The Dark Man
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The Dark Man submerged himself into the Force. He peered at the latticework of energy. Alva’s manipulation of the Force appeared as countless tiny threads, a cleaver weaving with overlapping threads that hold other threads in place. He realised that she had been preparing this for some time, even before he had known her presence. The Dark Man had inserted his own weft in between the strands of the alien Crinan magic as ti were, just enough to seize part of the current. Whether it was by poor design on her part, or by sheer luck on his own, he had managed to turn the spell on itself. He had successfully and narrowly dodged the tree, as he recalled. He remembered well when he redirected her attack, as though swimming in a sea of energy, lattices forming faster than the eye could follow. He remembered Ir’cara’suhl’s teachings about perspective and had forced himself to look for something recognisable, even among this strange manipulation of the Force that Alva concocted, and he forced himself to look for something recognisable, a quality within the swarming energies that he could use for orientation. It was the very reason he was able to spinning uncontrollably in the storm, and suddenly revert this affect so that he were perfectly lit when he came unto the ground. The Dark Man had sought out further, and he followed the energy away from the forming lattice and back to its source, Alva. Subtle movements of his hands, the plucking of these cords, and it was blasted back to its owner, and at the last possible moment, The Dark Man had held on to the tail end of these threads. In the physical world, that which the organic eye could perceive, it was much different. Unexplainably he was flung into the air, hurtling head-over-heels and the next movement he was coming back towards the ground, landing and then launching towards Alva. It had taken place in a matter of seconds, but to The Dark Man, it felt much longer. His connection to the Force, while not unique, was remarkable. He had been a padawan for fifty-five years, and it was no fault of lacking the ability or training. It was a self-imposed ideology he had orchestrated. He believed that no true Jedi should achieve the rank of Knight until they were truly spiritually connected with the Force. A task that came easier for some than for others. Though The Dark Man had met very few in his life that were as he placed it, spiritually connected. He perceived there were two type of Jedi. The younger understood the Force, they acknowledged it, and they could delve into its infinite resources at a whim. It was typically the older who took the Force on a more spiritual level. Those who went beyond simple understanding, but they became a being of the Force, the physical representation. The very thing The Dark Man strives for, and in a way, has become. Ekul Selah was no more, The Dark Man had abandoned that name as the ultimate form of fealty to the Force, showing that as an agent of The Force, he had no possessions, he had no identity. One could question why he had a lightsaber, or why he wore robes. He could answer this simply. If the Force wants him to have more, it will find a way. These opinions, ideologies, perspectives is what had defined him as an outcast among the Order. He was considered a controversial, mysterious and unorthodox Jedi, at best. The Dark Man pulled back into reality. He was moving with speed towards Alva, and she was moving for him, too. He dived mentally into the lattices of energy. He used his prodigious ability, being deeply and spiritually in tune with the energies that bound the stars and cosmos and life, and quickly moved from point to point along the threads of energy, for a brief instant touching a strand to judge the endurance and ability of Alva. For countless many, it was known as Force Sense, but for The Dark Man, it was far more complex, and yet, to him, it felt far simpler. He extended his senses to the boundaries of the energy and began to intersect them into a spinning motion. The Force complied to his wishes, and with opened eyes, he found himself to be twirling, his body stiff and rigid into that of a spear, with his lightsaber extended vertically downwards, and as he spun, it completed a full circle around him. The very speed of his spin made the plasmatic blade appear as a single golden disc that shimmered around him. The whine of the energy was intense, almost as loud as the screaming winds shooting towards Alva. He saw her stumble, and then they collided. The force whirlwind-turned-blast. She resisted for a chance second, but a second longer and she was in the same boat as he had been not twenty seconds ago. The energy blade flung out of her hand. He saw his blade come closer to her armour, and he prepared himself mentally to see the deep scorches of plasma burns across her body. In a way, he had been pleasantly surprised when it crashed into her faintly glowing blue shield. The speed and sheer velocity of his lightsaber was enough to drain the energy reserves in the blink of an eye, but in truth the lightsaber had struck against it several times before he had passed over her. To the frogs watching from the creeks, or the lonely owl hooing, they would have seen a woman inexplicably thrown into the air, and a spinning man with a golden disc around him race over her. A strange sight indeed, for an even stranger swamp.
