Acme: The Face of God

Posted on Sun Apr 12th, 2026 @ 7:20pm by Axion & Thane
Edited on on Sun Apr 12th, 2026 @ 8:29pm

6,741 words; about a 34 minute read

Chapter: Chapter VIII: Broken Chains
Location: Undervos Holdings Factory, Wastes, Sleheyron
Timeline: During the "Acme" series of posts

The weight in Thane's arms had scarcely begun to settle before the air above him changed.

Something in the space itself seemed to draw taut, as if the heat and vapour crowding the upper reaches of the factory had been made to acknowledge a greater presence moving through them. Thane's gaze lifted sharply from Ventul's lifeless face, and what he saw above the platform did not at first resolve as a man descending, but as an arrangement of colour, shape and malignant force coalescing from the red-lit haze overhead into something almost too complete to be natural. It was as if the facility had finally revealed the thing it had been built to house.

Axion descended in perfect, effortless flight.

There was no leap, no obvious exertion, no sense of a body moving according to any law Thane recognised, even with the power of the Force and the dark side. He came down slowly through the heat-distorted air with the terrible calm of something that had never needed the ground beneath it, long dark robes hanging and stirring in defiance of the industrial drafts that shifted the vapours below. The silhouette struck first - broad at the shoulders, narrowing cleanly, one arm slightly lowered at his side, the other loose and easy, every line of him composed with a precision so complete it felt less like posture than iconography. Behind his head and upper body, the haze and furnace-glow bent into a dim circular radiance that did not fully register when looked at directly, a false halo made from heat, smoke and something else more invasive, more wrong, which turned his arrival into the mockery of a religious vision. A red angel or a fallen god... descending to witness the ruin he had authored.

He was more than Thane remembered.

Not merely stronger, nor merely more overt in his corruption than the dark, self-assured figure who had stood before them on Nar Shaddaa nearly two years before and vanished before justice or revenge could properly touch him. This was something beyond that memory entirely, as though the version they had faced then had only ever been a lesser expression, simply a mask worn. Axion did not carry power around him now so much as deform the space with it. Light flickered at his passing and the drifting fumes recoiled and twisted. The very air seemed slower near him, burdened by the pressure of his presence, and beneath it all ran the sense - impossible to prove and yet immediate - that he was not entering the scene at all, but had always been above it, watching every turn of Thane's grief unfold with perfect patience.

Across his throat and upper chest sat a gorget, broad and ceremonial, metallic surfaces engraved with old and intricate patterns that caught the furnace-light and broke it into thin veins of blood-red reflection. It flared outward over his collarbones in the style of some ancient war-priest or king, an ornate ritual war-gorget made monstrous by what had been set into it: three Kaiburr shards, one central and largest, two smaller flanking it at asymmetrical position, each embedded deep into the worked metal and each alive with a pulsing, unstable crimson glow that moved like a heartbeat too rapid and too violent to belong to any living thing. Their light bled over the engravings, through the folds of his robes, across the planes of his face, and from time to time tiny arcs of red current snapped between crystal and metal with a hiss so fine it barely rose above the machinery below.

His eyes found Thane at once.

They were still that unnatural deep blue, in the barest physical sense, but blue only as a wound might still be called skin. At their centres burned compact red cores, bright and vicious, as though some smaller star had been lit behind the irises and was now trying to burn through them. They did not look upon Thane with the ordinary focus of one man regarding another. They seemed to pass through skin, through posture, through fury and pain alike, prying past all of it with effortless contempt, as though Thane's body and expression were merely the least interesting surfaces of him. The effect was intimate in the worst possible way.

Then, Axion smiled.

