A DARK SHADOW NEEDS LIGHT
JEDHA | JEDI MONASTERY
A DARK SHADOW NEEDS LIGHT TO EXIST
BUT LIGHT DOESN'T NEED DARKNESS TO BE LUMINOUS
Malign energy sparked and stretched in all directions. Lightning ripped across the room, tearing into the beast and spiralling around her sword’s blade and her wrist, burning a permanent bracelet against her skin, turning pale poignant into something knotted, raw, and violent. Through it all, she grit her teeth.
Tormented beyond reason, betaken of a weakness that drained her very essence, the enfeebled young Jedi dropped forward, caught only by her hands. At the same time the creature’s swords clatter noisily against the stonework, she too falls forward to her hands, scrunching in on herself like a cat caught in a storm.
But the unceremonious sound of clattering metal and sizzling sabres is nothing in comparison to the ear-shattering caterwaul of the enemy. It’s inhuman, the sound of suffering stretching from his throat into the monastery’s echo chamber.
It was awful. Excruciating to hear. And blinking through her salt-stained grief, the Ashina heir felt her hands shaking against the stone, threatening to no longer support her table topped position.
In wide-eyed, abject horror, Ishida was cast back to Coruscant in a scene that paralleled this very one. Her, crumpled in agony. Her opposition — her brother —
writhing in unfathomable pain and bellowing out in ripples through the force to give voice to his excruciation. It was too similar for her not to feel her heart twist at the realization, and she felt her vocal cords buzz soundlessly.
Through the deafening agony, and her dizziness, she tried to figure the distance between them. How alike was this to her and Qiy’on? Was this so alike to give her that chance back, where she’d failed on Coruscant? Where she’d condemned him instead of understood him?
But it was almost impossible to see through the fog of her tears, the vignette of her pain. It was through a distracting cloud that was the air - atoms and molecules bouncing against each other, striking and spinning away and striking again. Something hummed and throbbed, ticking faster than she should be aware of. The pulse of her own brain, the tempo of her consciousness. It sang like a chorus, and she heard herself hearing it.
Then, in a subtle decrescendo, those molecule-splitting bellows could no longer manifest the pain, all outward excruciation turned against him, inward, to breathless, hoarse, silent agony.
In the dimness of the lobby, she saw the subtle shift of the silhouette that had charred so much of her. He looked lamer, limp against the stone while golden electric snakes fizzled and snapped around his shape. Biting at the oxygen around him, spreading through the cracks of humanity and widening the wounds. Blood flowed freely now, black ichor that had been so hard to come by just moments before.
Ishida took this chance to draw in a deep breath, close her eyes, and draw on the whispers of the past. This was a monastery, rich and ripe with Jedi giving to take. Through the silent religious whispers she murmured, she felt their willingness swell around her imprint within the great empyrean. Healing breaths roamed over and through her, and she felt a series of tremors travel through her muscles.
Drawing up from her knees, weak, enervated, Ishida felt she was dragging her swords back up with her rather than a typical warrior stance.
The enemy did not stand.
From his mouth babbled strange, alien gurgling sounds. Through his fangs, over his lips, tar-black dribbled down to the earthy masonry of the temple. Distant of mind, Ishida touched her throat where matching blood was stained against her skin. By now, it smelled like burnt metal. Much of it dried and cracked.
Slowly, she approached the quivering mass of a demon. Victory seemed so easy now, as it had with Qiy’on. Like it was something tangible that she could snap apart.
She’d lost victory on Coruscant against Qiy’on because she’d let her hubris get in the way. Her ego. She’d hesitated.
Hesitated to redeem.
Hesitated to kill.
They both result in the same thing.
Hesitation is defeat.
And she felt it here, again, now. As if time were stopping for her benefit, letting her know that the edges of this moment had the potential to be transformative. The likeness between the now, and the past failure of her brother were too uncanny to ignore.
Trembling, she stood above Laoth, the point of her glowing blade at the Sith’s throat. She could kill him now. End the torment that glowed behind his eyes, end the potential slaughter by his hand. She moved to draw back her hand to deliver the final blow, the coup de grace underserved by something so unholy.
I help them, they stop being a threat. And, well. We add something to the Galaxy instead of taking it away.
She wanted to destroy this thing of darkness, this thing that had scorched her insides, killed Alliance men and women and reduced them to corpses, statistics. This thing that was…
..that was…
Had that intangible something all along been suffering?
