Nature, as the saying goes, abhors a vacuum.
For thousands of years the Jedi Temple, once the heart of the order thanks to the sacking of Coruscant, had lain vacant - its classrooms empty, its training fields silent, its meditation chambers filled with naught but dust and scuttling scavengers. Sheltered by the mountains at its back and the lakes and rolling hills that spread out before it, it was a peaceful, secluded place, seldom disturbed. But that had been
before the great battle for Tython had begun. Now no place with strategic value could remain unused. Now the ruins were coveted.
They drew armies like a compass needle to the poles.
There was a smattering of Imperials, the soldiers of the 4th and 313th, working to dig in on the east side of the temple. On the south side, just across the water from the Flesh Raider grounds, the Elysium Empire - a foe new to the Maw - had established their encampment. And north of the place, directly between the Brotherhood army and their goal, was a mixture of lightsiders - Alliance soldiers, Silver Jedi, and Ashlan Crusaders all worked to reinforce the area, or patrol for any sign of the coming storm. They were the temple's new walls.
All of them stood between the Maw and Kaleth.
Rather than
converging on a single location, the Brotherhood's armies
spread out from one. Sinister
Kyrel Ren
and his savage Crimson Hands marched northwest from the downed star destroyer, toward Master's Rest. Mighty
Zachariel Steelblood
and his Bloodsworn marched southeast, determined to guard the Dark Voice's ritual site at Akar Kesh.
Thomas Barran
and his detachment of Scar Hounds seized the mountains to the north, watching down over the whole field, while
Romund Sro
gathered up his madmen.
So it fell to The Mongrel's own to march
due south.
They, too, aimed to fill the emptiness.
-----------------------------------
Of course, not all of Tython's defenders were
patient.
The Scar Hounds faced their first challenge from the same threat that had first confronted the Mawite warfleet: House Io. Rushing ahead of all other defenders, this particular foe seemed determined to square off
alone against a threat that the entire rest of the galaxy had felt it prudent to unite against.
"They're certainly brave," Onas Korv murmured, watching the
Rhand-class cruiser descending onto the flooded plain directly opposite the Mawite star destroyer. Or perhaps they just had too much faith in that weird-looking ship.
Onas was a tall, broad-shouldered woman, a Shorak mercenary who'd joined the Brotherhood for credits rather than faith. The Mawites were going to overrun Shor at some point - just a matter of time, really, they owned pretty much all the space around it - and Onas had figured she might as well get out in front of her homeworld's fall. She'd always been good at
adapting, and she'd risen through the ranks pretty quickly, becoming a Scar Hound subchief within a couple of years. The wind might be blowing another way now, though.
Might be time to grab some Jedi artifacts and split.
Lowering her macrobinoculars, her mechanical arm whirring on one side of her body while the muscles of her heavily-tattooed organic one rippled on the other, Onas looked over the force that The Mongrel had left in her care. Then she looked back at the Io ship, all twenty-eight hundred squidlike meters of it. They didn't have time to tangle with the thing; they had places to
be, and clashing with such a minor part of the defensive alliance would only waste hours and troops. But she had to deal with all this interference
somehow.
Or did she? The battle cruiser looked to be about as nimble on the turn as her geriatric granddad trying to maneuver his walker through a turnstile, and the main advantages of the Scar Hounds' mechanized force were
speed and
mobility.
"Just race the armor past it," she finally ordered, shrugging.
"By the time it adjusts its firing arcs or unloading position, we'll be half done with the battle." By her command, the War Skiffs and technicals and speeder bikes just kept on going due south, entirely ignoring the deploying Io forces.
She supposed she couldn't leave them
totally unopposed, though, or the armor would have a threat nipping at their heels.
"Send in the worms to slow 'em down," she followed up.
"They love swamp fighting." And the
Legion of the Leech did indeed enjoy fighting in slimy conditions. The lugubraa mercenaries slithered forth at her order, spreading out across the flooded plain. Their grenades and rotary cannons would be
excellent for shredding infantry, and they would be incredibly difficult to root out of the boggy landscape.
They weren't much for anti-vehicle combat, though, so the tanks - how
did they have so many tanks and battleships without the resources of an actual galactic government? - would be a problem. Or they would have been, if the Io battlecruiser hadn't set down right across from a grounded but still operational
star destroyer. Oops! Onas raised her macrobinoculars again, then called out coordinates to the gunnery teams.
