Star Wars Roleplay: Chaos

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Sweet Apathy's Black Toll

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Point Nadir

“Identification.”

The woman’s voice at the other end of the line was brusque, though Matsu was not expecting anything different. A flash of annoyance cast out like a net, dragged back with nothing to show for it as she let her fingers fly over keys to type rather than speak her response. At this distance and with no familiarity with the bored stranger it would require too much of Matsu’s energy and steal too much of her current subtlety to communicate telepathically. So she answered with an alias crafted rather artfully for her by a lone slicer who seemed to see the benefit in maintaining her warm wishes. While she assumed no one within the comet-city would have scruples in regards to her morality, she thought her reputation might precede and preclude her. Her invasion of several unsuspecting planets within the last few months was hardly idle gossip, and no one was more prickly about protecting what they considered theirs than criminals.

But while there was something appealing about the daydream of bringing her armies to bear against Point Nadir, the destruction she craved was more personal.

“Cleared.”

She’d never visited the criminal comet before, mostly because she’d never had a reason to take the trouble. The problem had never been finding Them so much as wherever their haunt was at the current moment. As Jackrab Hole yawned in to Fische’s Cove Matsu pulled up the fabric that had draped around her neck while it wasn’t being used to cover the lower half of her face, obscuring the mess of gnarled flesh. She had taken to having all of her clothes designed to cover her scarring elegantly - a fact that She would no doubt find as amusing as ever. Matsu’s discontent lay not with her appearance but what it meant for her, and one of its most glaring grievances was how much harder it made it to go unnoticed. Her arms were already a giveaway, but there was no getting around her holohorror face.

She left her ship in the Tethers. She didn’t much care what condition it was in when she came back to it, if it was even there at all.

The streets of the lower levels - if they could be called such - twisted and turned, rolling back on themselves or opening to completely new passages choked by the stench of decay both human and animal. Cloaked and hooded, Matsu could have passed for some slip of a ghost gliding among the rats feasting on half-rotten cheeks and tongues. Bodies rose silently as she walked by, pulling rodents and cockroaches from their flesh as they shuffled after her, muscle and bone gaining more coordination as they moved for the first time in days and weeks. Those who’d come to Point Nadir to make something of themselves only to find there was nothing to build threw themselves where they thought she couldn’t see, pressed in the slivers between makeshift shacks or hiding themselves under blankets. But she wasn’t there for them, and by the time her surroundings started showing more signs of affluence she had a sizable group of the Dead marching behind her.

Though still far from the more showy districts, wherever she found herself now was still admirably more perceptive of the hooded lady and her companions. And as was inevitable in such a place, the group whose turf it was considered did not take kindly to the gathering.

“Oi! What the hell is this?” The query was delivered in an exceptionally abrasive, nasal tone and Matsu wouldn’t have stopped were it not for the owner inserting himself squarely in her path.

“Let me pass,” she said simply.

“What, you dumb or something? Don’t speak Basic? I asked you a fething question lady - what the hell are you on about?”

Her eyes narrowed, rage hollowing her stomach at the realization that he was one of those who would never understand her, who couldn’t hear or understand anything sent telepathically. He hadn’t heard her. It drove her mad.

One of the Undead slipped out from behind her, walking impressively upright despite half of its ribcage having rotted in a crumpled mess due to the way it had died. It ignored the three bullets the protesting man put in its chest, reaching out a hand for the vest he wore and holding him close as it heaved an ocean of acidic bile on his face. Matsu pushed the hood off her head then to watch, her impassive face hellish in the glow of the acid pouring from her creature’s mouth. Time, practice, and experimentation made each incarnation of her army more easy to control and therefore deadlier. Beautiful.

The Undead who had so kindly removed the annoyance stepped back, wiping its mouth on the back of its hand and seeming to ignore the way the acid chewed through its own appendage. What was left of the guard rose from its knees, flesh melted from crown to sternum in a blooming pattern revealing a denuded skull - the center of some awful flower.

“You can understand me now,” she stated it in that sorceress’ language only her children understood.

It nodded and she would have smiled.

The other members of the gang she assumed her newest child had once belonged to came pouring from their hiding spots, intent on protecting their territory and riches. Matsu wanted nothing so fleeting, but it was the quickest way to what she did want. People came to Nadir to build something, and they came to be hidden. And so she must draw Them out. She assumed information would not travel at quite the same speed as which it was carried on Coruscant, but there was no ignoring the screaming that surrounded the Sith Lady as her army set to work expanding its ranks.

[member="Loray Tares"] | [member="Aver Brand"]​
<3​
 
For the restless soul that found shelter beneath such calloused form, he so rarely sought peaceful sleep. Laden with thoughts of the past, of acts committed, this time was no different. He discovered stability on the planet of Annaj, a cat hunting a mouse. Only to find the roles quickly reversed, all by the flip of a coin and thoughts of revenge. A world covered in water and death, a delimbed cat found comfort from the pawing of another. And with each scrape of the claw and lick of bloody fur, each pull of the nails, hair and flesh were stripped away. From the chasm of the feline corpse, a spider emerged to overshadow its original form. And there, it towered above not one, but two cats.

The history raced about, like a blur, as one battle became a thousand. And for two cats playing in the alley, scratching at the carcasses of those they mauled, it seemed they were so far apart. Worlds, cosmic ventures, and the vast emptiness of space separated what once felt like a bond formed of mutual benefit and only destroyed through death. And in the vein of his attention, bleeding dry from the world he was currently inhabiting, he awoke to a standing position...

