Rose & Coral

[Seydon of Arda]

~Tingle Arm~
~Indigo Reef~
~Arda~

~Beyond the Straights of Damocles~

The Golden Rose. It had been fashioned to order, a smooth-hulled yacht modeled after the classic Mara-Jade-Pattern, gilded as its namesake with a burnished hulling polished to a keen finish, painted over in gold-chrome, with recessed running lights along the mast-finials glowing appropriately with raspberry tints. Sleek-engine blocks tapered into a blade-nose capped with molded silvertine; the sculpted likeness of a bare-breasted void-maid clothed by broad flower petals laid in delicate repose. Marble-white broadcast vanes bracketed the dorsal lines. Thick landing-pads prodded out of folded bays in the ventral plating, sunk into the island earth, vast hydraulics married to several gyroscopic balancers working to keep the 'Rose on a fit balance 'lest it tip over and crash.

It was past four from the midnight hour, three hours until sun-up on the northern dawn. The Three Brothers, moons Priad, Memnes, and fat Andromak wallowed heavy over in the western skies, right atop the Serpent's Coils. Massive whirlpools notorious for sinking and devouring most any Ardan vessels that dared try navigating treacherous Scipio's Way. The visitor sailed on a wide raft attached with attending canoe-dugouts. It was wide and sturdy on carved logs drawn from pumice-wood forests in the east, sporting thick buoyancy with a parted tent fixed with a high shark-wood pipe chimney.

Seydon ran it aground on the island. It was a nondescript slap of sand by the Damocles Straights, nameless, overgrown with saline vegetation, copses of bitter mangroves dripping heavily from sour fruit growths. A pack of jaguar-sealions lazily cocked their noses at Seydon's arrival. He stroked the steering paddle in one hand, tacking the sail-rigging, catching a bloom of wind. Timber ground a deep spar against the shoreline until the raft had cleared itself from the surf. Seydon was only dressed in a blue-striped jacket atop a worn cotton shirt and belted black pants, kitted with just a belt and shoulder harness weighed by his tools.

He took off from his grounded vessel. It was a sixteen meter jaunt to the berthed Golden Rose. Seydon cleared in exactly two seconds. Powerful legs raced him at break-neck speed until air whistled shrilly by his ears. The Dunaan vaulted up a railed debarkation step-ladder, faced with a solid air-lock hatch refusing any attempts to budge. He tried to mag-lock pad. She'd changed out the factory-wrote access codes with her own encryption. Seydon took to smacking the duranium hatch with the flat of his right fist. Dull thwacks echoed off the metal. With luck, [member="Rosa Gunn"] would come awake to see and investigate who was ratcheting against her ship in the dark of the Ardan morning...

 

[Rosa Gunn]

BOOM.

Rosa jumped, head snapping up from where it had fallen on the kitchen counter, the long cold caff cup skittered across the counter top, sleepy hand fumbled and failed to catch it as it slid off the edge and shattered on the galley floor.

BOOM.

The noise reverberated through the ship again. She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes and tried to wake herself, properly. Arda, she was on Arda, she was home. The tension rolled from her, no longer in a war zone in Republic space she could relax. She'd come home because of a dream of slaughtered Ardan's lining the beach. Vision or no, she'd taken it as a sign to step away, however briefly, from the war against the sith. She'd found his letter. Hands moved from her eyes to glance down at the tear stained paper.

BOOM.

She slid from the stool, passing a porthole that told her it was dark out, time had lost its meaning so for all she knew the sun could have only just set. Still somewhat disorientated she padded barefoot along the hall of the ship as another demanding knock rumbled through the Rose'e core. She entered the mag lock code and rubbed the sleep from her eyes as the lock hissed loudly and the airlock opened.

Dark eyes lifted to meet those of a wolves, golden and glinting in the dark hour and her breath caught in her throat. For a moment, she didn't move, frozen in place by those eyes, but in not moving force senses caught up with a sleepy mind. She'd know her husband anywhere, with any face. A sob caught in her throat and she launched herself at him arms curling about his neck with an iron grip and she drew him close, tears of joy and relief carving fresh tracks down her cheeks.

