A Clean Slate

Posted on Sat Mar 28th, 2026 @ 2:55pm by Axion & Bomoor Thort

4,594 words; about a 23 minute read

Chapter: Chapter VIII: Broken Chains
Location: Corulag
Timeline: Nighttime, Three weeks after New Alderaan

Night had settled across Corulag's capital in a muted glow of distant towers and slow drifting traffic lanes. The senatorial compound stood at the centre of the city like a fortress of glass and metal, its terraces overlooking the vast urban sprawl that stretched to the horizon. Normally, the complex remained brightly lit through the night, a symbol of civic order and political continuity.

Tonight, much of it lay dark.

Emergency lighting flickered along the outer colonnades. Internal power relays had been cut in carefully selected sections, leaving long corridors in shadow. Only the distant glow of city traffic filtered through the reinforced windows that lined the compound's interior halls.

The Red Raptor crew had entered the compound less than fifteen minutes earlier. Their arrival had been swift and deliberate. Communications across the complex had collapsed almost immediately. Senatorial security had attempted to call for reinforcement from the planetary defence grid, but every outgoing signal now vanished into silence. Rex, assisted by G2 and Reave, had overridden the compound's communications hub and erected a dense wall of electronic interference across the district.

Nothing entered and nothing left.

Within the compound itself, the resistance had proven stronger than expected. Several members of Senator Talven Ruur's personal staff had revealed themselves as something more than administrators and aides. Armed cultists loyal to Axion had attempted to hold the inner chambers of the residence wing, supported by elements of Corulag's own security service who had been quietly drawn into the senator's influence over the years.

They were being dealt with, as Thane, Amare and Mentis had pushed into the central administrative levels where the enclave's apparent leader had established a defensive position. Fighting continued there now. The occasional tremor of distant impacts carried faintly through the stone structure as doors were forced open and barricades collapsed.

Elsewhere, the compound had grown eerily quiet.

Bomoor moved through one of the darkened corridors with deliberate weight behind every step.

His broad Ithorian frame filled the passageway as he advanced, the heavy tread of his feet echoing off the walls. Each step landed with a dull, deliberate thud that travelled far ahead into the darkness.

He was hunting.

The corridor lights flickered briefly as the station's emergency circuits struggled under the strain of Rex's interference. Thin lines of red illumination traced the floor panels before fading again.

Somewhere deeper within the residence wing a door slammed. The sound carried clearly through the compound's silent interior, and Bomoor adjusted his course toward it.

The senator was still inside, and Bomoor Thort was coming for him.

---

Talven Ruur crouched behind the polished desk in his private office, one hand gripping the small holdout blaster so tightly that his knuckles had gone pale.

The lights had died minutes ago. Only the faintest illumination reached the room now, filtering through the tall reinforced windows that overlooked the city. Traffic lanes crossed the skyline beyond the glass, and every few seconds the glow of a passing vehicle washed briefly across the dark interior before fading again.

Each flash of light seemed to stretch the shadows further across the floor.

Ruur wiped sweat from his forehead with a trembling sleeve.

This is impossible.

His Dark Master had promised him protection! Absolution!

He had served faithfully for years. Quietly guiding legislation through the Senate, redirecting patrol routes, shielding certain corporate interests from investigation. The work had required patience and subtlety, but it had always served a greater purpose.

A divine purpose, as Axion had shown him the truth; the Republic was weak and blind. Its leaders clung to decaying ideals while the galaxy drifted toward chaos and pointlessness, oblivious to the true purpose and glory Axion embodied. The future of all of them and nothing - the true Meaning and God of their universe.

Ruur believed that with absolute certainty, that the Republic and its followers were as like sightless, mute and deaf children, rampaging in the dark with playground ideals. He knew it. He was already saved and enlightened.

Which was why the fear tightening around his chest felt so confusing.

He shifted slightly behind the desk, peering toward the office entrance. The corridor beyond remained dark. He raised the holdout blaster with shaking hands, as a faint sound carried through the silence.

Footsteps.

Heavy.

Slow.

Each one striking the floor with a dull impact that seemed to vibrate through the walls.

Ruur froze as another step echoed through the corridor, and then another. The sound was unmistakable; something large was moving through the compound, and moving inexorably closer.

The senator swallowed hard and forced himself to stand, creeping away from the desk toward a second workstation near the far wall. The blaster trembled slightly in his grip as he crouched behind the console.

Axion would not abandon me! His most devout, powerful and useful disciple!

