As Above, So Below

Posted on Sun Nov 2nd, 2025 @ 1:45am by Amare & Bomoor Thort & Thane & Mentis & G2-O7

3,914 words; about a 20 minute read

Chapter: Chapter VIII: Broken Chains
Location: Cloud City, Bespin
Timeline: Week Two (Around a week after Irrikut)

OLD

"Careful, they know this place better than we do. Don't let them back us into a corner," Bomoor's eyes darted around, staying focused on the first cultist.

He summoned his inner fire and, with a roar of effort, hurled the deformed humanoid back. As it struggled to regain balance, Bomoor swung his viridian blade across its right side, grazing the skin and severing the arm clean below the shoulder.

The creature's skin cracked and shattered like molten glass as it collapsed to the ground, cursing in a strange, garbled tongue. Though only briefly: the glowing, pulsing skin grew brighter, and its curses morphed into mocking laughter. Using its remaining arm, the humanoid clawed at the ground, reaching for its lightsaber and starting to rise again.

Its laughter was echoed by the chilling voices of its brethren, surrounding the three newcomers in the desolate city.

NEW

The passage widened by slow degrees until the tight, cable-choked artery gave way to a broader maintenance causeway. The walls here were blackened and scored, their panels warped by ages of heat and pressure. Faint plumes of steam drifted from hairline cracks in the durasteel, and somewhere beyond the walls came the deep, rhythmic thunder of machinery.

G2’s dome rotated nervously, photoreceptor flashing amber as it emitted a tremulous series of binary beeps that echoed down the tunnel. Its sensors flickered, momentarily blinded by the heavy trace of gas and smog.

Thane slowed his pace, drawing a steady breath through his teeth. The air was thick and alive - the heat pressed close, carrying with it the scent of burnt metal and faint copper. Each step forward sent vibrations through the soles of his boots, as though the very city pulsed beneath them.

He reached out with the Force.

Below the grinding machinery and the hum of power conduits, he felt that deeper rhythm again - uneven, broken, but conscious. It throbbed like an irregular heartbeat filtered through steel.

As they pressed on, the tunnel opened onto a gantry stretching over a chasm. The space beyond was dimly lit by the molten glyphs running like veins through the walls, their dull orange glow refracted on the clouded haze that hung over the abyss. Below, faint blue light flickered - perhaps the ancient carbon-freeze chambers still waiting in the dark.

G2 then gave a startled bleat, reversing slightly as a faint scuffling came from behind the machinery lining the walls. A pipe tremored. Then, with a squeal and a hiss of escaping steam, a small figure squeezed out through a broken vent grille, its leathery hands clutching the metal, snout wrinkled, eyes wide in the half-light.

An Ugnaught.

It blinked up at them, squeaking something quick and nervous before retreating a step into the shadows. Then another appeared, this one limping, dragging a bent tool behind it. Then another. Within moments, there were half a dozen, emerging one by one from the cracks and maintenance holes, their overalls scorched and caked with soot, their tusked faces greyed with exhaustion, bodies emaciated.

They did not speak Galactic Basic, nor even try. Instead, they chattered in rapid bursts of their guttural tongue, voices overlapping in a strange mixture of curiosity and fear. Their wide eyes shone in the glow of the glyphs, darting between Thane, Amare, and G2.

Thane slowed his stride, his hand brushing the hilt of his lightsaber but making no move yet to draw it. He could feel their emotions and feelings through the Force - hunger, confusion, something like awe. They had been strays, once, but were now slaves; creatures abandoned when the city's old masters fled and new ones came to claim it.

One Ugnaught tottered closer, its small hands raised in tentative offering, holding a piece of twisted metal that glowed faintly orange - a scrap from a crystal forge, perhaps. It squealed, as though expecting reward or punishment, and pointed down the gantry into the depths.

Thane regarded it in silence for a moment, his hood casting deep shadows across his features. Then, without looking back, he spoke quietly to his apprentice. “Why do you think they follow?"

Amare judged the porcine sentients not entirely with reliance upon the Force, but with insight.

