Almas

[Zutia Lavell]

First this Sith choked Zutia to the point of unconsciousness, and now he was calmly questioning her. There was no questioning that the man was in control of the situation and was perfectly capable of slaughtering her at a moment’s notice, but he didn’t seem to have any sinister motives beyond this interrogation. The Agamarian drew her knees up to her sides and she sat upright with her back pressed against the stony wall, ignoring the nagging pain that emanated from the broken ankle of her prosthetic leg.

 

“I’m Force Sensitive.” Her memory flashed back on a rather unfortunate accident, one that would have probably taken her life if she hadn’t kept a clear head when it seemed as though the universe wanted her dead. “Seems a shame to waste potential like that, and I fear that my personal philosophies would not exactly endear me to the Jedi, if you take my meaning.”

 

If this Sith had bothered to inspect the rifle that Zutia had wielded like an expensive crutch, he would have found that it was a highly specialized weapon designed specifically for game hunting. The overhauled barrel and gas injector allowed for a high-velocity, accurate bolt, capable of effectiveness far beyond the range of the short-barreled carbines that most military organizations favored for the use of their marines and shock troopers. Ms. Lavell was a hunter of dangerous game, and the experiences she'd survived in the past had gotten her this far, although not without some unique scars and a somewhat diminished view of the value of life... at least compared to the views of the stagnant Jedi Order.

[Haphaestus]

Haphaestus was completely still, and he made no move to restrain the woman as she sat up. Her hands were still bound behind her back and her prosthetic ankle was still broken, so it wasn't like she was going to try to escape. Not when she knew he held her life in his hands.

 

He wasn't quite satisfied with her answer, however. She needed to know what she was getting herself into. "There is a great divide between the Jedi and the Sith," he said. Every word he intoned was as carefully formed as if he was reciting prose. "Simply because you are ill-suited to one does not mean you are fit to become the other. The dark side requires passion, and is fueled by ambition, aggression... and fear."

 

The Sith Master shifted slightly and turned his head so as not to look directly at her. "If you were not so weak, I would consider teaching you myself," he revealed. "You would soon come to understand that I am unlike most Sith, and you would in time become greater than any of them. But I do not believe you are capable; that you even knew what it was you were seeking when you stumbled blindly to Korriban."

 

At least half of that was lies. But the parts that weren't he genuinely needed her to answer, or his planned endeavor would end up being a waste of time after all.

[Zutia Lavell]

So the Sith Lord was engaging in an actual conversation with her. That was beyond anything that Zutia could have hoped for, given that her first interaction with the man was with him nearly throttling her to death. Zutia blinked her blue eyes slowly and allowed a trace of her Agamarian drawl to resurface in her speech as she responded.

 

“Oh … I’ll bet that even Darth Vader was belted by his mother a few times when he was a cub.” So she was weak; it didn’t wound Zutia’s pride to admit that her capabilities were lacking in comparison to one that could harness the Force to their will. Compared to this man, she was merely a big game hunter with ambitions far greater than could be expected from one of her stature, just a humble sinner before a great warlord and sorcerer. However, she refused to accept her weakness—the Agamarian would find a way to reach her true potential, even if that meant escaping this benighted world and seeking tutelage elsewhere.

 

Belied by her casual reaction and quaint drawl was an inner fire, a drive to succeed and survive no matter what challenges the galaxy set in her path. What was this man expecting? Did he really expect a woman that came before the Sith Order at this point of her life to be full of psychotic rage and unbridled aggression? Would he have been more pleased if Zutia had lashed out like a wounded beast that had been run down by the hounds?

 

“That said—look at me!” She snapped. “You speak of aggression and ambition and fear. You want aggression? You want ambition? How does the overthrow of the Galactic Alliance sound to you? That's my ambition.” That stagnant government needed to be put down before the sickly creature lost its mind and tore apart the entire galaxy in its death throes. The Jedi Order was even worse. For thousands of years, the Jedi Order had simply existed, unwilling to impose its will or even its ideals on the rest of the galaxy. The entire rotten structure needed to die. Zutia had no doubts about how messy the entire affair would be and how many lives would have to be taken to shake the foundations of the Galactic Alliance, but she was willing to see it through.

 

“But I don’t see any use in fear. Fear doesn’t give power to anything. It only destroys.”

[Haphaestus]

Her ambition was small for Haphaestus' taste, but large for one uninitiated. "The Galactic Alliance is insignificant," he said. "Before it, there was the New Republic and the Galactic Empire; before the New Republic was the Rebel Alliance, before either was the Republic. During the Republic there were Sith Empires and great tracts of galaxy controlled by Mandalorians. Even before the Republic there was the Infinite Empire, and the Rakata were not the first to know what it meant to rule. This place I reside in has predated the Galactic Alliance by millennia, and it will still be here when that social construct is remembered no more. If you wish to know what real power is, your ambition to overthrow this era's government is quite small... but it is a starting place." The more important part was the subtext, her underlying will to destroy, to rip out what was wrong with the galaxy and cleanse its iniquities. That he could work with.

 

His glowing eyes seemed to flare deviously at her. "As for fear," he began, "you cannot know power until you know fear. Then, when you have become it, you will learn how useful it is.

 

"It is time for you to learn how to draw on the Force. It is strong in this place. It is hot, it burns in your blood. It is hate, it is pain, tempered by your will and focused on a goal. You will use it to attack me."

 

Without warning, he suddenly brought his darkstaff whirling around in a lightning-fast strike to smash her uninjured prosthetic leg into pieces. A painful way to learn, but if she could hate him enough and embrace her pain in that moment, the gateway would be opened. As soon as his first strike ended, he struck a second time, deliberately missing her head by centimeters. The stone wall cracked under the tremendous strength of his blow and the unyielding hardness of his staff and the room seemed to shake.

[Zutia Lavell]

Zutia wasn’t quite sure what the Sith meant by his lair being strong in the Force, much less how an inanimate structure could be imbued with such a property, but she didn’t have time to voice her confusion or ruminate on the topic. Though the limb was a artificial and wasn’t quite as sensitive as her own flesh, the leg was still capable of feeling pain, the synthetic nerves of her left leg burned with pain as the Sith Lord’s staff smashed the sophisticated knee joint of her prosthetic leg with a single blow so swift that the Agamarian couldn’t even attempt to evade it. She gritted her teeth as she sank down to protect the shattered joint, feeling the wind of another strike rush over the back of her neck as the Sith Lord’s staff buried itself into the stone with an impact so mighty that gravel ran down her back.

 

Feeling the wind of the blow pass over her, Zutia realized that this man intended to kill her. So this was it; after a long chase, it came down to a few desperate seconds of struggle that would seal her fate. Hunting dangerous prey often ended in a moment in which the beast was run down to the ground, having exhausted all of its tricks and reduced to a primal struggle to wound its attacker or die fighting. That could sometimes be the most dangerous part of a hunt, as an animal reduced to mindlessly lashing out at its attackers was unpredictable and completely without hesitation.

 

As was the case with Zutia Lavell. Bound at her wrists, pinned against an unyielding rock wall, and with both her legs broken, her situation was reduced to that of the beast at bay. Oh, how she wanted to hurt this man—not merely to protect herself but in retaliation for the unending iniquities that he had heaped upon her. Howling with pain and anger, Zutia took a good look at the man’s throat and was seized with an instinct to leap from her berth and tear out his jugular with her teeth. Maybe feeling her teeth clamp around his throat would wipe the smug expression from his face. It would be quite a fitting end, after having spent so much time toying with her and doubting whether she would survive another hour.

 

In her anger, Zutia felt a kind of primal force come over her, as though some pagan god had lifted her up from the ground with the enormous palm its titanic hand. The god whispered to her with a voice that could crumble entire worlds, imploring her to take its fist and guide it to strike against her enemies.She took that fist and placed it around the Sith Lord’s neck, clenching it tightly and holding him where he stood. The fist jerked backwards to smash his face into the stony wall that Zutia was pinned against, bring his body close to hers. She took that opportunity, lunging for the closest part of his body that she could reach and clamping her teeth down on his right wrist.

