Duel Primordial | Kirie Corsell vs Lirka Ka

[Kirie]

PRIMORDIAL

Jutrand

| Lirka Ka |

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Kirie Corsell's mind was unraveling. She had unpicked something awful, something appalling, from the tangled ball of string that made up her memory. In her hurry to scrub her mind clean, in the manner that had become habit of late, the whole mess had come undone. Maybe, she had pushed that particular memory-washing technique a bit far. Maybe, she had just been heavy-handed this time. She didn't know, but what was obvious now was that a fog had descended upon her mind, her thoughts had become disjointed, and the world around her had become dreamlike and unreal.

In her fast-closing window of clarity, Kirie had only a single remaining goal:

Revenge.

The landing legs of the shuttle dug into the soft ground of the lawn. Kirie unstrapped the harness and rose silently from her seat. She closed her eyes, senses expanding outward to the rhythm of her breathing, searching for the hulking, aberrant signature hiding in the stillness of the evening. Though she could not yet feel her, she knew that she had to be close.

Kirie had left Belazura with nary an explanation. Anet Raine , ever the reliable enabler, had paved her way to Jutrand, and Kirie had spent the journey alternating between staring at the wall, throwing up, and lying, catatonic, on the cold durasteel floor panelling. When the ugly rock that was Jutrand came into view, she stirred, and stood up, wiped the fear and repulsion and grief from her heart, and calmly went about her preparations.

She left the hate, though. Anet would have told her to leave the hate.

The block where she had landed had been carefully chosen. It was a place significant to the two of them only. The place where her long ascent to freedom and happiness had been arrested, and she had begun the long and slow slide to destruction. Well, she was not destroyed yet.

Unsure exactly why she was doing it, Kirie's fingers dug out her communicator, opening a channel she had deliberately left closed for more than a year. Her fingers hovered over the input in a moment of indecision, but after a few moments, she sent the message with a resigned and fatalistic sigh. It was unpleasant, really, what she had done. Probably necessary only for herself, and yet it still felt like a knife to the gut. She read over the message:

To <3782626384826279472> Quinn Varanin
From <761628283836269263> Kirie Corsell

"It was Lirka Ka. Just thought you would want to know."​

It was unforgivable to tell her like that, but maybe what she was about to do would be apology enough.

With a swipe, Kirie closed the channel and secreted the device back into a deep pocket. She left the shuttle. It rose into the night air, leaving her alone on the street, shivering a little in the sudden chill.

Kirie stowed her hands in her robes, fingers curling around an ornate hilt, a gift given to her not far from where she stood now. Fitting that she should use it tonight. Correct, in some cosmic way.

With her hands pressed to the saber like a talisman, Kirie waited for Lirka to answer the call.

 

[Lirka Ka]

JUTRAND

Politics was messy at the best of times. But Sith politics? Oh that was a whole different beast. Lirka had buried herself in the muck of Sithly machinations for decades, and she had gotten what she wanted from this most recent bout. How grand was a single sniveling casualty like Kirie in the Dark Path that would extend for millennia?

But perhaps, Lirka had underestimated the girl. She had seen her among the coreward marauders, maybe she was even a fighter now. A variable of note. She intended to find out.

Lirka was a predator, maddened by suffocating paranoia. It was not often she was surprised - she saw assassins in every shadow. But every assassin, an opportunity: the weak were to be weeded from the worthy, every weapon could be turned to malign ends with the right…motivations.

Lirka Ka was a monster of many quirks one of them being, despite her mighty metal bulk, the ability to move with odd silence. But her presence gave her away first, always: the meager whisper in the force, trying to scream. The vague ripples of the Dark Side now emanating from her being as she gorged herself in hidden places.

“Kirie-Corsell-of-Weik.”

The words purred out across the horizon, there was a humor in them. It was not a common occurrence for one to seek the Once-Sephi out, and those that did rarely did so for peaceful reasons.

“My, how long it has been since you walked behind our wall.”

Thump. Thump. Thump. No more silence. Heavy metal footfalls upon the earth, the glimmer of metal plate in the shining lights of Jutrand. That blank-faced helm, glowing slit-lenses that glared with an intensity that transpirsteel shouldn’t.

At a first glance, she was even unarmed as she approached. Clawed hands clasped behind her back…though were it ever so simple with a woman who kept enough shivs hidden upon her person to the entire Assembly.

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[Kirie]

It did not take long. Kirie knew Lirka to be a curious and preening creature. She would not resist such obvious bait. Not because she was foolish, but because Lirka Ka had earned her overconfidence, and she would not be troubled by a visitation from a little bug like Kirie.

So it was that Lirka Ka arrived, apparently unarmed, heralded by the low tones of her voice and the heavy scrape of her boots on stone. Kirie's head whipped around at the sound, and when she recognised her the signs of greeting flowed out unbidden.

'Oh. Hello Lirka.' Her face was slack, a distant, slightly confused expression worn upon her fine features, with her body half-turned towards the monstrous woman. That passed momentarily. The glassy look in her eyes cleared, gaze sharpening on the hulking figure that had emerged from the gloomy evening. Kirie bit the inside of her cheeks, and willed her crumbling mind to remain focused.

