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Haphaestus stood. Zutia's encounter with the Sith artifact was coming to a close, and now it was time to resume her training in proper. He began to make his way toward the front of the Temple, feeling something rather peculiar in the Force surrounding her location. The former Dark Lord was not especially wary--Rivan's artifacts, mysterious in origin and purpose as they were, were rarely harmful. Even now his spirit lingered in this place, and in Zutia he had a promising heir, another being to carry on his teachings and thus prolong his influence in the galaxy. Haphaestus highly doubted that the ancient SIth would allow her to come to harm, least of all in this place.

 

And yet Haphaestus was most interested in learning the extent of her experience with the orb and what lessons she had taken away from it. He suspected that the artifact was akin to a holocron, and that the vision she had experienced had instructive purposes. The moral she took from this story could define her in ways that Haphaestus' teachings had not.

 

Soon he approached the chamber where she dwelt, but he remained wordless as he neared, for the moment only observing.

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For a few seconds, Zutia stood motionless in the silence, thinking herself alone. The Agamarian wasn’t quite sure what to make of the visions that she had received during the activation of the orb. As chauvinistic as the personality that inhabited the Sith artifact might have been, the visions were vivid and disturbing enough to give her pause and wonder what the purpose was behind them. Were they a premonition activated by her use of the artifact? Or perhaps a lesson in disguise, and one that the personality felt that she had failed?

 

Or did it genuinely think that she was unprepared to access its contents, whatever they were, and just have some fun with her instead?

 

Suddenly sensing that she was no longer alone, Zutia gave a little jump and resisted the urge to look in the direction of the artifact that she had just left on its dais. It didn’t really matter, she suspected. IT had to be obvious why she had come back to this otherwise featureless room.

 

“Well, it sure ain’t no paperweight.” She started, her head tilting slightly backwards towards the seemingly featureless sphere. Zutia tried to find words. “I tried touching it with the Force and it… made me see things. Not exactly pleasant, mind you. I think I saw Coruscant—or what was left of it. It was under attack, bombardment from Star Destroyers. It wasn’t exactly surgical. They being pretty indiscriminate with their heavy firepower.”

 

Zutia fell silent, not exactly sure how to describe her experience.

So build that wall and build it strong,

'cause we'll be there before too long...

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Haphaestus gazed into Zutia's eyes intently while she struggled to put her vision into words, and he approached her, his cloaked form soon looming above her relatively diminutive 162 cm frame. "The Jedi Temple was there," he supplied, his voice suggesting recollection, "and the deaths of the innocents spread chaos through the Force."

 

He paused. "I know not the purpose of your experience, whether portent or echo. But Darth Rivan's artifacts do not bestow such visions upon the unworthy. Only through the refinement of your power will the significance of these shadows be made clear.

 

"And to that end, I have brought you gifts," he continued. The Sith Master then produced the two pieces of equipment he had wrought from darkmetal in the Eternal Forge. The first was a lightsaber, black and silver, forged with the Force to be seamless, elegant beyond its function. The hilt was balanced according to Zutia's dimensions, from the width of her stance to the length of her arm and the shape of her palm.

 

But the other gift was even greater craft. It was a gauntlet of pure darkmetal. It would fit over Zutia's sword hand and proceed to her elbow. The gauntlet was intricately detailed and articulated, attractive to the eye but exquisitely functional. She would find it comfortable to wear, and it would not restrict the motion of her arm, wrist, or hand. It was thin enough to not be too heavy, and yet made of the incredibly durable darkmetal, it would be strong enough to survive blasterfire and lightsaber strikes. It was, simply put, an advantage.

 

"You have learned to draw upon the Force like a Sith," he said. "But to truly focus your mind, you must learn to fight like a Sith."

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((Apologies for the delay. This has been an insane week with loads of distractions.))

 

Zutia's eyes lit upon seeing the lightsaber. It had never occurred to the Agamarian before, even though her adolescence had been spent hearing about the exploits of the Jedi and myriad villainies of the Sith, but the lightsaber was a truly unique weapon. Hefting the metal of the hilt in her right hand, she guided the emitter cup of the weapon so that the blade, when triggered, would safely ignite above and to the side of Hephaestus’ right shoulder. As she did so, she couldn’t help note that, by emitting a massless blade, all of the weight of the weapon was in a hilt only slightly longer than her hand. A skilled swordsman would probably be able to exploit that gross imbalance and make the blade dance like a stylus.

 

Caught in her admiration of the archaic weapon, Zutia’s eyes darted up to examine the darkmetal gauntlet that he next produced… and then focused more deliberately when she detected a hint of pride in the gesture as he presented it to his student. Clearly there was something more than mundane smithing and metallurgy that went into the crafting of this piece of armor. Transferring the Sith weapon into her off-hand and donning the gauntlet and clasping the bracer around her forearm, she noted that it weighed only slightly more than a set of high-quality gloves and that the additional mass was distributed so well over the length of her arm that the alloy—unusually thin for what was clearly supposed to be a functional piece of armor and no ceremonial object—felt as natural as clothing.

 

Zutia returned the lightsaber to her right hand and gripped it tightly, noting that the two pieces had clearly been manufactured to function as one unit, as the hilt of the lightsaber was elegantly curved to fit tightly in the grooves of her gauntleted hand.

 

“I have questions.” Zutia’s tone indicated that she was perfectly ready to defend herself, if need be. “Who is Darth Rivan? And…” stretching her armored fingers so easily that the might have been bare, she continued. “What is this metal?”

 

The lightsaber was a powerful weapon, but its fundamental design was positively ancient and it had been without anything more than practical refinements for thousands of years. Supposedly, the original Force Users had used lightsabers with power cells so massive that they needed to be worn as backpacks! Sith and Jedi had been battling each other with them for millennia. There were a museums that boasted these artifacts—non-functional, of course—as the pride of their collection, and the principles of their operation were so well-known that even the Force-blind were capable of constructing similar, though inferior weapons.

 

This metal, on the other hand, was something different.

So build that wall and build it strong,

'cause we'll be there before too long...

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Haphaestus watched Zutia try out both the crafts. Ultimately, she would need to create her own lightsaber--as well-crafted as the one he had created was, only a weapon wrought with her own hands could be bound to her spiritually so that she and the blade became tempered together as one. She seemed equally impressed with the craftsmanship of the gauntlet, and it was almost with wonder that she tested its fit and flexibility. The great craftsman derived pleasure from the approval of the one who would trust themselves to his creation, no matter how aloof a Sith Master oft pretended to be.

 

From her questions, it seemed time to introduce her to where she was, and just who her Master happened to be. "Darth Rivan is the creator of this fortress," he began. "He resided here in the flesh approximately fifteen hundred years ago, and even since has bound his spirit to this realm using this place as an anchor.

 

"I did not always dwell here alone. Myself and others--where they are now I know not, though we are nothing if not persistent--have bound ourselves to each other in a sect called the Alcazarins. Ever since the inception of the Sith Order, it has preyed upon itself. Never, it seems, can Sith gather without spilling each others' blood. Rivan realized the truth: that this tendency is the critical flaw that has kept the Order from vanquishing its enemies for millenia. When Darth Dominus discovered this place and those teachings, he embraced them and founded the Alcazarins." Haphaestus' eyes seemed to burn from behind his mask. "I am the first true progeny of this sect; not a true Sith, perhaps, but something stronger."