It was not warm nor theatrical, nor even especially broad. It simply formed with complete certainty, touched at one corner first before spreading with the easy assurance of someone arriving precisely where he had always intended to be. A laugh followed it, low at first, then widening into something richer and more amused as he continued to descend, the sound carrying strangely through the chamber. His mouth moved - Thane could see that much - but the laughter did not sit cleanly in the air. It arrived from too many places at once, brushing the railings, the drums, the walkways, settling into the lungs as much as the ears. The acoustics did not explain it - it simply existed, layered and faintly delayed, as though the space itself had chosen to join him in mockery.

By the time his boots came level with the platform, he still had not hurried.

A few feet above the metal, he seemed to pause without actually stopping, held there in perfect poise while the red current crept in thin lines over his fingers and around the edges of the gorget. His robes shifted softly around him. The halo behind him thinned and reformed with the movements of the haze. Below, in Thane's arms, Ventul's body had already begun to cool against the heat of the place. Above, Axion looked immaculate, untouched by soot, grief, effort or consequence.

Thane rose with abrupt violence, letting Ventul's weight slip from his arms and strike the platform with a hard metallic sound that was swallowed at once by the wider rhythm of the factory. There was no reverence in the motion now - no gentleness. Whatever fragile thing had remained in him a few moments before had been burned out by the sight of fear in his brother's dying face, and what replaced it was hotter, cleaner and far less Human. His hand summoned his hilt back to it - but the violet blade answered a fraction too late.

That delay, small enough that another man might not even have recognised it, hit him like an insult.

He felt it in the resistance running up through the weapon as it ignited, a minute but unmistakable wrongness in the crystal's response, a reluctance buried within the familiar mechanics of activation, as had taunted him for months, despite every effort to tune and amend the weapon. The blade came forth still, but not cleanly nor gladly. There was the slightest instability in the line of it; the pitch a shade off true before correcting itself. In the state he was now in, that tiny betrayal was intolerable.

It cost him nothing and everything all at once: precision and confidence began there. A swordsman of lesser discipline could have ignored it - but Thane had not and could not. He felt the flaw immediately, felt the extra effort required to force weapon, will and body into alignment, and that effort fed the pressure already mounting in his chest until rage and strain became nearly indivisible.

Axion laughed again when he saw it.

Not loudly or with surprise, but almost with appreciation, as if some private joke had just confirmed itself. He lowered at last, boots touching the platform with almost tender softness, no jolt, no imbalance, no sign at all that gravity had reclaimed him so much as been permitted to. Red light moved in loose currents over his hand as he tilted his head a fraction, studying Thane as though the sight of him - burn-marked, shaking with fury, standing over his brother's body with a blade that no longer wholly loved him - were the most entertaining thing he had ever seen.

"Ah," he said, and even that single syllable carried the same doubled quality as the laughter, one voice housed inside another, perfectly synchronised but not entirely natural. "There you are, Thane."

Thane answered with motion rather than speech. He came forward at once, shoulders set, blade raised in a tight and vicious line as he crossed the first stretch of platform with speed that bordered on reckless. The pain in his shoulder sharpened as he moved. The toxins clawed deeper into his lungs. The lightsaber's resistance bit through his grip and into his concentration, each correction requiring that little more force and that little more intent, but he embraced all of it because it gave shape to the fury. Axion had taken Ventul from him twice; he had taken his mother; unravelled his childhood world and pulled at the one he had sought to forge here; he had caused the death of Bomoor's mother and destroyed countless lives. He would end him.

Axion did not move to meet him straight away. He only stood there with that same slight smile, head still canted, red arcs whispering over the broad lines of the gorget while Thane closed the distance. Then, just before the first strike could land, he shifted - not hurriedly, not even sharply, but with a smooth economy that made the attack seem almost clumsy by comparison. His own red blade ignited in one hand with a snap of crimson light, and he turned it into place as though humouring an old ritual, an amusement he did not need but was willing to indulge.

The first clash rang out hard and bright across the platform.

