The Shadows Under Mantell, Part Two

Posted on Sat Apr 4th, 2026 @ 8:16pm by Axion & Thane & Amare

3,495 words; about a 17 minute read

Chapter: Chapter VIII: Broken Chains
Location: Underwater, Near the Coastline, Ord Mantell
Timeline: After "The Shadows Under Mantell"

The sea closed around Amare as he swam further into its depths.

The world above had vanished into distortion as the surface fractured into pale shards of moonlight barely breaching this far down, and beneath it all came something else. Not sound - not in any way the ear could truly understand, anyway.

It was a call.

It tore through the water and into the mind with unbearable force, a vast, keening resonance that did not simply echo but pressed. It filled the space around her, then within her, flooding thought and instinct alike with a wailing chorus that felt as though it had been dragged from something long dead and forced back into motion.

It was wrong, and not the natural song of a Mantellian Sea Singer. It was not the deep, rolling and beautiful communication of a creature born to the abyss.

This was something broken, something that screamed because it could not do anything else. The pressure of it built, rising until it bordered on suffocation, until even the surrounding water seemed secondary to the presence of that voice. It howled through the Force itself, raw and unfiltered, drowning the senses in a tide of agony and hunger that had no clear source and no end.

Then, the shape finally revealed itself. At first, it was only scale - a shadow beneath the water so vast it displaced the current around it, dragging the sea around it as it moved. The light from above bent and vanished across its surface, swallowed by a mass that should not have been able to exist so close to shore.

Then, the eye opened. Enormous and pale, clouded with decay, yet aware and brimming with intelligence. It rolled slowly towards Amare, tracking with deliberate intent as though it had already known where she would be before she had entered the water at all.

The body followed behind it. A colossal form, easily rivaling the largest normative whales of any ocean, forced its way fully into sight, replacing all around her. Its flesh hung in ragged layers, torn and sloughing away in places to reveal darker tissue beneath. Entire sections appeared necrotic, drifting in slow strands that trailed behind it like rotting banners in the current.

Barnacles covered it in apparent colonies, much like the Deacon. Thick clusters embedded across its head, along its spine, across the vast breadth of its fins. Many of them split open as it moved, each revealing thin, writhing tendrils that extended outward into the water, tasting, searching, reacting in unison as though they were not separate growths, but part of a single, parasitic intelligence.

Its fins, as well, seemed wrong. Too long and too wide, they did not simply guide its movement but shaped the water around it, displacing entire currents with slow, deliberate motions that sent pressure waves rolling outward through the cavern.

Behind it, something else moved, but it was not a tail as one would have expected, but a amass of writhing tentacles, dozens of them.

They were thick, muscular, and impossibly long, trailing from its rear in a writhing cluster that spread outward through the water like the roots of some submerged tree. They coiled and uncoiled independently.

It was not merely large - it dominated the space.

Then, the call came again; a scream-song that tore through the water and into Amare's mind with renewed force, layered now with something else, something close to recognition.

And from behind the Sith apprentice - the Deacon followed.

His presence cut through the water with violent intent, the red glow of his blade burning through the murk as he drove forward in pursuit, the writhing remnants of his damaged limb trailing behind him.

Amare was locked in speechless shock and terror at what stared back at her from the abyss. The leviathan was like the amalgamation of all Nautolan nightmares and superstitions made manifest. The legends on Glee Anselm spoke of a corrupted abomination that could lie eternal within the darkest depths, said to be older than countless aeons, and once its gaze was upon you and it captured your eyes, the madness it would instill into your soul would make you beg for swift death.

All of her knowledge, her experiences, and her powers collapsed in absolute helplessness before the peerless ocean entity. She was heedless of the Deacon closing the distance behind her. Nothing made sense anymore, and Amare was trapped in disbelief and a diminishing grip on reality. It had her in its mental snare, and Amare was little more than plankton compared to its presence.

The Deacon slowed. The red glow of his blade faltered in the water as the scream-song deepened, no longer merely a call, but a voice that filled the space between thought and instinct. His forward momentum broke against it like surf against stone, his form dragging to a halt as the vast shape before them asserted itself fully.

His tendrils stilled, then curled inward, not in pain this time, but in something closer to reverence.