[Haphaestus]

Perfect, Haphaestus thought as his apprentice gave herself to her fear and anger. She had transitioned seamlessly from being inquisitive and trying to navigate her way through a potentially perilous conversation to acting on pure survival instinct in the span of an instant. And then, in that moment, the Force had come to her. She had suddenly and quite forcefully grabbed hold of him and slammed him into the wall beside her, and now he felt her teeth sinking into the flesh that sheathed his ultimately-mechanical wrist. The pain was very real for him--a gift of his flesh--but his actual systems had sustained no damage and were very unlikely to considering what this woman had at her disposal. He was much more durable than this fragile human.

 

He stretched out and called the dark side to him, preparing himself to fend off any further telekinetic attacks the woman might be able to muster. With a sudden but precise motion, he attempted to extract his wrist from her mouth without taking any of her teeth with it. Humans, poorly optimized as they were, couldn't regrow those. Then he took a step back again and brought his staff between their bodies. He was prepared to defend himself further, but he wouldn't strike her again. It was time to see if she could bring herself back out of the state she had entered.

 

"That is what it means to draw on the dark side. Fear not; I shall not kill you," he said. Probably, was his unspoken addition. He had actually killed one of his apprentices before for a particularly important lesson. But Phillep had been a Sith, and this woman would become more. "I can teach you to harness this power. Or you can leave and I shall throw you back to the Sith. Perhaps you would rather die here."

[Zutia Lavell]

No sooner than Zutia felt the power of that furious god take over her body and smash the Sith’s face into the stone above her head, the man reacted with perfect calm. He pried away her teeth from his wrist with the exasperated ease with which one pulled away the feeble jaws of a teething pup. Zutia tried wresting back his arm before he could pull back his staff for the finishing blow, but he patiently fell back to a practiced stance with the weapon between the two to ward off any further attacks.

 

Zutia blinked repeatedly. The head of that staff was no more than centimeters from the tip of her nose. She stared at it as the tunnel of blackness around the edges of her vision withdrew and the pounding in her head—her own pulse, she realized, beating like the hammering of a brave’s war drums—faded into the perfect silence of the Sith’s lair. The Agamarian just sat there, not quite understanding what had just happened as the Sith Lord invited her to train under his tutelage. In disbelief that she could have felt such power and still been so vulnerable before him, Zutia slowly shook her head.

 

“No, thank you.” She didn’t his eyes as she answered. “You… honestly… think I went through all this to just return to where I started?”

 

She didn’t really believe this man when he promised that she would be afforded passage off planet and allowed to leave alive. Having just told her where this secluded hermitage was located, why would he simply allow her to leave of her own volition? He had to be living this cloistered existence for a reason, and with this kind of power at his disposal, Zutia doubted that it was because he enjoyed the fresh air and the night sky. And yet… after this demonstration she had no doubt that the Sith Lord could claim her life at any moment with little struggle, but he had given her this chance to defend herself.

 

His motives were completely alien to her. All Zutia could be assured of was that if she remained in this man’s presence for much longer, this same confrontation would be reenacted in the future. The only difference would be whether the Agamarian had learned enough of the Force to not be forced to rely on his mercy.

 

“I suppose I’ll stay then.” Zutia’s blue eyes flickered down to the wreck of her prosthetic leg and the woman instantly regretted it. Her eyes immediately returned to his. “What should I call you?”

[Haphaestus]

Haphaestus experienced the emotion that most would display as a slow smile. She feared him and lusted for the power he could teach her. It was a good start. It would be a long journey to get her to the place she needed to end up, especially if she was going to become an Alcazarin instead of merely a Sith. But by establishing this starting point, it would be so much more meaningful when they got there. She was taking her first steps down a path that would completely transform her and just might have repercussions upon Haphaestus himself.

 

As he lowered his staff he noticed her pained glance at her legs and considered what to do. It could be a long and painful lesson for her if he decided to leave them as they were. But he decided it would suit the rest of his purposes better to restore them.

 

"I am Haphaestus," he said. "And I am quite unlike any other being in the galaxy." He reached out with the Force and focused on her damaged prosthetics. If there was anything Haphaestus did exceptionally well, it was smithing. With the Force he had rebuilt his own body from scratched, formed armor and weapons from darkmetal, and performed countless related feats. Much as evidenced in the creation of lightsabers, the Force could bind and reforge materials as though they had never been separate. A lightsaber was a single piece, seamless, not apparently crafted by any machine, more whole. A work of art. Now Zutia's lower legs popped and snapped as they came back together, and in 12.344 seconds, they were completely restored. Indeed, they would be even stronger than they had been before.

[Zutia Lavell]

Zutia grimaced and turned pale when her legs suddenly disassembled under Haphaestus’ direction. It wasn’t just out of amazement at the feat of mechanical genius. Like most civilian prosthetics, the synthetic nerves in the artificial limbs that made them feel as natural as her own flesh were capable of feeling pain, and the process of restoring the limbs evidently required the severing and restoration of some of the neural connections. It passed quickly, but the reforging of her prosthetic limbs was quite painful.

 

However, as the connections reformed and the synthskin that encased the legs reformed around the limbs, the pain quickly faded. All that was left was amazement.

 

Zutia stared at her restored legs, her mouth slightly agape. By reflex she worked the knee of her left leg and the ankle of her right—both were restored to full functionality, if the natural flexing of the joints was any evidence. The Agamarian had often heard of the ferocity of Sith warriors in battle and their unmatched mastery of both blades and subterfuge, but this effortless manipulation of an exceedingly complex machine was something new, and she wanted to wield this kind of power.

 

She finally found the words, or a word. “How?”

[Haphaestus]

With another taste of what the dark side could do, the woman seemed quite fascinated. Haphaestus stepped behind her and removed her bindings. "The dark side is a pathway to many abilities," he answered. "In time, the truth of my abilities may become known to you. But first, you must learn control." The truth was, Haphaestus was a rather unique organism. He was especially adept with machinery because of his nature, his perfect memory and extensive knowledge banks on such very systems as his apprentice had in need of repair. He had excellent control, of course, and a tremendous amount was required for such detailed work with the Force, but for him it was knowing how to configure everything correctly that enabled such on-the-fly repairs. He was uncertain that a mere human could attain that level of prowess... but then, humans had surprised him before.

 

He gestured for her to follow him on her new legs and headed over to the next room. The items he had confiscated from her were in a pile on the floor, if she wanted them back. But his focus was on the pedestel in the center of the room. On it sat a darkmetal sphere about the size of a human head. Haphaestus had no idea what the purpose of the sphere was, and had intended to commune with Rivan one of these days to find out. But all he knew now was that it resonated on some level with the dark side. It was also rather heavy.

 

"Command the sphere to rise," he said. "When I provoked you to anger, the dark side answered. It was like a current flowing through your body. You must learn to harness that power on command. At first, you will need to draw on stronger emotions. Soon, you will be able to do it simply by hardening you will. The Force will obey your demands when you learn to speak to it.

 

"As you have yet to share your name, speak it, and command the sphere to move from the pedestel. Your voice, too, may help to focus your command." There were entire Force-using sects who used their voices to help focus their power. Haphaestus had more or less recently encountered a witch named Qaela who had done such. Ultimately she divorced herself from needing to use her voice, but the usefulness of the technique could help a student, if Haphaestus' theory was correct.

[Zutia Lavell]

Zutia took an unsteady pair of steps when she first lifted her body from the stony cot, wondering for a moment if her legs were going to collapse the moment that she put her full weight on them. The Agamarian followed Hephaestus through the structure, trying without much success to get her bearings as to whether they were in above the planet’s surface or in a reinforced subterranean bunker, or how large the edifice was.

 

This next room was just as sparse as the only other room that she had seen of the fortress, with only her confiscated gear laying on the floor and featureless pedestal that was in the center of the room. A dark orb rested on top of the altar, though what purpose it served was completely unknown to her. Its age was similarly unknown—judging from its featureless surface, it was just as likely that it had been built millennia ago or come out of the workshop days ago. But considering how sturdy the dais that it rested upon seemed to be, it had to be heavy.

 

Zutia listened closely. Everyone in the galactic core had heard of how Jedi and Sith could move enormous objects with nothing more than the power of their minds—telekenesis, it was called—but the description of the technique was always a little bit vague. It generally revolved around poetic but nonsensical descriptions like “stretch out with your feelings,” and “let go of your conscious self.” The phrases were beautiful but ultimately useless, like a lot of the information about the Jedi that was publicly disseminated. Now this was something a little more direct.

