Private Bad Feeling About This

[Jerec Asyr]

The Pomojema
Deep Space

The ship was a One Sith shuttle in great condition, a little dated but sleek and sharp-edged. Jerec took his shaking hands off the controls and rubbed at the ring that Dissero had made him. The karking thing always felt cold, made him sore.

But in the Force it made him feel like a Sith, which went hand in hand with the black robe and the chunky gold jewelry and the Sithliner Prazutis soft black eyeliner and the claws bolted onto his lightsaber.

"This may be a bad time," he said to Cato Fett , peering out the canopy at the Pomojema's docking bay, "but I still can't pick a good Darth name."

 

[Cato Fett]

“Is it orthodox to strictly have one?” Cato asked. He stood off behind Jerec’s shoulder at the pilot seat, peering over the Ithorian’s eye-bridge to the central view screen. Minute starlight pricked through the void, no larger than the bore of sewing needle. They’d made the drop to realspace somewhere outside charted hyperlanes and were cruising genially on half-impulse motivation. The shuttle engines were fairly purring, leaving a soft vibration in the shuttle decking palpable under his reinforced boot soles.

“Recall some old stories, from before the plagues,” He said. “A student turned warlord. Ulic Qel-Droma. He defeated the Mandalore and earned himself the loyalty of many warbands. They say he was Sith and he never took the name, far as the legend goes. It’s a precedent. …Look.”

A hard outline glided into a stab of bright, stark light streaking through deep void. The broad and sepulchral Pomojema, fabricated along the lines of traditional Korriban mausoleums, with a coffin-esque forward bow scowling against prevailing solar winds. Cato’s grip strayed to his Asahi daisho. Their edges had been thrice passed over with a whetstone, cleaned, oiled, readied for altercation. His knuckles cracked dully in the sudden, swallowed quiet. “…Whatever happens, Mr. Asyr, I’ll be with you. Burcyan.”

 

[Jerec Asyr]

Jerec eased the shuttle into the docking bay like a fish into a firaxa's mouth. "Oh, we'll be fine. Juuust fine. The ring's the real deal, so are you. My big-"

The shuttle landed a little harder than normal. He winced. Ithorians had worse reflexes and coordination than humans, by a bit anyway. The Force compensated for that, mostly, inconsistently.

"My big issue is the eyeliner. Is it too much for...Buulic Delkoma, independent Sith Knight? Nah, the way I hear it, this place is picky but new. They don't want to kill off the folks who show up, even if I don't meet their standards."

He got up from the controls and straightened his black robe.

"Let's get Sithy, comrade."

 

[Cato Fett]

Mind of No Mind. Cato exhaled and kept time with his heart rate briefly, cleansing his thought process. His focus transformed to the immediate now and retarded emotional output, reflexes keyed to micro-second response. A swift, final check over: armour, harness-webbing beneath, swords, knives, micro-machined gauntlets, the jetpack weight clipped to his shoulder blades, the snub-barrelled EE-3 composited with aftermarket close-quarter additions and modifications. Light arsenal, limited, but it provided perfect mobility. He fell into step behind Jerec’s gait and followed him out of the cockpit.

The landing ramp jawed open. As a swift afterthought, Cato released a pressure valve nestled in the banded piping, pouring out a venting, cold cloud. To the hanger deck crew, observing the arrivals, they evoked a pair of fur-edged shadows departing the landed spacecraft in obscuring shroud. Detached and reserved, otherworldly. Suitably in-character. Industrial glow-globes installed high in the bulkhead rafters raked severe shadows down across their brows and shoulders. Carbine in hand, Cato watched a robed, hooded trio clamp forward from an escort of darkly masked troopers. Frigid air crawled up under his hakama and waist-plates. He felt sweat that refused to bead. It now came down to Jerec Asyr 's salesman skills.

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

Another day, another would-be.

Greeting and evaluating prospective students and teachers often fell to Ashin and the other instructors in turn. It wasn't her turn this time, but she'd taken it after seeing the One Sith shuttle.

She'd been a committed enemy of the One Sith after a couple of their people tortured her wife or looked the other way. But in this day and age you couldn't spit without hitting a Sith who'd been part of the One in some capacity. She'd learned to grin and bear it in pursuit of the broader goals that had brought her here. That didn't mean she couldn't look a little harsher at someone who flaunted it.