Thane drove into it with everything already burning inside him, Makashi structure tightening the line of his attack while something less disciplined and more ravenous pressed beneath it, forcing him forward where once he might have measured, tested, probed. Axion received the blow on a precise angle and let it slide harmlessly away, not giving ground so much as choosing where the impact would mean nothing. There was no strain in him and no urgency - only amusement. Thane struck again, and again, each motion faster, harsher, the blade trembling faintly at the edges of alignment as the resistant crystal imposed its tiny costs upon him with every transition. A fraction late here and slight drag there - corrections so small they would have been invisible to almost anyone else, and yet he felt every one of them with maddening clarity.

Axion felt them too.

It showed not in effort, but in the way his smile deepened. In the lightness of his one-handed guard. In the low, pleased sound that left him when another of Thane's cuts came within the margin that should have drawn blood and instead skimmed aside because the blade had not answered quite quickly enough. He moved with maddening restraint, the base of Soresu visible in the impossible efficiency of his defence, every angle exact, every economy perfect, while Makashi's disdainful precision laced through it like mockery. It was fencing by a god who considered swordplay an affectation and therefore had no need to prove himself by it. Each parry seemed to ask the same question without words: is this truly all you are?

Thane pressed harder in answer, incensed beyond speech now, boots hammering the grating as he drove Axion back across the platform in clean, relentless lines. The machinery below thundered and cycled. Heat rolled up through the gaps in the catwalk. Somewhere overhead, metal groaned under fresh strain as the facility continued its slow slide toward catastrophe, explosions in the distance now ringing out and carrying through from further off - but the world had narrowed around the figure before him and the laughter that persisted between their clashes.

Axion's amusement did not diminish under the assault. If anything, it sharpened. He slipped to one side, blade catching Thane's and gliding it off-line with a touch so delicate it felt insulting, and the dark smile that followed was somehow worse than any snarl would have been.

"Yes," he murmured, almost approvingly.

Then he laughed in Thane's face and moved, at last, like something that understood exactly how far beneath it everyone else was.

Axion did not retreat as Thane pressed forward again - he simply was no longer where Thane struck.

The violet blade cut through the space his body had occupied a fraction before, meeting nothing but heat-warped air and drifting vapour as the follow-through carried Thane a step too far, his footing biting hard against the grating to recover. For an instant it looked like a misjudged step, a failure of timing. Then, Axion was standing three paces to the side, exactly where the strike should have driven him, head tilted the same way, smile unchanged, as though the attack had occurred around him rather than toward him.

Thane turned sharply, already moving, the correction immediate and aggressive as he drove in again, refusing the implication of it. The next strike came faster, tighter, a clean strike aimed not at where Axion stood, but where he would need to move to avoid it.

Again - nothing. Not a dodge or a retreat. Not even the clean, minimal redirection Axion had used before. He simply slipped from the line of attack, present until the instant he was not, leaving Thane’s dulled, slow blade to cut across empty space while the ethereal glow reappeared a half-step behind his shoulder.

A laugh brushed past his ear.

Thane pivoted into it, blade snapping back in a reverse cut that should have taken Axion across the torso. It passed through a fading afterimage of heat and red light, the true figure already elsewhere, already watching. The movement cost him more this time. He felt it in the hilt, in the slight resistance of the crystal as it struggled to keep pace with the violence he was forcing through it, the edge of the blade trembling faintly as it corrected its alignment a fraction too late.

"Stand and fight me!" he snapped, voice breaking, already chasing again, already committing to the next line.

Axion’s answer was more laughter.

He moved then, not away, but through the space of the platform, crossing it in a way that defied clean observation. One moment he stood within reach, the next he occupied the far end of the catwalk, boots touching lightly as if he had merely taken a single step rather than traversed the intervening distance. The red blade remained low at his side, almost idle, his posture unchanged despite the impossible displacement.

Thane followed without hesitation. The Makashi form demanded clarity, demanded control of distance, of line, of timing - and Axion denied him all three. The geometry of the duel refused to settle into anything stable, each engagement dissolving before it could resolve, each calculated strike rendered meaningless by the simple fact that the target would not remain where it should have been. The precision that had always anchored Thane’s fighting began to slip, replaced by something more direct and more forceful.