 

The fire seemed to fade. "The metal is unique to this place, malleable to the practiced but conventionally indestructible in combat," he continued. "In the heart of this fortress is the forge, and from there darkmetal can be extracted and shaped. Its craft is my art, but in time you too may learn its secrets."

 

The weight of his stare became heavy upon her, intentional. "You, now, are the worthy heir to Rivan's teachings, if you are willing to accept them. It is a commitment beyond apprenticeship, but it is a vision of kinship which the Sith sorely lack. Give of yourself freely to this ideal, and I will show you things you thought impossible."

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The meager information that Hephaestus gave her regarding Darth Rivan was clearly all he could divulge at this moment, the two Sith standing before each other, preparing to engage in a lightsaber duel. The summary wasn’t quite satisfying to Zutia and she was clearly going to engage in some research on her own to examine Rivan’s teachings, but it did suffice to explain why the Sith had disappeared from the face of the galaxy since the formation of the Galactic Alliance.

 

For a second Zutia stared through her master’s imposing form to look at the fourth wall, making eye contact with a rather bookish, pasty-faced researcher who really should have been working on something else at the moment. The geek just shrugged back and threw up his hands in confusion. “Beats me. I’ve done my part.” He explained with a slight Midwestern drawl. “For all I know some writer in Bioware got lazy and didn’t do his research, or just plain couldn’t be asked to coordinate with the other authors in the ee-you. You know, par of course. Look, it’s your world, I just play in it—and thank bloody God for that.”

 

Zutia’s gaze returned to her mentor’s eerily brilliant eyes and took a measured step back. “I suppose that means we would be considered heretics by the Sith?” Far from being horrified at the prospect of being deemed an apostate by a multitude of exceptionally dangerous individuals, Zutia sounded positively delighted at the idea. The galaxy was due for a shake-up of the current order: the end of the futile struggle between the slowly stagnating regimes that were propped up by the Jedi Order, and the Sith who never seemed to be capable of maintaining their grasp on power after slaying their foes. Oh, yes, the galaxy was quite overdue for an extreme paradigm shift.

 

Zutia’s grip tightened on her lightsaber and she returned it to its original position, the dowsed blade angled just above her teacher’s massive shoulder. She felt the hairs on her tanned arm stand on end as her thumb ran along the ignition control, just before she pressed down on the button and the weapon spat out a broiling crimson blade between the two.

 

“Then teach me everything you can. I want to know everything.” Zutia placed her other hand on the butt of the Sith weapon, her mind withdrawing into the Force in preparation for whatever onslaught her mentor was about to unleash upon her. The focus was coming more easily now and she was becoming more confident in her ability to command the Force—not quite the half-mad enthusiasm that had inspired her to leap thoughtlessly from the peak of this fortress only a few hours ago, but an eagerness to learn everything that her master could teach.

So build that wall and build it strong,

'cause we'll be there before too long...

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Haphaestus would have smiled had he a proper mouth. He wouldn't exactly have said that the Alcazarins were reviled by the Sith, but it was certainly true that their ways were far from embraced by the larger Order. Indeed, during Haphaestus' tenure as Dark Lord of the Sith, he had set into motion many plans that, if they had concluded, would have changed the face of the Sith Order while casting down its enemies. And yet the Order at large was either unwilling or unable to look far enough into the future to see the inevitable conclusion of his plans and the vast power that it would bring them. Instead they had continued to stab each other in the back, and Quietus had proven once and for all that the Sith were not ready for a leader with Haphaestus' vision.

 

That did not mean that they could not change, however. It was quite possible that it was not through the mantle of leadership that the Order would eventually transform. Zutia Lavell could be the agent of the fulfillment of Rivan's vision. Haphaestus did not foresee it being long before the ancient Dark Lord revealed himself to her personally, through means more directly than the vision his artifact had granted her, its meaning still unclear even to Haphaestus' practiced mind.

 

As an Alcazarin, Zutia would also be entitled to the benefits of being more than just a Sith apprentice.

 

"Then let us proceed according to Rivan's design," he said. His tone changed somewhat away from the imperious and authoritative tones he typically employed in her presence, becoming instead almost conversational. "Since you arrived, I have sought to maintain in you a fear of me. Hatred makes you strong, after all. But you have proven that fear is not what allows you to access the dark side most easily. You have nothing left to fear from me, Zutia.

 

"Now, let us explore the art of lightsaber combat." So saying, Haphaestus discarded his darkstaff and drew a single lightsaber from beneath his robes, one very similar what he had created for his apprentice. "Observe my forms for now and pick up what you can. I will explain the specifics as needed."

 

He dropped into a combat stance and moved swiftly forward, crossing blades with her. She would quickly find that he was very strong, and she would need to soon adapt accordingly.

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  • 2 weeks later...

“Just pain. And humiliation.” Zutia gave her teacher a little smile behind the crimson blade of her lightsaber after he told her that she had nothing left to fear from him. But the last few hours should have demonstrated that the Agamarian had no fear of pain—crippling injury, perhaps, but pain was just one of the consequences of the kind of life she had led. A few bumps were inevitable, even if it was just a knee or back injury from hauling an animal carcass all over creation. Damage to her pride, on the other hand, was an injury worth fearing.

 

Aside from a few honor-obsessed blowhards politely murdering each other with jewel-encrusted longswords on the manicured grounds of some of the older estates on Agamar in carefully organized duels, the most Zutia had ever heard of two combatants crossing blades were the battles she had heard between the Jedi and Sith. She had never even held a blade longer than a simple vibroknife, let alone wielded one in combat. A massless, meter-long blade composed of pure plasma that seemed determined to escape from her grasp was something quite out of her element.

 

That complete lack of experience was reflected in Zutia’s defense as she widened her stance and raised her blade to absorb a strike that would have split her skull in half. The impact was surprisingly heavy for a massless blade. She sprang back when Hephaestus continued to press his advantage in size and experience, her legs carrying her slight frame further back as she absorbed blow after blow squarely on the base of her blade. This was not technique, just a desperate attempt to protect herself from being dismembered by her teacher, even by accident.

 

Eventually the Alcarazin aspirant became very conscious of the fact that her back was being driven against the wall and she was rapidly running out of working space. The next attack from her teacher was a vicious diagonal slice that would have neatly opened up her carotid artery and spinal column in a heartbeat. Again she managed to catch her teacher’s strike near the hilt of her weapon, but in an attempt to improve her circumstances and by herself some space from being pinned to the wall, she angled the tip of her burning blade towards her teacher’s throat and advanced, gliding the edge of her blade along that of Hephaestus’ to try to run him through.

 

And Zutia hoped that she didn’t succeed, for she sincerely doubted that her control of her lightsaber was such that she could stop herself from inflicting a lethal wound on her mentor if he couldn’t deflect her counterattack.

So build that wall and build it strong,

'cause we'll be there before too long...