"A kind of longing, I think," she began to surmise, almost pitying the Ugnaughts' clearly diminished health. "No...'tis hope, I feel. Perhaps they think us to be their salvation, or they mistake us as members of the cult."

The nascent Dark Lord turned his gaze toward the endless dark below, where the faint blue glow pulsed like a dying heart. “Let them follow, then,” he added. “Even creatures as simple as these can sense the turning of great wheels.”

Behind him, the Ugnaughts shuffled into a loose, uneasy procession, their chatter rising and falling like the rustle of wind through machinery. Some carried makeshift tools or chunks of crystal, others simply watched, eyes fixed on the Sith pair as though caught between devotion and desperation.

The tunnel sloped downward again, the air growing hotter and heavier with every step. The clang of the gantry underfoot became a steady drumbeat. Somewhere ahead, deep in the haze, a sharp mechanical hiss echoed - the sound of pressurised steam, or perhaps something alive exhaling.

G2 trilled softly, uncertain.

Thane’s expression did not change. “Onward,” he decided after the droid made its noise, his own voice cold. “We are close now. The machine stirs.”

The Ugnaughts squeaked in fearful agreement, scurrying faster to keep pace as the trio moved deeper into the furnace-like bowels of Cloud City.

"There is one more possibility," Amare offered as she paced forth beside the reigning Sith Lord, her voice low, but was close enough for Thane's ear to pick up. "They may be ushering us into a trap."

For the moment, Thane said nothing, but fast a long glance towards the diminutive creatures hobbling along nearby.

The gantry curved, narrowing once more before opening onto a corridor that seemed unnaturally preserved. Its walls, though darkened by age and soot, still bore the clean geometric precision of Old Empire era architecture - straight lines, glossed durasteel, and the faint echo of order long dead.

Thane slowed as he stepped through the threshold. The air here was colder, thinner, as though the city itself was holding its breath. Even G2, whose wheels whirred faintly against the metal grating, seemed to move slower, its photoreceptor dimming to a soft blue.

Above them, strips of broken lighting flickered intermittently, casting rhythmic shadows that stretched and folded with each pulse. The silence was deceptive - not absence, but aftermath.

Thane’s gaze traced the long passage ahead, lined by tall columns and crossed by steel catwalks. Some bore faint scorch marks; long, slashing burns that had melted clean through the walls, frozen mid-motion like the echoes of a duel never finished. Whilst the centuries had changed the face of much of this floating city, the tell-tale scars of lightsaber combat were harder to hide.

He reached out a gloved hand and brushed the surface of one of those scars. The metal was cool now, but his senses flared with something older, like the memory of heat. A violent pulse in the Force rippled outward from the point of contact, brief but powerful, and the darkness of the corridor seemed to draw closer for a moment.

He closed his eyes for the moment, and could almost hear the clash of blades. The sharp intake of breath. A cry cut short by pain and revelation. The air smelled of ozone and burning coolant. The metallic tang of fear and defiance lingered still.

When he opened his eyes, the world had steadied again, but the resonance remained - an unexpected wound in the Force.

He spoke quietly, his voice carrying across the silence, meant for Amare though he did not look back. “Something happened here,” he said, sensing she could more keenly feel whatever it was he had touched upon, her innate talent for psychometry far beyond even his own.

His eyes travelled along the corridor once more, and he felt the faintest tremor beneath his boots. It was not movement, but the weight of something heavier and more profound pressing down, and he could feel the Force being drawn into Amare behind him. He could sense echoes of purpose and despair intertwined, the final moments of conviction and ruin, converging around the Nautolan.

The Ugnaughts seemed to react, as well, their beady eyes scanning the corners of the corridor with familiar and desperate fear.

Thane looked now to his apprentice, the porcine aliens retreating, as the air seemed to grew colder still, and the next light flickered overhead, the corridor filled with a rhythm not its own. He stepped towards her, faint concern creasing around his eyes. "Amare?"