The thought repeated itself desperately in his mind.

The Dark Master saw everything.

The Dark Master protected his faithful.

Outside the window a transport vehicle passed across the skyline, its engines casting a brief wash of light into the office. For a fraction of a second, the entire room illuminated - and the shadow of something enormous crossed the frosted glass of the office door.

The footsteps stopped and silence filled the corridor.

Ruur's breath caught in his throat as he stared toward the door, the blaster shaking visibly in his hands.

Somewhere just beyond the wall the Ithorian monster had arrived.

The senator's heart jumped and he slid down, back against the workstation, eyes closed, no longer wanting to acknowledge reality. Both hands still clutched the blaster, trembling so hard that firing the weapon precisely would be miraculous.

There was a pregnant pause, with naught but the sound of his beating heart in his ears. His hands stabilised temporarily as he tentatively listened for sounds of further activity.

It was then that he heard it: the clink of his office door's latch releasing and the gentle rattle of it sliding aside. Through the thin carpet tiles, he felt the vibration of a large Ithorian foot setting down in the office and immediately he was consumed by a great heavy sensation absorbing the entire room with him in it.

There was an almost delicate huff of air that escaped the intruders lungs as he tasted the air in the room and Ruur instinctively held his breath as though the air of his lungs would draw the beast to him. But even the miniscule inhalation of breath was enough to prompt a sudden shuffling sound from the Ithorian, as though his wide head had just swung in the senator's direction.

With a low, more confident murmur of breath, the intruder slid the door closed, sealing them both in with an agonising click of the latch.

"This little game of hide and seek is finished Senator," the voice then came, resonant and intrusive, assaulting Ruur's senses, "Many of your servicemen and women have died tonight needlessly so that you could come here and cower. While I suspect many of them were well aware of the cause they were defending, I am certain that some were merely victims of Axion's brainwashing and did not deserve that fate."

He moved again, heavy feet sinking into the floor, as he moved across the room, deliberately avoiding Ruur's hiding spot, instead pacing towards the window, casting an eerie hunched silhouette right beside the senator like a spectre come to drag him to the netherworld.

"Is that what you are, Talven?" the monster spoke his first name with sickening ease, "Are you a victim of Axion's influence like so many others? There is no shame in that - he has created a vast network across the galaxy but it is one we are slowly dismantling."

The shadow beside Ruur shifted as the Ithorian turned, now speaking directly to his position.

"I can help you," he said, plainly. Earnestly.

For a moment, Talven Ruur did not move.

The voice still hung in the air, low and resonant, pressing against him from all sides. It did not sound like a voice meant for a single body. It filled the room too completely, as though it belonged to something larger than the shape that had entered.

I am not a victim. The thought came quickly. Sharply, as a correction. He swallowed, his throat dry to the point of pain. I was chosen!

That was the truth. He clung to it with deliberate force, dragging it up through the panic that threatened to close around him. He had seen what others had not. He had been elevated beyond them, beyond the Third Republic and its hollow structures, beyond the frightened animals now creeping through his home.

This thing in the room with him did not understand that. It could not.

Ruur’s eyes flicked toward the silhouette near the window. It appeared wrong - too large and too still. The shape of it seemed to distort in the low light, broad and hunched and impossibly heavy, as though the floor itself had bent slightly beneath its weight. When the faint glow from passing traffic brushed across it, it did not illuminate cleanly. It caught edges that did not quite align, angles that seemed to shift a fraction too late.

Monstrous.

The senator's grip tightened on the blaster.

Axion’s chosen would not fear this.

The thought came slower this time, though. Less certain, even as his gaze snapped toward the door. The distance was not far. Ten steps, perhaps less - a straight line if he committed to it. The corridor beyond would still be dark and the compound was large, but there were places to run and places hide. Places where this thing might not follow.

Another flicker of light passed across the room and the shadow moved with it.

Ruur flinched.

The blaster trembled harder in his hands now, the fine control he had once prided himself on reduced to a barely contained shake. His mouth opened, as if to speak, to assert something, anything, but no words came. His tongue felt thick and useless.

The silence stretched, pressed and closed in.

I am not prey!

His eyes darted once more between the shape and the door. Decision finally snapped into place. Fast and instinctive... desperate.

He moved and the blaster came up and fired twice in quick succession, sharp flashes tearing through the dark as he lunged sideways from cover, already turning, already driving himself toward the door before the light had even fully faded.

