Acme: Pressure

Posted on Sun Apr 12th, 2026 @ 12:37pm by Bomoor Thort & Thane & Amare

3,588 words; about a 18 minute read

Chapter: Chapter VIII: Broken Chains
Location: Undervos Holdings Factory, Wastes, Sleheyron
Timeline: After "Acme: Unto Sleheyron"

The door parted with a reluctant grind, and heat met them first. Not sharp, not overwhelming - but constant, rising from below in slow, breath-like currents that carried with it the same sweet, chemical weight they had already begun to taste. The air moved differently here. It was less contained, and seemed more alive.

The catwalk stretched out ahead of them in narrow segments, bolted together in long runs that crossed over the vast interior of the facility. Below, the factory floor churned in steady, mechanical rhythm. Conveyor lines moved and vapour rose in thick plumes. In the haze, figures still worked.

Thane stepped out onto the metal grating. The violet blade cast a faint glow against the railings as he moved, its light cutting cleanly through the drifting haze. His gaze did not linger on the scale of the space, nor on the workers below. He tracked forward, already mapping the descent in his mind, following the logic of the structure rather than reacting to it.

Behind him, the catwalk gave a low metallic groan as the others followed, the structure shifting subtly under their combined weight. Somewhere below, a pressure release valve burst with a sharp hiss, venting steam upward in a sudden plume that briefly obscured the lower levels.

Through it, those workers - those shapes - moved. One figure even passed beneath them, head tilted upward for a fraction longer than necessary before returning to its task. Another stood too still beside a control station, hands resting against it without movement. A third walked in a slow, looping path that did not seem to lead anywhere. The rhythm between them all was entirely wrong.

Thane, however, continued forward, angling toward the next junction in the catwalk, already identifying the descent points that would take them lower.

"Down there," he said, gesturing slightly with the blade. The faintest hint of that earlier edge remained to his tone.

I feel it," Bomoor agreed, his low voice even heavier in the dense atmosphere, "Not just below, but all around us. The cult is here and they are moving to meet us. Stay on your guard and don't hesitate."

A sound then followed them, soft at first, but just out of step with their own movement. It was not footsteps, but more like something brushing lightly against the metal behind them, stopping when they did, continuing when they moved. It never resolved into anything clear enough to confront, only present enough to sit at the edge of awareness.

Thane’s grip on the hilt tightened slightly, but he did not look back.

Ahead, the catwalk split, one path descending more steeply toward the lower levels, the other continuing laterally across the facility. Thane moved the descent without pause.

Amare nervously gripped her songsteel lightsaber hilt tight, but calmed herself recalling the previous harrowing things she faced and survived in the last year. She reminded herself that she managed to survive the lost Sith dungeon on Irrikut and the Vaa-Thaalda hordes, held on for dear life on the back of a massive flying abomination and stabbed it to death, made it through a terrorist attack in that nightclub on Lorrd, and endured the slashes and poison of the terentetek on Korriban and cheated death itself. The grim atmosphere and strange worker behavior in the factory suddenly felt like a casual innocent jaunt by comparison. Nevertheless, she still kept her nerves steeled, determined not to let Thane or Bomoor down. There was too much at stake to let her guard down now.

"Those fumes carry the unknown additive," Bomoor observed, the sickly sweet aroma might have been alluring under better circumstances, yet screamed of corruption in this place, "Try to slow your breathing and retain as much clean air as possible."

He crept on, adding with unease as he reflexively unclipped his weapon from his belt, "Perhaps we should have considered respirators."

The air thickened further as they moved lower. Breathing felt fractionally slower and heavier. It was not laboured - just delayed, as if each inhale took a moment longer to settle. The smell deepened with it, the sweetness turning faintly sour at the edges.

Below, though, the workers became clearer. One paused mid-task as they passed overhead, head lifting slowly. Its mouth moved, forming words that did not carry, but seemed to move with a rhythm. Another stepped too close to the edge of a platform, swaying slightly before correcting itself and returning to its station as though nothing had occurred.

None of them reacted with any urgency and none of them fled from the newcomers or their weapons.

"Like marionettes in a Naboo puppet theatre," Amare quietly commented on her observation of the workers. It was one of the few memories she could recall of her brief family vacation visit to Naboo when she was a little girl. "They're trying to distract us...subvert our attention. It's what I would do in their place."