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[member="Rosa Gunn"]

Despite stinking of gull-lizard guano, skin crusty, flaking dead with salt and sun-burned stripes, despite his gaunt face and haggard expression, looking sore for his effort, he felt her body latch like a berthing mag-lock and not let go. Seydon reached to take her in; he'd fairly lifted her from up off her toes and heels, losing himself in skin licked with shampoo and perfume. He quickly stripped his hands free of their gloving and wove them into her locks. Knuckles caught and gently cased in the heady, dark curls, reminded that mortals could spin silk if they so wished. Rosa Gunn was soft and hard and light and heavy, ten thousand contradictions and yet none of them at all.

Most importantly; she was real. He'd dreamt of her in visions sick with horror, otherwise caught up in terrible hallucinations where memory cruelly dredged up her likeness. The witcher bustled them up the debarkation ramp and into a shadowed air-lock. His hands reached and snapped off his harness buckles, slapping at a wall-mounted control cycle pad. The hatch hissed down into place and locked with hydraulic groans. Servos seized the hatch into atmospheric locks. Sterling too bright light shone down over their heads from bulkhead mounted lamps as the air-lock ran through a brief pressure-cycling routine. A second auto-door opened. Seydon could smell cold, spent coffee, sugar, smell the unwashed galley, scent the can-tins waiting to be peeled open.

They paused against the durasteel hatch-jamb. His hand was upon her cheek, one grasped to her ribs and clutching at her dust-jacket and shirt, kissing. Kissing with all fury, until his arms were wrapped around her shoulder blades and palms softly pawed down her hair and crown.

 

[Rosa Gunn]

Rosa reciprocated his ferocity, her heart soaring high above and only when her lung demanded that she breath properly did she draw back. Her hands moved to his face, thumbs running over the coarse hair on his face. She was still crying, breathes coming in short as she tried to calm herself, her forehead pressed against his. It was only in seeing him, in feeling him there that she came to realise just how worried she had been. "I missed you." she murmured kissing him again. "I love you."

A year. It had been a year the last time she lost sight of him, but it felt like longer. It felt like it had been a decade and she had wondered for a decade with a heavy heart. a decade of sleeping and waking in a cold bed. A decade of casting her eyes skyward in hope of seeing the hard lined Snake bearing her husband back to her. But it had only been a year. A long year. She tugged him out of the airlock and into the corridor, lips barely leaving his. Her back found the wall as she drew him close, fingers fumbling for the buttons in his shirt.

Ardan's say that the Season of Woe produces storms like no other, driving fear into the faint hearted. [member="Seydon of Arda"] and Rosa Gunn took pride in their ability to outlast a storm of Woe.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[member="Rosa Gunn"]

Rain turned the morning light grey. Sunbeams were just a murky suggestion of star-rise north along vacant fog gauze, hemming round the storm-walls of another passing micro-typhoon system. Outside, colour was dank, soured out of contrast, kelp-weeds draped down over every second observation porthole mounted on the port hulling. Winds had tugged a finger of palm-copse out of their ball-roots and flung them out to sea. Somewhere, waters were lapping up around the Golden Rose's lander-claws.

Seydon reached out with an unsteady hand and lit off a small, too-cheery chrono-counter from winking what the time was. It was half past the eleventh hour and approaching local realside noon, by the Ardan cycle. They'd gone to bed at a quarter past four, but spent five hours out of seven viscerally awake. He had cycled off room air-conditioning; the shared bedroom was muggy with both temperature, disarray. Clothing laid in unkempt piles, dropped and ignored where they fell, her pant-legs and work-shirt and rain coat discarded by the clawed feet of a darkly stained side-table. Razorlight leaned against a track of red striping on a bulkhead wall. Winterfang was propped up over her blackwood dresser.

