Private Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands...

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

LASARALEEN SETTLEMENT, TASH-TARAL
FORMER LEVANTINE SANCTUM TERRITORY
864 ABY

"You were the one I feared, Seydon of Arda of Arda."

The tent was untanned sun-tanned hide, not even proper leather. The terentatek had been a large one. In here the Force was quiet, almost tranquil. The air smelled like charred peppers and sharpening oil. Ashin sat by the dead fire uninvited and unarmed.

"You, Jaxton Ravos, Jorus Merrill, Rosa Mazhar - your resistance cell or whatever you were - you scared me spitless once upon a time. You could have broken the Lords of the Fringe in their infancy more often than you know."

She extended a hand, a gift: a whetstone of the finest Svolten rhyolite.

"I'd say you're looking well, but..."

 

[Seydon of Arda]

A hand clothed in hanks of rotten linen reached and took the cake of rhyolite from Ashin’s upraised palm. The linen peeled away in frayed ribbons, calloused fingers and thumb gnarled with lines of pale scar tissue feeling against the whetstone’s smoothed grain. The texture was like amber and pumice, somehow subtly porous without a blemish on the blackened sheen. The other hand reached over and tugged the linen back into place, tucking the rhyolite into a ragged belt pouch.

Seydon did not look well.

Heat, sunlight, dehydration and the sear of wind and sand grit had washed his skin to ruddy stone. What showed of his face above a black scarf was craggy, broken with torn lines where wounds had ripped and reknitted together in snarls of angry, fibrous tissue. The hair beneath a burlap hood, once white as fresh snowfall, was yellowed and browned from frequent sand baths. His clothing too was little better than refashioned tatters bound and rebound with crude stitching, his harness work just a web of old, partially gnawed waist belts repurposed to hold everyday kit. The sword Winterfang still waited behind his right shoulder-blade. The sword Razorlight resided across his left hip and belly, slipped into the belt. Despite the power still apparent in his thews, he sat bowed and hunched. Weight laid across his shoulders. And unknown pains reddened the meat of his eyes, viper-like and bright.

He looked up. Said nothing. Peered from Ashin’s waiting expression to the vast badlands beyond her, raked with dark gulches and rock-toothed gullies. At that beat, the wind turned the flaps of the small, sparse lean-to. The smell of the desert briefly expelled the tomb-like pungence holding to his frame. Somewhere, far off, tuk’ata yipped and howled.

“…Seems you got over it,” He said, finally. He shifted, folding his arms close, resting a hand on Razorlight’s grip. “Thank you for the rhyolite. Doesn’t come cheap. But why’d you waste credits on fuel to Tash-Taral? There’s nothing out here, Varanin…”

Ashin Cardé Varanin

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

She couldn't stop a flinch, a spark of tension in her cheek, when Seydon of Arda put his hand on the grip of his legendary sword.

"It wasn't nostalgia, I'll say that much, except whatever memory I can use to spur you. You're why I'm here."

She, too, looked unhealthy. In recent months she'd committed harder to the Dark Side than ever before, and reaped what she'd sowed. Pallor, ashen skin, gray hair, a missing fingernail, an unwholesome Bando Gora blue-fire gleam in the eyes - despite a handful of body-thefts she looked every one of her sixty-four years.

"The Sith Empire killed my wife Spencer. She's beyond my reach and I'm pursuing every possible angle to bring her back. You represent two of those opportunities. You've delved deeper into Sith ruins than anyone. I could use your advice - any resource, guide, being, site. I have money and access. I can make any contribution worth your time."

The disquieting ruin of his face and hair suggested he might not put the same value on a tossed coin as he once had.

"...whatever that means to you at the moment."

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Brutish, seething retorts recoiled and butted against a roil of academic interest, a writhe of nerve-raw emotion kept checked by Seydon’s iron clad conscience. His jaw worked, unseen frown pulling at his crow’s feet, pushing gritty hair strands and rinds of salt off his brow. Sunlight so bright it glowed colourless poured through holes rent in the lean-to hide, the wind calming, now quiet, the distant tuk’ata silent save for a few errant yowls breaking across the badland stone.

Rising, Seydon crouched and moved to the side of the lean-to, stopping before a battered samovar. He ruminated as he worked, pouring from a sloshing waterskin to the kettle basin and adding handfuls of warped branch-wood and ebon bark to the underlying stove chamber, readying a bitter tea mix in the bowl of a chipped mortar cup. Thoughts boiled and percolated with the water, the coarse scent of raw, pulped iktox leaves thickening with the piping steam. Condensation sweated down the brass skin of the samovar.

Unkind angels bent his ear with a legion of causes to deny Ashin any aid. The worst parts of his soul revelled in it. Seydon never considered himself a named adversary of hers, existing and working in the unknown galactic margins. They’d but only spoken once, to his memory, exchanging acid and stinging rebukes over comms. Ashin Cardé Varanin at the helm of power, always her first, best destiny, propped up by scores of lieutenants seduced by the chronicles of She Who Conquered Ten-Thousand Worlds. Himself, no one. An itinerant worker in a specialized niche career, a living anachronism that did not and could not fit into the larger galaxy. What did he owe her? What did she owe him? Seydon allowed a shiver to roll down his shoulders, setting the tea to boil further in the samovar.