One figure broke from the thick mass of steam and metal. At first, it was just another shape shifting out of the haze, another worker moving without urgency, without purpose, but this one came closer. He came up a short access ramp, onto the same level.

He carried something - a container, industrial, metal-rimmed and sealed poorly, clutched loosely in both hands as if it were something precious rather than discarded. As he neared, the contents became clearer through the smeared viewport - some small creature, long dead, its body split open, innards pressed against the interior in a slick, dark mass. The smell reached them a moment later.

The man stopped a few paces away. His head tilted and his mouth stretched. The grin was too wide, corners of his mouth splitting, the lips too wet, with strings of sinew caught between his teeth, something still clinging there as though he had not quite finished whatever he had been doing before they arrived. His eyes did not settle. One tracked too far to the left, the other lagging behind, trying to catch up.

When he spoke, it came out light, almost delighted.

"You're here," he said, voice trembling with something close to joy. "You can feel it, can't you? It’s in everything. In the air. In the blood." He lifted the container slightly, as if presenting it. "Ecstasy," he whispered, reverent now. "For all of us. He showed us! He showed us how to be full." A soft, breathy laugh slipped from him.

"Salvation.! Joy! It’s coming... For you. For us... It’s already h-"

Thane did not let him finish. Before Bomoor could react or Amare comment, his offhand moved in a small gesture, barely more than wave or tightening of the first. The sound that followed was sharp and final, as the man’s neck snapped to the side with a wet crack, the grin still fixed in place as his body dropped, the container slipping from his hands and clattering against the grating, its contents spilling partially free.

Nothing shifted for half a second, but then there was movement - it was subtle at first, and began to gather around them. Shapes emerged from behind stacked containers, from shadowed recesses between support struts, from maintenance alcoves that should have been empty. Workers, dozens of them, were now visible. They did not rush so much as drifted, murmuring.

Some grumbled in Basic, and most in Huttese. Some, however, spoke in other tongues - and all spoke occasionally with words that did not belong to anything recognisable. The same rhythm carried through all of it, a low, collective cadence that built steadily.

Thane’s expression tightened in irritation.

"Amare is right," he said, voice low, edged. "This is a waste of time." His gaze cut through the approaching figures, not seeing them as individuals, not even as obstacles - just plain interference. "Nothing here matters."

One of them drew closer, arm lifting in that same slow, reaching motion. Thane stepped forward, his blade moved in a single, clean arc upward. It passed through the body without resistance, violet light cutting flesh and bone as though they were not there at all. The two halves separated a moment later, collapsing in opposite directions, the motion almost secondary to the strike itself.

There was no pause or acknowledgement from either the Sith or the others gathering. He moved again, not waiting for his companions, angling through them, forcing a path rather than reacting to their presence.

Around them, the murmuring deepened.

And, somewhere beneath it, to Amare's ears, threaded so lightly it might have been mistaken for memory, a melody began to form. It was soft and measured - and familiar.

A string-led arrangement, precise in its composition, carried through the air as though it had already been playing before their arrival. Notes that did not belong to this place, yet settled into it without resistance. The tune was of New Alderaan, had played in the main chamber at House Wyrd, and Amare heard it now clearer than the voices, and clearer than the machinery.

A voice soon followed it, low and smooth,singing just beneath the music, shaping the melody into something more deliberate. The voice of Meliah Glynt.

"Return to us child..." the voice came to Amare, making her pause as Bomoor and Thane were unaware of the contact, "You needn't walk their path to the slaughter. Return to me... return to Axion and be cherished for your gifts."

Amare's eyes widened as the all-too-familiar ethereal voice assaulted her senses, easily cutting through her willpower like hot nerf butter.

"Why do you allow them to admonish you for your powers?" Glynt's words continued to press upon the Nautolan's mind, creeping deep into old wounds, "The Ithorian treats you like a child, chastising your agency, while your so-called master keeps you under his thumb, sending you to suffer, to murder, to cast away your family. Why die for their cause when you could be part of something eternal?"

Glynt's voice was one Amare didn't expect to hear again so soon, and yet there it was in remarkable clarity coaxing her through the Force, speaking to her accurately on her private feelings about Thane and Bomoor's treatment of her over the past year. With each phrase boring into her senses, a migraine that wasn't there before began to bloom with rising pain and heightening sensitivity to light and low vibrating sounds from the factory that made her wince, and her thoughts momentarily flashback to the dungeon under the Wyrd estate.