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With only the faintest of movements Haphaestus pushed her blade aside just enough that it passed over his shoulder instead of through his neck, allowing himself to give a step and giving Zutia the nonverbal cue to take the offensive. When she did so, he made an effort to make textbook parries for each of her attacks while slowly yielding ground. Each parry was the minimum amount of movement required from his blade so that each of her attacks came close to his body without ever striking it. Once or twice he allowed her blade past him without a parry, instead letting his step back bring him momentarily out of range.

 

"Be mindful of your footwork," he said, blocking her latest swing and letting the blades tangle, smoking and hissing for a moment. "Observe me." He was holding a fencer's stance, feet shoulder-width apart, his leading foot pointing forward and his back foot sideways. He took a sudden step, leading with his forward foot and then bringing the rear one back up into place. Then he started to slowly circle, placing his feet very deliberately so that if Zutia were to suddenly attack, he would never be flat-footed and unable to fall back a step.

 

Suddenly, he beat her blade--a strike against the lightsaber itself designed to knock it aside, then advanced and attacked her directly. It was possible that she would be fast enough to parry, but the correct move was to give a step and negate the tactic altogether. As her instructor, it was important that these lessons felt dangerous enough that she learned how to train her instinctual reactions, but Haphaestus had a droid's control and could halt his lightsaber blade a centimeter from her skin if she ever missed a parry.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Zutia watched her teacher’s motions intently, mimicking his stance as he sank down slightly so that the blade of his lightsaber protected more of the length of his body without requiring a split-second reaction. The posture was somewhat less solid than the stances that she had learned for steadying a blaster, but it made sense. Nimbleness and flight of foot mattered more in a duel with blades, especially with a lightsaber’s massless blade, where a sudden flick of a wrist could open a contender from navel to neck. Once she had learned to maintain her balance and gently redirect Hephaestus’ attacks with the tip of her blade rather than taking the brunt of the assault on its edge, Zutia began to almost enjoy herself until she was suddenly overwhelmed by a fierce offensive from her teacher.

 

With a brutal crash of his lightsaber’s blade against her own, Hephaestus dashed away Zutia’s defenses with a stroke that betrayed a strength even greater than the Agamarian had earlier guessed. Pressing his advantage, he followed through with another strike on the backstroke. Zutia instantly realized that there was no way that she would be able to return her blade in time to defend against the slash that would turn her neck and head into a misshapen football. She darted backwards by instinct, almost jumping backwards and angling her head back to escape his blade.

 

The blaze of his lightsaber’s blade swept under her chin, humming angrily as it harmlessly passed her by. A flick of her wrist returned the massless edge of her weapon to a guard position, Zutia frowned past the glare at her teacher. Again and again, the man had had the opportunity to kill her, and their first meeting showed that he certainly had the power to snuff out her life without much of a struggle. And yet, he had offered her training, artifacts that were nearly unique in the galaxy, and weapons with which his pupil could possibly kill him even by accident. It was possible that the man was a sadist that was taking some private delight in toying with his prey for hours before he moved in for the kill, but Hephaestus didn’t quite strike her as a sadist. He clearly enjoyed some delight in her admiration of the artifacts that he had just given her.

 

Hephaestus had saved her from so many of her own mistakes that there was no possibility that he had malign intentions towards her. And with that in mind, Zutia decided that she did trust him.

 

The Agamarian returned the onslaught with greater enthusiasm, relying on the discipline of her wrists, already honed by her practice with blasters, rather the brute force of her somewhat slender arms. Zutia was not flimsy in any stretch of the imagination even as the muscles of her arms burned pleasantly within the confines of her black cloak, but it was obvious that her strength was nothing compared to her master’s. Instead of trying to attempt the same clash of blades that had thrown aside her own barrier, she focused on trying to bypass her master’s defenses with the tip of her lightsaber and unexpected adjustments of the angle of her attack.

 

After several exchanges, Zutia lunged forward and stabbed towards her teacher’s abdomen. Already expecting the parry that harmlessly deflected her assault off to the side, the huntress used the energy of that redirection to loop around her blade with a flick of her wrist in an attack that would neatly amputate his leg at the knee.

So build that wall and build it strong,

'cause we'll be there before too long...

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Haphaestus noticed immediately when Zutia found her rhythm and opened herself up to embrace the moment. She suddenly realized that he had been telling the truth when he declared he had no intention of harming her, and that let her fight without that constant worry nagging at her that a mistake could cost her life. This was a very good realization for her form, he noted, and her attacks became more frequent and varied as she experimented with the capabilities of a lightsaber. She was learning tremendously quickly, proving that her warrior's instinct could be applied to other art forms than just marksmanship.

 

When she improvised and rolled her blade off a block and towards his knee, he was impressed--she had actually caught him out of position. But with a telekinetic nudge he used the Force to drive her lightsaber down and clear of his leg, then took a half-jump back to put several feet between them.

 

"You are learning well, but lightsaber combat involves much more than lightsabers," he said. "You will find the dark side flows easily in combat, and even that is not your only advantage."

 

Before he gave her another moment to consider, he advanced and attacked again. This time he gave a wide variety of attacks in rapid succession, striking from different sides in an attempt to get her to either open up to the Force and allow precognition to guide her movements or to find another way to deflect or evade them all.

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As Zutia took an inward breath and focused on her unbending will to control and dominate her surroundings, her focused away from the flashes of light as her blade clashed with her teacher’s, instead staring blankly at an imaginary point a few inches before her face. Her features settled into an expression of mild concern, her brow furrowing in concentration as she pursed her dust-cracked lips. The second in which it took the Agamarian to harness the Force was nearly too long, for no sooner than she summoned her latent talents, Hephaestus’ blade came at her neck with an angry hum.

 

Though the light of the massless blade was only barely visible in her peripheral vision, the Alcarazin pupil could already sense where the blade would intersect with her flesh before it landed. She could even feel her skin pucker into goosebumps. Holding the blade close to her body, her wrists instantly snapped the crimson edge of her lightsaber to protect herself and prepared for the heavy impact with a broad stance. The clash came with a heavy impact and Zutia forced his blade back with a powerful thrust from her arms. Her master immediately renewed the assault, but the Agamarian hunter gently angled away each attack before it became dangerous.

 

Finally another slash came that threatened to bisect Zutia at the level of her neck. Taking a cautionary step back, Zutia swept the length of her blade along the tip of Hephaestus’ weapon, guiding it so that it passed harmlessly over her forehead. The Sith acolyte tightened her control of the Force and helped the momentum of her teacher’s weapon along with a gentle telekinetic nudge, then seized the advantage by hacking downward at her opponent’s shoulder. She had misjudged the range and neglected to take an advancing step to close the distance, so only the tip of her crimson blade would rake along the bone, but it would nevertheless be a crippling blow if it wasn’t evaded.

So build that wall and build it strong,

'cause we'll be there before too long...

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Sufficient, perhaps, Haphaestus decided. Zutia still hadn't made use of all of her resources, but she had weathered the assault by drawing on the Force to bolster her defenses. Her counterattack following the application of telekinesis was similarly controlled. The Sith Master's mechanical mind had the time to consider his options in the face of the well-executed attack and plot multiple responses to it. An appropriate repositioning or a rapid parry could take advantage of Zutia's lack of reach, and there were a number of options that would enable him to make a rapid counterattack that would be difficult for her to deflect.