Bright lights, far brighter than he could have ever wanted. That sterilized feel of the police headquarters, swept away for all their efforts, and yet here he stood within another esoteric domain, lit by fuselage components and metallic dome arrays. Paint spatter in excess throughout, complimented by marks of rust and complacent neglect. Dangling lamps swung and shook with every step that pushed him forward, weighted with the ideas of past responsibility - left in the worlds long gone and crushed into dust. The wake of his life, like dirt moving from his path, was something easily forgotten. At least, for the subconscious.

But he hardly ventured into the world without his armor. Not out of fear or thought, but simply practice and habit. The shoes sitting closest to the door were often the ones worn and how worn this armor truly was. Marks of age, circles of scorch and scuffs and cuts. Occasionally, he had some difficulty discerning difference between this heavy thing and the flesh that covered him. How often, it felt, that both might be an unneeded burden.

Would it not have been better to be stripped of it? To move about as only muscle and bone, a simplicity to covet?

"Are you looking to purchase something, sir?"

Sir? Was that what he was now? How confused could this vendor be, to look upon monster and interpret something other than monstrosity. Loray stepped forward, hand wading through suspended vegetables and meats, knocking them about like wind chimes.

"Sir...sir! Please don't touch. These are fresh!"
"Are they?"
"They are...please!" The vendor grabbed at the mans wrist, squeezing tightly around only to feel flesh that wouldn't give. Loray paused, frozen by the stimulation, as red visor turned to the vendor.
"You must pay for these items, now. I insist."
"You insist?"
"Yes."

He reached forward with unencumbered hand, removing the vendors grip. Ever so gingerly. Ever so uncharacteristic. Stepping forward, he looked up towards the meat and vegetables. A smile grew beneath the helmet, tinted by the yellow lamps above.

"I...don't want to pay for this..." Or anything.
"But...you have to. I'll call the cops!"
"I noticed the way you handled the register...you're left handed?"
"Y...yes?"

Loray lifted his left hand to shoulder height. With a snap of his fingers, the carpals in the left hand of the vendor snapped in place. The force proceeded through to the metacarpals. Following the sound of cracking and popping, the vendor leaned over the wooden stand, crying out in pain. The Bazaar seemed to just...move on. Perhaps it was because of notoriety, fame taken from bloody hands and agonal rasps. And perhaps this one was new to Point Nadir, new to who claimed control. Loray leaned over, pressing his hand against the Vendors head. But before he could apply the desired pressure, his communications rang.

::We've got an issue.::
"Hmmm..." He pulled his hand away, bearing teeth beneath metal. "I hope it's important, I'm in the middle of dinner."
::Someones stirring things up in the lower levels.::
"Interesting."
::Should I tell them you're heading there?::

Strafing his voxyn fingers against the communication device, he shut off the interface with a sudden mute. He had no interest in providing that sort of satisfaction, or at least not the hope in association. He'd investigate but he wouldn't do so for the purpose of fulfilling request. No unless the request came from her. Or her.

His mind drifted to ralltiir tigers in the snow, angels of blood and viscera beneath a trolley. Squealing and echoing in the distance, metal buckets bouncing against taught guy-wire. He didn't pay any mind to the feelings and thoughts that drifted aimlessly through him, despite the obvious overtones and notions of something missing. In the here and now. Instead, he pulled a piece of meat from the metal hangers and tossed it to a congregation of dogs. They barked and fought over the scraps as he stepped away from the vendor.

"Take care." A greeting. A threat. A warning. He left to the sound of a grown man wailing into his vegetables, watering them with tears and humiliation.

[member="Matsu Xiangu"] | [member="Aver Brand"]
 
Screams of the dying – their Siren’s call.

Precious, treasured, shrill and dead-quiet at the same time. As only She could be. Against the tapestry of countless suns and infinite blackness – she loathed it, for it harbored doubt and fear and questions left unanswered – against this quilt of pinprick lights, a supernova. There was no sound in space, no breath, no air. Nothing to carry the tremor of those silken, purring cords rippling in a swanlike throat.

But it was there. Vrag knew. Aver remembered.

Sweat-slick and wired, the firrerreo shot up in bed. Ragged gasps and a ramrod spine, with a thousand spiders crawling up her back. The scar-webs, just as countless as the stars in a sky she couldn’t see here, where leagues of comet and metal kept them separate. Only the artificial, cruel fires of Nadir left. Her fires.

Aver exhaled, willing her body into stillness and her mind back beneath the glacier. It was a dream – had to be – because [member="Matsu Xiangu"] was somewhere far away, ripping creatures apart just so she could feel them spill their life over those claw-fingers.

click click click

Metal boots or spider legs up her vertebrae?

She craned her neck, saw the lone worn boot of [member="Loray Tares"] disappear through the door. As her thoughts settled, she could feel his mirrored agitation echo along her spine, dripping blood.

There were no coincidences.

Soundless, Aver slipped from the bed, padding across the cool tile to the windows. Two clammy hands pressed against the invisible wall, and her breath hitched as she observed the lawless lands sprawling outwards. Hellfire vista and a halo of red. Aver could taste Her on her tongue suddenly, copper and nameless horror.

Her arms fell to her sides and then she was gone in a flurry of armor and arms; a hound caught the whiff of her favorite scent.
 