"Abyssal Singer..." The name escaped him in an underwater breath, less spoken than remembered, drawn from some half-buried fragment of doctrine or dream. "The Deep made flesh..."

His eye flicked toward Amare and changed. What he had seen in her before now sharpened into certainty, his expression shifting from fanatic hunger to something more devout - and more dangerous.

"It sees you..." The words came softer now, edged with awe.

The leviathan’s eye did not move, but the pressure in the water shifted, becoming more focused, flooding Amare in mind and Force, searching, prevailing, intruding.

"...as kin." The Deacon’s grip tightened on his weapon, though he did not advance. For the first time since the encounter began, hesitation touched him, thin but undeniable, as the truth settled into him with terrible clarity. "Then be judged," he whispered, voice trembling with something close to exultation. "By the Deep itself."

All truth and memory in Amare was revealed to the leviathan. It saw into her, through her, what she was in the present, what she had been, and even glimpses of her future potential. It consumed her every thought, her identity, her hopes, her ambitions...

...Her songs. There was profound music in this Nautolan girl, once known to others as Zaracoda with delusions of heroism marked by naive kindness. She played a bitter lament strummed upon a wooden instrument with strings made of rare fibers. Her notes were played with vigor, yet laced with unfathomable sorrow, a longing for a life of goodness and Jedi light she could never have. A chance to heal others. A chance to sacrifice for the greater good. A requiem o'er a torrent sea.

There was a great storm...the Nautolans called it the worst hurricane they had in five centuries. After catastrophic impacts, the storm's perfect eye had passed over Zara's island, the leviathan gazing into the memory through the mighty vortex walls as if it had been the god which summoned the storm itself. Zara stood upon a cliff's sheer edge in the stillness.

Two spirits only she could sense spoke to her:

A vengeful and envious wraith from the Force named Shadrak. He told her to jump. She almost did.

A second, more ancient presence was there. It protected Zara from the wraith's malicious demands, hidden in the shadowy ether not in form, but in subtle influence within her soul. It spoke through Zara's blood, echoing memories hidden in her very genes. It promised to show her the lost ways of water. It spoke of seas parting and bowing before her, and using the totality of the ocean's power as an instrument of absolute judgment. It guided her will.

It spoke of another whom she would serve, one who's hand would reach across the galaxy itself and command its fate for generations.

The leviathan saw the girl's eyes glazed over in the memory, completely surrendered in trance, quivering hands raised up as if she were a marionette, and the Force began to answer. The tsunami slowly started to rise, and then a young Nautolan man came and rescued her before the calm of the storm's eye was about to depart. The birthing tsunami collapsed; the miracle utterly disrupted. Had the ritual completed, thousands would have perished on a resort island some distance away.

When the memory folded to its conclusion, the levithan's eye widened, for it beheld not a mere child of the sea, but one whose will controlled the fate of the abyss itself. And there was something more...the mark of a powerful man...

Axion.

Though there was another whose unparalleled power was destined to eclipse the false light of the Cult...

The vision of this other man it spied in Amare's thoughts had changed its perception of the Deacon and it gave back all that belonged to Amare, though their minds remained firmly linked. When Amare was compelled to turn and look upon the Deacon, her own eyes mirrored the leviathan, hazy with cataracts, not fully herself. Yet, she was not entirely gone.

The Abyssal Singer did not move and its gaze held. Within that gaze, the storm of her memory did not pass as fragments, but as current. Every thought, every echo, every buried imprint drawn outward and unspooled before it, not consumed, but understood.

The scream-song shifted. The agony within it bent, reshaped, finding new resonance as it touched something within her that had not yet fully awakened, but had always been there. Ancient, buried and waiting.

The barnacles along its vast form pulsed in unison, their tendrils extending further, reaching not through water, but through the unseen current that bound them. The tentacles behind it slowed their restless motion, coiling inward as the leviathan’s immense consciousness narrowed its focus.

The memory of the storm did not fade. It deepened. The force that had nearly answered her once was not foreign to it. It knew that shape and that pressure - that will bending water not as environment, but as extension.

Its eye widened as it peered at and into the small Nautolan. The clouded decay parted just enough for something older to surface beneath, and the scream became a chord, logical and beautiful, familiar and known.

