Public An Average Day on Epoch [OPEN]

[Csariden]

An Average Day on Epoch
Odessa, Capital of the Erebus System​

---

“There was a time when darkness ruled this world. They say you can still hear it breathing in the cold.”
—Local proverb, Epochian North

Odessa was born from blood, but she had long since forgotten it.

The capital of Epoch was no mere city—it was a continent-spanning megalopolis, an urban colossus stitched together over centuries of war, wealth, and reclamation. Civic architecture towered in thick stone and industrial alloys. The Epochan Assembly sat at the center like a silver heart, its domed roof etched with the names of former kings and dead despots. Nearby rose the Palace of Odessa—massive, historic, and austere. What had once been the throneworld of tyrants was now a ceremonial seat beneath a commoner-led Assembly.

To the north, beyond the city’s edge, stormwinds scoured the wastes of the Atlas Region—and beyond even that, if one dared believe the tales, lay a forbidden ruin: the Citadel of the Forsaken.
No satellite reached it. No map could hold it.
And no one who looked for it ever came back whole.

But in Odessa?

Today was quiet.

---

“So… you’ve never even touched coaxium before?”

Eline’s smile was wide, teasing. She sipped her chilled caf with both hands wrapped around the cup, elbows tucked inward like the question was a secret.

Across from her, Tarin Fossk flushed a shade pinker than he'd expected. “No. My father said I’d break my teeth on it.”

“Coaxium isn’t that hard.”

“That’s not the point.”

They both laughed. A breeze swept through the plaza café, ruffling the tablecloths. Tourists ambled past with cameras; vendors sold softshells and printed art of the Erebus Gates—the impossible stone spheres hovering in the north. Somewhere behind them, a street musician played an off-world ballad on a slim-stringed instrument.

Tarin reached for her hand, shyly. Eline didn’t stop him.

Neither noticed the trio of blue-skinned men seated across the street. Pantoran, maybe. Or Chiss.
They spoke quietly in a dialect neither could quite parse. They never looked at each other—only toward the Palace.

---

Sergeant Koss Vaine checked his tracker. It pinged green—no anomalies.

Below his perch atop a traffic observation tower, the northern promenade buzzed with motion: transport caravans hauling refinery crates, conscripts on leave from the Military Academy, and a school group touring the Assembly.

He sighed, muting his comlink and removing his helmet.

Epoch had been stable lately. Too stable. The old oligarchs were quiet, the nobles sulking in resort villas, and the Assembly hadn’t had a protest in weeks. Even the Industrial Control Sector was hitting quotas.

Still, the Atlas winds hadn't let up. And the Citadel out there—whatever it was—kept making his spine itch.

He scanned the crowd again.

Blue skin.
A tall figure passed beneath the archways. Long coat. Speeder case. Unremarkable.
Then another.
Then a third, blending into a tram queue.

...Weird.

---

“You don’t get it, Dad,” said the girl, thumbing through a holodisplay of vintage Sithwar holograms. “This is an original 'Mawswept' issue. They only printed 500.”

Her father, grizzled and unimpressed, raised an eyebrow. “Bet none of them are about doing homework.”

She scoffed, then paused. Her hand hovered over a black-and-red framed panel. It showed a stylized depiction of a Force Lord astride a cliff, one hand outstretched to summon a collapsing star.

“Do you remember when he—?” she started.

“No,” her father said quickly. “We don’t remember that man. We remember the crater.”

There was silence for a beat.

Then the girl put the issue back.

---

It started as just an average day on Epoch.​

---

Spoiler: OOC

Welcome! This is an open, sandbox-style beginning centered in and around the capital city of Odessa. All are welcome to write slice-of-life, political, casual, or secretive scenes.

However... this will not remain a social thread for long.

You're encouraged to explore, interact, or simply pass through—but this is only the calm before the storm.

 

[Malrok Duskwell]

INTO THE TEETH OF THE STORM​

The wind shrieked like a wounded god.

Snow tore sideways across the black cliffs, fraying into daggers against flesh, stone, and steel. Lightning forked in bruised skies overhead, each strike casting fractured shadows over the mountain path—the only passage into the Atlas Region that hadn’t been erased by time, frost, or war.

At the front of the formation, a lone figure advanced through the chaos.

A short spear carved a path ahead of him, humming low with unnatural resonance—its tip dripping silent defiance against the storm. The wind seemed to recoil from the weapon, just slightly, and the Force-shrouded world around it winced.

Behind him followed a procession of cloaked figures, faceless beneath tattered hoods. Their forms were careful, efficient, quiet. Not quite soldiers. Not quite alive. Each bore a burden of some kind, veiled beneath dark armor and insulated crates. No words passed between them. Only the crunch of snow and the low pulse of the spear guided their ascent.

