Rawnblade

[Seydon of Arda]

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[SIZE=10pt]“Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
But my heart is a lonely hunter[/SIZE] that hunts on a lonely hill.[SIZE=10pt]”[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=10pt]R A W N B L A D E[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]Or ‘The Falling Riders’[/SIZE]​

​

[SIZE=10pt]~Then, sometime before the Troubles of Alderaan…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She laid upon the wide, sunken bed, draped in a nightgown of licking sweat, lights from distant tidal pools rippling through porthole onto the ceramic ceiling and upon her gently quivering belly. Lithe, beautiful, illumination drew finely lined curls of leg, hip, rib, and breast, sloped shoulders kept under curtains of darkening, rowdy hair. Lilac petals were in her eyes, half-closed by appreciative exhaustion. Breaths were counted in time to the rhythmic beat in her ear. The woman kept still preferring to let her profile indent onto the mattress, still waiting to hear any tell-tale action coming from the bedchamber bathroom. But her eyes knew all lights were killed off, the bathroom auto-door cued open, and if she were not concentrating into the Force then she wouldn’t tell her partner’s coming and going. Sleep still refused her beckons. With effort, she pushed up off her backbone onto her side, curling the coverlets around herself. It was a late hour and though her abode was a taxingly sealed, air-conditioned liner-cruiser, somehow cold winds off the easterly dunes and tide made the bulkheads bleed with chilly perspiration. She snatched a towel off a black-wroshyr nightstand, dabbing moisture off her throat. Such was the quiet, she allowed herself a moment’s thought.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Lonesomeness. There was no complimenting body heat beside her skin in the close quilts and comforters. The woman rose, shadow following faithfully on the rosy bulkhead, propped up by her palm and long arm. Long dressers bordered where the curled interior walling allowed, pieces of heavily refashioned driftwood glued together by a substance, she’d been told, suckled from the jowls of an oceanic trench predator. Atop them were a great deal of keepsakes, new and old, like faint holo-portraits, pict frames, alizarin pearls, black scallops, a pair of dusty saber-hilts. She got out from the bed and strolled by the footboard, pausing to dress up in her housecoat. It was another gift; fur taken from the hides of the great killer seals roaming the north currents but lined with further insulate. Now tall and silken like twilight shadow, she padded out from her bedding room.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Crossing by a pair of darkened passage intersections, on a way to an upper deck gallery lounge resting beneath the pilot’s nest, she paused at something aromatic wafting down the corridor. Thickly salted moisture, warmly lulling, blew up over her lips and nose, leaving a taste of aged dunes on her wet tongue. Not unlike grain beer, she thought, a local intoxicant ground up from red coconut flesh and laced with century old salt pinches. She hadn’t much to sip on, however, just a cup poured from bottled water, a stamina invigorator hours later, and odess-kelp tablets. Midwives proscribed the very latter to her as a failsafe contraceptive. Three months after their unanimous recommendation, she had to lend agreement: they operated like a spell~[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She followed the windy scent, trailing down a built-in staircase spiral in lieu of a short turbolift drop. It led through the kitchenette bays, through pantry, larder, along a squeezed hallway bisecting the belly holds. Standing in the primary debarkation chamber, moonlight filtered up from sucking waves onto the interior gun-grey bulkheads and railed machinery lining the ceiling. The landing ramp was lowered down into beach sand, she discovered. Besides the oceanic breeze, voices calmly floated along from where the prow was nosed up over drift-rocks. One voice was coarse and rapt by gravel. The second warbled, fluting out consonants, pitching up adjective and noun words with odd, clacking pronunciation. The woman gathered up her long robe, secured the waist sash, venturing out from her starship.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]An ebon-washed sea spanned out from their tiny atoll over every natural direction, beached wood struck up over the dune lips like craggy, rotten tooth pegs. Moonlight from three brother-moons was meandering gracefully over the northerly fern-palm trees cresting on an earthen gnoll not yet devoured by tidal sand-moors. Her ship, the Golden Rose, a forty meter cruise-liner cast in subtle resemblance of an Eldorai halberd, jutted over an equally sizeable shard of risen, salt-dried reef. A hull like electrum, moonbeams made it shimmer bronze and copper. A league out into the open waters and away from spiking shoals, a school of breaching iron-whales tossed and cavorted in play. Resounding throat-calls tremored up the shore.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon of Arda looked up from his small campfire at Rosa Gunn striding down the landing tongue onto the ground. He sat crossed on a rush-mat, dressed in his trousers and fading tunic, powerfully framed despite the slouchy posture and bowed head. Where Rosa wore her beauty in dark colours, flushed skin, and enviable proportions, he’d lost considerable pigmentation, hair shocked into silver-white that was kept tied back by a thin leather headband. Fearsome musculature was pitted and striped by scarring. Lit eyes watched her approach, walking barefoot, smiling as she smiled with those many tide-grains tickling up into her soles. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sleepless?” She asked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Something like that.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You disappointed me.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon narrowed wolven, slit-eyes up at his wife. “I’m sorry. How did that come about?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I came awake and you weren’t there to keep me dressed from the night,” She said, settling onto a spare portion of his mat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Dressed?” He had to question, feeling her arms link about his shoulder.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You make for a very warm blanket,” Came her croon, taking the sharp of her thumbnail to scrape it up his spine. His skin woke up pricked and he sought out her hip with a worn palm, chuckling. Neither resisted pulling close, beach fire warming up their brows and surfing zephyrs blowing over their shoulder and nape.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…You brought those out again.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon peered along the line of her pointing arm, through silken ash and smoke hazing the mid-summer’s night air. Past the firepit arraigned roughly in a wide, forum semi-circle were half a dozen equipment chests, stamped from worn sheeting duranium, pocked with bowled indents, striating cuts, and the backs of old, ripped-away customs approval stickers. She’d seen them when midnight shade provided by awning fern-palms shifted with a wind-gust, shining the brother-moons over their trapped lids. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Mmmn.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Taking inventory?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Suppose that’s the best way to put it,” He said and drew out a ragged, leather-hide bound field journal wrapped in a string catch. Faded on the curling spine was a name writ out in splotched ink: ‘SHEV RAYNER’.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Rosa left off from leaning on his ribs and waist, taking the tiny book when Seydon proffered, briefly leafing through a scant handful of pages. The handwriting inside was reedy, jumping with spidery flourishes, tabled with roughly sketched objects: archaic weaponry, constellations, ruined impressions of sizeably old architecture, fetid beast-things. Stuffed in besides were unattached stick-it notes extrapolating further points, corrections, and observation. It was hodge-podge, the result of a hurried man trying to keep up with a greatly pressed journey, the leafing spattered with grayed mud stains. Holding it close by her lips, Rosa smelled faint aftershave and cleaning oils.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“This is the account he wrote adventuring with Ajax?” She asked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon nodded and took it back into his hand. “Have you read it through yet?” …Her husband shook his head after a beat and laid the journal against the sand by his lying feet.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Why not?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It’s the way to Ys,” He said. “How he and Ajax found their way to its gates but turned away. Most could not give a care or damn whether or not that place is real, but… I can’t trust that I wouldn’t be tempted to go and see it for myself. That I wouldn’t be followed, too. There was another ambush.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Rosa’s nails seized into his hand sharply. “Where? When?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]-[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Fields the color of Drundland-gold, rustic ochre, and pigments of motley, spinach green clinched a long horizon, spun by waves of gliding wind. After nine days tracked over the long gnolls, the crop-plague loosed a narrow groan and fell into a narrow flint depression between a set of grassy hills. It was dying while the hunter crested the last gnoll in a hard sprint, taking meters at a time. Seydon then found it completely expired and leaking ichor-blood from an opened, flat-toothed gob. The crop-plague once had been a sub-species of mulch-boar; it’d run squat to the ground on wide-set legs, feet cloven in three-point shears of hardened black keratin. He ran a hand over the hide: hairs like folded steel, pleated atop each other for almost an inch thickness from skull to rump. The Alwari facing it were stamped under meter-long tusk protrudes, unnaturally sharpened, and two metric tons of boar-weight.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]And then it met the Dunaan, on the long, seldom walked road from Kander to the Valley of the Borokii. It charged him with little recourse, restraint. He had not yet tracked the monster’s initial crossing over Ansion’s southern reaches, where it’d been first seen and had first slayed. But its bloodwrath was foreign to the otherwise mellow mulch-boar attitude. It came for him and bellowed squealing yells. Seydon held his ground but drew his longsword Winterfang, Bane of Monsters, feeling time slow while reflex sharpened preternaturally. At the final half-second, he hopped long but twisted with his waist and let the core muscles dictate the force in his arms. The cut took off its left flank razor-tusks but it arrested its trembling momentum, hurling back over the road and ditch to charge again. Seydon kept to its left and forced the creature to continually compensate, trying to rack its right-tusks into a line with his torso.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It leapt the tuber-rotted ditch and flew, torpedoing into a falling column of tusk and fur. There were no compulsions against hurling itself face first through packed earth and rock if it smashed this assaulter in the same motion. Seydon braced his shoulders and forearms, before stroking his sword upwards. Winterfang slid in through the crop-plagueists teeth, cheek, and throat, opening up the felling wound deep into its shoulder, ribs, and spine. Even dying, it managed nine days fleeing, night and day, putting as many leagues it could manage between it and the implacable hunter.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What changed you?” He asked presently, looking over its splayed hind-legs. Ansion wasn’t home to many spiritual anomalies. Certainly the ancestors of the Alwari kept up their roam-invisible but such was natural. Seydon was close to putting torch to the cavernous remains, when an odour struck him…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…Jagged, metallic, whetted with foulness, a scent like the rot of a soul. Worse, it was not unfamiliar. Seydon knew it. So he in one motion, he spun on hip and feet, drew Razorlight, Bane of Men, and cut a twirling slice through empty air. A beat. Just stillness answered his faster-than-lightning aggression. But… impossibly, empty air opened up a ragged, bleeding cut dripping torridly. The assassin’s dark side obfuscation fell away. It stood roughly six feet, lean with haggard muscle clinging to long arms and legs, dressed in a supple leather-suit body running chain-mail beneath. For a face, it wore a silver-forged doll-mask. Killed, surprise betrayed, it shivered and toppled back, chest separating in two. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Five other cloaked shades emerged out of the grasses. Blades flickered and spun under an eton-blue sky.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]-[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“On Ansion two weeks ago, I was trailing a crop-plagueist that’d killed a few outlier Alwari tribes. It was heading deeper inland over the plains. I’d just caught up, put pay to it, and was burning the remains when the long-grasses suddenly parted open.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Cloaked?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Her husband nodded lightly. “Half a dozen fighters all sporting new alchemy-grafts and poisoned weaponry.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You destroyed them?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]-[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The manling caught its hands round a groove inside their silver face-plate and wrenched the mask free, sporting a flesh-smoothed face wrinkled terribly round black eyes. Their mouth yawned wide, wider, sutures on the cheeks popping while throat-sacks undulated wildly. Seydon stepped forward, darting in and then aside, ruining its bile-spray. Viscous acid hosed over his shoulder and landed hissing and smoking onto a line of wheat grasses. It was turning hard to its flank, speed unbelievable, clutching at bi-form double-ended dirks in either of its long hands. The Dunaan crossed a snapping guard and paused five blows under a second, flicking his sword-tip up through a minute gap in the assassin’s retreating arms. It gouged up through its jaw, swung down and back to return behind Seydon’s hip, whilst opening a hot wound from their throat to navel. Razorlight peeled air for a curt, sucking horizontal hack.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Its head came free. Blood hosed whilst pallid limbs jiggled, Seydon cutting twice again, the midriff and knees, collapsing the corpse in on itself. The other five shade-killers laid smote where they likewise fell, torn apart at torso and appendage. He cleaned smouldering blood off his longsword on its armoured tunic before spinning alight a gust of pyromantic fire out of his thrust palm and onto the bodies…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]-[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I left no trace but ash.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Rosa strayed her eyes to Rayner’s journal, little better than a field-abused notepad, still wearing discolourations painted by drawn gore and sap. “Still prowling for this, I imagine. Under orders from that man calling himself Inquisitor.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Borja.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Have you gotten any word of him in the last while?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The witcher shook his head, a cinder-coal sparking off the fire to bounce against his knee. Borja Sennex, self-styled as a ‘High Lord Inquisitor’, once upon a time ersatz mercenary and beast stalker, transitioning from lowly operator to an empowered Sith Lord over a period of two heavily occluded decades. A vicious telepath and flourish duelist. Seydon and shared little in fond memories, Sennex himself responsible for sealing a rift between his mother and father, ensuring the murder of the latter, the destruction of their ancestral hunting clan, his mother’s permanent corruption. They found one another again on Dromund Kaas in a long, black episode. The Dunaan had been ‘Seroth’ then, and Sennex had left him to die in the pits of the Dark Temple’s forgotten ward: Jurgoran Prison. He had only survived by accepting an indelible transformation and, in thanks to his now-roaming compatriot Ajax, embraced his heritage and purpose. He was Seydon now, by his birthname, and one of perhaps a scant dozen witchers calling themselves Dunaan at work in the galaxy. All for the purpose of hunting darkspawn for coin, and ensuring the secrets of their mythologized homeland remained undefiled.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ys. That world with castles in the sky…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“How come you’re outside then?” Rosa took her hand up to his cheek and guided him out of his reminisce. “It’s not so hard to sleep at my side, is it?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Never.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She looked again at the displayed keepsake chests, drawing her stare from their stamped locks, to the small beachside fire, to Shev Rayner’s written accounting hide-bound in her husband’s fingers. Indigo eyes narrowed. Belying speed helped her reach propel forward and snatch the journal back to her own grasp, hugging it tightly over her sternum. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Rosa…” Seydon cautioned softly, trying to retrieve the book. Her fingers pinched on his wrist, slapping down his knuckles while she leaned forward, scolding.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Don’t. Don’t think of it, even,” She said.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…A thousand people were kidnapped, slain, and then devoured by monsters Sennex unleashed just so he could have that thing,” He argued back. “There’s no secret worth keeping that costs that much.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye, and you avenged them until you were nearly broke yourself, love. An effort you’ll waste if you just toss this away.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It’s not worth it, Rosa.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Says you,” She shook her head. “Where is the point of keeping an oath to ensure little treasures like this are never lost? Or at least not lost to the wrong hands? Have you even read it?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No. I don’t want to. Rosa, please, give it here – “[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You’re a liar.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon blinked before his eyes turned arch and cross. “…What?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“When you say that: you can’t read this. Yes, you can. If you could not, you would have long thrown it into the fire, the ocean, a black hole or what have you. But I know my husband,” Rosa said. She sidled back to their shared sand-mat, putting a hand to his cheek while she mirrored the gesture instinctively. “And he doesn’t recklessly trash things that have import to him.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His head bowed, until it rested below her curled throat and arms enveloped his wearied shoulders. “…You’re right.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You will have to be a little more specific, love,” Came her chide mixed with singing chuckles.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I did read it,” Seydon glanced up between her folded arms. “Just some. I… don’t like secrets. I don’t favour the addiction that begins germinating in your heart, when you get to know something you shouldn’t or wasn’t meant for you. …But I’ve been dreaming. Wondering… So I read. A few pages.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Can’t imagine Rayner’s pidgin basic was much fun translating.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“He could show you nine different methods to collect fresh water, another nine on how to set fishing traps, or how to stop six foes with just a two-inch paring knife. If you asked him to try write anything down, he would blanche,” He managed a small grunt, tapping a finger over the journal’s spine. “But he was comprehensive, in his way.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What did you learn?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Only beginning preparations, lots of preliminary gathering, devising. He keeps mentioning Ajax but that dipped in and out of his narration like a myth himself. But he was excited. I could tell.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shev?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Stealing the book back, he untied the string binding and scrolled a handful of pages aside until his fingernail stroked over a line in a wrist-smeared paragraph. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“’Gate of Crete’?” Rosa read.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I don’t know what it is. Sounds like neither did Shev, not then at least. But that’s the third mention on the same page. It’s what he and Ajax went questing after…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She ran a thumb along the grit-smeared leafing, flicking months of recorded adventuring along until it ran to an emptied page reserved at the book-end. “Do you think they found it?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…I don’t know,” Seydon shrugged wryly. “…I’d have to read.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Don’t burn it, Seroth,” Rosa turned to him and took care gliding the little field-journal onto his hands, before folding each finger over the cover. It was only very rarely those days that she called him by his older, borrowed cognomen. “At least promise that for my sake.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“For your sake? Rosa, that’s why I’d consign it all to flame in the first place. Your sake. We have enemies that will kill as many people as they think necessary to have anything once belonging to Shev. If it turns to ash – “[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Then you’ll have soot on your hands and no less responsibility. Love, destruction just begets destruction. If these foes are just that unbending, what’s it to them if they learn you’ve torched their treasures? Their wrath will be a hundred fold and there won’t be any placation. Not unless they get hands on both of us, anyone else who may know, and drag out every detail they can about Shev, this ‘Ys’, a ‘Gate of Crete’, before slitting our throats.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…You really believe I should preserve all this,” Seydon nodded to both journal and fire-warmed footlockers idling behind the smoke in dancing shadows. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shev Rayner intended for you to have it,” Rosa shrugged. “I never knew him. But you say he always had a decent purpose behind everything he did. If he thought it’d be a better idea to destroy anything to do with Ys or the Dunaan, he would have done as much. And you know what I think?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No,” Her beau glanced over slyly. “That’s why you tell me.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hush. Idgit,” She guffawed and raked his white-streaks of hair with none-too-gentle fingers. “What I mean is perhaps he had a thought you would follow after him. Maybe in a perfect world, you’d have inherited the Sayda, turned them about and reinvigorated their purpose, and then gone after this place with castles in the sky…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Maybe,” Seydon whispered soberly. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“For what it’s worth? If he could see you now?” Rosa tipped his sunken chin up, sitting in close enough for her breath to tickle at his cheeks and eyelashes. “He would be so proud.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Of all this?” The witcher cast a glance over his mutant physicality. Rosa’s eyes followed, reading stanzas of muscle and scar-tissue with both her stare and hands. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I know I am,” Her whisper skipped into his ear before her kiss dapped the lobe and she withdrew, standing in the snowy sand. Light from the three brother-moons, Priad, Andromak, and Xander, was passing through parts in the atoll’s hinterland palm forests, slashing her with ribbons of off-white and dust motes. Seydon watched Rosa tug on the tail of her robe-belt, in time letting a wash of warm sea-breeze run up her bare legs, belly, and ribs. She briefly shivered and drew up a flushed grin, winking at her husband.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Now if I can trust you not to go recklessly burning priceless directions, I –“ She waited for her him to face her on his knee and foot and bent low, painting a kiss onto his brow. Saltloons cooed in the rock shoals. “ – Am going back to bed. See you there?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“In a little while,” Seydon promised. “I’ve the chests to put back and the journal will need storing too.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Alright. But don’t take long…”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]He kept still for just another minute in nodding meditation, then rose off the rush-mat, rolled it beneath his arm and saw to his work. Six caskets still resting in their pliant semi-circle before the dying fire. Seydon looked to them, and then gripped a thin lead bucket and went to the shoreline. These atolls, he thought, have scores of hidden little tunnels wormed out by the tide. Care had to be taken. The most common way an Ardan broke their leg was an unfortunate fall, tumble, and snap against a kelp-lidded eddy pot. He dipped the bucket, drawing up a load of milky sea-water thrashing with disturbed knut-clams. The whole lot he tossed onto the fire-pit, liquid, clams, pod-laced kelp weed, and watched in case the coals managed to endure. It ate the salt and all detritus, choking itself into a nozzle of fat steam wafting away into the breeze. The kelp-pods briefly superheated and burst, to spit lines of whizzing buoyant fat like so many greasy fireworks. Now the pit was just a sulking mess of glassy sand-grit muddying into hot, earthen clumps, beside chattering molluscs and cooked oceanic weeds. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then, a smell.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon was half-bent near the fourth of Shev Rayner’s six footlockers, kneeling into velveteen sand. He was close to wresting it free from its gentle sink into the silt-floor, standing with the weight braced across his bared shoulders and pectorals, when his nostrils flared. An odd wind had come up from the south and west, pungently cold. It slapped over the tide-dunes, across the petrified wood-pegs struck into the mid-swell hills loaming up into the sub-tropic forestry, loosing a hollow groan over the cooling shallows. The Dunaan paused, sampling the air. Both taste bud and olfactory sensor embedded in tongue and nose revolted, wetting at the scent. It was like an accumulation of egg-rot and flesh gone rancid, almost choking at Seydon until he hacked a stung cough and replaced the chest back into the sand. In spite of moisture seals applied to the tin and duranium, the metal was flaking, spinning into ribbons of pollinating rust.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It’s like death turned over to compost, he thought, alarmed and mystified. He went to the shore proper and waded out barefoot through shingle and grit, salt waves lapping up his dressed knees and calf’s until skin and cloth were soaked. That befouled wind kept up tremulous gusts. Every so often it whipped hard at the night crests and swung fogs of curling vapor into the witcher’s eyes. Behind him the fern-palms were beginning to wail, cracking under pulping curtains of assaulting wind. A few just cracked over, snapping down like shutting pen-knives, flaring debris-spars of stringy wood the size of a man into neighboring trunks. Just the Golden Rose seemed immovable, parked into shelter behind a reef-wall draped by fungal lichen.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Dunaan was staring to the horizon far away. The night sky was a painting of cold starlight in absence of the moons Priad, Andromak, Xander, a high basilica ceiling shivering under unnatural breezes. Thick odours of decomposing marrow, of hair lit afire, weak sulfides and metallic tang, wove amidst the salt-spray. Now, with Seydon trying to peer at what he thought he could make out on the merged line between night sky and lightless ocean, light appeared. Not like a dance of fae-flies or ship lanterns coasting soundlessly, but a full, broken glow. A premature dawn. An aborted sun stained mauve and bruised yellow, becoming washed grey by storm clouds thickening through the night air like ink in water.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A finger of lightning strobed over Seydon’s head, to break the numb silence with a peeling crash. Second and third veins of diseased, burning illumination pelted at the atoll in its wake. Grappled copses of junsa-firs and wiry aphaca bushes were struck, then blistered, blooming into fibrous explosions. Thunder woke like the roar of siege cannons. In moments, the Dunaan watched the storm front overtake their tiny mid-ocean retreat, convulsing rolls of trembling overcast backlit by that unnatural sunlight. The wind was a ghost-keen hailing whispers of dead things. Guttural snickers found bemusement in the surf foaming into a piling wall of plastic offal. Seydon leapt free back up the beach and turned from the nightmare tempest, running. Ice-rain followed at his heels.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Even before the false dawn had begun rising, he felt his soul and heart become leaden with anxiousness. And then with a sick worry, maturing into fear. It was hoarfrost on his belly. Lancing screws turning a vice against his ribs. Seydon was plying up muddying beach for the reef shelf the Golden Rose kept anchored upon. The silt was beginning to broil into a quicksand soup, clenching torturously on his undressed ankles. He tore up onto rocky ground, scattering clumped grass in his stride and making a bolt for the cruiser. More lightning branched in behind its sloped prow to shade it in stark relief. Something in the thunder began to beat insidiously, drawing out thick gnells of doom whilst Seydon patted up the lowered debarkation ramp. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Inside the first cloistered holding berth was sweating bulkhead walls, leaking almost cavernously, glowglobes flickering on a short-circuit. Seydon traversed waist-deep pockets thrust in through the underfoot decking and filled with bleakly cold water-bracken. All about, the Golden Rose kept echoing bemoaning complaints from its stressing hull. He grappled onto a stanchion beam when the winds outside accosted her broadly on the stern, nearly pushing the ship off its rock-sunk moorings. Reverberate squeals, like an axe-head across anchor cables, echoed back into his ears.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]That sense of heart-felt wrongness failed to lessen the further Seydon eked and barged through interior hallways. He was seeking a cargo elevator to Main, in lieu of the primary staircase, found entangled with a thorn-nest of broken girders. There wasn’t time to simply rip his way through up to the topmost landing. But each turn and cross in the hold kept twisting his direction, one passage on to Hold II taking a switchback that left him flabbergasted by the debarkation exit. His inner familiarity, a handy instinctual compass, was knotted into a Gordian mayhem. Once, trying to navigate over a hump of scaled and packed dry-stored canisters, another shape came hurtling by below in the half-lit dark. It’d been half-dressed and slick with a coat of moisture and he thought it wore an unkempt wig flaring white hair like a mast banner. But it sensed his spying and lurched to a pause, swinging about to stare back: it wore a bone-face eye sockets stuck in a wretched expression of crying agony. The gumless jaw lurched open, screaming.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It resembled Seydon himself.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He found the cage-gate cordoning the kitchenette lift. Engaging the lock revealed the servo-motors had suffered under interior fusion within their motor-housing. The robust wiring and gears had slagged into asymmetrical sculptures. The gate would not budge. Then his hands fell onto the gate-barring and all the interlinked steel cast-fashioned and woven together. Seydon paused just long enough to catch his bare soles into the grilled decking. His body shrugged. The steel kept resisting until it screamed plaintively, tore apart in his grasp and came wrenching out of its rails. Beyond, the elevator shaft was a darkened portal. The accompanying lift was gone. Seydon stepped in past the ruined gating and peered up, and became just briefly awed as he stared into a jet-lit tower spearing up into… forever. Then he was ascending up for the main level, finding any purchase in the cabled wiring stapled to the shaft interior or ledges, scurrying with dread speed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]More unreality waited for the Dunaan in the kitchen galley, the pantries. Food having undergone a month’s worth of gutting rot splayed the floor in grossly molded carpets. Viral boots of quivering sludge hugged the seams where the ceiling met curled bulkhead walling. Seydon rose, peering through a darkness he saw light as day. The air was sourer than an abattoir, webbed and curtained by flocking tse-flies. He ignored the gorge inducing sensory gag, keeping one hand clamped over lips and nostrils. Despite the sense of skyrocketed alarm, he couldn’t make a straight blitz for the dining room without tripping on slicks of spreading grease. Passing the stoves, one flipped open its second lower oven door, scatter-blasting heated ash at him. It fell on Seydon’s bare hide like carpeting, catching to hair and pore, burning. To his credit, he didn’t scream or roar. He still loosed a hissing note under his breath and then broke for the living room.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Golden Rose was mounted upon a six-decked level plan linked through by regular stairwells and seldom used turbo-lift spines running up the vertical length of the vessel. It was trim, impeccable, interior architect-function preferring neat exquisiteness, from ribbed walling simulating the shell-lining of a great nautilus to just inch-high carpeting fletched with velveteen shag, to silver-cased glowglobes, cherubic details sculpted onto the outward faces of engaged stanchions half hidden in the bulkhead. Foot navigation exercised as much natural and habitual ergonomics. Seydon and Rosa never walked so much as glided through to main and ancillary chambers and had never ceased being wowed by their occasionally shared home. Seydon thought he knew every cranny like a carnal secret.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]But someone had taken a plasma-torch and cut away through the ship. The Dunaan came into the living room. It’d been halved and mounted against the extended bathrooms on the second floor; a queer cross-section of snapped plumbing flushing running water onto carpeting and warped linoleum. There was a risk of electrocution where exposed cabling had been stripped of sheathing and swung about, dangling by miniature waterfalls. Seydon waded through the vandalism, bewildered. What was this, he wondered, it was an episode stolen from the Tatooine razorbleme. Or that inner dream he walked in the presence of self-made ghosts, when he’d been entrapped for a week submerged in a Ys alchemical bath. He climbed up into the broke lavatory and passed onward through a now-grimed, stained sauna. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]That same daemonic architect had busied themselves with further alterations. Viewfinders and holo-pict slates were each tuned to the same dead-air channel of crimson dyed white noise. They lit Seydon in blood, who prowled from distressed corridor to corridor, wanting so terribly for a blade. Where was his wife in all this? Was Rosa asleep in this grim fantasy? That question tried to open a course of doubting thought into the witcher’s brain, before he shut it out. One screen to his right blinked with imagery; menageries of ghastly structures composed of rock and living shadow, eyes winking where they hovered suspended by air. Every so often, the trellis speakers fizzed out spectral chuckles. They were always womanly and consistently smug, mayhap even gloating. Seydon found the occasional chatters of laughter a strange brand of signaling beacon. Before long he was following it through rust-caked passageways, each seeming to run infinitely into a haze of blue-light. The Dunaan only paused to collect the next bearing, turning to go down some ripped open hallway tunneled through duranium and ceramite walling layers. Electronic-masked giggles began eroding into chipped sound-bites. He could hear squeals of blurred sentencing. Damn it, why couldn’t he find his blades in all this mess?