His eyes could not focus properly on the dark mass he was firing towards, but it seemed to streak away and return like a flickering holo-display, blaster bolts passing through the shimmer like light through a transparisteel plate. With fear threatening to choke his throat, the senator continued lurching towards the door only to see one of the desks from the far wall hurtling towards him.

He was sent hurtling sideways, the momentum of the furniture carrying him along with it until he impacted with a blunt, painful thud against a data index cabinet. He crumpled down, but could not fully collapse as he realised his lower torso was now pinned by the desk. He flailed, firing another couple of rounds from his blaster before, with another jolt, he felt it tugged out of his hand by an invisible force. It flew across the room and was secured by a grotesque inhuman hand that wrapped its long, vine-like fingers around the small weapon.

"Your thoughts betray you senator," came the voice again from the mass, now creeping towards him, although, in Ruur's struggle, his face was yet to truly focus, "I can practically hear you screaming in your head."

Again, those wide, heavy feet took another couple of plods in his direction; the vibrations churned his stomach.

"These are not the thoughts of the proud, precise politician that you once were," the voice continued, "But those of a caged creature under Axion's thumb."

The Ithorian beast's crooked neck came into view now and the senator spied the sticky ripples of the twin lips twisting breath into Galactic Basic. The neck lowered and two dark orbs on creased, ebony stalks descended towards him. Ruur wrenched his face away.

"You probably think there is no way back now," the deep reverbing voice held a hint of inquisitiveness as the eyes peered over him, "That the only choice is to submit or die..."

Ruur felt the twisted head retract slightly, although he still dared not look as the beast continued:

"But those are not the options I bring to you today, senator. What if I could make things right? Take it all back and offer a clean slate, so to speak?"

Talven Ruur drew in a sharp, uneven breath as the words settled over him, not as comfort, but as something heavier.

His vision then fractured. The office bled at its edges, dark corners stretching into shapes that did not belong. The ceiling felt too high, then too close all at once. The walls leaned and corrected themselves in the same instant. The thing before him seemed to flicker, its outline refusing to remain fixed, as though it existed across several positions at once.

"No..." The word slipped out thin and unsteady. His hands came up to his head, fingers pressing hard into his temples as if he could hold his thoughts in place. It did not help, though.

Images surged painfully. Fragments of memories, or like a badly-remembered dream.

In his mind, he saw a chamber that seemed to breathe. Smooth surfaces that pulsed with a slow, living rhythm. Voices that had no sound, pressing into him until they became indistinguishable from his own thoughts.

Axion.

Not seen, but felt - everywhere.

You were chosen.

The thought cut through the panic with sudden clarity.

You were elevated!

Ruur’s breathing hitched. His grip tightened, nails biting into his skin as the pressure built. The office flickered again, slipping for a moment into something vast and empty.

Then pain. Blunt, immediate and, this time, real. It was the desk pinning him. The cabinet pushing at his back.

His eyes snapped open and the room returned in pieces - but the thing was still there.

His lips parted but no sound came at first. His throat worked, dry and tight, before something finally forced its way out.

"A clean slate?"

The words felt wrong. They hung in the air between them, fragile and uncertain. Something moved beneath them in his head. It was not the certainty Axion had given him; it was not the overwhelming clarity that had burned everything else away.

It was something older.

A hesitation, from a man who had once questioned.

It surfaced for only a moment, as the fear surged back in, dragging with it those fractured impressions of devotion and unravelled meaning. The sense of being remade - of a surrender that had once felt like purpose.

Ruur’s hands pressed harder against his head.

"I..." The word faltered. His eyes lifted despite himself, drawn back toward the looming shape, toward those eyes that seemed to reach beyond what they should. His voice dropped to little more than a breath. "I was shown the truth..."

"One man's truth, not your own" the Ithorian's voice was ready to cut in again, "Absorbing all else to make you forget your own truth, even if it makes you a monster."

Hearing the hulking creature call him a 'monster' flipped everything on its head. How could such an obviously ridiculous statement carry such weight?

The intruder shifted again and brought a spindly hand down upon the desk that pinned the senator. Ruur felt a sharp pain as the desk moved: it was unclear if the Ithorian was moving the desk closer of further away from his body but it felt like a scalding pain in his lower torso.

The hand retracted and the being spoke again:

"I must be candid: I intend to get the answers I seek either way. But, with your co-operation, we can ensure your mind is not damaged by the process and I can remove the taint of Axion that swells in there like a cancer."

Ruur had gasped as the desk shifted again, a sharp, tearing pain ripping through his lower body.