'You came.' Kirie remarked.

“My, how long it has been since you walked behind our wall.”

Kirie's back stiffened involuntarily as Lirka Ka drew closer. She tried to suppress the cold, leaden feeling, instead forcing her legs to take slow, even steps towards the woman, stopping a half dozen paces short. Close enough to see her in detail. Close enough to be dwarfed by her size, by her presence, by her reputation. Only, Kirie found she scarcely cared about these things anymore.

"I know what you did, Lirka Ka." These words were not signed. No, she spoke them into the woman before her, driving each syllable like a spear into the wet mass that passed for Lirka's brain. "It is time you reaped what you have sown."

Her nerves raced with feverish energy, tightening her muscles to sprung coils. making her hands shake and her teeth chatter. Kirie Corsell did not stand deadly still in a practiced stance. In fact, she swayed a little as she looked up at Ka, and pulled the saber from her robes. She held it ready, but did not ignite it, not yet.

"If you had any honour left in you..." Kirie continued to speak into Lirka's mind. "You would kneel before me and take the punishment you deserve. But you won't."

Kirie's features contorted into a sneer. A unnatural expression that did not suit her face, made her look ghastly and deranged. Which, to be fair, she sort of was.

The saber ignited with a satisfying hiss that seemed as loud as an explosion in the still night air. It crackled and hummed as though it were a long-starved beast. Crimson light poured across the pair of them, deepening the dark circles and sharp lines of Kirie's face and turning the hulking figure of Lirka Ka positively ghoulish.

"Maybe I could make you."

Lirka Ka ​

 

[Lirka Ka]

Primordial Darkness worked in funny ways. In its boundless apathy for all existence, it left stark reminder that all schemes were temporary. Foundations cracked and crumbled, and lies gave way to truth.

But did it really matter? The strong took, and the strong claimed. The veneer could fall, yet all that would matter is that Lirka had let her diseased existence seep deeper and deeper into the eidolons in which she infected.

Stiffening. Was it fear, pride perhaps? Somewhere in between? Whatever it was that Lirka saw in Kirie today, it brought her great amusement. A wicked grin growing beneath her helmet.

The wonderful lie revealed. Flash memories never lasted too long before the wise saw through their shadow. Lirka had imparted some fraction of her own maddened misery upon another - and regardless of what happened here today, she was take sickly glee in that fact.

Lirka was rarely still, because she paced with a hunter’s gait as the words slammed against her mind. How fascinating. The little bird found its song again. She couldn’t fault the girl, not really. But graciously would she twist the knife in sadistic hedonism.

“Oh? And what is that I did?”

There was humor behind those words, she felt no compulsion to play the game. The girl deserved some modicum of honesty.

“That I stole you from your home, shattered your meager little existence because I wanted to? Because I decided that Kirie-Corsell-of-Weik would be the perfect little game-piece upon my Dejarik board?”

Goading. Poking. Prodding. She wanted rage, she wanted wrath. Before Lirka’s eyes, ever calculating, she saw raw material unrefined. A knife waiting to be sharpened.

She laugh, it was as horrible and humorless as ever.

“Honor!? Don’t make me laugh, little girl. There is no honor. There is no crime. You were weak, and I was strong. Nothing but a miserly whelp, a tool that has served its purpose. Meat expended.”

She planted her feet to the ground now, hands still clasped behind her back. She stood firm, an iron sentinel. Challenge invited. A grin, ever wide beneath that helmet. Rage. Hate. Primal violence. Dzara.

“Test your theory then, tool.”

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[Kirie]

If Kirie had considered herself sufficiently detached and resolute to take whatever jeering Lirka Ka could throw at her, she had been sorely mistaken. Each word hit her with force, each a knife slotting neatly into her ribcage and knocking the wind out of her. So brazen, so arrogant, so goading, like she had been waiting for this day since the moment she had walked from Kirie's door after leaving her broken and despondent with her amore. Kirie wouldn't put it past her.

She hardened herself for the next barrage. This time, her eyes narrowed to muddy yellow-brown slits. Instead of shock and horror, the words did the job of reviving and stoking the anger and hurt in her chest. Kirie's fingers tightened around her saber in spasm. She forced herself to take deep, and steady breaths as she continued her approach. By the time she stood before the monster who had unwittingly haunted her nightmares since she left Jutrand, Kirie had only insider her a perfect, curated, crystalline hatred.

Lirka stood before her, stock still and waiting, in the ready stance of a teacher about to deliver an unpleasant lesson.

“Test your theory then, tool.”

Kirie gritted her teeth. She made a silent vow, and delivered it like a speeding slug into Lirka's brain.

"I will teach you regret."

If Kirie was a duelist of any skill. It was here that she would have exploded into movement, performed an exceptional feint and flourish, and driven the brilliant blade of her saber straight into Lirka's shrivelled heart.