This time, the 'sound' did not drown her but aligned. The link was made and it held - firm and unbroken, and the intrusive essence receded, becoming something more settled and shared. The pressure receded enough now for breath, for thought, for this separation without true disconnection.

The leviathan’s gaze shifted, past her to the Deacon, and the change was immediate and absolute: the Deep did not recognise him, as vessel, herald or anything else. The tendrils along its body recoiled slightly, no longer reaching outward in blind hunger, but drawing inward in quiet refusal. Its judgment had passed, and in that silent verdict, the balance within the ocean shifted.

The Deacon was no longer the centre of the Deep’s call - he was something standing in its way.

The leviathan's eye wandered to Amare, its twisted, decayed and ancient mind peering to hers for direction and insight.

Partly enthralled by the overwhelming power of the Abyssal Singer, Amare's subconscious took control and she slowly outstretched both of her hands toward the Deacon and a large field of telekinetic energy four or fives times her size began to gradually coalesce before her. It began to stabilize and became something of a nigh-invisible sphere seen only by the distortions of light bending around its circumference, like a huge air bubble, but solid and stable as a rock.

The Deacon saw it. Not the forming sphere alone, though the distortion in the water was unmistakable, the pressure building with impossible density as the ocean itself seemed to hesitate around her. Not merely a technique - not merely Force, but something else.

His eye flicked past her to the Abyssal Singer, and he understood - the connection between them was no longer abstract. It was visible now, not in light or energy, but in the way the water moved, the way the pressure gathered and held, the way the Deep itself seemed to lend its will through her form. The song had changed, and where once it had been agony, it now carried something different.

His breathing slowed and the writhing remnants of his damaged limb stilled, tendrils curling inward as though the instinct to strike had simply fallen away. The coral blade remained ignited in his hand, but it dipped slightly, no longer held in readiness.

His head tilted, the barnacles along his form pulsing faintly as the truth clarified within him. His gaze returned to her fully, looking upon her with some reference. The realisation settled into him completely, and with it came something like peace. The tension left his posture, the rigid aggression that had driven every movement until now dissolving as though it had never been his to begin with.

"So this is His will." He deactivated the blade. The red light vanished into the coral hilt, leaving only the dim, shifting blue of the water and the vast, looming presence behind Amare.

His arms spread slowly, open and exposed. "To be unmade..."A faint smile touched what remained of his face. "...and remade through you."

He did not resist and did not move to evade. He simply hovered within the path of the gathering force, his body held upright by conviction alone as the pressure of the forming sphere reached its apex.

The pressure broke without sound. The sphere surged forward, a distortion of water and Force fused into one, its boundary visible only where the ocean bent unnaturally around it. The sea parted in its wake, currents dragged aside as though yielding to something older than their own flow.

It did not strike the Deacon so much as pass through him. His form came apart instantly, not with violence but with inevitability. Flesh unraveled into drifting strands, coral growths fractured and dissolved, and the writhing mass of his tendrils disintegrated into particulate ruin that was swallowed by the surrounding water. For a brief moment, his single violet eye remained, fixed and unblinking, before it too collapsed into nothingness.

The sphere carried on beyond him before collapsing in upon itself, the ocean rushing back into place as though correcting a wound. Where he had hovered, there was nothing left. Only disturbed water, already dispersing into the vast dark, and behind it, the Abyssal Singer watching in silence.

Slowly, Amare turned and she caught the piercing gaze of the Singer's one good eye. The Sith's vision was cleared, her enthrallment fading, and the glint of a new light appeared from within the hollow decaying innards of the leviathan.

A silent bargain written through the deepest essence of their dark souls had been struck.

---

About twenty minutes had passed as the sea currents of Ord Mantell lapping the shore gave up an exhausted Nautolan woman from its depths. Her efforts to swim were minimal and she allowed herself to be carried to a beach. A strong wave unceremoniously tossed her to the damp shore, and it was revealed that she had retrieved Glynt's lightsaber clipped back at her side, and she held on tight to something far more consequential.

Amare's knees were upon the sand, shivering, almost hypothermic, but the shining crystal with its white resonance outlined in magenta that she held at her chest gave her warmth and a feeling of renewal like few things she had ever felt. She shut her eyes tight and whimpered as an unbridled flow of the Force coursed through her, every cell and midichlorian in her body became a conduit for the relentless cascade of cosmic energy. It was both pain and euphoria that tore through her as she was involuntarily lifted into the air.