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]In time, he found his way to the deck six living quarters. They were he and Rosa’s private chambers, where they sometimes ate, often chatted, and frequently lusted. Seydon sprinted along a black-silenced tunnel for the auto-door; an ogee arch with further decorative filigree. Flat groans paused by fierce exhales, accompanied by fleshy collides and a chorus of weighed down bed foaming, kept escaping through pokes in the jamb-metal. Consternation flared in Seydon; what was this eldritch sequence attacking him with now? The door refused moving at his approach. The Dunaan settled his palms across sequence-etched metal and paused long enough for warm power to begin throbbing in his fingerprints. It was a climber’s technique; a way to ably cling to sheer and frictionless surfaces. But Seydon had found it had far more robust application.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Trial of the Waters imbued enough practical, raw might into his frame without leaving him unable to delicately interact with a given environ. From his skeleton down to the minuteness of blood-vessels, nerve-sheathes, muscle lattices, organ, muscle, sinew, connective tissues, there wasn’t an inch of him physically that hadn’t been subjected to mutant changes. Seydon could battle harder, longer, faster than most any living thing and that precluded any jumbo of Force power multiplication. He was Dunaan. Witcher. Monster slayer. He bit his heels into the floor and peeled the door open. Locked servos shrieked on their aligned maglocks, rending to warped debris showering in hails of incandescent sparks. The bedroom was opened. Seydon detached himself from any wreckage and leapt inside.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Rosa?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Their double-mattress was wrangled undressed of sheeting or quilting, save for spare pillows kept piled against the ebon, water-motif headboard. All of the bequeathed keepsakes jostled on the siding-dressers were scattered as bitter trash over the floor, most crunched to shards under foot. What was most disconcerting was not any danger he found Rosa engaged in. …But rather, the cutting groans of her singing voice rolling in orgasmic notes. She was denuded as the bed beneath and laughing with hurting cadence. Rolling in time, she made haughty love with a massive shadow dwarfing her. It was malignant with odour; sweat, acid, blood, acerbic elements screwing up Seydon’s nose, burning his eyes. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It could not have been true, Seydon thought. No one who loved him as dearly, as profoundly as Rosa Gunn did could find the notion to enact this kind of adulterous betrayal. Coupled with a spectral storm shrieking down ghosts with every lightning crash and drumming thunder, their vessel-home turned upside wrong with tainted, physical corruption, his wits were straining for answers. The shadow-man had sat up now. Seydon could see he was gowned in wisped, fogged gauzes, and kept his face obscured by frothing, onyx shades that shut out all light. Eyes, burning as ruby-coals, stared back. They blinked maliciously.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Rosa…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She was settled behind his fulsome shoulder, wearing only guilt and a smirk. Hectic activity had rung her hair back in a wide frame of dark curls. Rosa looked proposed to say something of the moment but her lips kept tightened in a chained purse, peering with lilac eyes shot with light as further bolts hammered down to the beach and atoll forestry outside. White shadows glared through each sunken porthole. Seydon felt his body-frame grow heavy as leaden iron and throat parch with dust, blinking. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]This wasn’t his life. He wasn’t caught in fuming dream he couldn’t wake from. Another blink, and he’d awake. Rosa would be sleeping on her side facing the dressers since she hated how the alarm clock kept up an LED ray in her eyes. They’d get up, pair for a long shower before breakfast, and he’d watch her try and not lean to the wall for support. It would be just them an hour following dawn. Rosa, speaking over piled dataslates keeping abreast of the latest Force War. Himself, either exercising through calisthenics or seeing to his field gear. Normalcy. A subtle romance. Another blink.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Another blink.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Rosa and the shadow-suitor were gone. Their bed was trashed wreckage, exploded foam contouring, whittled piecemeal remnants of the ebon-wood framing, all callously thrust in a far corner and set aflame. The adulterers were simply gone, having occupied no more than hot air for the brevity of their betraying revelation. A hole like someone had punched an artillery shell-stake through the decking smoked raggedly where the bed previously occupied. Striated paneling fanged by jagged wreckage, piping flooding, wiring spilling electro arcs, was opened into a hellacious pit. Pockets of running air bit at Seydon with frigidity as he knelt over the edge. Even as he tried peering against strange tunneled gloom, exposed durasteel and alloy elements were beginning to flake with ice. Frost. The hole had opened into a long, barely lit void. Glacial azure winked in and out of sight where there was a presumable bottom.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon was trying to reconcile every piece of strange logic and fact he’d seen in the last hours. …Then, from the same void smashed open, Rosa Gunn’s voice rose up from the deep. …Screaming. Not in delight, but mortal alarm. The Dunaan knew the sound far, far too well.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Rosa!” He cried back, bracing on the scabrous steel hemming the hole. Come the next half-second he was already a meter down and streaking through cold, descending in a rippling fall. Empty air slashed at his loose pants and shocked his blood with frigidity. The bottom down, down beneath in the azure glow seemed never to come at all. His nightmare hadn’t stagnated. It’d only begun birthing its awful vision onto him…[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Wind cracked over the skin of his ear-drums. Sometime between launching into the black ringed fall and reaching the rapidly meeting ice-rock bottom deep below, Seydon found he had gotten dressed. Again, that strange, omnipresent logic that dictated broken rules of torn reality had activated. He was in a beige, unwashed tunic rung with string-buttons up the collar, a blue-striped jacket atop that and belt loops for spare items. The pants were plain, black trousers cobbled with repurposed cloth-swatches, belted at waist, hip, and thigh. Each hand was thinly gloved. The same weird logos that had dragged him breathless through the Golden Rose and subsequently dragged his wife screaming into an hell-pit left him unarmed. Seydon’s hands ached for a blade, still. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]For the meanwhile, he worried about arresting his crashing plummet. The azure-backlight of mist and reflection at the pits very bottom deep was slamming up into his vision much too fast. Wind drag kept clawing into his chest and outstretched limbs, keeping the Dunaan stuck in a half-folded reverse curl, his spine nearly in a crescent and head fighting to keep postured against air stress. Prior, the fall had been clocking on for minutes. Seydon briefly considered the option that he was trapped in a Clifford torus, plummeting indefinitely. Forever. His story would end as a flying skeleton eventually degrading into just bone-vapor to join the glowing at the edge of his vision. Now, the true end was the ground he kept hurtling inexorably towards. He briefly tried calculating his terminal speed, against his weight, air buoyancy, the drag cutting into his solid frame, and quickly gave up. Seydon exhaled then, and forced his inward to his chest, then went clawing for the shimmering shaft walling on his right. Fingertips briefly met resistance against slicing earth and gravel. The Dunaan gritted his teeth and managed to sustain a long catch into the showering soil. Black gods, but for super-reinforced tendon, bone, muscle, his hands would have tore off at the wrist.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His left hand raked at the dirt-matter, then his right. The weight-drag crushing on his ribs, belly, and groin lessened. Seydon’s legs began swinging down. He gnashed the boot-toes against the wall in addition to hands and elbows, kicking one leg back to try and get a touch of resisting grit across the holes span. It was working. Momentum slowed. Heart, stomach, lungs and diaphragm were no longer attempting to egress out through his esophageal trunk and nostrils. The blood beginning to line his sight ceased their avid pulsing, and Seydon finally caught a chilly breath to fill his raw chest. Now the flooring was approaching somewhat more manageably, falling at a stroke of feet rather than meters per second. Seydon counted down on his tongue. Five… Four… Three… Two…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The witcher simultaneously punched and slam-kneed off the scrolling walling and curled his spine over, legs hugged up into his belly, spinning. Up came the floor. Time blinked. Seydon executed a divorce out of the one-roll somersault and hit his landing; a three point crunch that shuddered wrenching vibration up his musculoskeletal structure and flattened a ring of frozen peat-earth and crackling ice snowflakes about him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A heartbeat pause. Seydon kept still on his knees and hand. He exhaled and all the ache in his frame went with it, standing up straight. Overhead, the aperture that deposited him amidst feldspar and stitch-back granite quartz was sealing up with the consistency of reformatting gelatin. Before long, a second and change, the vast, indifferent pit-shaft Seydon careened down vanished into a flint pocked vaulted ceiling. Alone. The Dunaan shuddered in breath and looked at the flooring. Like the stone overhead, it was carpeted black rock welded plate-to-plate with long cooled volcanic flotsam, overlaid in its lower slopes by gathered, flash-frozen liquid. It smelled distinctly of hydrogen sulfide: queasy sickly, egg-flesh spending too much time in open sun. Temperature felt below zero centigrade, Seydon thought, and he could feel oily moisture on his whiskers beginning to frost.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The tunnel was a half-circle arch meeting seamlessly into the buckled ground and stretched in similar infinity each way it wove. Darkness, true and almost fully lightless, was emphasized by formless pools of shiny inky nothingness hiding behind rises of sloped and knife-sharp clastic glass. Seydon didn’t move for a time, trying to find both his bearing and sign of where Rosa’s adulterous vision and that strange ‘Nowhere-Man’ had gone. Moisture kept tapping from running drips overhead. He had thought that he could at the very least interpret disturbances in any settled dust clinging like wax to each near surface, but the only body to have recently kicked up any scuffing was his. The two were gone, or had made it so it appeared they’d never come this way. Seydon blinked, slit-eyes making the dark appear monochromatically black and white. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seydon!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He spun around. There! Behind him, echoing through stiffened air deep in the opposite coarse of the tunnel. Seydon gripped his toes to litter and heat-brushed rock and tilted his weight forward, engaging a sprint. On a bad day, he could just keep up with a Suubatar in full gallop. When he had purpose to fuel his locomotive action, he wagered only the wind would manage keeping its back to him. Rosa’s voice kept echoing away in increasingly despondent canter. The echo died completely, in spite of his hearing, only the hissing shingle-slide of scree running out beneath his footfalls. He tracked up where the tunnel began inclining, nearly climbing up hand over boot when the slope straightened up like bluff-wall and forced him to scale. Hoarfrost was growing increasingly prevalent, entire sheets of skating ice planing over scalloped onyx dishes, forcing Seydon to slow and hazard his steps. Air was becoming scratchy and what little light shone off ultra-sharp protrudes in the walling made the atmosphere jump with motes, thinner than fiberglass but thrice as prevalent. He broke a stalagmite of calcified snow off the ground in his wake, constantly seeking for a clue, any clue, pointing to someone’s erstwhile passing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Nothing. Seydon kept venturing, until snow replaced the quartzite, schist, and slate rubbed together in the tunnel’s visible structure. Rosa’s voice hadn’t called back to him for approximately three hours. Ticking the minutes over through his mental gymnastics kept up a tertiary and dulling layer of further anxiety, more frustration. Dressed only in his jacketing he could feel the cooling minus-centigrade beginning to eat into his marrow and adjoining tendons. A familiar wind sour and wooden with that familiar and onerous gust of flesh-decay began to reach the Dunaan through the snowflakes. Seydon kept at measuring the gradual increase of illuminate; light was bending towards him ahead at an angle, drawn from a tubing curl. He kept picking up strange, phlegmy sounds: utterances of explosive cracks, screaming glass shredding to sand, and bellowing groans of pressured air. Flesh-rot turned to burning skin and calcium in his nose. The blued glow to everything he stepped over began to turn a pillowed, rich crimson, hot like oxygenated blood. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon kept pressing on and followed the tunnel. In beneath glacial fangs bordered by lesser, fatter molars hanging from the ceiling and jutting from the ground. He punched his way through frozen curtains some centimeters thick, others a meter, more, showering in mica-thin detrital fog. Here and there, the flooring had fallen out into trap-pits lined with further skewering snow formations, forcing the witcher to vault-jump and scrabble for arrest on the other side. Abridging light began scattering the shadows. Some, Seydon saw, lifted from their abodes like watery mist and flitted away past him, back into the long underground vaults. Ahead past another fifty meters of even traversal, he could make out an oval of white. Shades of red edged it, throbbing. Hellacious breezes stung at his eyes. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Here, so close to the exit, the breezing was turning the rolling marbles of snow to water. Melting flows splashed up into Seydon’s boots and panting. Gripping with the under-soles was a virtual non-existent and often, Seydon kept steadied by old witch-spells anchoring him to the slicked ground-gnolls. It was a trick of Force power taught by Ember Rekali, wizened Mandalorian ranger, that he’d inherited from the witch-clans of Dathomir. Willful compulsion kept Seydon upright. Another sixty paces would take him to the tunnel’s last brink, at naked and emptied air warmed by flailing light. He smote a final cell of leaking ice-glass into splashing shards. The light waited for him. Seydon rubbed his forearm high on his brow against the leeching glare and planted a foot onto the edging…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…It had been a once bright city burned to a shade of warped, shattered black, and every building stood like cyclopean architecture, bleeding rivulets of liquid metal superheated by the hinted infernos gutting them from the foundations up. Seydon stood at the jaw of a hollowed out portal struck into the side of a titanic glacier wall. That wall extended for another seven hundred kilometers round, in a dwarfing, starkly gargantuan grotto carved out of the belly of seemingly unending ice and stone. It was a subterranean city; a sunken mote of dedicated civilization installed in the flooring beneath winter and ice miles and miles above. Leveled, encircling with gradually increasing layers of upraised urban sprawl, it climaxed at an inset palace. The palace, an arch fortress with heavy lines indicating installed defense work, walls doubtlessly meters thick enough and ray-shielded, held nine towers connected through armoured bridge-ways, sparking with heat-deformed glass. Atop the central wing, a massively brute rectangle faced with austere facades, another nine pillars rose in various pinnacle heights, kept in noetic arrangement. Fire walled it off, in sheathes overshadowing the upper crenellations and gunner bulwarks. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon woke himself out of staring. The sight reminded him of a rig-site complex; each charred, flat-faced one hundred floored structure like a discharge stack for venting H2S fumes from active wells, installing drain-bores through the heath to suckle petrol lakes underneath. Lesser storied buildings about the skyscraper haunches were akin to sub-structures. Incessant, roiling smoke edged a reversing curtain upwards over the sprawl. The grotto was beginning to sport an artificial cloud mass of vaporized construction materials, lit below and within by a million billion tossing embers. Somewhere, the Dunaan knew, in the mess of inferno and collapsing prefab levels, was Rosa Gunn. Briefly, the presence of airborne wafts of disintegrated metal, he smelled vanilla-spice perfume. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He got down off the tunnel opening and climbed down over the glacier face. Where hand and toeholds would not present themselves, Seydon made his own. Rock-ice broke under knuckle and foot, giving enough snug grit to keep him from peeling off the sheer wall. He kept clambouring down until he could readily see the hems of ghetto hab-stack districts nestling as close as to the grotto-edge as local zoning codes allowed. There, like everywhere, hab-stack units were backlit with interior blazes and coughing ragged plumes of bloating smoke clouds. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was fifteen minutes on the ice-wall, until Seydon judged the final distance as safe enough to plummet. Like the tunnel fall, he pushed out but kept the automatic bracing in his knees and back more elastic this time. He hit upon a torched avenue, rolled forward and over, coming up to his feet in the same second. The scale of the metropolitan super-blaze finally struck him with its chthonic, brooding immensity. Some buildings were so consumed they lit the umbrage of overcast darkness with second, third, and fourth dawns, giant seething pillars of coiling fire. In all that, the heat and wrecked carnage, his wife was lost and hidden. Seydon let worry tingle in his fingertips and pushed meaningful purpose down into his legs. He started running.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]On the roadways, across the street detours, upon sidewalk, avenue, up every concourse, were shorn air-cars suckled to a crackling glaze by the blazes, bereft of interior lining, insulation, on-board electronics. Most were collapsed through the landspar pavement at his feet, or twisted into mangled patterns and thrown side-long into surrounding hab-stacks. The heat was stark. Seydon was fast drenched in sweat that poured down his pant-legs, squelched into his boots, to leak and hiss to rank steam in his wake. But horrifically, when Seydon stopped to gather his next direction in a four-way intersection lined by electric-fires eating through the rockcrete, he saw that there had been people.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They stood entrapped like extras in a background pict-capture. He tried counting out the hundreds of stiffened, skeletal outlines crying out soundlessly in howling anguish, but let the count fall when his mental arithmetic began blurring round the one thousand mark. And there were many, many more. Each was frozen to the ground with their skin shriveled into wrinkled epidermal sacks clutched around cold-sapped musculature. Their flesh, as he drew up closer to one upright corpse, had been frost-burned to moldy, clotted black, wide red-lensed eyes faded back into chilly, heatless mauve. Most were caught in partially sprinting poses with their backs turned to the interior, burning artificial canyons and the aglow city-heart. As if in a great panicking stampede, trying to run out of the inner hab-blocks. All seemed to wear habitually common black hair, but threading fear and unnatural, mortal terror had collapsed the colour to streaks of pale ash where it still clung to blinkered, crazed skulls. He noted a few were age-addled and struggling against weakened ligament flesh that was beginning to come unraveled in their over-taxed limbs. A few more were adolescents, children, gangly youths, mouths parted so wide the lower mandible looked ready to dislocate. Screaming. Crying out. Seydon felt a similar, sinking horror beginning to tumble and chill the air in his chest.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“[/SIZE][SIZE=10pt]Hahahahahaha~[/SIZE][SIZE=10pt]”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was deep laughter, throttled by boneplate bass but warped by the presence of a second and third falsetto and baritone choir. Seydon heard it come up the long thoroughfare, racing up the steaming roadwork. The sound drove another spike of worry up against the meat of his heart. Somewhere in its dislocated echo, failing like sunset light while the cadence lingered, could be heard another sound: a feminine whimper of damaged pain. The spike shredded across an aortal canal and began feeding tumblers of ice into the witcher’s veins. Seydon began running at the city center.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Sprinting was taking him up the long, long highway. Fallen, inferno devoured speeder cadavers hobbled his progress. He mounted most in brief canters up their displaced duranium skeletons. Others he sped up and hopped long vault-jumps over, landing with a bricking crunch, picking up momentum in the spare second after. And some he shifted out of the way with bare-shoulder checks, Dunaan-strength gouging the car, bus, loader, or carrier out of their sink in the paved rockcrete and over the guard-rails. There were linking explosions running up adjacent roadways and urban canal routes like punch-stitching. Further conflagrations were raising up in his wake, fireballs coursing to the grotto cave-ceiling hundreds of meters overhead. Ahead was the worse yet: the city-heart, hellscape, monolithic, building blocks so taken by the unremitting heat it not only appeared to be melting in the molecule-haze, but actually was.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon watched a three-hundred story-leveled administration tower buckle at its midriff. Top-weight began corkscrewing the upper stories off its waist and canter in an achingly slow fall. Flowers of sun-bright flame retched up in their scores along its buckling siding. The one-fifty stories leaning off its smote stanchions fell in against a smaller rotunda, and crushed it into hurling embers that sneezed from the impact in their thousands. Not embers, Seydon realized, not from that distance. But hundreds of superheated girders running magma hot, . The closer he ran into the first pillars of ashen ‘scrapers in the city-heart, he could understand what true heat was. Seydon felt swamped by his own perspiration. Fallen speeder vehicles and bulk-loaders blocked arterial ground-level roadways in rickety, layered hills. Poor, stuck drivers and pilots had died strapped to their seating. But strangely, like all the other stuck mannequin-esque body-statues of similarly frozen citizens, they too showed damage by intense cold. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Dunaan ventured onto a side-long concourse, beneath a holed portico torn through by unwanted skylights. He had been drawn off the road by an odd but obvious sign in the slowly packing ash: footprints. They were wide and displaced piles of whitened soot, grounding armoured treads against melting asphalt sand and tore-up cementing beneath. Following them brought Seydon up in the portico’s coverage, past door-less holes into a ransacked and paint-stripped lobby. It all belonged to another business administrative outfit, as he passed by buckled holo-emitter portrait modules, flaking plaster and wallpaper that was curled up into disappearing ash. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“[/SIZE][SIZE=10pt]Hahahahahahaha~[/SIZE][SIZE=10pt]” Came a second, throatier boom of warped laughter. It hastened Seydon on and he wove through smog-choked hallways to the opposite exit on the ground floor’s presumable east side. Coming out brought him onto an emptied courtyard enlarged parking depot, with wretchedly burning luggage shuttles and smaller two-seater personnel bikes. A light cast from overhead like a streetlamp drew up Seydon’s attention. …It was the artificial heavens…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Casting pillars and sheets of red-white light was parting through the ever-growing smog clouds poured upwards by a hundred-thousand joining urban fires. Seydon could feel there was an element sickly and evil to the illumination, a blackness behind the reddening columns that was virtually indescribable. It all felt like a reoccurring memory. Living déjà-vu, Seydon thought to himself, but he had never seen any sights like this. Not a burning, sub-surface metropolis where the dead were killed by absolute-zero exposure and the architecture was ate by almost living tongues of fire. …Something was travelling down along the slanting colonnades of encarmine photons. Seydon pressed his eyes to resolve their image. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…It was men. Humanoid figures, riding abreast legged steeds that stamped corposant hoofs onto bridges only they could see. Hundreds of skeletally armoured warriors, bearing jagged scimitars and heavy body-shields in each hand, each a tall image of gun-metal plating dressing them in foreboding casement. Seydon felt himself shocked to the spot in the courtyard, unable to look away. The riders spurred on their beasts until they began to fall onto the city as living hail. Balled light broke the air at their bow wake. And the polluted overcast in the ceilinged grotto began to spit and cough out rods and spider-branches of sympathetic lightning. Now, the Dunaan saw, it was truly a vision gone to the apocalypse. Slit-eyes turned back to the obvious trailing in the soot before him on the ground and Seydon took up his pumping run.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was screaming. Either side of the lengthy secondary avenue needling like thread between immense, crackling habitation tenements were moving shadows scrabbling to outrun a fell keen whistling at their backsides. They wore blue flesh, eyes so red they were bejeweled like rubies, dressed in simplified tunic and skirt fashions. On their breast were marked familial insignias. Seydon started. Chiss…?? Then their harassers stepped into view.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Behind a stanchion arcade, came the striding warriors. Though they were not sitting by saddle atop their now discarded beasts, their height was no less intimidating. None were an inch less than six-feet and topped by helmeted brows peering down through frost-crusted, grilled visors. Each was powerfully built, mirroring Seydon, and moving with easy, taut violence straining their limbs. He could see closer now their armour was fashioned round mortis flavours, ribbed with steel-shaped bone, face-plates skull-like, dire. Tattered, pitch-black cloaks sewn with true bones, femurs and flesh-stripped radio-ulna, flapped off chainmail dressed shoulders. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One raised their gleaming scimitar and brought it across a fleeing civilian’s back. It cracked through their shoulder bone and spine, nearly tearing the torso-trunk asunder as split rib-bones poked through traumatized flesh. Seydon was too late when he came upon the dying woman vomiting blood and clavicle shards through a cut in her esophageal lining. The Rider, trailing smoke of a row of misty fur ridging his helmet, turned on him. He could see his eyes: vacant pits of dead sun-glow. Not vacant as empty but like windows to titan, immeasurable distances. The Rider stepped up over bricked rubble and swung for Seydon’s throat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Dunaan ducked forward, beneath the keening scream of the scimitar cutting neatly through oxygen, and engaged the battler personally. It was brief, terrifying close-quarters, Seydon’s unarmed limbs grappling over plate and mail. The Rider tossed his arm back and broke free out of his hands, bringing it round for a second decapitation. Seydon rolled his shoulders forward, again feeling it sweep the air off his backbone, and rammed his forearm and elbow into the enemy’s stomach. It doubled the Rider back by a pace before he caught himself. Second, third, and fourth hammer-blows cratered in the armour-lines of his modified armet. Seydon’s knuckles were torn white and bleeding. He came on again, dodging a shield-smash at his sternum, clawing his grip into the Rider’s waist-seam and arm-pit. His body shrugged. The Rider found himself blithely flipped off his boots and carried on a sailing throw. Seydon kept up readjusting his back-foot’s purchasing in the pitted herringbone bricking. He felled the warrior into the earth helm-first, pushing metal to unyielding ground, metal through skull, into a vivid burst of running grey-matter.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His allies came on when they realized their companion had taken wounds and fallen. Striding lithely, an odd martial grace to their movements, caliper-precise and measured for optimal motion with minimal waste of exertion. So much like Ajax, Seydon thought. So much like Dunaan. Each carried either scimitar and shield, or two-hander man-splitter swords, longblades, a heavy and stark axe, or paired maces and cruelly serrated cross-hilted knives. He could count off a dozen, no – thirteen, a straggler was picking their way along over strewn building refuse and had loped into a full sprint. Seydon collected the dead rider’s fallen battle-blade off the ground from his limp gauntlet, cocked up into a stern guard, and met them amidst the hissing ruins. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Light strobed through the clouds to cast them all in a hellish glaze. The Dunaan split his guard between three battlers and cast aside their death-strokes, reversing his pacing until he dodged left and took a warrior through their ribs and spine. Chinks of parted armour flew free. His seeking attack-line tried slicing through the second Rider’s upper guard but be broke curtly forward, trying to spit his foe on the end of his rusting longsword. Seydon swung, caught his blade on the opposing edge, skirting back until their cross-guards shunted together and locked. A downward wrench opened up a new line, Seydon wrestling his elbow up until it planted with a shudder into Second’s eye-slit. The force buckled the metal back until it stuck into the unseen face. Blood swam up into the face-cage to briefly sunder the foes vision. The Dunaan half –spun free to the Rider’s left, ending in a gripped, overhead chop. It took the Rider through his high collar-plating, the gorget beneath, neck invertebrate, spine-meat, and the rest of the neck forward. Third was using the sharpened point-guard on his oval-triangular shield to slice open a neat cut across the mutant’s shoulders. Seydon gasped. Warmth began dribbling down his waist. He turned, clove the shield in twain and the forearm keeping a strapped grip on it, before impaling Third on his breastbone. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Where’s Rosa?” He called.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Gore dangled off his borrowed implement. He slew the fourth Rider by ricocheting his attack off his blade-flat so hard it snapped the opposing, razor-keen two-edged sword back hard into their cold-polished barbute.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Where’s Rosa?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The fifth harried him with that two-hander. It was a boar-zweihander that he cocked and hacked with dazzling surety, finessing nine blows through their attack – counter – attack dance. He had thought his strikes had numbed the Dunaan to his spot and so brought his follow-up from back across his right hip, aiming for diagonal slash to cut Seydon up from his left thigh up clean into his right-hand ribs. His foe just bent with the vector, supple as a willow-sap, and engaged the opening left. Three holes were poked wicked-fast through his pectorals, both lungs and a hard dip into his heart through the heavy armour.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Where’s Rosa?” Seydon asked again as Fifth collapsed shivering around his feet. Rider Six tossed his off-hand knife forward to force the Dunaan’s to parry, spinning an outstretched mace-head. The follow-through was close to tearing the sword free out of the witcher’s palms. Trembling force threw vibration up into his shoulders. Seydon gritted his teeth. Six was quickly adjusting his gripping with both hands levering on the mace-handle, assaulting another barrage of over-shoulder clubs onto Seydon’s guard. The Dunaan refused backpedalling under the pressure. Both met each other in a brief cross slice, blade to rod, nearly helm to brow. Seydon snapped his right foot out and broke Six’s knee with hooking toes. The Rider faltered soundlessly. His torso, plating, cuirass, flesh and all, parted into two sections.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Now, the less than half dozen began retreating back into the smoking murk, keeping their guards raised while stepped in through obfuscating soot curtains trailing from still-raging fires in the stack-shops surrounding them. A rain of weak acid was beginning to pour. It began turning the world into an off-white veil, clinging burn-fog onto still decrepitating surfaces of heat-scorched stone, alloy, tarpaulin. Seydon chased after those phantoms, trying to seek their cold, imperious outlines through the misting downpour. It burned at his scalp and throat. His gloves had torn free and hard spatters were kissing exposed skin, dyeing the flesh raw. Fractious shapes that may have been his prey kept flitting in and out of confirmable shape. He felt like being taunted on through a reshaping maze. City architecture looked too blasted similar, prefab molds trading identity for ease of manufacture. Where was Rosa, he kept asking the phantoms?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Where’s my wife, god-damn you!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Weighted, thundering daemon-laughter rolled down from the sky. Seydon looked up to see the hosts of the armoured Riders retreating up along their bridges of hard crimson light. Kicking bodies were wedged in their gripping; flailing, crying citizens trussed up in pricking roping that dug and bled out their arms the harder they attempted to struggle. The sight was grand, mesmerizing, forcing Seydon to observe despite its wretched grossness. The laughter broke again, so loud it echoed like a siege cannon, such was its closeness. He felt it rumble up frenziedly beside a narrow lane parted by a meter’s thickness between hugging manufactories. Seydon took the cue. The lane looked to end in a second mirror of sick light, as with the long, forgotten tunnel that brought him into the mammoth grotto. Seydon rubbed his forearm high on his brow against the leeching glare and planted a foot into an emptied clearing…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…What…?” He whispered, despite himself.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was a winter-froze tableau. A lake of discoloured ice, greasy-yellow, iridescent like a gas-slick, cupped into a shelled bowl wrinkled with snowed up dunes. Chalk-white flakes were descending on a vortex-draft pushing down from a pale globe settled high in the wounded air. It fell, mingling with rust-petals, sweeping aside black ash grit. Shadow-flames sported on the lakes darkening edging where the outlines of a few remaining dark marauders stood at bay, helms tipped forward to stare over the sheer-planed ice. Seydon panned his gaze down, and saw what they were staring so felly upon…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…Rosa Gunn lied upon her back against the solidified, chemically stained waters, still as marble, holding linked hands atop her belly. Her dark as midnight shade hair was impeccably arraigned beneath the rest of her skull, her shoulders. Someone had dressed her in a long mourner’s gown of pitchy-suede with silver-buckled shoes laced to her toes and ankles. Garlands of Ardan coral-lilac grasses surrounded her in a roughed circle, slowly becoming lost under the snow paste. A second lake of colour had pooled round her waist and had stiffened out in the abrupt, silent cold. Seydon paled until he felt almost ghostly. His throat closed from breathing, as a blanket of dead panic settled onto his frame like phrik-shackles. Rosa refused to move from her coverlet of blood.