Kirie did none of that. Instead, she swung the saber overhand, a heavy, ungainly downward strike that would be trivial to block. But, the saber was not the point. The saber was a tool for distraction, for pressure, for defence, and for the great monster to collect off her corpse if she failed.

No, what Kirie needed was to touch her hand to Lirka.

As the blow can in to land, Kirie rushed recklessly forward, her free hand trailing to smack her unarmed palm against Lirka Ka's chestplate.

Lirka Ka

 

[Lirka Ka]

Words like needles, pricking away at the skin for no grander purpose than to irritate. Those worth consideration would rise to goading with rage. And ultimately, Kirie was not wrong: Lirka had been waiting. She had reaped her boon, played politics and now sit herself upon the Dark Council. But the Dark Path did not care for politics, it cared only for those strong enough to take the first step.

And sometimes, the first step just needed a push to get started. Kirie had been maimed, marred, cursed by another just as Lirka had been. It left the most simple of tests for the Once-Sephi’s endless maddened calculus, would she wither beneath the suffer, or would the flower bloom?

Lirka relished in the hatred, drank in all the vileness that Kirie’s eyes threw her way. Good. Seething hatred was the start, the key to power.

But alas, the girl was but a human still. Cursed by the fragility of human sensibilities.

Yet, graciously would Lirka accept a lesson. And she would provide her own in turn. For all that metal bulk, Lirka was always faster than she seemed. Forward momentum was met was a simple surging sidestep.

“Sloppy.”

As quickly as the metal monster moved aside from Kirie’s surge, the Once-Sephi responded with a “Lirka Ka classic”

A tree-trunk leg of gleaming steel launched out, swinging mechanically-enhanced force against the girl’s shin as she rushed forward. Yet, Lirka spoke with stern casualness in the wake of this attempted-assassination

“There is no regret. The strong do not regret, regret is a weight, that drags you beneath the waves.”

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[Kirie]

“Sloppy.”

The heavy kick broke Kirie's shin. The metal boot struck her with a wet and sickening crunch, leaving a sizeable divot in her leg. Kirie doubled over, gasping in pain, and hobbled backwards away from the woman. From the outside, it might look like Kirie was retreating, but she wasn't, really.

Kirie's reckless swing had cost her a savage blow, in fact, her leg was barely taking her weight, and growing more agonising by the second. But, Kirie had also succeeded in getting Lirka Ka to touch her.

Confident she was not about to be rushed, Kirie closed her eyes and focused on Lirka's foot, then the connecting leg, then the whole huge ugly mess. In a second, her perception had spread to the monster woman's whole self. The shining starmap of shatterpoints that made up Lirka was as real and tangible as her flesh. The number of fractures and half, healed connection points was dizzying, and Kirie was tempted to try and simply unlace Lirka’s structure then and there. Not yet. though, she needed more information, more time to focus on the weak points.

The Dark had been coalescing around them since Kirie had first arrived. Here on Jutrand, it occupied every hidden corner, sheltered in every drop of shadow, clung to every living being. Now, Kirie called it to herself. It churned around her like an intangible maelstrom. Kirie's leg buckled and she fell to a knee. She snarled, raised a hand, and directed the Darkness to flow out from her fingertips, to wrap its tendrils around Lirka, and to pull.

If it struck true and stuck, the effect of the Draining would be immediate. Starting as a sudden weakness and growing rapidly into a smothering pressure that sapped the semblance of life that kept the once-Sephi walking and talking. As it did so, it would flow unto Kirie, knitting back together her shattered leg bone and smoothing the skin.

Lirka Ka
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[Lirka Ka]

Banging. Snapping. Cracking. The visceral sounds of combat that made Lirka’s rancid form ripple in anticipation- the savagery of her more crude fighting style brought a great pleasure to the Once-Sephi and her boundless mockeries of Sithly tradition. There’s’ was a new era, an era that demanded minds willing to embrace the transience of power.

A withdraw was the only logical course in Lirka’s calculus, but she knew better than to underestimate Kirie so readily. Even a bug could sting. If the girl was bold enough to come here with saber in hand, she certainly believed she had some modicum of a chance. So Lirka let the distance between them grow once again, ever the patient hunter

Within the Shatterpoints hunting through the whisper of Lirka’s presence in the force, that is where the true horror was revealed. Within the patchwork of through-lines between metal and sculpted meat there was a blackness. A mass of inky slopping foulness that bound everything together. Like starring into an abyssal sea. It was a mass that pulsated with purpose, with ravenous hunger. That sought to consume and pull more and more into its gestalt till the next apotheosis was reached.

The true horribleness that propelled the sculpted cadaver that Kirie brawled.

A huff was air expelled as Lirka felt her life force leeched from her foul being, lurching forward in some surprise. But surprise quickly turned to her own dark purpose - so the girl had become something worthy of consideration.

“It feels good to take, doesn’t it?”

Even in the wake of the assault, Lirka still straightened her resolve. Where meat failed, machine would propel. To indulge in the powers of the Dark Side was to open oneself to the Darkness Beyond Darkness and its terror.