An Ithorian Sith exited the shuttle. Ashin's Force senses weren't great, but enough to evaluate him as somewhere in Knight range, and his Mandalorian bodyguard seemed the real deal. She'd known enough Mandos to be able to separate the wheat from the tares at a glance, give or take.

"And you are?" she asked them both.

The Ithorian straightened up and gave her what she assumed was an imperious look. "Buulic Delkoma," he said - one of the few Ithorians who could speak Basic, apparently. He didn't introduce his guard.

"Ashin Varanin. Welcome to the Pomojema. Tell me, Buulic-" She glanced at the old One Sith ship and refocused on its owner. "-what's your provenance?"

He didn't appear surprised that she was alive, but she saw recognition. "I trained alone," the Ithorian said. "A few scattered teachers, but I've never aligned with any particular Sith faction. I have no names to drop, if that's what you're filtering for."

Her limited truth-sense didn't pick up any blatant lies, though she had her doubts about the name. That was fine. She'd gone by several in her time. "Well, come along. Let's see what you can do."

***
​

It usually took an hour or so to get a solid sense of potential. The Ithorian wasn't as good as he thought he was. In a phrik-lined training chamber, much scarred and stinking of ozone, Ashin finally called a halt and sheathed her sword.

"The answer's no," she said without apology. "My guess is you spend most of your life as your cover identity and not nearly enough invested in learning the Sith skills. Feel free to come back when you're committed."

She turned to Cato Fett .

"You, though...you strike me as a professional. Are you Force-sensitive?" She grinned perversely, happy to throw them both for a loop. "If not, do you want to be?"

 

[Cato Fett]

“…What?” Cato muttered. It was the best reply he could muster, caught quite suddenly flat footed and trapped down the sights of one of the galaxy’s more august Dark Lords. The sweat that’d refused to pinprick prior now budded and ran freely down his spine. The vault of the examination chamber shrunk, bringing the phrik weight down over his shoulders, a numb, warm pressure while his vision tunnelled. It still stank of cooked air, flitted with metallic aftertastes. Jerec Asyr felt like a tiny presence lingering just beside his elbow.

For the duration of the examination process, Cato sat on an uncomfortable bleacher row and kept a cycling headcount. The bench was a narrow, rolled bar of stained and clawed togg-wood, that pushed up against his rump and kneaded his buttocks muscle miserably against his pelvic bone. While Jerec fought and struggled to keep pace with the tempo set by Varanin, handfuls of skulking, sneering instructors and students filtered in and out of the semi-portcullis entry. The Pomojema hosted a youthful menagerie, with some learners sporting strategically placed scar-lines that did little else but enhance jaw and cheekbone lines. A few sported cracked vambraces, strapped shin-guards, holed garments hinting at intensive tutoring sessions. His helm audio-sensors picked up and filtered their conversation, disparaging poor Jerec’s blade form. Some not-so-subtly laced their commentary with taunting remarks regarding Varanin herself and the tenuous ladder of academic authority. Most students, Cato reminded himself, were masters and marauders that’d survived Ashin’s auditing process. No unruly batch of untried pups here but tested, skilled, blooded, ambitious practitioners. Pale faces with sickly bright, blood-shot eyes strobed over him from beneath cowled robes. Smiles. Sharp, fluoride-white teeth. They smiled all the larger when he jammed his thumb beneath his sword’s tsuba-guard and jutted free an inch of alpine-crisp steel.

He stumbled through another ad-hoc sentence, squinting tensely behind the black of his T-bar visor. “I… Lady, I’m just hired help. What do you mean ‘want to be?’”

 

[Jerec Asyr]

"You take my pride," Jerec hissed, "and you'd take my bodyguard too?"

He was, admittedly, getting into the spirit of the thing a little too much. The ring was to blame, clearly. He stormed from the room in a swirl of black robes. The ruse had failed. But Cato, he realized as his blood pressure eased, might yet succeed. And that win could far outweigh Jerec's severely disappointed irritation.

Behind him he heard Varanin say something to the effect that she could make it happen using Sith magic. 'It', apparently, was turning Cato Force-sensitive. And Jerec happened to glance back as she handed him a stone, a crystal. At first it glowed red, but as it left Ashin's hand the glow faded. Thaissen, he realized: a rock from Mimban that he'd prized in his prospector days. He paused at the door to see if it glowed for Cato.

