The Nightmother
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T W I S T I N G T H E K N I F E
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There was nothing more vile to the High Priestess than the sight of Dathomir—her Dathomir—bent beneath the shadow of outsiders. While war never changed and the hunger for power never truly quelled, neither had ever hindered her convictions, nor would any interloper ever possess the power to reshape them. It disgusted her, this grotesque inversion: females bowing to the whims of males, lowering themselves into the fetid chains of masculine desire rather than wielding it as the weapon it was always meant to be.
Vice versa had been the natural order—their order—yet here they knelt, enthralled and diminished, trading sovereignty for the fleeting illusion of devotion. The very air on Dathomir seemed tainted by it, thick with the rot of misplaced submission.
It was her unyielding opinion that many of Dathomir’s daughters had grown weak—complacent, foolishly blinded by the seductive lies of equality and affection. They had softened, these once-fierce scions, their spines curved in deference where they should have remained iron-clad and unbowed.
Weakness, in her eyes, was a contagion that demanded culling, not coddling; it should have been excised with ritual blade and incantation, not permitted to breed and infest the sacred bloodlines like some parasitic rot. To allow such frailty to propagate was an affront to the very spirits that birthed them—an invitation to decay that would one day choke the Nightsisters’ power beneath layers of simpering mediocrity. The High Priestess felt the bile rise at the thought, her fingers curling as though already wrapped around the throat of that gathering weakness.
While she had clawed her way back from the dark recesses of the unknown—those fathomless voids where even the spirits dared not linger long—it had come to her with abrupt and lacerating clarity that a Mandalorian influence now festered over Dathomir. Some of the Witches had lowered themselves into an alliance—if one could even dignify that craven arrangement with such a noble word—seeking protection from outsiders.
A salt ground deep into an already festering wound.
The very thought curdled the air in her lungs. Mandalorian daring to cast their shadow across Nightsister soil. Protection. As though the daughters of Dathomir had ever needed anything beyond their own magick. The insult burned like venom across her tongue, sharp and unrelenting, fueling the storm already gathering behind her eyes.
Santeria understood the cold calculus of alliances forged for domination—she had wielded such instruments herself with masterful precision, bending outsiders to her will until they served as little more than sharpened tools in the Nightsisters’ arsenal. Use them, drain them, discard them when their utility expired. That was the way of power.
Yet this… this Mandalorian connection had not sat right with her. It coiled in her gut like spoiled ichor, wrong in its very essence. While she assumed—no, she knew—she held no true blood-ties or lingering debts to these current Witches of Dathomir, that detachment would not stay her hand. She would defend the planet’s crimson heart from any threat, even from its own wayward daughters, with ritual fire and unrelenting magick.
Unless betrayal was afoot.
The possibility slithered through her thoughts like a shadow in the mist—perhaps these so-called alliances masked something deeper, a fracture she had yet to perceive. If treachery had taken root among them, then culling would not be a mercy but a necessity, and she would carve it out herself, bone by bone, until Dathomir’s purity ran crimson once more.
There was something about the current Mand’alor that had stayed her hand in vengeance—something that kept the storm of her wrath leashed, if only for now. Whispered words had reached her from the ether, fragments of a past she had long thought gone, scattered like dawn chasing the moonlight into oblivion. A rumor, veiled and treacherous, that clung to the edges of her consciousness and refused to be banished. It was that single thread of possibility which prevented her from descending upon them as a one-woman apocalypse, magick and malice woven into every strike.
Instead, Santeria had sent forth her word—an audience demanded with the Mand’alor. She did not mince her intent, nor cloak her purpose in diplomatic silk. This Mand’alor the Iron would know precisely why a High Priestess of Dathomir sought him out. She had made her identity abundantly clear, her titles and her power laid bare like an unsheathed blade.
Perhaps he had already heard the old tales of her. Perhaps not.
If the latter held true, he was about to.
There she stood now, poised like a blade half-drawn, awaiting the commencement of this fraught gathering. While she held no true ill-intent toward the Mandalorians—no burning desire to plunge her people into open war on some egregious, wasteful scale—their presence still failed to strip away even a fraction of her over-protectiveness. Dathomir was hers. Not a prize to be bartered, not a fragile world in need of iron-clad benefactors, and certainly not a territory to be softened by foreign creeds. Her devotion to its sovereignty ran deeper than blood, sharper than any Nightsister blade.
She would listen. She would measure this Mand’alor the Iron with the cold precision of one who had walked through death and returned. Should his words ring hollow, should his alliance prove nothing more than a gilded cage—then mercy would not temper the storm she carried within.
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