"Haahh...," He sighed, beginning to crack a smile. Grinning, then. They were both what Shev Rayner liked to call 'very naked'. Seydon turned, running a thumbnail down the length of Rosa's spine 'till he poked it gently into her tail-bone.

"Those are new," Seydon murmured, stroking his palm across collections of reddened silver nicks and scar lines. "Thought I had it rough..."

 

[Rosa Gunn]

"Hmmm." Rosa responded her relaxed state refusing to offer much more. Her head rested on his chest, her hand toyed lazily with the the obsidian ring that hung from his neck, eyes closed as she listened to his heart beating beneath her ear, its rhythm different to that which she remembered. She turned onto her front and propped herself up on her elbows. "I can assure you, my assailants came off far worse." Dark eyes locked with golden orbs. There were a hundred things to be told, stories to be shared. Where did one begin?

She reached up a hand and brushed a strand of white hair from his forehead. "Your changes are far greater than mine, love." She pushed herself up the bed slightly so she could kiss him gently before sliding back down to rest her head back on his chest. "I saw you...in my dreams...I saw Stenwulf break you over his knee, so I dug around, found out he'd escaped. I should have done something but my dreams were shifting and there was no... warning, nothing that said I should intervene. I saw them seal you in something with brass top." she turned again, propping herself up on her elbows, eyes shimmering with tears "I didn't come for you, because to do so, would have been selfish of me and I was surrounded by people who had lost more than just a husband. It wasn't till Arda crept into my dreams, here shores littered with dead, that I came home. A letter you wrote a year ago I only read yesterday."

She sniffed, brushing away a tear that trailed down her cheek. "What happened, Seroth?"

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[member="Rosa Gunn"]

He guarded her from tears. Hands swept up her cheeks, catching felt-soft droplets pooling into calloused palms. Seydon's touch was roughened, coarse, plying to her ribs as he tugged her up the length of his torso. The only supplication he knew to offer her instead of dragging explanations were through kisses. So he parted her mouth and begged forgiveness over her lips and tongue. As if cued to routine, wind whipped up the port plane-hulling, posing after-light images composed of distant lightning on a long horizon fogged by drifting cloud walls.

"It fell through my fingers," He whispered. "Rosa, I don't know how it started. It just did. I went out for a contract and suddenly, everything began escalating, I couldn't make it stop. Just... Let me tell you, Ashla..."

So he told her the wrought tale of coming to dead Dromund Kaas, steering amidst flattened metropolis' ground under Mandalorian heels, pooled with oceans of heat-scoured bodies rendered into skeletal fragments and boney char. There was the SOS call originating from Slahtiz Port, encountering 'spawnbeasts and a singular, ominous watcher. Along came the Dunaan Ajax who befriended him, his briefing by the coarse, exhausted Commander Boudica, on to Hythe Park not a day later, and his wrestled contests with further monsters on the waters beyond Scale Mile. Harcress. Sillian Cassat. Rosa Gunn was told of a yawning conspiracy involving ransoming over six hundred thousand souls for the cooperation of one man. Their first trap he foiled. Ajax took him into his confidences; overnight, nursery rhymes about long gone Ys took on clarified reality. There was scope now, and threat. If Ys, that bygone half-myth little considered in any annal, was truth enough to motivate butchering killings, then how much more terrible and sophisticated was their sought prize?

After idling for a week to nurse wounds, writing out her letter, Seroth went out when the Shistavanen beast Harcress reared his head, burning a power plant to cinders. The monster was tracked below ground, confronted in a dismal chamber, fought. Beaten. But then rescued. Stenwulf appeared and proceeded to have his game. He did what he could to mitigate details but Rosa's eyes bored wide on him during the relating of his snapped arm and broken spine. Then he met Borja Sennex and learned either false truths or some semblance of a terrible relation between them. When his offer of cooperation was rebutted, he left Seroth to Stenwulf. He woke up next in a coffin, broke free and dug for the surface, only to find the Mercenary's voice mocking him.