Removal and the corruption of a thousand alternate timelines shown to her at once had not driven her mad so much as stripped away the reason which used to define her. True, she still required provocation - but that patience was gone, worn thin by the knowledge that she’d squandered perhaps the only precious thing she’d managed to find. In all those other worlds They were there, and somewhere in this time she called home, she’d allowed herself to believe the triangle would stand without one of its sides - that in fact, it had never wanted that side at all. The vulnerability made her rage double.

The screaming was nearly non-stop, a mingling of fear and indignation spread between those fleeing and attacking. Some of the former were tinged by pain but her Children made quick work, sensing her urgency. They ripped arteries, punctured lungs, cracked sternums to remove hearts, raising the dead as quickly as they created them. Though they fought with the grit expected of men and women protecting their own they figured out to aim for the head only when the tide had risen too high to stop, falling beneath the onslaught to join its ranks. Matsu watched from behind the horde, gliding along their ranks and keeping her focus on finding Them in the Force. I’ve waited too long. Don’t make me wait any longer. Let me hurt you.

She tracked a brave soul with a flamethrower sprinting from within one of the miserable huts that lined the streets, watching as she unleashed fire on her Children. It was a slow but sure method of destroying them as eventually the flames would melt their brains, but for the moment they kept running headlong to meet her in the middle. She backed up quickly as she realized it wouldn’t act as quickly as she intended, but Matsu snapped out sharp tendrils, latching on to her brain and freezing her in place. The second closest thing to pleasure she knew overwhelmed her as panic by proxy flooded her brainstem, clamping down tighter against the woman’s struggle. She stayed there as the woman burned under the weight of dozens of crushing dead giving her flame back to her, feeling the melting of nerves and flesh as if it were her own.

But she had the luxury of leaving.

When she emerged on a higher level with her flock in tow, the comet’s insides had subtly changed with her presence - something like alertness. I feel you. Come out. They left havoc in their wake, blood on Matsu’s fingers as for once she took to brutalization, to the solid purity of striking something living. From here things would get more challenging the greater the threat she posed, but that had been the point. Yet still she held back, reserving that moment she was begging to let loose for their arrival. She was itching to wound them for her own mistakes.

[member="Loray Tares"] | [member="Aver Brand"]​
 
Turn the right corner on Point Nadir, and you can find anything...

...Screams...

...Dead and Dying...

...Emptiness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUV5-ZqQ4o0

The Souk was a middle ground between the upper echelons of Nadir and the Pits and the Fissure District. Despite the population of the comet, the distance wasn't all that far to traverse. Like encroaching the perimeter of a wind tunnel from the distance, the sounds of wailing and havoc filled the air. Discord on the wind, blood in the breeze, and the hard sensation of something mystic and wrong. There was a brand of alchemy turning the soil over, a brand that Loray would have known with both eyes gouged out and deafened by the sickening sound of his own screams. All sensations removed, all form of interface from the world gone, and he would have still known.

Nothing raised the hair quite like this.

Stepping towards a ledge, lofty position held above the lower levels like some defensible parapet, Loray knelt down. Hand clutching crumbling stone, he watched as the horde moved through the dark city. Red city, burned auburn and smelling of grime. The sounds were a motley, wails and moans and grunts all intertwined. Plop plop plop. A victim running from the group, through streets damp with blood and excrement and everything between. A maze slowly filling with used oil. Nadir, particularly the lower levels, wasn't known for it's keen sense of hygiene. In times like these, he was reminded of the Underworld of Coruscant, just out of arms length of the elevated despot. On Nadir, it was all in plain sight, and no one cared.

Except now.

Standing, he fell from the ledge with a swift kick off. Plummeting to the ground, he found himself between a runner and her chasers. One had a broken ankle and dragged his foot along with a limp, another held a hand at a large hole in the stomach - containing the intestines for the moment, between rigidly clutched fingers. Flies began to gather in thick floating carpets, buzzing as harbingers for the onslaught. One of the raised carried the head of a doll in her small hands, her face covered in marks of seeping red, as a sibling crawling to catch up behind her.

"Thank you, thank you for helping! Please, save me."

Loray diverted his attention from the revenants for just a moment, addressing the cowering woman with a tone of indifference. This woman didn't belong here, she didn't belong on Nadir or any place like it. A plight, a stain and indication of weakness upon the pyre of many more. Flashes of an old purpose crossed his mind, nations wiped clean for removal of deficiencies inherited throughout. He felt an anger well up, a point of no control, as he considered cutting her down himself. But then, what fun would there be for the flocking vultures who might feast upon flesh, once so carelessly used.

"No." Kneeling down, he launched himself above the army to cling to the window pane of the adjacent building. Flinging himself up to the slanted roof, he looked back to the expression of disbelief. And that slow transition to realization of fate. The horde paid him mind for just a moment, before turning on the woman. She slipped as she tried to stand, running and hitting every garbage can in her path. Until there was nowhere left to go, finding herself surrounded on all sides.

And the feast roared on, another victim claimed and shredded to pieces. When all was said and done, the stampede moved on, leaving the corpse wasted in the mud. A clicking sound resonated in the distance as one arm moved, propping up the body despite broken bones. One arm, the another. Until re-animation took full hold, body twisted and turned upwards as the nose searched the air. And just like that, she was suddenly mighty.

Knocking his tongue against his cheek, he took off in a run in the opposite direction. To find the center of the storm was rather simple. Somewhere in the middle.