“Perhaps, you even feel it now. That little piece of me inside of you, nourished by my malice. That slinking blackness that suffocates your words, and steals away the self.”

Another barb, another goad. A reveal of the thing nestled within her, Lirka’s little spy that fed the monster’s insatiable need to know.

“Marred. Maimed. Just like me.”

It was no grand surprise, but Lirka Ka was never unarmed. Popping into her hand the hilt of her electro whip, the weapon flared to life in crackling yellow energy. A Zygerrian tool of torment that lashed out, looking to coil around the girl and bring her the gift of agony.

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[Kirie]

There was something wrong with Lirka Ka. Even through the haze of her anger and madness Kirie could feel it. It wasn't that she was a hulking monster of synthetic sewn flesh. Kirie knew that. It wasn't that her heart had only room for cruelty; She knew that too. No, what became apparent as the Force siphon began to drain Lirka's energy is that the woman was rotting.

Kirie's mouth twisted into a disgusted grimace. Inside Lirka Ka, some dark, twisted puppet was pulling the strings. The woman wasn't just a genetically modified test-tube creature, she was the corpse of said creature, moved by some writhing Darkness. It was that, whatever lay inside, that was Lirka Ka. What she imagined, what the Galaxy saw, was perhaps the shell. At least, that's what Kirie saw, in the wriggling void at the centre of the woman's being.

It was disgusting. She was disgusting. A stain who had inflicted her horrors on Kirie, on untold others, without anyone coming closed to stop her. It made her so angry.

“It feels good to take, doesn’t it?”

Kirie's knuckles tightened on her saber. The words rattled her, the brutal openness of the them, but she maintained her concentration on the draining field. The words struck and stung, but she used the hurt and anger to fuel the fire, keeping a razor focus on her power, on sapping Lirka until nothing remained but a husk and deadened sludge.

“Perhaps, you even feel it now. That little piece of me inside of you, nourished by my malice. That slinking blackness that suffocates your words, and steals away the self.”

She wanted to throw up. Was there any truth to what Lirka was saying? There had to be, for Lirka Ka had cut off Kirie's voice, sealed away her memories and painted over the spots where they belonged. She had inserted part of herself, an unwanted parasite lodged in her being.

A parasite, her addled and despairing brain reasoned, had to be excised, and its source destroyed.

In response to Lirka’s goading, Kirie imagined a dozen brutal deaths she would inflict on the woman, bundled them up, and speared them into her brain tissue with a power that would collapse a regular person.

"I am nothing like you."

Never fast nor observant, the crackling whip caught Kirie by surprise. It was only a preternatural reflex that triggered her to block with her saber, the electrified line wrapping and sizzling around the blade instead of her arm. She was similarly unprepared for the tug, which sent her stumbling forward, causing her to extinguish her saber to free herself.

Panic began to burn at her synapses. She felt on the edge of a more substantial meltdown than the revenge-fuelled determination that had filled her earlier. She worried soon she would succumb to whatever awaited her on the other side of that. But not yet.

Kirie scrabbled backwards, now far closer to the beast than she wanted. Her concentration on her draining flickered, severed for but a moment, before she reestablished the flow, shaken. Kirie reignited the blade to send a few basic thrusts towards Lirka, trying to play for the space and time she had lost.

Lirka Ka ​

 

[Lirka Ka]

Power had a cost. The transience of strength was not seeming earned meekly. Just as the Dark Side of the Force corrupted and decayed its users, so too did the path of a Primordial Darkness. Lirka had slowly chipped away at the weakness of a meager existence, and in the shadow of hidden labs, and unnatural delving. She had turned herself into a being to meld and remake as the future demand.

Pulsating, hateful, blackness. Thumping like the beating of a heart. Writhing in anticipation. Skin and bone nothing but a horrid chrysalis.

Sacrifices upon the path. The cost of survival. Always another pound of flesh to expend, never a chance to regret. Forward. Always swimming forward. Denying the call to oblivion.

Yet for all of this violence, horrid revelations of rancid bile Lirka took everything with a wickedly amused glee. It was these moments of great emotion and distress that a good zealot knew to proselytize. In her endless loneliness, Lirka had made sure she would never be alone.

By the forceful hands of the strong, Lirka had set poor poor Kirie into the same circumstances of her own miserable existence.

With the stabbing psychic attack, Lirka’s mind was steeled: she had no fear of a gory death, a sadist and masochist all the same. She’d relish every wound Kirie inflicted upon her, and vice versa. Power through pain.

Indeed, all she could do was laugh. A horrid rancorous sound, the true horribleness of it: there was actual humor behind. Not the obnoxious humorless noise that usually chortled out of that mask.

“Aren’t you?”

The thrusts came, and Lirka was ready. What had been sucked away rekindled into a fire as steel groaned and meat pulsated. A flash of a steeled gauntlet came to knock away the thrusts - the slim remnants of her plundered beskar from Moridinae long forgotten nestled within her forearms and claws: a brief respite as her whip reeled back into its hilt.