"Turbolasers and concussion missiles, fire on my mark. Let's teach them the meaning of 'personal space', eh?"
-----------------------------------
While Onas dealt with
that unwelcome interruption as best she could, Mandugei of Tiantang led his
orbak riders southward. He and his warriors were Kagan-Jin, the people of the rolling plains, herders and wanderers and raiders of the great horde. When the Brotherhood had come to their homeworld, showing them the power of the Three Avatars and granting them vengeance against the Jin cities, they had eagerly joined up to follow the prophet of the Maw. Mandugei had faced many battles since then, from Felucia to Teta.
In each, he had found glory for himself and his clan.
Today, however, Mandugei was about to meet the last thing he expected: his enemy equivalent. As his unit of twelve riders crested the hill overlooking the Jedi Temple ruins, they caught sight of
Lehvi Vass
and his Akk Riders, scouting for his enemies just as Mandugei scouted for the Maw.
"Kill them before they report back!" the rough rider bellowed, spurring his orbak mount into a charge. In one hand he gripped his power lance, aimed for strike to the heart. In the other he held a blaster pistol, firing madly as he rode.
His fellow warriors charged after him, bearing down on the Akk Riders, determined to keep them from bringing any warning to the rest of the valley. The Mawite vehicles would be moving up right behind them, and surprise would be a powerful weapon against the Alliance marines in the temple if they could preserve it. Mud and grass churned beneath the thundering hooves of the orbaks, and Mandugei gripped his lance tight. The weapon could tear through tank armor with ease; against flesh, the results would be horrific.
If they could
catch the Akk Riders, of course...
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Aboard the lead
Mawite War Skiff, which its crew had nicknamed the
Messy Blighter, Mucknose of the Brotherhood Auxiliaries cranked the deck-mounted MetaCannon to the correct firing angle. Mucknose was a short fellow, but built like he'd had one Gamorrean parent, his frame bulging with hard-earned muscle. It hadn't always been that way, but the effort of cranking and loading the huge cannon in battle after battle had swollen his upper body to near-cartoonish proportions. Hard work, but better that than the front lines.
Mucknose hadn't always been called Mucknose, but he couldn't remember his old name anymore; the Heathen Priests had tortured it out of him, replacing it with obedience and faith. He was a true believer in the Maw, certain that he would be reincarnated into the Galaxy To Come... only he wasn't too eager to be reincarnated
today, thanks very much. He'd earned his name by being an unrepentant suck-up to the Overseers, but he didn't mind the mockery. It'd gotten him his gunner position, and that position had kept him alive.
Well, so far, anyway. Today wasn't looking good.
The whole galaxy had decided to show up to Tython, and poor Mucknose was caught in the middle of it. If he was going to die, and let's be honest, he probably
was, he just hoped it was quick. He was down for a martyr's reward, but he wasn't too keen on
blood. That was why he liked artillery, fighting from a distance. And today his artillery assignment was to land some shells on the northern outskirts of the Jedi Temple ruins,
incendiary shells that would burn the Alliance marines out of their defensive positions, with any luck.
"Owright, then," he huffed, wiping a grimy hand across his glistening forehead.
"Clear to fire, cap'n." The
Messy Blighter's commander, a rail-thin Weequay they just called "Slim", nodded at him. With her go-ahead, he depressed the massive firing lever, and the MetaCannon barked like a dozen angry Rontos struck with shock prods. A wave of incendiary shells flew over the hill and arced into the valley, headed for the northern edge of the temple ruins. A storm of smaller
thundahvelins followed, launched from technicals.
Zark San Tekka
and
Madison Starr better take cover...
Before
You are more than what the Brotherhood made you, she told him. The Mongrel - no, Asher, at least inside his head - wanted to believe her. Perhaps the simple act of giving himself a new name was enough to prove that. He had been able to hide his true self, the self that lived and loved beyond the Maw, from even the mighty Taskmaster. Through all this time, all these battles, he'd been so much more than even his closest allies knew. All except Mercy, the one who had made it all possible, who had made his mind strong and whole again.
But was that truly an
escape from the Maw? In the end, he was still their creature. There was nowhere else in the galaxy he could go, nothing else he could do but fight for them. If he gave up on their holy mission, stopped seeking martyrdom in the name of the Avatars, then he would be admitting that all the
horrible things he'd done were for
nothing. He couldn't live with that. He
had to believe, had to keep going along the path that the Dark Voice had set for him. It if was all meaningless, if it didn't matter, he hadn't just been a monster.