[member="Aver Brand"] | [member="Matsu Xiangu"]
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfhkXxmnYHc

A live wire. She was a fething live wire, charge sizzling through her pumping blood. Couldn’t recall when she last ran like this. Didn’t care. The noise in the back of the head was growing louder with each slam of phrik boot against the ferrocrete. It was the scraping of saw against bone; the grinding of teeth; the cries of a thousand souls going out in agony. Unison. It was unison.

Familiarity flooded her veins as she pounded the streets, weaving through the stampede of fleeing hundreds. Some shot her crazed looks, mouths gaping. The whites of their eyes screaming ‘Are you mad?’. She was grinning despite the effort, not that they could see it. All they saw was the shadow of death speeding past, shoving their cowardice out of the way when they didn’t fling themselves aside fast enough.

Aver had been reduced to hunger in a matter of seconds. It was all she was, all she could think of. And only one manner of flesh, only one flavor of blood would satisfy her ravenous desire.

She crested a metal hill, stepping into a scene unknown even to Nadir and its many indiscretions. For all the forms of violence created, familiar, and perpetuated, this was one that the station hadn’t witnessed in all its eras. Neither had Ygdris, in all her eras.

The flood of undead was tar-like in its advance. It spilled through the alleys and swelled over stairways. It broke down doors, smoking out the cowering inhabitants in a chorus of pain. It ebbed and waned as She commanded, without a single trace of disobedience.

And Aver, for all her lives and fierce independence, understood.

Nearly crumbled then and there, nearly fell to her knees and begged for [member="Matsu Xiangu"] to collect what was hers. She hadn’t felt those claws gouge rivers into her back in years, nor those teeth shred silver flesh. Hadn’t felt the soft, soft skin, hadn’t gazed into endless eyes, hadn’t heard the Spider moan her name.

But she wanted to.

So she didn’t kneel, and didn’t succumb to that want. (a need really) Because Aver was not Vrag, after all. Because creatures mutate and evolve in adverse circumstances, and their relationship was nothing if not the epitome of hostility and violence. Yet they did it out of love, in all their twisted absurdity. Because they wanted to be better. They wanted to evolve. Together.

She picked up her pace again, scaling a nearby set of makeshift stairs onto a roof. The heights were still safe, or safer, at least. Oddly enough, there was no fear eating at her heart. It had been consumed by the all-encompassing knowledge that she and [member="Loray Tares"] were the only things in the universe that She would rather see alive than dead.

Creature comforts.
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFSWbkrAwwM

Inevitable as the tides they came, incessant pulse not quite the same as she'd remembered, but unmistakable. As they moved closer she felt them entering her web, their footsteps plucking gossamer strands to set her world to trembling.

The horde coalesced and broke apart, joined and dissolved at the whim of its hunger. Like some great wave monuments toppled before it, dwellings reduced to ruins under the weight of an ever increasing herd. Her mother had named her ‘goddess of the sea’, and in some mockery of their theme of evolution she had become her namesake, alone and afloat at the center of her ocean of corpses. Some dark buoy, she walked and ran among them, dead-dry skin whispering against her clothes. Those closest to her tugged and pulled, anxious to show her something, chattering their teeth anxiously before the weight of their brethren pulled them out towards the center.

It was when she looked up to decide a path to the higher reaches of Nadir that she saw Him. She thought of other times, that first time, a red sky and a different rooftop. And she was overwhelmed.

At once her flood became a hurricane, the eye slowing to a stop around her as she halted in her tracks and her undead stopped with her. Those at the edges continued their headlong careening towards prey, but the rest looked up with her to the man above. A stretch of seconds without the hiss and growl of the horde yawned wide, their sudden silence somehow deafening after their collective screams of hunger had filled the streets. They watched, a dark rotten sea with a pair of bright red eyes at its center, until Matsu made to move out of their ranks and towards the stranger.

And then they screamed.

Inexorably tied to their creator, they frothed to her emotions, white-capped and deadly as the sea began writhing against itself. Bony hands reached in to the sky towards the man high above, desperate for Him, grasping as the spider scaled the side of the building with leaps and claws. The necromancer hadn’t yet spotted Her but she was close enough that she might as well have been putting her hands all over Matsu. As the Sith approached the lip of the roof the tide of her creatures below pushed out in all directions, wild for the taste of flesh as their creator let go of composure.

Momentum carried her over the side of the rooftop in a roll, lifting out of it to her feet with her hands already curled around each other in a spell. True - there were no two creatures she would rather see alive than Them, but time had made some wound rotten in her guts, festered until she’d fabricated hatred. It was easy to release the spell from her hands even before she’d fully gotten her footing, purging everything she’d let decay. The metal of her hands was hot when she reached up to adjust the fabric around her ruined face but it was of no consequence right then - nearly all of her concentration centered on battering her way in to His head, pouring a barrage of past wounds and the things she’d do to him given half the chance. For that was her web (stop struggling and let me finish it) - promises of pain neither of them would find anywhere else. She simply resented getting caught in her own strands and finding she cared.