But… She had come to him. Seydon leaned away from the samovar and gauged Ashin with a long glance. Then down, at his wrapped and bandaged hands. He owed her nothing, true. Yet a deeper, swelling thrum tore up at his soul and offered an undeniable argument. He could help. He would help. Because he wanted to. He was good for nothing else.

Pouring the tea, he offered Ashin a dented tin cup. The tea itself was a heady mixture of mocha flecks spinning in a cha-green froth. He sipped once, savoured the sharp bitterness warming the skin of his tongue, then sat against a recliner that was a simple lump of smoothed rock draped with discarded rugs.

Seydon spoke over the steaming rim of his cup. “…I know a place. It’s… a college of a sort. Very independent, very proud of it. The Unirohd School for Practical Chemistry, or ‘the Burgundy’ they call it. They’ve supposedly collected a library’s worth on noetic techniques involving all kinds of Force sorcery. If you’re looking for a way to bring your love back and do so in a manner that returns her whole?”

He laid the cup aside, leaning forward. “You could do worse than give the Burgundy a visit. And if that fails… Then there’s the Collegea.”

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

She took the tin cup and sat on the floor, or rather the ground.

"The Collegea are fools. Anything they know, I've forgotten. But these Unirohd, these Burgundy - I've heard the name in good contexts, and anyone who's worthwhile and can avoid assimilation by one of the great powers has my interest. Independent competence always does."

The tea scalded her tongue and pooled painfully behind her teeth. She grimaced and adjusted its temperature with a thought, then drank deep lest he think she was disdaining the hospitality.

"You can trust someone's heart and not the strength of their arm," she said, apropos of nothing. "I have some trusted contacts who aren't strong enough to keep me company in the places I need to go. I'll pay you what you're worth - both for the information you've given me and, if you're willing, for your protection on certain errands. I'm swimming in deeper water these days than I have in decades."

 

[Seydon of Arda]

“…I haven’t contracted out in years,” Seydon said almost mutely. He pulled a thin, bent tab on the samovar kettle and poured into his emptied, cracked mug. Aromatic vapours wafted up over his chin, filled his nostrils with an acridly savoury bouquet, briefly concentrating to still his hands enough until he noted his reflection peering back in the dark brew. He tilted the mug lip slightly, until Ashin’s portrait pooled into view in the tea. Brooded in the dry silence, turning over her offer, the wind freshening and gusting in desert smells of thorn-sage and mica sand.

Within the lean-to, the only evident furniture was an ancient driftwood clothes chest missing half its drawers, a small foot-stool doubling as a table and piled with rudimentary alchemical apparatus, a sooty, carbon-scored fusion stove powered by a trio of solar panels angled outside near the mouth of the tent. He absently took inventory of the piled cured terentatek meat and three wineskins worth of warm but desalinated water, a rough month’s worth of minimum sustenance. Seydon’s world, condensed into a holed tent built from stretched sithspawn hide, dead wood, pegs of broken iron forcefully hammered into the stony earth. Long days and hour-less nights spent haunting the canyons between old burial grounds, killing whatever emerged from the tomb complexes. Quieting and banishing wayward ghosts and burning phantoms away. He let the turns of unbearable sun heat and midnight cold sear and scour away his thoughts, took solace in the numbing routine. It kept the memories caged and wounds taken from monstrous combat held a strange, addictive sting that distracted him from other pains.

Coping. Just coping, he knew, through isolation and trial by hardship. Seydon pulled his fingers along Razorlight’s battered hilt and clenched them around the crossguard. For an age now, it felt all he wished to become was another sand mote and get lost in the dust storms. Turning the blade scabbard over in his hands, he thought ‘When last was I good for something?’ Seydon blinked slowly, as if coming out of a stupor, looked up and let go of a breath he forgot he was holding.

“Alright… Alright,” Seydon said. “I’ll give you whatever I’ve got left.”

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

Two unexpected emotions reared up. The contempt was an old friend. The pity was not. She put them both aside, both to avoid spooking Seydon of Arda and because she'd realized something that put their potential relationship in an entirely new light.

Namely, that their very different obsessions made them the same, in bone-deep ways.

"I found you from the names. In the qo'saarai tuk'ata villages you're Akh'irae, the Burning Hand. In New Dreshdae you're Tuk-jikkalr, the Crypt Stalker, and there's a folk singer serenading qhat-houses about the time you saved her father from dreambeasts. In Tashbaan they know both those names and they throw in Bherirr Dhore, the Mourning Man, forever searching for a sword embedded in a giant terentatek. I'm no stranger to a self-destructive, blinkered crusade. It's what I'm on at the moment, in fact. It feels like meaning, significance, the only kind I deserve. But don't get so much tunnel vision that you miss what you are. And on Tash-Taral, what you've made yourself is mythic."

Ashin put the teacup aside and stood. "We should go. Time to introduce you to my self-destruction."