First Reply Northern Blood

[Darth Virelia]

"Crush Them Underfoot."

- TAG: OPEN

It was a quiet night.

The communities of Nordra were fiercely devoted to traditions older than most recorded history. On the midnight of every fourth day, those who had passed from this life were carried in solemn procession to the nearest lava pit beyond their settlements, there to be returned to the earth from which all life had once emerged. No speeches were given. Silence itself was considered sacred amongst the Nord, for it allowed every soul present the opportunity to reflect upon the departed in their own way.

Such customs ensured that grief belonged equally to all, for before the molten earth, every Nord stood as one people beneath the weight of death.

Hashelm had become a place of terrible sorrow.

The misallocation of critical supplies by compromised off-world officials had left the settlement catastrophically unprepared for the blizzards that followed. Heating systems failed district by district. Emergency shelters lacked fuel. Medical stations exhausted their supplies within days. Entire families froze together within their homes as the storm consumed the settlement from the outside in.

Of the nearly twelve thousand Nord who called Hashelm home, one thousand two hundred and forty-one perished beneath the icy grip of Nordra's wrath.

To call the rites that followed sombre would have been a grotesque understatement.

Pilgrims arrived from villages and settlements across the surrounding mountain regions, many traveling for days through blizzards and volcanic ash simply to stand witness to what had become of their people. Communities that would ordinarily have regarded such ceremonies with quiet distance now gathered shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the lava pits, forced to confront the scale of the disaster with their own eyes. They came seeking understanding.

How could a settlement so large have been allowed to suffer such deprivation? How could so many lives be extinguished not by war, nor invasion, nor plague, but by numbers written incorrectly upon datapads and manifests? How could something so seemingly small condemn over a thousand souls to die in the cold?

The answers whispered amongst the crowds were ugly ones.

One by one, the dead were brought forward.

The elderly who had guided the settlement for decades. Workers whose hands still bore burns and scars from the mines. Mothers clutching children who would never again wake to see the glow of Nordra's lava rivers. Each was lowered into the molten earth below. Steam and ash rose into the midnight air as frozen flesh vanished into fire, returning at last to the warmth that had eluded them in their final moments of life.

And with every body surrendered to the ancestors, the mood amongst the living darkened further.

The Nord were a stoic people by nature. Hardship was woven into their existence from birth. Hunger, cold, and death were accepted realities upon Nordra. But this had not been the work of nature alone.

Rumours had spread relentlessly through the mountain settlements in the days following the disaster. Off-worlders, elusive and secretive, were said to be constructing something deep within the mountains. Resources intended for Nord communities had instead been diverted toward hidden facilities and black projects. Officials had been bribed. Supply chains manipulated. Entire shipments quietly vanished before ever reaching Hashelm.

The exact same supplies that had been promised to the Nord people. The exact same supplies that could have saved them.

As corpse after corpse disappeared into the lava below, grief slowly curdled into fury upon the faces of those who remained. The silence of the ceremony became strained, heavy with restrained hatred and suspicion.

Only tradition kept the gathering from erupting outright.

Knowing the situation was rapidly approaching a breaking point, the elder of Hashelm finally turned toward a relic long preserved by his people.

The device was ancient, the metal casing had dulled with age, worn smooth by decades of careful handling and ritual preservation. Strange symbols, foreign to the Nord tongue, lined its surface in faded aurebesh script. Most within the settlement no longer understood how the object truly functioned, only that generations earlier it had been entrusted to their ancestors by a wandering off-worlder who had once crossed the frozen wastes of Nordra.

A Jedi.

The elder still remembered the stories told to him as a child beside geothermal fires deep beneath the mountains. The stranger had arrived alone during another terrible winter many decades ago, aiding isolated settlements as storms consumed entire valleys. Before departing Nordra, he had entrusted the device to the Nord people with a single promise.

"Should your people ever truly need help, activate this device."

"Someone will come."

For generations, the device had remained untouched.

The Nord endured their hardships alone whenever possible. Such was their way. To invoke the aid of outsiders was not done lightly, especially not for a people forged by cold, loss, and survival. Yet as the elder stood overlooking the lava pits of Hashelm, watching the final ashes of the dead rise into the midnight sky, he understood something terrible.

The anger spreading through the settlements would soon consume more lives than the storm itself.

Justice was demanded. Blood cried out for blood. Already armed clans spoke openly of marching into the mountains to drag the hidden off-worlders from whatever fortress they had built amongst the peaks. Others demanded the execution of the compromised officials who had diverted the supplies. Fear, grief, and fury had become inseparable.

And beneath it all lingered something worse.

Someone had engineered this disaster. Someone had profited from the suffering of Hashelm. The elder could feel it in the unease spreading through his people like poison beneath the skin. If peace were to survive upon Nordra, then someone beyond the mountains would need to intervene. Someone capable of seeing beyond vengeance before the entire region descended into bloodshed.

