Footnotes and Fables

Posted on Sun Dec 14th, 2025 @ 8:54pm by Thane

1,089 words; about a 5 minute read

Chapter: Chapter VIII: Broken Chains
Location: Thane's Cabin, Red Raptor
Timeline: Two months after Bespin

The cabin lights were dimmed to a low amber, as was the occupant's preference, his eyes finding more solace in the dark, as was the way for his people. Thane sat hunched at the narrow desk built into the forward bulkhead of his quarters, shoulders tight, posture long since abandoned. The air smelled faintly of hot metal, old paper, and tea - too much tea. The dregs of the last cup had long since gone cold beside him.

Datapads lay stacked and scattered in untidy piles: shipping manifests seized from Cult couriers, fragments of intercepted underworld chatter, half-translated Alderaanian civic records from New Alderaan’s early colonial period after the collapse of the Old Empire. Between them were physical tomes - real paper, real bindings - salvaged, traded for, or taken when no one was left to object.

His lightsaber hilt lay in pieces at the edge of the desk.

Not damaged. Not broken. Not in the traditional sense.

He had stripped it down hours ago, intent on discovering the cause of his ongoing frustrations with its function. The emitter matrix was disassembled, the casing laid open like a dissected instrument. He had lost focus midway through, his thoughts pulled elsewhere, as they so often were now.

It was two months since Bespin.

Two months of relentless pressure on the Cult of Axion’s lesser enclaves; listening posts, shell companies, ritual cells operating under a dozen guises had all been uncovered or targeted by them and their newfound ally in Damask Hul. It had not been glorious work on the face of it. It had been patient, ugly and necessary. They had leaned on whatever resources they could beyond their support from Speaker Hul - favours owed in the underworld, information traded by frightened intermediaries, scraps of intelligence teased loose by Bomoor’s unsettling calm or Amare’s growing, frightening intuition.

The thought of his apprentice drew a faint, tired smile from him. Her talent had accelerated far faster than he’d anticipated - not merely raw power, but perception. Pattern recognition. She saw fault lines before they were obvious. More than once, she had saved them weeks of work by quietly pointing at a datapad and saying, “There. That’s wrong.”

Bomoor, too, had changed. Settled, in a way Thane had not expected. Not consumed, not raging... simply accepting. His fall had not been a collapse, but a decision, and the calm with which he carried it was instructive.

Thane exhaled slowly and rubbed at his eyes. He was aware, dimly, of the things he had neglected.

The masked identity of Lord Serus had gone unused for too long. The underworld did not wait forever; influence, once left idle, calcified or was claimed by others. His sessions with the Telos Holocron had also grown infrequent, and Darth Plagueis’s cool, probing presence lingered in his thoughts like an unanswered question. He had barely engaged with the Bane gatekeeper.

Soon, he told himself, without conviction. The true objective was taking shape now. Everything else was secondary.

He reached forward and slid one of the older volumes closer, its brittle pages whispering in protest. The Alderaanian text stared back at him, dense and archaic, the script painstakingly copied centuries ago.

His gaze drifted to a familiar passage, one he had reread so often the words seemed burned into his thoughts.

“Þer he fond a djinn abydenge,” he read aloud, trying his best to imitate the correct pronunciation.

A djinn.

He snorted softly, almost despite himself. A child’s word. A comfortable lie.

His own translation lay open on physical pages beside it, annotated in the margins with notes, corrections, and quiet, damning certainty.

"There he found a djinn waiting."

Waiting.

That, more than anything, had begun to gnaw at him. Not summoned. Not sought. Waiting.

His eyes moved down the page.

“At his brest brenned oon rubye of crymsyn, glowyng softe as a lyvynge herte.”

He did not need the translation for that line anymore.

A crimson jewel… glowing softly like a living heart.

Axion’s iconography was nothing if not consistent. The colour. The symbolism. Power made visible, made desirable. Even the honeyed cadence of the creature’s speech rang true.

“Bynde þi name and bynde þi lyne…”

Bind thy name and bind thy line.

Thane leaned back in his chair, the faint hum of the ship filling the silence. New Alderaan drifted uncomfortably close in his mind now. A world that wore civility like a mask. A noble house - House Wyrd, so curiously named - whose improbable fortune had long been a curiosity, a footnote, a joke told by other houses with polite smiles.

Too polite. Too enduring.

His gaze flicked to his own translation again.

“Give me one, and I give thee ten.”

This seemed typical of Axion. It was not conquest. Not annihilation. It was transaction - consent. The illusion of agency. He did not take; he persuaded. He convinced others to damn themselves and call it wisdom.

Thane closed his eyes briefly.

They had been chasing shadows for months, but this was a root. A seed planted centuries ago and allowed to grow into respectability, into influence. An enclave that did not look like a cult because it had never needed to. He pushed aside the increasing alarm that skittered at the edge of his mind when he considered what Axion's true age or lineage must be.

When he opened his eyes again, his hand drifted to the disassembled lightsaber hilt, fingers brushing the cold metal absently. He did not yet think to reassemble it.

Instead, he reached for another cup of tea, grimaced at its temperature, and drank it anyway.

New Alderaan was no longer a possibility in his mind. It was a near certainty.

Axion had been there - he was sure of it.

And if the fable was true - if it had ever been true - then whatever bargain had been struck was still being honoured or collected.

He straightened slowly, fatigue settling deeper into his bones, no effort made at rejuvenation within the Force, and began gathering the datapads into something resembling order.

Soon, he would put the mask back on. Soon, he would return to the holocron and to Plagueis’ cold, probing questions. Soon, he would act as a Sith.

But for now, in the quiet of his cabin, surrounded by ancient lies and modern truths, Thane allowed himself the smallest, most dangerous indulgence.

Certainty.

They were close.

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