[member="Loray Tares"] | [member="Aver Brand"]​
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMlbY-0ypt8​

Vociferous and rapacious, this opening and gasping maw filled the otherwise mute streets with thick, breathing life. Where he stood, suspended in his own apotheosis, he thought upon notions of his own downfall and the world that stood beneath him, waiting and clamoring for his arrival. And her, an etched diamond held within a bucket of coal, shifting and slithering and stirring from such prefabricated entanglement. How could she be expected to stand still, while the streets bled, and not join the brouhaha? From the distance, he sought distinguishing marks upon her face, a scar he didn't know. He would've liked to imagine that he knew every bit of her, flesh wrapped around his in some macabre scene of his own death. A worm hole laying upon him, splaying for his immediate separation, as bones and cartilage cracked beneath the vacuum. Folded over by the pressure, the weight of this thing he could never understand, to be brutalized and utterly annihilated. Like an insect, caught between two worlds colliding, he wondered what sort of illustrious end soon raced towards him. He hoped for something savage and beyond necessity, something significant in how insignificant it made him, like standing on the shores of an ocean just as the water recedes. Staring up to see the wave, 10,000 miles above him and blotting out space and time, just to pause and regale him with laughter and splash of foamy seas - at a fate that couldn't be escaped.

But there was emotion here, something he wasn't sure he had ever felt. The sting of the spiders bite, clamping down on flesh, only to sense the pause as it contemplated not tugging away the skin. This challenge felt different, this escapade more than just another encounter. Something beyond pain and death and the promise of being the last. He felt pampered, given more purpose than he would afford himself, and the revelation left him feeling robust. Beneath her fleeting precepts, something he once conjured alongside understanding, the world watched in agony and longing - to be so abandoned, he could only understand the moaning undead for so long - before his attention was focused back on the object of his affection. That worlds might bow beneath her feet, that societies might cling to her image, she now split the sea to interact with him. And amidst all the excitement, he could feel the inner turmoil swell.

A loss of control...

One she had never known...

Did she truly know him?

Of course. This was just another vestibule, blocked from the light. He couldn't deny her earned perception on that basis, on never having traced arachnid fingers across this particular patch of wall. Peeling the wallpaper back to reveal seeping brick and breathing faces, souls trapped away and waiting and wailing through outstretching imprints of their own countenance - a home made of bones and pain and stolen life. Faces held taught against a brick toned balloon, crying and weeping and cursing every day to come. Was he truly himself, anymore, or was he just a thing now? A figure transferring between sentience and saber, never knowing a moment of true self. Was he the man she once loved to cut, or simply an aberration that wore his face? Was that brother really something so important...

The arm convulsed beneath the armor, heaving and spitting, tongue flicking out of the sockets of the hand. Whipping across the armor, it dragged tinted saliva down the length of the forearm as a cry escaped it's deep set lips, eye whirling and dilating from the struggle and pain. It would no longer be denied. The shoulder shook with a spasm, the bicep and tricep shifted beneath the metal and skin, turning over on each other like snakes unraveling and lashing out at one another. He grit his teeth in pain, stifling a scream, as the bones of the arm twirled and collapsed, cracking and separating and splintering the flesh. Oragami stars, taking shape in corrugation just to turn back flat in response to the force, the saber pushed itself from the threshold that separated him from himself.

The dragon sculpted hilt was evacuated in an instance, upon her approach, as the force of the nexus tore itself from his chest in abrupt exclamation. Black and red, like the streets below, energy poured out from his very pores. Charred smoke, tendrils of blood and night whipped about him, coiling across the armor. Just as the energy approached him, the force of the sabers presence, molesting his own, clung to the attack in exasperation. Like stepping into another's shadow, it pressed in and introduced the thousands and the hate that stood within. It would have been enough to simply step away but coalescence held far more esteem, more principle. In his mind's eye, he couldn't tell where her hate ended and his begin, and he couldn't tell the streets from where he stood. The fog of loathing and disgust cascaded down him, blinding him to any nuance, as he showed resistance to her strike in the form of pure stubbornness and its dissipation.

Breathing in, as the attack subsided, a wordless growl escaped him as he ignited the saber. Hues of violet and black shot from the mouth of the hilt, a dragon violently spewing that telltale hum of acrimony, as specks of blood and misery circled the beam in suspension. Dropping his arm, heavy of breath, the smell of burning rooftop shingles and asphalt filled the air as he was blind to all but her. And the hate that would soon sustain him.

[member="Matsu Xiangu"] | [member="Aver Brand"]
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTrCVsHhR4g​


It hit her like a freighter on atmospheric reentry.

The hate slammed into her gut with the force of a nosediving SSD, and Aver stumbled over her own legs, mid-sprint. Through her red-speckled haze of violet and black, the mercenary could see a hard roof rushing up to meet her, and base instincts responded. Narrowly avoiding a case of flayed face, the firrerreo rolled over a shoulder instead. Something ground nastily against the ferrocrete, but she was already moving ahead.

No time to stop. No time to think.

She was here.

Aver screamed, or maybe it was the echo of a thousand chained souls reverberating up her spine. While her phrik boots made short work of the distance, the growing proximity made short work of her paper-thin walls. These days, [member="Loray Tares"] was about as good at mental defense as she was, which is to say, worth jack shet.

There was no telling where one of them ended and the other two began.

In this whirlpool of virulent emotions, Aver felt like a foreign object in a wound. Her ice was melting at an alarming rate, but her body refused to stop. The deadly attraction they had always felt towards one another dragged them together, forever. Their confluence was as imminent as the heat death of the universe.

Maybe there was beauty to that. Certainly there was poetic justice, considering all the heinous atrocities they had committed. As individuals, they were terrifying. As couples, they could level battlefields and come out bleeding just enough to kark it away.

But all three of them… if there was a word for what they were, she didn’t know it.

An entity of such incessant ambition and will that it could not be contained in a single body. The galaxy was spared, and they were forced to orbit ever closer, never near enough for the lasting bliss of being whole again. No rest for the wicked.

