Private The Thunder Rolls

[Katarine Ryiah]

"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.

 

[Darth Carnifex]

They monitored her closely. Around the clock, a team of analysts kept careful documentation of the prisoner's vital systems and general disposition. Inmates who were similarly categorized as 'special' were held in cells adjacent to Katarine's own, kept under similar guard. Some bore the scars of prolonged imprisonment, vacant stares fixed straight ahead. While others were in the same predicament as Katarine, recently collected and deposited without any knowledge of where they'd been taken.

Those that fought against their captors were quickly broken, subjected to a host of terrible iniquities meant to erode the will. The greater one struggled, the more brutal the captors became. Some had even died. Fortunately for Katarine, they hadn't inflicted such terror upon her at this junction. Solitude filled the hours since she first awoke. A fixture in the wall afforded her fresh water while another deposited flavorless nutrient paste, both of which were free to use on demand.

They obviously did not want her deprived or dead, but their true intentions were not conveyed at all. They studied the sample of blood they stole upon her capture, letting their powerful instruments parse each and every aspect of her genetics. When their preliminary experiments were complete, they sent along the results to their Master.

Who had now come to lay witness to the subject in question.

The gate to her cell door opened with a sharp hiss, burning white light spilling into the perpetually twilight room. A shadow blocked the light as heavy steps approached, and when the light finally evaporated away all that was left was the truth of her captor.

Darth Carnifex, Dark Lord of the Sith, loomed over her.

"They tell me you are special. Do you know why?"

Katarine Ryiah ​

 

[Katarine Ryiah]

"Never Hide Your Heart"
​

She had long since lost track of time in the cell.

Without windows, without a clock, and cut off completely from the Force, there was no way to measure the passing hours. The artificial lights never dimmed. They simply existed, cold and constant.

The silence should have been comforting, but it wasn't.

Occasionally she heard movement from neighboring cells, a cough, a muttered curse, the scrape of metal against metal. Enough to remind her that she wasn't alone.

Strangely, that didn't make her feel any better.

She found herself wondering about the others. Were they frightened? Injured? Desperate? Even now, after everything, she couldn't completely shut off her concern for people she had never met.

Though another feeling was beginning to drown it out.

Withdrawal.

Her skin itched. Not physically, not exactly. It was deeper than that, beneath her flesh, buried in her nerves. The sensation reminded her of addicts she'd encountered over the years, people coming down from a chemical high and desperate for another hit.

The Force had always been there.

A constant companion.

Now there was nothing.

Just an aching void.

Some detached corner of her mind recognized that this forced separation might ultimately be good for her. A brutal detox. A chance to regain clarity.

At the moment, she couldn't have cared less.

She wanted to climb the walls. She wanted to scream. Instead, centuries of Jedi discipline held firm. Katarine sat perfectly still in the center of her cell, the picture of obedience and control, even while every nerve ending in her body felt like it was on fire.

When the cell door finally opened, brilliant light spilled into the room.

For the first time since her imprisonment, she moved.

She surged to her feet and instinctively settled into a fighting stance. The gesture was almost laughable. She was cut off from the Force, deprived of her lightsaber, and trapped inside a prison designed to contain beings far more dangerous than ordinary criminals.

Still, Katarine Ryiah had been a Jedi for centuries. If someone was foolish enough to step into her cell, she intended to make them earn every inch.

A massive silhouette filled the doorway. The figure stood nearly two feet taller than her, broad enough to block most of the light behind him.

Ordinarily, that alone would have been intimidating. It wasn't what made her heart lurch into her throat.

She knew who he was.

Every Jedi in the galaxy knew who he was.

Katarine found herself staring face-to-face with one of the most feared Sith Lords alive.

They tell me you are special. Do you know why

“Special? Wow you really know how to flatter a girl.”

Yep that’s right Katarine….

Make it worse.

Brilliant.

Darth Carnifex

 

[Darth Carnifex]

"Careful now," purred the Dark Lord of the Sith.

An unbearable pressure pressed against Katarine's arms and legs, the muscles cramping as they were seized. She was pulled along as if by strings, drawn towards the towering darkness that loomed ahead of her. When her limbs were at last released, they ached and burned. Striations of discoloration ran up and down her arms, fading into dull bruises of yellow and purple. The same was true for her legs, which threatened to buckle and give out from under her.

