Private Blood Red

[Adron Malvern]

Shakti Sweet | Adron's Office | Golbah City​

The sun had already fallen below the horizon and darkness was beginning to overtake Geonosis. Adron stood at his window wall that showed a stunning view of Golbah City. He'd been drinking a glass of fine Illyrian wine but it was not improving his evening.

Something had been on his mind. With the exodus of the Eternal Empire there were many questions left unanswered, however Adron would see the darkness brought to his light. His eyes were a vibrant form of amethyst, practically glowing as the Dark Side of the Force wrapped itself around him. It moved in violent, unhindered waves as his anger spilled from him. The room was heavy with his power and rage, yet he did keep it in check to some degree. He was an emotional man, composed, yet emotional. So it was often that Darth Metus or Srina would sense his disturbance and dismiss it as nothing more than something knew having pissed him off. He exhaled, taking his glass to his lips so he could down a bit more of the fine red.

He had sent a number of his Guard to fetch Shakti Sweet , the only woman who could settle his rage, one way or another. Either the truth she revealed would be enough to calm the storm or it would only infuriate him to the point of releasing his rage upon her. On his desk were a number of datapads, as well as a medium sized pin that held the standard of the Eternal Empire. Adron had been the Grand Vizier of the Eternal Empire until their exodus. There was no man or woman who would question his loyalty to the Confederacy, yet this had come as an embarrassment to him all the same.

He grabbed the bottle of wine on his table, refilling the glass before his apprentice arrived. He would need more wine before the night was out.

 

[Shakti Sweet]

The days following the trial had been... Difficult.

The mute had continued on as she always did, taking her daily combat training with the droids that the Exarch had ordered, continuing to hone her skills with a single blade vs. the pair she'd come to him with. The reckless abandon she'd used when combating the droids had resulted in some injuries - both for herself, and the destruction in it's totality of one of the droids. She'd managed to best them a few times, though it seemed that when this one had not managed to keep it's guard up, the Firrerreo had used the training blade she wielded to dismantle the thing with one blunted strike after the next...

No comments had been given, no contact at all in fact, from her Master - and she'd been allowed to continue on the following day, and the one after that, and the one after that... Days were spent training, evenings spent alone in her small, notably silent apartment in Golbah City. It was the way her days bled slowly into weeks before one evening, following a particularly uneventful afternoon of training, she found herself summoned before Adron Malvern , inside his offices within the capital.

Well before the squadron of droids that he'd sent to escort her could be heard making their way down the hall, he'd be able to feel her. It was wholly different than any time before, far more muted in her anger than she had been even when he'd seen her at her calmest. That unbridled rage which had attracted him to her from the beginning seemed shrouded in something else, something darker and much more bleak.

When the chamber doors glided open and they escorted her in, he'd find her looking well enough - she'd selected one of the simple black suits he enjoyed so much, and her hair, longer than it had been when they met, was captured back in a low pony-tail at the nape of her neck. The pearlecent scarring that marred her throat dipped below the line of her collar and was nearly undetectable thanks to the expert tailoring he'd made available to her... Perhaps a bit thinner, though - and the bags beneath her eyes made all that gold skin appear almost blue.

Her eyes remained downcast, her posture rigid, until the droids had exited, and the door slid closed quietly at her back. Only then did the pair of jewel-toned jade eyes lift from where they'd remained fixed to the floor, glancing to the man who, when last they'd seen one another, cast her from the chamber where the fate of her former friend had been decided and meted out.

 

[Adron Malvern]

When the redheaded apprentice stepped through the door, Adron's eyes did not rise to meet her. He did not need to see her, what was she in the physical realm that he did not already know? Her existence in the Force was all that mattered. His Darkness had extended itself through out the room, creating a pressure that most would find unbearable. Not Shakti, she was strong, powerful, willful. It was these characteristics that caused her to select her as his apprentice. It was these characteristics that yet allowed her to draw breath.

"I'm a patient man, in many ways. Not necessarily a good man, but I do good things for people. People like you." He said, raising his eyes to her. "I took you out of the streets. Clothes, food, money, I provided you with anything you could want. Im even teaching you to put your rage to use." He said, before setting down the piece of paper that had been in his hands. The lights that remained on in the room seemed to flicker, all while the Force pulses out in a single overwhelming wave.

"You allowed me to look like a fool." He said simply, removing his glasses and placing them on his desk. For a few seconds all that could be heard was the faint clicking of Adron's heels against the polished marble beneath them. He approached Shakti, reaching out to place a hand on her cheek. His touch was soft, almost warm as he practically caressed her cheek. "Shakti, tell me now...."