She glanced about looking for Glynt, growing angry with her inability to resist in spite of the additional Sith training she received in recent weeks. She began to panic and realized Glynt had done something to her that bypassed her psychic defenses. She was compromised. She was vulnerable. She was becoming a critical liability yet again. A barely controlled panic began to settle in her Nautolan hearts, and the migraine worsened as something firmly caught her undivided attention.

Ahead, Bomoor paused, sensing the disturbance behind while Thane's burning focus remained on the road ahead and the workers hovering with giddy euphoria about them. Looking back, he saw Amare's eyes fixed somewhere in the distance. A branch in the catwalk leading back out of the factory floor into another section.

"Amare!", he called back, now finding himself isolated between the pair on the catwalk, "What is it?"

The voice Amare could hear shifted. It did not replace the other so much as slide beneath it, smoother, closer, as though it had always been there waiting for space to speak. The music thinned, drawn back into something quieter, more distant, and in its place came something sharper.

"...still pretending?"

The words were delivered in Amare's native tongue, like the grotesque Deacon on Ord Mantell - and she knew the voice came from Nala Sao. The words came low, almost amused, carrying that same lilting cadence she remembered from Korriban.

"You felt it, didn’t you?" the voice continued, closer now, as though circling just behind her shoulder. "What He is. What He offers. And, still... you hesitate."

Amare whirled around with her songsteel lightsaber ignited in one furious motion, firmly gripped in both hands, her stance in a classic Shii-Cho opening defense as was her rookie instinct, already faltering from her more advanced Soresu and Niman training.

There was nothing there when she looked.

"Show yourself you miserable schutta!" Amare shouted in her native scathing south islander Nautilia dialect, hurling back the Twi'lek pejorative word Nala had spat at her back on Korriban. Her auditory canals starting ringing and all sources of light however faint, were becoming haloed with increased brightness. Amare was quickly losing all her concentration, and she whimpered softly in agony under her deepening neurological distress. She began to separate herself from her masters in frantic search of Nala.

"You dress it up as loyalty," Nala went on, softer now, almost conversational, "as discipline, as control... but it's a child's fear." A faint laugh followed, light and cutting. "Always fear, with you."

The heat seemed to press in closer around her, the air thickening as the distant machinery groaned somewhere below. For a moment, the sounds of the factory dulled, as though muffled beneath the weight of that voice.

A Rodian worker stumbled in Amare's path and she maliciously cross-slashed him down with a scream of rage bordering on wild madness. Her footing was awkward and was close to stumbling about too.

"You think they see you? The Ithorian watches you like something that might break if handled too roughly... and your 'master' ..." another laugh from Nala, "he uses you, like a toy or tool. You’re useful, but not unique. You’re obedient and you suffer well... but you are not what you could be, if you allowed a true master to remake you." The tone shifted then, sounding like Nala was directly behind her. "But you will never be like me."

"I-I'm not afraid of you! Ngh!!" Amare ferociously retorted in Nautili as she whirled around and saw Bomoor a short distance away. She stumbled and braced herself against some industrial conduit piping. "Get out of my head, c-curse you!"

Her composure and balance were frail like tattered weaves of delicate silk torn by thorny vines in an overgrown jungle. She tried to maintain a valiant stand, but she also knew she had become an easy target for the likes of Nala whilst Glynt continued to exploit Amare's defenses from somewhere unseen. Amare tried to use her power of Force Sight, but the migraine made it virtually impossible to concentrate.

The young Sith Apprentice had Nala's fighting style in mind ever since Korriban, was even armed with the memories her mother, Zenarrah, had shared with her in their Force bonding regarding their duel which Zen had come close to being victorious. Amare had played that day in her mind over and over, and had dedicated herself to tweaking her lightsaber katas to specifically counter Nala Sao for it had become an obsession to best her at all costs, a rival who was a fellow Nautolan female. And yet, in spite of everything, it all came to nothing yet again. Painful doubts began to set in. Glynt's and Nala's words began to simmer as digestible truths that became too hard to deny. She didn't feel like a Sith anymore.

Amare began to feel like a "pretender"...like a fraud. Just plain fearful Zaracoda again. A lone amphibian girl on a shadowy flight through a dangerous galaxy ruled by those who operated above the law with powers far beyond her own.

