Rise

Azula

Mommy’s Little Psychopath
Joined
Aug 1, 2018
Messages
56
Awards
3
Essence
€9,557
Coin
₡13,778
Tokens
0
World
Opealon
Profile
Click Here
Faction
Bad Girls Club
She was back on Malachor V again, in the depths of the Trayus Academy.

I wondered if, here, at this ending between us, if you would care enough to try to save me—if a Jedi could find it within themselves to spare one who has fallen so far,” the Sith Lord before her smirked tauntingly.

The darkness behind Kreia’s eyes shifted and danced maniacally, and in spite of everything they had been through together—in spite of the old woman’s efforts to taint her which had, thus far, failed completely—the famed Jedi exile knew she would not repent. She was Darth Traya through and through, now, easing into the Sith Lord role she’d lost—that she’d always wanted back—with terrifying ease.

But I do not want your mercy,” Darth Traya scowled, “I want you to break.

The exile scowled. “Why me?”

Well, I suppose I would not be a good teacher if I did not give you the answers you seek, here, now.” She shifted, three violet lightsabers humming to life behind her. “It is said that the Force has a will; it has a destiny for us all. I wield it, but it uses all of us, and that is abhorrent to me.”

Elsewhere on Malachor V, it seemed as if almost all activity had stopped. Everything outside the antechamber had grown eerily quiet in the absence of Sion. What had happened to her companions? Had they succeeded in their task? Would the Mass Shadow Generator be activated, would the planet be swallowed whole? Would the Sith be destroyed once and for all?

Deep down, the exile recognized she was merely in a dream, and knew the Sith would never be destroyed.

Because I hate the Force,” Kreia spat venomously, “I hate that it seems to have a will, that it would control us to achieve some measure of balance, while countless lives are lost. But in you…

She paused for a moment, and regarded the exile. Simultaneously, the blonde Jedi examined her former master, perhaps truly looking at her for the first time since they’d met on the Peragus Mining Facility. The old woman’s skin may have turned a mysterious, dusky shade of gray, but the lines and wrinkles on her face were still in the same place as they’d been when they first met. The irises in her eyes may have disappeared in favor of a deep blackness, but they still moved with the same vigor, the same activity of life as they had beneath her hood all those weeks ago, when they’d stumbled upon each other in their weakest moments. Somewhere beneath the dark side’s monstrous hold, Darth Traya and Kreia were still one in the same. Neither had died yet.

The bond between them thinned, and the exile knew one of them would soon.

…but in you,” the Sith Lord continued, “I see the potential to see the Force die, to turn away from its will. And that is what pleases me. You are beautiful to me, exile. An dead spot in the Force, an emptiness in which its will might be denied…

And in that denial, in that emptiness—the destruction of balance, the exile knew. This had always been Kreia’s will, to usurp the balance.

Within the dreamscape, as the walls of the Trayus Academy on Malachor V melted into some sort of astral essence, the exile felt the Force bond between her and her former master melt just the same.

Severed, once again.

* * *​

The Ebon Hawk zoomed through hyperspace.

During the rather uneventful drive, the normally always-alert Meetra Surik had nodded off in her seat in the cockpit. Her search for her former master had thus far proven equal parts exhausting and futile, and in this rare moment of respite, had nudged the exile into a much-deserved slumber.

Kreia faded, and visions of Revan danced in her head as she slept. In her dreams, the lights of a thousand unfamiliar stars bounced off his signature. She called out to him, but he didn’t answer—didn’t even spare her a look. Instead, he turned away and dissolved into deep, black mist.

Where had he gone? Was he safe?

Did he even want to be found?

The ship rollicked a bit, and the frantic whirrs and buzzes of her trusty droid companion, T3-M4, shook the Jedi from her slumber. With a grunt, she bolted upright, her fingers smashing into various buttons on the control panel in front of her. The Ebon Hawk shifted slightly, responding to her accidental commands, and dipped abruptly out of hyperspace before reaching the earlier-input destination.