 

But he was not looking for an opportunity to win this fight, and he seized instead a teacher's opportunity to both demonstrate a lesson and reveal something about himself. And so he let the blade pass into his shoulder, penetrating his robe, the layer of bluish flesh beneath, then the mechanical chassis and dip into the wiring beneath. He made sure that he didn't lose power to the motors that actually enabled him to move his limb, but did note that he lost access to a cluster of surface sensors that were a droid's equivalent of being able to feel. It was an odd sensation when coupled with Haphaestus' unique architecture, since his organic skin also contained nerves which enabled him to feel the constructive sensation of pain....

 

A sensation that accompanied the wound Zutia had dealt him, which was accompanied with a flash of sparks before he changed posture, causing the skin to pinch shut and insulate the circuitry as he counterattacked. "Pain is a powerful catalyst for the dark side," he said as he battered away her defenses with a direct application of inorganic strength. "If you sustain wounds in combat, you must learn to focus your pain into emotion, and then power."

 

He lashed out with a Force push but deliberately missed her. The telekinetic spear was so powerful that as it struck the stone wall the room seemed to shake and the stone splintered.

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  • 2 weeks later...

There was no resistance at all when the blade of Zutia’s lightsaber sliced into her teacher’s flesh, no sudden resistance or vibration, or seizure of movement when it hit bone, or any feedback in the hilt whatsoever. The only signature of the wound was the bitter scent of burning cloth and the unique reek of sizzling tissue that filled her senses as the crimson blade raked across her opponent’s skin. She almost dropped the weapon out of shock and an apology was on her lips.

 

She briefly pondered how such a wound could be treated… or if it was even possible for her to treat it with her meager skills. If it was true that lightsabers instantly cauterized the wounds they inflicted after the passage of the blade…

 

But that proved to be irrelevant, as her teacher straightened and turned to face her, concealing the bluish flesh that had been revealed by the slash of her lightsaber. She couldn’t help but stare at the exposed cords as the wound shifted out of view. Even hailing from a world as removed from the cosmopolitan core of the galaxy as Agamar, Zutia had met and worked with a number of alien species, but the sunburned woman had never conceived that her mentor, even taking into account the unnatural hue of his eyes, was anything but… human.

 

But her opportunity to wonder exactly what species Hephaestus belonged to was dashed when the man returned his weapon to its guard and summoned his formidable strength to bash away her defenses with a series of crushing blows, continuing his lesson as though the agony of the wound meant nothing to him. Zutia felt the sleeve of her ebony cloak ripple as she felt… something rush past her and crash into the reinforced wall behind her. She glanced backwards, keeping the gleam of her mentor’s weapon in her peripheral vision, and saw that his telekinetic attack had partially caved in the wall.

 

Zugtia returned her gaze to her master, only offering the man of unknown origins a sly smile. “Behold the power of the Force, then?” She inquired with a playful twitch of her eyebrows. Her teasing expression took on a sinister edge as she summoned the Force to her will, losing herself in the exhilarating rush of power that it offered. She had drawn taken plenty of lives in her existence—mostly non-sentient, but she had set foot on a few worlds where it was wiser to greet a stranger at the business end of a blaster—but never with much pleasure. It was watching a mindless herd bend itself to her will, that momentary flash of horror as a being that wished her harm realized that he was at her mercy that she relished. It was having complete control over the fate of a feeling creature that Zutia took pleasure in, whether it was a base animal, a sentient being, or, perhaps, even her own teacher.

 

She formed a telekinetic fist around her mentor’s neck and squeezed with as firm a grip as possible, seeking to drive the very breath from his lungs. Pulling downward at his neck, Zutia sought to drag his body to the floor, where she could watch for a few seconds Hephaestus appreciated how well he had taught his pupil.

 

The Agamarian didn’t want to kill the man, or even to permanently maim him, but the irony when their roles reversed would be delicious.

So build that wall and build it strong,

'cause we'll be there before too long...

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She controlled her reactions well, Haphaestus noted. It was remarkable how far she had come with the Force in the short time he had been teaching her, and it reflected her natural proclivity to wield the dark side and her warrior's spirit. She had taken to lightsaber combat like a Beldon took to biospheric plankton, and her ambition elevated her talents rapidly now that she knew how to direct them. It would not be long until she would be ready to face the galaxy again and experience it with new senses and purpose.

 

Presently, the Sith Master felt the pressure of the Force close around his neck, and it was clear that he injury he had allowed himself to sustain had not shed sufficient light on what he was. He drew no breath and thus could not be strangled, and he called on the Force to root his body in place, resisting the downward pull that would otherwise have had the strength to put him on his knees despite the strength of his craftsmanship. The dark side of the Force rushed around the room, their garments fluttering in the pressures at work, the energies audible as a deep rumble and so powerful they could almost be visible. There they paused for a moment, paralyzed in the contest of wills.

 

Finally Haphaestus broke the lock by channeling his focus and pain into a blast of Force lightning, which leapt the distance between Master and apprentice in an instant. The expenditure, however, did cause Haphaestus to lose his footing and, even as the blast connected, he dropped to one knee. Zutia, thrown off her feet entirely, probably wouldn't fare quite as well, but even a focused lightning blast was unlikely to do any permanent damage.

 

"Use your pain. It grants both power and understanding," he said. His voice sounded a little strained. " You can renew your attack or interpret the vision that the artifact of Rivan granted you; master secrets of the dark side or conquer civilizations; destroy the Jedi or the Sith."

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Hephaestus’ towering figure refused to yield one centimeter to her grip, and his expression appeared thoroughly unimpressed by her attack. A growing sense of outrage blossomed within her, and turning the indignity of her failure against her master, Zutia’s stranglehold tightened further and the crushing weight around his neck grew heavier. Hephaestus’ discipline seemed indomitable. Not only did he refused to yield to the pressure, but as their battle of wills continued, she realized that he wasn’t even attempting to resist the grip around his neck. Either he was able to remain extraordinarily calm despite the burning need for air that he had to have been feeling… or…

 

…or he simply didn’t breathe.

 

Zutia’s stomach seemed to drop about a half a meter below her navel as she realized just how ineffectual her stranglehold had been. That sinking doubt eroded at her grip around her mentor’s neck at the very moment of his counterattack. In the tunnel vision induced by her deep immersion in the Dark Side, she only barely perceived a forked burst bluish light rushing towards her body at the same time that her more esoteric senses detected a wave of staggering powerful energy, too slowly for her to react.

 

The wave of energy caught her just below her neck, and Zutia was blasted off her feet at the same moment that a wave of agony, unlike anything that she had ever felt before, set every nerve ending in her body alight with pain. Her previous self-control forgotten, she gave out a cry of pain just before her form slammed to the ground with a painful crack of her skull against the floor and her lightsaber fell from her weakened grip. Fortunately, it seemed that her master had deemed it wise to fit the weapon with a pressure-sensitive dead man’s grip, so the blade deactivated before the hilt could spin around and inflict irreparable damage to either Zutia’s crumpled body or her surroundings.