He widened his stance and his cuts grew heavier. The next exchange came not as a measured engagement, but as a driving sequence, Thane closing the distance in a series of long, aggressive steps, blade arcing in powerful lines designed to overwhelm rather than outmanoeuvre. Niman bled into the motion, then something harsher beneath it, something that did not care for elegance or efficiency so long as it forced Axion to actually answer.

For a moment, it worked.

Axion met the assault directly, blade rising to intercept as Thane’s strikes came in rapid succession, each one carrying more weight than the last. Sparks snapped between them, brief and violent, the contact points bright against the haze as metal beneath their feet rang under the force of each impact. Axion’s guard remained one-handed, light, almost casual, but the necessity of meeting the blows was there now, the space between them compressed into something real.

Then it slipped again as Axion turned one strike aside and was suddenly no longer within range for the next, the distance between them opening in a blink that felt less like movement and more like refusal. Thane drove forward after him, but the gap held, stretched just enough to deny the continuation of his assault.

Axion raised his hand and scarlet lightning tore free of his fingers without warning.

It struck with a force that hit before it was fully seen, a searing arc of concentrated energy that crossed the space between them in an instant, lashing into Thane’s guard as he brought his blade up on instinct. The contact screamed and the violet blade flared under the impact, its unstable edge distorting further as the current poured against it, splitting and crawling along its length in jagged branches that spilled into the metal around him.

Thane felt it through his arms and through his chest - through the air in his lungs as it was forced back out of him in a harsh, involuntary breath. The pressure drove him half a step back, boots grinding against the grating as the current pressed in, relentless, controlled, far more precise than the wild, unrefined bursts he had faced from lesser practitioners.

The Force surged through him then - not cleanly with the measured control he favoured - as something raw and immediate, drawn up from the same well of anger that now defined him. His free hand came up without thought, fingers splaying as his own lightning answered, blue-white arcs snapping into existence and driving forward to meet the red in a violent collision of opposing currents.

The impact tore through the space between them. Energy struck energy, twisted, merged and split again, neither yielding cleanly as the opposing streams fought for dominance. The clash lit the platform in strobing bursts, throwing harsh, shifting shadows across the barrels and rails as the air itself seemed to recoil under the strain. Where the combined current struck the surroundings, it did not dissipate - it bit. Metal blackened and warped rapdily, and one of the stacked drums behind Thane ruptured with a sharp report, its contents erupting outward in a spray that ignited where it met the energy, flame racing across the slick surface in a sudden bloom.

The catwalk shuddered beneath them and Thane drove forward into it, teeth bared now, forcing more of himself into the clash, the current intensifying as it surged from his hand, less refined than Axion’s but heavier, more violent, fuelled by something that did not seek balance but domination. The resistance in his blade bit again, the instability worsening under the strain, the pitch of it shifting as it struggled to maintain coherence under the pressure passing so close to it.

Axion’s smile thinned. For the first time, there was a break in the perfect ease of his posture, a subtle shift as the opposing force met his own with enough weight to require correction. The red lightning wavered for a fraction of a second, its clean lines distorting under the impact of Thane’s counter.

That was all Thane needed - he broke the clash violently, dropping his guard and surging forward through the dissipating arcs before they had fully collapsed, closing the distance in a single, committed motion that abandoned defence entirely in favour of reach. His violet lightsaber came up in a tight, brutal arc aimed not at Axion’s body, but higher - toward the broad line of the gorget where the crimson shards pulsed with unnatural life.

Axion moved to evade but for once, he was not entirely beyond it - and the blade actually struck!

It connected not with flesh, but with the central span of the gorget, scraping across engraved metal before biting into one of the flanking shards with a sharp, jarring impact that sent a shock up through Thane’s arms. The crystal resisted for an instant, then gave just enough for a fracture to spider across its surface, a thin, branching crack that disrupted the steady pulse of its light.

