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Quiet. Loneliness. The hiss of snow carousing through the branches of pines soaring high overhead, seeming to reach for each other in hopes of warmth that never quite seemed to reach them. A layer of frost crunching underfoot, a slick rain frozen to crust the inches of snow swallowing her step. The sun can barely reach, filtering through green needles and tumbling over jagged ledges of rock, traversing forest’s winding path through metamorphic erosion. It breathes. The earth watches down on her, peering from its unreachable heights, snow-capped where she looks up to the underside, shadows of argillite peering from blankets of white. Shhhhhhh, shhhhhhh, the snow whispers - and yet here she finds no comfort. Dusty swirls of it stick to her cheeks, melting and making her face wet and cold as she pushes on to everywhere and nowhere.
Breaking the treeline, she stands at a riverbank. Its waters are sluggish, choked by thick ice floes that creak and groan in the winter’s silence, crunching against one another in their plodding desire to move on. The water that peers from beneath its icy sheet is dark, blue and bottomless. Mountains line the horizon, dancing in jagged peaks like partners. A rabbit, lone and silent, hops along the border of the riverbank across from her.
There is no sun, though it may hide behind the clouds. It is dark here, gray and cold.
Somewhere in the forest she’d just left, a wolf howls - low at first, though growing long and sorrowful as she looks over her shoulder to watch the pines twisting in a gust of wind.
When her eyes open, it's as if she's never left that place under the mountain from the last time she saw him. It had been years...decades, even.
Skye had always been a thorn in his side for one reason – Matsu Xiangu. That woman born of Krius’s own time and dedication had plagued him from the moment he saw the doubt in her eyes. Did he wished he had left the wide-eyed girl on Upatau? No, not one bit. Through her teaching and their journey, he had come to see now how perfect his creation had become.
Since leaving her to die – the time was so right for her to do so – Krius has become devoid of purpose, which bothered him for years. Even now, sitting in his small shack nestle in the mountain side, sipping a warm mixture of water and honey, he had no regrets. None.
Keziah Denko had been a pitiful subject found on Abregado-rae, and even the killing of her baby twins wasn’t enough to show her what true power really was. Hopefully she had died a death as pathetic as her children. Hapes had been just as uneventful when he returned there to try and make a life for himself, but it was just as stagnant as he remembered with parasitic non-Force users running wild. Even the events on Kinooine, Endor and Nar Shaddaa had been a waste of his time.
Krius had confirmed only one thing in his travels – the galaxy was decaying and there was little he could do to stop it. He looked over the cup at his battered helmet on the side of the hut, sitting on a shelf. Beside it, the broken lightsaber Keziah had given him. Next to that, his Red Ravens blaster. A legacy of nothing to show for it but trinkets. The blood matted black hair Krius kept on him at all times was the only thing he had to show what he created.
His lips smacked on the drink, feet resting on the side of the stone fire that crackled. He knew the owner of this hut wouldn’t mind him using it. Because he was dead. He was only a non-Force user anyway so no big loss.
Leaning back in the wooden chair, Krius was going to leave Skye for a few more days to visit Utapau. He spent most of his time simply wandering the Outer Rim to see how much the galaxy was decaying, and if he could do something to change it, he would. Because he could. He had that right and the strength to do so.
His thermal suit was zipped up to the neck, keeping him warm on the bitter mountain range where he had left her to die. It was sad that he wanted to take up home here, but this was the only place where he felt comfortable, and privately the only place he could mourn the moment Krius Syonis died a little when she had eclipsed him as something more than he could ever imagine – his perfect creation.
The list of things she’d done since the last time she’d seen Krius Syonis was long, strange, sometimes close to unexplainable. She’d seen a thousand places and too many faces to number and yet his was one of the few she didn’t forget. But unlike something more pleasant – Reverance, Ygdris, Sage, the beautiful gore of those she’d met Out There – his was a torture. She wondered if he would find some sort of satisfaction in being a blight or merely call it a roadblock.
She watches from the trees, staring at an inky silhouette cutting out part of the fire that illuminated his edges.
She feels like she’s drowning. She burns and freezes as the waves tossed her body around like a ragdoll in the dark, choppy waters. She couldn’t hear anything except the blood pounding to the rhythm of her heart against her eardrums.
Just as her vision started blurring around the edges the water went still, no ripple seen for miles in any direction that she turned as the sky shifted from a midnight blue to a deep shade of purple. An outline appeared in front of her, a spider fat and heavy with hunger.
The creatures feelers curled back in what could only be described as a grin: it had a mouth, and inside its impossible maw was a row of pointed shark teeth.