Deep within The Force’s folds, layers, intangibly untouchable realms of humanity, Ishida thought she could perceive something hidden in the way the Devaronian’s face knitted and scrunched, flexed and perspired.
Those eyes look old, lost, uncertain, tired. That agonizingly wretched scream, it’s one born from pain –– the eyes, his terrorized yells, they condemn and beckon her to hesitate. Earlier, she’d wondered if this man was made of solid evil. Of opaque darkness. But now, the way his eyes flicker, the way his blood pours –– the cracks exposed themselves, fissures separating, vying for her glimmering touch.
Is this where she would succumb to the circumstance, or transcend it?
There was an opportunity here. Another chance for her to learn a lesson. To seek redemption for driving her brother to the darkside.
It wasn’t The Alliance that was to blame for her adopted brother’s fall. Nor The Maw’s attractive lure. It was her own. The only debt to be collected was her own penance.
Ishida stared at the Devaronian beneath her. It was the shape of someone alive, someone capable of making their own decisions, but what she hated, what had hurt her, what had killed, was darkness. Somehow, that silhouette of evil lifted above the crimson-skinned devil and shaped into something else. Something separate.
The hilt of her sabre swallowed the glowing white extension, containing the deadly plasma rod within its kyber containment.
She shuddered and looked up to the ceiling as if the next step were written overhead.
But then the atmosphere shifted. Again.
Everything drew upward, like the temple itself had drawn in a sharp inhale and just..stayed..there. Hovering like a breath held. Vying for release from this unholy suspension.
“No,” she murmured, more to herself than anything. Through the breathless stagnation, the suspension of everything hostile between them, ripples start to form in the air to create tiny currents that hold the crystalized forms of black blood in place. Fallen bodies become risen, limp and lifeless but suspended by The Force’s fake promise of renewal. Debris and rubble start to join the gathering heights, and Ishida finds herself feeling immense pressure building beneath her feet. The ground starts to quiver and quake, rumbling deeply as if the stones themselves were parroting the bellows of before.
Soon, the quakes become too much for someone so enervated.
“You don’t have to do this.” Ishida hears herself whisper, as her muscles give way and force her to drop down to her knees again. She’s not really speaking to the devil, at this juncture. She’s speaking to the opportunity. To the shadow of her fallen adopted brother.
Her heart isn’t fully in it, and the devil can see through her unfeeling deceit.
"The foundations of history, so easily to be swept away,"
“No!” She barks out, louder, truer this time.
Again, she's too late. Darkness takes over.
Everything built up rolls out from him, and the typhonic roll of darkness drowns her. It slammed against her chest and she’s knocked to her back, the sound of metal skittering on stone ringing out again above the shifting sand and dust that makes up the archway of the entrance. Its intense, palpable darkness. Siphoning hope from her final vestiges of heroism and replacing it with despair.
The ground becomes uneven and moving, her body shaking beyond control under the whims of the architecture. Desperately, she reaches and scrambles for her dropped katana. Patting through nothingness and everything, she finds the hilt and stretches on her stomach to shove it back into its containment on her back. From above, massive stones start to crack. Silt dripping like waterfalls from the force-ruptured cracks.
Dark waves continue to pound and crash relentlessly, and Ishida finds a jagged juncture to wedge her heel into. Temporarily it stops her from sliding, enough to erect a small protective bubble around her that debris plunk harmlessly from. Though, the blue glow spiderwebs threateningly on impact.
If she was making sounds while she crawled, fruitlessly back to the gap of an entrance in an attempt to escape, any of her noises were harmonized by the screams of ancient stones, beladen with secrets and whispers of knowledge untapped for centuries. They cracked, reduced to dust.
Crawling back toward the entrance meant she had to crawl back toward the afflicted warrior guarding it, tearing it down with his sheer might. To survive, she had to try where she’d failed before. He wasn’t a monster, he was for all intents and purposes now, her brother.
“You have to stop!” Ishida yelled over the tremours, feeling the darkness rip at her throat as soon as she opened her mouth to defy its deluge.
“You’ll die here!”
She blinked, desperately searching for a way to negotiate with the murderous brute.
Maintain it, Jedi. Make...him...learn."
“You still have to learn!”
Learn what, she didn’t know — but being crushed beneath a monastery tended to cut academic pursuits short.
ALLIES | NJO | GA|
Tren Chaar
FOES | BOTM |
Laoth
Halketh
//:
Taiia Locke
//:
Valery Noble
//:
Ripley Kühn
//: 