She was here. There was no more roof to cross, no more dead seas to part. She was here.

Though who – or what – ‘she’ was, at the moment, she wasn’t sure. The hate clawing against her ribs precluded everything else. She licked her lips and found them slick with blood.

“I missed you,” she breathed out.
 
She was confused by the space inside his head, foreign like a landscape wasted by war - familiar only because the coordinates were the same but otherwise somewhere completely strange. She could hardly think straight for the rage and bewilderment. But then that apocalyptic blaze of power fractured the air around him and it didn’t matter what he’d become, who he’d become. That undeniable cacophony was so characteristic in whatever form it took. None of them could be called romantics but she thought of him on Annaj then - that quiet few seconds with her breath and her heartbeat when she’d first felt him watching, one red eye burning between passerby as the crowd went on oblivious to her world changing.

Matsu wasn’t looking when Aver arrived but she didn’t have to see her to know she was finally there - some abhorrent, sacred triangle nearly whole save for the jagged trench of the spider’s venom. She turned her head slowly then, as one might when surrounded by predators they were unwilling to set off with quick movement. This woman wasn’t exactly what she remembered either but that didn’t matter - it was her. The admission (i missed you) shattered like glass up Matsu’s spine, left her undone like a speeder crash, teeth and bone and brain scattered to the four winds. And then, too, it felt just like seeing Ygdris all those years ago for the first time on Manaan, seeming to appear out of thin air with a joke and a smirk - an unmistakable force of nature.

Give in now and you can never go back.
That solitary loneliness you so crave is gone.

Even with the dark cloth covering the bottom half of her face it would be obvious her voice was only in their heads though Matsu had perfected the art of making it sound projected. The fabric wouldn’t move even as she finally said her first words to them after months and months and months of being dust.

“I missed you too.”

She’d never intended for this moment to be so simple. She’d spent days searching for Nadir, weeks imagining the shapes she would carve out of their mortal flesh as repayment for making her so desperately human in some aspect. It would have been easier not to come back, to deny that she’d ever cared at all. But that was impossible. They were as inevitable as entropy, a gravity she'd wasted so many years pretending did not rule her beyond physical need.

The creatures below hadn’t slowed in their destruction, their frenzy giving rise to creativity as they began forming a ladder out of their own bodies, climbing over each other in the race to return to their creator on the roof. Fires had begun breaking out, smoke joining the motes in the haze of His lingering power. She had come to destroy all that which she could before she killed them or they killed her, and while the latter part of the plan no longer appealed to her (never had, really) she saw no reason not to continue with the former. She ached for their agony.

Digging her claws in to their minds was instinctual but she held herself back from the urge at least for the moment, knowing if she dove now the likelihood of coming back up for air before she dissolved in her fabrications was unlikely. So instead she collected every unpleasant emotion bouncing in the center of their triad and pulled it together, balling it up before releasing it in a breathtaking split-second absence of sound. It wasn’t telekinetics though at first it might have looked that way save for the sorcery that cracked through the air once its sonic beginnings returned their hearing, purple and crimson storm ballooning outwards from its tiny, Atrisian eye. The roof shattered under her feet, slabs of ferrocrete flinging through the air in all directions as Matsu pushed her sorcery outwards to throw the two down towards her hungry Children below. It was oddly reminiscent of her suicidal dive from a rooftop with Rev all those years ago, but history was bound to repeat itself.

The heat of her work singed the air, acrid and full as she rose from the crouch her own work had forced her in to.

[member="Loray Tares"] | [member="Aver Brand"]​
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xreAnQ2ao8​

In but a moment, an uneasy balance fell into place. The sort of kilter that seemed entirely unnatural, in power and stability. An eclipse, one that occurred only for so long, just to watch as celestial bodies moved out of sync once more. Missing her, that was something easy and insincere. There was no strength to the statement, no affliction of desperation. His feelings for her bordered on mania, leaving such semblance of normalcy far behind for the dead and dying. He was more likely to find kindred spirits beneath a full moon, absolved of sin for want, allowed to appreciate the lunacy and lechery that grew within. That was what she inspired, in these moments so rare and seldom, in a man that was losing his senses.

There was never fear between them. A triumvirate of sadism and masochism, the desire to cut was only equaled by the loving sensation it provided. None of them would ever use the term openly, for lack of understanding, but the universe provided interpretation through inflection of emotions nonetheless. Need, lust, hate, anger, pain, pleasure. All that was needed for an unhealthy obsession, allowed to fester like a stinking wound. And rotting in their own decomposition of torment and self-flagellation and desire, dependency was born. For Loray, these were his Gods. And a man could never feel shame for falling to his knees before those he considered savior. Saviors from the life of monotony, the ill-fate of uniformity, and the tasteless death that lingered at the end. Beneath the weight of such presences, he hoped this pain might never end.

He felt her clawing her way around, bypassing all the preformed defenses that once put them at such distances. Held at arms length, she cut deep in reminder of the span. It hurt, how much he desired for her to lash out within a mind no longer protected, to reveal the full gravity of her power and unleash it all. But as quickly as the threat was made, it recoiled for something far less abstract. Beyond his understanding, he felt the wick of his energy pull towards the center. A hard gust against a rapidly burning flame, now centered and siphoned away from him, he felt the blast of negative emotions like the silhouette that preceded the hammer. Only to feel the recourse quickly thereafter.