The ethereal current snapping across the gorget faltered, breaking rhythm as the damaged shard flickered, its internal light distorting into something uneven and unstable. The pressure in the air shifted with it, not collapsing, but changing, the perfect, oppressive consistency of Axion’s presence breaking for the first time since his arrival.

Both of them felt it - and Thane did not hesitate. He pressed in, driving the advantage with a follow-up strike that sought to exploit the disruption, but the moment had already passed. Axion withdrew from the line cleanly this time, no longer slipping but moving with deliberate precision, creating space with a single step that placed him just beyond reach once more.

His gaze dropped briefly to the cracked shard, the faint distortion of its light reflecting in the red cores of his eyes as he regarded the damage with a quiet, almost curious focus. Then his attention returned to Thane, and what had been amusement settled into something colder, sharper, no less controlled but now entirely attentive.

"Interesting," he said softly.

But, the red current quickly returned, although not with the same loose play as before, but tighter, more focused as it crept again across his hand and along the lines of the gorget. The flicker in the damaged shard remained, a flaw in the otherwise perfect symmetry of its pulse.

Thane felt the shift immediately and the space between them changed. The allowance that had existed, the sense that Axion had been indulging him, thinned and then vanished entirely, replaced by something far more deliberate. The air pressed in harder and the heat seemed sharper. Even the rhythm of the machinery below felt more distant, less relevant, as if the fight had moved beyond it, and that the environment continued to answer to its true master - Axion, not the would-be Sith screaming at the void.

Axion lifted his hand again. The lightning came in a barrage this time, nor as one sustained stream, but as a succession of precise, murderous strokes, each bolt shaped and placed with cruel intelligence. They lanced across the gap in rapid sequence, forcing Thane to move his blade again and again, each deflection a separate act of will rather than part of any flowing defence. The first crashed into the violet edge and burst outward in a red spray of branching fire that ran down the hilt and into his hands. The next struck before the pain of the first had even fully registered. Then another and then two in quick succession, one high, one low, driving him to turn his wrists sharply and catch them on unstable angles that sent the current slithering up his forearms in bright, vicious coils.

The smell reached him almost at once, of burnt fabric and burnt skin, with ozone and sweet chemical vapour mingling into something so foul and sharp it seemed to cut the inside of his skull. His fingers threatened to lock around the hilt and his arms shook under the force of it. Somewhere deep in his chest,his heart seemed to seize, then stammer back into motion with a violent, unnatural rhythm that made the whole world pulse strangely for half a beat. The catwalk beneath him flashed white and red in fragments and heat burst around his hands - but through will and the fuel of the dark side, Thane held.

The Hurrikaine crystal in his electrum-and-silver hilt hated this, too. He felt it in the minute judder of the blade, in the tiny wavering of its edge as the lightning pressed against it and the weapon fought to maintain its shape under the strain. Every correction cost him - every redirected stroke tore a little more sensation from his palms and a little more strength from his grip.

Axion did not need to say anything. The precision of the assault said enough: this was punishment, assessment... reduction.

He was being tested to see exactly where he would break.

Thane refused him that knowledge.

He gave ground by inches only, boots scraping hard over the grating as he twisted the blade into tighter and tighter angles, forcing the lightning away from him and off into the ruptured structure around him. A rail blackened and peeled open under one redirected stroke. Red current lashed over the loader half-suspended on a nearby track, making it buck and shriek as metal warped and hydraulic fluid hissed free in steaming sprays. Yet, Axion kept coming, relentless and composed, hand slightly raised, fingers flexing only enough to adjust the shape and line of each discharge. His face remained calm and attentive... but the damaged shard flickered against the broad line of the gorget.

That flicker caught Thane's eye; a flaw, small and uneven - real.