Something had gone in his body. Both his leg and his ribs. He could feel it in the way each breath scraped and caught, shallow and wrong.

Broken.

The pain surged, hot and consuming - but than it changed.

Pain is service.

The thought surfaced, steadying him in a strange, distorted way. His breathing slowed slightly, though it still trembled. This was not random nor meaningless. It could be a divine test. His eyes then lifted toward the looming shape again, struggling to focus. It still flickered at the edges, still wrong, but there was something familiar in it now. Not in form, but in presence.

That same weight and that same intrusion as the Dark Master.

Axion…

Or something close to Him. His eyelids fluttered and his hand lifted weakly, reaching out.

"If this is… His will…"

The motion then faltered as surged back in, violently and suddenly, the hand drawn back just as quickly. His body jerked, thrashing around. Pain exploded through him as bone shifted with a sickening crunch, but he could not stop. His limbs fought blindly, breath breaking into ragged gasps.

"Get away!" He hissed, the words fractured as he struggled, twisting uselessly beneath the weight, eyes wide and unfocused. "I am not yours! You are not Him!"

A sudden impact struck him: not another blunt object or what he would imagine a telekinetic force would feel like. Instead it was a violent and immediate halting of his body's motion. His eyes drooped down slightly and he saw that the Ithorian's hand was in the air, fingers spread and palm towards him like a comms dish.

"Pointless..." the man was no longer talking to him, rather, simply conversing with himself, "I thought I'd give him the choice but some people just won't be helped..."

Ruur felt his arms slowly lowering. He had not lost muscle control but simply felt compelled to retract them down. He still saw and felt everything but he was like an ash-rabbit caught in headlights.

The Ithorian kept his hand up, but began to creep closer again, eyes peering at him with intensity: staring deep inside him.

"I suppose you're going to fight me, but I would highly advise against it," he now spoke to Ruur again, although his tone had become more airy, as though he no longer felt it worthwhile trying to be convincing, "While I am getting better at breaching the mind, I still could damage something in there if I am also having to battle your mental barriers. Of course, we might find that Axion has stripped those down long ago."

The fingers narrowed slightly and the senator's body flinched as something slipped past, like a shadow sliding just behind his eyes and then, a moment later, a stronger tug. He groaned, regaining the will in his muscles to bring his hands up to his head, scraping his temples to squeeze out the intrusive essence.

Ruur’s resistance collapsed without ceremony. One moment there was pressure, the next there was nothing to hold against it. Whatever structure he had clung to simply gave way, and the presence moved through him cleanly, not tearing, not forcing, but passing as though the barriers had never been there at all. He felt it unfold him, layer by layer, his thoughts no longer contained but laid bare and ordered, every memory rising up in sequence whether he willed it or not. He could still see, still feel, still exist, but only as something being observed from within. His breath caught, shallow and helpless, as the last fragments of defiance slipped from his grasp.

And, yet, he was not alone inside himself. Every memory that surfaced, every moment of his life, carried that same weight threaded through it, subtle but undeniable. Axion was there - not as an intruder, but as a presence already woven into the fabric of it all, watching from behind every recollection like a second set of eyes. The chamber, the Senate floor, quiet nights of calculation and ambition, even the smallest, most mundane moments, all of them held that same echo. It was as if he had never been untouched, as if there had never been a version of him that was truly his own. And, somewhere beneath the exposure, beneath the terror, a single, fragile thought surfaced and lingered in quiet horror.

He had not been shown the truth - he had been rewritten, Axion filtered across every moment.

Then something shifted.

Not in the room, but in him.

The presence that had unfolded within his mind now pressed deeper, not tearing, but sifting. Memories rose and fell like sediment stirred in dark water. Axion’s echo threaded through all of them: a constant whisper, a second heartbeat.

But then, the whisper began to fade as a pressure, gentle yet absolute, pushed against it. Ruur felt the ever-present voice recoil, then stretch thin before flickering like a faltering signal.

No...

The thought was faint, distant, as though spoken by someone else.

The chamber of living walls dissolved. The Senate dissolved, the red chamber on Alderaan dissolved, all of it peeled away like sheets of paper torn from an old book until only a void remained: a vast, grey expanse where memory and meaning had once lived.

Then, in that void, something else took shape: at first, it was monstrous: the wide silhouette, the twisted neck. It was too heavy, too wrong: the shape that had stalked him through the corridors, then pinned him, crushed him, violated him.

He recoiled instinctively, but the figure did not lunge or loom over him. It simply waited.