Slowly, the elder activated the ancient device.

A low hum echoed from within the relic as dormant systems awakened for the first time in decades. Pale light flickered weakly against the elder's weathered hands while the signal vanished silently into the stars above Nordra. Who now carried the receiver was impossible to know. Perhaps no one, or perhaps the Jedi Order itself no longer existed in the form the old stories described.

It mattered little.

The message had been sent.

And somewhere in the galaxy, whether Jedi, wanderer, mercenary, or something far darker, someone would hear the call of Hashelm.

 

[Neryn Ka]

Tags: Darth Virelia ​

As it happened, Nordra's "salvation" would almost assuredly only make matters worse.

Neryn's leather-booted feet produced a hiss of rapidly-melting snow where they touched the freezing ground. Soil that hadn't seen the sky in centuries was exposed as the creature stalked up the mountainside, full of purpose and malignant curiosity.

Neryn hadn't thought much of the device after he'd pried it from the still-twitching hands of its previous owner. Just another shiny thing of many, added to an ever-growing pile of moldering plunder that was interesting enough to take, but not interesting enough to investigate further.

Neryn possessed a number of distressingly-birdlike qualities, chief among them a fascination with stealing things that caught his attention. Ornate ceremonial weapons, personal effects, the odd still-bright eyeball plucked expertly from a skull. Only a few of these retained his admiration for long, until it was off to the next shiny thing that had the supreme misfortune to attract his attention.

The transponder was no different.

That was, until the ancient machine had started to chime. Neryn had excavated it from a pile of stolen rubbish, dusted it off, and given it an overdue second look.

And so it was, that the elders of Hashelm sought refuge from their demons by calling upon a worse one. No Jedi answered the call today, though Neryn was beginning to wish one had done so instead of himself.

Occasionally, the winged creature would lift his ghoulish theater mask, spewing a torrent of fire from his jaws to melt a particularly-large snowdrift. The resultant clouds of steam were enormous, but didn't stay that way long; the spawn's progress up the harsh slopes could easily be tracked by the unusually-resilient, freezing mists that he left in his wake.

The shrieking winds whipped furiously at his ragged garments, and were he a creature of a more sanely-arranged physiological makeup, Neryn was certain he'd have frozen to death hours ago. As it was, the sheer ferocity of the winds inconvenienced him where the cold could not; they made flight effectively impossible. He had tried twice already, only to come crashing painfully down into the snow.

Only the sheer heat of his fury made the way viable, clearing a path as effectively as a fleet of bulldozers. There was anger aplenty to go around, too, and before long, Neryn was effectively surrounded in a bubble of tropical warmth.

The Amphibow coiled around one shoulder shivered convulsively despite this, and the masked man did his best to keep the creature alive. It had served him faithfully, and losing it to the life-sapping chill of this place would be a devastating loss. He carefully retrieved the last chunk of a ration bar from a pouch at his waist, popping it into the bioform's waiting mouth and giving the creature an affectionate scratch.

The transponder clutched in one rust-armored claw wasn't faring quite so well; it took much focus to avoid moltenizing the ancient device, and thus wasting a trip all the way out here. As it was, the outer coating had deformed somewhat, but the thing still appeared functional.

Neryn couldn't recall ever seeing a place so hostile and lifeless in his existence thus far. For kilometers around, the world was a flat, hazy gray palette, devoid of the flickering soul-candles that spoke of living things. The device had led him deep into the mountainous wilderness, yet its steady pulse only now indicated that he was getting close.

He was also getting tired. Much as Neryn liked to imagine himself as invulnerable, his energy was not an infinite quantity. He just hoped that whatever was at the end was worth it.

It occurred to him, albeit belatedly, that maybe this was precisely the plan. To tire him out trekking through an active blizzard, before setting upon him with ill intent. The longer the trip went, the more this seemed like the most plausible explanation. He was young and inexperienced, but had already made his share of enemies.

Neryn's particular brand of cruelty was as flamboyant as it was graphic; the sort of terrors that plastered lurid news stories and wartime clickbait the galaxy over. Lianna had been the worst; thankfully for him, his atrocities toward the civilian population there had largely been a mere footnote in the wider chaos of the war. That didn't mean, however, that nobody was seeking well-deserved vengeance for the things he had done there.

No matter. Slow-roasting the skin from a wailing would-be assailant seemed exactly the sort of diversion to improve his rapidly-souring mood. If this was a hunt, or a trap, then Neryn planned to very creatively express his displeasure after the fact.

Plausible, yes, but he sensed otherwise. There were other ways to knock off an enemy, most of them quicker, cheaper, and more direct than a scavenger hunt through the mountains. He'd just have to see who (or what) lay at the end of this road before he decided what to do with it.