Price of Entry
Posted on Thu Mar 5th, 2026 @ 10:12pm by Thane & Bomoor Thort & Amare & Melliah Glynt
3,687 words; about a 18 minute read
Chapter:
Chapter VIII: Broken Chains
Location: Wyrd Estate Lower Levels, New Alderaan
Timeline: After "Visitors and Viziers"
OLD
The dual-phase effect extended the energy blade, lengthening it to a standard lightsaber's reach. "Hah!" She attacked the door at its center line, up at an angle just above her head with a vicious thrust. Immediately, metal began relenting to pure unrelenting plasma. The smell of melting metal was profuse and violated her olfactory senses. She pressed furiously, then began to slowly bisect downward. The cutting reminded her of the way she killed her adopted brother Capo. The thought motivated her to keep going with a wry satisfied grin.
So engrossed in her task to split the door, that she failed to realize the tremendous instability within the shoto's hilt. A short, hair-thin cleft formed upon the lightsaber crystal, then another, and the power cell was on the verge of extreme overheating...
NEW
A shriek tore through the confined stairwell. It was not from the door, but from the hilt.
The dual phase blade flickered violently as Amare drove it downward, metal parting in a molten seam that spat sparks and liquid fire onto the stone. The pitch of the weapon rose beyond a clean hum into something strained, unstable. The cut was nearly complete when the first crack inside the crystal deepened.
The blade guttered and then flared. The feedback hit her palm like a living thing. Heat surged back through the casing, biting into her skin. The power cell howled as containment failed. Amare tore the weapon free just as the shoto spat a violent arc of energy sideways, carving a jagged wound into the wall.
The blade collapsed into nothing. A concussive pulse followed, not explosive but catastrophic within the hilt itself. The casing split along the weakened seam, venting smoke and the bitter stench of scorched circuitry. The crystal inside fractured with a sharp internal snap she felt more than heard.
Silence fell, broken only by the hiss of cooling metal. The door sagged inward along the molten cut she had managed to complete. The structural integrity was compromised. The weakened halves tore apart and collapsed with a loud clang, albeit it was mostly muted by the curated Alderaanian architecture.
Amare's hearts each skipped a beat, not from the fallen door, but from the depth of the loss she felt at watching the shoto rendered useless for her carelessness.
"Thane is going to carve me into chum for this," she whispered almost breathless as she stared a bit longer at the destroyed Jedi weapon on the floor. She wanted to retrieve its remains, but she didn't need to move her hand close to see that it was too dangerous to touch for the moment. She would have to come back for the pieces later, assuming that opportunity even presented itself.
She glanced about behind her, but saw no droid or any sign of curious sapiens approaching. She had to press on. The property damage and the death of the eldest son of the Wyrd family meant she was far beyond the point of no return. It was ride or die now.
Cold air breathed up through the breached doorway, thick with incense that failed to mask something far fouler beneath. Rot and stagnant water. Something long confined. The stairwell beyond was also no longer finished stone.
Archaic blocks, uneven and damp, formed a descending passage lit by queer purple flames suspended in iron brackets along the walls. The fire did not flicker with heat. It burned with a steady, unnatural luminescence that cast long violet shadows across etched symbols carved deep into the stone.
The sigils twisted in looping geometries reminiscent of those she had seen in the bowels of Cloud City. Esoteric and functional. Meant to bind, not inspire - and the air grew colder with each step.
Damp seeped through the stone. Water dripped somewhere unseen, echoing at irregular intervals. The incense thickened as she descended, sweet and cloying, fighting desperately against the stench of something organic and failing.
"The Cult leaves its marks here too," she commented softly as she felt the eldritch pull in the Force around drawing her steps ever forward, but not enough to make her paces loud. She was careful to maintain her cautious prowler's gait. "Stupid Amare...now you're in their den without a--"
She stopped herself and spun where she stood believing something or someone had been following her. The energies around felt oscillating and unstable to her in subtle ways. The Assassin of Sleheyron knew by conventional senses that she was alone, and yet the Force played with her feelings and made her doubt that assessment.
"I...have to keep moving," she reaffirmed her resolve with a shake of her head. She dismissively passed off what she was experiencing as being the effects from lack of sleep and anxiety being unarmed in hostile territory.
Back at the entrance, Mistress Glynt arrived in silence, her steps barely disturbing the dust that still drifted from the ruined doorframe. The air was sharp with the scent of scorched circuitry and molten alloy. She reached out a hand faintly, feeling the lingering heat and getting a sense of the collapsed door and the blackened scar carved into the wall.