As he watched, the edges softened, the weight lifted and the form became clearer and more reasonable.

The shape resolved.

What had been vast and unbearable settled into something simple. A figure - an Ithorian. Nothing more. The weight that had crushed the space around it seemed to lift, leaving only a quiet presence standing before him.

The man blinked slowly.

The darkness of the room returned in pieces, soft and indistinct. The desk, the faint glow beyond the windows, the outline of furniture. He became dimly aware of his body again, though only in the vaguest sense. There was pressure somewhere below, a heaviness, an awkwardness in how he lay.

His mouth felt dry. He swallowed, testing it, as though that were the only thing of note. His gaze then lifted, settling calmly upon the Ithorian. It was a mild curiosity to see this large being standing there, and something gentler beneath it, in his mind. A strange, unearned contentment that sat easily in his chest. It was nice, whatever it was.

He offered a small, polite smile.

"Excuse me, sir," he said, his voice soft and even, as though nothing at all were amiss. "I appear to be trapped... and," he added, looking down, "injured." A brief pause as he considered his predicament further. The Ithorian seemed pleasant enough, but strange to be pinned here with this alien (wherever they were).

"Is there any chance you could assist me?" He added with no urgency.

The large sentient stepped back a moment and braced against the other workstation in the room.

He seemed somewhat drained, which troubled Ruur, but the strange individual managed to answer, "One moment. I'm just... processing..."

With a sudden jolt, the Ithorian brought himself upright.

"There's one here?" he exclaimed with surprise, "No, why would he give one to you?"

He swing his head around the room, before settling on the sideboard. Ruur's own gaze gently drifted in the same direction where he saw what appeared to be a wooden Nerf statuette. It meant little to Ruur any more, but he believed he had acquired it from Alderaan at some point. Was Alderaan someone he knew?

The other man stepped over to the miniature, wrenching it up enthusiastically and turning it over in his hands until finding what he was looking for. With a single long finger, the Ithorian eased a section of the model on the Nerf's belly backwards and then plucking something small and glistening from within.

"It really is one!" the strange being was clearly enthused by his find as his whole body seemed to respond pleasingly to the touch of the object: some kind of small crystal perhaps, although the colour and texture was hard to discern in the faint light.

The Ithorian looked at it for a long moment, drinking it in before shaking his head and carefully returning it inside the statuette and turning towards Ruur.

"I'll need to take this little souvenir," he said, "Along with the information stripped from your mind: several names and dates feel important, although I imagine that our contacts might be able to make more sense of it all."

He walked back over and glanced down at Ruur's abdomen.

"It might be best if I didn't remove the pressure right away," the man stated, eyes slightly askew as he pondered, "I'll let someone know you are here so they can send a better equipped team over."

He then raised the statuette again and added, with almost a hint of levity, "You just tell them your Nerf got loose and knocked your desk over. They'll understand."

Ruur watched him move about the room with quiet interest, his gaze following the strange sequence of actions without urgency or concern. The mention of names and dates meant nothing to him now, nor did the small object retrieved from the statuette. It all felt distant, like overhearing a conversation not meant for him. When the Ithorian explained the situation, it seemed entirely reasonable.

"Yes… of course," Ruur replied gently, offering another small, polite smile. "That sounds quite sensible."

He shifted slightly, or attempted to, before settling again beneath the weight. There was still that vague pressure, that awareness that something was not quite right, but it did not trouble him in any meaningful way.

"I am sure someone will be along shortly," he added, as though reassuring them both. "No need to rush." As the Ithorian prepared to leave, Ruur inclined his head faintly. "And thank you," he said. "I do appreciate your assistance." There was a brief pause, and then, almost as an afterthought: "I hope you have a pleasant day."

The door opened then closed. The room settled back into its quiet.

Ruur lay there for a moment, staring up at the dim ceiling, the faint glow of Corulag’s traffic drifting across the room in slow, intermittent waves. He considered the situation. It was mildly inconvenient, certainly. A little uncomfortable, perhaps. He wondered, briefly, if there might be internal bleeding. That seemed like the sort of thing one should be concerned about.

Still.

Someone was coming - that was reassuring.

His thoughts drifted.

Nerfs.

He liked nerfs, he thought. Or at least, he believed he did. They seemed agreeable creatures, but then another thought came to mind and a small crease formed in his brow.

Did he prefer his steak well-done… or rare?

The question lingered for a moment, then, quite smoothly, slipped away.

 

RSS Feed