Her only reply was her trembling body language and her held breath, frozen in place, daring not to move another step. Amare had felt the depths of darkness in the nightmare fields of Vaa and the bowels of Korriban, and saw the rise of Sith wrath boil and simmer behind Thane's golden eyes as the phantom of Serus lingered deep in his wounded heart. This new feeling, however, was far, far beyond any of that.

Breathing...

...mechanical...

...tormented...

...ruthless...

Her chitinous Nautolan bones trembled and her hearts chilled in rapid succession as she heard the voice of pain and unrivaled terror itself, disjointed, ancient ultimatums echoing across time...

"THE FORCE IS WITH YOU..."

It was a deep, resonant contrabass modulated voice, each spoken syllable a declaration that carried the weight of destiny itself.

...But you are not a Jedi yet...JOIN ME...If you only knew the POWER of the DARK SIDE...

And then she was startled with soul-rending fright as she heard the unmistakable sounds of lightsaber plasma blades clashing, arcing through air, tearing furiously through metal nearby.

Locked in absolute fear, she ignited her songsteel lightsaber, its amber hue coating her natural faded blue skin, taking up a tight defensive position, pivoting all around, seeking a menace that wasn't truly there.

"Where is he?! There is another here! I knew it was an ambush!" she screamed frantically in warning to her master.

Thane did not answer at once.

The hiss of Amare’s blade filled the corridor, its amber glow flickering against the cold steel like the pulse of something alive. The Ugnaughts squealed and scattered, retreating into the alcoves and ductways, their frightened muttering echoing like wind through a dead city.

He stood still, his own hand resting on the hilt at his side but making no move to draw it. His eyes swept the shadows that clung to the columns, the long streaks of melted metal that lined the walls. The Force still hummed, thick with residual violence. What Amare saw and heard was a reflection, a resonance caught in the metal, bleeding through time.

Slowly, he took a step towards her. His voice, when he spoke, was measured but not entirely unkind.

“Calm yourself,” he said. “What you feel is not of this moment. The Force remembers conflict as our bodies remember wounds as scars. Whatever happened here, it ended long before either of us drew breath.”

Amare focused her alien eyes squarely on her Dark Lord, the onyx pools of her twin black orbs reflecting the light of her radiant weapon. She was barely able to hold still, breathing shallow and rapid and filled with adrenaline and terror, but somehow managing to accept the wisdom of his words. This power that she had...it was fascinating, but she hated the randomness of it.

Thane looked again to the marks carved into the wall, following their path with his eyes. The precision of them, the power - one strike had cleaved almost clean through a support brace. Whoever had fought here had been more than skilled. They had been driven by something consuming.

Folding his arms across his chest, Amare's master examined the long corridor with renewed interest. “It lingers because it mattered, I wonder,” he said softly, almost to himself. “Perhaps that is why the cult chose this place. Some instinct drew them here - the echo of that struggle, feeding their designs. Or perhaps they simply found what remained useful, in the tibanna gas below, and the machinery to harness it."

Thane’s eyes flicked back to his apprentice. Her grip on the hilt was tight, her stance rigid. He took another step closer, lowering his tone.
“Enough,” he instructed quietly. “Close yourself to it. Not every echo is an invitation. Let the past speak, but do not let it take your voice in turn."

He reached out, his gloved hand brushing the air near her shoulder without quite touching. "You have strength enough to master what you hear,” he said. “Do not become a vessel for ghosts.”

The Ugnaughts peeked from their hiding places, chittering uncertainly, the faint red of the emergency lights reflecting in their beady eyes. The corridor was silent again, save for the faint hum of Amare’s blade and the distant mechanical groan of the city’s heart somewhere below.

Thane glanced once more toward the far end of the passage, where the floor sloped downward into the old carbon-freeze complex. The air there shimmered faintly with heat.

The Nautolan woman found comforting strength in his words and nodded subtly several times as she focused and centered herself, her breathing easing, and her lightsaber blade withdrew from sight.

"I...I heard a man's voice speaking of the dark side," she said, her body still trembling, and her words quivered a bit too, almost as if she were that runaway girl, Coda, evading bloodthirsty bounty hunters all over again. "Such anger. So powerful. Like nothing I ever felt, not even from you. I think...I think he was a Sith who fought a Jedi here, or someone trying to be one. It was like they somehow knew each other."