"Reckless," she murmured, though there was a faint curl of approval beneath the word, "But effective."
Her attention shifted to the shattered shoto lying amid the debris. The casing still glowed faintly with residual heat, but the chartreuse crystal inside screamed out even louder in her mind like a frantic prisoner. She extended two fingers, stopping just short of touching it. The crystal within pulsed once, responding to her presence, before settling down to an inert state once again.
"Such waste," Glynt whispered, "The girl burns too brightly for her own good."
With a small, precise gesture, she summoned the fractured crystal into her palm. It was still hot enough to sting, but she closed her fingers around it regardless, letting the pain ground her. The rest of the hilt she left where it lay.
Her blindfolded gaze turned toward the stairwell, where a waft of stale air breathed up from the depths. She smelled the waft of the incense, masking the rot. The old sigils hummed faintly against her senses.
"I wonder what she will do when she meets him," Glynt said softly, "If she will even recognise what he is."
She stepped forward, her presence thinning into the shadows as though the darkness welcomed her.
"Go on, little flame," she whispered, descending after Amare with the patience of a hunter, "I will be watching."
And with that, she slipped into the depths; not close enough to be seen, but close enough to observe.
The descent did not continue as a corridor, but narrowed. The purple flames thinned out until only every third bracket held a steady, unnatural glow. Between them, the dark pooled thick and complete, swallowing depth and distance alike. The stone absorbed sound; footfalls did not echo here, and were instead taken.
The temperature dropped with abrupt severity. Breath misted faintly in the air, drifting sideways in currents too subtle to be natural. The incense grew heavier, almost syrupy, but beneath it the smell persisted. Not fresh rot or recent decay, but something older. .
The sigils also changed. Higher up they had been orderly, geometric, looping in intentional patterns, like in Cloud City. Here, they grew denser and less symmetrical. Lines cut into stone with greater force. Intersections were deeper and some glowed faintly from within - not bright enough to illuminate, only enough to suggest contour. In places the markings pulsed once and faded, as if reacting to proximity.
The light eventually failed almost entirely. The purple flames, spaced now at long intervals, barely defined the edges of walls. The space between them was absolute black. Orientation became unreliable; the passage did not run straight, but it shifted subtly, curving in angles too shallow to register immediately.
Moisture also clung to the stone. A single drop of water fell somewhere ahead.
Then another... And then a different sound.
Low and irregular.
At first, it could have been wind forced through a narrow shaft, but then it resolved.
It was breathing, slow and laboured, rattling at the end of each draw. There was also a faint metallic scrape that followed, delicate but unmistakable. Chain against stone.
The breathing briefly paused, as if the being had paused to listen, but then resumed. Dust seemed to cling to the sound itself, as though each exhale dragged through decades of confinement before reaching open air.
The passage widened ahead into a chamber that did not announce itself with architecture but with absence. The walls retreated outward and the ceiling rose. The dark thickened rather than thinned.
The sounds of careful footfalls slowed and halted, fading into the deafening silence of the chamber. Amare had every ambition to keep moving forward, keeping the pace, knowing time was not on her side. Yet, through a pulse of instinct, she felt keen to stop in the middle of the room and simply listen.
Her hearing offered her nothing but the silence around her. Nevertheless, something she couldn't describe seemed disturbingly askew. The air felt a bit thinner, the gravity a touch heavier on her shoulders, and a strange sense of...familiarity assaulted her expectations.
Her mind slipped back to that day years ago on Corellia, that fateful night when a shock whip set to lethal voltage nearly fell upon her right before she saw the cyan lightsaber blade sprout out of her late husband's chest, felled by a mother who would do anything to protect her daughter.
Amare expected that to be her fate in this room, not as a premonition, but as imagination driven by guilt. It would be a sick twist of irony, one sneak bested by a better sneak. She assumed her predator was Nala, or another Force-empowered agent of Axion she had yet to meet that had the drop on her. Whomever it was, if there was indeed a living soul and not her paranoia at play, then it was better to face her fate with dignity and respect the fact that she had been caught dead to rights.
"If you're going to end me," Amare said over her shoulder with grim resignation, her back to the shifting presence dwelling in the gloom behind her, "make it quick."
An echo of feminine laughter emerged from the darkness, bouncing off the walls of the chamber; it was melodic in a way but carried a harmonic eerie enough to set Amare on edge.
"Oh, little flame," a rich woman's voice followed, "I may do just that. But you must bear witness to the truth first."
Amare heard faint footsteps and silken cloth gently brushing with slow gliding movement.
