Naomi Kilnshire-Elswin

An Inquisitor? She could feel a shiver tinge its way up her spine, cut off only by the warm look in the eyes of the man that stood before her. The kindness in his voice and his stature brought such nightmares to an easy end. She took a breath and nodded. There needed to be an investigation, and she would gladly answer any questions that she might know the answer to. Her blood stained hand came up, indicating the rearmost compartment of the vessel, whose siding was torn asunder like a ruptured carbonated muja fruit juice can. Her voice faltered as she spoke, a feeling of extreme tiredness beginning to seep into her very being. “I think he jumped into hyperspace. I do not think he enthralled anyone, but I am sure the inquisitor can get to the bottom of that.” She hoped what she said was not too ridiculous, and a Sith committing suicide was something nearly unheard of. She noticed his eyes searching the sword that was still clasped in her shaking hands. She offered up its hilt to the man. Though in the back of her mind she could feel a pang of fear that he might take it from her. It was all she had in the world.

How could she explain the horror? What words could she utter from a throat parched with raw emotion? Fear, anger, regret. All boiled in the centre of her heart, sending pangs of emotion to every nerve. Now that there was safety and a man looking her in the eye that seemed to care, her emotions threatened to finally come boiling up. She wanted to scream, to cry, to throw up, and just lay down and sleep forever. But she knew now was not the time for that. Even as tears welled up in her eyes she straightened and squared her shoulders. And looked the man in the eyes. Pulling at whatever generational strength the Kilnshires might have had to offer. Afterall she was not the first nor the last Kilnshire or Elswin left orphaned by terrorism, genocide, or war. She blinked and hot tears dripped down her blood stained face. “The Sith.” She said in an accented speech pattern that clashed with the high core worlds accents of the Caridian throneworld. She had practised quite a bit at hiding the brogue accent with a neutral high core style, but her tiredness and emotions would not let her try it. This was not the time for any kind of fakeness, and the Caridian would likely see right through it. “A Sith Lord was left wounded and came aboard our shuttle.” Here came again the emotions, more tears and guilt. “I didn’t know and tried to help him and he just killed everyone.” Now came the hard sobbing breaths and unreleased tears. But she did not drop the heavy sword that was still stained with blood and avarice.

The sword dancers played their jig step after step. Their only accompaniment, the deep thrum of a bass harp, and a lonely tune of a highland bagpipe. There was something tragic in those steps, a deep sorrow played out with every change of note, and every feathered waltz. The whispered notes washed across her memory like the cold ocean waves of her home. It was a tune that went back at least 100 generations, stretching back to the apartheid and destruction of their home world to the wrath of some long forgotten empire. Some darkside cult or some Sith aligned faction of long ago. Whose emperor and soldiers were now nothing but dust, and whose names were long ago forgotten in the deep archives of fallen Hesperidium. Their only feat to be referenced by some young historian, trying their best to write an interesting thesis. But her people had survived. They had grown, and the clans now occupied a hundred worlds, while the Sith and their foul craft were regulated to nothing more than a sad and tragic memory. Memory Her eyes flew open before her wandering mind would show her a scene of one such Sith carving his sword through her Father’s breast. But the memory clawed its way up despite however much she might have wanted to stop it. She could taste the copper blood on her lips. She could see their faces. Their terror. His joy. Red locks of hair bounced around her ears as she shook her head. They had arrived at Carida. Where the house of Malczewski held their fiefdom. A place her father had said that they would be safe. Where they could rebuild, she could marry, and their house cadet branch could survive. But instead here she was. Covered in dried blood. Holding a sword that made her whole soul cry out in shame and pain. The transport had landed very hard at the emergency services berth. And no doubt there would be an inquiry as to why she was the only survivor of the passenger manifest.