 

[Cato Fett]

It was a hefty tetratoid lattice of interlinked mineral glass, symmetrical despite an uneven, murky mien. Cato observed it glow like a dying sun in Ashin’s hand when she unceremoniously dropped it for him to reach and catch. Instinctively, he snagged it out of the air. Its mass was less than a common desk paperweight, fit in the cup of his gloved palm. Cato partially anticipated an electric discharge to pass at contact. The crystal only sat unobtrusively, no more remarkable than a stone. He saw bodies stride up to inspect the test, massing at the furred edges of his peripheral. Ashin Varanin simply stood at the chamber’s scarred centre, waiting and expectant.

As he grasped the crystal, it remained briefly inert. Then the dye of red bleached to dirty white before becoming replaced by a steady cyan pulsation.

Cato was glad for his helm; his face felt suddenly very cold. Blood thrummed a siren threnody in his ears. He tried to focus on the fighting lines and circles of concentric reach and influence etched into the rusty lavender plating fitted into the flooring. The crystal remained clutched in his grasp. A crack showed. Then the Thaissen quartz shattered to glassy dust and Cato’s hands clamped tight to his daisho sword-hilts. Unlit lightsabers appeared in a dozen hands amid the monitoring onlookers.

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

"And there we have it," Ashin said softly in the fluent Mando'a she'd learned from Jasper Ordo. "A pure little spark. You didn't know. And your relationship with that spark is a matter of...calm, isn't it. Clean focus, a state of flow. Dead silence in your heart while you're cutting them down, just like the finest Jedi sociopaths. I can work with you."

She took a long step back, raised her hand, and snapped her fingers. "Three Knights," she said in Basic. "Take a hand if you can, but don't kill."

Three stepped forward - a Barabel who'd lost her family to the Bryn'adul, a Nightsister who'd survived a similar genocide at the hands of the Sith Empire, and a tall Falleen. The Barabel and the Nightsister carried traditional swords; the Falleen had a double-bladed lightsaber. They kept their distance from each other, unused to cooperation, but closed on Cato hungrily.

 

[Cato Fett]

Time briefly dilated. Dust and motes of facet-faced crystalline ceased tossing end-over-end and held suspended in the long negative space not yet breached between Cato and his assaulters. The Falleen closed his hands round his hilt’s control studs, the Barabel and Nightsister adopting venomous Juyo stances, all blades angled close, parallel to their eyes, and pointed for Cato’s throat. Their lunges closed the last few paces, blows staggered, roughly coordinated but lacking in firm cohesion. Time resumed. A gale of hard light and steel flew at him. Cato blinked, exhaled, and vanished all thought save for a small, coldly comforting notion of imminent demise. Mind of No Mind.

His daisho drew free. The blade folding had been patterned with sparing webs of fine cortosis. Not enough to short-out a proper laser sword but so their cuts wouldn’t melt through the steel altogether. Their techniques were finely tuned and savage, their strength awing. Cato folded through a trio of narrow parries from the Barabel and barely afforded a guard for the Nightsister at his flank, countering in spinning whirlwind strokes that drove through the pair and away from the Falleen attempting to hazard his backside. They skidded across the flooring, all but chasing Cato towards a far corner. Blows rained close, hemming in at every escape vector, battering at his guard and forcing him back pace by pace. He backpedalled, wrenching parries with ferocious desperation, at a loss for their immaculate speed and precision. The Nightsister was fairly trilling and the Falleen crowed booming laughter. The Barabel just hissed, bashing at him with over-head strikes. Mind of No Mind.

This was in error. He was allowing their aggressive energies to overtake him, control the tempo and rhythm. Whether or not their power was Force-enhanced was irrelevant. He was raised Mandalorian, inculcated and inducted into the secret places of Asahi’s most lethal, most dangerous ryu. Command the skirmish, he thought. The issue was the dizzying array of abundant threats incoming at virtually every angle, between the spans of single seconds. It confused and slowed his responses and weakened his ability to counter properly. Mind of No Mind. Cato ejected all but rudimentary self-awareness and refocused on survival. He settled on the Falleen.