Without struggle, he was knocked from the building to smack against another. Clink clank clink. He rolled down the slanted building like a de-stringed marionette, slicing gashes in the structures with every twirl of the saber. Hitting the square with a thud, he stood slowly to the sounds of the hunger and empty hollow stomach pangs. Red visor turned upwards, away from those who would feast upon him, to the ones by which he desired to be consumed. The saber extinguished, drawing back into the hand, as the first lunged forward. Loray lifted his blackened hand as teeth chomped down between thumb and pointer. Snarling, like an unleashed fighting dog, the monster yanked and ripped. Such strength, he thought, as the flesh tore free from the palm. The Voxyn was not so easily wounded, squealing in response to the alien impression.

The zombie gagged and heaved, spitting up black and red, as it fell to its knees. Sudden sentience overtook it as it struggled, fingers clawing at its throat, as it dug at its own flesh. Spitting up bile and venom, as dark as the night was black, the creature fell to the ground in a pool of its own excrement. The armored warrior continued to look towards Matsu, recalling the first words he had ever sent to her through the force.

Come...come and dance with me.
Body standing as pinnacle of sentient and technological advancement, the gears and cogs moved on the sails of the force. The same speed she had known on Annaj, the same he used to ripple the very durocrete beneath him, sent him flinging towards her in a flash of energy. The propulsion left a wake in his absence, sucking in the dead and dying to fill the void. And in a single moment, he stood before Matsu, entirely within striking distance. Lifting his bitten hand to her face, he pulled on the wrapped fabric that concealed wound, to reveal the extent of the damage and restructuring.

"Who has marred what we hold dear? I would see their flesh stripped from the bone." He felt possessiveness creep in. And he enjoyed the tone. The station was ripping itself part, from the inside out, and all that concerned him now stood before him. Those he would always save for last.

[member="Aver Brand"] | [member="Matsu Xiangu"]
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDJkUjWJoAo​

The world stood still, eternal revolution ground to a halt so that she could observe the beauty of the moment. The edges of her vision ebbed, invaded by the greedy tendrils of darkness that heralded Her presence. Like a soothing blanket, it cascaded over her mind; if blankets were woven out of un-space and shred any flesh they touched. From the wounds inflicted, sanity and coherence bled like blood from a severed carotid.

Everything was painted red, and then She exploded in white.

The merc was flung backwards like a leaf in the grip of a hurricane. A crack rang distant in her own ears as her body met a wall. Phrik screamed against ferrocrete as she fell, hitting every pole and rail on the way down.

A wet smack.

Covered in blood that wasn’t her own, Aver stumbled back to her feet. Boots found slippery purchase in the goop of rotting flesh. She shot out a hand to steady herself against the building, the other scrambling for a weapon. The collision had cleared her head of Her cobwebs, and now she was stood here, within a ring of dead meat wriggling back together. Reminiscent of their chance meeting in the carnage that was Manaan, no? Undeath, missing limbs, iron and irony on her tongue.

Aver laughed. It was the sound of saw against bone, nails against back, fist against jaw. She ached to break and be broken, a remnant desire from years long past. Something moved in the depths, then, ancient and intoxicating. The woman nearly doubled over as it brought its full weight to bear, forced down on one knee.

I am not now what I was then.

In a mind that felt like it might be her own again, Ygdris growled. She clawed against the rising tide of squirming bodies, wreathed with her own right to shed blood. A blade snapped into her hand, dancing with preternatural skill. She cut them all down like a storm wreaks a swath through a young forest. They fell off to the wayside, mere distractions on her path to what she was owed.

What she owned.

She bounded up, muscle and iron coiling in unison. Circuitry and metal had filled the physical void left by living armor, but her mind still ached for what was lost. Nothing could replace the song of war chanted by a thousand voices.

Nothing but Her.

Insides twisted at the sight of a missing jaw. Her resolve buckled, veins flooded with instinct to maim and hurt and kill.

But she was ice, and all that came after. Years had honed her from hammer to scalpel, from Ygdris to Cellis to Neive to Vrag to Aver. Perhaps, one day, to Ygdris again. Her first and last strength was control, and so she exerted it, proud and tall and bleeding.

“We will hunt them together,” she said, and did not kneel again.

[member="Matsu Xiangu"] | [member="Loray Tares"]
 
Had it been her choice, she would have left her disfigurement hidden until she found a way to repair it to something resembling normal. That she was changed physically she paid no mind - this body was fleeting, and what had marred her face was the greatest pain of her life, and therefore made her more powerful than she could imagine according to her own philosophy. But it was the unexpected repercussions that gnawed at her, the small things she’d once taken for granted. Eating and drinking she’d always found perfunctory anyway, but it was the larger things...she dragged her thoughts away from the thought of Ygdris’ lips.

“Who has marred what we hold dear?”

Whomever they’d become, she could sense they were connected in a way that tugged at her sense of guilt for disappearing. Whatever she fed to one went to the other and so she barely expended any energy showing instead of telling.

Dromund Kaas had quaked under the force of her arrival, dozens of images of the invasion from her eyes flashing through their minds. Jedi had perished that day - those too weak to learn her Way, to see suffering as salvation. Her Children had run free and ripped up the earth from where they’d landed all the way to the old sith cities deep in the jungle, their master hot at their heels. Storms had broken loose once the planet had felt the return of dark energy, so long buried under the yoke of the Silver Sanctum’s presence. Lightning flashed off wet leaves and grass and the hides of enormous, undead creatures tearing their way through the jungle.

