Private Devil's Den

[Vesta]

There was no regular schedule for when the pair met, nothing that let her apprentice know when to expect to be thrust into an impromptu lesson, at first it had been a consequence to the somewhat irritating habit the girl had early on in which she tried a number of ways to kill the Sith lord. They had moved passed that - she thought - but the random nature of their training did not. Sometimes this was inconvenient to the two of them, as it might strike Vesta's fancy while Aradia, having not known, might've left for the day, so there was certainly an argument to be made to organize things.

Finding the girl in the state she was in now, however, was reason enough to toss that argument out of the window. She expected the rebellious streak, anticipated it some days, and steadily she had gotten that under control, even if the girl might disagree with her. What she did not expect, however, was to find her apprentice crouched over some servant like an animal, knuckles white with how strong her grip on the poor thing was, trying to drain her of every last ounce of her very essence.

She was separating the two from each other with the force before she had time to speak.

"What in the Nine Hells do you think that you are doing?" She asked, genuinely flabbergasted - and clearly incensed.

Darth Daiara

 

[Darth Daiara]

It had been a spell gone wrong.

Ancient runes, the oldest of the sith, were scrabbled across the floor. The signs of a ceremony were clear. Once lit candles were scattered, the wax splattered by the struggle Vesta ripped apart. In the center was a dagger, covered in the blood of a second body that laid lifeless on the floor.

It was no one familiar, but the servant girl... yes, that was Vesta's own.

There was no sense of reason in Aradia's eyes as she was ripped away. She snarled, black veins streaking across her face as she struggled against the unseen. It struggle would only last a moment before her weaken state became clear. She fell limp in the hold, every breath a struggle as blood flowed freely from her mouth.

Something had been ruptured. The servant girl was not the only one on death's door.

Aradia had not waited for Vesta today and that spell... that spell was certainly no where in the shifters books.

 

[Vesta]

To consume was her domain, or at least that was surely what the girl had assumed - this reckless ploy at pushing into a territory that her master had complete dominion, in her mind, reaching its logical conclusion at the point where the girl tried to push much further than she had even been told. Some of that was on Vesta's shoulders, to have told her apprentice to question those that restrained their learning, but she had always assumed that Darth Daiara would come to her rather than act on her own. It was perhaps that expectation that ended up with the two where they were, and with a dead body to boot.

"Reckless.. unintuitive.. foolish.." She muttered as she felt her fingers to the girl's next, her other hand holding the girl in place with a telekinetic force she'd never felt the need to employ - the feral look on Aradia's face forcing that caution. There was still a pulse, meaning the girl hadn't done what Vesta immediately assumed she had, but it still didn't rule out the potential that she might've been attempting it. That would've made her kill the girl there and then, and that would've been supremely difficult for her to do.

Again the force tore into the Sith lord's hand, the one which was held to the girl's neck, but she did not drain the world of its life to feed the girl - she knew better than to tempt the hunger lurking within her, at least at this stage. Vesta's eyes narrowed to a squint as she focused her sight through the force to peer into the many web-like cracks that ran along the girl in the force, the dozens of shatterpoints that ran across her like fault lines. There, where the girl had injured herself, she adjusted her focus and pried it open with the dark side of the force, disintegrating the organic matter as if all the atomic bonds holding that part of her broke at once --

Then recreated the missing flesh with the energy that immediately tried to escape directly after.

Alchemy, of the flesh, one might call it, but the Sith lord had another name for it, a better one.

Domination.

To exceed the whims of reality, to impose her own will upon it, and to dominate and reshape it - or bring it to its end - was where her studies pushed her, not towards the mindless hunger that predicated that path. "Breath." She said, her words a demand rather than an order. Her fingers curled around the girl's throat and squeezed, albeit gently, with energy surging through her like electricity to a stopped heart - the energy the girl had craved so much, energy taken from the canvas that had once been saturated with it on Coruscant.

"Wake. Up."

 

[Darth Daiara]

Aradia gasped, her eyes snapping open. Every breath came easier, coughs clearing out her throat as she looked around in wildly. Awareness had returned to her, but she was no less panicked to find herself pinned, her bloody spittle scattered across Vesta's features.

"Wha-wha-" Her bucks died down until she was submissive inside the hold.

Her eyes landed on the dead street rat... the unconscious servant... and then finally, the dagger. It pulsed with the faint sense of the darkside. Had it worked? Had she done it?

She squirmed again, that look of need no less subded as she finally came around to her master. Vesta looked furious. Aradia grimaced and held in another cough.

