Athanasios
Transcendent Scholar
Tormented souls on Alderaan?
In other news; water, wet.
Athanasios was not the first psychopomp to pass through this area of space, she supposed, and neither would she be the last. The truth was painfully simple; practitioners of her arts were often branded as evil (a backwards concept held by ignorant fools incapable of functioning without a black-and-white perception of the Galaxy), and chased by self-righteous warriors of Light. With so much stigma, so much misconceptions, how could they ever guide so many souls to the beyond? Alderaan's population, by some estimations from contemporary accounts, was gauged to be around two billions when the planet was first destroyed. Many such voices were silenced forever, gone, thrown into the Shadowlands without much ado, but some lingered. Tens of thousands were but a trifle, compared to the original numbers of the dead, but all too numerous for the shepherds of the lost to tend to.
But the wandering scholar was not so easily deterred, and her sojourn in Alliance space would not be complete without stopping by the temple to folly that was Alderaan. From the moment her boots touched the earth beneath, she felt a certain disdain for the planet and its people. So much of it was fake. Preserving the culture of a dead civilisation was laudable, yes, and a significant part of her duties, but painstakingly recreating a facsimile of what had once been? Insanity! And the proud people of this New Alderaan, this falsity - they thought themselves a noble people, when the very world they called home was nothing but a lie. So little time, and yet she already found her calm compromised by mounting irritation...
Duty called, however, and so she walked past the locals, uncaring of the odd looks she caught on her way there, having opted to wear the full extent of her vestments. An atypical nun of sorts, they might take her to be, and such an assumption was not quite far from the truth. Scholarly pursuits were one thing, but many of her peers discarded theology a little too readily for her liking.
Under the cover of night, she delved within the mausoleum of an Alderaanian family of certain prestige, having stolen the keys during the afternoon. Calmly and meaningfully placing a few candles about the interior, she lit them one by one, not with use of the Force, but merely matches. Trivialization of one's powers was a surefire gateway to corruption of intent, corruption of self. Once the interior was sufficiently lit (and still casting but a gloomy illumination), she sat upon a sarcophagus, casual as can be, her face turning this way and that, looking beyond the veil of reality, beyond what everyone chose to perceive.
Long into the night, did she speak to the tormented souls of Alderaan's dead, roused from their torpor with news of a resurgent faction of Imperials, threatening Coruscant - threatening the Core. Desperately did they scream in anguish, desperate for their descendants to hear them, but they would not her. They were too wrapped up in their lives to do so, in the modernity of it all.
Captivated by the stories shared by such ancient dead and calm in her moderation of this debate, Athanasios failed to notice the presence of another...
Alicio Organa