He'd been left to die in the haunts of Jurgoran Prison, some ancient and evil place Dark Lords had sent their foes to perish since time immemorial. Ajax once more rescued him from certain demise and began careful tending to his condition. Without immediate and professional medical aid, he'd never walk again. Ajax laid out a final option. Some secrets of Jurgoran were unknown even to such wily parties as Borja Sennex. Seroth learned in greater depth the Dunaan, a caste of monster slayers, called witchers by some and most, and a figure named the Lodge of Shade who occupied a foreboding keep deep below the prison itself. It was there Ajax underwent his own transformation, subsequently offering the same chance to him. With little recourse otherwise, Seroth accepted.

They ventured in like company down into fortified reliquary chambers styled in ancient, disused architectural motifs, some thirty thousand years old and even older as Ajax told. The Lodge of Shade awaited in a dust-choked laboratory stacked with noetic tools of frightening make and unknowable purpose. Put to an examination, he was deemed unworthy. But for Ajax's argument and his own desire to accept the Trial of the Waters, he was allowed an orthodox chance. He slipped into a sleep for seven excruciating days in the alchemical concoction, vividly hallucinating troubling visions that resurrected memories of ghosts. When he emerged... Seroth was a virtually dead character, now replaced by the figure Rosa gave her love and body for, though his soul remained intact.

Empowered by the Trial, Ajax slaved the man through an aggressive process of retraining. Time was lost while hours and days blurred into a motley collection of ever increasingly demanding exercises. But Seroth learned. By Gods, he learned. Now his way was with the longsword, master of the Ysian school of blade combat, tracker and haunter of monsters. Paired brother-swords were collected from the tomb of an ancestor: the unnamed Marauder, who'd been a Dunaan witcher herself, and from whose loins he'd descended from. A last trial before Ajax accepted him into the caste was to simply make an escape for the surface. Seroth did so, battling monsters and ghosts alike, confronting assassins sent to guard the upper Dark Temple from anything that emerged down below. One survived, pointing the way to another world. As a last formality, Ajax asked for him to relinquish his name and take on a new one. Seroth did so... And became Seydon.

Harcress and Cassat he tracked to Cholganna, slaying both in vengeance for their crimes against the dead of Dromund Kaas. From 'Black Vermillion', he extracted that Borja Sennex was fast on his way for Arda before attempting a dual murder/suicide before blowing out the side of a cliff-face. Seydon survived, then voyaged home. On Arda, he found further evidence of Sennex's willingness to commit atrocity for the sake of his own long laboured ambitions. The Lord Inquisitor had driven on through a hurricane's blistering wrath. He followed, and subsequently confronted Stenwulf. They battled; one last time. And Stenwulf was felled. Sennex too, as Seydon rescued Shev Rayner's personal effects from being pilfered by the Inquisitor in his bid to discover the way to Ys, though the Inquisitor made good with his escape. ...When all was said and done, what remained was still wind and thunder.

"Then I waited for you," Seydon whispered in the cleft between Rosa's breasts, kissing up to her sternum. "Locals said you'd landed out somewhere east. I didn't think I catch up in time before you left. That's the whole of the story, Rosa, all of it..."

 

[Rosa Gunn]

Time always seemed to slip by them as they were engulfed by matters out of their control. The force demanded they protect those unable to protect themselves. Seydon hunted, took out beasts before they could do more damage, and Rosa healed what damage they had done. They were guardians, and nothing would pull them from that task, no matter how selfish they wanted to be, no matter how much they wanted to turn their backs on the galaxy and simply lie in each others arms, the force would always call to them. So Rosa understood, when the matter had slipped out of his control, she understood why there had been no word and she listened intently, never interrupting as her love told his story.