“Fuck,” she muttered, straightening her spine and sliding toward the controls. She manipulated the navigation controls wildly, but the freighter seemed to take on a mind of its own; it wouldn’t respond to her commands, and, in fact, seemed to slow almost to a stop without any prompting.

A quizzical look crossed Meetra Surik’s face as the Ebon Hawk halted its trajectory. T3-M4 rolled up beside her beeping madly, and through the droid’s lunacy she made out something about the navigation systems unceremoniously exploding.

…wait, exploding?!

She leapt up, rushing out of the cockpit and busting into the navigation room to find, indeed, all of the nav computers aflame and smoke billowing towards her. “Goddammit,” she growled, raising her hand and using the Force to twist the sprinklers on. Why didn’t they fucking activate when the smoke had reached them? What was wrong with her fucking ship?

Teethree stood in the doorway just beneath the cloud of smoke, monotonously reciting everything he’d ever loved about his master as if this was their death throes. The Jedi Exile would have none of that. She’d survived a war with the most physically threatening race in the galaxy, a huge, drawn-out battle against three Sith Lords, and the complete and utter destruction of Malachor V; no way a simple hyperspace malfunction was going to do her in. Not on this journey, of all journeys, and not today, of all days.

And then gravity shifted, and she flew into the air and smacked into the ceiling. She blacked out for a few seconds, and moments later came to as the entire room around her spun. Teethree’s screams faded as his programming began to shut down, and Meetra Surik crawled across the smoke-stained, wet ceiling, through the hallway, and back into the cockpit. She reached the frontmost room of the freighter just in time to gaze out the window and watch as her beloved ship, that had been with her through so much, met its match in the form of a craggly, blood orange-colored rock face jutting out of the ground of what seemed to be some sort of desert planet.

The Ebon Hawk crashed, and Meetra Surik and T3-M4 faded into the darkness.

* * *​

And within that darkness, her master returned.

Silver braids fell from Kreia’s hood as she knelt next to the defeated exile. “You said my time with you was done,” she whispered. Surik’s breathing quickened at the sound of the old woman’s voice. “And yet…

A chill ran up the exiled woman’s spine.

You still need your teacher.

The exile tried to open her eyes, but they refused to obey.

Rise.
 

Azula

Mommy’s Little Psychopath
Joined
Aug 1, 2018
Messages
56
Awards
3
Essence
€9,557
Coin
₡13,778
Tokens
0
World
Opealon
Profile
Click Here
Faction
Bad Girls Club
The Jedi exile’s eyes snapped open. “Teethree?”

A low whirr sounded from underneath some rubble nearby, where chunks of orange rock had caused a segment of the Ebon Hawk’s roof to capsize. Meetra Surik clambered over, raising a hand and using the Force to free her droid companion.

T3-M4 waddled out from underneath the floating mass of metal and stone and Surik released her hold on it, sending it crashing down as the droid neared her.

“Thank God you’re alright,” she said, placing a hand on Teethree’s headpiece.

“Beep boop da beeeeeeeeeeep,” the droid buzzed affectionately in response.

The rest of the ship hadn’t been as lucky as T3-M4. A quick glance around revealed that the entire cockpit was in disrepair, the nav room burnt to a crisp, and various other sections of the freighter stabbed with rocks and maimed in any number of ways. Surik briefly considered having Teethree run a diagnostic of the systems, but her eyes could do the majority of the work—the Ebon Hawk had not been through this much hell in quite a while, and for the time being, it seemed the exile and her droid had been grounded on this planet.

Whatever planet this was, anyway. Where had they even dropped out of hyperspace? They’d been headed to the Unknown Regions when she’d accidentally mashed the controls and sent them careening into this strange system, so logically, they must be in the Outer Rim somewhere. Perhaps they’d landed on Tatooine? The desert-like topography seemed to confirm such an assertion, but for the life of her, she couldn’t remember the sand being quite so… reddish there the last time she’d been. But how many desert planets could there be in the Outer Rim, anyway? Perhaps a foolhardy question, considering the relative unknownness of the region, but nevertheless.