"I am a Lord of exceptional patience, but my attention only graces that which I find interesting or amusing. The worst thing you can do at this juncture is bore me." He reached down to physically cup her chin, His touch abhorrent to the senses. The darkness radiated off of Him like heat from an open reactor, but rather than burn it chilled down to the bone. To an addict suffering from withdrawal, His mere proximity must have been woefully intoxicating.

"They tell me you crave the power of the Dark, even though it runs contrary to your nature. I wonder why that is?"

Katarine Ryiah ​

 

[Katarine Ryiah]

"Never Hide Your Heart"​

His presence burned through her like liquid ice poured directly into her veins. She felt the marks he left long before she saw them, every nerve ending lighting up in agonizing awareness. Her knees buckled beneath her. Any thought of a fighting stance vanished instantly. In the span of a heartbeat, he had reduced her to something pathetic and helpless, a rag doll dangling from invisible strings, dragged toward his towering form by a force she could neither resist nor understand.

The dark side had always been intoxicating. She knew its rush. Knew the fierce exhilaration of drawing upon it, the addictive surge of power that made everything else seem dull by comparison.

This was different. This was too much. It was the highest high she had ever experienced, magnified beyond reason, beyond sanity. It crashed into her all at once, flooding every corner of her mind until she couldn't tell where she ended and it began. It felt less like touching the dark side and more like drowning in it.

A gasp tore from her throat the moment he laid a hand on her. Her legs gave out completely. She collapsed forward, catching herself on trembling hands and knees as the room lurched violently around her. She tried to pull her chin free from his grasp, but her body barely obeyed her anymore.

The sensation was impossible to describe. Like spending years chasing a drug and then having its purest form injected straight into her bloodstream. Every nerve screamed. Every heartbeat thundered. Ecstasy and agony became indistinguishable.

The power pouring off him was overwhelming, intoxicating, suffocating.

The room spun faster.

Darkness crowded the edges of her vision.

She squeezed her eyes shut against the dizziness, even as every survival instinct she possessed shrieked at her not to. Not here. Not in front of him.

Because some primal part of her understood what the rest of her mind was struggling to accept.

This wasn't a man. This was a predator, and she was already caught in its jaws.

"Please."

The word escaped her in a breathless whisper, but she didn't know what she was asking for.

Mercy? Relief? More?

The sensation was unbearable, a tidal wave crashing over her again and again, each surge threatening to drag her beneath the surface. She should have wanted it to stop. Every instinct screamed that this was wrong, that she was drowning, that no living thing was meant to withstand this much power.

Yet the thought of it ending filled her with a different kind of panic.

She had spent enough time around darksiders to know that eventually their presence became easier to endure. The mind adapted. The body adjusted. What had once felt overwhelming slowly became familiar.

But this…

This was beyond overwhelming. This felt like trying to survive an overdose. Every heartbeat sent another violent rush through her veins. Every breath felt stolen from someone else. Her skin burned. Her thoughts scattered. The boundaries of her own mind felt fragile, ready to splinter apart beneath the weight of what was pouring into her.

She wasn't sure adaptation was possible.

She wasn't sure there was a version of her left on the other side of this. A wild, desperate thought surfaced through the haze.

This is how I die.

Not in battle. Not with a blade through her chest.

She was going to come apart at the seams beneath the sheer gravity of his existence, consumed by something so vast and terrible that her body simply could not contain it.

The most frightening part was that some small, treacherous corner of her wanted to hold on for just one second longer.

Darth Carnifex

 

[Darth Carnifex]

The edges of His lips curled in a smile, voraciously predatory. She was virtually putty in His hands, elastic and malleable to the touch. In the throes of her overdose, He observed her closely. Turning her over this way and that, inspecting her with an invasive fascination. There was nothing to her physically that He considered abnormal or exceptional, the allures of the flesh were a fancy of His but only to briefly whet an aspect of His appetite.

His hunger was multifaceted.

With the callous hands of a scientist, He turned the woman where He wished. His fingers trailed across goose-pimpled skin, clamping her eyelids open to observe the frantic dilation of her pupils, thumb prying open her lips to expose gum and teeth.

She was being handled like livestock, an animal. An object. Product.

"Very interesting," He whispered, hot and breathy. "You are so drawn to darkness, but mine is too great." He clenched His right hand into a tight fist, sharpened nails carving into the soft flesh of His palm. Black blood oozed from between His fingers, dripping small droplets down across her chest and neck. He hovered His hand above her face, some of His blood dripping onto her cheeks.

"Drink this," He intoned, "It will stabilize you."