She ran her finger through his now white hair as he ran kisses along her sternum, eyes fixed on the ceiling above. "Seydon..." she tried the name on her lips smiling slightly as she did. "Your father would be proud of you, I think." she moved her eyes to him "I am proud of you. Time and time again you are placed in a situation that begs you to question your actions, your morals and every time you come out on top. Stenwulf is gone and we have a new enemy to contend with. For now, let him wallow in his wounded pride." She sat up, kissed Seydon fiercely and then slid from the bed, she flet the worries of the rest of the galaxy settle on her shoulders as she moved from his arms and desperately wanted to climb back between the sheets with him.

"You missed a lot, love. None of it good." She climbed back onto the bed, raining kisses all over his face "I can depress you with it while you cook breakfast." She grinned, dancing away from any hands that sought to pull her back into bed and left him lying there. Her caff cup from earlier was still scattered across the floor. Cleaning up the mess hastily, she uttered a soft curse as she realised the state of her galley counter. There wasn't any food in sight, just old caff cups and various piled of datachips, pads and papers. When had she gotten so messy?

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Slit eyes widened into gentle ovals while following the soft, teasing bounce in [member="Rosa Gunn"]'s fleeing step, as she rounded the corner by the entry doors and disappeared out into the vessel interior. Why she bothered to hang on her royal emerald velvet robe he didn't know. After brunch, they'd need to wash. Seydon knew he stank of caked sweat, foul with body odour. It wasn't entirely his fault; rolling up onto his haunches, dangling legs off the mattress, he felt along strokes of nail-cuts rapidly closing over his shoulders and spine.

The witcher's mind wandered... Sweat. Flesh. The sight of her bare stomach contorting with clean muscle. Eyes clenched. Lips parted, teeth flashing with spittle. Screaming. Hanging on. Desperately. Tightly. Heat baking them. Thunder rippled overhead with godly laughter. She begged him to hurry. He did. She spoke his name in mantra. More. Then she couldn't hold on. Fire took them. "I love you, Rosa..."

Seydon smiled and blew a kiss at a holo-portrait they'd taken prior, twelve months ago when they wed and Jaxton insisted they'd have more than simple memory as a keepsake. In her strapless wedding gown, hair perfectly coiffed in a net of veiled silk and gauze, Rosa Gunn looked better than perfect. The Dunaan rose, slid on his pants, strolling out into the kitchens.

Their mess was a small disaster but he shooed Rosa away and asked her to run the caff dispensers. He dipped into their freezer stocks following a brisk clean up of counter-space. His wife preferred his touch at the stove. Heat elements roared on and he got to work, wielding obsidian-edged cutlery.

There was sweet corn, bacon, and tomato salsa for the dry flatbread chips he warmed in delicate oils, mushroom and onion melt sandwiches, ophidiean-duck complimented by stacks of burned orange confit, and cool, milky jar-glasses filmed high with his personal concoction of bananas, mangos, and strawberries. Her husband didn't finish yet. Seydon topped off pancakes dripped from a batter blend milked with Corellian yogurt and Ardan peaches, fetching a farmer's market veggie pizza from a closed stone-oven, before topping the spread with a balsamic marinated Nerf flank-steak with prosciutto, spinach, and provolone. A grand breakfast to spite bad news.

 

[Rosa Gunn]

Rosa became almost childlike in his presence, forgetting the worries that lurked at yhe edge of her vision she tried her hand at stealing morsels of food as he prepared it, earning a sharp smack on the back of her hands. She rained kisses down the side of his neck, fire rising between them only for her to slide again out of his grasp, teasing.

As the feast took form Rosa realised how poorly she had eaten without him. Surviving mostly on caf and what ever fast snack she could grab between patients. Sitting opposite him on the breakfast bar, her chin resting on her hand she made a silent vow not to let him slip away for so long again. Not without contact.

