Private Stellar Exchanges

[Astra Sadow]

Astra simply stared at the man as he stepped back and turned his back on her. Burnt golden eyes turned into seas of red once more the moment she left his sight. It hadn't been enough. Or had she given him too much? Both. Yes, of course, it was never enough especially when you gave someone more than they'd earned. Everything wanted more. It'd claw and bite its way to laying claim to everything that fell before its eyes.

In the time it took Lysander to take a single step, everything changed.

The transport simply vanished. Not even signs of its landing struts crushing the wild grass and glowers beneath its unyielding mass could be found.

A sharp ping of metal as it struck rock filled the open air. Nightstar now stood upright on its own, a third of it enveloped by solid stone. Some traditions deserved to be brought back. Some hallmarks should never be forgotten.

It, at least, freed Astra's hands as she suddenly appeared upon a throne situated upon a stone floor. It began at a single point and then stretched backwards -- seemingly a tear in reality itself with two places stitched together. The interior of a throne room built out in the open with a red moon glowing through a floor to ceiling window behind the high-back throne; an impossibility in contract to the sun that still rose over head over the field. A sharp crack of leather sounded as she swept her jacket wide with a pivot to settle down on to the seat. One leg crossed atop the other as she reached over to lift a chalice from a nearby pedestal.

She didn't say anything as the contents of the chalice swirled under a lazy, circular motion in the palm of her hand. Astra lifted the vessel to her lips and felt the ravenous thirst slacked but a little as the wet fluid soothed her parched throat. It was not nearly as good as that freshly obtained, but Astra had gone without long enough. The mood to appease a desire to do nothing needless had gone. A layover at some space station along the way no longer was an amusing thought, and so something to take the edge off while she waited.

What would Lysander do now? How long would the stubbornness hold? The pride. If he didn't want to use words, she had other means of conversation.

Lysander von Ascania​

 

[Lysander von Ascania]

Astra Sadow​

Movement was supposed to give the mind somewhere to go; standing still left hardly any room to think, let alone untangle anything.

Another step forward and the ground held, the sky held, but the transport did not. Where solid bulk should have cast its shadow across the field, only grass continued unbroken; for half a second even sight felt unreliable, as if light had tricked the eye or a blink had been missed. Was his vision the thing in need of correcting, or had perception simply failed before impossibility did?

Waiting came next, braced for some familiar sting or for fury to beat its wings. Yet nothing arrived. Once, that reaction would have been instantaneous.

Outrage would've been easier to hold. This, however... most things offered something to work with. An argument could be taken apart, a threat answered, a bargain reworked. Any sort of problem with edges was typically preferable.

The sharp report of metal on stone pulled attention elsewhere. Nightstar stood where decidedly nothing had stood before. Architecture now occupied a place where it had no business being. Beyond that, a red moon burned.

No doubt the scene surprised him, though apparently, after losing a hand to another dimension and finding it again, the reaction took more effort to show. And there the Queen sat, enthroned not in fire as some songs promised, but in something far cooler and more terrible; disillusionment spread through Lysander like frost blooming across a windowpane, leaving the myth paler than before.

Weirdest of all was how clearly everything registered. Colors were almost too crisp to be real. Suppose there was a kind of mercy in the way Astra had stopped hiding how things were truly built, how they fit together underneath. It was easier to know where everything stood, or more accurately, where she had decided everything belonged without bothering to ask him. At least, that was how it felt as he approached the throne.

Right now, Lysander lacked the energy to cross-examine his own heart, and the honesty of that exhaustion felt damning in itself.

His hand drifted up, turning and opening while searching for a way to show what he meant. "Is this how we're speaking now?"

 

[Astra Sadow]

Astra regarded Lysander when he turned back toward her, but she made no effort to stand at his reversal. "You spurn efforts to save you. You grow incensed at the return of your sword. You go to contemplate on your own. And now you question my house." Her hands spread out to either side of the throne.

Echoes of movement or chatter seemed to bounce off the stone walls behind Astra. A row of columns appeared in the fields now to either side of Lysander. Bit by bit it seemed another place was encroaching on the world upon which they -- he -- stood.

The red-eyed woman chuckle. "If my people had been half so ungrateful or suspicious their broken bodies wouldn't even be ash after all this time."

"Mistress," a gravely voice hissed from the ether, "whomst troubles thee?"

A flippant roll of the wrist followed the question. "A man of many questions. So many he now questions me."

A low rumble followed from the void. "Shall I devour it, Mistress, so it troubles thee no more?"

"No, Dear. This one is not for you." Astra stretched out her left hand, fingers interlocking with long, black talons that hung suspended in the air of a yet revealed source. A smile spread across her red lips before their hands parted.

Then her eyes slid back to Lysander. Perhaps he'd have more questions, or perhaps he would turn away from her once again.

Lysander von Ascania​

 

[Lysander von Ascania]

Astra Sadow​

Stone kept trespassing. From nothing at the field's edge, columns unfurled themselves, one after another. Rooted in place, Lysander watched Astra's world claim another inch and felt the ground under his boots become less his own. Outnumbered, outmaneuvered, outmatched... such a pattern had become so familiar it had curdled into tolerance.

Eventually words gathered enough substance to break their silence and leave. "Do you extend an invitation for questions only to turn them away once they stand at your door? Fidelity to myself was the only honest gift I could lay before you. Questioning your house was never meant to wound it."

In answer to her assertion, Lysander's palm turned upward; his fingers unfurled slowly. "Then it's fortunate I'm not one of your people."

The first true break in an otherwise carefully kept impassiveness arrived as his brows furrowed. "Restrain your little pet," came the murmur that was somehow colder for its softness, eyes never leaving the dark where the talons had been. "Courtesy between us will not survive a second invitation to be eaten."

And still no movement followed.

"By what self-serving logic do you alone remain unexamined, while every other element of this wretched affair is laid bare beneath scrutiny? Do grant me illumination, Astra. Speak and enlighten me, for clearly some crucial axiom, some truth, has eluded my grasp entirely."

 

[Astra Sadow]

The chalice was flung aside in the same instant Astra uncrossed her legs. She launched out of the throne and took a step forward without an ounce of mirth gracing her suddenly angular features. "Call my daughter a pet once more, Prince of Ukatis," the thought needn't be completed, it should be evident whatever the ramification was it would not be pleasant.

In the same breath, Had Abaddon was swallowed by the stone Hall that now surrounded them. A second level ran parallel to the wide, open approach to the throne. On both levels and to either side stood numerous figures. Few looked alike, and fewer still could be mistaken for Human by even the most generous of definitions. The daughter or pet that had spoken might very well be a seven foot tall, thin, pale create with black dragon scales down her center and along most of her limbs. Her solid black eyes regarded the fleshy thing suddenly in full view of all assembled.

Silence reigned in the Hall as Astra's crimson gaze seized upon her guest.

With a snort and a shake of her head that broken the tension that ran the length of her body, coiled to strike, Astra's features relaxed once more. "You do not examine me, Lysander. Ever since I saved you from being devoured you've snidely turned my every grace away. Even now you accuse me of refusing to answer a question you haven't asked. The decorum of the gratitude of the 'Modern' Sith."

"Ask it, then. Let us see what festers under the surface together."

Lysander von Ascania​