Her eyes saw the scale of destruction and she did not let herself look away though her heart broke. It was true, tangentially, that these people would have all died anyway. That justification bubbled up as quickly as her mind could make it up. But too came the swift reproachful words of her father. ‘But there are no excuses for the works of our own hands.’ She could feel the death in the pit of her stomach, and she was responsible for every single one of them. For every poor soul that clawed and begged with bugged out eyes. Each fell silent, pink and frosted giblets of blood drifting for the moment before the ship slammed the hatch shut over the broken windscreen. The Sith of course had survived. And it had been a waste. But the Sith had also left her alive. To torture her perhaps? To teach her the way of pain? To inflict his broken ideology on her like a wip on her back. He spoke and his words were bitter, breaking her from her own thoughts. It was so cold. Frost was teasing at the edges of her hair, coating everything that had once been covered in sweat in a soft layer of reflecting light. Blood too had an ice-like sheen. Coating the floor of the room with a slippery wash of human matter. She leaned down and ran her hand across the pommel of the sword, her eyes looking from the blood soaked ground to the Sith Lord coughing his lungs out. Dying. “To avenge them is to take my own life.” Perhaps it was stubbornness, perhaps it was defeat, likely it was the profound sorrow that her father would be disappointed in her. Her voice was a whisper and she left the sword where it lay and walked to where he knelt. She put her hand on his shoulder and knelt in front of him. Their faces close enough to whisper. “Or to throw it all away as you have.” She gestured to the corpses that lay scattered. Including her father who lay only feet away. “I have already done so much evil. I cannot do more. And I will not let you die alone.”

@Mavanger Whatever words she might have had died in her throat as she watched her father die. A man who had cared for her beyond reason. Sacrificing a good job and a career to take her in after her mom had been claimed by the spice. She could still see his eyes, they had looked for her, even in the terror, now lifeless and unseeing. Her fault. Like everything. Her fault. She had to go help a Sith Lord feel better from his wounds. She had to try and be nice to him. How could she have known? Who had put him on this ship? But those were excuses, and there were no excuses. Only actions. And there was nothing that could be done to stop this man. She looked down and away from those lifeless eyes as the body dropped. There was only one action that might be worth it. And if this was all a bad dream then it would bring her screaming awake, covered in sweat in her old room on Salini prime. She couldn’t even feel her fear anymore. Just numbness and a pain in her heart. She reached down beside her and grabbed the hilt of the war sword. It was heavy. So heavy that it felt like she was trying to lift a permacrete slab. But it did move, and all she would need was the strength for a single blow. With all fiber of her being she pulled on the sword as she stood, dragging it behind her few steps as she strode towards the small blue glowing window. She smiled a bitter and resolved smile, then hurled the sword into the tranparasteel. Where hyperspace and depressurization would end the terror that was killing everything she loved behind her.

All hell broke loose with the second stroke of his wicked blade. Blood arced like a fountain into the air, and she could feel the warmth of it on her face as she stumbled back from the Sith’s push. He was so strong, not even paying attention as she tripped and fell next to his other discarded Sith war sword. She felt cold, numb, instead of the sticky warm wet of blood that was now covering her. Why? She didn’t know the answer. It was evil, it was gross. What could she learn from this but to hate him? Why the kriff was he doing this? At any other point she would have flushed at the idea of even thinking that word out loud. But now she didn’t give a damn what dad might have said. Her eyes widened. Dad was right there! He was next, he was terrified and screaming beneath the shadow of the Sith Lord. “Damn you!” She screamed. She didn’t want to learn this lesson. She wanted it to end. She would do anything. She reached out her hand towards him, wishing that she could pluck his heart from his chest. She could almost see it in her minds eye. Pumping away in calm and uncaring rythm as it’s master slew the only thing she had left. She could see the blood pulsing from each beat. All she needed to do was to stop it. To squeeze it. To crush it under hand and snuff the life from the wicked man before he could kill her father. So she squeezed. She wished, she desired him to die. For him to collapse and sputter away his last breath as he stared into her eyes. “Kriff you.” Her voice was calm.

Her candid smile seemed frozen on her face as the man stood. He towered over her like a golem. Clad in his fell armour and suddenly there was a tickle of fear on the back of her neck. His hand grasped the wicked sword like it had been forged for him, lifting the heavy metal weapon like it was nothing more than a piece of flimsiplast. She could feel her blood turn cold and a shot of ice seemed to run up her spine. She shivered in his shadow. “Stop.” Her voice was a hoarse whisper. A plea that kicked aside any pretend adult was that she had been trying to show. Dread. She knew what he was going to do before he did it. The propaganda films always made it seem so stupid, so unbelievable. People couldn’t be so evil as to willingly murder innocents like this. It was unreal. His sword drew back behind the back of a sleeping man, and she wanted to cry out. To warn the ship, to raise a hell that could storm the man and pin him to the decking. But she was so detached, it didn’t feel real. And her voice didn’t want to come. Not even a squeak until the sword plunged forward. Pinning the man to his foam mattress. Blood. Gods there was so much blood. Then her voice came. Again in a whispered plea. Her feet moved as she ran towards him, she could feel only the coldness of the metal tiles beneath her bare feet. She tried to grab his arm to stop him from pulling the blade free. “What point are you trying to make? Stop, I'll do anything. Please. Whatever you want.”