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He watched a second form materialize over his wife. She was another woman, dressed in the same like gown as his wife but with a longer train fanning out behind her long stature and sewn up with decorative shards of broken songsteel. Her face she kept obscured by a dirty-gold mask, in a model like a symmetrical ziggurat. Platinum needles poked from the metallic jaw, cheek, and brow, mimicking a design reversal of a dreaded Iron Maiden. Past the eye slits were a hint of pale flesh taking on necrotic hues. Eyes were just blackened yet infinitely sad pools of jet reflection. They turned from the body of Rosa to her husband. Seydon couldn’t move. Strange laws of vision control had froze him, turned his breath to concrete in his lungs, blood impassable sludge backed up in every vein and artery. He looked. Her right palm had opened; a thin, silvertine dagger painted in dead-tones of cochineal on its steel fell from her grasp, and shattered upon the ice by her booted toes.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Rosa!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The ice began buckling. Seydon saw and encountered an uplifting pressure forcing the froze-lake to begin upsetting. Ice-berg chunks broke from the sheer planing and hurled skyward. The Dunaan lost sight of both his wife and that visionary murderer, the latter loosing a howled wail before snowy cataclysm swallowed her. Yet, a third shade made itself apparent. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Striding from the cavorting ridging of writhing jet-fire was a giant. Another woman, but a nephilite in dimension. Shouldering at least nine feet height at her matte-dark pauldrons, armoured like a jove vision of a deathless battle-god come back from the void to do pitched battle. Her expression was a featureless mask of formless night broken by paired starlight eyes, glaring with that same immensity found in the gazes of her warriors. Those same Riders joined her flanks, burgeoning into a crowd, then a mob, thronging until it looked like the Nine Hells emptied their barracks. Helmed faces peered in seamless formation, not a part or space between blade, shield, or shoulder.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]In her fight fist girded by adamite curls of flexing chain-weave, beneath a gauntlet of unnatural steels harnessing a deep heat within, was a heavy warsword. Even Seydon felt daunted by the dimensions and weight presented, its fuller running with a hose of blood-ichor. It was scaled enough to easily cleave through the spine of a tank or even a feared Mandalorian basilisk. The Fellqueen raised it high from its rest off the tumbling ice. She said something though, the Dunaan couldn’t make out her lips or even a tongue. It was incomprehensible, with an ocean’s weight of inhuman malice. Her sword dominated his vision. It rose and glinted high above with unreal light.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]And then slashed with hellion speed onto Seydon’s brow - [/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The kill slash woke him back to life.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Practice, curt familiarity, battled down the in-grown reflex to jolt under the sudden ministration of true reality. Seydon kept absolutely still, his eyes the only muscle twitch, slit-ovals widening briefly at hooded light before creasing narrowly, panning with care side to side, all the while his fogged mind dried up the lagging dew left behind by his dream-state’s fugue. Raw cold, the kind that turned meat into rock, left pain searing up his esophageal lining, numbed the skin and blood in his fingertips. Another moment was spent carefully examining the surrounding for any hint of inhalation, exhalation, movement, scent over the ice-crystals flecking his nostrils with constantly melting rime. Sleep caught up on him. Seydon shouldn’t have been resting at all, but the caff-tabs must’ve wore down in his bloodstream, just enough for unconsciousness to creep over his eyes and shade them for a long while. Now placated with the environ, he moved up his arms and began peeling off bulky gauntlet-mitts. Heavy sealant clips relaxed and slid open, and a hiss of humidified air escaped out his exposed sleeving. Seydon was more worried over his fingernails. Thankfully, no digits had whitened over, and cap-refills from pressing on the keratin bloomed back, telling that circulation was full and fine. He pulled the gauntlets back over and rechecked the clip-locks. Something in his sleep had caused the detach-tabs to squeeze inwardly, and resulted in each glove sliding forward a half-inch, breaking the suit lock on his torso and letting the winter in to kiss icily over his palms and digit-pads. Re-warmed recirculated breath eased up his wrists. Seydon sighed gently in the quiet and massaged his thumbs over his closed eyes.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The dream was still a pain-flash seared hotly onto his memory pan. Phantoms of Rosa Gunn’s kisses and perfumed silk-hair rocked him with pining, which was growing ever harder to quiet. The Dunaan oft dreamed of their shared, extended vacations into Levant spaces but it had never evolved into such a staccato act of death and plunging madness. One moment, his bare toes padding through wet sand that gave under his weight like pleasant mulch, the next hauled through time-warped and space-lapsed environs within the Golden Rose, cracked, bleeding grille-decking screaming up him. That burning, encapsulated city. Pillared hab-blocks, administration towers, business hubs lit from foundation to broadcast receivers in wrapping flames. A false sky cloaked over by ink-well clouds flashed from within by abrasive lightning, and thunder that beat with peculiar rhythm. Creatures wearing armour like men, complete with ice and skeletal motifs, riding down on bridges of hard light. All architecture and surface seemed to simultaneously burn and freeze up at their coming. And Seydon remembered the stilled droves of mannequin civilians stuck on the spot where they ran, paused, or died. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He blinked; crowds of cold-blistered faces, fore-brows showing where extreme temperature had caked and peeled dead flesh away, bone exposed. They reached out for unforthcoming aid, and every hand was tarred by eschar and blanched knuckles. Dead-men riders swinging off similarly baroque-armoured beast-mounts wandered their fallen streets and picked away a few of their numbers that met some unknown criteria. The rest, he remembered, they ignored or just destroyed, cruelly fashioned orc-iron scimitars sundering them into quartered flesh-hanks. Some familiar element haunted their visage, though. In their snow-ratty armour, steel worn by age, exposure, by effort, in their skulled face-guards backlit by crystallized starlight. Seydon knew them. Déjà vu cast them as fresco and tapestry renderings in the deeply buried cathedrals underneath Jurgoran Prison, on Dromund Kaas. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]But they had been just minute outlines of black thread or brush-strokes, christened by bleak halos, tiny swords shining. He hadn’t been prepared against towering marauders in brooding casement, fighting him like grotesque mirror-witchers. The last time the dream episode visited him had been six weeks ago. There were another nine occasions prior. Seydon upset all obligations then following a return hunt on Tash-Taral, leaving sparse explanation behind for any seeking parties that he was going back to the trail. He’d seen his wife slipping beneath a pooling eclipse of blood while her murderer stood over her and dropped a bleeding dagger. It was only a strange vision, true, but Rosa never missed an opportunity to caution him against dismissing their nature. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Now, lost somewhere in the latest Jedi Wars, Rosa was gone. There was only a pixilated sec-cam recording her in company with Turin Val-Kur, another voluntary exile fled from Republic space. She’d chased him to Laekia and cornered him at Lavron, within a soiled, greased mechanic’s garage at DWTD Interplanetary Mass-Port. Rosa intercepted Turin, hinting at some rogue behaviour, who Seydon had read through his demeanor. The boy was witchy with some clawing obsession, and quickly reacted with confrontation. The pair fought, but backwash from spent Force kinetics tarnished the vid-feed. Where the pict-record ended, so did her trail. He picked up a few fluid rumours reporting a woman with similar physical characteristics wandering the contested edges of the One Sith imperium. They were just ‘maybe’ stories. A lot of hints at some cabal occultism, handmaidens, ‘Vahl’, connected legends about a queen-crone with an all-seeing inner eye that possessed a taste for empathics. If Rosa hadn’t been slain, black gods how Seydon hoped not, she was entrapped by baleful powers. Something in that revisiting dream of his held the key.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]So on instinct, he tracked north-west across the galactic plane. From Olum to Ansion, bypassing Mnencheiasus and restocking kit at Esfandia, barely avoiding a surly Mando-warband itching for a war that seemed to take its time arriving. Afterward, it was three smuggler runs heading up the Vizidier Pylots to Ornfra, Miasma, pausing just on Vagar Praxut. There Seydon was briefly waylaid dealing with a nomad Vagaari too eager to test his steel, tempted by stories that the Levant rangers didn’t cower from battle-fare. He had another story attempting to bribe a bored, unscrupulous patrol-commander belonging to the Sith war effort, but that was another bitter, punchy tale for later. Eventually, he breached enemy territory, and made quiet landfall on a glacier clenched world.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon drew back out from his thoughts and rolled in his shoulders, testing for any tensile limits to his range of motion. He slipped the pivot-knife strapped outside his left gauntlet and chipped off a few fingers of ice from gripping his boots, rotating his ankles against stiff insulation greaves keeping his dystolic extremities warm. It was very dark and very chilly, the layer-packed snow where his back pressed gently melting to hold his heavy contour. Sunlight was just a weak cataract overhead somewhere, in a sky Seydon couldn’t see. He was sitting holed up in an artificial cave-knot slashed and broken out between a slight part in the levels of an ageless, virtually motionless glacier. Entry was gained climbing up through crude sets of wide-split ‘stairs’ worked into further ice cocked at a crazed eighty degree angle, half a mile up-land on a field of deposited icefall. The cavern itself he could see was mechanically wrought, by hard, shearing cuts that loosened then shoveled debris and rime out through a stocky porthole door. Seven inch deep scars left over in the ice, trickling with needle extrusions, told the Dunaan of a beast’s great talon-knuckled paws, its bearing height, and fortitude in defeating the slaying temperatures.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The animal was his contract. The chipped grotto he had uncovered was its lair. Seydon had been deposited on the exposed surface near a last report of its activities, where a nine man ‘taming crew’ sent to pacify the beast went black under radio silence. Forty-eight hours were allowed for communications to be regained before search parties were dispatched to effect rescue operations. Instead, and unwilling to leave out more bodies for the permanent winter to devour, they sent a contracted third party. Seydon found the tamers wedged brokenly in caterpillar tracks left over by their sno-cat another forty-eight hours after. The sno-cat itself, a ten-tonne dual-motored snub-nose with a line of communication-antennae curled like pine-quills along its capered roof-seam, had been rent to pieces. The forward steering cabin was decapitated off the main body and its control panels thickly sluiced with frozen bio-matter and blood. The rest of the frame was irregularly crumpled, bearing tear-scars where incredible force had broke through the siding, reached in, and then folded the temp-armour outward. Seydon picked up a linger of soiled terror still permeating the kill-site. An aging but still viable spoor and heat trail lead away across a pristine field, slowly bumping up into hilled territory, onward into treacherous icefall territories. He only paused to murmur words for the dead, and then adjusted his self-heating over-suit and began trudging forward into azure darkness.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was three days and as many nights spent holed up in the animal’s lair. Climbing in, Seydon first encountered a skull yard caking the floor. Half-smashed skulls peered up like failed goblets, filled to boney brim with ice-runoff dripping in slow creeps out their empty sockets. He found gnawed humerus bones stuck into the curled walls like nails, femurs cracked open, suckled empty of nourishing marrow, beside heat-gowns scissored apart and their previously centimeter thick interior lining rung out and flung abroad like confetti. Broken O2 tank regulators blinked in the gloom. Bent ice-picks, snapped climbing knives, knotted up spools of anti-freeze nylon roping, were hemmed in as loot. On a section of walling, the beast had taken its time freeing a victim of their skin, and hung to solidify as a permanent, decorative fixture. Three days, three nights, now on the empty dawn of the fourth cycle according to his chronometer, Seydon endured waiting for the monster’s return. Ghosts keening inside lashes of wind that found the cave opening were his only companions.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Tuung. Seydon sat up. He felt it. Imperceptible vibration that ran up from the ice and tickled at his skin, then wound up his arms, back, scapula, into his ears. Tuunng. Tuunng. Regular, mechanical. Footsteps. Out by three kilometers if he was reading the sound out right. Seydon pushed back into a shallow crevice he wrought out of the icing, just behind a great knurl of flaked hoar-rime growing down and away from a glacial column pushing down from the rough ceiling. The cover was imperfect but it would keep his body out of direct sight until his coming visitor was enclosed by the space. He palmed a half-ounce pouch into his left palm, a three ounce skin-flagon into his right, and then tried to settle comfortably against an elbow of jutting glacier studiously prodding against one of his kidneys. With luck, his insulate-garb would keep his heat shielded from infra-vision. Little was to be done about his potential spoor-scent mucking up the dead air in the cavern. It was too hunched low overhead to get his blade clear from its shoulder catch. Despite his own prodigious strength, the Dunaan had little intention of engaging the thing hand-to-paw. Best bet was driving it back onto open space, then outmaneuver it. Snow-scree crackled and ran free at the far grotto entrance. Seydon tilted back his head and relaxed into a breathing exercise. And then he waited…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They called it a ‘manfinder’. In profile, it resembled a prototypical lupine, settled on well-attenuated legs ending in widely spanned footpads, toes arching forward into enormous talon-claws of vine-black keratin. Yellowed cartilage and ligament showed where thinning skin peeled away between the knuckles. Sleek bands of pressure-tight muscle corded up the fore and aft-limbs, lending curled bulk round its short-haired shoulders and haunches. It was a daemon-thing, a cross-bred example of strange artistry that blended marsupial agility with rubberized musculature, trying to marry on olfactory nerve-pools in a narrow, arrow-head nose to a shrunken hippocampus stuck up in a tight, hound skull. Dark eyes completely filmed over by paste-green sclera were blinking between shades of ultra-violet and infra-red, lapping a tri-forked tongue to taste at errant, noisome scents in the sub-zero chill. Seydon could hear its breathing exhaling in sticky, phlegmatic gusts, heat radiating off its articulated spine. The beast was a foreign addition to the local bio-table: short furred with splotched, raised striping up where the haunches wound out into a thickly skin-wound, naked rat-tail. And roughly man-height where the plated scapula rubbed up against its tawny flesh. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A foreign addition, both alien and unnatural. It wasn’t geared for the exacting cold permeating every surface above the tidally-locked glacier plates spread out majestically, larger than continents. The Manfinder was expending energy to keep up controllable temperatures cradling its vulnerable solid and hollow organs, its inch-thick fur no real barrier against the frigidity. To that end, it was on a constant hunt, seek-and-destroy-and-devour, for any moving source of heat it found out there on the great snow-plains. The beast was a Sithspawn, and one that had escaped its master’s controls before fleeing out of reach. Behavioral engrams responsible for its studied loyalty and efficiency had broken down without a constant salve of Force power being injected into its thought-centers. Its consciousness was slowly being torn apart by the same alchemical energies that had first given it ushered life. Decision was turning to instinct, instinct into mindlessness, with madness encroaching fast. A sloppy creation it was, but expedient and mostly manageable, if costly. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon listened to it pad in on a liquid gate and swing its narrow, sharp skull around at the half-dark greeting it. Thankfully it couldn’t make distinction in memory; if there were any padded tracks tracing low on the ground, between parts in the petrifying bones, it would not tell. Freeze-caked gore hung from its lower mandible-jaw like beards of blood rime. The concave depression in its gut told of increasing starvation, paired off with shuddering effort in its throat to draw back stinging air. It was bleeding from cracked flesh along its shifting rib-cave. Soon, the Dunaan thought, it would abandon this haunt and go back east until it found some way back down beneath the glacier-belts and have at the chained settlements below. Its killing would extend from inclinations to feed to a want for sheer murder-thrill. That it retained mammalian normalcy lent Seydon some pity: most Sithspawn were bred from the get-go to harbour a want for slaughter. Death was the beginning and end of their purpose. Seydon supposed it was true for him as well.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Dunaan weren’t human either, and good for only one thing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]When the Manfinder tipped further into the grotto and nodded its head past a familiar knurl in the wall, Seydon reached out. Left hand first, the opened palm smacking its held pouch over its brow, ripping the thin, oiled leather skin. Salt crystals dug up from a shallow vein on Kessel and thrice blessed in Ardan spring-water splashed onto the Manfinder’s snout. The fur immediately dyed pallid, whiskers curling back or wilting off entirely. He could see its skin suddenly grow hot and swollen with reactive welting. Pained, stunned, the Manfinder paced away furiously, howling while pawing snow onto its nose. Next, the flagon. Seydon hefted his right arm and beaned it in the forward flanks. The flagon tore itself open on the sharp prods of its shoulder blades, and deposited noxiously aromatic salves and oils. Suddenly, it stank horrendously of kelp-salt and wickedly sweet sugar. Even Seydon felt his gorge catch behind his throat and threaten to hurl over his teeth. For the spawn-thing, its senses were blunted, stung by odour that wrenched and gagged its belly. Vomit bulged its throat out like an air-sac. Half-digested meat bits hosed onto a depression of dimpled snow, acid-hot, braising partially chewed ilium crests. The Manfinder turned on itself and fled out the rippled grotto, turning up shards of glassy ice in its wake.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon just saw its tail-end snap like whipcord going out the narrow crevice door. He was up onto his feet, cleat-teeth in his boot soles catching into the ground. The heat-dressing, snow-pants, and ‘Below-One-Hundred’ boots were tape-wrapped onto his frame and lend unwelcomed bulk to his frame. Seydon felt slowed though he compensated with a slight press of greater strength. A fear was a tear in the air-tight lining at any of his extremity-joints. Though he too was incredibly hardy by alchemical treatment, freeze was still freeze. In his vision, the Manfinder was a hard, bright shot of rippling colour and heat against the white-on-silver dune crests. Seydon loosed a blade from a pair kept in scabbards across his shoulders. This one was Winterfang, Bane of Monsters, sewn with spellwork, terentatek blood, and silver in its forging to be a sundering edge to cleave through Force enchantments responsible for Sithspawn creation. A wraith-slayer blade. Its brother was Razorlight, Bane of Men, grown out of a master blacksmith’s bellows and anvil to be the doom of mortals and those claiming to be undying. No Dunaan was without their twin weapons: steel and silver. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Manfinder had stopped for a moment to bury its nostrils, snout, and eyes into a whispery climb of snow, thrashing around like a berserk. The salts were still caught up in its pores, oils and disgusting perfumes rolling off in bulged rivulets across its back legs. It all throbbed like a chemical burn, sensation leaching from skin through nerve into bone, crazing the daemon-dog. Seydon found it attempting to shave fur and skin off its throat and skull by the catches in its talon feet. Scrabbling motion had flattened surrounding snow down into a ring of sloughed hair and blood, with its whiptail surging round in chasing arcs. A blow from that could flail a human’s chest cavity. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon tugged on his heat-gown collar; sweat was beginning to drip off his brow and over his cold-gear goggles, rapidly cooling until it cemented against his flesh. He hadn’t appreciated how insulating the lair-grotto had truly been. They were three kilometers down an incline towards the icefall crags with the amateur stairways climbing up onto the glacier face now far behind. According to a gauge, it was minus forty-four centigrade, not calculating in the wind-chill. Circulation in his fingertips was numbing out into just grey noise, nerves clamping up. The heft of Winterfang against his palm told his grip was still engaged.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Those green-filmed eyes drew a dead bead onto the Dunaan. That hurried excitement of clawing out the burning holy salts and unguents melted to soundless calm. Air whistled through the parts in Seydon’s fur-edged hooding. He could see remembrance clouding out the Manfinder’s vision; it’d gone one a sabbatical hunt for a week and a day, but returned empty bellied, desperate for partial flesh to stave off demise by starvation. The beast-dog got up to its paws and those seven inch claws began to tap irregular beats against the hard glacier-snow. It sized up the interloper: broad and well portioned. Seydon would feed for at least a fortnight, if it could keep from simply eating him whole in a single day. The Dunaan cocked up Winterfang, snapping the sword into a hanging guard, feeling the chilly alchemy-steel crossguard teasing skin and whiskers on his cheek. The blade filled up the air with a charge of ominous countenance. The Manfinder could feel it: weaponry to slay things of his ilk. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It didn’t bark. The Manfinder hardly telegraphed its charge. Very suddenly its snout was jabbing into Seydon’s belly and pushing him over into a bank of crystal flakes, worrying his shoulders and face with great paws slashing to cut open his throat. The Dunaan lashed back. A punch socked into its right-hand rib bones and snapped a few inwards. Pain whimpered out its nostrils, and it slammed Seydon’s frame against the unyielding ground, taking his waist between its jaws. The man flew in a cracking tumble for five meters. Winterfang got lost from his hand and landed impaled through a jag of upright rock protruding against an ice-wave. Seydon was onto a knee and fast undoing the bindings in his heat-gauntlets. Pivot blades poked up through the lining before snapping into pre-set grips. Left hand, pick-hold. Right hand, axe-clench. The Manfinder came for him. Its long frame was extending and collapsing like the gait of a racing hound. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Coming on, it bounced off its fore-paws and leapt for him. Seydon crunched his cleat-soles and nimbly stepped out of its way, scoring two long ribbon-cuts lancing from its nape to its mid-spine. The Manfinder didn’t look to mind it. It braced on all fours and twirled. The long rat-tail snapped at his head and throat. From the tears rent by the beasts claws, his recirculation lining was leaking sustaining warmth out into the wind. Freeze and shiver shot up from his hips, into his neck and teeth. It was enough to dull his reflexes, and let the tail wallop him. He took the brunt off by cross his forearms about his chin and clavicle, and was only rocked off his feet. Cold was making time slow down like a drip of old molasses. The daemon-mutt was charging again. No time. Not enough to get back to his feet and counter-slash. Seydon sat up onto his rump, ignoring the paining ache in his pelvic sacrum. His right hand disengaged the rail-locks keeping the pivot-knife stowed into his hand. Seydon fixed the duller blade-spine between his index and middle knuckles, and took a momentary judge of speed, wind sheer, distance. The pivot-knife shot and spun forward.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Manfinder took the thrown blade through an eye. It twirled like a heavy flake, just a dance of glinting filigree in the dog’s sight. Then it found the soft of its eye, plunged in with a stroke, and broke in through the plating bone behind the organ. Its charge became upset. The Manfinder roared in animal agony, tripping over paw and tail into a rolling tangle of scrabbling limbs. Seydon was up in a dash for his sword, taking meters in a single lunging jump that skidded him along a bare ice patch. Winterfang found warmth again in his grasp, cut free from the rock by a single shrug. Just in time, as well. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]With his back turned, the spawndog had mounted a third run and was looking to land onto his unguarded shoulders. Seydon shivered on the spot, turning Winterfang up and high in his hands, twirling on toe, knee, hip, working his core in tandem with the muscle in his arms. Sword and man, neither an extension, reacting with hard practiced killing precision. Winterfang came off from behind Seydon’s shoulder and slid forward, up and then down biting its peak through the Manfinder’s throat and exited out an inch above its shoulder plates. It kept going. Seydon worked its length in a heavy cutting, fast stroke blow. It opened up the dog-thing’s chest and split the sternum open like a lid. It hit a snow dune on its shoulder, shuddering into a twitching halt.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon ignored a last, muffled pitch of bubbling past its tight jowls. He put a boot to its throat and knelt for the kill-blow, punching Winterfang through its skull, brain, and the bone and ice past. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Save for sympathetic nerve twitches flexing its back-hoeing toes, the beast went still. The Dunaan listened for a last part of locked breath easing out of its damaged lung-tissue. He waited standing in the black winter icefall landscape, immobile, weathering an eye over the dead thing slowly burying at his feet under snowfall. This was his work. ‘Suffer not the monster to live.’ When satisfied the creature wasn’t going to begin exercising any delayed regeneration powers (a warped bull-frhayn pulled that stunt on him once), he sat beside the skull. Seydon elevated its head slightly on a borrowed ice-slab. Winterfang was stowed again over his backbone beside Razorlight, and he pried his temporarily lost pivot-dagger free from it’s sheathe in the Manfinder’s brain-matter. Those he locked into their hidden slides clasped tightly on his inner forearms. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He flipped the bolt-thong keeping a heavy D-guard knife secured on his thigh. It could sever an unarmoured man cleanly nearly to the spine, or could whittle a grass-flute with equal finesse. Seydon was thirsty. Hungering, too. Regardless of his success, he still had another few days travel walking back over his now lost trail on the tundra. Fatigue from the constant vigil in the cave was harrying his better wits. Concentration locked his mentality into place beside a steel trap of discipline. His contractors would require proof of a successful slaying. Seydon rolled the dead thing up. The longknife stabbed down and began wrenching along gristle and gelatin spinal fluid. Midnight clouds thundered along overhead.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]~[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They waited atop a knoll skirting gradated shelves of trembling hoarfrost and glacier-rime. It was eighteen hours since the appointed hour of kill-confirmation.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Six figures stood in close huddle along the knoll’s forward thrust ridge, peering out over a long, planed field that ended in wind tossed snow structured like mid-froze storm crests and tidal walls. Each were short at the torso, leanly statured, constantly readjusting tie-straps holding their black parka-suits in close. Heat was pooling off them like pond ripples. Massive glare-goggles helped keep their facial descriptions obscured, and they kept well greased slug-carbines hugged ready between their mitts and hips. Behind them idled an armoured sno-cat, a more militant grade machine, mounted with cannon-barrels secured behind the fore-cabin steering carriage. Its diesel power-plant burped out the exhaust intermittently, staining the camouflage paints grease-yellow and viridian up the aft armour-shields.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One spotted a fleck dotting in and out of sight distantly. All turned, watching through mono-noculars and carbine-sights. The fleck slowly coalesced into a describing figure jogging over the tundra for their position. They looked oddly corpulent, with something like a shadowed cape flaring out behind them whenever the wind turned across their path. Eventually, they could make out details, like a tore-up heat-suit repaired by reflective tape, swords kept holstered over a tall backside, with strokes of blood crusted across his sleeving.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon trudged up the knoll. He was wearing the Manfinder over his back: a skinned, makeshift cape. The figures in their dour heatgowns allowed him approach without hassle. One stepped out and offered a heavy duranium thermos, the Dunaan bowing his thanks before slurping half the warm contents down. It was only a kind of sour tea, but it was welcomingly hot. Their leader, a half-head taller carrying a lever-action slug-harpoon rifle, took the hide off him. He took off a mitt and began parting the hairs where they tucked behind a folded, fleshless ear. Branded numbers in phosphor ink glowed under lamp shine.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hmn,” He said. “You prove true after all, witcher.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Did anything else get loose while I was gone?” Seydon asked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“If only. I’d toll out the Nine Houses’ treasury if it assured these kinds of results,” The leader shrugged, pulling back hood and goggles. A Chiss face, darkly blue, eyes redder than carmine, wore a thin smile in the gloom. “You’ll receive pay when we make it back under the glaciers. Coin is better when warm. Come on.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon didn’t protest. He followed the armed crew back into their track-cat and took up a seat at the back of the carrier, planting himself upright with arms crossed. Above him was a screwed vent fixture murmuring air-conditioned heat onto his face. The Dunaan sighed as aches in his fingertips and toes began receding to just a pins-and-needle throb. Just briefly, he imagined the Manfinder’s grinning snout gnashing for his throat. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“How do you find Csilla?” Asked one soldier as he slipped off his coat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Was it much trouble?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Dunaan smiled a little. “Ahh… What trouble?”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The Descension Cage was swallowed in the back of an artificial snow-mount, combed across by permanently gusting snow-drifts and fanged by ten meter icicles. Seydon watched it coalesce out of the night. Black-gowned custodial rangers, propping their footing with cleat-toothed lamp poles, loomed on either side of the tract-road pushing up the drumlin. Some were climbed up the jowls of the tunnel mouth with plasma-edged axes and low-powered cutter torches, sawing, melting, chipping, or beating accumulated hoarfrost off mirror-faced flood lights. One, now wiped free of ice, blinked on. Dimmer-skeins in the sno-cats front viewfinder coloured nearly opaque at the harsh luminosity. Seydon stepped back through the low cabin, taking back his seating in the darkened rear. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They’d ridden twenty-eight hours southward from the rendezvous drumlin. Six had been taken up effecting repairs on a line break beneath the carriage, and the designated mechanics returned to the cabin warmth with cramped wrist-creases flecked grey by melted antifreeze and anti-friction unguents. Seydon had briefly debarked to stare over the landscape; rolling glacier prairies fielded, not with wheat, but upright bushels of spectacularly frozen sleet, mimicking stalks of barley. The sky was still a dead screen streaked by coal and jet clouds. He ducked away back into the sno-cat, and either slept or reflected while watching Csilla’s craggy domains rumble past.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He felt the forward tracks bite into the decking angled up into the mouth of the Cage. Inside through the plastiglass porthole, a synthsteel, honeycombed igloo arched forward to engulf the sno-cat, winking bright bay-lamps coloured tinted white-blue. Massive, ovular ventilation screens swirling durasteel fan-blades swirled in a constant pressure of agreeable warmth. No one in the tractor’s cabin had reached to undo their harsh-weather gear. All seven of them, counting Seydon, sat harnessed against seat-plush, waiting for the ‘clear’ callsign up from the foreward steerage seats. The ‘cat shuddered over a rolled, kneaded fold of bolted ferrocrete acting as a speed-bump, and plowed forward until it paused atop a wire-mesh encircled platform. It spun on the spot, jimmied with rocking positioning moments and then stilled. Mag-clamps flexed up from lids recessed in plated mechanisms and fastened blunt teeth to the inside of the track suspension bogies. Seydon listened: servo-engines mounted as riveted boxes on the honeycomb support-arches enclosed the platform in mesh-gating, while some larger mag-pulsors warmed up beneath the platform.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Suddenly, a soft knot of g-force washed up into the Dunaan’s stomach and clamped his diaphragm. They were descending. Seydon looked out the portiglass again, to see whisking lines of brushed steel flying upwards as their passage fell down and down. At his right, the midnight winter men and women belonging, almost unstated, to Chiss authority were unbuttoning and zipping out of their odorous and sweat soaked parka-gowns. He followed suite, disengaging a few male/female clasps on his zipper-line, folding back the circulatory hood still virtually glued to his scalp. The others were speaking in gruff, interwoven words that melded together to produce fluid, if incredibly precise, crisp, sentences. At times, he noted their red-within-red eyes peering at him, drinking up details. They often thought he wasn’t aware. Then his own eyes would roll and stare back, gold and slit-oval, chillingly predatory. [/SIZE]