With some effort, the exile climbed onto the Ebon Hawk’s roof and surveyed the area surrounding their crash site. As far as the eye could see, desert existed, save for a small grouping of black dots on the horizon.

A city?

Perhaps.

The croaking voice of Kreia rang in her head. The exile grasped her temples—what the hell was going on? The old woman was dead.

In physical form, yes,” her former teacher droned, anticipating her thoughts almost as if she herself was in the exile’s head, “but the Force can allow… magnificent things. Terrible, cursed, but magnificent nonetheless.

Teethree burst his thrusters and landed squarely on the roof just in time to watch Meetra Surik fall to her knees, the echoes of Kreia’s voice overpowering her senses. He rolled to her, cooing a tad and asking—in his own, droid way—if she was alright.

The droid cares for you,” Kreia chuckled. “Perhaps time for a memory wipe.

Surik glared at nothing, hoping perhaps the disdain she held deep in her soul would be enough to banish the old crone from her mind and from existence all together. The woman’s form was nowhere to be found, but Surik could see her all too well, in her eyes and yet only in her mind, craning over her like an overbearing teacher, like a manipulative puppeteer. The exile scowled; she had been Kreia’s unwitting slave for months on end, and led good Jedi to their deaths under her influence. She would not become a servant to an old master.

Get out of my head, she mentally barked. I will not be your slave. I release you.

Kreia’s maniacal, throaty laugh assaulted her from every direction. “Release me? Fool,” she chortled, “you mistake yourself. You are not the master here, I am. And yet—I do not desire a slave. But you… you are lost. You need your teacher, whether you accept it or not.

No, no, no. She wasn’t lost—she just didn’t know where she was.

That’s the same thing, idiot,” Kreia mocked her.

The exile pushed off the ground and shakily stood up. Her body was still weak from the crash landing, but as steadily as she could, she moved to the edge of the Ebon Hawk’s structure and leapt down to the desert floor, folding into a somersault to catch herself. She stood, and looked around, doing her best to ignore the old woman tugging on the back of her thoughts.

She wouldn’t let herself be pushed around by her own hallucination of her former teacher. She was stronger than that, trained for years in the Jedi arts, in the arts of protecting her mind from such maladies—

Unless…

Unless it wasn’t a malady at all. Unless, somehow, Kreia was right: her physical form had been destroyed, killed and sucked into oblivion on Malachor V, but her mental state—her spirit, her soul—lived on thanks to her strong and powerful binding contract with the Dark Side of the Force. Even after all she’d been through, Meetra Surik still found herself at war with the Force, desperately clinging onto it. It refused to wrap around her the way that it did most Jedi, forcing the exile to grasp tighter to her connection, work harder to keep it alive, which made her stronger and more capable when wielding it but much more susceptible to suggestion. She’d worked long and hard to resist the pull of the Dark Side that Revan and Malak had so readily accepted following the Mandalorian Wars. That’s why she’d willingly let the Jedi Council sever her connection to the Force originally—she couldn’t turn to the Dark Side if there was no Dark Side to turn to in the first place.

A noble effort,” Kreia harrumphed, “but one that, it remains to be seen, may have been proven completely futile. The Force has found you again and it won’t be so easy to be rid of this time, exile. And neither will I.

The exile scowled. Somehow, she expected Kreia was right on both counts.

The sounds of T3-M4’s thrusters signaled the droid’s descent to the planet’s surface, and within seconds, he’d joined Surik on the ground. By his calculations, the settlement was a few days’ journey away by foot, and considering the status of their current only vehicle, by foot seemed to be their only true option.

The still young woman let out a deep, annoyed sigh. A few days’ walk with only an anxious droid, the evil spirit of her former teacher, and her own thoughts to keep her company.

She wasn’t exactly keen on the circumstances, but she trudged on.
 
Top