Thane listened without interruption, the set of his jaw sharpening as her account unfurled. For a long moment he regarded the cleaved supports and charred gouges as a scholar might study an illuminated page.

“An echo of the Old Empire, perhaps... and not a faint one,” he said at last. “So much of that era is myth and rumour, worse remembered than even the ancient Republic. Yet here, the currents cross and hold. It would draw carrion and pilgrims alike. Perfect for a forge, with memory to feed the rite, tibanna to feed the flame, and machinery to harness both.”

The Sith inclined his head to her, the gesture spare but sincere. “You did very well, Amare. You did not drown. Your talent is precisely what we require." He smiled softly, just briefly. "When we reach their furnace, you will read its scars and seams. Show me where it breaks, and we shall unmake it.”

At that, the Caanan's gaze slipped to the Ugnaughts gathering at the margins, eyes bright with fear and curiosity. Thane lifted one palm and the Force answered; a squat foreman with a braid of filthy cabling at his belt jerked off his feet and drifted towards the Sith Lord’s outstretched hand sharply. Thane closed his grip until the creature hung poised before him, boots kicking once before going still.

“Lead us,” he instructed, voice low but edged with iron. “The forge. Now.”

The Ugnaught squealed, eyes darting from Thane’s mask of calm to the Nautolan’s extinguished blade and back again. Understanding needed no language. It bobbed its head in frantic assent, snout puffing, and thrust a stubby arm, with a hand already a few digits short, toward the downward slope. Thane released him; the creature hit the grate, steadied, and began a hurried, limping trot into the gloom, chattering to its fellows.

“G2,” Thane added, without looking round, “mark our path and monitor vent pressures. If they try to flood these corridors, we will know before they do.”

The droid warbled acknowledgement and rolled after the guide. The rest of the Ugnaughts fell in behind, a ragged procession of soot and frightened purpose.

Thane set off at their heel, cloak drawing the corridor’s cold into its folds. “Come,” he said to his apprentice as he passed her. “History has left us a map. We will finish what it began, and then we will tear out their heart.”

Amare gave him a curt nod of agreement and tried her best to match his bold stride. However, it became difficult for her to focus on the mission as her mind grew perturbed and filled with awe from what the Force had revealed to her. She had to know who that Sith Lord was with the booming electronic voice that she heard, and made a mental note to inquire about it with the Telos Holocron later.

The passage dipped and tightened. Heat bled up from below in slow, furnace breaths; somewhere ahead, a deep pump cycled, and the blue ghost-light of ancient carbonite arrays began to flicker through the haze.

---

Several floors above, against a darkening sky, Mentis ducked beneath a sweeping blow, his crimson blade sizzling against the cultist’s unstable weapon. As he twisted to counter, his eye caught the glow once more: deep within the creature’s chest, beneath the cracked, scaly boils and scorched flesh, a shard pulsed with molten light. Not just a glow but a crystal. It was embedded half-way into the skin and pulsed like a living organ; like a beating heart.

He staggered back, breath sharp: “There's a crystal!” he yelled, voice cutting through the chaos. “In their skin, where the glow is brightest! I think that's what's keeping them moving!”

Bomoor’s gaze dropped to the original cultist, now with a single remaining arm, still clawing its way across the durasteel, dragging its shattered body with grotesque persistence. The glow in its chest flared brighter with each movement, casting warped shadows across its ruined face. Bomoor narrowed his eyes.

He extended a hand, fingers splayed, and reached out through the Force. The crystal pulsed in response, resisting him as if it knew his intent. With a guttural growl, Bomoor clenched his fist. The creature shrieked, its limbs spasming violently as the shard tore free from its flesh in a spray of steam and molten ichor. The crystal hovered in the air before the Ithoran, slick with blood and glowing like a fragment of a dying star.