[SIZE=10pt]Fifteen minutes on and the load-bay began slowing. Contrast to ordinary, conventional brake mechanics, the mag-pulsors settled the platform to the bottom shaft docking plate on a cushion of flaked air. The pilot woke himself out of a brief doze, keying the sno-cat’s electro-chem engine, raking the gear-stick down in its shift box. Piston noise coughed in the cased housing behind Seydon’s headrest, and the sno-cat began tacking forward.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They drove into a staging field that was a heavy, harshly lit motor garage and fuel depot, encased completely underground in thaw-smoothed ice. A dozen other sno-cats, stripped and painted in the livery of the Chiss Ascendancy, waited in penned off stalls overarched with oiled, dangling manipulator arm-chains and mechandendrite spools that were coiled, attached with soldering arc-welders, blocky rivet drills, LED lamp-heads, and clawed, ball-knuckled grippers. Personnel in drab-olive overalls and billed caps, snagged with locks that held holo-pens and examiner flash-nodes worked back and forth across the shop floor, hauling along durasteel-cast enginery dripping so thick with oil, it was as if they’d been dredged up by chain from the bottom of a sump pool. A checkpoint at the fore and back end of the garage was staffed by, almost peculiarly, by a handful of human officers and black-visored stormtroopers.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Sith troopers. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon felt himself sit up a little straighter on his seat, feeding one hand into his unzipped rucksack. It’d been impossible to keep wearing his swords when in transport. Razorlight virtually sprang up to meet his palm. He watched an officer, dressed in board-stiff grey fatigues, an expression as chipped and cold as the ice beneath his boots, come round to the driver’s side screen. Their pilot shot a glance to his seated co-navigator, reached behind his headrest, and slid the steerage cabin door closed. They were conversing, the pilot in a twang of low-Common that was base-human lingual, pitched against the captaining officer with his starchy accent, clicking his tongue behind his teeth with every consonant end. A sliver of Seydon’s attention was keeping mind of their exchange. He was likewise listening to the four armed, armoured troopers trying to softly circuit around the sno-cat. They had cyber-mastiffs, giant automatons built in the visage of bullish canines, fitted with gun-pod shoulder pauldrons and tracking, sun-red photoreceptor eyes.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“They usually make a hassle?” Seydon asked a Chiss on his left. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“At times,” She answered. Like him, her hands had disappeared into her coat. Her armpits bulged slightly with flat-strapped holster rigs. “The Ascendancy and these Imperials sometimes find their mutual authorities… overlapping. We are allied. But they believe we under a thrall-agreement.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…We’re being recalled.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Chiss glanced at him. “’Recalled’? Under what direction? You can hear them?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon nodded, leaning against his seat head-rest. A trooper was passing round on their starboard plating and occasionally peering in through brassteel rimmed portholes. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Why?”