Old wisdoms told Sith fed on aggression. Cato defaulted to a slippery defense, sliding his blades in sharp, oblique parries that redirected their physical energies. He guarded with the longsword on a perpendicular angle and caught the Barabel’s blow squarely on whining steel, twisting her flow inward toward him and away over his hip. She briefly gasped and stumbled to arrest her floundering. Room opened, briefly. It was enough. Cato rounded on the Nightsister. Feinted, interrupted the rhythm of her broken staccato drum-blows, forcing her to guard and reorient. Her next slash was countered and answered, reversing his short-sword to ram the pommel-butt through her solar-plexus and smash her back off her heels. Ashin’s directive hadn’t been clear on whom she addressed. If he landed a killing blow, fair chances told he would not be leaving the phrik chamber intact. The Nightsister rolled herself away, choking and sucking for air.

The Falleen flourished his double-blade in a close, swirling kata and came on viciously, charging and leaping. Cato’s jetpack flared. They met with feet off the ground, exchanging a handful of mid-air blows that left sparking after-images. Landed, spun about. Before they re-engaged, the Falleen simply loosed a hand and shunted it, palm forward and flat. An unseen concussive wallop decked Cato in the centre of his torso-plate. It tore him off his footing, tossing him leg over rump across the chamber to impact with the impervious walling. Cato felt something crumple and give in his jetpack’s housing; sparks were vomiting over his shoulder from some compromised system. Breathless, vision swimming still, Cato groped to his elbows and depressed a small safety-catch. The jetpack weight shifted, loosened from his spine.

Again, the Falleen came on, the Barabel close behind. The Nightsister was swaying back to her feet. He jammed a thumb down on a small control nub on a gauntlet. The jetpack sputtered but shot off his casement like a slug-round, impacting squarely with the Falleen’s midriff. The Sith Knight folded over. The double-blade hilt slipped out his hands and bounced off through a drool of blood.

Murmurs within the ring of observing practitioner grew steadily silent. The Barabel and Nightsister matched their strides, separating to mount a pincer formation. Cato groped and pulled his katana into grasp. Through lancing cracks, fiendish strokes and counter-strokes, he got to his feet in the midst of their renewed rush. The Barabel blitzed in, gnashing her longsword down across his gauntlet, the Nightsister trying to fence through his guard and skewer a blow where the plates met along his ribs. A strike washed sparks onto the decking, knocking off Cato’s helm. Bright, red pain edged his vision; missed a guard and took a shallow stab in the meat surrounding his liver. That invisible force came to bear once more, grasping him in enveloping, unseen fist, hurtling him upward into the overhead bulkhead girders. His frame bounced once, twice. Was dropped ingloriously to the floor. A boot-toe kicked in under his jaw and came to close to tearing his head free. A crying ring of cold-blooded rage; the Barabel sat his katana in her jaw and with a heavy clench-bite, snapped the steel to pieces.

There was agony in so many untold places. He couldn’t submerge from the pain. Cato still possessed enough control to not cry out, climbing to his feet, his hands fallen away to the sides of his hips. Somewhere in the rafters, he’d taken an injury and now warm blood poured out of his dark hair. Mind of No Mind. Breath was still yet being drawn. Wait, he told himself, just wait. Cede nothing to the foe, not even on the brink of defeat. Like a Nexu sensing a nerf foal with a broken limb, the Nighsister sauntered up for the winning blow. Into range. Cato counted her steps and offered a very small, very quiet smile. It gave the Nighsister momentary pause.

He stepped in. Cato’s fist hammered down her right forearm and dropped her arm away, the same fist cracking his knuckles onto the span of her nose-bridge. With her head thrown back, he grasped her left arm and twisted it out, down, pulling the limb up through a circle ‘till it went over his brow, leaving her torso trunk and belly vulnerable, her balance off-set. His foot snapped in and kicked her left leg out, her own weight projecting her to the phrik decking. As her shoulders rebounded off the plating, Cato fell with her, plunging the point of his elbow against her temple. The Nightsister ungainly flopped into unconsciousness.

The Barabel raised her clawed fist. Cato rose with it, entrapped in her Force Grip, breath crushing in his throat.

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

The Falleen rose with a rattling wheeze that suggested a flail chest and internal bleeding. He struggled for dignity. The Nightsister had taken less damage but was out like a light. The Barabel - currently choking the new arrival with a distant grip - was keenly and furiously aware that she'd won against a weakened, distracted enemy. Glory, zero. She threw Cato aside and stalked after him, sword raised.

"Enough," Ashin said without special emphasis, and the Barabel froze, trembling in wrath.

"You said take a hand."

"If you could. The three of you couldn't. Train hard, Ksava, and maybe in a year or two you'll have a chance. Take Brailiss to Medical. Hytheer, you go too. Well done, the three of you. You failed, but I might have too." Ashin raised her voice. "Leave us."