Ripples of energy began to pancake down through his spine, sending a cold shiver down his back, and the feeling of icy water shooting up his veins. The hairs on his nape and forearms stood on end. The cool wind slamming into his face as he was further propelled by the gale. It was a malignant aura, and he tried to react. He saw the slicewire come under him, threatening to slice and dice him, but given his already spinning lightsaber, it would have battered away the slicewire, or cleaved through it. That was not the danger most presently. He knew the feeling before. He could recall it as clear as day. A feeling of impending death. Despair on a grandiose level. He knew he would become one with the Force were he to die, but yet, he feared death. An innate and animalistic emotion. An irrational fear for one as connected as he. He fell into recollection of those events. Some would be brash enough to call it a flashback, or the dancing images one saw before death. The Dark Man knew what it was, a living terror, memories burned and imprinted into his very mind. They never truly left him. And now he recalled smooth albeit cold marble floor under his feet. The sound of cloudcutters and starscrapers crumbling away and ploughing into the planet had been enough to jar his teeth. The python of fear constricted itself around his heart as his stomach churned. He had brushed past the maimed, mutilated and wounded Jedi that fled to safety - and their ultimate demise. An immense diversification of species that interlaced themselves into the stretching crowd that scarpered away from the ensuing fight at the temple steps. He entered into the vestibule and was greeted with a most diabolic sight. The fallen who could not be carried away remained. Their robes cast asunder, deep wounds festered where the molten streak of a plasma blade had extinguished their life. The One Sith had been ruthless, and horribly efficient. The Dark Man, known as Ekul Selah in that time, and nearing his mid-sixties, had to reconcile himself from these atrocities. He repeated to himself, quietly, as to not stir the dragon that sought out the Jedi, weeding them out from whatever hole they could find themselves hiding in. "There is no death, only the Force.” It was the final mantra of the Jedi Code. He couldn't think of anything else to say. A slimed skinned nautolan hurtled past him, one of the few Jedi remaining on their feet unaided, he recalled. In his hands was a large metallic pole, Ekul did not need to pry with the Force to feel the connection this creature had with the weapon. It was purposefully symbolic, a ying and yang. Jedi; protectors of lives. Lightsaber; taker of lives. For all their training, there were instances as these the taking of lives could not be avoided. He had willed himself not to mutter that the Sith deserved it, even in the sight of the younglings that lay frozen in time, never again and forever unmoving. He was still a Jedi, and he owed the galaxy a duty. If that mean't his life, such was his destiny. He had followed the Jedi, now far ahead, out of the mouth of the Jedi Temple and onto the steps where a fierce battle flowed. He watched as the nautolan burst into the fray, wielding a cerulean lightsaber pike with the deftness, flair and ingenuity unlike he had ever seen before. An expert of his craft. He moved without second thought for his own life and personal regard, upholding the deepest tenants of the Jedi philosophy. Duty before anything else. And their duty today was to spare others of the slaughter they would lay witness too. An unnoticed trooper fired upon him. If not for the Force, Ekul would have been blasted there and then. His instincts kicked into gear. He found himself leaping aside as he relinquished himself to the cosmic energies. Allowing it to guide him. The marble steps beside his feet were reduced to a molten slag. He reached towards his belt and seized his lightsaber. Before the trooper, who was carefully lining up his shot, could fire again, Ekul activated the blade. With a fierce electronic growl, the energy shaft surged forth, as if eager to be free after all that time. He had let the Force wash him towards the trooper, an invisible cascade that carried him down the steps and in a long arc toward the floor. Ekul swung the blade once, then reversed the stroke, slashing and melting through the troopers armour. The soldiers body slumped to the ground in a meaty thud. Ekul rose his chin from the gnarled corpse, looking vacantly at the army that marched onto the temple. There was no hope. They were helpless. A fear of death resonated throughout. A flurry of attacks caught his eye as another Jedi went down in a howl of pain. More death. Ekul quickly battered away a handful of blaster bolts that moved his way, but someone was pulling their attention. Ekul observed in open awe as the nautolan moved through the horde, his body moving in two and three directions at once, joints flexing, unlimited by human vertebral restraints. Who he touched went down. And those who went down, stayed down. Ekul had realised in that moment it was true for what they said about the double-bladed lightsabers, 'they can make enemies stampede over each other running for cover.' Each attack following into the next was as fluid and effortless as his own blinking. The nautolan had cleaved a path through the Sith troops, he was making himself a target. Distracting the enemy from the Jedi that needed to retreat - lest they die. The lightsaber pike twirled between the creatures aquatic fingers, slamming a disruptor bolt as though he were a baseball player. His pike short-circuited. The plasma vanished before the Jedi could even