Somewhere in that wilderness she’d run in to two others bent on stopping her. She’d seen the one - Siobhan Kerrigan - again, and proved that whatever maiming had befallen her had only made her mentalism stronger. But she’d never seen the one who’d destroyed her face since that day on Kaas. Valiens Nantaris.

She let them have that memory then, no element held back. She still remembered her teeth littered through sparkling grass blinding in a lightning flash, choking on the well of blood that rushed down her windpipe, the creaking in her bones from the crushing blow of Siobhan’s telekinetic squeeze. She still saw those teeth in her sleep, heard their tapping crash as they flew from her. Gone, gone, gone, and learning what it was like to live with that.

“I have not seen him since, but how can he escape us?”

Us, us, us.

She looked between them, an absurdist laughing somewhere at their reuniting so calmly in the middle of her storm.

“Why do you feel...different?”

Can I come home?

[member="Loray Tares"] | [member="Aver Brand"]​
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSjUb-aRloY​
Dromund Kaas, the ghost of a dream lingering in the back of his mind, threatening to blow out with a moments notice. The morbid moving picture of a descent into madness, through the gaping mouth licking out from the ground, to the sounds of the squelching deaths of cultists and strangers. But now, the memory was transitioning forward, blurry and windswept by the creeping encroachments of reality. Like a film, taken in a dust bowl, the memory unfolded before him and Aver. He could feel the attachment and its wiggling burrow within her, like watching the world to the ever persistent echo of its own shadow.

He watched it all unravel, like a frayed rug presented for all to see. The sounds of the lightning, the rain soaked leaves, and the click and clatter of teeth. Bouncing against themselves, against the blades of grass, and finding rest against the forest floor. The taste of iron crawled along his tongue, swallowing liters of blood amidst the simulated landscape. He was a port, forever resting harbor for unkempt hatred and anger. And as he watched, he couldn't mask the feeling of jealousy and envy. This was a painful agony, one he and Aver could not claim, and he couldn't silence the creeping feeling of loss. Slithering within, the blackened arm let out a wheeze as he clenched his fingers in a taut grip.

It never felt so good to be cut. And from that cut, control and stability bled. But in her image, in both of their images, he was a cold fire burning deep beneath the ground. Contained and quelled for the purpose of presence.

"We are unburdened with purpose..." His hand extended out, unfettered from any notions they may have once held in each others presence, as fingers trailed down unscathed and scarred skin alike. Whatever complexities were fitted to make repairs, to make her whole once more, it only pushed her further towards apotheosis. They were all monsters and machinations here, elevated far above her children that lurched and danced below. "Without weakness or care, we are without limits."

His hand turned, drifting down below her chin, as a sharpened vong nail cradled the weight of her enormous presence upon such meager fulcrum. While his crimson and singular vision may have been shielded by the creased metal of his helmet, the intensity of his stare beamed down upon her through a slit visor. "We are free."

Even a dying sun casts a long shadow, hanging low in the horizon. But for the sun that was steadily rising, the Equalizers would claim or forsake all that their silhouette touched, all hewed from the conceptualized view of manifest destiny. These two in the jungle, those that marred her, would not be fortunate enough to be looked over.

She has missed you...we have missed you. You are home. There was an undeniable void left in her wake, traveling within and through the stars to leave those she touched, in wonder. It was something that couldn't be filled, no matter the blood or lust or pain or abundance that existed throughout. She wasn't in their home. She was their home, constantly shifting and changing and always seemingly out of grasp.

[member="Matsu Xiangu"] | [member="Aver Brand"]
 
The universe felt at once too small to hold them. As if standing so close to each other, in one place, for this long, would rip it apart. It squirmed around them like air does when liquid fire licks it with greed. Reality let out a pitiful whine, then folded into darkness. A player outmatched at a game of Sabacc.

Aver had never played stakes so high.

Aver had also never played a game she didn’t win.

Night and rain fell over them, a blanket woven thick from screams and that stifling humidity only jungles can boast. (memories of Onderon swelled in her breast. she pushed them back down. deep. deeper.) Water-slicked hands went to grab a weapon but she found with rising ire that she was incorporeal. Doomed to bear witness even when her fingers yearned to gouge into flesh and her teeth to tear at throats.

While she could do neither of those things, Aver wasn’t useless. Refused to be. She spent every moment of the second-hand experience committing those two faces to memory. Through the sheets of deluge, through the spray of blood, through the dancing lightsabers and screams and swirling leaves. And she pinned those features to their names, with nine inch nails. Something raw and red clawed at her chest, awakened and hungry.

With a blink, the agony curling her frame was gone, and she sucked in a breath.

Rev spoke beside her, voice eerily steady for the loss they’d just relived. Then again, the frakker was probably sporting a semi from all that pain.

This one certainty (normalcy) in the flux of emotion inside her chest grounded her in an instant. Nadir didn’t so much bleed back in as it crashed down around her. The futile scraping of carpals against ferrocrete filled her ears, drowning in the cries of whoever still clung to life below. Admirable, but ultimately irrelevant.

Just like the resistance the galaxy was trying to mount against this reunion.

Aver grinned at nothing in particular (but really at everything) and raised a gauntleted hand to a shorn cheek. Her touch was a promise to never let time and space separate them again – not for this long, not to these ends. Not when there were such great goals they had yet to achieve. Not when they had so many people left to kill.

“Together,” she said, and it sounded like a death sentence and a warm welcome at the same time.

Maybe for them, there had never been a difference.

[member="Loray Tares"] | [member="Matsu Xiangu"]
 

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