“Don’t know.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We’re supposed to debrief here,” Scowled another operator down the cabin. “It’s six hours on track-route to Csaplar.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The capital?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We’re in trouble, maybe. Some obtuse protocol’s been broken or ignored somewhere. The Sith rarely miss their chance to upbraid the Expeditionary Fleet, and we’re being dragged to Csaplar for a dress-down.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“But we did break protocol,” Said the woman. The Dunaan had been noting her hands had yet to leave the comfort of her pistol-rigs, and she was constantly looking from each porthole to the entry hatch-seal propped like an ear behind forward steerage.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The operator nodded, looking at the cockpit tersely, murmuring a doubtless string of foul-edged oaths beneath his breath in Cheunh. Seydon listened to their pilot and ostensibly their squad-leader conclude with the Sith CO, acquiescing to his relayed orders, closing up the plasteel shielding and reengaging the cabin’s recycled heat. Beneath the decking, all aboard felt the tractor-teeth take out fresh bites from the machine worn ice floor spanning the outpost depot. Engine-purr was rolling up the insulation and paneling behind Seydon’s spine, drumming a sub-sonic note into the back of his skull. The inside atmosphere hadn’t been composed of anything more than dry relief at being out of Csilla’s arch cold, yet now, all aboard were unnerved. Seydon glanced at his rucksack, at his blades and kit pressed within, compactly arranged and waiting further work.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The door forward to steerage slid back into its bracket recess and the pilot began curtly arranging his team in Cheunh-argot, the Dunaan observing their heads nod in affirmation or briefly pipe up to either clarify or challenge details in their rearranging stratagem. Their captain-pilot, with his broad cheeks flecked grey by age, shook his head, and over emphatically nodded at Seydon peering back from the cabin aft. Ahead through the view-port, they were tracking into a broadly spacious tunnel, kept lit by lamp-strips bolt-nailed to the ice and indifferent rime. Lighting extended onward for perhaps another sixty meters, then petered out into a cold, shining blue darkness. As the Chiss squadmates refined amongst themselves their revised, standing orders, Seydon let his mind go forward into the blackness.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]His threadbare lead chasing after the faint echo-shadow of Rosa Gunn depended on a tenuous hunch. That dream where she sank beneath the collapse of a breaking ice-pond, surrounded by colossal, cyclopean structures stained with the light of gods-damned midnight, was fenced in by an almost too-specific boundary of mental detail. A city. A broad, interlocked super-architecture reaching skyward to a convex, monumentally scaled grotto ceiling of permanently frozen ice shelves, fumed by a noxious overcast composed of smoke and fire-blasted chemical condensation. Columned rolls of acid-clouds, soot, pitch-dark, backlit by a dead nebular shadow of strange light. From where riders carrying deathly winter chills rode down on bridges of blood-red light. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A buried metropolitan. A world gloved permanently with winter and cold. Seydon knew of just one real-world equivalent outside the dark providence of his repeating dream.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]From out of the tunnel mouth, Csaplar irised into view. Prior, Seydon had exchanged seats with a ranger, giving them his back row and a more commanding, advantageous point-of-view across the cabin. It was telling how glad the Chiss was without exuding much appreciative speech, now that he was settled his lap angled at the far entry hatch, knees squared a foot and an inch apart, as he nestled a loaded slug-carbine up across his torso. Three others were just as armed and waiting in their belt-harnesses, the rest in the midst of making ready preparations for whatever awaited them at Base. He listened against the mechanical smacks of gas-clips ramming home into waiting mag-lock feed housing, shoulder stock-ends clicking back and forth under adjustment, on-rail screwed optics being fine tuned, electronically dialed to automatically adjust foreground/background details according to subtle pupil cues. Someone was grating a fat combat blade down and along a whetstone bar. The pilot-captain said something to Seydon when he came in behind his seating and stared out through the view finder. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was no apocalyptic torch of engulfing blaze devouring Csaplar. But Seydon still knew it, from each crown of night coloured tower, the recessed, columned palace armed and armoured with brutal resplendence, the uncanny, fierce symmetry realized in each four-squared skyscraper, to the dirigible fleets slowly idling in high patrol across the city-space, search-lights arcing widely from underbelly scaffolding, a host of disseminated patrol carriers winking in and out of sight by their faint running exterior strobe-lamps. A million on million lit windows stared out across every building face. Seydon braced his body between rubber-tiled flooring and the roofing overhead, as the sno-cat transferred from the tunnel exit-way onto a pole-lit, superficial venule winding blithely towards Csaplar’s scattered, membranous outer-districts.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They wheeled closer, driving up and merging into a similar tracked convoy comprising of armoured ski-carriers resembling a nightmare of cubist anti-blast plating that struck off light in odd angles, playing illusionary havoc on the eyes the longer it was gazed upon. Their captain broke silence to identify and organize with the convoy controllers, barking still in edged chuenh, counting off ‘mikes’ on a console display-slate. In an hour, they were under the glacial shadow of the city’s monolithic immensity. Only now could Seydon appreciate its scale. The Chiss had an appreciation for subdued aesthetics, seemingly preferring function as a form. Overhead, some twenty kilometers above, was the below-surface mega dome, notched out of antediluvian glacier deposits of permafrost, snow, and steel-tough ice. Deep as Csaplar was situated from Csilla’s frosty atmosphere, all illumination was sapient-produced, wholly artificial. There was a sense of unbidden claustrophobia, of unreal antiquity, despite the ludicrous genius apparent from the aglow sink-stacks pulling heat up from the planetary mantle in the outlying thermal plants. To interlocked geometry matching and pairing municipal, education, and healthcare sites together with a robust infrastructure.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Barracks muster sites and further vessel housing were erected along a thin stretch of loaned territory that stood as a ring of Imperial sovereign soil encircling Csaplar. Phalanxes of dressed-down men and women, all shaved, all garbed in the same olive-black jumpsuit fatigues that constrained pressure on their legs and torsos, were out in display in the wide, chilly yards, being chased into rigorous fitness drills by red-faced sergeants. Seydon was making a fast count of thousands of un-armoured bodies, all being whipped out of morning lethargy, attacking agility courses designed, somewhat, to pace them through simulated harsh environs. Mud-pits, laz-wire decks, un-even bulges of slick terrain, waist deep pools of ice water fixed with bayonet targets that acquired addressing before the trooper could crawl out free. He remembered old Shev Rayner; age-lined like a maze of toughened scar-tissue for a face, mustache bristle-hard and whiter than lightning, and possessing a voice somewhere between crunching gravel and glass writing on a chalk board. He’d had every jack-boot soldier in each encampment laden from toe to arse in eighty kilogram weight vests, repeating the drills until they met his exact, exact approval. A bastard legionnaire, through and through. Seydon missed him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He smudged out vapor warmth fogging up the porthole, glancing at the flier grounds. The Imperials were relying on a host of heavily modified and modulated air-cars to supplement or outright exchange from their TIE-squads, now rendered handicapped by the enclosed subcutaneous glacial dome. Engineers, a small army in of themselves, were sectioning off each speeder, replacing any interior luxuries with military grade console instrumentation and comm. shielding, popping off the fiberglass framing before welding a new husk of grey-matte armour-plate that further segmented into place. Civilian market repulsor mechanisms were being stripped out entirely. Gurneys laboring under the weight of full-bore, jet-nozzled ion engines, all chrome-washed and trailing black tuber diagnostic feeds, were hurried along across the landing fields from pre-fabricated warehouse sheds. Guidance personnel, armed with light batons, were virtually everywhere, busily coaxing flier squads up or off the flight-ground. The speeders departed in exacting formation, now hunched in ogrish profile with blunt blast-cannons bolted under their nose-grilles like fighting mandibles.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]‘Base’ was a multi-storied repair shop, a nexus of garage modules, that had been requisitioned and then converted into a joint Ascendancy-One Sith command junction. Seydon saw it as a darkly painted fort of broad, stacked ferrocrete buildings masted with comm. antennae quills, flood-lamps, ray-shielded heavy-cal blaster turrets, drumming with activity. Surrounding dilapidation had been bulldozed and supplanted with quick-fabricate ancillary shell-keeps. Barrack halls extended along the perimeter of a widely landscaped courtyard that worked as an all-purpose muster point, troops, officers, engineers, comm. personnel, heavy-ordnance specialists, gunners, off-duty pilots on loan from the air-fields, and occasionally grey-faced individuals bound in black-felt robes and polished, duraplast cuirasses. Lightsabers rolled with their strides. Acolytes and Knights. Seydon sat back on an empty harness seat, reaffirming to himself all the troubled decisions that were landing him deeper and deeper into held OS territory. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…For Rosa. His Rosa. Always for the beautiful woman edging his dreams with a familiar smile she only drew on her expression just for him. Someone on Csilla knew. There was a scrap, an isolated mote of verifiable hint. He’d find it, and through that morsel edge just that much closer to rediscovering his wife. Or her fate. Either or, it would be closure. Seydon tightened his awareness through a fast mental exercise and came back to the ‘now’. Their sno-cat was pulling in through the gated walls after making the checkpoint inspection. All aboard, the seven Chiss operators and himself, were readying for debarkation. The mood was spiked with acidic apprehension. Their captain drove them past the command-house and then east along a supply-packed roadway. Ice flakes blew down from a blue and jet sky. The titan dome overarching them all seemed crushing with a presence all its own. They wove past several garages, past a choked fuel-dump, around trooper squads on double-time march with patrol sacks lashed on their backplates, to a familiarly cordoned off yard penned in by shimmering force-field walling. Seydon hadn’t seen an indigo face since they’d driven past the initial guard-post. Now, Chiss in identifiable numbers were thronging around the sequestered atrium, as busy if not more manically so than their OS counterparts, fashioning repairs to kit and seeing to duty rosters.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The sno-cat down-shifted and whirled snow coming to a stop. At once, teeth threaded into the front ski-guides snapped out of their plastic braces and sank down, anchoring the ‘cat to place, as the engine began throttling and ticking over to silence behind the cabin fuselage, the debarkation hatchway hissing open as a ramped stairway folded itself out and deposited onto the ground. Seydon waited for the squad to troop outside, then followed at the rear, pulling his parka coat back up over his shoulders.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Outside was a chilly damp and the hard light of flare-globes illuminating the boot-worn yard from high specter-poles. To his right, Csaplar’s city-proper loomed like a waiting storm. He waited with the squad with his ruckbag shouldered and held taut by his fingers gripped at a hand-strap. It smelled sharply with brackish odors emanating from the sparking force-shields putting up a guard around the Chiss inter-compound. The squad-captain had stood out from his soldiers, jaw thrust out against the cold. Even his solid, unbothered demeanor looked to be pacing on the spot.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon heard him murmuring comments in further chuenh and glancing furtively at the compound gates. Finally, after increasingly taut beats, an armoured personnel carrier rolled up on spiked-wheels. It bore an unfamiliar shield of grotesque sigils decaled to resemble a knot of threaded text, surrounding a stylized starlight core. A ramp sighed open on greased hydraulics and thudded abruptly against snow and dirtied mud-grit, discharging a heat-cloud of wafting, silver smoke. Figures, ten or so by their bobbing shadows, made a visible show of aggravatingly deigning to quit the warmth of their air-recycled crawler, to come forth and deal with this, as yet, unspecified wrongdoing. Their overseer broke through the heat-cloud followed close by his extended entourage. Seydon felt the squad-captain tense.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Chet.” Even the Dunaan understood that one.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Son of a queen,” Said the overseer, hurrying on agitated strides. “This is the legendary Chiss dedication to imperial hierarchy? You son of a queen!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The squad-captain tipped a slow bow. “My Lord Creste,” He said in clipped basic.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon looked to the overseer. Grife, but he was only a boy. ‘Lord Creste’ was a sizeable young man obviously hailing from Iridonia, a Zabrak by his breeding, from the proud, handsomely rough features that elongated his already shelved cheeks to the crown of hooked bone-horns protruding like clawing spires from the top of his shaved skull, all ritualistically tattooed with an overlay of esoterically derived dark Force symbols. His eyes were sick-yellow, shot with blood, looking almost purposefully sleepless. He filled out a black-on-brown tunic-gi and a scarlet robe gilded with a golden embroidered, bone-frilled dragon, cutting a trim figure. Yet, he was still a boyish youth, just now coming into visible maturity, and the quick anger on his face looked unbridled, barely checked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“My lord, I was seeing to my duties.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Were you?” Creste snapped. “Because as I understand, you deducted funds from the Ascendancy treasury to pay out a safari. After I made an obvious statement I would deal, personally, with this manfinder gnat that had you all so bothered. An action I don’t recall you running past for authorization with me. Rogue work, captain. I could draw you up on charges. The Ascendancy’s courts for military discipline aren’t kind, from what I hear.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“My liege needn’t bother with the minutiae of grunt work,” Said the captain with honeyed placation, though Seydon read something almost mocking to his tone. “The beast has been dealt with.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Is it? You bowl over my authority and come back with unconfirmed news that – “ Creste halted. One of the squad-mates, at her captain’s silent behest, stepped forward. The glossy-maned hound skull of the manfinder, caped in its tattered skin of brushed fur, glared back at the Iridonian, its jaw slightly unhinged. A thick, swollen tongue limply slid out between its gleaming, rowed teeth. Even with the Chiss’ muscled proportions, the eviscerated head still appeared giant. Creste snatched it up into his own grasp and made a show of a perfunctory visual examination, tossing it over his shoulder where a flunky smoothly caught it. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Impressive, I suppose. You’ll get some commendation through a little word of mouth, eh, Captain Sadira?” Creste paced forward, patting the Chiss’ shoulder almost conciliatory. The squad bristled as a whole. The Sith bowed his face in closer. “’Captain Sadira. Brave one, that. He played at screwing with a Sith Lord to have his vindication. Justice for all those eaten locals. It’s very bad though, that he went with defined insubordination and got his head set out on a pike in front of the Palace of the Nine Houses.’”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“My liege,” Sadira barked suddenly. “My operation was met with approval by parliament, and the funds siphoned at their directive. I worked wholly within military law. My liege should be pleased with our results.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“But I’m really not, Captain. I made a very public point to say that I was going to reign in the stupid beast and have it returned to our keeping. You need to understand the embarrassment I’m facing now. What better way to improve Imperial-Ascendancy relations than with a display of ability?” Said Creste with sweetly edged contempt. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“My expressed apologies, my liege,” Sadira sneered. “I wasn’t made aware of your benign forbearing for my people.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Creste clenched his hand up in a raised fist before the captain’s face. Seydon and his squad watched the colour rush from his expression, as spittle rolled across his tongue, lips, and he struggled to remain standing while he grappled with his invisibly tightening airway. The Dunaan could see blood-vessels in the Chiss’ complexion beginning to burst under oxygen deprived strain. Sadira gagged, dropping to a knee, and the Forceful grip throttling him eased.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Better,” Creste said over him. “A manfinder is a very expensive, Captain. I have a legion of alchemists complaining daily over their wants for further resources. They are investments, Sadira, not gun fodder for you to go shooting out after on some boggled scout exercise?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Is that why my liege took his time to see about our lost pathfinders devoured by that monstrosity?” Sadira choked between sore breaths. The Zabrak turned and imparted a modicum of force from his boot toe into the captain’s belly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“If only to watch the lot of you sons of bitches squirm every time some pitiable idiot didn’t return for role-call.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We get it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One-sided conversation trickled to a dead halt. Creste stepped away from Sadira who was climbing back to his feet, and went up to stand before the newer speaker. The Sith glared at Seydon. “What?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We get it. You’re pissed. You didn’t get your due. If you’re going to keep kicking snow into everyone’s eyes, can we do it somewhere warm?” He asked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Who are you?” Creste hadn’t bother to pay note to the rowed soldiery standing at Sadira’s back, wanting to vent his wounded ego on the captain until he had accumulated enough wrath to uninhibitedly take his head from his neck. This one, however, resembled nothing like a soldier, most definitely not a Chiss. “The Ascendancy doesn’t take irregulars.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’m not an irregular.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Then who are you?” The boy peeled back his robing to let the wind prod at the lightsaber clipped on his belt. “That’s a question you are going to answer in the next five seconds.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seydon of Arda. Dunaan. Sometimes, people call us witchers,” Seydon answered. “What now?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…What do you mean ‘what now’?” Creste replied tersely, off his footing with the Dunaan’s bold irreverence.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We’re standing here while you dress down the captain. So far, it sounds like you haven’t made up your mind how you want to put him over the coals.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And we shall stand exactly here until I’ve had the fullest extent of my say in this conceived slight to Sith authority!” A vein showed up on Creste’s throat as he now leveled his petulant temper at the Dunaan. “By the end of which, you’ll all be lucky if I haven’t slain you on the spot and given you up for charr to the hound-kennels.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon shrugged, turning to Sadira. “Does he mean that? Where’s the quartermaster around here?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Creste had just about enough. His lightsaber appeared in his hand and waved ominously while stepping in towards them. “That’s enough brass neck from you, you dog-eyed mutt for a – “[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…The boy-Lord was curious and likewise astounded that he hadn’t seen the move that had brought Razorlight free of its packed away scabbard and now struck the snow-peaked killing point out close to Creste’s face. His attending entourage spurred and fanned out in a partial circle surrounding their Lord, Sadira, and the stunningly armed Seydon. The Dunaan’s expression hadn’t broke, save for a light frown. Further hilts were produced, not yet lit, but menacing the sudden stand-off. Seydon counted six conventionally armed, the other four biding themselves behind their martially inclined companions, smiling a little under their flared cowls. There was a weight of psionics brewing in the air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That was fast,” Creste breathed. “Damn fast. I couldn’t see you move. How did you do that?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Practice,” Seydon said. “Can appreciate your anger. Maybe you’re even a little justified. But I’ve got work to do. I’m not sticking around to get cut down at your say so. ‘Liege’ or not, Lord Creste. Where’s the quartermaster?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Why do you want to know that?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Because, my liege,” Sadira spoke up. “It was he whom we hired out to deal with the manfinder. He was the one who slew it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Creste paused and shot a glare to the captain. “How?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“He took his pack and walked out into the desolation, to track it over the surface. He came back six days later with its head and skin like a cowl around him.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…On his own?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That’s how their kind operates, my liege,” Sadira sighed but nodded, finding the weight of forced deference on his lips increasingly tiresome. “He asks for the quartermaster because he’s not been paid in full yet. His due is pending, my liege.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…You killed a starving manfinder on your own?” Creste turned to Seydon, still menaced by his sword. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Then there’s such a thing as surprise left in this dreariness,” The Iridonian smirked, and reached to carefully push aside Razorlight’s blade-flat. Seydon let his sword fall away, promptly sheathing it before stowing it back within its waiting ruckpack. “You’d never think there was anything like a warrior behind that mange-scruff and lice crawling across him. Dunaan. I thought they were just a half-myth made up whenever another ragged mutant trotted along with a rate fee to clean up a hamlet’s monster worry. I’ll admit. You’ve reflexes enough to give even me a run for it. You’ll get that much.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We’re done then?” Seydon asked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Not quite. Go and get your pay, but have a thought to return to me,” Creste stroked over his chin, somewhat conscious of how close he’d come to getting his face split open upon that fierce blade. “We’ll dine tonight, I think. I want to hear this story in its entirety. A manfinder slew on your own? …Perhaps. Perhaps. I would have liked to see it myself.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Dunaan only glanced to Sadira. “The quartermaster?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Past the third mess-hall, near a munitions store. They’ll have your coin,” He said.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Another time, Lord Creste,” Seydon answered for himself, making a swift check his ruckpack rode properly on his shoulder, feeling hampered by the stuffed pocketing of his borrowed heat-parka. At a curt nod to the Captain and a quietly simmering Iridonian, he set off through ‘Base’, soon becoming another blended figure pressing against the constant personnel flow hauling materiel and tooling.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The Quartermaster looked the part of a bored ex-trooper stuck to a managerial position by dint of vague ‘still usefulness’, down to the heavy olive and tan tanktop stretched across a copiously muscled torso, revealing the metal of an augment surgery to replace a missing left arm and a chunk of dorsal abdominal tissue, and a weary blaster-carbine folded across a records cabinet, still looking admirably machined in spite of a ragged tooth-wound that’d burst through a sheet housing the gas-release tube. Her office was a converted parts show-floor; the walls were losing hanks of plaster every week thanks to damp-rot, exposing ivy-climbs of wiring and oxidized copper piping. Ammunition cases, boxes of unpacked foodstuffs, replacement shipments detailing various circuit boards, and officer fatigues formed up a haphazard maze across the red and cream tiled floor. She glanced up from her standing desk, at the entry doors cycling open and letting in the Csilla cold.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What?” She said at the man. “…Look, despite what the ensigns may have tricked you with, this isn’t sign-up.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Quartermaster?” Seydon asked, stepping around a pallet of crate-sealed gas-mags. Frost bled off his boots onto the tile.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye? You on retrieval or summat?” She began flipping through an oversized datapad, using the equal enlarged motor-fingers on her prosthetic. “Name? Ident-chit?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seydon, Quartermaster Mum,” He said, coming to a pause before her desk space. “Payment voucher.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ohhh, you’re that one,” She murmured. The Quartermaster stowed the ‘pad aside next to a sheet pile of untouched paperwork, swearing unkindly to herself as she worked the stubborn servos grating in her false left hip and ankle as she knelt out of sight. There was a sound of detritus being tossed and rummaged aside. Seydon watched her deftly dispose of a crushed caff-can with a ‘no eyes’ over-the-shoulder toss. It clanged off that same records cabinet, skittered on a mid-air hang, and promptly dropped into a waste bin. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Word went around they were going to leave the thing out there to starve in the wastes,” She grunted, scraping a tin box out from beneath a bundle of packed socks. Her personal stash. “But manfinders don’t go hungry. They go and they feed. They die from injury. Never starvation. So you slew it?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It was the damnedest thing,” She said. “Forward One and here, Base, get a voucher come down through some pretty fething official channels. Say ‘hold this, there’s a guy that’ll be by for it. Either at Forward One or in Base. Keep an eye out.’ I asked around after what all this cash is for: bounty hunter or summat? Nah, I get told, it’s for the guy they got up top that’s aiming to kill that loosed dog-bastard. Holy shid. Finally. After that do-nothing mi’Lord Creste made a stink of fielding himself to see to it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Quartermaster heaved up from her kneel on the floor and slapped a platinum wafer down. “Five thou. You cleaned up.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon picked it up between his thumb and forefinger, watching light play off the small etching of the coin’s assigned denomination. Five thousand imperial credits, as agreed between he, the Ascendancy’s parliament representative, and another party that’d operated clandestinely from behind the ranks of the One Sith army. It seemed such a very small piece of compensation, compared against the slain and their mourners, and it was. He pocketed it within a belt catch-pouch and looked to the Quartermaster.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“There a fast way into the city interior?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]~[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She described a reliable manner to get from outward Base into Csaplar’s symmetric interior, where they could see the bare shoulders of exactly machined super-towers, reminding Seydon less of rectangular construction and more like perfectly grown geodes. The Quartermaster told him simply that every hour, on the hour, a ‘pulsor-truck sped out from Base to collect a restock of some missing materiel. Foodstuffs, saline, crepe tape, general antibiotics, solder-wire, sheet siding, collapsible furniture, nondescript goods that disappeared in a hurry when standing armies grew bored.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]That ‘pulsor-truck was an old Hak-Sok 8 bulk transporter, but had the skeletal crane-lifts attached over its tented box-end welded off. What remained were just thin derrick lattices that looked like an exo-skeletal brace support, helping the ancient Hak-Sok retain its strength and integrity. Old tenting fabric stretched over the box-end on wide iron ribs had been replaced with a cheaper brand of grey tarp, showing curious rents torn through in diagonal tears. Perhaps not only wedged supplies had been carried in transport on the old truck. Seydon went to its pilot: a gangly man with a curiously portly face with wide, dark eyes, and evidence of dried, scabbed over micro-fissures in rash patches on his cheeks and nose. They debated over service and price: credits for unbothered transport into the Csaplar metro-interior. Seydon paid him out roughly in ten half-talents of Kyrikalan gold. Republic-issued credits were plummeting in stock worth. The pilot took them, stared a while at the flecks of weighty metal in his colourless palms, and then motioned for the Dunaan to hop aboard. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon gripped the box-lid and hopped inward with a strong vault. The back of the Hak-Sok was a litter of plastic cartons and a few smashed, red-glassed bottles. He found a spot on the box wall that afforded some makeshift seating, propping himself into a wedge with a few cartons laid either side of his hips. It was a half hour’s time before the driver received comm.-code to depart Base. The Hak-Sok woke crankily, shuddering off the melted depot ice-decking on coughing grav-plates bulging beneath the steel framing. In minutes, suffering the ministrations of the exit-entry checkpoint, they were out of Base, following up a long, die-straight eight lane highway.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The highway flew on an exclusive tract built for military expedience. Only speeders, truckers, carriers, bikes wielding appropriate transponder codes and attached OS ID were given clearance to make the turn off going to Base. Seydon looked out through tears in the tarp-hank wrapped over the truck-bedding, noting they were all but flying past other integumentary roads. The bustle drone of Base soon felt like a murmur in Seydon’s memory. The roar of Csaplar’s labyrinth interior gaped open wide to swallow them up.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]~[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Csaplar, from a topographic viewpoint, was a roughly octangular city featuring various concentric rings that grew in formidable urban scale and congestion. The metro-heart, the precise geo-center marking the medial lines running from the outside grease-ice shanty ghettos and the heat throbbing thermal-sink plants to the towers of House parliament, was anchored by the low bastion of the Palace of the Nine Houses. Function-as-form. That was how Seydon likened the leaden design that made even the Palace appear understated, mute, the artificial canyon roadways running like erosion tributaries through ground level and aerial lanes, blurring past the Hak-Sok like a grey deluge of rushing sump water. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Through the parts in the tarpaulin, Seydon risked fast glances outside each moment the ‘pulsor-truck halted in traffic. Csaplar modeled itself into an increasingly vertical construct, shelves and shelves of tiered sidewalks layering up into cold-washed terraces boasting throngs of crowds. Colour came is pastiches of pastel lite-signs and through corrugated glass shop-fronts, painted through tones of verdigris and teal. Fashion was a host of sleek, modified heat-gowns made to accommodate taste and every day decorum. In opposition to the coreward norm, there were only a fringe handful of faces that bore colours outside indigo and azure. Soldiers were everywhere. Seydon blinked. And they wore the matte-white cuirasses and grim, hooded visors of the imperial armour standard.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The compact between the Ascendancy and the One Sith never quite looked so lopsided in terms of shared authorities. The imperial presence was like an occupation force. It was an occupation force, Seydon thought. APC’s glowered in the raw mouths of too-clean, austere alleyways pinging scoped cannon-mounts to and fro, motivated under automatic program scripts that took the aspect of crowd observation out from the hands of bored detachment officers and their equally fidgety squads. There were a handful of stormtroopers to every routing intersection, ground story and in sequence high above to additional terraces, keeping watch over a fitfully subdued population. They had rifles and scram riot-shields equipped broadly, shoulder targeters blinking, clicking, and tagging passerby’s. Cyber-mastiff hounds, droid dogs fitted with auto-sensors and fixed gunpods, idled on their haunches while handlers idly recalibrated their control wands. Patrol gigs, sub-orbital close ground fliers composed of transparisteel, duralloy caging, repulsor nacelles and in-atmo attitude jets, wandered above in the blue-filmed air. Every so often, their paths crossed alongside meandering ident-drones: they were carapaced boxes kept aloft by suspension fields burning green-hot on the bottom of their balanced housing. Discrete scan fields wafted out of photoreceptor ports and panned across the crowds below, piercing through building faces to gander at interior activities. Passive glances showed just barely stowed, tight resentment in the faces of Chiss. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Hak-Sok again paused at a three-way section and waited on idling grav-plates shuddering with a purr beneath the box decking. Seydon looked against his hanging chronowatch; they, he and the pilot, had spent at a guess roughly three hours making cautious ingresses against Csaplar’s initial zonal rings. Habitation wasn’t simply compact and soaring, it was frothing like river-rapids with foot and vehicular traffic, bottle-necked at every sixth set of control lights. An armoured air-car shaded in auto-reactive plating sighed up alongside the Hak-Sok. Seydon could see the imperial decals denoting its serial code, company number, and a voluptuously outlined artistic flourish of a bikini dressed Twi’lek winking on the passenger-seat door panel. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Over the engine sound-drone, Seydon picked up voices growing increasingly raised from the far east sidewalk. He crouched out of his make-do seating and scurried to the opposite side of the truck-boxing, pulling aside a slash of tearing in the tarpaulin to see. Two Chiss, a male and female, approximately still adolescent, had run afoul of a patrol squad. The troopers were large, probably gene-soaked to amplify their natural musculature to turn them into more hulking, abrasive figures. They menaced the pair with guttural warnings brayed over their helmet speakers, and Seydon could as much guess that they just had the misfortune of bumping into one another. …But his personal apprehension was growing the longer he glanced at the boy and girl. Their shoulders were hunched up and in a forward lean, like knuckle-brawlers about to throw down for a moody fight. The girl spat something back at the trooper captain. Passing foot-traffic was pausing to watch. He watched the squad captain shrug, take a step, and club the girl across her brow with his rifle-stock.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon saw the boy go for it. “Shid -!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The boy had managed to buy himself a snub-blaster that hid well up his sleeve as a makeshift hold-out gun. Seydon watched him produce it in the next second, and fire it up into the captain’s face plate. A hole punched through an eye-piece, exited out the top of the helm, and blew out flesh-matter, bone, blood, and quilted lining. The captain rocked backward on the spot and toppled backward across the sidewalk, smacking off the hooding of an idling air-sedan. His squad didn’t hesitate. All passerby’s with the sense to know what was about to follow dove to the side. Five carbine barrels opened immediate fire on the would-be Chiss insurrectionist. Seydon never heard him make a sound, probably as his skull was shot first and briefly fused into a naked skull hissing fire out of its sockets, before crumbling into wind carried dust. Bolts punched into his torso and carried him up off his boots, simultaneously incinerating and tearing him apart at the waist, shoulders, and hips. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Now, the girl knocked to the rockcrete had regained her senses. Saw what remained of her friend. Began crying, screaming, while stormtroopers hauled her up by the crooks of her elbows and binded her wrists together in plasteel cuffs. Seydon pulled the tarp back into place and sidled up to the back of the steering cabin. He banged his fist across a glass plate looking down onto a messy dashboard.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“How much further?” Seydon called.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Another eight blocks, I’ll let you out as close as I can spare. Traffic’s murder in this circle. It’s supposed to get a little more bare the further in you go towards the Palace.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That where you headed?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh frick no! Did you see that?” Asked his driver, pointing a thin wrist and hand to the sidewalk outside.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No,” Seydon lied, and went back to his small carton couch. The Hak-Sok lurched forward with traffic flow and began wheeling north and west on a cut of road angling out of the arterial route. For the moment, to pass the long still of time, the Dunaan began massaging out his legs and arms, restoring back their familiar shiver of waiting energy, not wanting to be caught with a cramp. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Memories turned over in his thoughts; of Cato Neimoidia, that old campaign, listening to reports of gunfights between Republic army and Neimodian nationalists fighting to retain their worldly independence. Same as Contruum, bless and damn that place. Pirated image captures of secreted execution squads blasting apart ‘patriot’ cells in dank cellars or abandoned hab-stack back alleys, underground documentaries detailing the long, private wars of equal, staged terror between frightened resistance and conscience-dulled authorities, made academic rounds in the former Republic Core. It inspired debate, questioning the moral veracity of the measures taken by their Senate to ensure control of critical territories. Pressure from the Desmius Sith Empire had been enormous. Ultimately, Seydon listened to the Jedi Order calm and then smother debate. Still just a boy, Seydon had decided then to take his leave.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Politics, morality debates, excuses of the superiority of righteous conscience, none of it interested him. He’d come to terms with all that complexity, when he slew Guenyvhar Gunn on the slope’s of Contruum’s Fang. Seydon would do his best to be good, to do good, never taking for granted all the skills, powers, and abilities bestowed and accumulated over the years, or as excuse that might equaled right. Do his best. In a complex, grayed out galaxy where nothing was simple and everyone fought their own private wars. He would do his best. Seydon owed everyone around him at least that much. The Dunaan reached into a small pocket on the inside of his glove lining. Inside, he pulled a free small, fading polaroid-pict.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Five figures dressed up in modest arraignment, tunics, cloaks, slacks, heavy boots, looked out through the fading, silty colours. Darron Wraith, built like a Dantooine cedar barn, with sculptural handsomeness and an easy grin. Ben Watts, dark haired, with a modest expression quite belying the silent powers active in his almost too-bright eyes. Jaxton Ravos, taller than the lot, filled out with enviable muscle, the image of a sports superstar turned paladin, with his iconic dreadlocks and violet skin. Rosa Mazhar, a raven beauty, hair that unfurled around her face much how a midnight storm broke with majesty and fury, lilac eyed, with her arm folded close around Darron’s. She was smiling, a little. And beside her, looking unremarkable, was a younger male with his black hair pulled back into a neat pony-tail. There was something sad to his expression. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon gently drew a finger over Rosa’s captured visage. Soon enough, he thought. Soon enough, the trail would reward him with something other than a false, deadened lead. But it was unnerving; he’d never placed so much hope in a nightmare terror for guidance. The Hak-Sok rolled on, and his ears filled with the sympathetic hisses of its mag-brakes locking. They’d pulled up to a portion of emptied sidewalk, briefly parking between the stalk of a street lamp and an idling speeder-coup. The driver slapped his knuckles back across the posterior window pane.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“This where you get out now.”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