"Then you must make your choice: awakening... or death."
Amare narrowed her eyes as she slowly turned to face her stalker.
"If you knew the life I've lived," she said slowly with a resolute tone masking the anxiety that thrummed through her veins within, "then you would know that I don't respond well to threats." She brought up her left hand in front of her and clenched it into a tight white-knuckle fist, on the verge of summoning her hunger for absorbing life essence.
Before the still-hidden Melliah could answer again, there was another clang of chains and a groan of exertion. Something pulling away, or perhaps towards them.
"Oh, do excuse us my Lord," Glynt's voice came through with a clear smile, even if the Nautolan could not see it, "I am detaining your guest. She and I will finish our discussion in a moment. Allow me to get the lights."
Without a word, several braziers lining the chamber sprung to life in a crimson flame.
The braziers revealed hat had been waiting: chains descended from the ceiling in patient arcs, their links darkened with age and ritual oil. They converged at the centre of the space, where a figure hung not quite suspended and not quite seated, as though the stone itself had started to grow around him then stopped.
He had once been a Human man. That much was still visible in the architecture of bone beneath parchment skin. Limbs thin beyond frailty and fingers elongated by dehydration rather than design. His ribs showed sharply beneath a desiccated chest carved over and over with glyphs that had not faded with time but deepened, as though the flesh remembered every incision. They spiralled across him in disciplined geometry, converging at the object embedded brutally between his sternum and heart.
The crystal there was fist-sized, jagged yet faceted with unnatural precision. It did not glow steadily, but pulsed at uneven intervals and different degrees of light. Each pulse was painfully out of rhythm with the creature’s breathing, and yet seemed tied to it. Light moved through it like it was almost getting trapped in glass, threads of deep red and muted violet refracting outward into the air rather than downward into stone.
The eyes that opened were not blind, but they were not seeing either. Milky and thickly filmed, they shifted without focus, drawn instead toward sensation and presence.
The warped current in the room thickened, now. It did not flare like much of the darkness Amare had experienced before, not even from the cultists they encountered. Instead, it pressed, warm at first - and reassuring. It was like a hand upon the shoulder of a child told everything would be safe, if only she would stop struggling. It carried the texture of faith cultivated over decades, of devotion layered upon devotion until belief itself had weight.
It brushed against Amare’s mind gently at first.
Security.
Continuity.
Belonging.
The breathing rattled again, closer now, and the chains answered with a faint metallic murmur as the ancient thing shifted the smallest degree. When it spoke, the voice did not project from a throat alone. It seemed to seep from the glyphs themselves, from the crystal, and even from the stone surrounding them all.
"Another... arrives." The pulse within the embedded shard brightened by a fraction as the paper-thin voice trickled forth. "And she... burns."
The air grew heavier, denser. To the Nautolan, it was as though the chamber was narrowing inward around her thoughts, inviting her-
-to rest.
-to kneel.
-to surrender the burden of choosing...
The chains moved again, a slow, deliberate adjustment, as if the being were leaning toward her without possessing the strength to truly move without dusty bones snapping from the effort.
Emerging now into the flickering light before the desiccated man, Mistress Glynt revealed herself in her scarlet robe, amber red hair spilling out from under her hood with the covering on her eyes barely even visible as her whole face was cast in shadow.
"Witness but a fraction of the power of a living god," her voice took on a heavier tone, the weight of the energy in the room subduing all now that it was visible to the Nautolan, "The one who bestows this power: you know him as Axion. This is his power gifted upon this house and its occupants, it is the power I too wield and a power that could be granted to you too."
With a deft motion, the Force-sighted woman produced the cracked chartreuse crystal from her sleeve and held it up to the flickering light so that the red flames danced within it like blood seeping through water.
"Your master scoffs at Legacy," she continued, "Calls it madness. But I think he merely fears the greatness true legacy can bestow, when cultured correctly. How can he claim to be your master, if he cares not for legacy? How long till he rejects you too and walks away from yet another legacy?"
Glynt rolled the crystal into her palm and began to squeeze it - instantly Amare felt the weight upon her increase. She fell to her knees as though she were being compressed like her broken weapon core. All the while, the woman slowly paced forward until they were face-to-face. There were no eyes on Melliah for Amare to peer into but she could feel the Miralukan's sightless gaze burrowing deep into her.
"See how much power symbolism can hold," Glynt insisted, her words becoming whispers that danced around Amare's head, "See how it binds you when you are on the outside but just imagine what you could do with that same influence when on the inside."