“A broken thing, thrashing with rage! Diseased with memories not your own. No different from when I awoke upon Kamino.”

She backed up, brawling with words as much as blades. She only needed a moment to let her free hand flash back down and pull up her next tool of torment.

Snap-hiss.

The gleaming golden glow of a saber, her plundered Jedi trinket from New Cov. Simmering with anticipation of what was to come.

“I took it all from you. Just like how they took the choice from me. Indeed, Kirie-Corsell-of-Weik, I shall never be alone again.”

She still moved back, the monster was playing on the defensive for now it seemed.

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[Kirie]

It was all getting a bit much for Kirie. If she had maintained a greater awareness of self, she might have observed the degradation of her higher-order thinking, the gradual quieting of her racing mind as it was flooded with the potent cocktail of panic, rage and purest Darkness. What emerged was a version of herself that she had seen only twice, First, when she had nearly beaten Darth Anathemous to death during a sparring match gone wrong, and then, much later, when she had eviscerated Anet Raine on Coruscant.

Kirie had originally regarded this part of her as a sort of shadow-self, a shade that took control when the real her left the party. Nowadays, she was less sure. In her dreams, this version of Kirie had clawed her way out of the shellacked container of her body, splitting open ribs and climbing out of her body cavity to roam freely. When she woke, it was with the insistent feeling that this was a truer self that resided at her core, as rotten as the insides of the monster before her.

And perhaps it was this unperson who drove all rational thought from Kirie's mind, who filled her with the savage urge to tear the woman apart, to stab and beat and drain her until the Jutrand street cleaners would have to hose the great Lirka Ka off the flagstones.

“A broken thing, thrashing with rage! Diseased with memories not your own. No different from when I awoke upon Kamino.”

The words roared past her. Heard, understood, but without their meaning being truly absorbed. Kirie's nostrils flared, eyes narrowing to slits as she waited, coiled with tension, for Lirka to move.

The saber ignited, and Kirie's concentration on the Force Drain dropped, halting the spiritual pulling abruptly. The relief would be immediate, like surfacing from a dive. But that relief would be a momentary distraction, for Kirie was pivoting, stepping forward, very close, within striking distance. She drew the Force around herself in a swirling whirlpool that coalesced at her fingertips- and raised a hand to shatter the saber hilt into tiny little pieces.

Kirie was moving again, ducking low and trying to retreat backwards. She raised her hand again, fingers curling in a twisting motion as she tried to manipulate the whip to defy its master, and lash itself around Lirka instead.

“I took it all from you. Just like how they took the choice from me. Indeed, Kirie-Corsell-of-Weik, I shall never be alone again.”

"You are a pathetic parasite." Kirie didn't even realise she had responded at first, her conscious brain lagging a few seconds behind her savage instincts. "If I have my way..." If the words had been passing her lips she would have spat them. Still telepathically they carried a similar venom. "You will die here, alone."

Lirka Ka ​

 

[Lirka Ka]

Lirka was a narcissist. Dare, one might even say, she was even worse than a narcissist. She was a zealous narcissist. Everything was colored through the lenses of dark faith, forged in the madness of a monster stuck with nothing but her own thoughts and the infallible idea that she knew more than everyone else to have ever lived. A self-given purpose as the luminary to the would-be-monsters of this Galaxy.

What Kirie regarded as the "shadow-self" was the beast that had allowed to consume her ages ago. The monster that had subsumed all that "Lirka Ka" was and took a dead woman's name for itself and christened its legacy in the blood of millions crushed beneath iron or obliterated to ash with the wave of the hand and the rumbling of orbital-autocannons. The shadow was eternal. The shadow was survival. To conquer the call of the Primordial Darkness, the only path forward was to embrace its wickedness that nestles within the hearts of all the powerful.

While Lirka rather enjoyed the worthy walking in her shadow on the Path, pawns to move in the great game from her own dominance...hate was just as useful when faith was involved.

She held her saber awkwardly, this weapon that Lirka had snatched like a vulture to take another step forward and find that acceptance among the Order that she so silently craved after silent specters looked down upon her with mockery and scorn. Ready to slash, twirl, and stab like the best of the Jedi and Sith alike that she had brawled with.

And then, sizzle, crackle. BOOM

The thing exploded in her hand, metal shrapnel flying and Lirka's prized trinket became nothing more than a useless hunk of metal. As quickly as she was to take a bloody step to stake her claim among the Sith, Lirka was reminded just how alien she was to be the people she had embedded herself with for decades.

With kirie's worthy attempt to bring the whip against its bearer, it was for naught. Lirka let the weapon fall, clawed hand off its activator leaving nothing but metal coils screeching against her plated armor. And rather uncharacteristically.

Lirka said nothing.

It was a simple thing, but the girl had found a barb deeper than a blade would cut. The most violate of anger was the wordless kind. Fine. Then Lirka Ka would be the beast they wanted. The chunk of useless metal in her hand was hurled at the girl's head like a bullet - wasting no time to even see if the thing connected Lirka disregarded all notion of humanity and flung herself at Kirie with arms swung wide to tackle her to the ground.