In short order she and Cato had the room to themselves. She raised an eyebrow.

 

[Cato Fett]

With an effort, Cato wiped blood off his teeth and snorted a fleshy knot of gore free of his nostril. He couldn’t stand without favouring the weight off his left leg. Portions of his armour, the lamellar plates on his shoulders, hips, back, and clavicle were especially scorched and buckled. Vision was clogged as well; right eye, nearly swollen shut and livid with blood-swell promising a beautiful shiner. He limped forward haltingly until he stood at two paces from Ashin Varanin, breathing cumbersomely through his somewhat cleared nose. A boot toe clattered over a shard of his broken sword. He noted Jerec’s absence. Without the Ithorian at hand, he felt at a loss for procedure. Alone, nursing increasingly avid pain, Cato felt defeated. Blood patter from his scalp-wound rang dully off the phrik plating between their boots.

“They were excellent…” Cato said, gritting out the words. “Faster… Stronger… Skilled… Almost… Hrgn… Almost complete fighters… What happens now…? What were…. Were you looking for…?”

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

"Authenticity. I'm in the business of building the highest-quality academy, full stop, in the galaxy. It's unheard of to take only knights and masters as students - and we're selective beyond that. I knew within five minutes that your employer had a slim chance of meeting our standards. You, however...I don't even know your name, let alone your history and allegiances, you didn't know you were Force-sensitive until ten minutes ago...and I'm ready to offer you a combat instruction role here.

"We have no relationship with the Sith who leveled Manda'yaim - I've fought against them and for your homeworld many times. For the record."

 

[Cato Fett]

She was entirely correct. Ten minutes prior, Cato had assumed the odd moments of combat prescience and snatches of vague ‘awareness’ were the simple results of rigorous tutelage, dedicated practice, and habitual meditation. The kinds of personal ‘zenith’ described by his sensei’s and so rarely reached, let alone mastered. But whereas his people evinced a sardonic boisterousness, brimming with hard sarcasm, martial pride, and fragile notions of personal honour, he adhered to sere self-discipline and nigh-on ascetic training. The fighting sciences were his religion. The way of the warrior his long, narrow, shrouded path. The face greeting him in the wash basin every morning informed Cato of nothing special or untoward. He was very, very mortal.

He swallowed down the blood welling on the base of his tongue, thoughts racing. This was unprecedented, for himself at the very least. Force Sensitive Mando’ade had been a violent, dividing contention for his people for generations. It had come to a head with the rise of Ra Vizsla, self-styled ‘Undying’; the pogroms, black pyramids, purgation squads, sanctioned prison clinics and forcible ‘purification’ treatments, fear, paranoia, treachery, betrayals. All done in an effort to steer the Mando’ade back to its ‘rightful’ identity. Cato wandered away and refused anything to do with the rechristened ‘Empire’ or her internally hemorrhaging clans. So long as any vestiges of that broken regime remained, he refused any reconnection with… ‘home’.

Now, he was everything the Old Guard spitefully loathed. Cato couldn’t help taking perverse pleasure in that. Anything that would make the ‘Undying’ groan and spin like a top in his grave. He quelled the trembling in his heart, attempting to parse through the manifold possibilities so suddenly available. Narrowing his thoughts down to a singular path of purpose. An idea, born out of a vengeful hunt. He looked up close at Ashin’s face.

“My name is Cato Fett,” He said. “I’m a bounty killer. My warband found me, raised me, and gave me my name. When I was a boy they were taken from me, and I was brought to a far away place to be trained in the old fighting ways. I’ve no home. I wear the armour on my skin, the tenets on my heart, and our language on my tongue. But my people do not know me. And it seems I do not know them anymore. You offer me instruction… Can I be faster? Stronger? Can I make them – “

Cato pointed to his cracked helmet keeled over on the decking. “ – Fear that again?”

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

"Of course. It takes remarkably little to strike fear into a heart, and if you can scare one you can learn to scare a thousand. That's not to say there won't be legions of fearless fools as well - but skill solves that problem as readily as being frightening takes care of their friends."

Small domed droids trundled in to clean blood off the floor. Ashin moved aside and let them work.