The next stroke came harder than the last, a concentrated lash designed to drive straight through his guard rather than around it. Thane caught it at the last possible instant, the contact exploding across the blade with a shriek that stabbed through his skull. Pain flared from both hands to his shoulders and into his chest. His heart lurched again and he tasted blood and chemicals at once. But, instead of merely turning the force aside, he wrenched the blade with deliberate violence, forcing the current to slide, travel, and bend according to a path he chose rather than the one Axion intended.

The redirected lightning arced wild through the air and struck the fractured Kaiburr shard - and the cracks lit blindlingly bright from within.

The damaged crystal flashed with a furious, overbright crimson that swelled past its own boundaries, light pouring through the spiderweb fault-lines in a way no stable lattice could have endured. Axion's eyes narrowed a fraction too late. The shard ruptured in a burst of red-white force that tore outward across the gorget in a spray of crystal fragments and molten metal, the shockwave striking his upper body hard enough to blast him backward off the line of his own attack. The current died with a violent snap and the oppressive pressure in the air lurched and broke. The halo behind him distorted, collapsed, then reformed only partially as he spun away through the red haze.

Thane was already moving. He surged through the blast-scorched air with a sound that was somewhere between a breath and a snarl, abandoning all thought of caution or structure as he launched himself at the recoiling figure, the threat of an almost-inconceivable victory against his Kaiburr-powered foe drawing him in. The violet blade came up in both hands, his burnt palms, the gloves entirely torn away, screaming in protest around the hilt, and he brought it down with a brutal two-handed cut intended to split through Axion before balance could return.

Axion recovered in motion, however. Even driven backward, even with red sparks still breaking from the ruined line of the gorget, he twisted through the air with impossible economy and brought his own blade up just in time to catch the descending strike. The impact cracked across the chamber like a blastershot. Red and violet light flared between them. But, for the first time, Axion's boots skidded a fraction on landing. Thane hit the platform hard and drove into him again before the sound had finished echoing.

Something changed in the way Thane now thought. Makashi was gone now. The clean geometry and the elegant lines had all become too narrow - too dependent on a world behaving as it should. What rose instead came from a different, more-recent instruction, from black rock and furnace heat and the harsh certainty of Zenarrah's voice on Mustafar; from lessons taught not as beauty but as survival through violence and the true power of rage and the dark side. He drew on that rage rather than containing it. Fed it motion and emotion - he let it course through his limbs and spine instead of trying to refine it into something more controlled. His stance widened and the blade ceased to be a precise instrument, instead becoming a wheeling extension of his wrath.

Vaapad, or the ragged edge of what he understood of it, took hold.

The next series of blows came savage and immediate, not probing for weakness but battering at Axion's guard in ceaseless, hammering succession, buoyed by his rage and overconfidence. Wide cuts tore sparks from the railings when they missed; one descending strike bit into the catwalk hard enough to shear partway through a load-bearing joint, before he ripped the blade free and came around again. Another clipped the side of the damaged loader and split through its armature, sending the machine toppling in a shower of sparks and collapsing pipes down into the lower levels where it vanished into steam and bursting flame. Chemical lines ruptured beneath the impact - green and amber fluids spilled from torn housings and spread across the metal in smoking sheets. Still, Thane drove forward, step after punishing step, forcing Axion back through a more traditional duel at last, his golden-lava eyes blazing with a feral intensity that made him look less like a man than the dark prophecy of a Sith he now thought himself to be.

For the first time since his descent, Axion was made to yield ground in recognisable steps. He blocked high, then low, then turned a cut aside and had to move with actual speed to avoid the next. The amusement had gone from him now and the red core of his alien-blue stare burned harder. His expression drew inward, the smile gone, the focus beneath it finally revealed as something colder and far more dangerous. The factory shook around them as distant explosions chained one into the next, each detonation feeding the next tier of collapse. Walkways below folded as a nearby vat burst open and vented luminous vapour through the structure. The entire facility had begun to die in earnest.