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[Kirie]

Ordinarily, the spectacle of a silent Lirka Ka, one angry enough that you could feel it boiling off of her, would have terrified Kirie. Only, that Kirie was gone. Or at least she had been shoved into a locker.

This Kirie, the self that was presently fighting the beast of her nightmares, felt only savage triumph that she had finally made the overconfident lout falter, that she was finally being treated with a degree of the gravity she deserved. There was blood in the water. Not real blood, she wasn't sure Lirka actually had that, but she had managed to make her stumble.

She snarled, actually snarled, albeit silently. Teeth bared and nostrils flaring, for all the Galaxy wishing she had the strength to tear Lirka apart with her hands. Maybe this time she did.

It was a short-lived celebration, though. Not least because Kirie was rather short on complex thinking capacity right then, but also because Lirka was reacting, moving faster than her mass of bulk and sinew should have been able to. As Lirka's arm rose, lightning fast, Kirie's practiced attention to Shatterpoints delivered unto her a frightening portent of her fate.

Death.

For all the preternatural foresight in the world Kirie could not make herself quicker. The jagged hunk of metal struck her with the force of a speeder bike, even as her legs extended to dodge Lirka's subsequent tackle. The result was that Kirie fell to the ground gracelessly, avoiding Lirka's encircling arms, and sliding a short distance to come to rest with a fist-sized hole in her head.

Like a screen suddenly cutting out, she disappeared, unable to see, hear, feel, even think. She knew nothing, was nothing, yet something blazed within her still.

Kirie lay on the flagstones. Defeated, unmoving, the front half of her skull caved in, staring sightlessly forward, a pool of crimson spreading beneath her and soaking her clothes.

Lirka Ka​

 

[Lirka Ka]

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She could’ve laughed. Rancorous humor at the reminder of the sheer fragility of the meager unenlightened. But she didn’t.

Admittedly, she had expected Kirie to stay standing for a moment longer so Lirka could relish in the feeling of hammering her skull into shattered bits and seeing what stayed after the fact. But there was no thud, no savage tackle. Merely a disappointing reminder.

With the ferocity of her charge, Lirka nearly stumbled to the ground as her bulk skidded to a screeching halt. Rage simmered silently within her black hearts still - but it was hard not to feel that cold weight of melancholy. So wasteful. So stupid. Life an inherently worthless thing till proven otherwise, and for a brief moment Lirka was given the hope that Kirie was to be able to walk the Path.

Alas.

Slow stumbling steps, the ache of her drained being quaking through her wretched form Lirka approached Kirie’s mangled form. For a moment, she considered crushing the rest of her head underfoot, desecrating this would-be-assassin as a reminder for all who would waste themselves so recklessly. But again, she did not. Base savagery would be denied for grander purpose.

Pneumatic hiss as Lirka tore her helmet from her head and let the thing fall to the ground below with a thud. All of that uncanny, disgustingly smooth, horribleness looking over the gore as Lirka knelt down.

Putting two clawed fingers into the blooding blood beneath her, sopping up the liquid into the suit’s many intricate runes before taking it and placing them to a serpentine tongue. Kirie may have wasted her life, but Lirka would not waste raw material. It was only a dab, but even a bit of bloody crimson could be subsumed into her gestalt.

Words of sloppy wetness, a maw of needle-teeth. Lirka preached to the dead.

“Reality is an ocean almost incompressible in its vastness. And in that incomprehensible mess, we each float. Drifting aimlessly among the stagnant waters, utterly blinded by irrelevance. Except there is one thing within the ocean, one factor that sits so far beneath the waves that most will never once get close to understanding it. The drain, sucking away the water of life. Pulling the aimless, floating, bodies into the embrace of nothingness. And it pulls you in, each minute it pulls you closer and closer. It tugs ravenously in its apathetic annihilation.”

It was odd to talk to a bloody mess. But Lirka had walked this path before. Both the woman-that-was, and the monster-that-became. The shawl of the Primordial draped over the eyes.

“And when you notice it…How can you not swim? How can you not fight with all your vigor to escape the drain? No matter how many worthless, miserable, sops you have to push down to get there. To know is the first step of the Path, to swim is the next. Each moment, Darkness gifts us with these Moments. None so grand as its cold touch. The darkness at the edge of your vision now, as nothingness takes hold.”

She leaned closer now, words turning into whispers of shuttering exaltation. She had shown so much potential, surely it couldn’t have all been for naught?

“Swim, Kirie. Listen to my guiding words; for I am the luminary. That which guides against the clarion call. Swim. Thrash. Do not give in.”

And if this truly was all for naught? Well. Lirka had a feast to keep her busy for the rest of the cycle.

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[Quinn Varanin]

//: Kirie //: Lirka Ka //:
//: Attire //:

The message came after she had already felt the intent in the bond. Quinn frowned as she looked at it; it was a fear she had when Kirie had come home that day. Lirka was the true culprit—the one who had sent their relationship into a downward spiral. She had lost her, assuming it was a recklessness that the young Princess couldn't control. One of the worst days of her life, she relived that very moment.