“You’re drowning in the middle of the ocean with nothing to keep you afloat,” It clicked to her and waved its hand in a sweeping gesture that stirs the flat water. The waves start small but quickly build so that it wasn’t until long they were drowning her as the salt water continued to burn its way down her throat like she’d been forced to swallow acid.
[SIZE=16pt]Allow me pull you to shore...[/SIZE]
When she sits down next to him cross-legged in the snow, the queen at the head of a long line of silent, powdery footprints she’d made as she trekked across the landscape to his side, she says nothing for a moment or two. This is the same mountain underneath which he left her to die. She can still smell it…all that blood, iron and something sweet. The fire popped as moisture sizzled out of a log, its orange glow illuminating the sharp lines of her face. The fur lining the hood of her jacket swayed gently in the wind. Her corruption showed only in eyes rimmed in gold.
“Almost as if we never parted,” she said quietly, looking up at the peak of the giant above them.
He'd had visions of meeting her one day - he always knew Matsu wasn't dead. She was too stubborn for that. He'd heard stories about Sith Lord Xiangu and her armies of the un-dead, her legacy through the Sith and beyond into the unknown worlds. Krius was actually a little jealous. She'd experienced things he could only have dreamed about, felt things he could only imagine and seen things he could only see in his mind's eye.
But, of course, without Krius Syonis there would have been no Matsu Xiangu in the galaxy. For that, he was always going to be silently proud of the monster he'd tipped over the edge.
Now she had come back to where it all began, and part of him expected where it would end. He'd left the hut and come to see that unmistakable aura that he'd been waiting for, like a nervous ex-lover or distant friend meeting their spurned other after years. No biting quips, no aggression - just silence and the planet before them and the mountains above. They were ants again in the snow.
"I always wondered what it would feel like seeing you again, Matsu." He titled his head up to the mountain, and looked at her as he did; face peeking out behind the hood. The same features only...sharper.
He held his hand out to the fire and warmed it gently, and gently manipulated the flames a little in a little dance as the logs cracked. He had lots to say and ask, but somehow couldn't find the words and didn't know if they were needed right now. But he had to say something.
"I figure you've not come for the scenery which begs the question why?" He looked at her profile. "So, Matsu. Why did you come?"
Oh, she laughed at that. It was a sound so quiet it might have been mistaken for the breeze that seemed to constantly wind its lazy fingers through the pine trees a distance off to their side but it was there, the soundtrack to the gentle tilt of his wrist as he manipulated the flames. (For a moment she sees the vision again, his skin melting off as he became fire, lava underneath the disguise of a human. He’d always been good with fire.)
“I dislike loose ends,” she answered.
She’d imagined seeing him again a thousand times. In some imaginings she killed him without saying a word. In others they ripped up the earth in some apocalyptic showdown much like their parting. But in just as many they talked just as they were now. They’d had their good days back then. But he’d ruined all of that as effectively as he did everything he touched. Everything except her. She’d ascended, and with his help - though not in the way he fancied. She would allow a dead man his dreams however.
“It’s been years Krius, and I’ve ignored your memory much like one might ignore vermin in the basement. But eventually on a quiet day it seems a good idea to do something about them.” Reaching up, she pushed the hood from off her head, the fire glinting off the black metal of both of her hands. She was beautiful, breathtaking in the way the mountains watching them were: cold, distant, deadly.
“I can sense you have questions, and I don’t mind if you ask. I’ll start. Left anyone else for dead lately?”
He sort of wished he’d brought his helmet out; of course he was on his guard – this viper could rear and strike at any moment, that was clear. Yet with all of her legacy and her whispers, she didn’t scare him. Why one would be scared of their own creation after-all bewildered him and showed him how weak others where when they cowered and quaked when facing death. It was a natural progression of life and he knew it. However, it wasn’t going to be as easy as she may have wanted.
"Loose ends?" He muttered to himself. He would gladly finish what he started years before.
Looking over again at her question, he scoffed a little, a forced laugh. She was just as irritating and self-assured as the day she spoke back to him like some insignificant bug. He saw the cybernetic limbs where those dainty hands had been. The girl was there, somewhere, behind those severe features, but even he couldn’t make her out. She looked devoid of anything – emotion, heart, urgency. There was little colour to her, and what colour was there was surely artificial. She looked in-human.
"No. I realised that mistake a while ago so I end what I start there and then. No loose ends as you say, no unexpected hiccups. You know me my dear, always to the point."