Malrok Duskwell did not look back. He was in too deep now. Condoriah was across the galaxy. Home was far out of reach. Until the day he could be free of his debts, he served, one job at a time. The Heartlander pulled his cloak tighter in a futile attempt to warm himself, but the cold wasn't what made him shiver.

The mountain knew what they carried. The storms had already begun to scream. Through the veil of sleet and psychic pressure, he crunched his boots in the ice and pressed forward. Into the Hungry Dark ahead.

He was here to break what could not be tamed. He was a phlegmatic shield against the choleric energies.

He was a monster, but he had sold his free will when he left Safeld.

 

[Thalen Dhorain]

Tags: Open for now

Thalen sat amongst the streets of Odessa, his gaze travelling amongst the various other civilians walking past them all. How curious. Everyone walking around as if they didn't have a care in the Galaxy. Of course there were a few who seemed quite nervous. Perhaps stressed. But for now Thalen let his gaze just wander. So this is what the Deep Core was like. Perhaps he should visit Coruscant next, yet there was a small pushing from the Force in the back of his mind that insisted he spent the day here. And who was Thalen, but a tool of the Force's Will? An empty smile spread across his face as he kept his hands hidden amongst the sleeves of his robes.

He flipped through a datapad for a moment, seeing what was trending at the moment. Thalen never quite cared for all of the shenanigans of the HoloNet. He had never quite been able to wrap his head around it all. He understood technology to an extent, but who cared about all of this trending nonsense? With that, he lifted his head up from the datapad and turned his attention to the crowd once more, before noting something quite peculiar that stood out to him. Chiss, Pantorans, and other blue skinned species weren't a surprise in the Galaxy. Thalen had already lost count of the various amount of species he had seen in his travels, yet there was something that stood out to him about the trio of Blue-Skinned men wandering through the streets.

"How...intriguing."

The smile rose for a moment, a small glimmer of something twinkling in Thalen's crystal eye as he shifted his hands out of his sleeves, interlocking his fingers together and resting his chin atop of them and just let his gaze follow the trio. It was time to watch and wait. See what was going on. He was an observer. A witness of the Force. Perhaps his paranoia was playing up again...but if there was something about to happen, Thalen wanted to have front row seats...and if he ended up getting dragged into something...Well, it had been a while since Thalen had gotten to stretch his arms out.

 

[Eivii]

Outfit: Durasteel Armor
Weapons: Slugthrower Rifle | Blaster Pistol
Location: Odessa, Enoch

She'd almost said yes.

The briefing had come through a scrambled relay—Csariden's name coded in reverse, the location ping buried behind a half dozen corpse-routed nodes. When she'd decrypted the payload and read the objective, her first instinct was bitterly familiar:

Execute. Exfil. Erase the witnesses.

It had been so easy once. She used to tell herself the galaxy was a rot that needed carving, and she was the knife. The Chiss had been ghosts, silent and surgical. But this?

This was something else.

She stood now on the upper rim of a transit hub, eyes scanning the crowd below like crosshairs itching for an excuse. Three Pantoran schoolkids jostled by a vending kiosk. An old couple feeding synthdoves. A street preacher railing about Sith bloodlines with a broken mic. And above it all, the domed crown of Palace of Odessa gleamed like a target. Her fingers curled reflexively near the safety of her rifle. Not to raise it. Just to feel it. Like a bad habit she hadn’t kicked.

She could walk away. Let Epoch burn. She wasn’t from here. These weren’t her people. But then Nos’s face flashed through her mind—the way he’d looked when he bled for someone else. When she’d reached for his scar and he hadn’t stopped her, even though he should have.

He had survived her.
Maybe she could survive herself.

Be the kind of woman he could love again…

Eivii exhaled sharply through her nose. Self-loathing always tasted better with a hint of hope. She stepped back from the ledge and melted into the crowd, her armor hidden beneath a scuffed cloak, her face unreadable.

The others hadn’t noticed her yet—the agents. The ones who looked like her. Spoke like her. Marched toward murder like it was cultural duty.

She wouldn’t stop all of them. But she could do something. she spotted one of the cloaked figures, a glint of durasteel implants, a flash of crimson eyes behind shades.

She began to tail him. She had to find the payload.

Csariden Malrok Duskwell Thalen Dhorain — open to interaction​

 

[Csariden]

---

“You’re smiling at me again,” Eline teased, brushing her hair back. “What’s wrong with you?”

Tarin blinked, startled. Then shrugged.

“Nothing. I just… like this. It’s nice. You’re nice.”

“That’s disgusting.”
But she was smiling too.

He reached for his drink—then paused. Across the plaza, two uniformed maintenance droids had stopped mid-sweep. Their lights blinked blue. One jerked slightly, its clawed limb twitching before rebooting with a high-pitched whine.