Her legs curled up tight to her body and she bent forward, her face close to her knees in a fetal-like position as the Azoth in her body dissociated from her bones, seeped through her skin, and enclosed her in an aquamarine cocoon. Surges of similarly colored bolts of electricity surged in random directions as the light from within the Kaiburr crystal overtook the natural color of alchemical substance from which she was augmented. It was only ten actual seconds in the cocoon that had passed for what felt for her like hours.

It wasn't so much power that Amare received, but rather a plethora of visions sporadically thrust upon her mind with the nonexistent precision of a scattergun. She saw glimpses of worlds and unexplored domains both strange and familiar.

There were realms of chaos that defied logic; a group of all-powerful masked priestesses each representing a different emotion; a mural of a Father, Son, and Daughter; and a crystalline palace in space linked by infinite translucent roads leading to places beyond linear time.

The flow of prophecy morphed to the smell of burning flesh as a wounded, yet relentless Cathar Jedi Master appeared, at his physical limit heavily augmented in cybernetics fighting an unseen person with a colorless lightsaber in a place shrouded in fog and twilight.

Then, in her vanity, Amare beheld a stark new vision of herself, clad in cortosis and electrum, a black and sanguine mantle flowing in the wind, the circlet of a sovereign resting over her weathered brows, eyes surging with crimson judgment, a new curved lightsaber in hand with a blood-orange blade, and a legion of bold armored men following her into the maw of fire and destruction, the spectre of her supreme liege watching everything from beyond the Force. The skies were rife with a squadron of powerful star destroyers decimating targets on the surface with deadly lances of thunderous turbolaser bolts. The muddy ground was saturated with ocean water and littered with the fresh corpses of the drowned dead. Human, aliens, males, females...children; none were spared. The mission was clear: death to the collaborators. Death to the rebels.

And then one final shift...a man in black shrouded beneath a hood. He held an amethyst crystal in his right cyber-augmented right hand. She recognized whose hand it was immediately. That hand gripped the crystal tight and Amare heard the blood-curdling screams of Thane's agony all around her in the distance, yet the dark one she gazed upon was soundless like the void of space, impossibly powerful and in control of himself as he relaxed his grasp upon the crystal. What had been amethyst became reborn in scarlet ferocity. The Dark Lord took a long and slow mechanically assisted breath, and he turned to Amare, narrowing twin orbs of radiant crimson light shining from the faceless shadow beneath the hood.

She most assuredly knew His name...

When the visions ceased, the light of the Kaiburr crystal dimmed to its normal gentle ethereal glow, and Amare had found herself on her bare feet on the beach, the Azoth withdrawn to the chitin and marrow of her bones. She looked up and saw Thane and Bomoor standing before her, having felt her presence in the Force and saw the last few seconds of her very brief and unique Kaiburr experience.

Amare's exhaustion returned, she fell to one knee before them and bowed her head. She held up with great care in both hands the Kaiburr crystal to Thane, very much in the same vein of how she offered the weapons of the fallen Rift Jedi she murdered nearly a year ago back on Yavin IV.

"It is done," she breathed with a gentle sob to her master, tears slipping from her eyes.

They had felt it long before they saw her.

The surge had cut through the storm and the sea alike, something vast and unnatural that neither of them could mistake. By the time they reached the shoreline, both were already marked by the night’s work, soaked through with brine and rain, clothing torn in places, the weight of combat still clinging to them.

Thane said nothing at first. His gaze moved over her, taking in the tremor in her stance, the lingering energy still bleeding from her presence, then settled on the crystal held out between her hands. The light it cast was soft, but it did not feel so. It pressed at the edges of perception, insistent, offering.

He did not reach for it. But, for a moment, it seemed as though he might.

He stepped forward, slow and deliberate, and placed a hand upon her shoulder. The contact was firm, steady, grounding. His expression did not soften, but there was something there beneath it - approval, even.

"Good," he said quietly.

He drew her up with him, guiding her back to her feet without once looking again at the crystal in her hands, his attention fixed entirely on her as the storm continued to break against the shore behind them.

 

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