 

The Agamarian couldn’t deny it; there was something… special about the orb, almost as though it occupied a space in the room far larger than its size. It practically vibrated in the room. She tried to focus on that sensation of presence, imagining the smoothness of its contours.

 

“My name is Zutia Lavell,” she said in an even tone. She pictured that orb levitating about half a meter in the air above the dais. “Rise.” She commanded. Zutia held that image in her mind, and absolutely nothing happened. It was a halfhearted attempt at best. The Agamarian looked back on her memory, recalling the memories of a number of hunting expeditions that had nearly gone disastrously wrong and Zutia had found her blue eyes staring into various sensory organs of all shapes and colors that were very intent on rending apart her comparatively fragile body. Those were always… exhilarating experiences, when the heat of the moment inspired her limbs to move faster than she thought possible and end the encounter with a desperate snapshot from her rifle or strike from her vibroknife.

 

She tried calling on that fear, but without that imminent threat it was more difficult to recreate it and focus. Zutia stole a glance at her teacher, Hephaestus. His expression was almost impossible to read, but surely he was expecting something more from his student than to make the molecules in the air move with nothing more than the power of her voice. How much time had Zutia spent glaring at the sphere? Minutes? Hours? What would be the cost of failure?

 

“I am Zutia Lavell. Rise!” The orb twitched from its resting place. Zutia’s eyes widened. She was using the Force! Almost immediately she lost that vivid sensation of fear, overshadowed by that moment of triumph.

 

“It isn’t fear that I need.” Zutia whispered to herself. Fear was something that prey animals relied on. When she was fully trained, Zutia had no intention of being a hunted creature that needed to jump at the mere shadow of a predator. It was the compulsion to completely dominate another creature that drove the hunter on her expeditions, to march directly into a creature’s lair and slay it when it thought itself safest—or to drive the prey to exhaustion until it was powerless to defend itself.

 

Zutia seized upon that emotion, her lips forming the command for the orb to rise… but absolutely frack all happened. The sphere rested perfectly in place.

 

“Move, damn you!” The moment her temper flared, the orb nearly shot up in the air, rising about a meter before it dropped out of the air. Zutia’s heart leapt up into her throat as it fell and instinctively lunged forward with an arm as though to catch the artifact—as though she would have been able to reach it in time. To her relief, its descent slowed until it rested about a third of a meter above its altar. The acolyte almost panted with effort as she stared wide-eyed at the sphere, focusing on nothing but the featureless face of that artifact and her will to control it. She had even forgotten about her teacher.

[Haphaestus]

Haphaestus gazed unmoving at his apprentice--Zutia Lavell, as she had said her name was--as she struggled to make the sphere rise. He said nothing as she attempted to harness her latent power through a variety of emotion. Embracing her fear gave her a start, but it was her surprisingly deep-rooted aggression that prevailed. There was a darkness deep within this one, and it was more firmly rooted than he would have guessed by looking at her. His initial read of her was that she was a hunter, which seemed correct, but while most hunters would pursue their profession to support themselves financially or perhaps for sport, from it she also derived the pleasure that came from the satiation of bloodlust.

 

He had questioned at first what had drawn her to seek out the Sith instead of the Jedi or perhaps some gray order, but now he understood; only a wielder of the dark side could this one be. By developing her powers, he would transform her prey from beasts to men and governments.

 

Presently the artifact hovered under her power. "You are now in control," Haphaestus stated. "This power is within you and around us. Feel it flow through you, know what it means to bend the universe to your will. Everything you know from your life so far, every natural law and self-evident truth, is undone.

 

"Do not yield your control. Focus, and move the sphere towards yourself. Such crude laws as mass are meaningless to the dark side. The only thing you must vanquish is yourself," he continued. He called to his hand Zutia's blaster rifle from where it had been laying. With a thought he corrected the damage it had sustained during her battle with the dark side dragon. "Also lift the rifle from my hands. Manipulating two objects is no more difficult than one, if your focus is sufficiently refined."

[Zutia Lavell]

((Oh, I feel terrible for coming up with that title. So wonderfully terrible.))

 

When Hephaestus jolted Zutia out of her reverie, the black orb wavered above the dais as her focus drifted away from her control over the featureless artifact. Her eyes widened as she tried to restore her grip over the sphere, just managing to call upon her compulsion to exert her will over the sphere before it slammed onto its berth. As she returned it back to its station half a meter over the altar, Zutia felt a peculiar tingle at the same moment that Hephaestus restored her blaster rifle. However, she refused to acknowledge the feeling beyond sensing it in her periphery, not daring to let anything break her concentration.

 

The Agamarian slowly turned towards her teacher. Deep in concentration, Zutia barely recognized that her rifle had been restored to working condition. Her blue eyes stared unblinkingly at the weapon as she tried to sense the weapon through the Force. However, compared to the orb, which thrummed with presence in this room, her blaster rifle was nearly invisible. She continued to gaze at her weapon, trying to gain some sense of its presence in the room.

 

She was having difficulty concentrating on her rifle. Whispering a command to herself, she gently set the onyx orb down on the pedestal so she could devote her full attention to her hunting rifle. This was mass-produced amalgamation of stamped metal, wiring, and optics that was assembled in only seconds by BlasTech Industries, not a mastercrafted artifact that had been individually meditated over by an ancient Sith Lord over innumerable hours of labor. It seemed dead, almost as though she was looking through an unconvincing holographic image of a computer-generated sentient.

 

Zutia continued to study her rifle, finally finding a tiny spark of life in the weapon. She pursed her lips as she stared at the firearm, trying to make out what she felt inside the hunting rifle. It seemed incredibly small, localized to a pinprick in the room… the power cell, perhaps? From there she was able to shift her focus and feel out the rest of the weapon, from its stamped metal and composite housing to its mile of fiber wiring and optics. Even though she was well-versed in its operation and maintenance, it wasn’t until now that she fully appreciated how complex her rifle was.

 

The woman blinked, her eyes dry from the long period of staring at the weapon. “My word…” She murmured under the breath.

 

Zutia took another deep breath. Calling upon her will to rise to the challenge and control both the mystical and mundane objects before her, she reached out with that fist and firmly hoisted the Sith sphere above its resting place. Letting out that breath with a long exhale and breathing in normally now, Zutia frowned at her blaster rifle. “Weapon. Rise. She whispered to the room. Alas, the weapon remained solidly in her teacher’s hands.

 

Not losing her grip on the sphere, Zutia reminded herself of one of her more morbidly satisfying jobs, one that posed almost no danger to herself but resulted in an absolutely wanton degree of bloodshed. There was a certain species of tusked porcine on Agamar, which after its breeding season, had a tendency to erupt from its dens in the hills and swarm over nearby farmlands like a pack of mammalian locusts. The ugly, foul-tempered beasts literally left wastelands in the wake of their mass foraging. However, the creatures were rather panicky and rather stupid, to the point that they would sometimes stampede and get themselves killed if the herd was channeled into an enclosed area—the results looked like the product of a meat grinder, if the meat grinder spat out bone, blood, and brain matter as well as flesh.

 

The job was laughably simple. Taking care to not allow the stampede escape her control or allow stragglers to veer away from the abattoir that she was driving them into, Zutia had simply flown gathered a herd of the rodents into a massive stampede and played the calls of one of its predators over a powerful loudspeaker. Over the course of a few hours, she had driven them over a cliff where each of them fell about a hundred meters to a rocky death. And then to make sure that none of the vermin survived by accident, she then doused the pile of corpses with a dash of fuel and set it ablaze with a few shots from her rifle.

 

The farmers that had commissioned the hunters expected that she would bring them a trophy from each slain beast as proof for payment. Zutia had flown them out to the smoldering piece of corpses and left with her credit chit considerably fuller and, in the case of some of the Agamarians, their stomachs considerably more empty. The job required some degree of malice, as the creatures were unbelievably stupid and had no inkling of their doom, but more important was the control over the herd—not exactly easy when flying an airspeeder at hundreds of kilometers per hour at night through the Agamarian hills.

 

Recalling the intense focus of that productive night’s work, Zutia took that will to dominate and grasped the rifle with the Force. She grinned as it lifted into the air, slowly calling both it and the Sith artifact towards the reach of her arms. Again, triumph! No doubt that with further practice she would be able to extend of dominance over any number of objects or creatures, no matter the size or mass.