 

Skidding to a halt, Zutia painfully looked back at Hephaestus. Every muscle in her body was aching as though she was in the grips of a skeeter-borne malarial fever, and her vision swam as she looked back at her teacher—clearly, the impact of her head against the floor was as painful as it had sounded. Her nostrils caught the scent of smoke rising from her robes. Despite the fact that her every limb protested at the movement, the Agamarian drew her legs under her body and smoothly rose to her feet. That childish outburst aside, she would not betray the weakness that pervaded her body. She would not reveal to her master how much he had just hurt her.

 

The pain brought a wonderful sense of clarity to her mind. Although her body felt as though the top millimeter of flesh had been flayed from her skin, Zutia was a daughter of Agamar, a planet where independent spirits became hardy souls or became hearty meals. She would not beg her teacher for mercy, nor would she chastise him for what seemed an unsporting tactic. She would not thoughtlessly lash out at her opponent like a cornered beast. She would not disgrace herself by succumbing to the pain. She would endure this pain like any other she had faced in her life, overcome it, and learn from the experience.

 

Zutia’s vision continued to fade in and out, but that was irrelevant. She had the Force; she had her heritage, and that was enough—more than enough. Harnessing the Dark Side, the Alcarazin acolyte gripped the hilt of her fallen lightsaber and yanked it towards her body, catching it effortlessly in the palm of her outstretched hand. “I’m not some mindless tool of destruction, Hephaestus.” Bringing the hilt of the lightsaber close to her waist, she ignited its crimson blade and sank down on her knees to the defensible posture that he had recently taught her. Her thigh muscles, already exerted by the duel and now punished by the Force Lightning, screamed at the unwelcome exertion and threatened to shake, but Zutia sank deeper in the Force to revitalize the protesting limbs. “Can that be defended against?”

So build that wall and build it strong,

'cause we'll be there before too long...

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The Sith Master nodded. As before, Zutia controlled her pain well. Now, even though her muscles twitched and spasmed with the lingering electricity, she controlled herself. Even as she was no doubt asking herself questions about just what he was, she remained focused on the lesson that she knew she could learn. Even though her body was tired and her nerves alight as with fire, she had returned to a combat stance wishing to be taught something new.

 

"I commend your discipline," he praised her. "The Sith were unwise to send you away so quickly; they could have learned much from your restraint and focus."

 

Without pause he continued on to answer her question. "The Force lightning can be deflected by a steady hand and a lightsaber blade. Barring that, only very advanced techniques enable it to be resisted, so you are best off obstructing its path through positioning or telekinesis. I will attack with the technique again, and you will foresee its trajectory and intercept it upon your blade."

 

Haphaestus followed words with action, taking a step away from Zutia and letting loose a sustained stream of Force lightning. Back in the days when he had been training with Nurgle and Dominus, the technique had been his forte. Nurgle had imbued lightsaber crystals with Force lightning and gifted Haphaestus with them to empower his use further. Since then Haphaestus had found he preferred not to rely on any one technique, particularly one that could be countered with only a lightsaber. Still, his familarity with it made his application rather potent. Zutia would find that the kinetic force behind the blast would be more difficult than its anticipation.

 

With all that she had accomplished in so short a time, however, he had no doubt that she was the equal of any trial he could throw her way.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Again, Zutia sensed a surge of energy from the vicinity of her teacher, followed by an unpleasantly familiar puckering of her skin beneath her collarbone. The Sith acolyte snapped the blade of her lightsaber up and thrust the hilt away from her body, just in time to block the stream of destructive energy from overtaking her body again.

 

The lightning coursed over the length of the crimson lightsaber blade, lining the massless edge with a wreath of brilliant blue energy. The coursing waves of lightning seemed glued to the lightsaber blade, though occasionally a spark of lightning jumped off of it and threatened to deliver a jolt to her hand or face. She even felt a stray lock of hair stand on end when an errant ray of lightning jumped off the blade and flashed in front of her face.

 

There was a kind of beauty in the coursing waves of energy as they writhed through the air to meet the edge of her blade. Though the lightning danced and flickered over the length of the blade and sometimes threatened the hilt, Zutia marveled at how the slender blade of her weapon completely shielded her frail body from the destructive potential of the lightning. Then she realized why Hephaestus’ Force Lightning seemed magnetically attracted to her defending blade—because it probably was. The Force Lightning was probably more than waves of Force energy. Just like natural lightning, the energy that sparked from her mentor’s fingertips was at least partially electric, and the blade of her lightsaber, composed of contained plasma, would magnetically attract the lightning.

 

During all the time that she had known Hephaestus, there was something that didn’t seem quite right about her mentor. From his unusual name and insistence on not having his surname being known to his student, to his gargantuan strength, to how the man had just been dealt a nontrivial wound with a lightsaber and had shrugged it off, refusing to even examine the wound… he very clearly was not Human. His flesh, an odd tinge of azure, was clearly not Human—though, of course, there was a possibility of cybernetic enhancements… but her blade had sliced dangerously deep through his arm, threatening to cleave through the bone itself. She had even attempted to cut off his breath with her own Force-driven attack, to no effect whatsoever.

 

Zutia had a sneaking suspicion as to what her teacher’s origin might be, but what trivia that she knew about the Force suggested that the very idea of a Force-sensitive droid was impossible. After all, if a droid had learned to use the Force, wouldn’t they have become one of the Masters of legend, like Darkfire or Faust? Still, it was a possibility that merited investigation. But how?

 

The Agamarian gave her teacher a smile through the Force-driven pyrotechnics and threw her lightsaber at him with a deft flick of her wrist. Remembering the dead-man switch that had just saved her from getting filleted by her own blade, she applied a modicum of pressure to the hilt to prevent the weapon from shutting off. The blade spinning nearly out of control due to the unbalanced weight of the hilt, she watched attentively, gauging her teacher’s reaction to the attack.

 

Zutia knew that she was going to pay for this offense, most likely through pain. She shifted her stance to lead with her armored right hand—as though that would be sufficient defense to what assault her mentor could answer with—and prepared herself for pain.

So build that wall and build it strong,

'cause we'll be there before too long...

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Zutia held well against the force of the lightning blast and let her lightsaber absorb the disperse the harmful tendrils of electricity that sought to destroy her body with relative ease. It was why the technique had fallen somewhat out of Haphaestus' good graces--a simple telekinetic thrust could be just as harmful while being much more difficult to counteract by an opponent with a lightsaber. The advantage was, perhaps, that it was more sustainable and could inflict agony without necessarily killing the victim, making it valuable for a Sith trying to torture his or her enemies or slowly batter down their defenses. Haphaestus had little use for the former and more direct ways of handling the latter.

 

He had to give Zutia credit for going for the unexpected lightsaber throw. It kept her from having to advance on his position through the lightning barrage and there was a fair chance the spinning blade would shield her long enough to avoid taking too much of a shock before he inevitably had to call off his own attack in order to defend. Time seemed to slow to a crawl within the android's mind as some of his higher functions burst into activity, calculating the trajectory of the blade and projecting the location of its hilt for any conceivable moment in the near future.