"You're home early..." As if that was the root of the problem here. Not the fact that there had nearly been 3 dead bodies for the woman to find.

 

[Vesta]

The humor, whatever it was, was lost on her. Her eyes narrowed and she nearly tightened her grip around the girl's throat before pushing her away, exasperated. She looked over towards the dead body, towards the one that was lingering in a state between this life and the next, and then glared at her apprentice expectantly. "Early?" She asked, just as furious as the girl had thought. "What would you have done if I hadn't been home? Died? Is that what you wanted?" Vesta demanded with an expression that did little to hide her confusion.

She could understand her own deathwish but the girl had so much more than her to live for - Vesta only existed, now, to undo everything that had led up to what she'd become but Darth Daiara at least had a life to fight for. "Are you that starved, is that what this is?" She asked as she started to stand, a scowl etched into her features. Perhaps it was hypocritical of her, to have advocated this power and now lambasted her for its abuse, but then she'd never held herself to an internal rule so much as whatever worked. This, whatever it had been, had not.

"Explain yourself."

 

[Darth Daiara]

If Vesta was looking for Aradia to be humbled by this, she would left wanting. The girl crawled forward, over bodies and candles and blood-- they didn't exist. Only the dagger did.

She brought it to her, metal dragging along stone. She could feel the faint echo of the curse alchemized into the metal. It twisted and coiled in an unseen haze. She could barely lift it to eye level, her hands shaking at the exertion.

How do we know if it worked?

We try it.

The memory flickered, then faded as she finally looked back up. She could sense Vesta's expectant impatience. Aradia held out the weapon, eyes wide and urging. Nothing else was heard, nothing else mattered.

"Draw blood."

 

[Vesta]

If simply staring would've resolved things then she would have stared a hole right through the girl's hand, but that wouldn't give her the answer she was looking for - or explain the obsession over something as pointless as a dagger, which she'd clearly used to stab one of her housemaids with. She snatched the tool from her apprentice's hand, gingerly holding the blade in a pinched grip between the tips of her fingers, and glanced it over.

"Draw blood?" She asked, stopping short of questioning her apprentice's hold on sanity - she'd crafted weapons that drained the very essence of their victims into their blade when they were cut, so she'd usually be cautious of such, but her existence now was beyond such means. Certainly she hadn't achieved what she wanted, not yet, but she doubted anything beneath her own pedigree of alchemy - even something the likes of Darth Arcanix, or Taeli Raaf might have fashioned - would do the deed even if she had cut herself deep enough.

Her gaze traced the unassuming blade, its plain design, and decided either her apprentice had the worst taste in aesthetic design or she'd been imbuing a power into something she had found or stolen rather than created it herself. There was a dark taint there, a stain like an ink blot in the force, but it'd been plunged into someone who had likely been screaming for her life so it was doubtlessly touched by the dark side. She turned it over, ran a finger along its side, and then glanced up at her apprentice with a lofted brow.

Then slit the palm of her hand.

Usually she couldn't shift wounds away, not in the way someone might expect - it would've simply moved it somewhere else, an internal wound perhaps, but she had crafted her body from the atoms that she'd been reduced to in the glassing of Rhand. That is to say, she could reform, at least generally, from nearly any form of harm besides a strong enough source of power or the purging rays of force light.

This wound, this gash, however, remained.

Her confusion turned to anger, to rage - to concern.

"This.." She asked, her voice steady, her tone even. "..Did you make this to kill me?" Vesta asked, glancing down at the weapon in her hand, blood streaming down from the middle of her palm. She looked up, perturbed, and frowned. "You would have succeeded." She added, calmly, and handed her back the blade while she pressed her gash against her side to slow the bleeding.

"Are you going to try?"

Darth Daiara

 

[Darth Daiara]

A laugh bubbled from her chest. It felt distant... perturbed... but undeniably hers as she stared down at the blade. She had done it. The world walloped against a wash of light headedness.

Aradia leaned against the ground, elbows locked as it gently rolled back away. "Kill you?" She echoed, her voice almost childlike. "Why would I want to do that? No, it's to kill them. All of them. Any of them," she breathed, letting the tip prick her finger. A dollop of blood weld up.

She bounced it between her fingers, entranced. Nothing continued to matter, not even the suggestion of betrayal as she laid on the floor surrounded by another's blood. It certainly could look that way. Aradia had no such notion, nor was she strong enough to overtake her if she tried.

Another series of coughs interrupted her spell. Blood cleared its way out of her lungs, leaving her keeled over and once again overtaken by dizziness.

"What did you do?" She accused, her memory dark.

