Private Lifestyles of the Rich and Alchemical

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

Mind. Body. Self. Spirit. Life. Earth. Fire.

All of them resisted her, and had for two days straight. The initial torrent of success had spoiled her. Death and Time and all the rest had come easily by comparison. Now Ashin faced a plateau with no obvious end in sight. In search of a quick win she'd spent hours upon hours drilling with Entropy, but even Body eluded her.

Very possibly because this wasn't the body she'd been born to. She'd worn so many faces, died so many times, that this is my body meant far less to her than to virtually anyone. And all that reinvention bled into Self as well.

For the first time, she seriously thought she might fail at this. What that meant for Dissero's work was pure guesswork, but clear enough to spark a frantic terror that Ashin kept burrowed in her heart. Fear led to the Dark Side, and she drew on it for greater strength, some measure of insight.

At last, after ten straight hours of sword work, Shii-Cho velocities adjusted in their nuances for a weighted blade, Body felt...close. As close as she'd come. As close as she would probably get. She'd known body-trading would come with prices attached, but she hadn't foreseen this one. That fear dug in and didn't leave.

Exhausted and sore, she was getting a drink in the kitchen when the explosion rumbled across the estate. In the split second between the flash and the boom, she wrapped Force protection around herself; she needn't have bothered. The windows held apart from scratching and cracks.

As fast as her sore muscles would allow, she hustled toward the explosion's epicenter in search of Dissero . If he'd managed to blow himself up-

 

[Dissero]

More heat.

What Ashin found was a hole blown into the thicket that had once been an open clearing for two middling-sized forges. One forge was completely missing, its pieces scattered in an arching circle through the trees and scorch lines. The other forge was all but decimated in the blast. And the forger?

More heat.

More power.

He was sprawled, blackened, burned, and full of shrapnel, amidst the outer blast radius.

I need more.

The man's eyes were closed and his lips were muttering an incantation of ye olde Sithe that a fellow forger might recognize for the culmination of energy, to increase the output levels of a forge already tasked to maximum. The logic followed rather easily: he pushed this one too far.

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

Faced with the ruin of Dissero's forge and body, Ashin faced an incongruous and inappropriate thought.

At least I'm not the only one wrestling with failure

She knew the thought was unworthy, contemptible, but there it was anyway, an unneeded delay. Crouching in the rubble, she sought and found his pulse. For a moment she was a twentysomething Lieutenant Commander Varanin again, watching friends bleed out at the ragged edge of the Jade Worlds.

Dissero needed medical care immediately, or Gabe and his siblings could be down one parent. But a household medpack wouldn't do the job and summoning first responders - here, for this - would have serious consequences for the family. And she couldn't very well extraxt and bind his soul to a place, object, or new body without upsetting everything he'd built and found here.

That left exactly one option. She hoped Dissero would forgive her.

She drew deep on fear, let the worst-case scenarios pull her into a frenzy of sorts, and-

 

[Dissero]

The mantra became strangled in his throat, exchanged instead for a deep gasp of air. Dissero's eyes shot open, beady and overtaken by black as the labored gasping continued. For a brief moment he thought he'd died, consumed by the flames of his practice and blown into the Netherworld itself. Then, as the air slowly seeped into his lungs, the dark gleam of his eyes faded back to a pale blue.

He felt the singe of Darkside in his veins once more and in its desperate need his body openly welcomed it.

Ashin's figure, hovering over him as an ambiguous black shadow molting waves of fear, scared him coherent again. A yelp escaped the grown man while he attempted to scramble backwards and made no headway; the pain of his wounds shocked him into a further state of self-awareness.

"Wait - WAIT! I'm okay," he leaned to sit up, failed, collapsed back, a fresh well of dark blood oozing from the multiple shrapnel pieces lodged in his flesh suggested strongly otherwise. Dissero cringed and bit back a sound of pain, his limbs tingled with the familiar and soothing sensation of Darkside, "Fething hell...not again."

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

The first remark was demonstrably false, the second made no sense without context, so Ashin shook her head.

"My daughters could tell you I'm not normally the motherly type - but trust me, this is for your own good."

She kept only a handful of Sith spells close to her heart. One was the agonizing sorcery that the soul of Naga Sadow had used to heal Exar Kun after an underground collapse crushed him. It had more than enough juice to fix Dissero's inner and outer wounds, get all that shrapnel out the hard way in the process, and put him back on his feet unharmed. Sadow had required Kun to commit deeply to the Dark Side first; Ashin made no such requirement.