Her question hinted at dry wit, that was almost human, right? He shuffled, turning slightly to her, a fascinating study for him to look at, listen to and try to work out.
"My turn. Why did you ever think speaking against me was a good thing when it did nothing to stop what you always were going to become; a freak. I knew it from Utapau, I knew your mind was damaged. I just find it so frustrating you tried to have free-will."
Then a little laugh, which was real. He may as well enjoy this time with her and spoke with a jovial warmth to his voice, like the golden fire beside them.
"Then again, without me you wouldn’t be anything like you are now, so you can't complain I guess. Just a shame you ruined yourself in pursuit of being what I could have given you in a heartbeat. I mean, look at you, Matsu. You've been pretty much re-built by those I always told you would stab you in the back one day. You being here proves you have nowhere else to go. I think you're a spent force and you've got nowhere else to go. No-one else to scare. Nobody cares for the scary sorceress act."
His voice had become as clear and precise as it always had been when he wanted to make a point.
Though she couldn’t hear his thoughts - mostly out of distaste for what she might read if she tried, something disgusting like cockroaches scurrying with too-dry hissing to the corners in the presence of illumination - she might have agreed with his assessment if she’d heard it. Much of the body language which humans used to communicate was lost on her. Once she’d been quite good at it herself and was still adept with reading it in others. But now she was expressionless most of the time, as alien as the place she’d returned from.
So it might almost have been startling as genuine confusion swept over her features like high tide over otherwise untouched sands. But that would be nothing next to the laughter that bubbled up out of her - warm, silken, golden laughter that echoed off the mountain face and lit her pale cheeks like roses.
With a smile, subtle fangs peeking past dark-painted lips, she rested her chin on a metal hand.
“Freak? Scary sorceress act? Oh come Krius, I didn’t pay you a visit to engage in a bout of name-calling.” She wondered what kind of cognitive dissonance he had to be experiencing to shove her in to the box which he’d once constructed so perfectly for her. “But as far as whether or not speaking up was a good idea, I think it worked out fairly well for me, even the part where you left me here. It pretty definitively showed me to steer clear. And at least I’m not the one living like a hermit suffering delusions of grandeur.”
There was a weightlessness burgeoning in her chest, a loosening she hadn’t felt since before she’d met him.
“If you don’t like loose ends either, how many have you ‘tied up’ since you learned from the mistake I am?”
With that cold look on her face, her features more like that of an animal than a human, Krius shifted again, rolling up to rest on his knees as he stoked the fire with another dry log. He didn’t look at her, but listened – he could her the laughter in her throat and the slight tinge of venom in her voice. It would be a lie if the remark about him living like a hermit didn’t sting.
All he had ever wanted was for her to stand by him and take on the galaxy together. He could have sorted out so much with her power at his fingertips – so many people would have learned what it meant to control the Force, to understand the gift a select few had. Instead she had stolen it all for herself.
"None.” He stabbed at the fire with sharp movements, clearly rattled. "Everyone who has crossed me has been insignificant and not worth my time. I did all I could for them as I did you, but even that wasn’t enough for them. No-one embraced my teaching as much as you.”
He stared into the dancing flames of the orange fire.
"Delusions of grandeur.” He scoffed and shook his head. She had a nerve. "Not delusions, Matsu Xiangu. Not delusions at all. You never understood, did you. You still don’t.”
With that, he turned to her, a face almost pained and frustrated with the current situation.
"I know what is inside that head of yours. I know why you’re here, but you’re so alone. You have no direction. Nowhere to go. You have nothing except me to keep you going. One day, in your final moments, you’ll find yourself thinking what IF you had stood by me. What IF you hadn’t lost your humanity. I would have carried you to greatness. If I have delusions of grandeur, Matsu, then so do you.”
He paused - another soft crack and spit from the fire, her face as plain as the snow behind her.
"You are more like me than you'll ever know. You carry me inside you. You always have, and you always will.”
She stiffened when he rose, prepared to bring him to the ground. He’d never been stupid though - just insane - and his movement was simply to stoke the fire, not attack her. She went back to listening, sitting cross-legged in the snow behind him, feeling it mold around her legs like it had when her hot blood had melted it all those years ago.
In a way she could understand at least part of his plight. She knew what it was to feel seperate from all those that surrounded her - fundamentally different, ‘other’. But that was where her ability to empathize stopped. It was hard to care for someone who’d tied the cinder block to their own ankle. She listened quietly to him, giving him the benefit of her full attention. Perhaps after all this time she’d glean something she’d truly just missed in her inexperience, that young woman devoid of all the knowledge and power she was armed with now.
Alas, nothing.