 

Her eyes caught glimpse of a dash of red light on the side of the trigger housing of her rifle as it hovered towards her. The safety had been left off after her encounter with the lizard that had attacked her earlier. Winking at her mentor, she took her invisible grip on the weapon and flipped it back on with an audible click. “Safety… on.”

[Haphaestus]

((I liked it. ))

 

Haphaestus gazed at Zutia silently as she struggled. Eventually she triumphed in lifting both objects simultaneously. "Well done," he commended her. She would need to learn quickly if she was going to get a chance at higher dark side powers. For now, though, he needed to guide her to discovering different parts of the Force, to see just what it could do for her. "You may set the objects down. Follow me." They would need a little bit of space for this next mind-expanding exercise.

 

The former Dark Lord strode back toward the massive Temple doors. They passed through a hallway to get there, and several other doors lined the hallway. One of them seemed to have no handle or control pad, and yet was practically soaked in dark side energy. Haphaestus ignored it and proceeded to the front doors, throwing them open with a seemingly effortless mental push. "The Force can enhance your body and your physical abilities so that they are much greater than your limited biological capabilities." Haphaestus walked directly away from the Temple of Rivan for perhaps fifteen meters, then turned around. There were a few uneven features on the Temple face, which for the most part looked like a bland lump of stone protruding up from the barren Almas landscape. He selected one and suddenly leapt the entire distance to it and landed upon it, a stunning thirty-meter leap. He then proceeded to jump a second time, and suddenly he was on top of the Temple.

 

"You must learn to free your mind," he said, his voice sounding conversational and yet inexplicably loud enough to be heard clearly despite the sudden distance between them.

[Zutia Lavell]

Zutia nearly grabbed her teacher’s shoulder to pull him back into the Sith fortress when the door to the outside opened, revealing the grey of a night sky that was just beginning to be illuminated by Almas’ star. The Agamarian had been left with a breath mask when her captors had abandoned her on this planet. Surely that implied that this planet’s atmosphere was toxic enough to seriously impair, if not kill a human? But Hephaestus strode into the wastes without a moment of hesitation. Either he was unaware or uncaring of this planet’s toxic atmosphere… or the atmosphere was not nearly as deadly as the gift of a rebreather had led her to believe. Zutia gave the air a ginger sniff and jogged lightly to join Hephaestus.

 

She watched as her teacher turned and approached the fortress. “Well… I’ll be…” Zutia murmured under her breath as she witnessed Hephaestus leap to the top of the Sith temple in two effortless bounds. The Agamarian had heard the tales of Force Users jumping unbelievable distances without any noticeable exertion, but she had never seen it in action. It was an impressive display, but this was something familiar to the freelance hunter. There had been many times when Zutia had been on an expedition and was forced to clamber over hills and sometimes mountains in search of her prey. Often there was no time for using the complete arsenal of safety repulsors and rock hammers that professional climbers deployed when surmounting a great height—all that extra equipment would just take up valuable space and weight on an expedition that might take days before returning to civilization. Zutia was no stranger to climbing a vertical face.

 

She grinned at the imposing wall before her. Even without the Force, Zutia would have been able to clamber up to the top of this structure in ten minutes or less. With the Force… Zutia was about to dominate it.

 

Striding back to the entrance of the Sith Temple, Zutia shed the bloodstained coat around her shirt, balled it up into a cloth roll, and tossed it into the threshold of the fortress. No need to complicate matters by risking the garment catching on something. Quickening her pace to an easy jog, her eyes focused on a point on the wall that jutted out just above the front door. As she approached, Zutia focused all her will on that ledge, and with an effortless flex of her left ankle as her foot bounced off the sandy soil, her body went sailing ten meters into the air. The Agamarian threw her weight forward as she landed to avoid falling backward from the narrow ledge, pressing her hands against the wall.

 

Zutia glanced upwards for another foothold. Finding another narrow ledge, Zutia held her gaze on the stone and easily surpassed the distance with another Force-assisted leap.

 

Too narrow! Zutia’s boots slipped as she landed and the apprentice managed to escape a deadly fall to the ground only by gripping the sharp edge of the wall with her fingertips. Her hands immediately broke into a cold sweat as she gripped the stony ledge, and she realized that her grip would quickly fail and slip. Her blue eyes widened and she fought off panic. There were only two ways out of this situation, and she doubted that her teacher, already having shown a lack of regard for her life, was going to get her out of this one.

 

Either fall and die, or climb and survive. Zutia had faced her death plenty of times in the past, and while she had come to terms with her own mortality, dying because of a miscalculation was not the way that she wanted to go.

 

Zutia stared upwards and measured the distance. Her right hand suddenly slipped, her fingers slick with sweat. The distance didn’t matter, she decided—this was do or die. The Agamarian woman banished that sudden fear from her mind, only allowing herself to feel her will to conquer the summit of the Sith Temple. Dragging her body upwards by her fingertips, Zutia felt an invigorating thrill as she relinquished her grip and the air rushed through hair.

 

This time she surmounted the fortress and joined her teacher, landing on all fours on the summit of the Sith Temple. Zutia breathed deeply, not saying a word to her mentor. She just tried to hold onto that incredible rush of power when she had been placed in a threatening situation, not daring to let it pass.

[Haphaestus]

Haphaestus made no move to assist Zutia as she struggled to replicate his feat. He wouldn't actually let her die if it came down to it, but it was better that she not know that. As she clung to the edge of the Temple outcropping, he let her fear for her life and then overcome that fear on her own. She was quickly proving what she had seemed to grasp early in their first training session--she wouldn't use fear as a way to draw on the dark side, but her own strength of will. He was satisfied with that. Eventually, most dark siders lost their sense of fear when they believed themselves sufficiently powerful to overcome any challenge. Perhaps it wasn't quite ideal to cut oneself off from such a potent emotion, but it had served enough powerful men well enough to be proven not a critical loss.

 

The Sith Master remained motionless until Zutia leapt the remaining distance to where he was standing. She was performing well. Her past frought with peril and her survivor's instinct made her a natural at grasping what it meant to let her willpower overcome her body's limitations. Before, all she'd had to work with was her natural adrenaline. Now, she had the Force.

 

"You are learning quickly," he said. "But do you trust your new abilities?" So saying, Haphaestus suddenly leapt from the summit of the Temple and plummeted towards the ground. Before he landed, he summoned the Force about himself to control his descent and landed almost lightly on one knee.

 

He stood and looked up at her expectantly. This would be a much more difficult challenge. She had fought a moment before against her fear of falling from a much lesser height. Now he was asking her to willingly leap and fall far enough that the impact would undoubtedly be fatal unless she was able to call on the power of the Force to save herself.

 

Haphaestus mentally prepared himself to catch her if she failed. Maybe let her break her legs again as an object lesson. To leap and to fail would show a complete mastery of her fear. It might even be better than if she succeeded right away. The only way she could fail is by refusing to leap. He was most interested to see the result.

[Sith X]

Thump thump...

 

The Darkness was binding, forever taking hold it's cool grasp upon everything that it encompassed. Nothing escaped it, either finding fear of the unknowing or finding comfort within. For it hid everything and shown nothing. It was the perfect camouflage for those who wished not to be found, the perfect peace for those who wished for solitude. It was here that demons ruled without question, where they're grasp was without limits, where the legend of them began and ended, and where the truth of their existence was absolute.

 

Thump thump...

 

It was here that one such creature, after nearly a year of such solitude and comfort, began to stir once more. Life was born within such darkness, and it was only fitting that his rebirth stirred within the very same conditions. His reasons for his absence were his own. But now, he found purpose to rise from his slumber. His heart beat quickened as he arose, the breath of his awakening echoing behind the mask which he adorned, his presence growing as he grasped upon the Force that was bound to him. Staff in hand, the Alcazarin stood. Darth Oni had returned.

 

Reaching outward into the Force, he grasped onto it like chains that were bound unto him, pulling his power and strength back within reach. Reaching into the minds of his brethren, his fellow Alcazarins whereever they may be, he announced his return with pride. And with such in his step, he moved forward, back into the Galaxy at large. Forward out of the Fortress his darkness did flow, and eventually outward from Almas. The Demon of Nurgle, a Son of Almas, had awoken.

 

Thump thump.... Thump thump....

 

"It's time to shake things up a bit."

