Dagon Kaze
“Another padawan.” Aeris exhaled and shook her head against Dagon’s shoulder.
“We were young, but… Well, it felt real at the time.”
She separated and took a seat in the sand and motioned for Dagon to do the same. Standing up felt pointless by now. That promise or rather ground rule she laid out at the start had backfired, and now she was the one to tell her story.
“I think I was fifteen at the time, if that tells you anything.” Aeris grabbed a handful of sand to hold onto.
“Not quite love, not quite nothing either. That part of your life when you start to wonder about nature and where things get interesting.”
That small shade of red on her cheeks forced her to shake her head in embarrassment for even having brought the idea up. As the fires beneath her skin began to die out she found the will to go on,
“Around this time the Alliance was slowly falling apart around us, but we tried to keep good spirits. The masters had tried to fill us with that ancient idea of ‘They only win if they destroy our morale’ crap. Heck, at this time we didn’t even have a library, we had already lost that to the Sith fires.” Aeris opened her hand to let the sand scatter in the slight breeze that rolled through the room.
“The person I lost was one of the padawans I moved around with. We saw a lot of the galaxy together, a lot of things that no kid really should have to see, but…”
Her head shook again with an aggravated sigh.
“There was always comfort in knowing that me and Alex saw a lot of it together. We ran from one Sith raid after another until finally we managed to get ourselves cornered.” She paused for a moment.
“Alex stayed behind to save the rest of us.”
“I thought they had died, but…” Her arms wrapped around her knees.
“They didn’t. Somehow the Sith had managed to keep them alive. I don’t know the details of how, but I know that when they came back they weren’t themself anymore. Alex reeked of fear and hate, the very opposites of what I knew them for.”
“I tried to reason, I tried to speak to them but... Alex refused to listen, they had already become one of them.” Aeris shook her head.
“A creature of violence and hate. For an hour, they tried to make me follow them back. When that didn’t work they began to scream about what we had once shared.”
“The Sith had turned what we had against us.” Aeris exhaled what to Dagon might have seemed like just the smallest of sobs hidden behind a deep, focused breath.
“Alex went through so much pain, and it was all because of...”
Her eyes closed, the rest didn't want to be said:
It was all because of their attachment to me.
