The Penitent's Shadow
Posted on Sat Apr 7th, 2018 @ 5:40am by Amare
Edited on on Sat Apr 7th, 2018 @ 7:47pm
2,068 words; about a 10 minute read
Chapter:
Chapter IV: Rezer's Edge
Location: Smoke n' Hots Club, Nar Shaddaa
Timeline: Concurrent with "When the Storm Arrives"
Tags: Tayla Dorinn, Caleb, Verne, Dansen Brothers, The Penitent, Jedi, nautolan shadow
ON:
The bounty was digitally signed and sealed for every interested opportunist on Nar Shaddaa with a blaster to seize upon.
Saucy Feril breathed a deep regretful sigh. She felt gut-wrenching remorse as she gazed frowning at Coda’s portrait on the desk monitor; formerly the desk of the man whose life she took to protect her protégé. She was confident it wouldn’t take long before the bounty was collected, and Coda was in the hands of a new slave trader, or just dead in some dark alley.
"Sorry darlin'," Saucy spoke mournfully to the picture. "Had to do it."
She took a heavy swig of the rare bottle of booze that was stashed in one of the desk drawers, and let the silence and solitude of the private office fall upon her.
She was not alone, however, and the silence would not last long.
"You are a gifted liar," said a gravelly female voice from nearby. The words were accusatory, harsh, as if a deliverance of an indictment of a crime before a tribunal. "You lie so well. You even lie to yourself and believe your own falsehoods as truth."
Saucy had sprung up out of her plush high-backed chair as the voice spoke seemingly from all directions at once, twisting and turning to seek the unwelcome intruder with blaster in hand. The office had been veiled in darkness, and it was difficult to see anything, or anyone. She smacked a control on the desk to turn the lights on, and when she looked up, she was already off her feet and flying hard against the wall that was behind her.
"You had a simple choice," said the intruder, now seen as a figure under the billowing garb of traditional Jedi robes and a brown hood that concealed all but her mouth and neck that was mantled with soft pale blue skin. "Honour our agreement, or pay this dead human's debts which you inherited the moment you shot him." She gestured to Brent Chesto's corpse as Saucy shook the spinning stars out of her vision.
It was a futile attempt, but Saucy nevertheless took aim with her blaster. She never had the opportunity to pull the trigger, however. The weapon was telekinetically yanked from her hand to the intruder's grasp. The robed woman tossed the blaster over her head and in one smooth motion drew and ignited a gleaming cyan-bladed lightsaber and tore the weapon asunder as it fell back to the floor in two pieces.
"You chose...poorly," said the shadowy force user as the brandished lightsaber spun fancifully in her hand for one smooth and intimidating rotation, then deactivated and vanished beneath her outer robe. "The Hutts, you, me, this entire moon; all insignificant next to the Force. Please, Tayla, return to your seat. This is where you belong, after all."
Saucy...no, Tayla's eyes were so wide with disbelief, she might as well had been slashed with a lightsaber herself upon hearing her birth name. She hadn't heard it spoken by anyone, not even herself, for many years. It almost sounded like it belonged to someone else.
"How did you know--?" Tayla began to ask, her voice now devoid of her country bumpkin drawl, a more refined Coruscanti accent coating her words instead. Her decades old mask had been lifted; there was no use pretending to be someone she wasn't, at least for the moment.
"Akkar Dorinn, your father, was a useful informant to my former master," the robed one replied whilst carefully watching the twi'lek returning to the chair as instructed. "But he was treacherous, and betrayed our trust just as you have betrayed mine."
"Like father, like daughter I suppose," Tayla said in quiet defiance with a grimace in the midst of her back pain from her impact with the wall. She groaned a little sitting back down knowing all she had left was her pride and stubborn nature to counter with. She threw her right lekku over her left shoulder, and crossed her legs casually as she continued. "I can't speak for what dad did to your master. I can say that he learned a long time ago that honesty doesn't get you far in life. I'm sure he had his reasons for not being a good choir boy to your cause. Right now, he's probably out there somewhere not giving a damn about what he did, or me for that matter." She softly chuckled and shook her head, inwardly loathing talking about him at all, but still had a soft spot for him in her heart.
"How vile and foolish must a man be to believe he could shoot a Jedi Knight in the back and get away with it?" the robed woman asked rhetorically.
"What?" Tayla watched the hooded Jedi slowly stalk around the desk and stopped behind her chair. She dared to not make any sudden moves, but she half expected to get attacked from behind at any second. Terror gripped her as she stared intensely at Chesto's limp form. Every instinct in her body screamed that she could be lying next to him, lifeless, at any moment. For the first time in years, Tayla "Saucy" Dorinn was no longer in charge of her destiny.
