Objective 1 - Something Unforgivable
The Standing Stone
Tags:
Kirie
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Astra Sadow
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Nilira Vornix
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Anet Raine
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Kaelyr
Nobody had warned her.
In a short time, Throneworld’s vast library had given Cassilde an amuse-bouche of knowledge, as she suddenly found herself thrust into an entirely new world. It was funny, in the way that trapping your fingers in a speeder door was funny, that she had spent her entire life preparing to be one thing, and only one thing.
Duch’a. From a child, she had been taught the correct posture for
being. The cutthroat minutiae of how to walk, talk, eat, laugh, and smile to one’s own benefit. How to manipulate with grace and make it seem as if it was the other party’s idea. It was her life’s work and training.
After one minor hiccup, one
minor trifle of a small failed assassination attempt on the Empress of the Core, she was back at step one.
A Sith Apprentice, in her thirties, no less. There was an indescribable horror in your peers being maladjusted youths. No, not peers; she wasn’t even their equal.
Yet. Cassilde was, perhaps arrogantly, confident she could surpass them with time and dedication, mostly because the few Acolytes and Apprentices she had encountered so far didn't, crudely put, have their emotional shit together.
The
real horror, however, was the clothing.
Even as Mercy’s cupbearer, she had the benefit of her own wardrobe, brought from Callamar. Not these dark, stiff, shapeless cupboard-issued robes over perfectly dull, practical thermals. The respirator, obviously a necessity, but
the hood? A travesty, a capital offence. A useful horror endured, worn up past the brow because advertising herself wasn’t on the agenda today.
She was to observe, to participate, and to report back. To
her.
Seeing wasn’t really on the agenda either; Hapan eyes had a strong disagreement with the dark, and in wishing to not shine a spotlight on herself, Cassilde had left her lamp behind, instead choosing the eternal struggle of viewing people as silhouettes, with the only comfort of light found in the merry dance of the aurorae above. She traced figures by voices, by the way the fog bent around them, having long since accepted that Sith did not travel where light touched.
So she picked out voices in the dark and made her half-baked assumptions. The leading voice was
painfully polite, even as it asked about the group's proficiency in draining life, like it was a lecture on the life cycle of a genus of grape. Another voice was one part terrifying and one part familiar, presumably from aboard
the Tyranny, but without faces, voices were useless.
She, of course, did
not know how to drain life, not that that was a prerequisite apparently, and she understood the concept alone in a way that felt nothing but humiliating. The Hapan was still on the basics, the bare bones of practical applications. To draw the life out of something, like a cork from a bottle?
Absurd. Out of darkened shapes in a jar, without a face to hate? Even more absurd.
Hatred, in her experience, needed a face. She had the perfect one in mind.
However, the greatest absurdity was found in just…
everything. Cassilde of House Vortayn, Duch’a of Callamar, huddled in the dark, in a terrible black robe, surrounded by a collection of lunatics next to a mystical rock, tasked with draining life from a jar of wriggling shapes. It was utter lunacy. What manner of madness had Mercy brought upon her life? She could have despaired, and she did, silently, with a jaw set in granite beneath her respirator.
What she did not do, however, was partake in the ritual. Instead, she stood frozen in an appalled stillness.