The Sith Apprentice's resolve was faltering, her willpower chipping away. Her body shook and her breathing accelerated as she tried hard to resist. She tried to get back on her feet, but nausea set it, and her knees didn't want to straighten and carry her away to cover.
"S-stop...this...!" she struggled to answer through grinding teeth, her eyes averted and closed from Glynt, hands pressed on the sides of her head. "You...d-don't know...my m-m-master! He'll...kill...nnnaaggh!!"
She screamed, her gazed forced up, eyes snapped open, compelled to lock her sight past Glynt and fixate at the crystal embedded in the chained husk of a man. Amare had believed few things could be as dark or insane as Darth Cabal back on Vaa, but that old dead Sith's power felt like a pale flicker compared to what assaulted her now.
Thane and the holocrons had completely failed to prepare her for this. Months and months of training and multiple life and death experiences, constantly skirting on the edge of victory and oblivion had all suddenly felt meaningless and hollow.
Amare began to see clearly: Axion commanded a power that was indeed far beyond the nascent Sith Lords were capable of handling. She felt her confidence, inner strength, and hope collapsing under the weight of a pack of lies built on the dusty ruins of Korriban. The Sith seemed like nothing more than an old joke, a legacy of corpses that achieved nothing but failure after devastating failure. Thousands of years power plays and struggles only to vanquished and forgotten again and again. The dark side had truly evolved. It had to. The Force had already chosen its true successor, and it was not he who sought to style himself as the Dark Lord of the Sith.
Imposter.
Liar.
Fool.
"Yes, little flame," Glynt's hand relaxed slightly and Amare felt part of the weight lifting from her, "You are starting to understand what has been denied to you."
Standing back slightly, Amare was able to look up, breathing still shallow, and see again the chained man also peering at her. There was no emotion in his gaze but just knowing he was looking pressed into her like she too was chained, seeping into the stone beneath her.
The red-robed cultist had now completely released the crystal and slipped it back into her robe. Instead, she now drew out a lightsaber hilt, forged like a series of bronze and golden rings and etched with more miniature glyphs like those about the chamber. With a gentle hiss, it pulsed to life and she raised the red plasma beam in the air.
"Now, comes the moment to decide," Melliah stated firmly, her blade poised and ready to sweep down towards the Nautolan, "In the sight of the real Lord of house Wyrd, bearer of the StarWyrd bargain, you will either join the ranks of the cult of Axion, or you shall die here as a fool who thought to defy what is eternal."
"What...what must I..." Amare whispered weakly, shivering, on the verge of giving in, yet a tiny part of her was still trying to resist out of pride, out of a sense of personal honor...out of fear of Serus' wrath. She crumbled to all fours and prostrated low, forehead to the floor, her head numb with pain and extreme nausea and cold sweat.
All it took was mere seconds for Axion to overwhelm her mental defenses, and not even in person, but from a distance through a chained, desiccated, seemingly half-alive agent and a female lackey. Amare's entire world-view and confidence in the way of the Sith had just about totally collapsed, and she hated it, and herself most of all. She hated Axion now, but she despised Thane and Bomoor for not making her strong enough for this, for letting her go once again to venture into hell on her own, expecting the dice to roll neatly in their favour as it had before, expecting the impossible with only less than a year's worth of training and hard study. They were indeed fools, and she was the bigger fool for believing so strongly in them.
Axion...was he truly the way all along? Perhaps Thane really was just a young imposter after all.
She lifted her face from the dingy dungeon floor and saw the tip of the lightsaber beam mere inches from her face. Weak and spiraling in despair, she opened her lips to answer the ultimatum.
As Amare’s lips parted, whatever answer she had trembling there, half-formed, the blade of the cultist hovered before her face, humming softly, its crimson glow washing across the stone and the sweat on her skin.
Then, two familiar voices tore through the pressure in the air like a thunderclap.
"Amare!"
For a heartbeat the spell of the chamber fractured. The whispering warmth in her mind faltered and the oppressive rhythm of the chained being staggered as something violent and alive entered the space above.
Stone shattered and Thane dropped from the broken balustrade like a falling blade, violet light igniting mid descent. A heartbeat behind him the far heavier form of Bomoor crashed down through the red lit air, viridian plasma flaring to life as ancient masonry broke loose and clattered across the floor.
The impact thundered through the chamber and dust burst outward across the stone. The chained husk lurched against its restraints with a dry shriek. The braziers flickered violently, their crimson flames bending in the sudden rush of displaced air.
The moment of decision, at least for now, was shattered.
TBC
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