Nobody else seemed to notice.

Tarin frowned.

“You ever get that feeling?” he asked.

“That something’s about to go horribly wrong?” Eline offered.

“…Yeah.”

“Every time I agree to see you again.”
She nudged his leg with her foot beneath the table, but her gaze lingered on the Palace dome. Just a moment too long.

---

Sergeant Koss Vaine adjusted the zoom on his optics. No alerts. No heat signatures. But something about the rhythm of the crowd bothered him.

Too many pauses. Too many glances. Like people were waiting for something.

He flipped to public frequency logs—no HoloNet outages. No emergency drills. Still…

There was a subtle shift in the wind. A dry pressure on the air, like static before a storm.

“Koss to Dispatch. Northern promenade clear. Recommend running a secondary systems diagnostic on metro sector Theta-Five. Got a few sync hiccups on the grid.”

He didn’t wait for a reply. He was probably just jumpy.

It had been a long time since Epoch felt this quiet.

---

“And here, my darlings, we have the Assembly Hall—one of the last Pre-Gulag civic structures still in active use!”

Lady Imarria Vex, dowager of House Vex and part-time historical docent, gestured dramatically with a silver-tipped cane. A half-dozen teenage girls from Kalakar stood in various stages of polite boredom, clutching stylus-tablets and rolling their eyes beneath thick hoods.

“This mural,” she continued, “was commissioned by the Fossk regime as a warning to off-world agitators. Do note the scale of the boot compared to the protestor. Very stylized. Very Imperial.”

One girl raised her hand.

“Lady Vex? Are those… soldiers?”

The noblewoman turned.

Three tall figures in heavy cloaks had just exited a side tram tunnel, slipping silently into the crowd without hesitation. Their boots left wet scuffs on the marble. Their faces were masked, not uncommon in Odessa’s winter. But their movements—

—They moved like people used to being shot at.

Imarria’s voice softened.

“No, dear. I believe they’re just tourists.”

She pulled her coat tighter.

---

No one noticed the wind shift. Not yet.​

---

 

[Malrok Duskwell]

THE EREBUS GATES​

They passed the treeline before the last of the snowlight faded.

The wind no longer howled—it watched. The storm had grown silent here. Not weaker. Not calm. Just... waiting.

Ahead, the mountains narrowed into a corridor of nightmares.

Two spires of jagged obsidian jutted from the white earth, forming a yawning pass between them. Suspended in the void above, a perfect sphere of black stone hung in defiance of gravity. Its surface was unmarked. Untouched. Unaged.

Malrok slowed his pace.

The ground here felt thinner. Not physically—but beneath it. Like something beneath his boots had been peeled back to make room for whatever force kept that monolith in the air. A chill rolled down his spine that had nothing to do with the cold.

The Revenants began to falter.

He could hear the crunch of staggered steps behind him. One dropped to a knee, clutching their head beneath the hood. Another let out a low static murmur, distorted through whatever voice modulator lay hidden beneath the layers. They weren’t speaking in Basic. Not anymore.

“Hold the line.”

Malrok’s voice was gravel, torn thin by altitude and disdain. He dug the butt of the spear into the frost, letting the Phlegmite crystal pulse outward in a low, steady thrum. The air recoiled around him. The smell of ozone burned away. Some invisible thread snapped behind his eyes.

Two of the revenants straightened—barely—but the damage had been done. A third convulsed violently before continuing forward like a broken puppet.

“Don’t listen to it.”

He wasn’t sure who he was talking to. The revenants. Himself. The screaming silence between the peaks.

The Gates of Erebus didn’t guard anything. They invited the mind to collapse under its own weight.

He pressed forward, muttering nothing, thinking nothing, breathing in short, controlled rhythms. The storm clawed at the edge of his null field like it wanted to pour in and fill him, like it hated the void where the Force remained neutral.

Let it hate.

He didn’t have the strength to pity it.

 

[Malrok Duskwell]

ARCTIC CIRCLE​

Beyond the Erebus Gates, the world died again.

There were no more mountains. No markers. No path.

Only the blizzard.

The Arctic Circle stretched in every direction like a blank page cursed never to be written on. Snowfall poured sideways, then upward, then downward again, as if gravity had forgotten what to obey. The light overhead was colorless. Neither day nor night, caught in a perpetual gray that scraped across the land like steel wool.

The Revenants began to flicker.

Their cloaks danced in impossible patterns, limbs jerking in short-lived spasms. One stopped moving altogether, frozen in place. Maybe from cold, maybe from something inside fracturing. Malrok didn’t stop for them. He couldn’t, not if he wanted to survive. To see the green fields and sanguinite hills of Safeld again.

The wind howled across the wastes, laced with voices.