 

[Vesta]

This was, perhaps, more of a cause for worry than her initial assumption, although she was a tad bit relieved that she hadn't literally cried to her would-be murderer. Relieved that she wouldn't have to kill her, too. The sudden coughing, however, wasn't at all comforting and rather quickly she was back at the girl's throat despite thinking she wouldn't need to have been - before remembering the lingering cough that fresh tissue on the diaphragm would cause.

She leaned back, taking Darth Daiara with her, and cradled her like a child. An insane child, but a child.

"I made you a new throat, you destroyed your original one." She said with frown. She wasn't old enough for this - an apprentice was meant to learn, to be taught, to grow, not to be an adopted brat that she'd vent to periodically and coddle the rest. "My father would have let you drown in your own blood, a harsh lesson for trying this shit on your own."

Of course her father had also shouted down at her when she had insisted she could bring back her mother - and did.

Similarly, the girl had created a weapon she'd never seen or heard of before.

"You're like the sister I never wanted." Vesta remarked with the roll of her eyes, moving her hand to the girl's throat, the force flowing through her and into her. It was unnecessary, of course, the girl would recover on her own in a few days and know not to try stupid things on her own again, but she had said what she meant - and family, if nothing else, was worth considerably more than the hand that was bleeding freely against her side.

This time, understanding that it had been a hunger for knowledge, curiosity, that had driven her and not a renewed attempt to kill her master, the power that flowed from her and into her apprentice was the same nourishment she had begged her for before she'd been cut off - the same energy Vesta had drained from Vjun to revitalize the girl, albeit from a different source.

"Take as much as you need." She said.

She had far too much to spare.

 

[Darth Daiara]

Life returned to her body, twisted and fraught with the darkness they bathed in. She no longer resisted it, not like she had those first days when Vesta held up a mirror to what she was. Somewhere in the past months she had found acceptance and she had committed. The contrast was clear in the willing grip that twisted into Vesta's clothes.

The blade warmed forgotten between their bodies as she drained. The tenants of their upbringing demanded that Aradia try something-- strive for more in this moment of vulnerability. She did not. This was enough, Vesta was enough. Aradia wouldn't risk her for anything. Aradia would like to think there was nothing, not even power, that could make her turn her back on her inner circle. They were stronger that way.

Untouchable.

It was the only reason Aradia had found the strength to stop the drain, a feat she hadn't known she was capable of until Zaavik forced her to try.

The world fell quiet as she laid in Vesta's arms.

"Who do you hate most in the galaxy?" She whispered, eyes distant and dark.

 

[Vesta]

For a moment she wasn't just the frustrated woman dealing with an ambitious apprentice, for just the breadth of a second, no longer than the span of time it took for oxygen to move from the girl's lungs and into the blood that would cycle through her body, Vesta was little more than a literal cloud of darkness. Hunger given shape, a hunger that grew increasingly starved as it shed away, little by little, the bits of herself that she had been slowly consuming to keep herself normal. Looking down, annoyance knit into the wrinkles in her forehead from where her brow was pushed together, there was something approaching envy in the bizarre mix of emotions that sculpted the look present on her face.

For the first time she saw the apprentice she had been after, the one that would do much more than she was willing to, but it just seemed that much more was further related to living than it was to the sort of strength that would be necessary to put her at ease. It wasn't surprising, not in the least, when she felt the pull slow, then stop. The girl had empathy, or something of the sort, and that already made her much more capable of restraint than the Sith lord was - her own hunger would have devoured the world, much less the girl, if their roles had been reversed. But still, Darth Daiara didn't cease to amaze her with the question she posed. It was a simple one, that, and perhaps it was relevant given who they were, but there was nothing in Vesta that had anticipated such a sudden interest in something that was nearly the root of her being at this point.

"Myself." She said, not giving much more than a moment of pause to answer. It was an easy answer but it was the truth, though she assumed there was likely someone else the girl would've thought she had in mind. "You?" Vesta asked, staring off into space now, distant.

It was the first time she had asked a question she didn't already know the answer to - a rule, her own, broken. Again.

 

[Darth Daiara]

Aradia's expression flickered, her fingers tightening to coil the blade minutely away from the woman's reach.

"... Today? Allyson Locke. Tomorrow?... Whoever crosses me next," she answered honestly. She didn't know the names or faces that had been responsible for what had happen to her peers. Maybe then they'd be on her list first. As time passed that passion had become eclipsed by an unrelenting force.

They were being hunted all over again.

She pulled back, just enough to pierce Vesta with an inquisitive gaze that wouldn't be dismissed. "Why you?"