She pushed herself off the ground, wiping clumped snow from her jacket before coming to stand next to the fire with him. It was eeriely reminiscent of their last moments together.
“I fully admit that I don’t understand, and never did.” The fire cast shadows on his face when she turned her head to look at him, and for a moment he was lava all over, the same demon whispering to remove sin, cut off her arm, it’s burning. She turned to him when he turned to her, arms crossed over her chest, hip cocked in a contemplative pose. Narrowing her eyes, she listened - reassurance for himself perhaps. ‘Speak and it shall become real.’
She smiled. A little thing that barely curled the edges of her mouth.
“You don’t know what’s in my head, not anymore. But with that speech I know what’s in yours. I’ve thought of both of those things. What if I hadn’t spoken up? What if we were here right now but we’d never been apart all the years in between? Well...I suppose the answer is we wouldn’t be. You would have ridden my coattails all the way to the top, convincing yourself it was your unparalleled vision and wisdom that had gotten us there.”
Once those words might have bothered her. The idea that she would always have a piece of him would have shaken her beyond words. Once, she’d thought it impossible to be rid of him. She’d thought it would require some elaborate revenge, to feel his blood running between her fingers, to feel sated. But she found that in some ways, life was sweet and did it for her.
“You’re right - we’re similar in some respects. We are both so very alone, aren’t we? The difference is I learned to do something with it, and when something doesn’t work out I don’t twist my mind in to a pretzel trying to remember it as something otherwise. I came here to see what’d become of you Krius. I expected you to have found some other poor soul to micromanage - that I’d see you on the Holonet showing us all some of that perfect vision. Yes, in some ways...you’re right.”
Unconsciously, she rubbed the fingertips of her left hand together. That subtle burning of the nerve endings in her shoulder would always be because of him. But what else?
“But there’s nothing of you inside of me. One day,” she said, repeating his line of questioning. “In my final moments…”
She paused, taking a deep breath of mountain air and letting it out in a contented sigh ending in an easy smile.
As he stood looking out to the planet, he heard her voice moving around as she rose and joined up. Krius always felt her presence, and she was dangerously calm at present. It was hard to listen to her, because she was the voice of reason and the voice inside his head that spoke loudest because she had survived and eclipsed Krius Syonis where nobody else had.
His breath vapoured in the cold air as he stood there with the warmth of the fire in front of his legs. His zip on the thermal suit was up to his neck and he felt snug in the outfit with his hands clasped behind his back looking out at the picture postcard landscape. They stood yards from the wooden huts he had taken as his own, with the mountain range to the left where she had been left for dead, and the rolling valley to their right dotted with trees and a small river.
It was annoying to him how calm he was around her – but, then again, so much had passed between them and so much time. Not that he expected one to simply brush off being mentally and physically tortured, nearly drowned and left for dead. However, his eyes flickered now and then to the right, to catch a glimpse of her either looking at him with piercing features, or looking out with him to the world that hold so much resonance for them.
It burned him that she knew exactly who he was now and what he had – nothing but pipe dreams that had collapsed around him. He didn't want to acknowledge the truth in her words. It pained him too much that she was one step ahead. God she was infuriating - part of him wanted to drag her face into the fire and let the flames consume her for good and finally see the animal die in his hands. The other part wanted to listen to her talk for days in a strange sense of calm
"How the hell did you survive out here? At least tell me that.”
That was the one evident question that niggled him – half buried in snow, hair matted in ice and blood, bleeding out with a severed arm and having her mind pulled apart and yet she was here now in control and with cybernetic limbs.
If things had been different - if their parting had been less violent, less an affront to her very existence - she might have offered him a position within her machinations. There was work for someone with his determination. He most likely would have been an excellent leader of men; Evil was rarely a cult of personality, but strength. He wouldn’t have needed to be liked to lead. But he was untrustworthy, a snake in the purest sense of the word. He couldn’t be allowed near anything important.
His question made her look to the mountains again.
“I say it was the mountains. When I lost sight of your ship flying away from me, it was just me and these giants, so much larger than I could fathom, staring down at me. I was alone except for them. I have been to every corner of this galaxy and then beyond, and I have never seen anything so beautiful as a mountain covered in snow.”
She paused, crossing her arms over her chest as she considered the faces looking at the pair now.
“But in the end, a friend felt my plight and came to my aid. He guided me towards freedom in the Force without fear that I might eclipse him,” she answered, turning her head back to Krius.
“If you prefer, I can kill you now and end your misery. Or I can leave you here to your silence. Perhaps the Mountains will save you too.”