Laughter. Mocking. High-pitched and wrong, as if the blizzard were a child’s broken toy, repeating its unnerving sounds endlessly. Distorting all the while.

Malrok shoved his spear into the permafrost and dropped to one knee. He let the Phlegmite crystal pulse out again. Wider this time. Deeper. Straining himself to keep the bubble of even temper around him. The air cracked like thin glass—something inside the storm flinched, and for just a moment, a circular ring of calm widened around him. The Revenants closest to him stopped twitching. The rest stayed lost. They would be left behind. The payload could be carried by the rest of them.

His breath steamed out in front of him, visible only for a moment before the wind shredded it to pieces. He looked forward. There was nothing to see. Just more white. More storm. More silence.

But beneath it—far beneath it—he could feel it. The Citadel was waiting.

He rose again, tightening the wrappings around his gauntlets, and pressed onward into the storm, spear first, silence trailing like a ghost behind him.

They were not walking toward salvation.
They were delivering fury to a place that should remain buried in snow.

 

[Eivii]

Outfit: Durasteel Armor
Weapons: Slugthrower Rifle | Blaster Pistol

She spotted him weaving through the spice vendor stalls near the transit loop—tall, blue-skinned, hood pulled low like a shadow refused to let go of his features.
It wasn’t the walk that gave him away. It was the weight, the bulk of equipment under a cloak.

Eivii slipped through the press of bodies and intercepted him near a row of kiosks, brushing past a pair of tourists with a murmured “sorry.” Her cloak dropped open just enough to show her hip-holster. A silent announcement. She wasn’t asking.

“K'ari'chun'vossin.” Her voice was low. Direct. Formal enough to sting. “You drop the dialect or I will.”

The agent turned. Cool red eyes. No insignia. But the shape of the satchel against his ribs told her everything.

Thermals. Three, maybe four. Wire-rigged. Quick-grab loops. They were ready. He said nothing. Just stared, waiting to be challenged.

Eivii’s hand twitched near her cloak. Not to draw—but to feel the difference. Her old self would've killed him already. Or carried a satchel herself.
“You're going to blow up a cultural archive. With civilians inside.” Her voice shook. “This isn’t vengeance. It’s pathetic. It's cowardice with a manifesto.”

Still he said nothing.
A pause.
She didn't like being ignored.
She raised her voice.

“They aren’t the ones who shattered Csilla!”

Silence.
Everything around them stilled like a held breath. Nearby conversation stopped. A holopad vendor blinked. A food cart worker turned off his grill. Merchants sellers hesitated mid-sale.

Eivii stepped forward, pointing at the satchel. “If you think wiping out a building full of bystanders makes you a martyr, you were never Chiss to begin with!”

The agent’s hand moved slightly toward his cloak.
She didn’t care.

“I used to be like you. I know how this story ends. It's not glory. It's not legacy. It’s your own people digging you out of rubble wondering what the hell happened.”

A child started crying somewhere. The air was too still regardless.
Her voice dropped to a whisper meant to cut deeper than a shout.

“You're not a chartic of revenge. You're a coward following a madman.”

She didn’t know if he’d pull. She didn’t care if he did. She was done being quiet.

Csariden Thalen Dhorain (loud enough to be heard).​

 

[Csariden]

---

“Tarin.”

Eline had stopped mid-sentence.

She wasn’t looking at him anymore. Her eyes were focused over his shoulder, toward the northern archways where a light shuttle had just finished offloading.

Three figures stepped into the plaza.
Not the same as before.
Heavier coats. Tighter movements. One adjusted their sleeve—just enough for a black carbine grip to flash in the light.

Tarin turned slowly, trying not to seem obvious.
This trio moved like security—but there were no unit patches, no holotags. No reason for them to be here.

One of them looked up. Just a glance. Then turned away.

“…I don’t think they’re tourists,” he muttered.

Eline didn’t answer. She was already getting up.

---

Sergeant Vaine’s scope focused on a rooftop.

Someone had taken position just across from the Palace.
Not unusual in theory—journalists sometimes filmed from that level. But this wasn’t a cam-drone operator. This one was kneeling.

A rifle sling flapped loose against the wind.

Koss exhaled through his nose.

“Control, this is Vaine. We’ve got armed overwatch at grid 34-Kappa, northeast view of central spire. Masked. Cloaked. No visible insignia.”

A pause.
No reply.

“…Control, confirm line.”

His headset crackled. Faint static. Then silence.

He flipped his failsafe to standby and checked his sidearm.

---

Lady Imarria Vex adjusted her earrings as she waited for the girls to finish their pictures.

She hated public days. Tourists walked too slow and nobles didn’t walk at all. At her age, you didn’t have the patience for either.

Still, something tickled the edge of her instincts.