 

[Vesta]

'Interesting.' She thought.

It'd been unexpected, though she supposed it wasn't all that far-flung from where she had been thinking. Still, it was an oddity that someone could hate someone who, misguided though they must have been, seemed to care so much for them. Her mind wandered, for a moment, to the person that had made it much easier for her to shoulder her own hatred, then pushed that train of thought aside as she rested her attention back onto her apprentice. There was a slight huff of air that she exhaled through her nose, a breath that substituted for a laugh that would've had to have been explained for it to have made sense in the context they had found themselves in, and for the shortest span of time the facade of temporary peace seemed to veil her senses before, just as quickly, it dissipated right before her eyes.

"Why you?" Darth Daiara had asked, breaking her rambling inner monologue and returning her to the reason behind her answer.

She smiled, then, at the self-awareness she'd been cursed with, the understanding that every last ounce of blame she'd assigned to everyone else in her life had been but a simple misdirect, a projection; the only person responsible for her own action, the sole owner of all of that blame, was herself. "Philosophy, dear Aradia, makes us question things typically beyond our understanding in a way that we can - when we are cut, do we blame the knife or the one holding it?" Vesta said, her words more than likely as confusing as they were poorly phrased - though she hoped it was obvious to infer that she was saying she was the metaphorical hand holding the blade in this scenario. "We can forgive it once, maybe twice, or however many times until it becomes something that doesn't end - a habit, a desire, no matter how self-destructive it might be. Once it's clear that the hand cannot be reasoned with, we either take the blade away or we kill it."

"And sometimes we fail to do either, so we hate it." Her expression had taken on a darker haze, though the smile was still present there. "I made a choice to do something that I would come to regret forever, and it is what set me on a path I can no longer leave."

"Freedom to choose, but ignorant to the result - the price of power. I chose to kill someone so early on.. when things could have been much different if I had not. Better, maybe, or perhaps not; I will never know, because I chose a different road to take."

 

[Darth Daiara]

Aradia didn't know what to make of the confession. It was raw... and human... and unexpected. She understood it. Even if she didn't take it to the degree Vesta did. If Aradia had been offered any other path in life it ... she would not have chosen this. She didn't like it, she had barely begun to embrace it.

But she hadn't had any other option. She had chosen this. It was nothing to dwell over, not to her.

She frowned at the face of Vesta's brutal truth. "Alright, well I'm taking this away from you." She tucked the cursed blade in its hilt. She was going to offer to let the woman use it against her enemies but she was in no mood to be another master short.

She sat up to find herself sticky with another's blood. She surveyed the damage with grim clarity. Bodies laid around them-- the surviving maid's breath shallow and strained.

"...Should I call the doctor?" Signs of the Aradia Vesta knew returned to the girl's figure-- a grimace of regret flickering across her face.

 

[Vesta]

With the hand that wasn't bleeding she ruffled the girl's hair, quietly snickering at the gesture of hilting the blade. She understood the sort of resignation the girl had towards the road she was wandering down, now, and it wasn't much different than her own - it was the actual thing which she hated about herself, about her willingness to accept what she disliked and projected the need to change onto the galaxy at large. More than that, it was that she, as if split between two minds, was unwilling to challenge herself on this and simply acted as though it was right. Or, perhaps, maybe it was right and she simply wished she was wrong.

"Get to sleep, I'll clean all of this up.. and figure out what to do about my hand, I suppose." She said, rising to stand now that her apprentice was no longer more or less in her lap. There were indeed things that needed to be resolved her, more than just her own issues or the girl's, and certainly more than the mess that Darth Daiara had left for her here. She shook her head at the question posed to her, she didn't need her parents to have a pointless conversation with her about this. "Oh, Aradia?" She asked, pausing for a moment to glance away from the blood that was seeping into the floor and towards her apprentice.

"You're doing good."

 

[Darth Daiara]

It felt disgusting.

Blood.

She stood with limbs that shook from exertion over strength alike, her arms held out awkwardly at her side. She was grateful Vesta offered to handle it all. Not only was she itching to break out and sate the electrified buzz in her limbs with a bit of movement, she was also secretly... squeamish.

The chamber was beginning to feel very small very quickly.

Vesta's praise earned another grimace, her pleasure catching in the corner of her lips.

"You're still not getting the blade." Her eyes twinkled, a wordless nod saying it all as she waddled towards the door. "And I'm using your shower." Because needless to say, she would not be arriving to Zaavik like this.

There were some things he just wasn't ready for. Not like she was.

She was getting stronger.