Her fingers twisted just right, and the prehistoric spell engaged.

 

[Dissero]

It burned. Like hellfire.

And Dissero could not hold back the bellow of agony it drove him to. Healing with the Darkside was nothing like the gentle touch of a Lightside Healer. His sister Amore had tended to his wounds countless times and never once could he recall pain such as this. Presently he worried for nothing except that he might live long enough to shout an angry thank you at the woman kneeled by him.

Later he would worry what this renewed touch of darkness would do to him in the long run.

Ten steps forward, one giant backwards leap off the cliff back.

Felt like his skin was coiling and pinching with rods of molten steel. Debris unlodged itself and toppled to the side. Pooling blood dissipated into the air. Flesh stitched itself back together again. His voice collapsed into a grimacing heave for air. Then, as quickly as it began, the fire abated and he was gaspingly free of pain.

"I hope-" the man wheezed as he rolled to his side and carefully pushed himself up, "you use bacta on your children. Fething hell..."

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

Ashin stuffed her shaking hands in her pockets and released the Dark Side by letting relief wash over her.

"Of course. I'm a terrible parent, not a monster. At least not in that context." She sagged against a blasted tree. Splinters and shrapnel dug into her back, and she jolted away to stand up straight. "Sorry about that. How do I put this...I feel...bad...for doing that against your protests. I didn't see another way that didn't put your life or your home and family at risk - but how I handled it wasn't respectful." She knotted her hands into fists in her pockets, and a fingernail cracked away. "I apologize. Do you at least feel..."

Well, he wasn't bleeding out from a thermal-detonator-scale explosion, so by default he felt better. But still.

 

[Dissero]

He was taking his sweet time getting to his feet, if for no other reason than the fact that he'd lost his bearings somewhere between stoking the forges and burrowing into ancient Sith forging techniques. In fact, he thought as he gave up halfway and promptly let himself collapse back on his rear, he'd rather sit for a moment.

Several moments.

He hung his arms over his knees and breathed deeply, allowing his paled gaze to shift from the dirt between his feet to the eviscerated surroundings of his forge hollow, then finally to rest on Ashin. Dissero shook his head.

"It's not fine, you're right," he wrestled away an angry grimace stoked by the fresh wealth of darkside energy, "and I feel terrible again, but I'm not full of forge pieces, bleeding out, or in pain. So ...thank you."

A beat of silence passed between them where he picked at a nearby shard of metal that he recognized as a piece of the forge body. The man swore under his breath and tossed it away with a heavy sigh, "That's done. Stupid," he looked on with frustration, "I knew better. I'll have to go to Vassek to keep working. Tell me you have some good news."

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

"Deadlocked. Plateaued. You probably took the brunt of my frustrations just now."

In another setting, she'd have gathered the bloody metal ejected from his wounds. Useful crafting material. But respect was already at issue.

"If I fail to attune with some of the stones...how big of a problem are we talking? How deep would the flaws go, and what would those flaws look like once I'm out there tracking her down with what you build me?"

 

[Dissero]

You probably took the brunt of my frustrations just now.

"Mm," he grunted in response, lips forming a thin line behind his beard, "better me than the house."

It had taken some time for Verie to grow to love this house as much as she loved the one on Rudrig. He would hate to ruin that for her. Welcome home darling, half the house is gone because Ashin's in a bit of a mood.

"Then the heart of your compass will be biased, unbalanced, and may not be able to track her the way it should. Worst case scenario--it won't work at all, maybe it damages something. Maybe instead of tracing the bond it poisons it. Maybe it breaks it." He didn't want that for them, of course. Dissero would never give Ashin an item of his own making that could put such things in harm's way.

"When I went into Netherworld to find my sister Cera, I had a piece of her own soul to guide me in her holocron. That's about as pure a compass as you can hope for, but we don't have a piece of Spencer's soul. What we do have is the next best thing," he gave Ashin a pointed look, "the woman she loves, connected to her through time and space by the bonds of blood, family, and the Force."

"It's the essence of that bond that you have to implant into the crystal, and it must be whole."

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

Aahin bit back half-formed retorts that verged on excuses, and nodded. "I'll get it done, then. All there is to it."