His hand wrapped around her neck, crushing her wind pipe and lifting her body from the ground. Amethyst flames wrapped around the two of them, their stinging kiss would burn across Shakti's skin as they lashed out. In the next second the flames were extinguished. He no longer wore the designed suit he had been, instead his crimson armor shined, like pools of blood flickering in the moonlight. With his free head he gestured back to the window wall that he'd stood by. Massive cracks began to strike across the glass before it shattered into a million pieces. The glass fell down to the city below.

In the next moment, Shakti would be hanging out of the window by her throat, her life in the hands of a very pissed off Sith Lord. He glared down at her, thin wisps flowing from his eyes as he spoke a single word.

"Why?!" He demanded.

 

[Shakti Sweet]

Though it may have been unbearable for others, the feeling of all that darkness that manifested and swirled around the room at her Master’s command was merely a gentle thrum across her skin. It was like a mild irritant that was easy enough to dismiss, had she not known what had caused it. His anger, to most, would be a fearsome thing - a rage that could mirror her own in its depth and ferocity, but not her. All that anger and heat that radiated around her was almost a comfort. Something familiar and, dare she even think it, perhaps calming? It felt a bit like home.

His words, though calm in tone, measured and simple, brought her spine all the more in-line. She’d heard the tone before, though never aimed in her direction. The Exarch was glorious in his fury, the small glimpses of it that she had glimpsed in the last year, but they always started in a place rooted in a false calm. Those soft assertions that she had been fortunate to have come under his tutelage - which was not untrue. Darth Malphas was a cruel man when the mood struck him, but more often he was shrewd, calculating, and logical, perhaps even to a fault at times. She had been immensely fortunate to have caught his eye and to have been able to study with him.

She had risked all of that when she’d become friends with Ephraim deWinter. The mercenary had seemed to all the world no more than a mouthy Southerner with a keen eye for trouble - but the actions he’d taken on Kuat had proven him a good deal more trouble himself than the mute could have ever guessed. He had allowed her to run off to assist her Master in his attempt to capture the leader of the Republic - and in her absence he had ended everything calm and functional in her life in a matter of moments.

Just the thought of it had the hairs on the back of her neck standing in end. She could hear, distantly, her Master questioning her... He’d asked her something... What had he said?

There was a moment of realization in those emerald eyes as she seemed to come back to herself with the Exarch standing just inches from her face. There was confusion in that gaze as she felt the brush of his fingers against her cheek, almost tender, before they instead wrapped around her throat. There was no opportunity for her to respond for so many reasons outside of the crushing grip that effectively closed off her windpipe, but the tension that had began to crawl over her before he’d grabbed her manifested in her becoming stiff in his grip as he hoisted her off the ground.

She did not fight him, did not struggle as he lifted his other hand and shattered the glass windows of his office and moved to dangle her form over the edge of the building. The evening air in Golbah City was like a soft wash of warmth across her skin, the breeze this high up whipping her hair against his fingers and the sides of her face from where it remained tied at the base of her skull. She knew it would do her no good to struggle against him, especially since that hand wrapped around her throat could as easily remove her head from her shoulders as it could simply drop her... Though she suspected that only one of those outcomes would be guaranteed to end the misery that her life had become.

When her voice came to him, that swirling tornado of shrieking, rending havoc that was normally her was markedly absent. Just as darkness had taken up court in his office, so too had it settled over his apprentice. The immense sense of nothingness that had been left in the absence of her companion lay over her like a dampening weight. It was somewhere in there, buried deep under a loss that she had not bothered to so much as glance at since it had settled in some weeks ago.

“I did not know.”

 

[Adron Malvern]

He held her out from the window, allowing the evening winds to spill into his office. His ebony cloak flowed behind him. Her words, barely heard, were spoken from a place that only brought his rage to the surface. Adron Malvern, Exarch, Lord, King, Husband, Father. For a shallow moment, he disappeared into the sea of darkness. There was only hatred, only discuss, only Malphas.

He turned on his heel, the Force multiplying his strength many fold. He threw her with a ferocity that could be matched by a Wookie. She would fly across his office, slamming into the metallic wall, bending and warping the metal upon impact. Malphas turned to her, slowly his eyes gazed out at her. As he spoke, it was no longer the voice of a man, but a demon. The accent was thick, impossibly thick as he spoke evenly to his apprentice. "You knew more than you told me." The low baritone of the voice echoed through out the room, surrounding shakti...binding her. The Dark Mark that was on her arm would burn with the fury of a thousand flames, hosting her in a loving embrace of pain and suffering. All the while, Adron walked over to her, his desk sliding out of his path upon silent command from the Force.

"Do you think me a fool?" He asked, his hand raised out to her.

Shakti's body would fly from where it had been. Snatched like a rag doll she would rise from the ground, slamming into the glass ceiling above. As she was surrounded by a shower of glass and metal, a loud snap could be heard. Purple streaks fired out from Malphas' hand. They wrapped around her, flowing so naturally as if she was bringing the lightning to her body, bathing in the beauty of it's hell. For several seconds the lightning would wash over her before he finally broke the connection. The moment he did the Force would seize every fiber of her being. Every muscle, every bone, would be held by the unseen tendrils of the Dark Side. She was slammed into the wall behind her as she was physically stretched, every part of her being feeling an impossible pain.