‘Aschello Sights’ advertised its cramped abodes as convenient leasing space for spacers and non-indigens looking for more privacy than what a hostel afforded at a more bargain price tag. A night was 59 credits in Ascendancy drachmas, a week 150, and for thirty days 500 and a safety deposit of another 50 drachmas. At any one day, Aschello Sights hosted three hundred temporary inhabitants that swallowed back their complaints at sub-par building engineering in exchange for relative comforts that included at least one bed, a toilet, and a working sub-net link. It was nestled beside a steam-wafted laundromat, a teeming eatery that catered to tastes as diversified from Basiliskans to Aqualish, with a licensing house to its aft behind a squalid wound of a backalley that doubled as a job-post to pilots and gun-runners looking to make exotic pay from clients sourcing from regions sequestered in riotous systems, where the Unknown Regions truly earned its moniker. The entrance was a recessed auto-door framed by concentric squares forming a blockish archivolt, occupied by somewhat permanent tenants smoking on the lead-up stairwell. They paid Seydon little mind as he bounded up the steps and into a lime-lit foyer hall. He’d walked six blocks from the Hak-Sok drop off, following a memorized route collected from the last occasion he navigated through the outer shanty-town city ring. Figures loitered in the half-dark by a grubby stairwell extending upwards in a pinnacle shaft. Seydon saw they were outfitted in personalized flight-suits featuring off-market hardware mods, or in mix-matched body-armour sporting blast grazing, unarmed as a personal courtesy to the establishment.