She looked the man in the eyes, seeing if she could judge his character by them. Perhaps she could imagine those eyes behind a masque of a murderer, the eyes slightly wrinkled from the joy brought from mass slaughter. But there was nothing in those eyes save a deep sadness. A broken heart lay buried in that armoured chest and perhaps from that profound grief he could have been some great vanquisher. A man that led the armies of the Sith in their viscous demonic array. And though his armour and the swords were fell, they did not speak directly to his character. And as mom had always taught, give someone the chance to prove themselves. She peeled away the red and gold armourweave with her fingers until she had fully exposed the shoulder wound, then sprayed it with a mix of antiseptic, pain relief, and bacta. Then she packed the wound with a patch of the spongelike bactaine filament, before covering and sealing it with a taped bandage. She sat back on her haunches and wiped her bloody hands on her pale blue tunic. Her dad would be mad about that for sure. She looked back up at the mysterious man and raised her eyebrows. “By the armour, cloak, wounds, and swords I might count you as having just exited a holofilm set onto our ship.” She smiled at her own joke then shrugged, sitting down across from him as she rubbed at her hands with an antiseptic wipe. “But I think you are either a Jedi or a Sith but i'm not scared. You aren't a scary person.” She gestured to his bandaged wounds again before cracking another cold compress and passing it to him to place on his neck. “As for why, why not? Why wouldn't you want to help someone who has been hurt?”

His eyes snapped open, pale ocean-like eyes, deep set and haunted. But haunted by what? What hells had the man seen? What deep abyss had he stared into and lost himself in? He sat up suddenly and broke her study of his eyes with a blink and a question. She gulped back a gasp as she saw what had lain beneath his crumpled form. Two wicked swords lay there, covered in a sheen of blood, their edges dark and greedy. She put out her hands on either side of his neck like the class had taught her and stared again into his deep eyes. No sign of concussion, both pupils reacted the same to the streaming light of hyperspace from the window behind her. She gestured that he should lie back down. And gave a reassuring smile. “Easy now, no enemies are around us that I know about. You are aboard the refugee ship Calribeis. I don’t know our destination though, no one has told me anything.” She gestured to her box of medi tools. And put on the commanding tone her teacher had taught. “Can you take your pauldron off? That cut looks very deep. And maybe you can tell me what your name is!”

|| Separate scenario for Darth Mavenger || Who was this man in fell armour? Whose wounds bled bright red blood into the rough decking? What had punctured his shoulder so that smoke still curled like a lit death stick? What had brought him to the decking of the Calribeis carried by such a monster? Perhaps he was one of the famous Jedi Knights who had fought so valiantly against one empire to the next! But no handle of a lightsaber could be seen at his belt. A Sith then. One of the cultists? And why was he here instead of dying on the fields of Falleen for the planet they had enslaved for so long. Her head was spinning with a mix of curiosity and a million questions. Whoever he was, he was obviously wounded in battle and needed help. She looked fervently up to where her dad was sleeping in the third bunk, then back at the man in bloody armour. Most everyone was asleep so it couldn’t hurt to go see if she could help right? She had taken that medi class last semester at the start of year nine. The only class she had given a shit about anyway. She nervously tucked a lock of red hair behind her ear then stood. On silent bare feet she walked to where the hulking man in armour lay and crouched down beside his head. She pulled the medi kit from her backpack and set it down beside him. Bought for the class, The crossed keys of her secondary school displayed in a crimson red below the Red Cross on the white metal box. She popped the seal then turned back to the hulking man in metal. He was huge, and the clasps that secured his helmet on were tough. With thin fingers she pried them open, one by one they popped loose until the heavy helmet could be slowly scootched off of his head. Stubble and a white face, bruised around the neck, black hair. Human like her. Though a decade and a little older. A handsome appearance, though he was no knight in shining armour that her holonovels always spoke about. She opened her kit and took out an instant cold compress and placed in on his very warm forehead. Next came a hypospray of bacta for his shoulder wound which she applied with some degree of skill. It was a strange wound, cauterized. From a lightsaber maybe? She leaned forward and took his pulse. Normal. She frowned and leaned forwards over him. “Are you awake?”