She glanced back at the house. "You should rest and eat - that spell will have stretched your body's resources thin. I'll clean this up before we go to Vassek; seems the least I can do. Go on. I'm not half the alchemist you are, but I know what's salvageable and how to dispose of what's not."

 

[Dissero]

Didn't like the idea of her cleaning up his own mess, but they were both making an effort to hold back uncharacteristic emotions. Dissero set his jaw against his own retort and offered her a short nod before getting back to his feet. Perhaps he would take a turn with the stones to realign and reset himself. The walk back to his house was not one of a proud man.

EN ROUTE TO VASSEK

He'd convinced Verie to take the little ones and Sahti to Borleias for a proper vacation and a visit with family. Gabriel was more than elated to learn he would get another few weeks of camp, and it had even been the boy's idea. Bless him. Too young for flight classes, but he got into the simulator section with a little help from Uncle Rune. That left Dissero's schedule clear for at least a few weeks, which gave not only him time to do his work, but Ashin time to do hers.

There was tea (two mugs) and the kitchen table. The stones were still packed away, for now.

Dissero took a seat and pulled his mug toward him, fixing his gaze on the liquid swirling within, "So," he began, "let's talk stones. Now that you've identified them all, I am no longer obligated to keep my mouth shut. Which ones are causing you trouble?"

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

One of her more frustrating realizations had been that she'd stalled on some of the more intuitive stones - Earth and Fire, at absolute minimum - because she'd plateaued at the overall task. She'd walked through firestorms and bombing runs and active volcanoes. Fire shouldn't be a challenge. It wouldn't be the first time she'd been her own worst enemy.

While Dissero made his arrangements she'd taken the opportunity to engage with the fire of the forge explosion. Every smoldering twig stamped out, every hot metal shard cooled to safety, became a bit of a meditation on heat and what it took to make a flame. While she'd repelled fire with great success, she hadn't connected with it, identified with it, in the necessary way. Not before lowering herself to go back to the Padawan-level basics: 'fuel plus heat plus oxygen.' Little swirls of glowing air, kicking out a spark with one's mind, gathering fuel from the atmosphere and the environment - it all came back to being...humble...enough to work hard at something that any Acolyte could do with a shrug.

Dissero had packed the Shamalain Stones before she'd finished cleaning up the forge ruins, but she was fairly sure she'd connected with the Fire stone regardless, or easily could once they reached Vassek.

"The real sticking points, the ones that worry me, are Body, Life, and Self. I'm also struggling with Mind, Spirit, and Earth, but I'll get there. I could probably have cracked them if I hadn't spent so much time bashing my head against the first three. Body - I effectively died of cancer almost thirty years ago, and I've died a few more times since then. 'Body' means something far different to me than to the infinite majority of people. Life...well, that's an even more complex story, and more shameful. And Self eludes me because of all the years and years I spent as a Jedi sleeper agent among the Sith, and Shira Karrde and Ajira Cardei and other aliases, lies upon lies. I'd wager the stones weren't designed with a student in mind who'd been that much of a chameleon."

 

[Dissero]

"No, probably not."

He pondered his own meditations with the stones throughout his life. Remembering the task of his youth in uncovering them all for the first time - it had taken years. Years. Silencia started her children young, and by the time he'd become a man he knew them all at face value, but felt confident with only a small selection of them.

"I have trouble with those three as well," a hand scraped through his beard, itching in thought, "for similar but less extensive reasons. This is my second incarnation of life. My first was ended by the Gulag virus. My mother had the foresight to save the souls of her lost family members by implanting them in special crystals so she could bring us back more easily in the next life. No need to go tearing through the afterlife for them. This body is a clone of the original, but altered in some ways. I think she let her bitterness with Avicus get the better of her ... replaced some of my inheritance from him with that of herself."

He let the amusement show and took a slow sip of tea, "I started this life off having no idea of the former. And it stayed that way until she died and all the memories from before came flooding back. Needless to say, I couldn't connect with the Body, Life, or Self stones for a long time."

"But here's what I found that helped," Dissero set the mug down and nudged it aside, then held out his hands between them palms up, "let me see your hands."

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

Ashin laughed hard. "I had no idea you had family connections to Avicus. Did you ever see the holos of Sarge Potteiger beating him down with a cortosis bayonet and a pair of boots? Now there's a blast from the past."

The anecdote was a delaying tactic, she realized: giving someone her hands for whatever purpose was a level of physical trust, even intimacy, that she'd walled off long ago. She got past the instinct and held them out as directed.