A dwarfed Chiss, propped up on a modified stool-seat refurbished to resemble an ebon throne, tended the lobby desk. It was a slab of quartered argite boulder, chipped away and scarred by seasons of long abuse, counter space cluttered with datapads, holoslates, brochures, print and cut-outs, emptied refreshment cans. She wore an augment-patch over her left eye and Seydon couldn’t help noticing her active chain-smoking habit as she flicked away a lho-stick butt into an overflowing trash-can. She looked up to him cursorily, shrugged, then handed off his room key. That eye-patch, he considered, was probably up-linked to a client database and streamed real-time recognition data based on picts taken through discrete camera feeds in the lobby and extended foyer. Seydon took his key, turning round, passing through a pair of identically garbed Shistavanen astronauts.

Floors spanned upward in a needle tower, looking like a construction that had been an afterthought following the construction of surrounding hab-block complexes for the local engineering corps. There was a grav-plate lift that skimmed the entirety of the building’s heightened structure, but few other than some brave souls bothered with its function. It had a reputation for sudden, stomach-clenching drops, inexplicable emergency braking, and rumour that a decade prior, four tenants had perished when safety-catches keeping the lift locked onto the mag-rail failed and plummeted them all thirty floors to the lobby. Seydon opted for the stairwell. The outward banister wound away to a pin hole of illumination issuing from a distant skylight. His room and board nested somewhere on the fourteenth story, past a crowd of idling, shadowed faces peering down at his coming over the banister grip. He mustered up his pace, taking two steps at a time, bearing his rucksack and ribboned heat-gown over a shoulder.

He was room 1609, four chambers south off the stairwell, past a chamber lacking a door with the inside occupants busy at setting a new record for hours spent at uninterrupted copulation. The hallways smelled of spent sweat and lho-smoke, a light fixture hanging crazily on a naked cable-bundle of vibrating wiring. Seydon tried his key into the digital reader for his rooms, and scowled when it failed to log his entry. He tried again successively, eventually jamming his boot-knife into a seam showing on the door frame and wedging it open. Servo-gears that motorized its action grated in protest. They slammed the door back into its recessed jamb when Seydon squirmed through the doorway, the key-reader blinking on a quarto of amber notification runes. The lock was resetting. [ Please Insert Key-Slide ]

Inside, the ceiling was a naked raft of exposed, steel joists pleated with silvery cabling running down into the crumbling walling. The rooms smelled of rotting paper, expired glue, and the unmistakable acidic aromatics of spent piss. To the left, immediately past the malfunctioning doorway, rested a soiled cot mounted on a too-small futon box that’d been thoughtfully drilled down into the ground. The floor was ancient laminate tiling curling out from the tin base moulding, and striped with grime by consistent foot traffic over the years. Light came either through a high, narrow wall stuck with caked glass that only allowed a faint, coloured glow from the outside, or a hanging halogen bulb stuck into a crudely nail and pasted screw-socket on a batten of plyboard mounted between a pair of joists. Seydon toggled the light on, and received a shock out of the wall-switch for his troubles. Next door, that rigorous couple bunched and slammed their cot about.

Seydon checked once more that the door’s bolt-lock was engaged, then laid his coat and rucksack aside and took up a visual and tactile inspection of his temporary safe house. His infiltration of OS territory was bold, and not exactingly subtle, and his trail ranged back across the quadrants marking the northern galactic belt. The Sith guarded their holdings jealously. Rife and secondhand as it was, cantina rumour consistently whispered that agents of the Dark Lord were everywhere. Supposedly, there was the Grey Dossier: a comprehensive file holder detailing potential players that could tip support or aggression against their war machine. Supposedly, a few names hailing from the Levant had made the listing. Seydon was only a mercenary, coin for the blood of monsters, but he hadn’t risked this last trail following after his wife to ignore caution. A micro-fine sense of touch to his hands scaled the walls, the rafters, over the flooring where it looked too far peeled over. He stepped into the bathroom and scrawled across the tiling, tipping the loose tub aside, even snapping the glass panel covering over a disused medicine cabinet off to gander at the backboard. No vox or pict-thieves, no bug-mics.

He paused in the dual bedroom and living space, drawing in long smell up his nose. …There was his own familiar odour, the background puddle of nauseating flavors on the air, flat, metallic tastes exuding from the fiber-wiring, lichen growing inside cavities in the vermin-chewed insulation, the stale musk of spent seminal expulsions on the unwashed cot. He juxtaposed it against his last memory before he took to the upper surface on his Manfinder hunt. And there it was: jagged, foul, rotten. He knew the scent. Seydon went to the doorway to wrench it wide and peered down and back along the story hall. Eyes that could see night as daylight cut through the twinkling half-shadows, ears pricked up against aural signs that could mention a hidden, watchful presence. Save for the almost obnoxious passion of his neighbors, all was still. Seydon closed in the auto-door, tripped its lock-jamb, and then knelt to retrieve something slid beneath a part in a tile seam under the cot.

It was a safety-deposit box lost from an unknowing bank vault, with its electro-code key aperture crudely sliced out by an arc-welder blade, subsequently replaced with a simple gene-lock with a primitive thumb pad awaiting passive identification. Seydon swung out from beneath the under-frame, scraping loose springs on his cot's rodent chewed underside. The box was once sturdy duralluminum now florid with barnacled rust. He loosed off a glove and depressed the thumb-print reader, listening. A gargled ping note, and the box lid sprung free. Seydon checked over his privatized contents: a synthhide ledger converted into a messily folded keepsake journal, and a micro-bead comm. link. The comm. link he snatched up, threaded down his hard collar, and affixed the translucent ear-phone into the cozier part of his right inner ear.

Tonight, someone was going to call. The arrangement was already made. He hadn't made landfall on Csilla of all places without an interior force of nature making sure his presence was casually obfuscated. And they were particular. Contact wouldn't come until late through the night-over cycle. Seydon could feel anxious sweat beginning to dampen up his fingertips. For seeing to the killing of the Mandfinder, his cloaked payment would be a lead. Solid, factual. Not a ghost of ether teasing him with a half-truth. But a factoid. An item dealing with Rosa Gunn and where she had gone.

He reached into the deposit box and pulled out his scratch-worn journal. Seydon wasn't sure where he'd bought it; perhaps at in a waystation convenience booth, needing a vein to compile through. Its leafing had been thumbed black by pencil lead traces, each page yellowed until almost jaundice, his thick script short-hand showing through where he had fiercely jotted down a clue, a theory, hypothesis, or observation made. Jammed against the glued page-spines were individual document reports, audio and pict transcripts from now long deleted surveillance archives, with headings and footers and margins scribbled fiercely with his own annotations. Trailing his wife, he made use of a methodical temperament Even a few hamfisted sketches in his weak artist's attempts at drawing out impressions of the woman from his dreams. Not that Queen of the Dead, but the murderess, with her mourning gown draped over Rosa's still body. The woman in a gold masked that peered back at him through eyes gilded sick by bloodshot and physical corruption. He could still hear the shattered ring of her betrayers stiletto breaking apart against the ice between her feet. He could still see Rosa disappearing under a cracking glacier into an undercurrent of blood. Then the Dark Queen would come, and kill him back to wakefulness with her colossal sword.

Seydon belted on a small book-end rucksack onto his hip loops; it was a vintage design meant to help carry a codice for safe but easy reach. He stole his journal from out the depository shoe-box and slid it into the waiting leather case. The Dunaan paused, listening. ...Finally. The young lovers next door were finished. Post-coital chatter whispered like a sand over chitin, giggles sounding now and then, their damned cot creaking each and every instance they moved. Seydon kicked the storage box back underneath his own meager bed and flopped down onto his own mattress. A chrono time-piece told is was four hours until night-over. Enough time to get in trouble exploring Csaplar's lower-class metropolis ring division, not enough to make gainful headway. Seydon set his time-piece to go off on alarm. Next, he settled his hands over his chest, axe haft and knife hilt gripped tautly in each, and began to catch a little sleep. Across the boarding chamber, something legged, small, and hairy scurried along the window sill…

~

He dreamed again. But not of a dead world being swallowed by fire, an ice age ravenously tugging at its coat tails. There were no silent marauders stalking between shadowed aisles, dressed in bone and steel finery. No emaciated steeds being rode down on bridges of bloody light. He walked through columns of pillared clouds, into sleepy vaults of disparate memories somehow yet clinging onto the Force after death. It was soundless but for an ocarina tune, playing fervently. And wind… Not a zephyr, but dour, wet with rain that was to come, blowing like a refreshing gale across his face. He could scent blood, meteorite steel, salts, marrow, sweat, opened flesh. The aromatics of mortal, crunching struggle. Behind him and aside came a shout and metal clamouring. The Dunaan turned about in time; a stalking profile backlit by shade, dressed in helm, mail, cuirass, and greaves. Lain across the pit of their shoulder, a mighty two-hander cleaver swayed to their step. Part of their vest armour had been poked open. Wads of sterile padding were stuffed in and kept in sealed place by starchy tape. The Dunaan could almost see a grim smile in the T-sectioned helm, dark as it was. And next, they'd gone, altering into a disintegrating cadence of smoke. It was an episode reminisce of the Trial of the Waters. Briefly, he was stepping through the profiles, souls, of old ancestors belonging to his ragged bloodline.

He was a woman who smelled like a rat, donning a leather cowl studded over the shoulders with pitted carascene steel, long, silver plated knives in each palm. They were beautiful, if stained. In their reflection, Seydon caught a pair of scarlet irises and a stocky face dabbed with freckles. She felt tired. She probably wouldn't see the pay she'd like for this contract. Cheaters. They hated her. Loathed her irreverence, her capability. No matter. The drowner lair was just ahead, in that courtyard formed between the steepled houses of a sculptor and limner. Damn it. Ache in her ribs. An old break, bacta hadn't done much to make the injury more agreeable. Again, no matter. Seydon was with her as she stepped low under a bowed archway. Coming face to face with her where naked figures in azure, slimy skin, enormous eyes bulging with photosynthetic light. They snarled at her. He felt the woman grin. She laid into them and the drowners died one by one...