He approached her, leaning forward, his voice calling out to her in silent whispers, yet repeating in her mind as impossibly loud screams. "Do not fear death....fear me."

 

[Shakti Sweet]

The winds that had flowed around the pair were nothing compared to the gale as he threw her back across his office. There was a moment before he released her where she felt the sharp tear of muscle across the back of her neck and shoulders, the damage from being flung by such a narrow part of her body not resulting in a favourable outcome for the parts of her that were attached to it. Though that short burst of heat was nothing compared to what was to come. As her back connected with the wall, the metal shrieked with the force of it, where her tailbone and shoulders connected indenting beneath the weight of her. The resulting smack of her skull against the wall left her dazed, however, unable to revel in the agony that the impact would have caused.

Her body crumpled to the floor like so much meat, her mind only distantly aware of the fact that several bones were broken. Blood was beginning to ooze its way down the back of her neck from where the skin had torn across the back of her head, and the tiny pool of it on the floor only had seconds to gather before he spoke to her once more, still no hint of that terrible anger in his voice, still frighteningly calm and even - though whatever power it was that had taken him amplified and distorted the sound, making it reverberate through every fibre of her being. Aginst all that power she carefully pushed, planting her hands beneath her as she shakily lifted her torso, attempting to position her legs beneath her to sit up.

The sound of the heavy desk sliding across the floor, moved as though by a massive, invisible hand, did not phase her as eyes rose, the jewelled green tone flickering out like a light as her irises were swallowed in a sea of molten yellow and orange, swirling sickeningly as her voice came to him again, still swaddled in whatever emotion was keeping her rage smothered. "By the time I knew it was too la-", the words died as his hand lifted, taking with it the entirety of his apprentice.

Hitting the ceiling was nowhere near as terrible as hitting the wall had been, though the myriad of tiny, and not-so-tiny, cuts that resulted from the shattering glass where no comfort to her. The cut against the back of her skull had already begun to knit itself back together in slow inches, but it would be slowed as her body had to fight now against dozens of other cuts across her arms and back, the glass that rained to the floor speckled in places with brilliant spots of crimson.

The lightening came next, the heat of it filling every nerve of her body and causing her to convulse uncontrollably as it poured into her, sheer agony as she felt her lungs and her heart seize with it. For an instant that dragged on like an eternity, the Firrerreo could feel her heart stop, her lungs freeze, every muscle slackening and tensing beyond her ability to control and leaving her breathless. When finally it ended there was no relief, however, her limbs yanked away from her, played out wide as she was slammed into the wall once more and left to hang there, her body shuddering as she fought to relearn how to breathe and think.

Her eyes were heavy-lidded, nearly closed, so she was unable to see him approach, but she could feel it across her skin, the waves of his anger like heat off an open flame, the long waves of red hair that had been neatly tucked away having been violently ripped free while he'd tossed her around the office, now blowing in the literal waves of dark energy that roiled off his form. Fear... He wanted her fear. Many things he could have from her, but as she panted and shuddered and hung from the wall, splayed before him, fear was not one of them.

Adron Malvern​

 

[Adron Malvern]

He took measured, paced steps towards Shakti. They were in an even stride and deliberate. His hand was still raised, keeping her suspended on the wall before him. His eyes were calm, his face was quiet, but the Force within him had built up a mighty wave of rage and he would release it. Her mind, so open to him like a crimson book that revealed the truths of the world. He smirked at her, speaking softly, his natural voice coming present once again. "You will bleed..." He promised her.

His hand went to her head, slamming it into the wall behind her. As the impact, surely a concussion, overtook her he allowed the deepest part of the Dark Side to envelope her. Her last sight would be the Sith Lord turning from her, walking away from the battered Firrerro. Darkness enveloped her sight as she drifted from the world of consciousness. "Goodbye Shakti." He said, ever so elegantly as he faded from her sight.

Darkness. It was all encompassing and all controlling. It ruled Shakti for years until finally....she awakened.

"Shakti?"

When she would come to, she would be so far from the realm of reality that even the Force seemed to be a concept she could no longer feel. Her eyes would open and she would be sitting across from Ephraim deWinter. He seemed no different from how he usually was, but his eyes looked to her with confusion. For this one moment, the world around her would become apparent. She was in Golbah City, though whether it was day or night was impossible to tell. Perhaps she would speak to him, perhaps not, it meant no difference. Ephraim was there, alive and well, standing before her. They had been in a cafe, Shakti would not be able to remember why, but she would remember this feeling, this emotions.