There were more of them now—cloaked ones. No longer just passing through. They were holding. One by the monument stairs. One by the tram depot entrance. Another at the fountain, still as stone.

Each in different places. But each looking the same way.
Toward the Palace.

Imarria narrowed her eyes.
It was an old feeling, but she knew it well.
The moment before the firing line opens.

She tapped her cane once.
“Girls,” she said, “stay behind me.”

---

Korlith Jenni, Epoch Public Transit Tier II Surveillance Supervisor, was about to regret staying late.

He sat hunched in front of a six-panel holoscreen, flicking through tram bay overlays. Most were the usual crowd: tourists, bureaucrats, refinery workers.

But Bay Twelve…
He leaned in.

There were six men.
All hooded. All still. Each facing different directions—except for one, who looked directly into the camera. Not accidentally. Not nervously.

Deliberately.
White hair.
Blue skin.
Cybernetic red eye glowing unnaturally.

Korlith sat back.
Then watched as the man reached into his coat.
Pulled a device.

Pointed it at the camera.

Bay Twelve went black.

He didn’t even have time to raise the alarm before screen after screen winked out, one by one, like stars being swallowed.

He reached for his comlink—
—and froze.

One of them was in the hallway.

They weren’t moving.
They were waiting.​

---

“They aren’t the ones who shattered Csilla!”

The words cut through the plaza like a vibroblade.

Eline froze in place halfway through standing. Tarin was already looking.

Across the crowd, a woman in a dark cloak was shouting—at another Chiss. Not debating. Not drunk. Confronting him. Loud. Angry.

The man didn’t respond.
But the satchel on his side?

Tarin saw it. So did three other people nearby. One of them reached for a comlink. Another pulled their child back instinctively. The hum of the plaza seemed to tilt off-balance, like gravity had shifted just a few degrees in the wrong direction.

Eline’s voice was small.

“…She said ‘detonator.’”

“We need to go.”

But they couldn't bring their feet to move.
They couldn’t look away.

---

Sergeant Koss Vaine’s headset finally crackled back online—just in time to catch the word ‘coward.’

He snapped his optics toward the square.

Civilians were staring. Backing away from a single, intense confrontation near the lower vendor rows. One woman—Chiss, armored beneath a cloak—stood face-to-face with a cloaked male agent. She was shouting something about Csilla. About martyrs. Her voice carried, edged with fury.

Koss knew that posture.

That’s the posture before someone draws iron.

He gritted his teeth and opened a wideband channel.

“Dispatch, we have a situation at Northern Promenade Tier 3. Verbal confrontation with possible armed participants. Visual on untagged satchel. No gun drawn yet. Crowd is shifting. We need eyes, now.”

No reply.

“Dispatch, confirm line—”

Silence again.
He looked up.

The figure on the rooftop looked back at Koss through the scope of his Charric.
Another Chiss.

The last thing Sargent Koss Vaine ever saw was a microsecond flash of plasma from the barrel of that rifle.

---

Lady Imarria Vex heard the shouting from the other side of the square. Blaster fire from the street.

She knew that tone. Knew it from protests, from riots, from the last time someone had called down death on this city.

She turned back to the girls.

“Inside. Now.”

“But Lady Vex—”

“Move!”

One of the cloaked figures by the monument stairs turned slightly. Just a tilt of the head. Imarria met his gaze across the open square, and for a heartbeat—
—he smiled.

She ushered her students into the archive annex, fast and firm, her heart pounding like war drums behind her ribs.

She heard the hum of a vibroblade activating behind her.

---

Korlith Jenni, Tier II Surveillance Supervisor, watched the feed go black.

The woman on camera was yelling. He couldn’t hear her, but the thermal bloom on her target’s chestplate said enough.

Then the plaza cameras cut.

Then the metro line.

Then—
—all of them.

He stood too quickly, knocking over his chair, fumbling for the failsafe reboot switch.

Too late.

The lights in the surveillance room flickered.

He heard footsteps behind the door.

---

The silence was over.​

---

 

[Malrok Duskwell]

THE VALLEY OF SORROW​

The wind dropped away the moment they crossed the ridgeline.

The Valley of Sorrow stretched out beneath them like a wound too wide to heal. Jagged cliffs framed either side, their faces carved with giants—statues of forgotten kings, warrior-monks, cloaked seers. Some bore weapons. Others simply watched. All mourning.

Snow fell in perfect silence. Even the Revenants stopped for a breath.

Malrok did not. He could not allow himself to hesitate.
He pushed forward, spear held low, boots grinding frost into the old path. The storm circled this place like a noose—unseen above, yet present in every step. He could feel it press down around them, closing tighter with every meter. No aircraft passed here. Nothing escaped.

And still… someone had once carved those faces into the stone.
He wondered if they regretted it now.
Behind him, another Revenant collapsed.
This time, Malrok did stop.

