Private Chaotic Singularity (Darth Carnifex)

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

One simple slip of parchment left on the arm of a monolith’s throne, writ with no ink others could see, but they who believed in truth that all things flowed through and around a greater sense of time. Folded twice in on itself, the paper laid off-centre, each fold a random angle. To any perfectionist, a lesson in futility. Chaos personified in parchment, which when unfolded displayed no markings but scratched colours in the ever shifting state of the nebula which perished to our first meeting.

“Find me, my love.” I am both older and newer to this universe than the man who holds my affections unquestionably in the palm of his beskar hand. He is both Master and Apprentice, dominant husband and protective father of our strange one, the Blessed Daughter of two Dark beasts. Dotage for Raya becomes desire for Ebele and Adir to remain rigid in the way of Him.

Of House Zambrano, rigid temple to beings who live their centuries and glance forward to eons in their shaken wake.

I held a singularity in the palm of my hand the first day seventeen years before. Seventeen cycles dictated by revolutions of planets around stars I care little about but for the way they dance between our fingers if we but grasp light enough to feel their fluctuant buzz.

Bastion’s indomitable pyramid is ash beneath a cauldron’s flame, the Empire splits and swerves and sucks in dire breaths. Unstable, evolving.

Unstable, indomitable and evolving.

“You are ready. Find me.” The whisper floats from wafts of colour off the page, a subtle hint of conjoined belonging to drive him off the throne and in a direction so random he may be ready to receive. But how would the Dark Lord search for his absent timed Queen? She who walked bare-footed across the plains of nebulae and planets alike?

The parchment will quiver in his hand, combust into the last vestige of a memory conjured into a solid object. Innate of its’ original potency, but no less visible or weightious. Fragile, the way all minds in the beginning of all metamorphoses are fragile. As shifting in the breeze as my fixation on this plane.

A miniature singularity in the palm of his hand. ​

Darth Carnifex

 

[Darth Carnifex]

The throne room of the Sith Citadel was cavernous and empty, large enough to hold hundreds of Sith to hear the proclamations of the Dark Lord but useful for little else. A single large seat at the lowest level of the amphitheater constituted the Emperor's throne, with wide flat benches expanding out in an ascending tiered half-circle serving as seating for those in attendance of the Emperor's presence. Not a single soul sat in attendance now, the cold wind howling across the empty seats.​

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A door at the far end of the amphitheater opened, hydraulic gears hissing white steam as the doors disappeared into their partitions. In strode the Dark Lord of the Sith flanked by two of his black-clad Crownsguard, his gaze severed as his eyes scanned the empty room. Walking forward, he made a quick advance upon his throne. There he snatched up the scrap of paper, reading it with a single glance before pocketing it in the confines of his robe.​

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And he left without a word.​

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Sometime later the Emperor strode through the streets of New Kaas City, his darker outfit replaced by an inconspicuous earthen robe and hood which concealed his face. He entered into Little Panatha without fanfare, disappearing into the crowds of people who resembled him in height and build. He continued to move through the district until he reaches its epicenter, the Bladuil Saziliebmr. A joined statue of the Dark Lord and the Shadow Hand, it was often visited by the Epicanthix of New Kaas City because of their cultural devotion to the pair. Even now there were a good deal of Epicanthix milling about, the harsh tongue of Epicant a welcome shift from the clipped Basic that often dominated the halls of power.​

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Carnifex stopped before the statue's base, his eyes looking up to stare at the marble facsimile. "Here of all places," he mused to seemingly no one, "Not what I would have expected."​

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Ahani Najwa-Zambrano ​

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

“Expectation is in itself a form of control, my love.” I weave around from the other side of the statues, one hand in the pocket of my dark grey linen trousers in another of the rather large button down shirts which billow off my frame. “To follow me, you must relinquish the control you desire. Why else do you think I waited this long?”

I hop down, trot behind my gargantuan husband, a hand stroking the outside of his cloak. The act leaves echoes behind it, as if my hand were present then, and now and in a future a few seconds long. “Where am I, Kaine? Am I this sinew and muscle? These strips of cloth? You change bodies like clothes, anchors for your intrinsic soul... are you the body or the soul? How do you know which piece is you?”

A cacophony breaks in the square, a tapcaf across from my beloved. My smile is all which remains for the sight of me dissipates on the wind as my lips stroke his ear. Until that too disappears for the growing fight, a cup of stimcaf spilled and unsavoury words spoken to the wrong trio of two brothers and their diminutive, but older, sister. “Am I in the tumult? Find me.”

I appear again, up on a rooftop further off. The wind batters at my clothes, silver hair caught whipping in the ponytail at the base of my neck. “What is the correlation between levitation and gravity? Between weight and mass? What is gravity but a weak force easily bent? Come. Come to me.”

Darth Carnifex

 

[Darth Carnifex]

He listened to his wife's words, absorbing each in turn.​

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She spoke of identity, of knowing one's own existence. Such questions seemed trivial to the Sith Lord, he had spent decades studying his own existence and perfecting it within the limitations of the galaxy. To explore beyond those limitations was something that he had worked towards for as long as he had grasped the power of the Dark Side, and with every rotation, that goal grew ever closer and closer. His experiments on Remnicore were on the cusp of bearing tangible results, and those results would unlock the gate towards power beyond comprehension.​

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"I am that I am," he spoke, confidently, "There is nothing but me."​

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He watched with a molten gaze as she disappeared from view, coincidentally right as a brawl broke out in the nearest tapcaf. His eyes swung upward, spying the sight of his wife on one of the nearby rooftops. She spoke to him of gravity and the force that it exerted on the world around them. The planet's mass drew in objects around it, which was why people didn't just float off into space, while the planets themselves were drawn in by the mass of the nearby star. Dancing in a scintillating orbiting ballet, the planets spun around the sun according to the dictations of gravity.​