Katarine Ryiah ​

 

[Katarine Ryiah]

"Never Hide Your Heart"
​

Katarine's stomach lurched as the world rolled violently beneath her. The floor refused to stay still. Walls bent and breathed around her, the ceiling stretching impossibly far away before crashing back down. Every heartbeat echoed in her skull like a hammer striking iron, and every attempt to focus only splintered her vision into double.

His hands found her again. She flinched instinctively. Not because of fear, though there was plenty of that, but because of the way he touched her. There was no lust in it. No anger. No cruelty born of passion. Nothing she was used to, but only... curiosity. Cold. Precise. Detached and aloof.

She had known rough hands before. Men who mistook power for affection. Men who looked at her as something to possess. Men who went beyond her refusals, but nothing like this.

This was worse.

He wasn't looking at her as a woman. He was looking at her as if she were an equation. A specimen laid open on a table. His thumb forced her lip aside. Fingers peeled back an eyelid despite her feeble resistance. Every movement reduced her further, stripping away whatever dignity remained until she felt less like a person and more like some strange animal pinned beneath glass.

A tremor crawled through her.

Stop...

The word never reached her lips. Her body simply wouldn't obey in the middle of the horrible acid trip she was experiencing.

Then something warm struck her face.

Drop.

Another.

The scent reached her before the sensation did. Her stomach twisted violently as she saw the black blood. She stared through blurred vision as it ran across her cheek, collecting at the corner of her mouth.

"Drink this."

She wanted to refuse. Every instinct she possessed screamed against it. Her hand twitched weakly toward his wrist, more an act of protest than any real attempt to stop him.

"No..."

The word barely escaped as a breath. When he extended His bleeding hand toward her, she hesitated as every muscle locked. Every fragment of reason she still possessed told her that whatever flowed through him was not meant for her veins.

But the room spun harder and the nausea that caused became unbearable. She couldn't even lift her own head.

With infuriating ease, he guided his wrist to her lips. Her resistance collapsed beneath the weight of her own weakness.

The first taste nearly made her retch. It was metallic and far richer than ordinary blood, with an acrid bitterness that coated her tongue and clung to the back of her throat. Her stomach seized, convulsing so violently she thought she might vomit then and there.

She coughed, swallowing only because her body betrayed her. Heat spread downward. Not warmth, but more like something alive crawing down her throat. It crawled through her chest like liquid fire before settling deep inside her.

For several agonizing seconds she thought it would kill her. But slowly the spinning slowed. The walls stopped breathing. The fractured images fused back into one. The pounding behind her eyes dulled into a distant ache, and the fog clouding her thoughts lifted just enough for the room to regain its shape.

She drew a ragged breath, blinking rapidly as his face finally came into sharp focus.

Confusion replaced panic, though fear lingered beneath it.

"...How?"

Her voice was hoarse, scarcely louder than a whisper. She looked from the black blood staining His hand back to His face, unable to reconcile what she'd just felt with anything she understood. Nothing had ever taken the high away, even a little, and yet right now she felt more in control. Not sober perhaps, but at least capable.

Her deep green eyes looked back at his.

"What... are you?"



Darth Carnifex

 

[Darth Carnifex]

"I am the pinnacle."

Such were the words spoken by the Dark Lord of the Sith, in a manner befitting an ontological truth. Just as one might say that gravity attracts mass and distorts light, so too did the Dark Lord declare Himself the uttermost zenith. There was no prideful boasting in the Dark Lord's words, no haughty arrogance tainting each syllable, only the self-evidence of absolute certainty. If anything was to be gleamed from the Dark Lord's response, it was an underlying disappointing that she had not come to the realization of obvious truth herself.

"And I am known by many names, but you can defer to me as Darth Carnifex, Dark Lord of the Sith." He gently rubbed the flat of His thumb against the self-inflicted wound on His hand, and the bloodied gash gradually vanished. Whatever compounds were present in His blood had stabilized her addiction, slaking its thirst and bringing her back from the edge of destruction. How long she would remain in this state, bordering on the edge of sobriety, was unknown.

"Some would say that your mystery is vexing, though I find it quite an interesting puzzle. Your obedience in unraveling this mystery would be greatly appreciated, but not required. All that happens henceforth will be entirely at your discretion, my young disciple." His hand snapped out, quick as a viper's bite, and tilted the tip of her chin up towards Him. She would find that His strength, even modestly exercised, was frightening.

"Do we have an understanding?"

Katarine Ryiah ​