Why did that girl always speak in riddles? Krius sighed inwardly; she’d do well to remember that no poetry or picture perfect postcard view could ever gloss over what was so prominent in everything; life and death. He turned to her and nodded his head once.
"I assume he’s now dead or he outgrew you. Shame. I hope you bought him a drink for his trouble.”
He looked back out to the snow valley, and with all her ruminations and words, she was right. Nothing was quite like this virginal plateau of snow and rock before them that held so many memories. All he had were memories really, of Matsu and the others. He'd changed lives and shaped the galaxy without anyone knowing it. There was plenty more to do out there, but right now, he simply wanted to watch the galaxy shake a little under his invisible touch.
Matsu’s eyes were on him, the snake had turned with bearing fangs to size up the prey. He could feel each hair on her body almost standing on end being this close to him again, to be in control again, and to hold his fate in her palm.
Did he want to die? Possibly. Did he want to live? Maybe. Either option held so much heartache to it that none seemed inviting right now.
Krius snapped his head to her and nodded again, one defiant nod. He stepped over, the fire behind him, and Matsu now in front. She was still petit, but gone were her features that had told him she was young and naïve all those years ago. She was a woman; corrupt and powerful.
"You’ve come so far and now you’re THIS close to ending it. I told you I’d make you a Goddess one day when you asked me to. Seems I fulfilled my promise.”
He gently reached up and brushed his finger down her face along the sharp cheekbone. It would make her skin crawl and he knew it. He was inches from her.
For a long time, she’d not allowed another creature to touch her after knowing him. She’d recoiled from intimacy, a leisure that seemed frivolous and ill-advised after letting him close only to be dashed against the stones. After a while she’d come to see its merits but even now she disliked being touched without warning. And even now...after all those years...she still felt revulsion when he touched her. It was like cold poison crawling up over the knife’s edge of her sharp cheekbone.
“You weren’t around long enough to do anything but teach me caution, Krius,” she said, reaching up to splay a hand on his chest. Once she might have done so lovingly, a tender gesture she wished she’d never granted. “I did love you once.”
And then she sprang her claws, latching herself in to flesh as she pushed forward with enough telekinetic weight behind her to flatten him on his back in the fire. She went with him, the size of his body dwarfing hers enough to stop the bulk of the flames around him in a halo large enough for her to find shelter in as she watched him consumed. (And for a moment he looked just the creature he’d posed in that last vision he’d ever given her, approaching blackened, lifting himself from the lava, telling a young girl to maim herself for no more horrible a crime than speaking her mind.) Once she’d imagined quite a few things for him: brain slopping from foramen magnum as spine pulled from skull like sucking marrow from bone, gore soaking her. Tongue and lower jaw still intact (half a flower, tongue a petal covering teeth stamen, pluck it off, she loves me not), warm and wet, viscera pulled apart in fatty strips, the twang of mesentery lining snapping under her fingers.
But they said burning was the worst way to go. And she knew something of burning.
Holding him down, her breath heavy, her usually kempt hair wild around her face, she didn’t even notice her jacket melting around her arms. The metal was more resilient to all things that could harm human flesh and she let the fabric sizzle off her in grotesque spider-web strips of melted finery. (Force, it’s so beautiful. She must have looked fascinated there in her small halo of fire, her face sharply demonic as his cheekbones melted in to view - two perfect angelic crests of ivory peering up at her beneath sockets long melted to something unrecognizable. And the lips gone, teeth in perfect array and too-large without gingiva covering a wolf’s smile she should have seen on Utapau. Beautiful. Perfect.) In the fire everything came flooding back, a thousand painful memories boiled to the top with the steam and pressure.
Reaching up, she ran a finger along that ivory, unstained cheekbone. “But not anymore.” She cupped what was left of his cheek, melted sinew peeling away on her palm.
She let out a hiss as she scrambled away, finally realizing the fire had reached the front of her legs and burned the front of her thighs. Sitting back to nestle in the cold, she packed snow on her burns.
She sat there all night.
She sat there until the sun reached bright fingers over the crest of the mountain range.
She could have left, but then she would have been like him.
Pushing herself from the hole in the snow that her body heat had created over the first few hours of sitting, she walked to the remnants of the fire. It had mostly burned out, its last few embers choking in the fat that hadn’t burned. The larger bones remained perfectly intact, and for a moment she considered taking his skull. His zygomatic wings fascinated her. But she decided against it. Better here where he could turn to dust and be forgotten.
“Goodbye, Krius Syonis,” she said quietly before turning her back and following her footsteps back the way she came.