"In my opinion, most Mando'ade look down on Force-using vode because the Force - push, crush, burn, shock, shield - looks like a crutch. And like the armor and the weapons aren't good enough for you. But one-on-one combat abilities like that are only a tiny slice of what the Force can do for you. Here on the Pomojema, you can learn to...know your friends are safe from a galaxy away. Know they're telling you the truth. Heal them when a medpack fails. Shout so an army can hear you. Call allies to your position. Keep marching beyond the limits of your body - hunger, fatigue, hypothermia." She raised a fist and the air warped around it "Be your own armor when you're naked and off guard. Rip a dreadnought from the sky."

 

[Cato Fett]

A layer of translucent scales seemed to compose and interlock around the flesh of Ashin’s raised fist. Cato stared a moment, looked away to see his narrowed, warbled reflection in the glass of his visor. The notions she was proffering were heady. He inhaled deeply and held the breath, eyes lidded and misty with thought.

“Mando’ade are blind to our own hypocrisies,” He said after a long beat. “An Alor will label the Force a handicap yet ride into battle atop a million-credit basilisk encased in equally expensive, equally over-laden beskar armour. …I need this, I can feel it. Damn the Old Guard and all those utreekov hanging off their coattails, I want to be the most complete fighter I can be.

“I accept your offer,” Cato said, peering at the dark hungers oscillating in Ashin’s sickly-yellowed eyes.

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

"Good. You'll be both student and teacher, which is quite normal here. Completeness, as you put it, is a lifelong pursuit for many, and can take all manner of forms. Some are generalists. Me, I'm more specialized, though I've picked up more than my share of tricks over the years.

"Your first step, I think, is to replace that sword. We have extensive archives and collections of light weapons and solid blades, among other things. Talk to Azel Moran, our lead bladesmith. He'll walk you through the options and forge you something appropriate. Alchemy, phrik, songsteel, beskar - he knows it all. Your Atrisian-style sword all over again, if that's your preference, in pure Mandalorian iron. Or a traditional axe of mythosaur bone. Or a spear, the king of weapons."

 

[Cato Fett]

It was subtle dismissal. Cato nodded curtly and stooped with a grimace to collect his seared helmet and the shards of his bitten sword. He’d ground the pain down to a dull background ache, combining facets of taijutsu and simple, inflexible will. The limp remained; his footfalls skipped in broken rhythm across the Phrik decking. Behind the hatchway entrance Jerec awaited, appearing fittingly piqued and wicked in his corpse-grey complexion and bespoke black silk ensemble. For the benefit of watchful Sith leering idly down the passageway, Cato was subjected to a fit of sere verbal lashing as the Ithorian ‘pried’ details free.

The story was brief, punchy. They strolled in relative quiet toward the cabin wards, passing dark-clad figures that spared them grim expressions, icy glares, and predatory sneers. Cato clutched the broken haft of his sword still, as reminder and a brutal badge of survival. Whether or not he’d see it reforged was another matter. The hallways lights were beginning to spin in his vision as exhaustion closed and furred blackly at the peripheral edges. He’d secure private lodging, sink into a frigid bath, and then consult with whatever constituted the academy’s ‘medic’. Afterward when his stamina and physicality were replenished, he’d see to a lesson plan. Whether or not anyone in the student body would deign to be instructed in turn by a Mandalorian was a separate matter.

And then the strength in his legs failed and the world began to pitch forward in a roll. Cato gasped, only saved from crashing onto his knees and face by Jerec’s unfailingly steady grasp. The Ithorian was chunnering something; he couldn’t parse the words, every melodic syllable a blurry rumble in his ears. Pain had worsened. It was now a caustic throb in his limbs and extremities. He mumbled after bacta submersion and cryo-fluid treatment, before his weight slid down and struck the decking. Everything slid away into silky darkness.

Before the black swallowed up the almost colourless hallway lanterns, Cato watched the bulkheads unfold. There was a clean cedar-decked porch, raised off levelled soil, that lead to a pair of wood-and-paper latticed screens. He was suddenly eight years old with wet hair and a runny nose looking into a wide sunlit inner chamber. A wide-man with small, pitiless eyes and a shaved pate stared from before an altar of naked blades and incense burners. Cato blinked; the scene dissolved, replaced with the Pomojema’s stanchion pillars and harsh lighting. This would not be the first great upset on his path. And like those many years enduring the agonies of the sensei regimens, he too would master this challenge.

Maybe… Finally, he thought, unconsciousness pulling him back into the dark. Finally, he’d discover the Mandalorian he was meant to be.