Thane mistook it for advantage, and he presxed harder, every strike committed with the certainty of a man who believed he had finally cracked the shell and found the flesh beneath. His blade, despite the resistance within, came around in a broad horizontal sweep meant to take Axion across the ribs - and Axion dipped under it. The return cut came downward at the neck - but Axion slipped aside and inside the arc before it had fully formed. Thane reversed the motion, hauling the blade back up in a violent rising slash that would have split an ordinary opponent from hip to shoulder.

Axion went beneath that too.

Not away, Thane noticed a moment too late, as it registered wrong in his mind. Beneath.

One moment he was in front of Thane's line. The next he was lower, closer, inside the range where the violence of the strike became a hindrance rather than an asset. Red current flared around his free hand. Thane saw the movement a fraction late, already overextended, already committed, already too full of his own momentum to recover cleanly - and then the world dropped out from under him.

Power hit him from below and all around at once, not as a shove but as a total seizure of his body by a greater will and power, the Force enveloping around him. The metal vanished beneath his boots and his stomach lurched sickeningly as Axion drove upward in a burst of Kaiburr-assisted flight, dragging Thane with him in the invisible fist of telekinetic power. The platform fell away, and so did the next level - and the next. Heat and smoke and orange industrial light opened beneath them into a vast, broken anatomy of catwalks, pipelines, conveyors and bursting vats, the whole factory revealed at once from above as a dying mechanical labyrinth writhing in fire.

Thane hung there for one impossible instant, high enough now to see the collapse spreading outward, his elicit facility dying before his eyes and hubris. A loader tumbled into a chemical trench far below, and he saw barrels bursting like seeds thrown in a furnace. Great seams of fire raced along leaked compounds and fractured walkways dropped into orange-lit depths, the true floor invisible to him here. The scale of it reached him only in fragments, because the pressure around his ribs had already become unbearable and the sudden change in height and motion had ripped whatever remaining control he held over his breath into useless shreds.

Axion looked at him almost calmly - and then he hurled him down.

There was no elegant arc to it. There was no suspended moment in which recovery might be found. Thane was simply released into a catastrophic velocity, driven out of the air with such force that thought could not keep pace with his senses and understanding of what was happening. The descending structure blurred into streaks of steel and dying ochre light. He tried - some instinct still trying - to gather the Force around himself, to brace, to twist, to shield - to do anything - but pain, smoke, exhaustion and speed had already torn too much coherence from him. By the time the lower levels rushed up to meet him, he had managed only the barest, most inadequate shaping of the fall within the Force.

Thane hit metal first.

The impact detonated through his entire body. Ribs broke audibly, a cluster of hard internal cracks that seemed to come from both outside and within. His head struck the edge of a ruptured platform and something in the right side of his face gave with a wet, dense fracture that burst white pain through his skull, then plunged onward into the chemical runoff pooled beneath, the surface breaking around him in a splash that was at once liquid, fire and poison.

The compound found him instantly.

It soaked into torn fabric and open seams, bit through already-burned skin, flooded the right side of his body with an agony so complete it no longer resembled pain in any ordinary sense that his dazed mind understood. His back screamed with something deeper and worse - a raw wrongness along the spine that did not need naming to be understood as utterly catastrophic. He automatically tried to draw breath and inhaled fumes so dense and caustic that his lungs seized around them. The world convulsed, totally and absolutely. His hands clawed uselessly at slick metal and shallow fluid, his two metal digits even sounding unnatural as they made contact. Somewhere nearby, alarms were wailing.

Thane had just enough awareness to realise his face was partly in it.

The right side of his cheek and brow had already sunk into the burning compound, his skin reacting with a hideous immediacy that his mind could scarcely process. He dragged at himself by instinct, summoning the dark side not as art or doctrine but as pure refusal, in some vain effort to move his body, keep awake and stay alive. It came because he demanded it, his rage and agony still churning with him - because there was still hatred left.

Still humiliation.

Still Axion.