Quinn placed her comm device face down. Kirie had asked to be set free, to be released from their connection, never to see each other again. She had felt her a few times, some more painful than others. It had taken every ounce of willpower the Echani had to not go to the side of the Weikian woman. She reminded herself — almost a mantra at this point: This is what Kirie wanted.

So, like many other days, Quinn pushed her device aside and buried every feeling she had to continue her work.

The evening pressed in; the air felt thick as Quinn struggled to focus. Council documents all blended together until something struck her in her chest. The bond they had shared, the one that Quinn purposefully kept quiet, the blood trail echoing every ounce of pain the former slave was enduring.

This was nothing like before, and Quinn felt a surge of pain bloom deeply in her skull. Something terrible had happened, and she could feel Kirie slipping further away, not in distance… no, that was normal — but in connection.

Cursing, the Echani stood and grabbed what she needed.

The air changed first.

It grew dry enough to scrape the back of the throat, every trace of moisture leeched from it as static crawled across the flagstones in thin, snapping veins. Loose strands of hair lifted beneath the gathering charge. Then space folded with a violent crack of displaced air, thunder compressed into a single deafening instant —

— and Quinn stepped through.

Asarsi was already in her hand.

The spear extended before the last distortion of folded space had settled behind her, silver length snapping to full reach as its point found the exposed line of Lirka's throat. No warning. No hesitation. Quinn arrived prepared to put it through her.

Then she saw Kirie. For a fraction of a second, everything else ceased to matter. The blood spreading between the stones. The body lying far too still within it. The ruin where Kirie's face should have been. Lirka kneeling over her with crimson wet across those clawed fingers, her helmet discarded nearby like some obscene punctuation to whatever had happened here.

The scene was worse than anything Quinn had expected to find.

The pain that had torn through their bond had warned her that something was wrong. It had given her flashes without images, the violent agony and terror of something being torn abruptly away.

It had not prepared her for this. Something in Quinn went terribly still.

"Step. Back."

Heat began gathering along Asarsi's length, the metal answering its wielder as threads of crimson electricity crawled across it. They snapped between the spearhead and the air surrounding Lirka, staining Quinn's pale features red with every sharp pulse. The familiar scent of ozone joined the blood.

Her gaze never left the former Sephi.

They occupied the same chamber. Cast the same votes. Together, they decided the direction of the Sith Order and the lives spent beneath its banner.

Quinn found she did not care.

"I will kill you, Councilor Ka... without hesitation."

No raised voice followed the threat. No theatrical fury. Quinn spoke it with the same certainty she might have given an order already decided upon.

She moved forward.

One careful step carried her closer to Kirie, her boot deliberately finding clean stone rather than the blood spreading beneath her. Another placed Quinn between as much of Kirie and Lirka as she could manage without lowering the spear. The lightning around Asarsi intensified with every inch she claimed, red arcs snapping hungrily from one edge of the blade to the other.

Kirie was behind her now.
Protected. Or as protected as Quinn could make her.

Whatever remained would come after.

First, the beast needed to move.

"Know your place."

Quinn's grip shifted almost imperceptibly upon the spear.

"And behave before I remind you where you truly stand in the hierarchy of our Order."

 

[Kirie]

“Swim, Kirie. Listen to my guiding words; for I am the luminary. That which guides against the clarion call. Swim. Thrash. Do not give in.”

Nothing happened. There was only the drip drip drip of blood and brain matter leaking out of Kirie's sinuses. She did not move, she did not twitch. Lirka Ka's words washed over her with no apparent affect, dissipating into the air with a listless finality. To any usual observer, she was clearly very dead. To someone with the right senses, she was dead, but not gone.

"Step. Back."

Nor did Kirie stir at Quinn's arrival. Not as the air grew hot and charged and terrible and rushed across her body sending ruddy hair flying all about her face. Not at the scrape of her boot or the exhale of air as she raised the spear and not at the low, grave threats she spoke aloud to Lirka. To anyone, it would have been clear the Queen of Eshan was too late.

But the air changed again. When Kirie had arrived in the early dawning to confront Lirka, it had been mild and still. When Quinn had folded reality itself to step across the Galaxy, it had become superheated and angry. Now, as Kirie- well not Kirie, her body- lay still on the flagstones, the air took on a deathly, suffocating chill. Through her ruined senses she had heard had heard them. She heeded Lirka's call. Kirie felt Quinn draw close, and she came running back.

First, The Body's fingers twitched, then clenched, and her shoulders shuddered and she grew colder and colder and the air grew frigid all around them. Beautiful snowflakes crystallised upon the surface of her bloodless skin. They spread along the ground, crawling up the boots of the others and casting a heavy fog across the street, so it seemed the trio was lost in a grey-white dreamscape, a scene half-rendered. Blood oozed from The Body's pores, from her ears, from her eyes. It ran down her fine features in oozing crimson tear tracks. Finally, a dull and flickering red light began to emanate from The Body, her body, spilling out from the depths of her flesh and escaping from the crisscrossing veins of her hands, her wrists, her neck, her eyelids.