react. Ekul rushed to his defence, but it was too late. Three slugs slammed into the nautolan. One through his hip, another through his mid-section and a third grazed his shoulder. Fire burst to life, he ignited. And he shrieked. He let out an involuntary Force Bellow in pure agony. A deafening roar that washed out the noise of battle as the nautolan burned alive. Ekul couldn't help but sink to his knees and clasp his ears, pain erupted as his eardrum burst. Through blurred vision he watched the nautolan. He had dropped his lightsaber pike, fleeing, flailing, towards the Temple in retreat. His running became sluggish footsteps, the fire was tearing through his flesh. It was taking a toll on him. It was killing him, slowly, ever so slowly and painfully. In a show of considerable skill, the Jedi utilised the Force to expel the flames. He staggered forward. Slugs tore through his chest once more, a single solitary quiet gasp for air could be heard. Then he fell. He slammed against the steps with the resounding clap of a carcass slapping the floor of a slaughter house. Three holes in his chest. He remained unmoving. Death. It was then his heart had beat faster, as it was now, spinning in the vortex of wind. He couldn’t explain it, but when he had saw that nautolan die, his own heart pumped ever more rapidly. As though when his heart stopped, The Dark Man had picked up the slack. He knew it to be a natural reaction, adrenaline in his system, but ever still, the memory of that brought him to desperation.
The unexpected move had worked to her advantage. The Dark Man pulled away from the gale, suddenly tearing out of this complex lattice, and he carried himself, countering his spin to slow himself down without viciously and inadvertently slamming his brain against his skull. A sudden stop with such speed as that, he knew what happens. It usually happened to podracers. Though his speed was nothing but a speck of grain to their speed when compared, the physical still applied. He shifted his weight, torque his muscles, and twirled so that when he landed, he was facing Alva. He landed, perfectly balanced, though his stomach did not agree. Lightsaber at the ready. He caught the glimpse of the energy blade, and he twisted his hips, hunching his back to avoid the blade that came for him. He could see it, inching ever closer, and then it was upon him. He had moved out of the way of being impaled, but as the saying goes, jumping out of the frying-pan and into the fire. He felt something, a searing pain, and then blackness. He became aware of his scream. He clutched tighter onto the handle of his blade, as if hanging onto a rope for dear life. His knuckles, wrinkled with age, and leathered from weathering, grew white at the pressure he applied. Pain erupted throughout his body like a wildfire. As though someone had delicately taken a string of nerve and plucked at it, jerking it. He could see nothing. His glasses had been cut through like a warm knife through butter, and then his eyes had scraped across the blades edge, blinding him. He saw and did not see. What unraveled before him was not the organic eye perceiving the world before him, as his eye sockets were now sealed and cauterised, but his mind attempting feebly to explain what was happening. The memories of Coruscant flooded him once again, threatening to drown him. Employees and instructors at the academy were mowed down by blasterfire; and, worst of all, his scream, its pitch equal to the screams of the children and the young padawan as they had been cut down. His lungs burnt, and his throat grew sore, hands clenching tighter as he fell onto his knees in the mud. The memories collapsed, falling away into a thousand tiny diamonds of razor sharp glass. The universe unravelled like a ribbon, and a landscape grew before him. He found himself in a foreign landscape, his steps slowed as he reached the end of the crumbling dock and he dropped his deactivated hilt to the ground. This place was familiar to him, yet he had never visited it, and with confusion he found that he could see once again. The dock had once been painted a bright blue, perhaps the same color as the water it stood above, but now the little paint left flaked off at his step and beneath was only gray. The same gray of the empty lake bed below, where a few scrub trees and grasses attempted a comeback where fish once swam. The same gray as everything on this forbidding, forgotten world. It was a gray of decades-old ruin left untended and unhealed, and it would probably stay this way forever, as the planet had nothing more to offer, and its former masters had nothing left here to claim. He knew things he couldn’t explain. The first were the thin rays and glimpses of this world’s sun, which would rarely show itself, offering no real heat when it managed to struggle through the thick haze hanging constantly in the sky. The other was a column of smoke far to the west. To follow that ominous smoke sign he had to cross this dead hole of a lake and the dam at its far end. From the elevated vantage of the dock the Jedi Sentinel took a reflexive look around the horizon, scanning for threats, before casting a quick glance into the sky. For every waking moment, he was becoming more lost in this vision. He took up his fallen hilt, fastening it to his belt with a single-click of a buckle. As he turned back to find the shore and a way across the lake bed, he closed off the dry sound of his footsteps on the brittle grass and remembered the lake on Rendili, where he had spent much of his childhood. Fey music reverberated throughout this tomb-world, and the soft gentle words whispered on a stiff breeze, “Persevere.”