The cultist collapsed instantly, its body twitching once before falling still. The remaining organic skin instantly blackened as that fiery light left it and it became inert and immobile like cooling lava. Bomoor stared at the shard a moment, considering it, then crushed it with a final clench of his fist.

"A cheap imitation," he commented, before turning to Mentis and nodding, "Well done: that was a good spot. There's too many to defeat them all, but we can now cut down enough to make progress. I think Reave may also be working on clearing us a path too."

Nearby, the Jawa crouched low behind the twisted frame of an old pylon, his tiny hands moving with practised precision despite the carnage unfolding a few dozen metres ahead. Each motion was methodical - priming charges, checking contacts, biting down on the stub of a cigarra as the wind whipped the smoke back into the shadow about his face. The whine of his repeating blaster slung across his back underscored the distant clang of battle, a reminder waiting to be unleashed.

The cultists’ laughter echoed across the concourse, mingling with the crackle of unstable sabers and the harsh ring of metal on metal. The sound had weight, of too many feet scraping against the durasteel, too many voices screaming devotion and madness in equal measure.

Reave let out a short, sharp string of Jawaese as he twisted the final detonator cap into place and slammed it home with the heel of his hand. The soft green light that blinked to life reflected briefly in his golden eyes. He gave it a small nod, satisfied.

Above, shapes were moving. Half-seen silhouettes were clambering along the edges of the shattered façades, dropping onto the walkways in jagged, twitching motions. Some were still recognisably Humanoid; others had been altered beyond any clean description, limbs twisted with metal grafts, faces stitched with lines of glowing molten script or unseen embers within.

One fell close enough that Reave felt the air shudder as it hit the ground, its body folding unnaturally before snapping upright with a hiss of venting steam. It brandished a jagged blade of fused alloy, shrieking something wordless.

Reave did not flinch. He spat out the cigarra, levelled his blaster, and the weapon barked a single thunderous burst. The thing’s chest ruptured in a shower of molten sparks after an insufficient effort to block the assault, and it staggered backward into the shadows - but more were coming, pulling themselves up from the edge of the platform like vile swarming insects.

He gave a few loud jabbering yells, waving one hand in a harsh beckoning motion toward Bomoor and Mentis - an unmistakable, instruction to 'get moving' if ever there was one. Another burst of guttural Jawaese followed, the tone rising, urgent and angry.

The air thickened as the cultists began to close in, and Reave slung his rifle around again, bracing against another speeder wreckage. He snapped open the detonator’s guard plate and thumbed the first arming sequence. Tiny crimson indicators began to blink, marking the charges he had laid around the walkway's structure.

He hissed a single phrase before glancing back toward the Ithorian’s massive silhouette and the gleam of Mentis’s saber. Then, with a final flick of his thumb, the first pair of explosives beeped in unison.

A deep, rolling thoom rippled through the deck plates as one of the adjoining access bridges buckled and collapsed, taking several charging cultists with it in a cascade of sparks and fire. The blast wave swept the rest back momentarily - just enough space for Reave, Mentis and Bomoor to regroup.

Reave’s distorted voice crackled through the static of his comm as he barked another indecipherable command, the cadence sharp but purposeful. He pointed toward the shadowed route leading beneath the old administration tower.

The cultists’ growling, hissing and threatening resumed, angrier now, echoing over the fire and twisted metal.

Reave pulled a fresh cigarra from his belt, struck it on the edge of his rifle’s casing, and muttered another gravelly line of Jawaese around it - somewhere in between a curse and a prayer - before readying his weapon again and firing at a few choice foes not armed with lightsabers, their axes, swords and chunks of metal unable to deflect his assault.

Bomoor gestured upwards towards to the Jawa in acknowledgement and appreciation before turning to Mentis and indicating the way. As the pair ducked into the obscured path and disappeared from the Jawa's view, he saw his Rattataki companion grab his own commlink.

"Nice work, little partner," his voice came through with a little pride, "You keep hitting the glow-spots and we’ll get out of this yet."

The Jawa's lightshow had bought seconds, maybe minutes. But he’d made his point clear: time to move, before this entire level fell into the storm below.

TBC

 

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