[Zutia Lavell]

“I think I can do anything.” Still exultant at her recent triumph, Zutia grinned at her teacher as he boldly leapt from the summit of the Temple and plummeted to the wasted soil of Almas. Rather than leaving a small crater when he hit the ground, a gentle puff of sand drifted up to his knees and gently wafted back down around his shins.

 

The Agamarian took a step back from the ledge and threw herself over the precipice.

 

It was only a handful of seconds while she was in flight and the wind blasted into her face, but facing what seemed like an imminent introduction to her mortality, it felt much longer. For some length of time as the dark grey of the moonlit dirt rushed towards her, Zutia maintained her intense focus, quietly repeating her intention to land safely under her breath. It was about half a second before the woman’s boots hit the dirt that the first doubtful thought that reflected on how utterly insane her situation was entered her mind.

 

And she dismissed it. Fear was irrelevant. All that mattered was whether Zutia could master command over her own body and the Force. The Agamarian, in that last tenth of a second before her boots hit the silty soil of Almas, stared at her feet and banished everything from her mind other than her will to safely sink her feet into the ground.

 

She hit. A spray of sterile soil flew up around her face as her knees collapsed at the impact. Zutia threw her hands forward to protect her face from hitting the ground, bracing her impact against her arms. That turned out to be a big mistake. Although absorbing the impact through the Force saved her from what should have been a lethal fall, bracing her arms against her fall was far more than those unenhanced limbs could withstand.

 

Zutia instantly turned pale and cried out in pain, falling to her side against the soil. She could barely see through the pain, but her right elbow was at an unnatural angle, probably dislocated. Zutia cradled the twisted joint in her hand to steady it. In some distant part of her mind, she appreciated that she was lucky to still be alive, having fallen around thirty meters to what should have been a certain death. However, with her elbow dislocated and screaming in agony, she was more concerned with preserving her limb and not embarrassing herself by blubbering like a little girl.

[Haphaestus]

Zutia surprised Haphaestus again by her willingness to throw herself off the top of the Temple without even hesitation. She seemed to be riding her elation at discovering the power that she had. As her body plummeted to the cracked Almas dust, he wondered briefly at her sanity and decided he was definitely not going to catch her. Some lessons needed to be learned the hard way... and to experience one's limitations was an important check.

 

To her credit, she managed to survive the landing. Her new reinforced prosthetics in her legs held up nicely--if something had broken in her legs, it would have been her femurs--but she also took some of the impact on her arms and they weren't as tough. Pain radiated off her in the Force and she cried out as she experienced the truth of the lesson.

 

Haphaestus stood still and made no move to help her. "Good, now embrace the pain," he commanded her, verbally as well as practically forcing the words into her mind with the Force. "Examine it until you no longer recognize it. Become it. Draw on it, then relocate your own bones."

 

Pain was one of the most powerful tools of a dark sider. Combined with her tremendous will to survive and overcome, she didn't need him at all to defeat this most recent challenge.

[Zutia Lavell]

Zutia, her sunburned face almost white from the pain, cradled her dislocated elbow to her chest, keeping the askew joint as stationary as possible against the rapid movements of her distressed breath. The huntress wasn’t a complete stranger to this kind of pain—her prosthetic legs would attest to that—but she had merely survived long enough to make it to proper treatment. There was no great talent that helped her survive that experience, only sharp reflexes, clear thinking, and liberal use of tourniquets.

 

And she had still lost both her legs. Still, it beat bleeding to death on an Agamarian beach while a marine predator used her shins as toothpicks.

 

Zutia forced herself slow her breathing from her earlier panting. This sort of misfortune wasn’t unfamiliar to the Agamarian—Zutia had fought her way out of plenty of dire situations in the past, or simply endured until help arrived or a chance to escape surfaced. Losing control and panicking killed hunters when they were in the wild, days away from civilized lands without the aid of a landspeeder. Only cold rationality could save in these kinds of situations. Panicking was for the animals.

 

Focusing on her will to master her control over her own body, the Agamarian felt the all-encompassing power of the Force enter her body. Consumed in the tunnel vision that came with her limited command over the Force, she focused her perception on the pain that wracked her broken arm. The sensation of pain slowly faded from her mind, so intense was her focus.

 

Her perception penetrated straight through her darkened skin and into her flesh. Beyond that was a confusion of constant activity. There was constant movement directly under her skin—her blood through capillaries, probably—a steady throbbing of her heart in her breast, and throughout the entirety of her body, a constant snapping of… something that was so rapid that Zutia would have never been able to make sense of it all. No doubt a practitioner of medicine would the perspective absolutely fascinating, but the Agamarian’s knowledge of anatomy was largely limited to understanding her to kill beasts in the wild.

 

Zutia focused her perception on a portion of her body where the perplexing thrumming was different. She then realized what the sensation was: the electrical firing of her nerves all over her body. The peculiar sensation must have been that of pain from her dislocated elbow. It was strangely voyeuristic, examining her own body through the senses provided by the Force. It almost felt as though the pain belonged to someone else.

 

Zutia took her elbow in her good hand and gave it a gentle tug. The joint immediately protested the abuse and flared with pain, but the sensation felt different, as though she was merely a spectator to someone else’s private agony. Still gripping the dislocated elbow in her hand, Zutia had a brief moment of clarity just as she was about to pull and rotate the separated joint back into place. Only a complete idiot would try to set their own dislocation. With a joint as complex as the elbow, anything less than the expertise of a medical professional would probably result in incurring irreparable harm to the tendons or other parts of that delicate tissue. Coming to her senses, she promptly spoke up before she risked destroying her own arm.

 

“Set my own elbow? Are you completely batchin’ crazy?”

[Haphaestus]

She almost finished the task, but stopped just short. Haphaestus would rather have her complete it on her own, but the damage that could be caused by performing the operation without the proper knowledge was a non-trivial concern. He hadn't known whether Zutia had sufficient medical knowledge or experience to successfully set a dislocated elbow, and he supposed he would rather her acknowledge her limitations than attempt something that she simply couldn't do. The dark side did many things, but it did not instill medical knowledge, and healing was not a Sith technique.

 

Haphaestus approached Zutia and knelt beside her still-crumpled form. He put his own gloved hands on her arm, one above and one below the elbow. His own knowledge was complete, and Zutia had learned the lesson he had hoped to teach her. She had overcome her pain and experienced mental clarity through it. With inhuman steadiness and mechanical precision, he relocated the elbow. There was perhaps a moment where she could feel, faintly, the vibration of the servomotors beneath his very organic skin and the gloves over it.

 

He returned to standing. "You are weary and your body needs time to recover," he observed. "Take some time to tend to yourself. You will find proper facilities within the Temple, whether it is food, rest, or bacta that you require. Reflect on what you have learned, practice if you desire. You are dismissed."

 

Although Haphaestus had no use for any of those things, he wasn't always the Temple's sole occupant. It did mean he could not vouch for the quality of the meals Zutia might be able to locate. At any rate, he could feel a very particular presence in the Force, and he sensed that one of those other occupants might just have turned up again.

 

The former Dark Lord entered the Temple and began to descend to the place where he could feel Darth Oni stirring.

[Zutia Lavell]

((And life strikes back by sending me a busted laptop. Curse you, entropy. CURSE YOUUUUUUUU!!))

 

Zutia gave out a yelp of pain as Hephaestus twisted her dislocated elbow back into place. The pain passed quickly, as her teacher clearly had a better idea of what he was doing than his student and was able to relocate the joint in just a moment. A dull ache lingered from the damaged joint, but hopefully it would heal quickly and its owner would be left with no souvenir more dire than a bad memory to warn her against such recklessness in the future, as opposed to the more serious injury that would require surgical attention if Zutia had attempted to set it herself.

 

Slowly rising to her feet to avoid placing any weight on her damaged elbow, a cloud of silt wafted away from Zutia's body as a particularly swift gust swept over the wasteland. Her clothes, covered with the dried blood of an overgrown Dark Side-corrupted reptile and caked with the fine soil of this barren plain, were a complete loss, she realized. Gods only knew what else the ruin of that vicious creature had done to her--no doubt she was also covered in its brackish saliva.

 

Zutia followed her teacher back into the fortress. Hephaestus soon ventured off to attend to other business in some other unknown sector of the fortified structure, leaving the Agamarian to tend to her own needs--and mercifully so, as she had no idea how long her transit to this planet had taken and she was parched from her journey to the temple. With any luck this place would at least boast some standard living facilities, but when Sith were concerned, who knew what she would find?