The Body sucked in a wracking, bubbly breath, and she sat up. Her skull, shiny and white and new, grew and sealed over the hole in her head. With a wave of her hand, she extruding the long, jagged piece of metal that had lodged itself inside her brain with excruciating care, until it fell upon the stones with a soft clink. The freshest of her spilled blood, that which had not already dried, reversed its track. It flowed back up her arms and legs, dissolving the sheen of ice as soaked into her skin. The Body got to its feet. Fresh baby-pink skin crept along her scalp, sprouting hair that slithered down to the length of her back. The Darkness swirled around her like a maelstrom, feeding into The Body as her nervous tissue reconnected and its sensed returned. Jutrand was a wellspring of its own, but Lirka and Quinn were oceans in and of themselves.

Her newly reformed flesh was a perfect picture, yet the body was no longer fully a person. She was a storm now, a deliverer of the beautiful and sacred Darkness and the violence she wrought. Never could have Lirka Ka wished for a more fervent disciple than the one who stood before her now.

Kirie Corsell opened her eyes. She regarded the scene in front of her. Quinn, holding the crackling spear in threat. Lirka, eager and hungry, blocked from coming closer. The woman's words knocked around her head, refusing to leave. The closest thing to thought she could manage. Had that been what had brought her back, or was it the arrival of Quinn, coming to save her again? She did not know. Couldn't know. She was incapable of such rationalisation at that moment. She had been living, dead, living again, but her goal was unchanged, and the hate and the hurt and the anger and the Dark flowed through her stronger than it ever had before. She was a vessel for it, an instrument.

Kirie placed a hand on Quinn's shoulder, leaving a bloody handprint on the woman’s fine clothing. At her touch, she reopened the connection they shared, the one she had tried so long to forget, to run from. From Kirie's mind poured memories, raw and unfiltered, of the night Lirka had taken her. Every sickening detail and sensation delivered in a single instant to Quinn's mind. So she would know it and never forget it. Know it as if it was her who Lirka Ka had maimed. It was a cruel thing, but Kirie was ultimately a cruel being.

Yellow eyes looked over the woman who had saved her time and again, who had given her life meaning, then slipped coolly to Lirka. In her heart, she know it was the monster who had brought her back.

“Quinn…”

Kirie spoke in Quinn's mind with no voice that had ever passed her lips. A warped, reflected memory of herself. She pointed a pale finger at Lirka.

"Kill her."

Quinn Varanin | Lirka Ka ​

 

[Lirka Ka]

She was not surprised, though admittedly disappointed that Kirie did not immediately stir from her honeyed words. These things took time, so she held no great ire for the girl’s nonexistence. Frustration over wastefulness, most certainly - but she did not waste material. Alas, with the sizzle-crack of arrival it was quickly becoming apparent that waste was certainly to become an issue.

All action demanded reaction, Lirka understood that fact as much as she tried to weave, lie, and trick her way into defying that natural law as she defied so many others. The sudden appearance of Quinn Varanin was met with…stillness. There was no need to be rash. Lirka gladly abided by her request, a slow and calm rise as she gave the two the deserved space.

Lirka did not like to be without her helmet - this thing of flesh and sinew was not really her face. Her face was metal. These eyes, teeth, and ears were but byproduct. Her emotion was not much more forthcoming than that blank-faced helm though - save for the twitching nerves of instability

But…there was always politics to play. The first piece had been moved on the board, and success had been reaped. Now it was about defending her new hoard of power - with threat, or otherwise.

“Were it so easy.”

Emotion slowly seeped into her features, like the slow crawl of madness awakened. Pride, perhaps. It was the flame of an iconoclast’s vision that overwhelmed the sickly unnatural dyed-blue of her eyes.

“My place is the Will. Graced upon me by the Throne…my place, the Imperator of the Third. My place, she who dubbed Dzara into the Galaxy. Am I to just accept the assassin’s blade to my throat? Deny the honor of battle?”

Horrible yellowed teeth appeared through that grin, she knew what would happen here today. Lirka was under no delusion of that which she could fight, and that which she could not. But her ravings were interrupted by the rise of Kirie - Lirka’s very flesh rippled, her eyes widened: utterly unblinking. She wanted to cry out, the ecstasy of faith in the Moment of Revelation! Nature defied, the next step of the Path! She knew Kirie could do, and unearned pride swelled within her black hearts.

For Lirka knew she would be the luminary, she who guided the mighty down the path of survival against Primordial Darkness.

She spread her arms wide, all but welcoming the first blows it was a shame she could not exalt in this moment as much as it deserved.

But that day would come, the duo would certainly be disappointed that Lirka Ka did not die easily, nor would she die quietly.

“To slay a Councillor, at the behest of a foreign national…my, what a mess that could make. What a mess I could make.”

Lirka would not die today. She had too much work to do. But gladly would she accept the workload of leaving a flaming mess in her wake if all she had built was to come crumbling down

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