The figure trembled on hands and knees, armor crusted with frost, shoulders seizing as if something inside them tried to crawl free. Their voice—if it was theirs—rattled like wind through a cracked skull. Words in no language. Just gibberish, just pain.

Malrok stepped back, placed the haft of his spear against the Revenant’s shoulder, and let the null-field pulse inward.
The convulsions stopped. The body stilled.
Alive or dead, it didn’t matter. They would carry what they could.

He turned to the others and nodded once. The cloaked figures moved in silence, lifting the body like debris from a battlefield. There was no ceremony.
Only duty.

At the valley’s end, a shape began to rise through the snow—far beyond, past the haze, beyond where the statues watched and the storm whispered and the world forgot to breathe.

The Citadel was near.

He could feel its hatred licking at the edges of the Phlegmite crystal.
He could feel its memory.

A temple, aged by millenia. A place concentrated in the hot humours. A nexus.
The Chiss he served didn't care about the Force. They cared about the history of the structure. Destroyed Legacy, or some such. The blue people lost their homeworld and, unlike Malrok, they could never return.

It was why he was shielding these cybernetic murderers from unnatural storms so they could ferry a seismic charge to the end of this godsforsaken world.

Only a few more kilometers to go.

 

[Csariden]

---

Korlith Jenni’s hands were shaking.

He backed away from the console, one step at a time, heart hammering behind his ribs.

The figure in the hallway hadn’t moved.
Not fast. Not loud.
Just… there.

Blue-skinned. Tall. Eyes hidden behind angular lenses. A long coat darkened by frost or ash hung down to his boots. He looked like someone who had been standing there far longer than he should’ve.
As if he’d always been part of the room, just unnoticed.

He stepped forward.

Korlith gasped and raised a trembling hand.
“Hey! This is a secure—”

The lights cut out.

---

❖ CSARIDEN ❖
Rebuilt For Revenge.

One hand extended toward the wall-mounted relay port. Microspikes deployed from his wristplate, threading into the junction like surgical instruments seeking arteries.

A low thrum passed through the system as he exhaled.

Terminate. Dissect. Sever.

Screens blinked. Cameras bled static.
Odessa’s surveillance lattice fell—not all at once, but with surgical precision. Like veins being cut in sequence.

"You’ve lived on a grave long enough to forget the screaming."

He did not look at the technician until the task was complete.
When he did, his eye burned crimson behind the mask lenses—glowing faint red from behind frost-lined filters.

Furious.
Righteous.
Exact.

"I’m here to remind you."

He turned, cloak whispering against durasteel flooring as he moved deeper into the dark, sliding the High-frequency Vibroblade back into its sheathe, walking out into the chaos of Odessa's streets.

Just after, the bisected technician slid into two wet thuds on the floor.

@OPEN – come one and all, witness revenge​

 

[Malrok Duskwell]

THE CITADEL OF THE FORSAKEN​

The storm finally broke.

Malrok emerged into the eye like a corpse rising from the sea, frost clinging to his beard, cloak torn, the Phlegmite spear dim with exhaustion. The Revenants were gone. Not all at once. Not heroically. Just gone. Swallowed by the journey, the storm, their own minds.

Only he remained, dragging the repulsor sled with the payload behind him.
Before him loomed the Citadel of the Forsaken.

Its spires reached like fingers clawing at the underbelly of the sky—black stone slick with memory, warped by purpose. Doors that had never opened groaned with anticipation. Something old waited inside. Something that had once worn the title Dark Lord and left its scent in the mortar.

He didn’t look up, he only did what he must. He dragged the payload behind him.

The seismic charge hovered across the obsidian floor. No Revenants remained to lift it. No allies to help him reach the heart. Just his breath, the weight, and the void trailing behind his footsteps like a scar.

He reached the central chamber.

Alchemical tables that had crumbled to dust. Mummified carcasses blinked in jars that no longer fed them. A rusted throne slumped beneath layers of ash and ichor.

Malrok placed the Void-8 "PLZ" charge on the dais.

There was no need for ceremony.
He primed the detonation and walked.

The Citadel screamed behind him. Not physically. Not yet. The structure knew. The dark presence of the nexus assailed at his Phlegmatic protection. He did not linger a moment longer than necessary.

He crossed the valley again without looking back. Only footsteps in snow already being erased by the storm’s return. He reached the edge of the ridgeline when the mountain dropped away behind him.

A bloom of implosion shattered the world around the structure.

Two kilometers of obsidian and ancient hate vanished into a single flattened crater, consumed from the inside out. The sky blinked white, then closed over the ruin. No smoke, just ripples in the dirt and stone below, fresh cracks and hills to accommodate the new... Landing pad, if the device was used for its appropriate design.