Indeed, to her, Axion's Cult was proving themselves the superior wielders of the dark side of the Force. The Sith be damned...

---

Nearby, for a fraction of a second, Thane’s focus pulled back, the thread of Amare’s presence tightening somewhere behind him, just enough to register the disturbance in her state. His brow tightened, attention beginning to turn - but movement snapped it forward again.

One of the workers broke from the slow, swaying rhythm of the others, lurching across the narrow run of catwalk with sudden, violent intent. Its expression was wrong, stretched into something euphoric and vacant all at once, hands outstretched as it closed the distance.

Thane met it without slowing. The violet blade came up in a single, controlled motion - but somehow seemed to have been caught, delaying the motion, like a drag through the air. There was a momentary weight in the hilt, as though the weapon resisted the line he had chosen, pulling half a degree wide before he forced it through.

It drove through the man’s chest a fraction off-centre, the cut less clean than it should have been. Resistance followed where there should have been none, a brief, jarring feedback through his grip before the weapon finally punched free. The worker collapsed against him, then away, spilling over the railing and vanishing into the haze below.

Thane stilled, frustration growing. His grip tightened around the hilt, but he willed himself to turn his focus back to Amare, but then something ahead resolved out of the haze. It was small and still, standing just beyond the bend where the catwalk turned down toward the next tier.

For a moment, his mind refused what he saw. Everything about it sat outside the logic of the place they were in - but the details were exact.

The slight tilt of the head and the narrow line of the shoulders, even the way the fabric hung, loose and familiar, in colours he had not seen in years. Not since-

Thane’s eyes narrowed, a brief wince as though forcing the image to fracture under scrutiny. The Force did not answer him. It did not warn him nor encourage him to recoil.

His voice broke, dry and unsteady.

"...Ventul?"

The sudden shock surged back through the Force Bond and Bomoor found himself too, uttering the name, as the image of a young auburn-haired young Caanan flooded his vision as though pulled from deep in his own memory.

The Ithorian's gaze was torn from Amare, looking back towards the frozen Thane. He could not see the catwalk clearly past him to verify what Thane was seeing, only that it had seemed real to him.

Young Ventul ran from Thane's sight. It was not really a turn, nor a reaction to being seen - it simply broke into motion, small feet carrying it around the bend with a speed that did not match its size, vanishing into the drifting haze beyond as though it had never truly occupied the space at all.

Thane was already moving. There was no command given, no glance cast back. His stride lengthened into something sharper, faster, the earlier resistance in his blade forgotten as he closed the distance to the bend, eyes fixed ahead with a tightening focus that allowed no interruption. The catwalk shuddered faintly beneath his steps as he disappeared after it, leaving Bomoor alone in the space between paths.

Bomoor also felt the compulsion to follow and took a step in that direction, then the thought of Amare returned and he looked over his shoulder again to see her starting to walk along the other pathway.

"Amare!" he shouted again, to no response, "We need to stay together!"

His muscles clenched in frustration: while a deadly opponent to most, Amare had shown how easily she could come under the cult's sway on New Alderaan. If he left her now, she would be surely captured or killed by whatever trap she was being drawn into.

He lost control of his breathing for a moment and tasted the sickly air. Almost immediately he began to hear whispers around him, his racing heartrate delivering the mysterious additive quickly throughout his body. He seemed to hear the voices of the Jedi Council, calling on him to do their bidding. Telling him that it was Thane who led him down this dark path. If only Bomoor had stayed loyal to the council, they could have ended this before it begun and his family would have never been targeted by the cult.

"Mumin died because of your disobedience!"

The booming voice of Quellus became all too real for Bomoor's liking and he slowed his breath once more until the voices stopped. He looked around him again: to his right, Thane had already vanished into the haze, his violet blade the only thing still marking his path, while and a number of other workers had begun to shamble up onto the catwalk. In the other direction, Amare was still there but had almost reached the doorway leading away from the factory floor.

I still believe in Thane, he thought to himself, He can hold off whatever is ahead until I return but Amare needs someone...

Having decided where his priorities lay, he turned fully and shot back to the fork in the catwalk, wide feet pounding the metal on his chosen path as Thane vanished into the gloom of the factory floor. The Ithorian felt their bond tug once more, a faint echo of Thane’s focus sharpening into something dangerous but Bomoor shut it out, focussing on the one who needed him more.

TBC

 

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