He was a boy. Maybe fourteen, no older than sixteen. Seydon could feel an unkempt, oily drape of unwashed hair clinging to his brow and nape. He felt fear. This boy stood up tall and skinny. Yet to fill out, but there was a familiar soreness to his ligaments and musculature. The lad worked himself every day at the irons and punching dummies. Lessons barked out by his sister and uncle rang in his ears, damning, demanding, a mantra. Practice made practice; perfection was an illusion. He had his brother's steel and silver blades strapped over his left hip. They were all he had left of him. And dreams, memories. Dead when he was tiny. Someone mentioned he'd been taken by a fell stag with devil-fire in its eyes. A cursed cervine. The lad knew he would have to face it himself. Father was gone into the southern skies. Mother too, she had left to tend to a contract on a far away star. Uncle was laid up with an abscess on his intestinal tract. And sister… Sister was drunk. A local apothecary approached him out of desperation and explained his grim plight. A handful of villagers had come down with an ugly, septic ague. He did not have in his herbal stores the necessary mold that could alleviate their illness. It grew locally, but that was the problem: it grew in the Stag's Den. He would have to make a four day ride to the nearest city to collect it from a licensed herbalist, but he feared without his attendance, that handful of patience would depart him. The boy gave him his only and obvious answer: he would collect the mold. Yet now, it was turning to twilight. The Stag's Den loomed ahead on the road. Something bayed out to the coming night. Suddenly, Seydon felt the fear in the boy warm up into a rage. Warriors blood stoked. He would be alright. He would be okay. No god of death would have him this eve…

He was middle aged. Getting old. His casement had been patched up a hundred times, 'till the only original, unaltered piece of his ensemble was just his sallet and bevor helm. The man was grousing to himself on the latest, fitful state of war between opposing Jedi. Idiots. Doctrine could co-exist. It could; they just needed to police one another, weed out the radicals, disperse them, disband them. There was a worse evil out there just hemming their blinkered vision. He knew it. He saw it in his dreams. That place, with castles in the sky. With a Dark Queen awake below its earthen mantle at work at nefarious schemes. He was seeing her now more frequently. There was a rattle under his seet; Seydon suddenly became aware of sitting in the arched, folded bays of a great space-liner hold. The aging man stiffened. He sat alone and waited for eventual docking. The holds provided some solace, kept the fetid conversations of unknowing passengers out of his ears. He sat alone… or thought he did. Through his sallet visor, huntsman in pierced and tasselled jerkins were moving around cargo freight and stacked, tarped pallets. What did they want? Oh. They held up in their fists stock-issued machine blaster pistols, one with a long barreled las-carbine, another looped and belted with fat, punch-nosed grenades and a smooth-bored launcher in their hands. Ahh. That was what this visit was about. The aging man stood up from his cot and unsheathed the terrible claymore nestling between his shoulder blades…
He was a gunslinger gal with a love for old hammer-and-trigger firearms. She slew beasts with slug rounds machined from Corellian silver and inscribed by hand with the Arias of Cancel·lar. The girl was wondering, though. Thirty, going on thirty one. Getting to that age. Mahap now or never. Mayhap go find that young oyster raker on Mon Cal, see if he was still agreeable to the idea of union and child? ...Nah. Later. For now, she had to go shoot the hell out of an oversized raptor-condor that had taken to preying on the local, roof dwelling cutlers.

He was a man they called an assassin. He detested the moniker, but so be it. His methodology called for patience, subtlety, timing, attention to detail. All that could give him away were the blades strapped onto his back. He rarely ever allowed someone sight of his cats-eyes. In these regions, agents of that fell warband were seemingly everywhere, but he had to work. Had to fight. Had to give the downtrodden and ignored a force that could work in their favour. He waited in the rafters of an out-in-country estate, overlooking the entry vestibule. Auto-doors shuddered open. An assembly of cloaked figures licked with rain strolled in, languidly. He could smell their haughty age, contemptuous breath, the leak of rot and soiled vitae in their blood vessels, the stinging tang of their bio-electric synapses. Foul weather garb was flung onto waiting servants. The pack of pale eyed nobility stalked into the foyer, himself following soundlessly. Tiny figures were thrust along at their flanks, albeit with severe reluctance. ...Children. Adolescents between five and nine years old. Reeking of fear. A nobleman with skin like amber turned to one… His awful grin worsened with the lengthening of his razor incisors. Now or never. The assassin discharged potent garlic smoke grenades into their midst, dropped onto a noblewoman shrieking as she brandished her vibro-rapier. Seydon saw her split apart from skull to nethers…

He was a seventeen year old girl learning her parents hunted monsters stole up from the grave. Her brother was slumped dead in a corner. Her little sister shook in her arms. Further, deranged corpses sprawled around her feet, cut to hanks and ribbons. A man with forbidding cats eyes, yellow as gold and sin, peered down at her. The hand outstretched for her offered both salvation and damnation. She wanted revenge? She wanted purpose? Come with him. A second world behind the trappings of the galaxy awaited, filled with the enemies of her family. This was both misfortune and destiny. What would she do? Seydon felt her reach out with an arm around her sister and take hold of the witchers forearm…

The visions shifted. They spun from one memory to another, into a phantasmagoria kaleidoscope of violence, tragedy, heroism, silver plated swords and steel blades, Dunaan on the long hunt. All were interwoven by familial connections and forgotten comrades that smiled at them through all that death. Seydon crossed over memorial bridges spanning hundreds of years. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Beneath him was a visual metaphor of a sea of bubbling, frothing recollections. Were they true, he wondered? Were they just imaginings on his part? Out of his own curiosity, wondering what his lineage had that kept him so connected to forgotten Ys? That powerful gust of wind returned then at the mentioned place. Smokey colonnades dispersed aside. Seydon stood barefoot on a tall hillock. Grass blades were shooting up twixt his toes, and felt velveteen with their dewy countenance. Beside him, a great, scrunched beech gradating with moss up its tubular flanks swayed in the wind. He looked around.

The hillock stood out from a massed forest. It spread on like an emerald carpet, before meeting the foothills of absolutely olympian mountain peaks and toothy crags. He could spy out rivers kilometers in width span, tributaries, lakes, interior swampland bracken, clearings, ponds, interwoven together by underbrush thick as anything on Kashyyyk. Those mountains acted as a kind of exclamation mark. Seydon had to crane his skull just to make out where their faint peaks disappeared into crystal clear, blue skies. He could make out a flock of raven eagles in high flight, coming down through a passage cut against the side of one spectacular pyramidal alp. Loosely in formation, they crossed over the forestry canopy crowns, and brought the wind with them. One passed over his head; its wingspan was the kind of distance that made an x-wing look meager. He spied a glossy, hooked beak grained with ivory.

Seydon turned with their flight and observed them winging over a landscape of dipping plains, topped and bladed with striations of pine and birch. Further, more forest swung out like a green maw, extending to a slope of earthen rime that cut off the horizon and made the vegetation seem infinite. Perhaps it was infinite. Seydon leaned against the beech, glancing at himself. His garb had changed to a willowy shirt of dirty cotton and stringy pants stained by mulch and grit at the knees and ankles. Somehow, he'd gained a farmer's tan. The breeze rolled up the hillock, wove up his nostrils, down his throat. It was cold as ice, soulful. The Dunaan felt it lift him at his waist, feet, and shoulders like a chair. Bore up, he floated onward over leagues and leagues of unending wilderness.
Roadways parted through the tree roof. Here and there were disparate communities, some no larger than a halmet of a few dozen, others great townships just beginning to burgeon into cities. Each was marked by walling, gateways, timber and wire fencing. Foraging parties out into the undergrowth were accompanied by dressed soldiery wielding crossbow and bearded halberds. Caravans were drawn along by either equine beasts or broad oxen shouldering along at unhurried gates. Seydon remarked to himself: how medieval it all appeared. Had this place, Ys if it was what his mind's eye beckoned, ignored ordinary progressions? Or had they no use for it? Breezes tickled down his collar, made his eyes glance up from the ground.

And saw the floating castle.

Seydon blinked. Surely, impossibly, risen on a mound of conical earth and stone kept locked at anchor by immense, time coloured chains, was a castle in the sky.

Drafty currents holding him up aloft took him higher yet. He winged past sections of sparkling granite poking through trails of ropey lichen hanging off beneath the hovering islands underside. Avian specimens, coloured between root-cyan, swollen maroon, marble grey, nested in chipped away bird holes notched into the rock. Down far, far below, those black eagles Seydon had spied before looped around in an up-draft circuit. The dream kept carrying him upwards yet. He flew over a lip of bricked walling, that egressed into cyclopian, tiered fortifications. He made out buttresses and crenelations, spear mounted with fluttering standards snapping in the breeze. Soldiers manning the watch didn't pay him mind as he flew over their helmeted brows. He spied their livery: black and white and gunmetal steel.

He was conveyed into a castle city. It lacked the sense of over-raw height displayed in metropolises like Nar Shaddaa or Coruscant, the canyoneering avenues and streets that extended from level surface down and down into increasingly destitute, lightless technologically regressed second societies. It wasn't anything like in modern scale to offer contest against five mile high skyscrapers or senatorial pagodas resting like hardened welts amidst more blander architecture. Yet, it wore age with simple grace, and didn't mind that some bulwarks hanged with vegetation and patchy erosion's in the masonry.

The majority of the land had been tilled up and then replaced with in-grown townships. Time and population made each small patch of neighborhood expand, until roadways found one another, locked together like teeth into bone, and connected the floating islands people together. Architecture was a vast exercise in antiquity, in snarling gothicism that made no apologies for grandiosity. Independent castles rose through the labyrinthine. Onyx banners hung down from their armoured windows, to bear the sigil of a white flame dancing on the pommel of a greatsword. They were not estates of nobility, Seydon realized, but true fortresses. He possessed a chance to look down into one walled courtyard shielded off from the city at large. Young men and women in training tunics and ragged breaches attacked one another with blunted, facsimile longswords. Greyed instructors in studded armour roared instruction, encouragement, and condemnation. ...Each instructor wore cat-eyes blinked with gold. Each wore twin swords upon either their back or hips. Seydon felt his tongue go dry and tried swallowing for moisture.

Dunaan…? Witchers…? But, old Ajax commented that they were very few and far between nowadays. At best, between a dozen or a score survived. Every few years, that number fell.

Time wasn't kind enough to let him stare a while longer. The visions lucid veracity was begging him with questions. Undoubtedly, this was Ys. Lost, forgotten Ys, before the tremendous fall that pitched the world into a truly harrowing hour. Ajax tentatively described motes of her epoch existence. Here, the Dunaan originated, in a 'Kingdom Beyond The North'. A caste of 'warrior-monks'. Beast killers. Ajax and the Lodge of Shade provided him with cursory lore enough to keep him gently schooled in the legends. But details were always at best foggy to him. Now, like those visions of a buried metropolis being preyed upon by riders from the sky, he was being granted something concrete. He had been told dreams were amalgamations of waking memories and encounters. The brain never made up anything. And Seydon was sure he had never set foot in a place like this.

Gusts and gales tossed him over his feet. The vision was growing impatient. Everything he was was ancillary details. He was being drafted along to witness something else. Ahead towered a fortification to put all others across the face of the floating island to envious shame. Seydon could only describe it as a mammoth bastion. Plated fortifications, jet and alabaster, lined with idle ballistae, atriums filed with busily strolling figurines, all taut as strung bowline, all a wicked bastard with the weaponry strapped upon their bodies. The bastion occupied roughly a kilometer in each cardinal direction, with further space if that reckoning was properly squared. Within were the billets and barracks housing this castle-cities collection of fighting witchers. He could see amongst them the draped, ancient Force sorcerers he knew just as the Lodges. Masters of alchemy, they were responsible for the physical changes that made a Dunaan so wickedly good in a hunt or fight. The Lodge of Shade… One of the handful of surviving masters… A lore keeper of Ys that swore onto the memory of a woman named Seyda to never betray her trust, or their secrets.

One of their ilk paused, and glanced up through a skylight in an opened, iron framed atrium. For a moment, cataract eyes filmed milky looked at Seydon. They blinked, and looked down. The Lodge reached out with a pitted, metal cane and felt for his way out towards a wing of inner chambers built up into a bulwark wall.

He passed through layers of interior, austere chambers. Like a phantom, he was travailing through solid matter, into padlocked armouries where smiths kept at their labour of maintenance over suits of supple hide, shirts and gowns of chain-linked mail, worrying over plated blades. A few were deep into books of inscription, charming Force-spells into a few select, spectacular weaponry. Their fonting and hand-scripting were positively swan-like. Seydon left them behind and wandered through an emptied barrack room. Two Dunaan occupied bed and were likewise busy with each other. A pair of blushing men, embarrassed when their craggy demeanor faltered and admitted their affection.

The wind clutched about Seydon's waist. More distraction. Just phantom details of a world long dead. How did the Lodge of Shade put it? 'Ys was beautiful. More elegant than Eshan, more wild than Kashyyyk It was a place out of time. Anachronistic but that always seemed the point. We rejected advancement for its own sake. We dreamed fairy tales, and believed them.'

Without a warning, the gale that kept him affixed in its unseen arms released his frame. Seydon fell, and was deposited in a corridor of bleak stone as grey as thunderheads. At his hands and feet was a roll of carpet red as carbuncle. Atop fluted posts in aspes in the arcade faces of the walls were stone sculptures: not of busts, but of swords. Pennants hung from granular chain and steel hangers from the ceiling. The air was damned cold, and tasted like metal filings on his tongue. Seydon was wondering what the point of his environ was, when a far door at the corridor's furthest end burst open.

They flung aside with enough physical push to break and dent the lion's-mouth ring knobs nailed into the frame planks. A warrior woman, dressed in battle finery with those instantly recognizable swords upon her spine, strode forward in a rage. A second woman, less spectacular in garb but far more martial, caught up beside her and renewed their argument. The first had a mane of hair so darkened it wove like night around her shoulders. ...And the second with a too-white pony tail seized behind her skull in a severe tie.

Both were beautiful. Achingly so. Their eyes were gold and slit-oval, with a slight loss of natural pigmentation where their skin showed. Each carried herself with lethal poise. Seydon felt himself fixed on the visage of the white-haired woman. An inclination made him know her. The Silver Fox… Their argument reached him.

“You're tired, we are all tired. That doesn't leave you with excuse to go off and raid the Librarius,” Said the Silver Fox to the Black Wolf.

“Centuries on centuries battling the same foes, the same tools, the same methods. We are caught in a ring of stagnation! It's time someone among us took steps to rectify that. What use is power if not in good service?” She replied. There was no mistaking that hint of contempt ringing behind her teeth. “And you're right. I am tired. I'm exhausted by the Lodges, and their secrets. Their self pandering. Do you know what I found, my friend?”

“No. No, I don't. You think you're the first one to to rifle through those journals? Morribran, I thought the same as you once, but - “

“What changed, Seyda?” Morribran sneered, resting against a faux post running up the bricking. “Was it a nightmare that put you off?”

“The Librarius is kept both guarded and preserved for damned good reasons,” Seyda prodded her finger into Morribrans breast plate, turning aside, her chain-tunic tinkling like glass beneath her armour. “A repository for the techniques that ensure those monsters have hunters to fear. A record of all those sins and mistakes that left us with this mess in the first place. And the forbidden, only in times of the greatest, worst need!”

“Why wait for that? What's so dangerous in circumvention? We hold no diplomacy with those beasts below our forts. Atop of our responsibilities with the people? What would they say if it were found out the witchers knew all along the secrets of the beasts that harried them?”

“There's a difference between condemnation and damnation, Morribran. Maybe they can yell at us for holding our books so close. It does not alter our duty to them. You want to invoke change.”

“Damn you, yes I do,” Morribran fairly snarled. “Do you know what you sound like? Who you sound like? Like some craven old spinster afraid that all her comforts are about to burn up.”

“I'm not scared that tomorrow's always a mystery, Morribran. Nothing is certain. Even the Dunaan will fail one day. But I'm not so arrogant to believe that a snap of Power, a few motley experiments, and hussah! Ys is transformed for the better.”

“Then you don't understand anything of what I want, Seyda.”

“You want a perfect world. I want a better one. There's an ocean's difference between them.”

“Semantics,” Morribran tsked and began to stroll from the Silver Fox.

Seyda's hand clenched round her nape, pulling her round and back against the corridor wall. Seydon could feel a hint of Force energy blistering over the carpet like static. Both women looked envenomed with fury. “Friend. I covered for you more than once. Again, I defend you from the Lodges. But every time I find you, it's some new madness. You act like there is nothing beyond your providence. That you can do no wrong, because why? 'I've the best intentions.'”

“And what do you do, Seyda? Nine hundred years on the Path, and to what end?” Morribran tapped her knuckles across Seyda's shoulder blades and walloped her back with a blown murmur of telekinesis. “Nearly a thousand years and what has swinging your sword round bought us? Bought anyone? Monsters still infest our homelands. Day by day, there's a new affliction. Some new curse, or misfired spell. There are mages reappearing amongst the people. Can you not see? If the Dunaan do not take control of Ys' destiny, it's going to bury itself in fire! Again!”

“It's not our place! That is not the Path the Dunaan walk!”

“Evolution's painful, Seyda. I know. But I'm not going to feel sorry for the dross that falls to the wayside. The Dunaan need a better future. Ys needs it too. Even now, those nascent kingdoms we aim to safeguard are rearing up for war. Our woes will become worse than ever before.”

“It's still isn't our business,” Seyda growled. “We aren't anyone to tell folk how their lives should be shaped. We keep the monsters out of their homes. We take our coin for it. That's all.”

“That's not good enough.”

“Of course it's not!” She strutted back into Morribran's face, with a flash to her eyes. “You silly queen, you talk like it's all on you! Dunaan ride together! We all walk the Path, by our own decision! Power's blinding you to the dangers of what you want!”

“And cowardice is holding you back. What's a little evil, if it builds a fairytale?” Morribran spat. Finally, she wrenched from Seyda's grasp and strode in full wrathful bearing down the hallway. Seydon felt her presence bristle the air, leave ozone in her departure. Turning, he saw Seyda clenching her hands at her sides. Her frustration was palpable… fearful… But above all sad.

“Evil is evil,” She murmured against clenched teeth. “Lesser. Greater. Middling. It's all the same. ...What?”

Seydon heard it too. His palms slapped round his ear at the sudden and irritatingly incessant message-incoming chime. Looking up, he found Sayda glaring his way, almost uncomprehendingly. He wasn't certain either. If this was a dream of memory, why would he wish for her to look and see? But then, with like every dream, he grasped hold of the notion about waking up.

~

He blinked, and saw the gutted rafters of the roach motel room sighing under a creak of waning wind...

“Awake?”

A voice in his ear barked and grated a mean vibration where the micro-speaker of his comm.bead nestled close by his ear drum. Seydon collected himself, running his mind from grogginess with a fast conditioning exercise that restored his vigilance. Detail through his senses sharpened. He smelled the faint sodium rank against the usual background drafts of old, dried up fecal matter left behind by less attentive borders, heard someone up three floors sigh through their nap, felt the cool, hugging leather in his gloves. The Dunaan spoke back through his collar mic.

“Yeah.”

“I've been ringing you for five minutes.”

“Sorry,” Seydon rolled off his cot and stood. “I was sleeping.”

“Then wake up fast. The cycle's turning over the night hours. I've arranged a meeting window. If we both take care, we can make a passive drop and go our separate ways. You don't know how dangerous this is.”

“I appreciate the risk,” He was already taking adjustments of gear worn over his chest and waist harnesses. “But the Manfinder is dead. Now you owe me.”

“Sink Extract Site Fifteen,” Said the voice back curtly. “You'll find me inside. Get to the sub levels. I'll be waiting, witcher.”

“Thanks, Colonel Boudica,” He murmured to himself as the channel clicked dead. “I don't know what I'd do without you.”