Private Look What You Made Me Do

[Calyx Sundrift]

The desolate landscape stretched on endlessly. Ash and dust had swallowed the land, hills of rubble and craters marking where explosions and impacts had torn the ground apart. Even the air was thick with the scent of decay.

Each step raised a cloud of dust, smudging his black cloak with streaks of gray and white. Only the moan of wind or the far-off echoes of a collapsing structures ocasionally broke the silence.

There was nothing out here but pain.

He'd stopped seeing the makeshift shelters of scrap this far from Empress' Peace. The inhabitants of the planet that had survived had certainly given up on this stretch of the continent. And he couldn't blame them. The world they'd known was gone, replaced by a wasteland that offered no mercy and no rest.

This was what waited for every world that fell under the Empress's will.

It made him want to scream, to cry, to laugh. Anything to answer the absurdity of it. Aand the guilt underneath, the knowledge of his own hand in it.

He hadn't slept well in weeks. Only his grip on the dark side kept the exhaustion at bay, though even that couldn't hide the dark ring around his sickly golden eye that served as a reminder of the nights spent tossing and turning.

A weak, guttural sound stopped him mid-step. More cough than threat. He searched the rubble.

More sounds followed. Whimpers of pain. Pitched wines, and raspy breaths.

Then he saw them, creeping forward. The ruined shapes of Gados. Dozens of them, with spines twisted at wrong angles and furs matted with dark, oozing patches. Open sores split their flesh, and Calyx spotted the same bulging growths he remembered clinging to his own armor.

He watched them silently, cloak billowing in the wind. The diseased lifeforms kept creeping closer.

Fine.

The crimson blade ignited in his gauntleted hand.

Have it your way.

Varin Mortifer

 

[Varin Mortifer]

VARIN MORTIFER

Equipment: Durum Mantle | Black Blade of Chandrila | Eye of The Dragon | Heavy Sith Mace | Cross Guard Broadsaber | Wyrmfang​

Varin watched from a distance as Calyx looked around at his surroundings. The way he reacted, the confusion within him. He could feel the turmoil from within, and Varin saw the same rubble as well. Feeling what it was that Calyx felt, it was a sharp reminder of how cold Varin had grown since his youth and throughout the battles he had fought.

The rubble held no favoritism to who caused it. Whether it were by rifle, by explosives, by bombardments or by the very fire storm he created, it didn’t matter. The world laid shattered before them.

Varin watched as Calyx lifted some rubble to witness the horror of the disease, this time in a more personal matter. Chaos no longer blinded him to the horrendous nature of such a use of violence. It had Calyx’s full attention.

He watched the saber ignite, the look in Calyx’s tired eyes.

Varin knew a soldier at their breaking point. He knew what it felt like to witness such atrocities first thing. And he pitied him.

Not because of how Calyx responded to such sights, but the fact that he still held on to his humanity.

Varin quietly approached from behind, removing his helm with a soft hiss and setting it on the ground by him.

“Give them mercy.”

He spoke quietly, but the voice was direct as he slowly walked around the acolyte before him. Varin knew that he was also the monster that helped strengthen the disease and its rot. He helped perpetuate the torture these citizens would suffer through. The rot within their very being.

The smoldering cloak that wisped from Varin’s back gently swayed with the wind before them, an imitation of cloth.

“War is Hell, Calyx. It has no preference of the lives it takes and how. But we can be that hand that guides mercy to those who have suffered enough.”

Calyx Sundrift​