possessor’s palms. “It said so. ‘The grey eyed wolf-man with fire in his heart.’ Truly now, you Sayda have done expressly well. I fully expected someone other than you two – “ He nodded to the letch Stenwufl, then Guenyvhar, commando. “ – to come bearing me news. Most likely that of failure. Ohhh but a happy, happy day. Ninety nine nights I’ve sat here, watching expressions of simpering lust and frustrated physical desire, wafting up at the poor creature your lieutenant now fancies. So many had fallen before in your stead. I’ll be sending praises of the Sayda into every pulse of Terminus for a long time from now on.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The commando facing him tied on the shawl of her camo-cloak, adjusting the reinforced stringing so it rode beneath her strong throat more comfortably. Guen was smiling brightly for a change. Seroth thought it looked too much like a jackal appraising an unguarded dining hall. “We look forward to the business. Stenwulf.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Huh, wha - ? Aww no’ awreade…” He cussed and turned away from his mark. The dancer had sauntered down off the stage and was making heated small talk with the bristle-bearded killer, fascinated by the drawl of his accent, the ice in his eyes, and the unperturbed boldness of his advances. Guenyvhar looked no worse for jealousy or indignation, calling at him while he had his hand cupped to an unclothed breast. “…Fyne. Fethin’ fyne, back to th’ starboawt…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Each threw on the hood of their treated ponchos and walked out into the rage of the Monsoon Year, escorted on either street side by three stacks of individuals similarly dressed. Guen was in a cocky mode of heady victory, loosing a iho-stick from her belt-pack, lighting up beneath the shielded light of a rattling street lamp. It was black and noir, Seroth thought, a weird moment of reality and cinema blending as Terminus was rocked by the fury of unnatural weather. His mother dragged long on the stim-stick, in a rare moment of relaxation. She had pocketed the credit wafer and left the strange, covetous man and his unholy geode to his mutterings and personal successes. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We’ve done well. Enormously well.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Wha’s the take?” Stenwulf asked. He kept a customary hand planted on the thin, steel pommel of his favoured vibro longsword.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Three hundred.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Three hun’red wha’, ma’am?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Three. Hundred. Mill,” She said with an uncharacteristic relish. Satisfaction glistened in her bright, cold eyes, arms flexing with corded muscle.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Stenwulf’s jaw dropped for a change. “Yuu’re shiddin’ me… That little feth, freak wit’ th’ noze was packin’ tha kinda plundah…?? …Why dinn’ we fleece ‘im fer ‘moar…??”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sometimes, Sten, it’s best not to push your luck,” Guen sighed, flicking the spent iho-butt from her gloved fingers. “We’re lucky we came out of that arrangement with as many heads as we did. Couldn’t you tell?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Psfft…” Stenwulf snarked. “Tell wha-?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The dancer could have killed you…” Seroth said softly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Tha’ right, pup?” Stenwulf harked and eyed the lad with the same distanced contempt and derision as he always did. “Dinn’ seem so ‘armful t’me… Mayhap yah jus’ busied wit’ a bit o’ jealousee I ‘ad a beer in one hand an’ a tit in th’ awther?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“She was not enamoured with you,” Seroth replied, in his maddening calm. “She had come closer to you, in case myself and my mother did not reach a good accord with her master by the table. She was watching us.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye, and her hands looked good to snap a fool man’s neck in two,” Guen chuckled, ribbing her beet-red Second. “Course, you didn’t notice, because you’ve been looking for another decent lay since Saijo.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Tha ain’t true…” Stenwulf began to bluster. Guen silenced him with a wave, now glaring at him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Indeed and perhaps you can deign to show me, Mister Stenwulf? In the meantime, next occasion, keep your eyes up and your head clear. We just navigated an intercidere struggle, by the skin of our teeth too. That could have exploded into the three of us having to out-fight even more Bando Gora.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth’s brow furrowed, eyes flashing. His mother caught the look, shrugging. “Yes. Mister ‘Professorial Intent’ is the head of a secondary cult of psychotics, older and more entrenched then the monsters we slayed beneath the Quaille.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…And we just gave back to them a terrible object?” Seroth murmured incredulously through clenched teeth. “When by all rights, we should have destroyed it?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Could we have destroyed it?” Guen replied coyly, seeking to diffuse the now betrayed expression sharpening the stare of her son. “Do we possess the means? If not, what then, my boy? Take it with us? Risk the rather of the Bando Gora to come hunting us down on Tatooine? Nay. What they feel compelled to plot and unfold is none of our affair. The Sayda do as paid to perform. I thought you were savvy to that by now. This isn’t a Jedi mission.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You do not know what I had to see when I fought the creature that… That thing was in possession of!” Seroth shot back. “We have just erred in granting evil further autonomy to commit more terror! This is not a triumph! The coin is meaningless! As meaningless as it was on Commenor! We should have destroyed it…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye, and what then?” Guen sighed, trying to humour her child.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Then destroyed the others.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The commando woman paused from lighting her second iho-stick, looking balefully up to her only spawn. Whom looked back with as much unflinching will. Stenwulf kept his mouth shut, deciding he’d be facing a bad lot if he let his penchant for interrupting snide break the moment. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh yes,” Guen said, biting with sarcasm more acidic than the drips of sickly lime-green rain that patted down around them in near black sheets through the night. “Commit ourselves to uprooting a well funded, well entrenched system of die-hard cultists, possessing who knows what capabilities. All for the sake of staying on the side of ‘moral right.’ Seydon – “[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seroth.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seydon. Listen to me very carefully. Whatever you picked up in the Core, from the Jedi and others? Has no place here. None. This is a business, blood for coin or however we’re tasked to perform. I’m not about to throw my men and women at so-called moral crusade because you feel your scales of right and wrong slighted!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And by your leave, we are allowing a pit of adders to remain uncontested. They will squirm into the dens of the innocent, take them away screaming into the night. By your leave, we are allowing them to make off with an artifact that will increase their dark potency perhaps a hundred fold. They will murder. And mutilate. Destroy and alter. Burn, cut, slash, rape, commit further degeneracy’s for the sake of appealing to the baseness of conscienceless flesh. Appealing to their need to hurt, kill, and dominate.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That’s not our war.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It is not your war, mother…” Seroth growled pointedly, and walked past into the black rain. [/SIZE]