Private Brother, My Brother || Acier

[Aether Verd]

SINNER'S WELL, RYLOTH​

Darksaber ◈ Armor ◈ Basilisk ◈ Ship​

The Kom’rk shrieked across the twilight sky like a blade unsheathed.

Aether sat in silence as the vessel descended, his gaze fixed on the jagged horizon. Ryloth's surface stretched out beneath him: arid, hostile, familiar. Somewhere among the broken stone and windswept dust waited the legacy he had never asked for.

He could still feel her eyes. Not the Manda’s. Hers.

He had knelt at the edge of the Living Waters, surrounded by warriors whose loyalty had never wavered, whose faith in the Creed matched his own. One by one, they had been tested by the sacred space and emerged changed. Marked. Blessed.

When it had been his turn, the silence of the deep was broken not by a voice, but by a presence. Cloaked in darkness, shaped in memory. His mother.

She had scolded him. Had judged his path. Despite this, she stood there, as she always had, and loved him.

Aether had rejected her. Her legacy. Her truth.

But the Manda had shown him what his pride had blinded him to: that he was both his parents' son. That there was strength not only in the Creed, but in the current of power that flowed through his veins: a power he had refused to claim.

Until now.

The Kom’rk touched down in a plume of dust, a respectful distance from the cragged face of the mountain. The fortress loomed beyond it, half-swallowed by stone, its spires sunken and its gates long silent. Sinner’s Well.

His father’s sanctuary. His sister's refuge. The crucible where secrets were forged.

Aether disembarked alone.

The wind howled low as he picked his way across the terrain, silver beskar dulled beneath a coat of fine dust. Each step forward felt heavier, not from fatigue, but from what waited at the end.

The doors did not challenge him.

Towering, ancient, forged of obsidian and alloy, they did not rattle nor resist. They simply knew the blood of his father. With a groan that echoed through the valley, they parted for him, and sealed shut behind him with a thunderous finality.

He stood still for a long moment, eyes adjusting to the dim.

It reeked of shadow inside. Of power left to rot. The air was thick, not with dust, but with presence. It curled around the edges of his consciousness like smoke. Hungry. Testing.

He hated it. But he did not flinch.

"This is not yours," he muttered to the darkness. "It’s mine. And I will make it serve."

His boots echoed against the stone as he moved forward. Down corridors lined with forgotten tomes. Past murals scorched by Force fire. Toward the lower levels, where the alchemical sanctum waited.

Toward the relic that would make him whole.

◈ Acier Moonbound ◈

 

[Acier Moonbound]

The journey from Ord Mantell to Ryloth had been quiet, not in the way silence soothed, but in the way it pressed. Acier rode alone now, the low hum of the speeder bike rising and falling with the canyons of the Ryloth wastes.

He'd landed the day before, catching a ride off Ord Mantell from a smuggler with more credits than questions. Now, the jagged horizon stretched ahead of him like something half-remembered from a dream. The Nightsister spindle he'd recovered from Peridea lie inside his jacket.

The relic that started all of this. It hadn't made sense at first. The visions it triggered when he practiced psychometry came fractured, buried beneath noise and static. But one image cut through it all: a scorched symbol carved into stone, a fortress swallowed by dust, and a sigil, some kind of crest, that pulsed with a meaning he didn't yet understand. It had followed him since. Drawn him here. And now, as he sped across Ryloth's sunblasted terrain toward the place the spindle had shown him. That pull twisted deeper in his gut. Whatever waited for him out there… maybe it had something to do with who he was. Even if he didn't know what he was asking yet.

The wind shifted. What had been miles of monotonous red-brown wasteland began to change, subtly at first. The dust grew finer. The ridges sharper. The sky above, tinged with ash-colored light, seemed to press lower the closer he got. Acier eased off the throttle slightly, squinting ahead as the outline of something wrong began to cut across the horizon.

At first, it barely looked like anything at all, just a jagged formation swallowed by the stone around it. But as the speeder crested a rise, the illusion peeled back. There it was.

A spire. No… a fortress. Half-consumed by the mountain. The walls seemed carved from the same obsidian and alloy as the vision burned into his mind. Ancient. Sunken. Still. Like the planet itself had tried to forget it existed and failed.

His chest tightened, a flicker of vertigo sweeping over him. The Nightsister spindle, tucked beneath his jacket, throbbed faintly against his chest, not physically, but through the Force. The same presence he'd felt in the vision was here. Not alive, exactly. But waiting. He didn't know what this place was. Didn't know who built it. Or why it felt like the silence here could hear him. But he knew this was it.

The speeder's engine sputtered low as Acier eased it to a stop on the bluff overlooking the canyon. Dust swirled in the wake of his arrival, curling around him as he dismounted. For a moment, he just stood there - the barren wind tugging at his jacket, the spindle beneath his coat heavy with silence.

The fortress rose from the stone like a half-buried memory, carved straight into the cliffside. It looked ancient, sunken, and asleep. It felt dark and... cold. The kind of place that shouldn't exist, let alone call to someone. But it had. Through flame-colored visions and the twisted language of psychometry. This place had pulled him.

His boots crunched over brittle earth as he approached the base of the stairway. The carved steps were weather-worn, choked by sand and time, but they still held their shape, still led somewhere. Each footfall echoed softly, muffled by the weight of dust. He reached the top, heart in his throat, one hand unconsciously grazing the Nightsister spindle hidden beneath his jacket.

Then, with no warning, no sound of gears or servos - the stone doors opened. Not all the way. Just enough for passage. The air shifted. A low exhale from the depths.

Acier froze. His hand went instinctively to his lightsaber, but didn't draw it. There was no threat, not exactly. Only the sense that the building itself had seen him. Had recognized something it hadn't in a long time. He looked over his shoulder. No one. The yawning doorway continued to open.

"…Right," he muttered under his breath. "That's not weird at all."

He stepped inside. The air was cooler, stale with age. His footsteps were quiet now, swallowed by stone. The deeper he went, the stronger the pull became, like something in the walls knew him. Knew something about him. Then, as he rounded a shadowed archway, he stopped dead in his tracks.

Someone was already here. Someone powerful.

Aether Verd