He was screaming. He couldn’t see anything. The scenes he had witnessed were not his own, and they had shattered as quickly as they had come to him. Darkness engulfed him. Words drifted towards him, those of Alva, “Learn how to treat a lady better next time you lying old man.” He couldn’t reason himself to respond, only able to lesson his breathing, and delving his pain into the Force to soothe him. Though his breathing came easier, it was nonetheless heavy and quick. His chest rose and fell, and he felt the rain pour down on his shoulders, and the clumps of mud sticking to his boots, calves and knees, yet he did not see it. He knew he was blind, and realisation dawned on him. He could see the Force, in the way he perceived the strands of energy that he and Alva manipulated. He pushed past the sinking feeling of knowing he would likely never see again, at least with his natural-born eyes, or the feeling of drowning that he may die. He opened his mind, and unlike the man that slowly ambles into the pool, The Dark Man leapt. He saw threads, strands and lattices, weaves and curves. He saw everything, distortions of colour, forms of energy that comprised Alva, he looked down at his hands and saw them to be unfamiliar to him, but he knew they were his. He rains the rain drops, millions of tiny arrows that nose-dived into the puddles, ponds, creeks and plains. The Dark Man stood onto his feet, back-pedalling away from her, weaving his lightsaber in a warding pattern that spoke the words he could not; stay back. He could see strands extending away from the both of them, extending through higher dimensions where time and distance were meaningless, reverberating with their connections to still more beings, on this world and others: beings who had passed through this place. Some where livin; many were dead. The Dark Man had no desire to follow any of the threads to see the fates of those snared in the web of this volatile planet. He turned and pushed his way through the brush and shrubs, stampeding to gain some distance. He broke out into an embankment and stumbled down, falling into a roll that had him waist-high in the waters of a river. The murky green coursed around him, and the energies that he saw flowing were all too familiar. He wished to wonder at the beauty of it, but pain lingered on, and the Force could only do so much to relieve it. He reached out with his mind, stroking his fingers across the wires that stretched over this planet, those that were nearest. He felt a presence, large and foreboding, but he had come across it before. His mind gripped itself around this string, pulling it closer to him, caressing it as he did so. He heard the rumble. He knew Alva’s ingenuity matched his own skills, he had to show her his own genius, and his utilisation of their environment. The great dragon snake that had dared to chew him as a small meal emerged from the waters, its long frilly neck rising meters above him, shoulders slowly dawning out from the water. A long tongue flicked out, yet it did not threaten The Dark Man this time, he had called upon the creature through nurture. An unsteady hand reached out, caressing the beast, and swiftly he gripped onto the scales and pulled what strength he had to flip himself onto its back. He landed with a thump. The Dark Man reached out, sourcing this creatures hunger, and connected his own, their minds linked. It had only been a matter of seconds since he had fled Alva, and he knew she would be coming after him to finish the job. The Dark Man thought only one thing, and envisioning only one person; attack. The dragonsnake started faster than he would have liked. He almost fell from its back, but quickly he readjusted his weight with a shrug. The dragonsnake crashed through the trees and bushes like a man walking through a sandcastle, charging for Alva. The Dark Man held his activated blade out wide, avoiding it from coming into contact with this beast under his temporary service. He focused on the tendrils engulfing Alva, and compressed. He was attempting to invert the energies around her, forcing them to press and attempt to crush her knees and elbows simultaneously. He brought all his desperation, training and experience into this. He didn’t need to crush those bones, it was merely an acceptable boon if he was successful, he needed only to make her incapable of moving. The pressure on her would be severe, and painful. He continued this attempt, pushing himself deeper. He brought himself closer to the edge, and as his focus turned onto her and not his wounds, the searing pain doubled. He grit his teeth, and he hissed violently at his own agony. The dragonsnake would attempt to swipe out her legs with its long claws. He released himself fully into the Force. Pinpointing those joints. It was dangerous, not to his body, but to his spirit. He relinquished himself to the cosmic energies, mentally taking the threads of energy around her knees and elbows, and pinching them.
