Came to Dathomir in: The Lovers Reach
Wearing: Caberillo Armored Clothes
Armed with: Royal Decree (44. Magnum Revolver)
It had been a long time since she had walked Dathomir's surface.
The Flawed Sage, once a Darth, now something else, walked the world of jungles in something of a melancholic daze, back towards the site.
She only ever referred to it as the Site. Where it had all started, really started, for her.
The voluptuous Zeltron did not know what it would look like now. Thousands of years had passed since she had last given witness to it. It could have been razed from memory a hundred times while she had slumbered in Death. It would be a miracle if she recognized the terrain. But she had to go. She had to bear witness to it one more time.
The jungles did not bother her. Its inhabitants did not bother her. She still felt the coil of power within her, that maelstrom that allowed her to command the sky. It had been with her since she was young.
She had not come from privilege. Her family had been middle class on Zeltros. Her father worked hard as a bank accountant. Her mother had been a doctor.
She hadn't meant to lift that vehicle with her mind when she was ten. It had been an accident. But it had sealed her fate. It had been a joke. She had only been pretending she had magic powers. Pretending had quickly come to an end after the consulars had examined her. She didn't remember her parents faces any more. It was one of many things she despised the Jedi over in the past. Now it was just a cruel reminder for her.
The Zeltron had not brought any of her refinements of the Dark Side...just some armored clothes and a revolver with six shots. Maranon had long ago crossed that point where she had...she didn't want to say 'outgrown', as Sidious might have put it, the use of lightsabers. But she had certainly grown to the point where carrying one had become little more than a formality to be used only as a last resort. The Force and Magic were her real weapons.
The trouble was...she had been feeling...doubt as of late.
And so here she was, back to where it began. Where it really began. It had not begun with The Jedi, but they had certainly unknowingly moved things in place due to their policy of destroying or suppressing that which they did not understand.
They had thought themselves so wise. It gratified Maranon greatly to see them in this era, forced to endure everything they had feared coming about if they let the lid off the pot...precisely because they had been so stubborn about keeping the lid on.
Everything bad that happened to the order always seemed to be the result of a self fulfilling prophecy. Because the ancient Jedi had seen the Dark Side everywhere, they had suppressed anything even tangential in relation to it, and suppressed and censured any honest inquiry, making heretics out of those who strayed even a little from orthodoxy. People who never should have been enemies (and likely never would have been) had become enemies almost overnight from this treatment. Others, genuinely malicious, used this heavy handed policy to claim victimization at Jedi hands even when they really were every bit the depraved, psychotic, opportunistic filth that desecrated The Force with every breath they took that the Jedi portrayed them as.
But Maranon, later Darth Maranon, but known as Kerimi Avalon when she was still a Jedi, had been the righteous one. The one not tempted by any of these secrets, no matter how intriguing they promised to be. How many tomes, scrolls, relics had she destroyed as a Jedi simply because they had not been made by Jedi? Hundreds? Thousands?
She had grown up, studied ancient rites as a Consular, preserved the wisdom of the Jedi. But only their wisdom. Never those of the so called heretics. Nothing had hurt her more as a Jedi and as a person of intelligence then when those so called heretics had started referring to her as 'Master 451'. It had been a crude reference to the temperature at which book paper burns, but it stung like a slap to the face for a woman who prided herself on being an intellectual. Sometimes the bile rose in her throat at the shame of being exactly what they called her...a bookburner. The stink of the books as the flames consumed them still clung to her nostrils at times. The shame would never leave her.
Then her curiousity one day, finally won out...
Maranon at last reached a bare spot in the jungle. It was fitting it was so barren. Untouched.
The site had long been overgrown. She had not been surprised she could find no traces of the disposal site...it had been many thousands of years in the past...
The Zeltron walked the edges of the clearing, her senses picking up the faint hint of danger nearby. She paid it no mind, stepping forward to the spot, the exact spot, where her life had changed forever for the second time...
Kerimi Avalon stared at the bonfire with a deep sigh. They had paid too much for this 'victory', the magic users having fought tooth and nail to stop the Order from siezing the materials. They had lost six knights. She was the seventh, and only survivor of the fight.
She thought she had been doing good at first, helping the order rip away practices that would only corrupt them and lead to the darkness, teaching them the true way of The Force.
Only...none of them were of a mind to listen. The ones they took alive ended up killing themselves rather than be corrected, or guided. It was so disheartening. All she was trying to do was save them from making a terrible mistake. She had at least claimed as much, certainly, to their faces. They had simply spat on the ground, calling her nothing more than a petty book burner, suppressing all disagreement for the sake of some nebulous balance, of giving the order something to oppose and be distracted by for the sake of maintaining cohesion. She had been forced to kill them when they would not surrender.
It was her first time killing anyone. At age forty nine, still a dazzling beauty but with wrinkles starting to creep into her face and a streak of white creeping through long voluminous black hair, her dark green Jedi Tunic splashed with blood from the dead man lying at her feet, a spike of rock gone right into his brain from her telekinesis. He was young, barely out of his twenties, had been handsome, before the spike demolished his face. He had not been corrupted, merely disagreeing. She felt like a monster.
Kerimi stared down at him, then her hands. It felt horrible, darkening the Force. That was what every death did.
But at least they had seized the heretical texts. The ones she had always been too disciplined to actually take a peak in, so she could actually understand what she was destroying. What had all these poor people around her died for?