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"Gravity," he spoke, "is a harness."​

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He reached out with the Force and ascended into the air as the nearby patrons were too busy focusing on the brawl to pay any attention to him, gliding up by his own strength in the Force before his feet gracefully connected with the rooftop shared by his wife.​

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Ahani Najwa-Zambrano ​

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

“Yes! You are… and in that too you push with dominance. Claiming everything unto yourself.” Laughter taken through kindness filters around the biting winds, a hand flourished in front of our faces. “I am of you, but am not you. You are… and? You are not. We are the atomic cloud, the crackling energies and quantum entanglements throughout the cosmos. While relativistically we are the focal point with which to view the universe, the universe is not us. It is less than. A bastion of cells and amoebae fluctuating round in gravitic wakes and circles. If you see this universe as a sliver of yourself, you will never see past… I get ahead of myself.”

The air charges round as Darth Carnifex returns to my side. I feel the echoes of force, a levitation bound by the push and the pull in an astoundingly well balanced show of my husband’s masteries. Good. Seeing his shifting body closer to my own, I marvel at how precisely he connects with his Uncle, their diyad a universal constant. I celebrate my own place, the feminine to his utter masculinity. Separate, but connected. And still further we may go. Still further up my body travels, until air itself is thin.

“Gravity is a toy.” My hand waves in the air, body suspended in the middle of Dromund Kaas’ skyline as wind and its’ rush flap at loose clothing. “All you require to defeat it is a sense of scale.”

Higher, ever higher, until the throngs and people of Kaas City are as inconsequential as the weak force holding those plebians down to their planetary sense of vision. Here, I wonder. So large a man in proportion, how long until he begins to feel the choke of little air, the blue-ing of fingernails or flutter of heart all those whose bodies respond to such stimuli experience?

“Is this a planet, or a marble in Ebele’s hand? While the weight of Dromund Kaas calls out, it is a weight of conscience and experience that brings our feet toward its’ ground. Not the archaic spin of the planet’s polar regions or its’ place around its’ star. Defeat it. Detach from the meaning of Dromund Kaas as a planet and instead see it as a dot in your palm. Something so small cannot call your feet to its’ pull. Thus, we may fly through atmosphere and fluid alike without that downward pull or expenditure of energy. And if gravity can be so manipulated…” A cracked smile, the turn of my neck, to a direction pulled loose from the fragments of memory. Frost attempts to take my skin, as I follow the pathway of my mind back to the memory of the planetoid upon which I spent centuries trapped within.

The wind folds around my body like the tunic-shirt I wear, and with those folds, the image of the upper atmosphere shivers. Shakes.

“I am of you, my memories are yours… pull on a memory with the same strength as that which you defeated gravity, feel out for where your mind pulls you. Even a hand may fold, fingers to palms, as rigid as it can be. Even space may fold for those, whose surrender is sound… Like the flex of knuckles in your hand, tension will not close it. Relinquish force and power. Surrender to the sensation of memory, of motion and come find me, my love.” I duck backward through the folded portal, as it slices closed. If he were purely mortal, by now my Kaine would be dead and falling back to Dromund Kaas, but he is much more than sinew and bone.

A bitter chill consumes me, as the Krystalsovn and its’ purely crystalline environs swathes me once more in its’ mercies. “… whelp! Hope he figured out the hand-thing, or I’ll be a while getting home…”

 

[Darth Carnifex]

One might have found Ahani's mannerisms of speech confusing, perhaps frustrating, but Carnifex had learned to grow accustomed. When he had plucked her from where he had found her, deep in the darkness of the galaxy, he had found a woman marred by insanity. Her true potential had been hamstrung by madness, her actions limited by the restriction of her broken mind. He had sought the best minds which could repair broken minds, and he had found a savior in Taeli Raaf.​

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She had removed the malignity which tormented his wife, and she had regained blessed lucidity. With a sharp mind, she had become one of the most powerful tools in his arsenal, but she had also become so much more than that. In her, he had found a companionship wholly unique. Though he held some measure of twisted and dark affection for his other wives, Ahani possessed something that they did not.​

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The capacity to teach Carnifex something new.​

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Blackened eyes trailed up as he watched Ahani ascend higher and higher into the cloud-laden sky, disappearing from even his perspective while her voice still rang in his ears as if she was whispering right into them. He then slowly looked down at his own hands, which had risen outstretched before him, palms facing upwards as his fingers curled into fists.​

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His mind thought back of the three fundamental aspects of the Force; the Anima, the Aperion, and the Pneuma. Aperion included and united all matter, giving it shape and cohesion. Space and time, electromagnetism and gravity, were all disparate aspects of this fundamental force, directing the cosmic forces which whirled above on their path through the aether. ​

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For a moment, nothing happened as he channeled the power of the Force through his extremities and into his core. Then, like his wife before him, he too began to levitate up into the air, faster and faster as he worked his will over the controls of gravity. Frost gathers on the periphery of his being, but his control over his body was too great to allow such mundane cold to pierce his being. He breached the clouds, levitating high over Dromund Kaas with his wife.​

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Then she did the unexpected, which ironically was expected of her. She folded space and disappeared into a spatial rift. ​

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Not willing to be left behind in the dust, Carnifex heeded the words of his wife and began to focus energy in the manner she had described. Though it was difficult, seemingly impossible at times, he, at last, achieved what he had set out to do, and a new spatial rift opened up before him. He flung himself through appearing somewhere nearby to Ahani. Brief discharges of lightning danced off his body, excess power vented out lest his physical form overheat and meltdown.​

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"What next, teacher?" ​

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Ahani Najwa-Zambrano ​