He'd been a
pointlessly cruel monster.
She liked his name, liked what he shared with her, and he smiled. He loved to see her happy, the way a smile lit up her features... but he dared not think about it for too long. How many smiles had he denied her when he'd stolen her life?
~ On my world, Asher means 'blessed', ~ he told her, running a hand through her hair.
~ I chose it because you have been a blessing to me. ~ But I have been a curse upon you. She had healed him, brought him back from the brink... and he had given her so much hardship and horror and pain.
He was
blessed, but he was no
blessing.
-----------------------------------
Within
Mercy walked back to him, flicking him on the nose, teasing him for his laziness.
~ I was just admiring the view, ~ he told her, offering her a laugh and a wink. And she did look
good in his shirt, filling it out in all sorts of
interesting ways. She distracted him - her beauty, her smile, her laugh, her little teasing quips. And he
needed to be distracted. Outside this room, outside this little piece of paradise in their minds, he could feel reality like a half-remembered dream. He knew a battle was coming, another time when The Mongrel would fight.
When he would kill good, honest people.
And Kallan couldn't stop it.
~ Be lazy with me, ~ he told his wife, taking her hand and pulling her back to the bed.
~ Let's stay here a little longer, just you and me. All I want to think about is you. ~ He needed her, needed her help to block out the horrors at the edge of his awareness, the evil things that the man who'd been put inside his body would do. He wanted to curl up with her and shut out the whole galaxy, forget everything they'd been through, pretend that
reality was the dream and
this was all there really was. Maybe one day he'd do it all for real.
Until then, he wanted to pretend.
-----------------------------------
Now
At first, it was just a feeling, a call that came to his mind as if from the gods. It was probably only because of Mercy that he could sense it at all; The Mongrel had no connection to the Force, no ability to sense such things, and only his wife's telepathy could connect him to that wider world of mystical power. He knew enough to follow it, to go east across the hills and plains of this pristine world, heeding the call of the Avatars. But he did not know
where he was going, or
why. He simply obeyed, as he always did. Such was
faith.
It wasn't until the coordinates pinged on his comm that he realized what it all meant. He knew the sender, understood the message and what it meant. As soon as he laid eyes on it, he knew why he'd been called here, what his dreams had signified.
Barran. For ten years and more they had been commanders on opposing sides of this war, equal opposites bound together by a bloody destiny. Sometimes they had clashed directly, other times through champions and proxies and armies. But always they had been one another's rivals.
He respected no outsider more...
... but this was the end.
That was the way the cycle worked - apex to nadir to apex, rise and fall and rise, an endless circle, a crashing of waves upon the shore. They had been doing this for too long to continue without resolution. This time there would be no disengaging, no quirk of fate that would spare them from taking one another's lives. The duel that was about to begin, this Journey's End, would be final for one of them... or perhaps both. Some part of The Mongrel had known from the moment he'd met Barran that it would all have to end this way.
The Mongrel had won the last rounds of their contest, a battle fought not with blades but with
lives. He had taken away Erskine's champion,
Shai Maji
, the Wardog, and turned her to the service of the Maw. And he had made Erskine's own flesh and blood, his wayward son Thomas, into his successor. That was the warlord's vile Mawite gift - to corrupt all that he touched, turning the things that Barran had set against him back on their sender. But in a cycle such as this, blows were struck in turns... and that did not bode well for The Mongrel.
This would be either his final victory, or Erskine's vengeance.
"It's Barran," he told Mercy.
"He's calling to me."
She would come with him, of course. He thought about turning her away, sparing her the sight of this last, mortal duel... but she was part of him, his love and his strength, and he was not sure he could face this ending alone. Perhaps that was selfish, but he doubted he could have talked her out of coming along no matter how hard he'd tried. She'd felt the call of destiny too.
~ Thank you, ~ he whispered to her. She always
did take care of him, always found her way back to her place at his side, no matter what happened.
But she could not save him this time.
Mercy's arms encircled his metal waist, and the speeder bike kicked into gear. It streaked across the fields, heading for the campsite where Erskine and his closest friend even now awaited them. Soon the warlord could see the little trail of smoke curling up from the campfire the old general had built, and he guided his vehicle toward it. The noise of the battle faded into the background, and the world became oddly peaceful and still. Deep inside, Kallan stirred, remembering a camping trip he'd taken as a child. Better days. Kinder times.
They were nearly there now.
To the place this would all
end.
Liram Angellus
@open for tagging