 

The Agamarian wandered off, passing that strange portal that Hephaestus had led her past. She gave it a second glance as she walked, walking backwards to study it. Odd, that it didn't seem to have any physical mechanism for opening it, but the door was positively throbbing in the Force. Something of some importance must have been beyond it, though whatever it was was of concern to her at the moment. Zutia continued to wander through the metal corridors, soon coming across a section of the Temple that was lined with dormitories for the occupants of the fortress. Zutia passed them by, instead claiming a somewhat larger room that was likely intended for a more senior instructor. The huntress scavenged a black robe and cloak from the quarters--the dark robe didn't do her any favors, but any garment would do as a replacement to the bloodsoaked clothes she was wearing--and went to examine the sanitary facilities.

 

She immediately broke ear to ear in a grin. Far from the utilitarian sanisteam or sonic shower that she expected, the refresher boasted an old fashioned--and rather expensive--water-powered walk-in shower. Here was a luxury that was rare on even civilized planets, let alone fortified outposts on backwater worlds such as Almas. Still smiling, the Agamarian stripped and made to take full advantage of this uncommon comfort.

 

Oh, gods... The ancient Sith who had built this fortress may not have been much for luxuries, but it appeared that even they appreciated the comfort of a hot shower after an exhausting day of toil. She stretched her naked body in front of the jet of steaming water, sighing with relief as the shower washed away the filth from her skin.

 

Zutia watched as the water draining from the refresher turned black from the silt of Almas' soil to murky red. The Agamarian gave herself a thin-lipped smile. She had forgotten that she had spent most of the night covered with the blood of that dark side dragon that had attacked her while making her way to the Temple. She had slashed its throat right when it had her pinned to the ground--she must have been sprayed head to hip with its life fluids. Smearing her left hand over her face, Zutia gazed at the palm of her hand; it came away dark red with blood.

 

What a sight she must have been, climbing all over the Temple while covered in blood...

 

Soon after, Zutia sought out the dining hall of the Temple and could be found sitting cross-legged in a high-backed chair at an unoccupied table, munching on a number of bland ration patties. The foodstuff looked about as appetizing as it tasted--that is, it was featureless in its appearance as it was in its flavor--but the pre-packaged meal lasted nearly forever and provided enough nutrition to completely fulfill a grown human's dietary needs for twelve hours. Besides, she wasn't really aware of the overly-processed food-things that she was nibbling on. Her mind was focused on her command of the Force. Not exerting her will on any of the inanimate objects around her, Zutia simply expanded her senses outwards. Here she was surrounded by objects of a completely mundane nature, with little presence in the Force and possessing almost no potential for explosive spectacle.

 

Zutia slowly examined each object around her, from the tables and plates, to the eating utensils and her completely unremarkably meal. One object at a time, she expanded her sense of the room until she could visualize the entire dining hall and could observe every change inside it.

 

There was a fly buzzing around her food. It landed and began to have a meal. Zutia squished it with a tiny pincer-grab in the Force and flung its carcass away from the table.

[Haphaestus]

Haphaestus first went to the meditation room and retrieved a few items he could use to benefit Zutia's instruction. As soon as he had, he doubled back and headed for The Door. As he approached it he pressed his mind against it and it let him pass, closing in his wake. Soon he was descending to the Eternal Forge, his Inner Sanctum if not Rivan's. The heat level rose rapidly as he descended toward the roots of the great volcano near which the Temple had been erected.

 

As the heat rose, his connection to the Force heightened as he fed upon the energy that was thick in the air, drawing life through his flesh. It was a purely Alcazarin technique, one that he had derived from Darth Dominus during his creator's godhood. Though Dominus had disappeared long ago, Haphaestus respected strongly the man's philosophy and intended for it to find its way into Zutia. The woman had shown strong promise so far, and had already overcome her fear. Soon, she would realize how much the Sith limited themselves, how they let their hate and ambition cripple them.

 

Oni's presence seemed strongest here, but it was diffuse even to the former Dark Lord's augmented senses. It was possible that the man would not choose to show himself. Haphaestus determined that he would let Oni make the first move if he chose, and so went to the Forge. Rising from the molten depths of the Writhing Pit was a mass of liquid darkmetal, and in a moment Haphaestus began to coax it into a shape of his choosing....

[Zutia Lavell]

After finishing her meal of bland, over-processed mass-produced ration patties, Zutia returned to the room where Hephaestus had first taught her how to use the Force to move objects with nothing but her thoughts, intending to examine the tinkering that her mentor had done on her blaster rifle. The firearm laid resting on the bare floor, seemingly in perfect condition despite the mauling it had suffered during her encounter with the great reptile that had ambushed her in the wastes. With well-practiced movements of her darkly-skinned hands, the Agamarian gradually disassembled the weapon, tracing the lines of each individual part with her fingers as well as her newly-found senses.

 

It was peculiar; as her fingers followed muscle memory and steadily took the familiar weapon apart, until the stock and upper receiver lay in pieces on the floor, Zutia felt the weapon respond to her touch in the Force. There was an uncharacteristic texture in the parts as she pulled them apart, almost as though the pieces of the rifle had grown around each other. Frowning, the Agamarian reassembled the weapon, taking a moment to lightly brush off the silt that had collected on them with the sleeve of her cloak. She would have to give the rifle more attention later, but at least the dust wasn’t in danger of obstructing the connections to the power cell.

 

Her attention shifted to the dark orb that rested on the pedestal in the middle of the room. Because of its presence in the Force, Zutia had been able to sense it rather quickly. However, what purpose it had, if any, was completely unknown. Either Hephaestus held it in little value or had no idea what it was capable of, given that he had given it to his apprentice for practice in telekinesis. She could have easily lost her grip and dropped it onto the floor—in fact, she had done so while struggling to maintain control over multiple objects—possibly damaging the artifact.

 

Zutia approached the ebony orb’s resting place and touched the artifact through the Force, just barely grazing its contours with a telekinetic brush. No response—not unexpected, considering that she had spent some time hauling it all over this chamber. Zutia seized it in her hands and lifted it to the level of her eyes, straining as she raised the unexpectedly weighty artifact, staring in its perfectly black surface. The huntress brought it closer to her so that its featureless face dominated her view and blocked everything else from her vision.

 

Taking a deep breath to harden her focus, the Agamarian filled her mind with her urge to exert her will over her surroundings. With every breath, she fell deeper into that compulsion until her desire to reveal the orb’s potential consumed her. Time became irrelevant; the strain of her arms went unnoticed; all that mattered was the presence of the artifact in her mind.

[Haphaestus]

Haphaestus worked quickly. His first creation seemed to form itself in the air, wrought into being by the Force and the strong and complex mind of a Sith Master unlike any other. Made of darkmetal, it was almost impervious to damage. It was made to fit exacting specifications based on Haphaestus' observations, which intrinsically had more detail than a lesser, organic mind could appraise. The custom fit would enhance its purpose.

 

Without pause he set it aside and began work on a second creation. For this one, he reached deep into the fires of the Writhing Pit in search for a very particular element. Though rare, the considerable pressure and tremendous heat of the magma created rather unique gems, almost like diamonds but formed of Almasian elements rather than pure carbon. He fished around in the molten darkmetal for perhaps several minutes with the Force, knowing by feel what he sought.

 

Eventually, one shard answered his call. Withdrawing the firey red gem from the depths, Haphaestus took it over to a workbench and, with the tools he had collected, began to machine it into a very precise shape.

 

This task completed, he gathered a handful of high-quality components--most of which he had created himself in his infinite spare time before Zutia's arrival--and combined them precisely with more newly-cooled darkmetal. The gem fit snugly inside as Haphaestus replicated one of his earliest endeavors in metallurgy and created a lightsaber.

 

Now the Sith Master sat with both of his creations and meditated, turning his focus on Zutia to see how she was using her downtime. It seemed that she was, on some level, communing with the sphere she had been lifting earlier. He was most curious to see how it reacted to her and what she found out about it.

[Zutia Lavell]

((A week, two rewrites, and an Arkham City binge later…..)

 

Her focus intensifying further upon the square meter of space that Zutia and the Sith artifact occupied, the Agamarian lost her awareness of the outside world. The darkness that pervaded her vision became a pitch curtain of a shadow deeper than any physical cloak, and her ears were filled with a rhythmic pounding that grew more urgent and louder with every second. Under that, a shrill hum sang faintly in her ears. Gradually, the squeal in her ears became more coherent and took the form of something that vaguely resembled Human speech. Zutia couldn’t make sense of the voice, but she occasionally caught snippets of words amid the nonsense.