Malrok stood there for a long time.
He did not smile.
He did not mourn.
He simply recorded the moment in his mind, for the future.
He turned from the ruin and began the long walk down the mountain—same pace, same silence, as if nothing had changed at all.

Before he forgot entirely, he turned with a datapad, and snapped a short video of the ruined structure. Maybe that would be enough evidence for a payout from Csariden. He wished he had been looking at the implosion and filmed it.

"Oh well." he muttered, voice hoarse. “Theres always the next time.”

The wind swallowed his words. A long journey was ahead of him.

 

[Eivii]

Outfit: Durasteel Armor
Weapons: Slugthrower Rifle | Blaster Pistol

The rooftop blaster shot cracked like thunder through glass.

A clean, precise charric report. A soldier’s weapon. High vantage. The kind you use to start a war.

The plaza snapped.

Screams tore through the vendor stalls. Children wailed. Someone knocked over a food cart in a clatter of synthoil and char. A flock of synthdoves exploded into the air.

And the man in front of her—her own kind, her own blood—reached for his weapon.

She caught his wrist with a slap so sharp it cracked the air.

No words. No warning.

Her other hand shot up and palm-struck his nose with brutal force—shattering cartilage, flooding his sinuses with blood and disorientation. The agent staggered—

—and she didn’t stop.

Heel of her hand to the throat. Chop to the diaphragm. Knee to the groin, fast and rising.

He folded.

She tore the blaster free from his holster and pressed it to his temple.

“Sick of this chit.”

She pulled the trigger.

A bright bolt lanced clean through his skull. He collapsed in the dust.

Return fire whined through the plaza as the Orphans of Csilla opened up. Gunmen burst from cover, civilians screamed and scattered. One detonator went rolling into the open. Another agent drew a pistol and fired at a vendor stall Eivii had already ducked behind.

Her body moved faster than her brain.

She dropped to one knee, rolled, and fired a controlled three-round burst into the chestplate of a second agent across the fountain. His vest caught one shot—but not the second or third. He dropped.

She turned, exhaled once, and loosed a suppressive volley while retreating behind a tram pillar. The concrete hissed with heat from enemy bolts.

Somewhere behind her, civilians were crying, running, dying.

And still she moved.

Not a mission. Not an op. Not for pay. Not even for survival.

This wasn’t about ghosts anymore.
She was furious. The hypocrisy of it all.

Csariden is a dead man.

This was for the ones screaming now. For the kids in the tram queue. For the stupid tourist with the datapad still filming.

This was the only thing that felt right.

She leaned from cover and sighted a third agent creeping low beside a spice crate.

One shot clean through the spine.

Then she ran, cloak flaring, deeper into the plaza’s chaos.

Her voice called out once—half-command, half-dare:

“You want to avenge Csilla? Quit hiding behind brainwashed spacers!"

The firefight raged.

So did she.

Csariden Thalen Dhorain – the chaos has begun.​

 

[Csariden]

❖ CSARIDEN ❖
Rebuilt For Revenge.

He walked into the storm of panicked bodies and bloodied stone. The wind pulled at his coat. The flames licked at his boots. The screams washed around him like static noise.

A guard leveled a blaster rifle.

“Down on the gro—”

The man’s voice cut off with the swift note of metal through flesh. Csariden’s vibroblade parted him from collar to hip—one strike, no follow-up.

Another bolt fired from above.
Targeting arc.
Trajectory mapped.

He moved even as it still fired, no Jedi precognition involved, just lightning-fast cybernetic reflex and movement. A spin. A shriek of metal against plasma. The bolt deflected—redirected mid-motion into a fuel cart, which exploded behind him in a fan of screaming heat. He didn’t flinch.

Two more guards took up flanking positions.

Too slow.

He advanced, his cybernetic limbs accelerating, servos singing under tension, vibroblade humming high with kill-frequency. One parried. He lost the arm. The other tried to fall back.

The blade thrust upward into the man’s torso, then split outward with a snap-arc lunge, casting blood across the promenade’s banners.

He turned.

Aheah, ducked behind cover, weapon leveled in defiance was a woman of shared blood. Eivii

“I should have known.”

His voice cut through the din—filtered through the vocoder’s metallic crawl.

“You never believed in revenge. Just the thrill of the knife.”

He stepped forward. Slow. Sword dragging behind him with a whispering hiss against the stone.

“You wept for Csilla once. Spoke of fire. Of reckoning. Of longing for the homeworld, the birthright you were denied. Now you shelter cowards, for what? Some sudden conscience you've decided to develop?”

He pointed the vibroblade at her like a war crime remembered.

“Your'e already a killer, just as guilty as I. Now you forsake purpose. You are nothing but a turncoat now, a traitor dealing half-measure."
"I do not mourn traitors.”

