Never Hide Your Heart
"Never Hide Your Heart"
Locatoin: The Black Pyramid
Tags:
Darth Carnifex
The cell was silent. Not truly silent, there was always the distant groan of machinery somewhere within the Black Pyramid, the occasional hiss of pressurized doors opening and closing far beyond her prison, the faint hum of technology woven through the ancient Sith fortress, but silent in the way that mattered.
The Force was gone.
Katarine Ryiah sat with her back against the cold wall, knees drawn to her chest, arms wrapped tightly around them. The suppression field embedded into the chamber swallowed everything. Every instinct she had cultivated since childhood reached outward and found nothing.
No currents.
No life.
No presence.
Nothing.
For a woman who had spent nearly her entire life connected to the Force, the absence was suffocating. She hated it. She hated herself even more. Her eyes closed as she rested her forehead against her knees. The Prosperity had become a nightmare. One moment she had been helping frightened civilians escape the Sith raid. The next they had been hunted again, this time by the Kainate. Captured. Processed. Sorted like livestock.
The Selectors had noticed her immediately. Not because she was a Jedi Master, or because she was dangerous, but because she was interesting. The memory made her stomach churn. They had studied her. Questioned her. Tested her. They had looked at her with the detached curiosity of scientists examining some rare disease. She was a Jedi who craved the Dark Side. A Jedi who had fallen into its embrace before, but was unable to turn. A Jedi whose body and mind reacted to its power like an addict denied her next dose, but was unable to use the darkness herself. The realization that they could tell what was happening inside her heart had humiliated her.
Katarine squeezed her eyes shut. She should have been focused entirely on escape, survival, and on protecting the others who had been taken. Instead, part of her mind kept drifting elsewhere. To the feeling, the rush, and the terrible intoxicating warmth that the dark side offered. She hated that even now, trapped within the heart of a Sith fortress, stripped of the Force entirely, terrified of what awaited her beyond the cell door, a small part of her still wanted it. Still craved it, still whispered that if she could only touch the Force again, she could make everything stop hurting.
A shudder ran through her. "No," she whispered into the darkness. The word sounded weak and unconvincing. The suppression field continued to hum, and for the first time she felt completely alone. There were no allies, no Force, and no certainty to help her. Only her fear remained, and the dreadful knowledge that whatever the Sith intended for her, they had not brought her to the Black Pyramid simply to let her rot in a cell.
They had seen something inside her.
Something she desperately wished wasn't there, and she knew that sooner or later, they were going to come back for it.