 

Gracefully, almost casually, he broke off his lightning attack, took a half step back, and caught the thrown lightsaber near its pommel. "Cunning," he said, making no move to attack even though he was interested to see how well she would take to using her darkmetal glove to fend off lightsaber strikes.

 

Deactivating the weapon, he offered it back to her. "Very similar to using a lightsaber to ward off lightning--and considerably more useful--is to use it to deflect incoming blaster fire. Retrieve your rifle and open fire upon me, and I will demonstrate. We will then switch roles. You have already proven yourself adept at lightsaber combat, and once you are proven in this style of combat, we shall set aside our weapons for a time and move on."

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Despite Zutia’s sunburned complexion, a faint reddening of her cheeks be seen in response to her mentor’s praise. She actually had not expected to have been spared any reprisal in response to her reckless attack by throwing her lightsaber at Hephaestus and discarding her best form of defense. Punishment for her foolishness seemed more likely. Even wrath for trying to expose a possible weakness in her teacher’s anatomy seemed more likely than praise.

 

Zutia relinquished her Force grip on her lightsaber’s hilt when her master—his anatomy still uncertain—offered back her deactivated weapon with an underhanded toss. She reached outward with a black-clad arm and her lightsaber landed in the gauntlet with a satisfying clack of metal upon metal. Clipping her lightsaber to her belt, the Agamarian retreated to the periphery of the room to retrieve her hunting rifle, a long-barreled blaster with a boxy optical scope. Slamming the stock of the firearm home on her soldier, Zutia’s lips pursed into a frown and she cast a glance away from the sights and along the length of the weapon. Something about the weapon felt… different since her teacher had restored it from that lizard’s mauling. There was a very slight change in the balance of weight, and probing the body of the weapon with her newer, unhoned senses, something about its presence in the Force felt subtly different.

 

Presumably Hephaestus hadn’t modified it in a way so that it would blow up in her hands and leave half her body scarred from a cook-off of the ammunition. Glancing just over the optical scope—at this range, the device was actually a detriment to her aim—Zutia picked a spot right below her master’s sternum (if he even had one) and repeatedly squeezed the trigger with deliberate force, showering her mentor’s upper body with a barrage of carefully aimed semi-automatic fire. Hopefully his mastery of lightsaber defense wasn’t dependent on muscle memory, as the overlong barrel of her rifle accelerated its fire to a greater velocity than that of a standard blaster rifle.

 

Keeping up a steady rhythm of fire, Zutia kept her senses carefully focused on the short space that separated the two Sith. She had a sneaking suspicion that one of those bolts was going to come shrieking her way any moment…

So build that wall and build it strong,

'cause we'll be there before too long...

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Haphaestus was in motion before the first trigger pull. He made a series of lightning-fast, ultra-precise movements to intercept and deflect the incoming blasterfire upon his burning crimson blade, sending it screaming away at a variety of angles. Rather than make his movement continuous and fluid as he might have if he were trying to conserve energy or focus upon another task, he positioned his blade with snappish flicks and gestures that pronounced the fact that he was acting with foreknowledge of the bolts' trajectories. As the barrage continued, he began to demonstrate his control over their outbound course, not by sending them to strike Zutia but by redirecting them in a gradual arcing pattern over her head. Even as she shifted her aim and he repositioned his blade, each shot came back to take its place in the pattern.

 

After several seconds of this, the Sith Master nudged her rifle barrel out of the way with telekinesis, signaling a pause. "As you can see, the same danger sense and precognition that serves us in blade combat is the key to deflecting blasterfire," he instructed. "The precise positioning of the blade to not only intercept bolts but also to redirect them at a specific point in space is far too complex for a limited organic mind to calculate, especially in a combat situation. You must learn not to second-guess the guidance of the Force as you command it in your defense."

 

He closed the distance between them and reached out a hand for the blaster rifle so that they could reverse roles. He would start with shots just wide of their mark so that if she erred Zutia would not perish, then slowly work into something more real. Hopefully the rifle would have a low power setting as well--very few apprentices, even ones as strong as the Agamarian had proven to be, could master such techniques without ever missing a bolt.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Zutia nodded after her teacher retrieved her hunting rifle and raised the length of the weapon to a firing position. Reciprocating, the Agamarian called her lightsaber to her hand with a gentle nudge of the Force and ignited the crimson blade. Staring past the humming blade of her weapon, Zutia looked into the barrel of her own firearm and took a second to ask herself if she had gone insane by allowing a relative stranger to take her own weapon and use it against her. It was a distinct possibility, she knew, but the twists that her life had taken in the last few days—venturing to the homeworld of the Sith Order, being abducted by unknown agents and trafficked to a dangerous backwater, and accepting the tutelage of a man that had nearly killed her several hours earlier—certainly seemed insane by any reasonable measurement. Perhaps she had gone mad, but she had unlocked potential in herself that seemed impossible only months ago.

 

So Zutia gave her mentor a big grin, withdrew into the desire—her need—for complete sovereign over her own body, and spoke two words to Hephaestus: “I’m ready.”

 

Zutia could feel the burst of energy rush past her before she even registered the report of the blaster rifle. However, Zutia’s response was limited to flinching at the whine of the firearm, rather than any deliberate attempt to defend herself from a blaster bolt that had harmlessly flown wide of her arm. Next she felt an impact just above her left armpit. Gently angling the tip of her lightsaber, the Agamarian caught the bolt midflight and deflected it into the floor between the two Sith. Two more bolts came in that would spear her through the right shoulder and left hip. Ducking to avoid the first shot, she picked off the second blast and sent it flying into the ceiling.

 

More bolts came in different angles. Abandoning the robotic adjustments of the angle of her blade that she used to defend herself, Zutia’s movements became more fluid as she had to rush to deflect the incoming fire. One by one, she blocked each bolt and deflected them harmlessly away.

 

As her success continued, a subversive thought began to lurk in a quiet depth of Zutia’s mind. Hephaestus had been teaching her to regard the Force as a tool at her command, as another implement that she could control to augment her abilities or affect her surroundings. Now he was advising the Agamarian to place her trust in the Force to guide her in her defense—as an advisor to be trusted implicitly. If what little of the Jedi teachings had allowed to leak over the HoloNet were true and the Force had a will of its own, would it be possible for it to betray its wielder in a moment of need?

 

Or was that just propaganda put out by the eternal rival of the Sith? No doubt that had been a question asked by generations of Sith apprentices.

 

Either way, it was a distracting and ultimately eroding thought. In the critical milliseconds just before a squeeze of her blaster rifle’s trigger and her reaction, Zutia’s reflexes were slowed. Through some impossible stroke of fortune, that bolt came rushing towards her abdomen, the very same place that Zutia had returned the hilt of her lightsaber to a defensive position. Instead of catching her directly beneath her navel or striking the metal of the weapon’s hilt, it rushed in at the steel protecting her clenched fingers. Heat flared around her fingers and her shoulders stiffened in response to the scorching burn. However, the pain wasn’t nearly as intense as expected. After the initial shock of having been shot, she used the sudden agony to harden her focus and promptly defied her baser instincts by swatting two more bolts out of the air with a snappy vertical slash of her blade.