"If the secret to these rocks is a playground slap game..."

 

[Dissero]

"Yes," he replied, amused at the almost shocking bark of laughter from her, "and no... I don't think I've seen those. I'm sure neither Avicus or my mother would be keen on having that broadcasted..."

But he did kind of want to see it. The item was duly noted for later free time.

"Mother spoke very little about him and I barely knew him as more than a stranger in this life, but he was my father in my previous life. I suppose that has to count for something. Benefit of the doubt, right?" Dissero idly itched at his brow as he waited for those hands, and then met them openly when they were finally offered. He cupped hers lightly, turned them palm-side up, and held one in each of his own from beneath. He repressed the mental urge to flinch away at the touch of darkside, finding it curiously reminiscent of how his body had once reacted to Ankarres wood in an otherwise innocent game of strategy.

"If the secret to these rocks is a playground slap game..."

He raised his brows, "Madame," followed with mock offense, "this is serious hand business. Now," and a slight adjustment of his seat before he leaned in to take a look at her open palms. Some inquisitive sounds followed.

"Right, okay. It's been a few years since Amore taught me this, so ... bear with me if you will. Close your eyes, relax your posture, deep breath in, slow breath out, clear your thoughts," he watched her with a smirk, "stop picturing my father getting the ever-loving snot beaten out of him...and instead, picture in your mind your previous body. As much of it as you can. The color of the skin, the shape of the eyes, the line of the jaw, the set of the shoulders. Picture how it moved walking through a crowd. Remember how it conversed with friends ... with strangers ... with enemies. The color that it bled when harmed. The scars left behind. Can you see it?"

She would feel a subtle sensation of energy at the backs of her hands. It cooled and it flowed along the edges, pooling into the creases of her palms and along the bend of her fingers. The overflow seeped along the heel of her hands and then slowly followed the veins of her arms. Were she to open her eyes she would find Dissero's to be lightly closed and the faintest of auras surrounding her lower arms. There in a freely shifting form of energy was the ghost image of this prior body overlaying her current flesh.

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

The scars were what punched through the haze of years and age. She remembered the scars. The Cold, the vaguely arthropoid enemies she'd faced in the Jade Empire; Omni's droid hordes during the fall of Dromund Kaas; Lotek'k deep in the Unknown Regions; duel after duel, challenge after challenge. Scars from Moridin, Kaine, Apparatus, Darron Wraith, and so many more. Old enemies, long gone.

"I didn't think I would," she said. "But the scars...those, I remember."

When she looked down, she was herself again, her old self, the heavily scarred body she'd carried through so many wars in her twenties and thirties. She glanced down the neck of her shirt and saw the huge scars that crossed her chest at the sternum. At their centre was the mark of Naga Sadow, the same tattoo she now wore in the same place.

"That...I don't know what that was. I've never heard of that Force ability. I...I don't know how I feel, other than grateful. That..."

 

[Dissero]

His eyes remained closed, his focus lightly trained on the power working from him, through her.

"It is something she learned from the Aing-Tii ..." his voice was that of mild distraction, and in that the image Ashin saw did dim and flicker somewhat like a candle flame in a breeze, "she referred to it as astral projection. I'm not as good at it as she was but we can go further, if you like. To another of your previous bodies."

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

That explained it. "Leave it to the Aing-Tii Monks to come up with something so niche and so valuable. Not for the first time, I wonder what I could have been if I hadn't studied violence so exclusively. A little more anima, and pneuma, a little less aperion."

Over the next ten minutes or so, they went through the scars and faces of the main bodies that Ashin had worn: Shira Karrde, the Fringe despot and the template for her current body; Ajira Cardei, Naboo noblewoman and strategist.

"Can you unpack the Stones?"

 

[Dissero]

It was a lot of bodies and he was quite fatigued by the end of it. Hands flexed a pinning ache away as he sat back in his chair and finished his tea. He paused over the last sip and nodded, "Of course." Dissero hoped that Amore's teachings were enough to loosen the lock. They had aided him before, but he'd only one former body and life to unpack. Ashin had an entire legal team.


The largest open space of the ship was the cargo hold, so that is where he unpacked the stones and placed them in a wide circle.

"Not as cozy as home, but I think you are well acquainted with making do. I'll be back in the crew quarters." Poring over his notes for the hundredth time and sleeping off her astral projections.