A shadow settled then beside him with impossible calm. Axion landed lightly on the buckled metal at the edge of the pool, robes stirring faintly in the hot turbulence. He was marked now - the gorget broken, one shard gone, current moving in unstable lines across the damaged metal - but he stood with all the composure of a man arriving at the end of a demonstration. Thane tried to rise, even tried to turn - tried to force even one arm beneath him to drag his ruined body out of the compound through sheer malice, if nothing else.

Axion laughed.

The sound was softer here. It was closer and more intimate for being less grand. He stepped in beside Thane's face and, with the same unhurried ease he had shown descending from above, placed a boot against the unburned side of Thane's head.

"No," he said calmly, almost conversationally. "Stay."

The pressure increased, slowly and deliberately.

Thane felt the point at which resistance became movement and movement became helplessness. His head was forced sideways, his ruined body too broken to answer properly, one burnt hand scraping uselessly across metal as Axion pressed the other side of his face down into the compound. The right cheek went first, then the lip, then the eye. The liquid found every contour at once. Fumes surged up his nostrils and into his throat in a choking rush that made his body convulse violently against the downward force.

The scream tore out of him whole - but it was not Human for long.

The pain annihilated shape, thought, memory - all of it drowned beneath a brightness so vast and total it seemed to erase the idea that sensation had ever had lesser forms. His eye did not merely burn; it ceased to belong to him as an organ and became only a source of impossible information flooding the rest of his body with ruin as it burst and melted away. Skin tightened, blistered, split, sloughed under the compound's appetite. The corner of his mouth and lip went with it as his throat filled with chemical breath. He screamed until the scream itself began to fail, until the rawness in his chest became wet and broken and the muscles that should have forced sound outward no longer obeyed him.

Still, Axion held him there.

The dark side kept Thane conscious when consciousness should have fled. It kept his heart working and kept the shredded remains of will and flesh tethered together past the point mercy would or should have allowed. He tried to speak and found nothing but bubbling breath. He tried to pull power into one last movement and could not gather thought tightly enough to do it. The pain had become his entire existence. The smell of his own burning skin and the chemical reek around it filled every breath he could still manage.

Axion finally lifted his boot and Thane's head lolled half out of the compound, what remained of his right side hissing faintly where the fluid still clung and ate at him. He could not truly see now - only register blur and furnace-light and the towering shape that stood above him. Somewhere overhead, the factory gave a vast, shuddering groan as another chain of explosions ran through its wounded frame. The deck buckled and support beam tore loose in the distance and fell in a shriek of metal. Even Axion turned his head slightly at that.

He looked back down at Thane and smiled once more, smaller now, almost fond, just about visible to Thane's remaining golden eye of hateful fire.

"Goodbye, my lord."

The laughter that followed was the same laughter that had once filled Thane's childhood home while his world was being unmade for the first time, and the recognition of it - more than the words, more than the ruin of his own body - drove the last clean spear of hatred through what remained of his awareness. He tried to answer again, tried to say anthing - but nothing came. His voice had been burned out of him.

Another tremor passed through the platform, harder than the last.

Axion stepped back from the pool, robes gathering around him. He rose again, his vaguely-defined form gliding up and away through heat and smoke with the same effortless command he had arrived with, laughter fading into the wider roar of the collapsing factory until it seemed impossible to tell which sound belonged to him and which to the death of the place itself.

Thane lay where he had been left, unable to rise or call out, and barely unable to breathe.

The dark side held him to the edge of life with pitiless strength while the world around him shook and broke apart. The last thing fully clear to him was the smell that filled his ruined nostrils: the sickening stench of his own ruined flesh filling the remains of his lungs as the shadowy figure dwindled above and vanished into the firelit haze.

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THANE

▼ Dark Side Shift
▬ Lightsaber Combat Increase
▬ Form VII - Vaapad Increase
▬ Tutamanis Increase
▬ Force Lightning Increase

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