 

And then she looked past her blade, staring past its brilliance to look at her mentor without any expression on her face. Her susceptibility to distraction had again surfaced at an inopportune moment and posed a lesson in the form of pain. Until Zutia mastered that weakness in her self-control, her command over the Force would forever be flawed and she would remain vulnerable to even the most simple of tricks, and that was completely unacceptable.

So build that wall and build it strong,

'cause we'll be there before too long...

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"Clear your mind," Haphaestus snapped as she let a bolt slap against her gauntleted fingers. "You are feeble but the Force is strong. You must surrender your blade and divorce your mind from your movements. Once your muscles are autonomous, you may then turn your mind to other things, such as attack."

 

The Sith Master started mixing in a few other techniques to test Zutia's control. He would lay down a steady stream of fire, then pause to interrupt it and then trigger twice as many shots to make up for the pause. His trigger work was a bit more rapid than most species of organics could manage with a semi-automatic weapon, and he had such a fine control of his motions that he could exercise fine adjustments to his rate of fire to form both organized and random firing patterns with unique bolt placement and tempo.

 

He started sending more bolts than she could deflect her way, sometimes towards her feet or just past her frame to see if she could recognize and prioritize blaster fire that actually threatened her and to see if she would remain mobile and dodge incoming fire using the same precognition that was allowing to to deflect the shots.

 

And he wondered if it would become so easy to her that she started sending them back his way.

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It seemed that the exercise wasn’t quite over, and the student found herself scrambling to defend herself. The first ten bolts Zutia blocked with ease, harmlessly deflecting them into the walls and floor of the room. In one happy accident, she sent one whipping past her teacher’s left ear in such a narrow miss that he might have felt the scorching heat of the plasma bolt. The stream of fire quickly became overwhelming, however, and the Agamarian’s defense grew desperate and physical.

 

Faced with an unexpected flurry of bolts that targeted her from head to hip, the Agamarian’s cloaked form rushed to defend herself.The brilliant hue of her lightsaber swept about in a semicircle that blocked half a dozen shots that had targeted her collarbone, shoulders, and left side, sidestepping to evade a blast that was homing in on her navel. That maneuver wasn't quite as quick as it needed to be, unfortunately, and the beam of plasma that had been aimed at her midsection instead lanced into her right hip, spinning the Agamarian around and pitching her to the floor.

 

At this point, however, Zutia was past pain—past exhaustion, and past emotional drain. After her experience with the Alcarazin artifact, the practice duel with her master, and several minutes of fending off a stream of near-constant blaster fire from her teacher, the woman’s darkened skin was dripping with sweat and her muscles, if she could be bothered to listen to them, were screaming in protest against the overexertion. She barely felt the impact, only conscious of the fact that she carefully tucked the hilt of her lightsaber against her left arm. As she rolled, it gouged a glowing line through the floor rather than lopping off one of her limbs.

 

When Zutia’s body came to a stop and she finally stopped vandalizing the floor of this chamber, she looked up to see the barrel of her weapon squared directly at her face, a tremor in the Force warning of the pain to come. All throughout this exercise, the apprentice had found herself struggling with the idea of granted sovereignty over her body to a mystical energy field that she had only come to coherently perceive a few days ago. However, faced with the imminent prospect of great pain and injury, she decided to fully trust the Force to get her through this drill alive and unsullied by blaster fire.

 

The Force told her that she only had to tilt her head a few degrees to the left to evade the bolt rushing towards her face. Zutia did so, and didn't even perceive the heat of the bolt as it flicked over her cheek, burning off a loose strand of hair. Her boots pursued by a wave of blaster fire, Zutia swept her feet back under her center of mass in a simple self-defense maneuver and sprang to her full height.

 

Zutia danced. There really wasn’t any better way to describe how she fended off the torrent of blaster fire. Her motions were no longer limited to the rote sequences prescribed in the katas that Hephaestus had demonstrated earlier, with clean and mathematical lines from one stance to the next. Nor were they consumed in the unpredictable kaleidoscope of activity that some masters of Ataru were capable of, as though their physiology was no longer bound by human limitations. Instead, her movements were clean and economical. A flick of her wrists would swipe the tip of her blade across her shoulders to fend off a bolt rushing towards her shoulder—an adjustment with her elbow would cast away another wave of crimson that was streaming down her chest, and when her mentor commanded her to evade by sweeping her legs with blaster fire, she responded with a languid spin, her legs somehow finding the gaps through which they could harmlessly pass through the fire.

 

Completely consumed by the Force, Zutia’s movements became less physical, taking upon an aspect of grace due to the seemingly perfect control she had over her movement. The Agamarian wore a tiny smile on her lips throughout the entire set as though she was rather enjoying the experience but was focusing on her steps too intensely to share her delight with her dance partner.

 

However, it seemed that this number was reaching a close. Hephaestus had been firing at his student for quite some time, and even if he was using the low power settings that was normally reserved for calibrating the weapon and for hunting small game, he had to be running low on this power cell’s charge.

 

The Force guided her blade and she gave her blade another adjustment, picking off a bolt that was roaring towards her tanned cheek and returning it to Hephaestus. Her aim was true—unless he evaded the bolt, it was going to slag the optical scope on the body of her blaster rifle and strike him in the eye.

So build that wall and build it strong,

'cause we'll be there before too long...

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She had to be in real danger in order to get there, but Zutia finally made her transformation, experienced surrender to the dark side. The energy field swirled around her as she divorced her mind from her actions. A being of pure instinct, a finely-tuned body given preternatural reflex and skill, Zutia was more potent than any human could be without the Force. She was already starting to show the qualities of a fully-trained Sith Lord. But there was more to being a Sith than being able to fight.

 

When she sent a bolt back toward Haphaestus, he saw it before it happened. He lowered the scope of the rifle and tilted his head downward so the shot struck his forehead, where it left a small scorch mark on his metallic mask. He ceased fire, the rifle spent, and soaked in the dark side aura that was radiating from his transcendent apprentice. In a moment he grew aware that there was a third presence in the room, and identified the comfortingly dark presence of the spirit of Darth Rivan as it manifested before them.

 

Rivan nodded at Haphaestus and stepped toward Zutia. "You have grown powerful, young one," Rivan intoned. "The Force will grant you insight when you are in such a state as this. Tell me, how do you interpret the vision that was granted by my artifact? In discovering that, you will discover your purpose."

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Zutia shot a quick glance towards her mentor, not quite certain if she should trust her own eyes. Her eyes darted back and forth between the two figures and the Agamarian decided that she hadn’t hit her head too badly on the unpadded floor of this room. Hephaestus clearly could see the shadowy presence that had just entered the room, and he wasn’t quite astonished by its entrance. Rather, he seemed expectant, as though he had been anticipating a moment like this to come about and was quite eager to see what would happen.

 

The huntress dowsed her lightsaber and clipped the weapon to her belt. She studied the shade as it “spoke”—the words didn’t quite seem to have the same presence as audible sound, but were somewhat clearer. Regardless of how that phenomenon was generated (doubtless through some technique of the Force that Zutia hadn’t yet learned), the fine hairs on Zutia’s body stood on end when she realized that she was standing in the presence of something truly extraordinary. The being before her was beyond primeval—perhaps even prehistoric—and yet had chosen to communicate with her in a momentary slip of the shackles of death.