Blood splattered across her face. The warm crimson liquid painted her beautifully as Ephraim's throat was parted open. He gasped, struggling for breath. For whatever reason, the world would fade away. There would only be Ephraim. Frozen in time, dead. Ephraim was ripped to pieces by the very fabric of reality. Exploding into a mist of blood and marrow that transformed into thick wisps of shadow. Again, she was drowned in darkness.

When the Darkness finally parted, it was Malphas who stood before her. His crimson armor had never looked so covered in gore and blood as it did now. He glanced down for a moment, before holding up the head of Ephraim. He threw it at her feet. "Bleed..." His voice echoed out before he disappeared into the shadow once again.

 

[Shakti Sweet]

His voice was like an anchor in the sea of power that he was harnessing against her. She could feel in her mind that resonance that his words carried, making her teeth rattle like it was a gong that was being rung against her ears. His presence in her mind was heavy and unrelenting, and as he walked ever closer it was all she could do to keep her eyes open and watchful of his approach. Even the cruel upturn of his lips as he threatened to bleed her didn't earn him much of a reaction as she did her best just to keep herself grounded, try and keep her eyes on his.

There was nothing to be done as his hand lifted, feeling him dig those strong fingers of his into the locks of hair at the side of her head and lift it several inches from the wall, only to slam it back against it once more. There was a moment where brilliant white light danced across her eyes, her stomach doing a painful flip as she felt her skull impact against the wall and give under that force. Blood began to spill down the back of her neck and soak into that beautifully tailored white shirt he'd had made for her, but it mattered little to her as she was sure that the back of her head had been bashed in, just a little.

He turned from her then, that voice no longer monstrous, but sickly sweet as she watched him retreat back into his office, her vision slowly being swallowed at the edges by encroaching darkness. 'Goodbye, Shakti...' There was no will in her to fight it, and for a blissful moment the woman thought that, perhaps, his gift to her for her insolence and perceived slight would be an end to the suffering... An end to the weighted blanket of nothingness that had been wrapping like a constrictor around her life... But he was no so kind. Never so giving.

~ ~ ~
​

Her eyes snapped open at the mention of her name. Immediately she regretted opening them so quickly, as the light that bled in through the windows of the cafe was bright, early afternoon light, and the feel of it on her skin, even through the glass near the front of the cafe where they sat, was gloriously warm. She blinked a few times to clean the sunbursts from her eyes as she turned her face to glance at the man that stood across from her.

Ephraim looked well. The typical 10:45 shadow across his chin and cheeks was scruffy and clean, his lips curled in that mocking smile that he loved to toss her way so much. He wore his typical clothes, something well-worn but comfortable - nothing anyone would mistake for fashion-forward, but for whatever reason it always suited him. She nearly thought to offer him a smug retort, using her name like that instead of one of the many nicknames he'd made for her over the last year... But something was wrong.

Where that smile had been now concern was blatant. His eyes stared past her at something she could not perceive, and that concern became fear. She'd never seen that expression on his face before, but she knew it to be true... She attempted to turn, trying to pry her eyes from his face, but as her mind made to pull away there was a warm wash of blood across her skin.

The sounds he made, the look of abject horror on his face as whatever this phantom was that had stolen him away loomed above the dying man, her heart was broken anew. That heavy weight of sorrow that had laid upon her for weeks threatened to swallow her whole as her mind screamed at her to help him, to reach for him and to try and aid him, while her body remained inert and still... He fell to his knees, his hands clutching uselessly at his throat, what remained of him spilling out in a puddle on the floor as she watched... And did nothing. Again. She did nothing.

~ ~ ~
​

The vision faded at the edges once more, darkness beginning to swallow her whole as she found that breathing was becoming a chore, her chest shuddering with each inwards gasp - though all that eased as the figure of her Master appeared before her from the shadows, crimson armour dripping in gore, his pale skin decorating in it as well. Eyes lifted from where the form of the one man she may have called friend had knelt and instead found those deep pools of amethyst staring back at her. Her cheeks were soaked in tears, the painful breathing a result of silent sobs that wracked her, muscles straining from where he kept her pinned to the wall.

She could see it... She could see what he held in his hand, but she refused to look. Instead, she bored her gaze into his and let him feel that well of sorrow that threatened to eat her whole, let him gaze into eyes that were a bottomless pit of pain and loss, swallowing all her rage and making her useless to him and to herself.

She hadn't known.

Perhaps if she had, she'd have begged him to leave with her, to flee this place that neither of them truly called home. She'd have forsaken her training and what comforts she'd had at a chance to have companionship, even the strange form they'd shared, for a time. Though now it mattered not. His reckless choices had stollen all her options and left her here, alone, forced to bear the brunt of her Master's ire with no supports to catch her.

She was broken. She was nothing. She was hollow and shattered. A vessel that once was full now left empty and pitiful.

Adron Malvern​