"Glad to see you've not lost your touch, love." She drew a plate of pancakes towards her and tucked in, quiet for a moment as she tried to think where to begin. "The sith have returned. Two groups, one north of us known as the New Order and one between Fringe space and the Republic. The One Sith..." she paused playing with her food for a moment as she thought of Coruscant. "They came without warning. Took Coruscant, flattened the Jedi temple. Millions of people were trapped there." She shook her head "Ilias, Turin and I were doing a medical supply run from Carida when they hit again...I forgot how much I hated the battlefield." Eyes glazed for a moment as dead faces peered up at her in her memories. She blinkes them away and settled her gaze on her husband. "They were planning a counter attack when I left but they are tough, well organised. Those to the north of us have their eyes on the Mandalorians, thus far they've been unsuccessful in any attack. Makes me worry that they might look for an easier target but I'm doubtful that our neighbours will give them the chance to think twice."

That wss two wars, two out of three. "The protectorate have decided it's their duty to deal with the Feds. They struck Druckenwell, they won but it cost seven hundred billion lives. Its a mess out there."

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[member="Rosa Gunn"]

Druckenwell struck against cosmological fabric with enough vicious grief to tear open a new yawning rift across every spectrum of perception in the Force. Seydon remembered waking half-dressed, cloaked in chilly sweat, struggling to upend out of his island hammock before he violently heaved. Later, he learned of sympathetic water-spouts storming over Arda's eastern lagoon reaches, of mud volcanoes at Scypio's Reach awakening after their eight-thousand year slumber, a sink-hole half a kilometer wide swallowing up whole a pearled collection of linked coral islands before hushing, and blue-lightning burning out Hadrian's Band. To say nothing of horrific nightmares described as scenes of unnumbered bodies cavorting in terrifying dances, all dressed in fire and crackling flesh, tongues and eyes turning to roasted ooze.

Seydon sat down beside Rosa, quiet, thoughtful, dipping his sandwich into placid egg yokes. "I'd heard something of Baktoid being the apex party responsible for the losses at Druckenwell. Someone hit a kill-switch, dropped every orbital shipyard in their possession, burned out the world rather than give Cater an inch. And now you tell me Coruscant's lost."

He shook his brow, reaching for another sip of caff. "You're right. It is a mess. Just imagine what's slipped through the cracks..."

 

[Rosa Gunn]

"I don't want to." She replied shaking her head "Every time I do I find myself in the same place we were on Teth. We're known now, there is no escaping it, nowhere we can run too. Best we can do is harden our borders, make sure we have the right friends. Prepare for the worst case scenario and pray for the best." She fell into quiet contemplation as she ate the rest of their feast, whatever childlike moments of joy she had experienced earlier already seemed like a lifetime away, as the worries began to settle on her shoulders.

"I saw Darron." she said after a time "The first time we've actually spoken nicely to each other since...." she trailed off finger curling about her caff cup she stared into the dark liquid for a moment. It no longer hurt quite as much as it used to, time had seen to that and the relationship she had with her child's force ghost helped a great deal. Still she was never comfortable discussing it. "He's preparing for his death."

[member="Seydon of Arda"]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

"Mmmn..." Seydon hummed into a forkful of ophidiean duck meat, the colours of rosemary and violet, biting into the soft flesh 'till his teeth caught at the fork-prongs and tugged further sustenance off onto his tongue. He chewed through for a long moment, regarding Rosa, the light playing off her hair, her stare growing as long and wide as the Kessel Maw into her black-caff brew cup. Seydon nuzzled her knee with his toes, offering what he could in a comforting smile. Darron Wraith was a character, putting it diplomatically.

"Did he ask to reconcile?" Seydon said after a beat. "Did he mention at all what had him so dour?"

[member="Rosa Gunn"]

 

[Rosa Gunn]

"Aye, he did. Just about anyway." She blinked, looking up from her caff. "He's been having visions of an enemy he's not met before. He didn't say in so many words he believed he was going to die, but I know him well enough to hear what hasn't been said." There was another long pause, a gaze that carried her away from the here and now. "He wants me to find his son, should the worst happen." A sigh escaped her and she let the burden roll from her shoulders. Too quickly she was falling back into her state of worry.

"I'm sorry love, I don't mean to lay my burdens on your shoulders." She smiled sadly "What will you do with Shev's journals?"

[member="Seydon of Arda"]