 

The Agamarian woman suddenly felt rather small, but somehow was not threatened by the sensation.

 

She gave the figure a small curtsy, bending her knees and keeping her eyes fixed on the figure in a minor breach of etiquette. “I saw Coruscant burning. The Jedi Temple was being wiped out. The entire planet was getting blasted. But it all seemed so unnecessary. I mean, why waste all that effort, and innocent life for any purpose other than ego?” Zutia’s blue eyes unfocused. Coruscant, the traditional capital of the galaxy, had never seemed to serve a purpose beyond housing the bureaucracy that controlled the galaxy and existed seemingly on pure inertia, but she had been more than a little shocked by the brutality of the sacking.

 

She spoke up again, her Agamarian drawl resurfacing in her emotion. “I don't mean to be taken as soft--I mean, I never doubted that if the Alliance is going to be overthrown that some unpleasant things would have to be done, but does it really have to be like that? I’m halfway convinced that I saw the end of the galaxy.”

So build that wall and build it strong,

'cause we'll be there before too long...

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Darth Rivan met Zutia's eye, but he seemed to look straight through her. "The fall of governments is either very gradual or very violent," he said. "What of your perspective, your place in the vision?"

 

Haphaestus, meanwhile, sat and listened. Rivan was his Master as well.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The Agamarian’s head tilted ever so slightly at the apparition, trying to determine if there was a hint of condescension in the response from the ancient Sith Lord. Perhaps there wasn’t, but Zutia tended towards oversensitivity with regards to the way that the people of her world were stereotyped.

 

“I was a victim. I might as well have been one of the people that were being burned down by the Star Destroyers.” Zutia took a minute to try to imagine the untold numbers of people who were surely being incinerated by the suborbital bombardment. If what she had seen was occurring all over Coruscant, then the number of people who were dying was… inestimable. It was carnage so horrific that the human mind could being to process the death—worse than anything since the civil war. And those forces were unleashed by… what, exactly? Such carnage hadn’t been visited upon the galaxy since perhaps what had been callously named the “Shield Incident,” when a Sith Lord had razed all of the Upper Levels in a clever act of sabotage.

 

Maybe the historians’ minds had also been boggled by the scale of the devastation.

 

The words of one of the more infamous leaders in galactic history blinked in Zutia’s mind. A single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. Whether or not the dictator had actually said those words was true, the Agamarian had to admit that the words held some element of truth. It was comparatively easy to justify killing when one was far removed from the actual act of murder. Killing many with your own hands made you a violent psychopath; sending someone else to perform the deed made you a leader.

 

During the vision, not sincethe incident that sparked Zutia’s knowledge of her Force Sensitivity had she felt so adrift (though in that case, she had been alone in the middle of an ocean without so much as a paddle). However, through this ordeal she hadn’t been left stranded in the middle of predator-infested ocean; she was trapped in a burning apartment in the middle of one of the largest planetary bombardments in history. There wasn’t the loneliness of gently rolling waves; it was the heat and wind of turbolaser salvos that were threatening to spark a firestorm. It wasn’t the silence of total isolation, but the thunder of a mechanical giant that was shaking her entire world to pieces. Beyond the moral implications of the vision, it was one of the most terrifying experiences of her life.

 

“Let’s say it gave me… perspective.” Feeling as though that didn’t adequately explain her experience, Zutia pressed on. “For the people that were in the way of those Star Destroyers, that was their entire world—their homes, their friends and family, their homes, their everything—and it was all being destroyed by some twit that decided to make a statement. When I saw that ship bearing down on me and destroying everything in its path like it was nothing, I didn’t know whether I wanted to hide in a corner and hope that it it would all end soon or whether I wanted to kill every last person on board.”

 

“If what that vision intended to teach me was an understanding of their fear and helplessness and anger, then lesson learned. If that’s what it takes to end the Grek-Aurek, then I’ll have to find another way.”

 

((I may be horribly butchering Aurebesh. Also, Aurebesh acronyms do not work so well.))

So build that wall and build it strong,

'cause we'll be there before too long...

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((I recently started to wonder why it's Artoo Deetoo and not Resh-Two Dorn-Two.))

 

Rivan's shadowy, spectral face was passive. "Our Sith brethren are senseless," he said. "Such violence may be a path to overthrowing governments, but in the conclusion of your vision you were helpless, and your own destruction was inevitable. You must choose your path carefully from here if our enemies are to fall. Haphaestus believed that the Sith Order was not beyond redemption, and he attempted to reform them, but they cast him out. Only unwittingly can they be made to serve our designs.

 

"There is great peril in your path, and I have no comfort to give you; comfort is given in other sorts of times than these, by other sorts of ministers than I and to other sorts of beings than you. But I leave you with just the slightest chance of success. You must know your allies, you must know your enemies even better, but most of all you must know yourself. For in the absence of any one of these things, it would be best to delay your plans and wait for a better opportunity to arise."

 

Just as suddenly as he appeared, Rivan faded away back into the Force. Behind where the specter had been, Haphaestus' eyes glowed through his steel mask but the former Dark Lord remained silent.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just as mysteriously as the Sith Lord had appeared, Darth Rivan dematerialized, leaving featureless space in the vacuum in which he had manifested. It wasn’t particularly cold in this chamber, but Zutia shivered in the stillness and goose bumps had risen all over the flesh of her arms. That was a phenomenon that the Agamarian was certain that astonishingly few were privileged to witness in their lives: communicating with a deceased Lord of the Sith. Even more so, from what she had heard about the ancient Dark Lords entombed on Korriban, the spiritual homeworld of the dark Order, their avatars tended to not be entirely sane. More accurately, they tended to by power-hungry, paranoid, and sadistic--far from offering guidance to their descendant acolytes.

 

“That was Darth Rivan, wasn’t it?” The figure had quite the commanding presence in this room, but Zutia hadn’t been quite so awestruck that she hadn’t noticed the deference that her Master had shown him. “I’ve occasionally wondered if it’s possible to walk a line between power and the insanity that seems to affect some of the Sith. They sometimes make their own worst enemies, you know? But on the other hand, if it was possible wield that kind of power without turning into the kind of insane… beast that some of the Sith become—to be hard, yes, even cruel when necessary… but not the kind of senseless savagery that we saw in the war. To wield the power of the Dark Side without attracting the attention that would inevitably make them the kind of target that would be hunted down by the Jedi like a rabid dog. Until it’s too late, that is,” she added with a little smile.

 

The Agamarian was rambling somewhat, not quite coherent in her thoughts. Still, it had come to her attention that since the end of the war, there were quite a few veterans out there, many with skills that were not quite suitable for a civilian life. She had met a few of them—some of them had come to Agamar, in fact. They were city-dwellers, most of them, some of them lost souls who found some kind of solace in the harsh wilderness of her home planet. Many of them were former Imperials who were understandably bitter at how their fortunes had turned out—and even a few Reps, on that note. If they could become organized and motivated, they could become quite a potent guerrilla force against the Galactic Alliance.

So build that wall and build it strong,

'cause we'll be there before too long...

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