The bodies of her Jedi comrades lay on the ground where they died. The heretics, men and women hunting some strange substance the locals called 'Spirit Ichor' for their so-called profane rituals, also lay scattered about, the wreckage of their camp still giving off flames. She looked down at the one she killed, bile filling her throat. How could she justify this? Even though they had attacked first she still could not find a way to justify cutting down these people. Not when their only crime was defending a differing view in the Force.
She had not wanted this bloodshed. She heard some of the dissidents had started fighting back, but in her naivete, she had not thought it could get as vicious as it did.
And so Kerimi wandered through the remains of the camp, fetching the texts and burning them in the central bonfire after she finally got the nerve to take her eyes off the one she had killed.
Being this...being what they actually accused her of being hurt beyond her ability to articulate. She had loved books as a child. Especially the fairy tales about dashing princesses to be rescued. The library at Ossus let her read and understand the beliefs of a million different cultures.
Yet here she stood, burning books without taking even one peak as to why all these people were dead.
It was a travesty. A crime against reason. Against fairness. Against the lives of the people who died defending these books.
Kerimi had thought she had found all of them. The heretical texts on so-called Dathomir magic. But as she began arranging the bodies for transport back to Ossus, she spotted something partly obscured by a fallen basket. It was a book. A beautiful one.
Hesitantly, the blood splattered Jedi went over to it, lifting it up. It had no title, but the cover was embossed leather. Kerimi stared at it, then the bonfire, and then the man she had killed personally. She had not sensed the Dark Side in him. He had been strong and brave, facing down someone like her, even though there had been no hope of victory. She would have liked such a man for an apprentice.
Kerimi stared at the book and, wanting to understand why that man was dead, and why she had killed the poor fellow, she opened it. She flipped through the pages, growing more and more horrified. Not by the contents of the book. There was nothing evil about it, or the magical knowledge that astounded her as she sat in the camp of death and read it, choking back tears of shame.
This knowledge...she had never seen the Force utilized in this way before. It...it was brilliant. She understood it almost by instinct. Later, after she had become Maranon, she wondered whether or not she was among the few genetically predisposed to understanding and using Sorcery easier. She would even have herself tested, but the results came back negative...she had no genetic lottery favoring her. She was simply that good at it that genetics didn't matter. That fact would scare the hell out of the future Sith.
Kerimi read, and finally burst out weeping as she turned the final page after an hour of reading. This was what the Jedi had been calling heretical?
Were their standards so low for heresy? Were they so blinded by their cause?
A cold shudder escaped the blood soaked Jedi at how many works of wisdom from these people who ignored the Code that she had helped confiscate or put to the torch. She felt like she was going to throw up. She put the book down and did so a second later into a nearby bucket, still crying at what she had done. Still crying at having killed for the first time.
The Zeltron knew the secrets in the book now of course...she could always recall what she read with perfect clarity. And worse still because now that she knew what was inside, she knew she could never get into the business of destroying or confiscating these works any further. But she did not know what else to do.
The Jedi were her life. For better or worse they were all she knew. But she was done doing this. They would not begrudge such a master such as she wanting to leave the field a while to move past what happened here, though inwardly she had no intention of doing so.
She would continue to research, continue to understand the new system these 'heretics' had created...
Someday, when the Order had less of a knee jerk reaction to anything outside the orthodoxy, she would reveal what she had uncovered. Or she would pass it on to one who would. But she would find a way for these secrets to help the galaxy. She would do it so the one she killed would not have died in vain.
Kerimi sat the book down and her face went to her hands, trying not to think of what she had destroyed.
Maranon stared at the spot where her first kill had fallen in the jungle. She felt a cold emptiness, a guilt, suddenly, in how she let that poor boy down. Her magic had not been used to help. Only to hurt, when the pressures of a life lived in self denial finally caused her to snap. She did not regret becoming a Sith, and there was nothing that could undo her failure now, but the guilt still remained. The guilt still had its sting, even millenia later. Maranon knealt, touched the spot, and then left the vast clearing.
Later on...
Maranon had soon made it out of the major jungle back to the village her ship had landed nearby. She wasn't hungry and never planned on staying. She disliked Dathomir. She disliked everything about it. She disliked--
Maranon went still a bit as she wandered through the streets, ignoring the stares from men and women, some agape at the stunning beauty she possessed. Beauty that had not been enough to seduce the first love of her life, nor get the second love of her life to spare her.
She sensed a very specific type of magic nearing the village. She could almost taste the subtle variations between magics.
It was a curse. A curse affixed to an object of great power and...
Maranon grew intrigued.
A rather beautiful woman she thought to herself. Oh my, what has she got there?
Maranon of course, had not forgotten the obvious. Curses were very dangerous magic. Of all the types of magic that were difficult to defeat, Curses were among the worst and most powerful types of magic that were a pain in the ass once you were under one. She had seen too many dying people laying a blood curse at the feet of their rival to doubt their validity.
Maranon wondered for a second whether she should get involved. But when she saw the object in question...
The memory of that dead boy and the cold emptiness within prompted Maranon to start down the road, hands folded behind her back as she walked the road that [member="Myra"] walked.
Once in range, she turned on the charm, both as a natural seductress and a Sith Master, but refrained from actually smiling. The girl was clearly in panic mode. She decided to say something that would no doubt get her attention as she approached within earshot, keeping her posture non threatening to avoid misunderstandings.
"So, did you check for any traps before you pulled that book out of whatever tomb it was in? Or did you simply not know even books in Sith tombs can be traps?" Maranon asked. "Pardon me, but I could not help but smell the wickedness in that book."