He held his blade in a ready stance.

“I make an example of them.”

His cybernetic eye burned red.

I built you for this. And you broke yourself.

The world burned around them.

Eivii — No more hiding.​

 

[Eivii]

Outfit: Durasteel Armor
Weapons: Slugthrower Rifle | Blaster Pistols (Dual-Wielded)

She stepped from cover without ceremony—shoulders squared, cloak torn from shrapnel, hair singed at the tips. Both pistols drawn.

Her gaze swept over Csariden’s path of ruin—the split bodies, the firelit gore, the banners soaked in blood. Her ancestors' banners. His war.

He pointed the blade like like a showman.
She holstered one pistol.

Lifted the other.

And fired once into the street beside him.
The bolt sizzled past his foot, gouging a crater into the stone.

Her voice came quiet. Tight. Like something held in the teeth too long.

“You didn’t build me.”

She stepped forward.

“You didn't build anything.”

She shouldn’t have come. Should’ve waited. Gotten tested. Told Nos—
No. He had enough on his plate.
This wasn’t about a maybe. This was about now.
And if there was something real growing inside her she wasn’t going to let this ktah be the one who wrote the story they would learn.

She fired again, twice now, center-mass, to drive him off balance. The moment the second bolt left the chamber, she pivoted, drew the second blaster, and moved.

A full sprint.

Directly at him.
Every muscle ached with the memory of other missions, other sins.
But this wasn’t like those. This wasn’t a job or a grudge.
This was a choice. Maybe the first real one she’d made in years.
If she died here—so be it.
But if she lived…
…she was going to protect everything Nos didn’t know he’d already given her.

The pillars of fire behind her cast elongated shadows. Wind tore through the square, stirring ash and ruined banners. Charric fired, Civilians scattered. Guards fell. Screams melted into background static.

And between it all—
Two killers of Csilla closed the distance.
One to avenge it.
One to bury what’s left.

Eivii slid low, twin pistols hammering precision bursts at his left flank. Then she vaulted the shattered debris of a guard kiosk, twisting mid-air to fire downward at his shoulder joint before landing hard on one knee.

“You want to be the monster they blame?”

She reloaded in a blur.

“Fine.”

Her eyes locked with his, jaw tight with memory.

“But you’re not taking me with you.”

Csariden – One of us ends here.​

 

[Csariden]

❖ CSARIDEN ❖
Rebuilt For Revenge.

The first bolt scorched past his foot.

A warning. A challenge.

The second and third came center-mass shots, not desperate.

She’s not afraid. Good.

Csariden’s heel twisted on the stone. Servos hissed as his frame dipped low—one bolt seared across his shoulder, flash-frying synthetic fibers and blackening alloy. The other struck the edge of his vibroblade, screaming deflection in a shower of ion sparks, following through in an acrobatic corkscrew spin, landing gracefully on his feet, smoking vibroblade returning to a high guard position.

“You didn’t build me.”

He straightened just as she charged.

He met her advance in silence, cloak billowing back. His high-frequency blade shrieked against the tram rail as he pivoted, deflecting two of her side-bursts with twitch-reflex protocol. One bolt glanced off his flankplate. Another burst sliced through his shoulder cloak, exposing the gleam of reinforced plating beneath.

She vaulted the kiosk, firing downward mid-air. Csariden threw himself into a low spin, blade trailing like a turbine. One shot hissed past his prosthetic jaw—another pinged against his forearm plate.

She landed.

He was already moving.

In a single, fluid motion, he closed the gap—shoulder-first, trying to slam her mid-guard and drive her back toward the fountain’s stone rim. The edge of his blade followed in a rising arc lethal and brutal. Aimed for the left side of her ribcage, to cleave her.

The hum of his weapon sounded like a scream cut short.

“You broke oath, Elaeiviilomer.”

The name hit like a curse.

He followed the attack with a tight sidestep, keeping the fountain at her back, trying to deny her escape vector. His cybernetic eye flared—tracking pulse, thermal spread, adrenal readout.

And something else.

Slightly elevated heartrate. Tightness through the hips. Hesitation before the charge.

A sick recognition flickered in his voice.

“You came into the fire carrying something fragile.”

He raised the blade—not to strike, but to point.

“You’re not protecting life. You’re using it as a shield.”

He spat blood from where a bolt had grazed his mouthplate.

“You want to defend the people of Epoch? You'd risk ONE OF OURS on these people? The SAME BLOOD AS THE BASTARDS OF THE MAW!?”

His fury turned cold.

“Then die with them.”

He surged forward again, left hand reaching to grip her cloak while the vibroblade came crashing in a thrust at her belly. To test if her conviction held up under steel and fury. To prevent another generation born and left ignorant what was lost.

Eivii – There is no more mercy in me.​