 

Trying to understand the unintelligible voice whispering in her ear, Zutia didn’t notice the presence that slipped by directly behind her. However, when the Agamarian felt the unmistakable, skin-puckering sensation of a knife tip guiding over her darkened flesh, she whirled around and crouched to defend herself, already knowing that she had reacted too slowly and was at the tender mercy of the being that had ambushed her.

 

Zutia opened her eyes to see… absolutely no one. At least, no one living.

 

Zutia was no longer “safe”, relatively speaking, in the confines of an ancient fortress that had founded centuries before her time, ensconced in a fortification that had weathered all manner of punishment that both Man and Nature could inflict upon it. Instead, she was in a rather more urban environment, standing in the middle of a city block that could have belonged to any planet, where it not for the fact that a quick glance at the sky revealed nothing but dark concrete only a hundred meters above her head, rather than kilometers of open air. Disturbingly, she was alone, the only living sentient in this neighborhood—all of the other inhabitants lay dead at her feet, amidst the debris that had been scattered by what must have been an enormous explosion. Chunks of duracrete and steel peppered their limbs, and a slippery sheen of spilled blood squelched under her boots. The few pedestrians on this street lay twisted in conformations that no living creature would rest in. Some were… not quite dead, though were well on their way to joining them, considering the mad convulsions of their bodies.

 

Zutia stopped her breath as she stepped over one of them, trying to ignore the chattering of the soon-to-be-corpse’s teeth. Perhaps a neurotoxin was part of the deadly cocktail that had created this macabre scene? However, when she didn’t keel over and join the dying a few seconds later, the Agamarian took in a deep breath, ignoring the familiar aroma of spilled blood and an unknown, acrid stink that was just barely discernable beneath it. Whatever agent was causing these convulsions, she clearly wasn’t affected by it.

 

The Sith acolyte frowned at her relief. Of course she wasn’t affected by the nerve agent. Whatever this scene was, it couldn’t possibly be real, no matter how vivid it appeared to her. The Sith artifact that she had been holding had done… something in response to her focus. But whatever it had done, Zutia had absolutely no idea why it had chosen to show her this.

 

The huntress continued down the street, taking care not to slip over the blood-stained, shattered transparisteel that had spilled out from an overturned landspeeder in the middle of the street. She glanced downwards at the chassis of the totaled vehicle, noticing a Human limb—slender and long, possibly belonging to a young woman—that had been crushed by the weight of the speeder. Zutia merely paused before walking away, not feeling much of anything at the loss of the innocent woman’s life, just a faint sadness at the needless brutality.

 

Continuing further on towards the epicenter of the blast, Zutia began to dodge the totaled vehicles that littered the roadway. Whatever device had triggered this explosion, it had generated a tremendous amount of heat—most of the vehicles now were completely burned out and their inhabitants were reduced to skeletons. Some of the vehicles had even turned partly molten, their steel and plastic exoskeletons having dripped down like metal icicles towards the street, and were still excruciatingly hot to even be near. Still, as she approached the crater left by the explosion, the huntress began to feel a unsettling sensation that she was being watched by… something.

 

Stepping onto the pedestrian’s walkway, Zutia dodged the scorched chassis of a public transportation speeder that was still glowing in spots. Now there were very few intact bodies left on the street, mostly skeletons and ashes. The Agamarian’s blue eyes darted into the skeletal speeder’s interior and instantly regretted it—it had been packed full of sentient beings, though after being subjected to such intense heat and thrown through the air like a trantruming child’s miniature, the bones of those who had been riding inside were intermingled within as though it was a mass grave. Her throat tightened up, and her eyes began to water.

 

It was just the smoke, Zutia told herself.

 

Once she reached the precipice of the blast crater, Zutia leaned forward and saw that the explosive had blown clean through the city street and left another level of pedestrian space bare beneath it—more bodies, more twisted vehicles, and more burning fires, just like this street. Zutia glanced upwards again and realized what world she was seeing: Coruscant, the capital of the galaxy.

 

There was a faint rumble in the distance and Zutia felt the ground tremble under her feet. Another explosion, she thought.

 

A cheerful ping sounded towards Zutia’s side, and the door of a turbolift—miraculously intact, she noted—slid open. Wiping tears from her eyes and only managing to make the watering even worse from the ashes that covered her fingers, she stepped inside and noted that one button, for the top level that this lift could reach, was already lit up.

 

Clearly, there was something that the artifact wanted her to see. A second later, the doors slid shut behind her and the lift rocketed away. Zutia kept her eyes fixed on the bare steel door, rather than the windows on the other walls of the lift.

[Haphaestus]

Haphaestus meditated. He was surprised by the potency of the artifact, and impressed that Zutia seemed to have found a way to activate it. As she was drawn into her dream world, his mind seemed to drift after her....

 

((Don't stop now. ))

[Zutia Lavell]

The turbolift raced upwards, and a few seconds later Zutia trusted herself to turn around and face the viewport to the world outside the lift. There wasn’t much to see at the moment, only darkness interrupted by a set of glowlamps that the turbolift was passing by so speedily that Zutia’s eyes perceived it as a continuous strip of illumination. However, the Agamarian was struck with such an oppressive sensation of being locked into a cage that she felt bile rising up her throat and an overwhelming sense of nausea. She looked away from the viewport again, focusing on the blank steel of the turbolift’s door, glancing occasionally towards the side to watch the number of the level that the lift was rocketing past climb higher and higher.

 

A few minutes later, Zutia felt the floor drop under her feet and the fluorescent-white of the lift was replaced by the ominous burgundy of emergency glowstrips. The huntress wheeled around to see that the pitch black of the tunnel had been replaced by the red-orange of a Coruscanti sunset… and that the planet was burning.

 

((Cue the Imperial March.))

 

Hanging like silvery daggers in the air, a multitude of craft that resembled the venerable Imperial Star Destroyers floated kilometers above the cityscape of Coruscant’s surface. A curtain of emerald turbolaser fire spewed forth from their bellies, raining untold amounts of destruction on the metropolis below. Vermillion counter-fire answered from the surface in isolated pockets, but it was somewhat effective nonetheless. A battlecruiser that had been inching towards a distant tower with spires at each corner of its foundation—the Jedi Temple, she recognized—suddenly gave off a blinding flash of light seconds before the counterbattery fire began pounding against its armor plating.

 

Zutia whirled around and started jamming her thumb against the turbolift’s emergency door release. It opened, revealing that the turbolift had stopped almost directly between two levels in this tower. Only a tiny margin of space remained between the elevator and the floor beneath her. A second glance at the viewport made up Zutia’s mind in short order—one of the Star Destroyers was drifting in her general direction. The tower beyond the turbolift sounded like complete pandemonium, with alarms blaring at ear-splitting volumes and the screams of panicking aliens just outside the portal, but anything beat being at the epicenter of a rampaging Star Destroyer.

 

Kneeling down, Zutia began to slither through the portal of the turbolift, sending her feet through first. Then her hips cleared the gap, then her midsection… and then she was stuck, wedged uncomfortably in the portal just below the level of her shoulders. Screaming in frustration, Zutia kicked out into the hallway, not accomplishing much of anything aside from denting the ceiling with her hardened boots. Then, just when she thought things couldn’t get any worse, the huntress felt the entire turbolift shudder around her body.

 

“Oh, come on!” Zutia screamed at nothing in particular, just before an idea came to her. Why was it necessary to try to squeeze through this narrow gap when the Sith acolyte could have just as easily widened the gap for herself? Taking a deep breath, the Agamarian threw away her thoughts of her imminent mortality and focused on her will to survive this nightmare. This turbolift was not going to be her coffin, and Coruscant was not going to be her grave. Zutia allowed her senses to encompass the lift, and staring blankly at the featureless ceiling, willed it to lower a few centimeters.

 

Those few centimeters were all she needed. The steel of the turbolift groaning around her frail body as it declined, Zutia’s form slipped through the gap the moment she had enough clearance. As she fell to the floor of the blacked-out tower, the entire structure gave a tremendous groan and shudder, and the turbolift behind her simply collapsed, plummeting to the ground mere seconds after her escape.

