Drinking All My Cares Away

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Siobhan Kerrigan"]

"I captured the wrong Sith Lord -- and had the wrong Padawan at my back." This long since Temap's death, she could speak of him like this. Force alone knew a good portion of it had been his fault. "He killed our prisoner, and the rest of them started to hunt us, kill whatever Jedi got between them and us. They finally cornered us on Ossus, where we thought we were safe. Suffice it to say, I wound up poisoned and my Padawan ended up dead.

"It was a variant that absolutely locked me away from the Light Side, and I spent about a year in hiding on Trevel'ka, not using the Force hardly at all. But people kept dying, most of my family among them, so I started using the Force again in the only way I could." She grimaced. "And then a friend introduced me to a man who told me that he needed his Darksider servants to understand duty, responsibility, the rule of law. He told me I could still do good as a Darksider, and I halfway believed him.

"Even though the whole thing, apart from the poison, was a play. An undercover op, making the best of a bad lot. I don't defend the harm I did, of course. I just tried to balance it out, more or less."

 

[Siobhan Kerrigan]

[member="Ashin Varanin"]


"We're both terribly good at rationalising our long roads of good intentions, aren't we?" Siobhan asked rhetorically. Disbelief crossed her features at the mention of a Dark Lord wanting his people to learn the value of teamwork and the rule of law.


"I've yet to meet a Sith who wasn't just using that as a good line. What are the odds he engineered the whole poisoning? Would be right up the alley of an ancient Sith Lord I know." Perhaps she was projecting her own experience of being deceived by Shadow.


"Anyone on the Jedi Council knew about this kindly Sith, undercover Jedi gig? And Roche was what then, throw the Sith against the Republic and anyone else who came to the party to drain them? If Voracitos had kept his fingers off the trigger the Sith might've won. You were infected with Sith poison, yet the nation you built in the Fringe has a lab that makes the stuff, on top of other nastiness."

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Siobhan Kerrigan"]

Ashin smiled faintly. "Oh, he was playing me, all right, and playing the people I taught, to keep them in line and for his own amusement. That was Velok. But I ended up tearing down that particular government before I left the Unknown Regions and made for Moridin's Empire. I'm positive he arranged the circumstances that led to my poisoning -- he pitted me against the Cult of Shadow -- but the poison was all them. They were the sort who knew their own minds, and he was their enemy.

"Roche...Roche was inevitable. The Empire's long march down the Perlemian, that whole offensive was me guiding them away from weaker targets towards the one that could stop the Sith. If the Empire had won at Roche, well, there were plans upon plans. None of them relevant now.

"As for the rest of it, if I could control the Fringe, I wouldn't be here. I built that tower a little too tall."