 

Zutia gave a weak little laugh, smiling at her narrow her escape had been. Collecting herself, the Agamarian took a final glance out of the doorway to the collapsed turbolift. The nearby Star Destroyer was still approaching and its turbolaser fire was beginning to sweep towards its bow where it could leave a wasteland of burned-out cityscape in its wake, but beyond that, the starcraft that was bombarding the Jedi Temple caught her eye. The counterbattery fire from the cruiser was taking its toll on the ground-based cannons that were punishing its armor, but just as the lasdt few sources of vermillion destruction went silent, a blue-white beam of some tremendously powerful energy issued forth from the Jedi Temple, burning through its kilometer-long hull as though it were dry tinder.

 

As the craft began to plummet to the ground, one of its missile launchers fired a single projectile, as though defying the Jedi mystics who had just turned their ship into scrap. Zutia couldn’t help but watch as it sailed down to the ancient walls of the Jedi Temple. Its stream burrowed into the walls, and for a second the Agamarian thought it might have been a dud, or that it hadn’t armed itself in time, then, with an all-consuming flash of searing light that Zutia felt as much as she saw, it detonated. She staggered back, pressing her hands to her eyes. That burning flash of light turned her world, previously illuminated only by the Coruscanti sunset and the emergency glowlamps of the tower, into pure and complete darkness.

 

The floor beneath her began to rumble, and the quaking grew with intensity every second. Blinded and with no idea where to go, Zutia sank to the ground and covered the back of her neck with her hands, hoping irrationally that the storm of destruction that the Imperial cruisers had brought upon this world would somehow pass her by.

 

Amid the rumble, she thought she heard a snort of derision.

[Haphaestus]

((My apologies again for the delay before and brevity of this post. This has been the busiest week I've had in months.))

 

A picture began to grow in Hapahestus' mind as Zutia experienced the potent Force vision. It was so strong it was as though she was living it, and as he pressed his mind against hers and Rivan's relic, he began to become engulfed within it. There was quite a lot of destruction, and Zutia was now terrified by the prospect of her destruction at the hands of a turbolaser bombardment.

 

The question was... had she truly mastered her fear? Could she command her fate in this vision, or was the Force choosing to show her her ultimate powerlessness? For even the greatest wielder of the Force could not defy it.

[Zutia Lavell]

The rumbling around Zutia grew more powerful with every moment, until all the Agamarian could perceive around her was the world around her being blasted into smithereens and the inexpensive walls of the tenement rattling themselves apart. Even the shrill warbling of the alarm klaxons was deadened by the cacophony, and she could feel the quaking of the world within her own body, as vividly as the panicked beating of her own heart. So this was how she was going to die, it seemed: blinded by the flash of a massively destructive warhead, surrounded by the death of the capitol of the civilized galaxy. When the bombardment passed over her, there wouldn’t even be anything left of her body—not even ashes, just her constituent atoms and a cloud of superheated vapor.

 

No trace of her existence, and no one even left to mourn her. The idea of her fate was oddly… comforting in its familiarity. The chances of her surviving this day was impossible, but when it came to surviving impossible odds, this was not, as her people had a turn of phrase, her first rodeo.

 

That familiarity drove away her panic and replaced it with cold rationality. Her next breath came evenly and she seized upon the Force with ease. It was roiling like a maelstrom with the deaths of millions of sentient beings, but its limitless power swept her up just as quickly as it did in the Sith Temple on Almas—even more exhilarating, oddly enough. If she got out of alive, the Agamarian would have to ask her mentor about that.

 

Zutia rose to her feet just as a titanic blast wave swept her away and threw her body like a giant’s rag doll through the wall of the housing unit. Through sheer luck or some grim joke played by her by the universe, she landed on a relatively soft surface… a bed? Her entire body was stinging from being thrown through the drywall, but that was irrelevant at the moment. The only thing that mattered was the creeping bombardment of that Star Destroyer—if one of its turbolaser blasts struck anywhere close to Zutia, that would be the end of her, instantly cremated, her flesh superheated so that all that would remain of her were some carbon-bound molecules and water vapor. And with dozens of batteries dotting its hull, she had quite the task to accomplish.

 

She stared upwards at its dagger-like hull—or at least she thought she did, blind as she was and as imperceptive of her immediate surroundings as she was. For all she knew she was actually staring at the ceiling of this apartment unit. Millions of tons in mass, glowing with turbolaser fire, and seething with its fighter complement, the thought of bringing that vessel down, or at least removing it from the field, seemed an impossible task… then she realized that she didn’t need to. All Zutia needed to do was disable its weaponry, and only the batteries which were raining fire down on the planet surface. With the Force as her tool, bending the barrels of those enormous cannon would only be slightly more difficult than bending a cheap spoon…

 

The Agamarian allowed her mind to be consumed with that indomitable will to survive and focused her control on the Star Destroyer. One by one, her senses focused on the refined steel of turbolaser barrels and bent them with an invisible grasp—only a few degrees of deformity was required to turn the mighty weapons into expensive powder kegs. As she worked, a burst of energy emanated from the dagger-like cruiser as its crew realized that someone was reducing their weaponry to highly explosive hood ornaments, then it began to retreat, gradually rising into the sky.

 

Just like the cruiser that had been ravaged by counterbattery fire from the Jedi Temple, the Star Destroyer above her had one last insult to offer as it retreated. Another missile streaked down from its hull towards the planet surface—but instead of delivering its destructive payload in an apocalyptic fashion, Zutia reached out with the Force and plucked it out of the air with an enormous fist. The Agamarian, her lips chapped with the ashes of the dying planet, gave the rocket a little smirk as she held it in place.

 

“Down, boy.”

 

Then the missiles failsafes kicked in and detonated its warhead. Zutia didn’t even have time to feel pain before her mortal form was disintegrated.

 

Zutia became surrounded by impenetrable darkness and heard only complete stillness. Not the stillness of uninhabited wildlands, where if one was merely quiet, they would be entertained by the calls of hundreds of indigenous creatures… and if they listened carefully, could discern the millennial shifting of the earth from the clatter of pebbles down barren slopes. This was perfect, total, and above all, oppressive silence. It was quite eerie, and it wasn’t until a few minutes later that the Agamarian hunter suddenly became aware of her body, the way that one became aware of the clothing as they donned it, and the silence was replaced by the unnaturally loud sound of her own breath.

 

Despite the silence of the pitch-dark space, the Sith apprentice became aware that someone was approaching. She intensified her focus and drew upon the Force, ready to defend herself.

 

The internal shift of her stance was met by an amused chuckle. Now Zutia became aware of a great weight in her right hand.

 

Through the darkness, Zutia heard a loud whisper. “Foolish girl, you think you are worthy of these teachings? Go back to your backwater and live your simple life, you… hick.”

 

At those words Zutia’s choler rose and her temper ruled her actions. She was perfectly aware of the reputation of her homeworld in the greater galaxy and had met more than a few people who displayed their idiotic prejudice to her. All of them had been rebuffed with the polite wrath that came naturally to a woman of her breeding, but the words rankled nonetheless. To confront the same dismissive idiocy among the Sith, the sect of Force users that were Zutia’s only path to greatness, provoked her fury.

 

Zutia whirled around and hurled the onyx sphere at the source of the voice. The darkness suddenly replaced by the walls of the Sith fortress, the Agamarian watched in horror as the orb bounced off the wall of the artifact’s shrine and fell to the floor with a sharp crack at its impact. Cringing, Zutia approached the sphere and inspected it for damage—it appeared completely intact, though the wall had bowed slightly inwards at the point of impact.

 

The Agamarian’s moved to return the orb to its dais, her temper fading away to be replaced by cold determination. So, she had somehow activated this neglected artifact, only to be judged unworthy by whatever intelligence ruled its function?

 

“You think me unworthy, dear?” She gave the curved surface of the orb a little pat as she withdrew from the altar. “Maybe you’re right. We’ll have to see. But later, when I’ve completed my training and I’ve become a Sith Lord, I’ll return for you. We’ll have a real nice chat… we’ll get to set our wills against each other… and I will lay bare every secret that you’re hiding from me and share it amongst the entire galaxy, and you’ll get to spend the rest of your worthless existence in obsolescence. How does that sound to you, you arrogant, prejudiced little—“

 

Zutia’s words were cut off by another chuckle.