"Akkar tried to kill my old master," said the Jedi standing behind Tayla, her voice lowering an octave as she leaned down to bring her lips close to the sensory knob that was the female twi'lek equivalent of Tayla's right ear. "How pitiful for your sire that he never saw me coming." Yet again, the lightsaber ignited, but this time horizontal in front of Tayla's throat. Now the shadow's voice shifted to one of gentle nostalgic pride and sinister delight. "I was a padawan then. Rash and willful. I burned a hole through his back that night. A fitting end for a coward. My master, The Penitent himself, declared me a Jedi Knight that day for saving his life."
The shadow moved away from Tayla without harming her, and resumed her slow seething pace around the desk with the saber still blazing alight with the threat of instant death. "But I am older now, wiser, and no longer a Knight. I've felt pain like you could never imagine, sacrificed in ways that would drive most creatures to madness, and traveled deep into the abyss to bathe in the dark side of the Force. Those experiences taught me there is purpose in redemption." She stopped in front of the desk and leveled the saber's humming tip near Tayla's face. "Even murderers and liars like you can be saved. Your penance can start right now by calling off the bounty on Zaracoda ...that is, of course, if you are anxious to reunite with your father in death."
"I did everything you asked me to do," Tayla retorted with a sudden burst of emotion, her eyes filled with tears upon hearing that this Jedi, this...thing, was the slayer of her father. "I spared her from harm. I kept her fed. I gave her a safe and comfortable place to sleep at night. I assured her body remained pure and untouched by the thristy scum of this world. I taught her how to live and how to think and how to read and write and how to feel for others. And tonight I gave her freedom! Do you think I wanted this to happen? Did I want to betray her? Of course not! She was like a little sister to me. If I didn't comply to their demands, the Hutts would've sent their elites to destroy everything I have built here and kill all the innocent people working for me. They don't care about the life of one girl. I HAD NO CHOICE!"
"Cancel the bounty," the shadow pressed again calmly, this time with finality, the lightsaber raised with both hands on the hilt high above her head. It was a stance that was primed to chop down for a clean killing strike. "I will not say it again."
Tayla drew in a heavy breath with a bitter scowl on her face, her heart throbbing wildly as if desperate to burst free out of her rib cage before the worst happened. She looked down at the desk monitor to see the original bounty had been raised significantly by a vengeful third party. Under the lethal cyan-hued beam of light, Tayla couldn't believe her eyes.
"I'll cancel it, damn you, but things just got a lot more complicated. Whatever Coda is doing out there, she just made some enemies that raised the stakes."
The saber lowered slowly, and was returned to pointing at Tayla's face yet again at a perilously close distance. "Who are they? Who raised the bounty?"
Tayla hesitated; she knew the man that stacked the reward on Coda's head. He was a trusted acquaintance, and a reliable gun-for-hire. To give his name to this Jedi filth would sign the man's death warrant.
"Their names! Now!"
Minutes later...
In the midst of the heavy rain, fire hot pain in his shoulder, and the sound of blaster fire in the distance, Verne pressed on determined to get his revenge.
"We're almost at the plaza," Caleb said, helping his wounded buddy Verne to walk. "Don't worry. Some old friends spotted the little squid turd at Hon-Chu's pub. They'll git 'er no problem."
"They better," Verne said with a grunt, pushing aside Caleb's helping hand. "I'm fine. The stim's kicking in. Let's finish th--"
"Are you gentlemen the 'Dansen Brothers'?" a somewhat scratchy feminine voice called out behind them. "Caleb and Verne?"
Verne drew his blaster pistol and turned around to see a dark hooded figure covered in brown robes approach them. "Cousins more like, but yeah. And just who the hell are you?"
The cloaked one stopped, reached up with long delicate blue fingers, and removed the hood. What the Dansens saw caused them to exchange glances at each other, and then took aim and opened fire.
The shadow's lightsaber instantly awakened to the sounds of battle and effortlessly stroked, winded, flashed, and swiped at every incoming blaster bolt with fluid grace. It was a cyan dervish of whirling superheated plasma that deflected the Dansens' rapid-fire assault guided by a single slender hand. With each passing second, the revealed shadow followed the dancing blade one careful step forward at a time.
Verne bellowed, "I've had enough of this!" He produced and armed a thermal detonator from a pouch on his armored utility belt and hurled it at the Jedi. Its intended trajectory was instead diverted in an entirely different direction with a simple backhanded wave of the shadow's free hand, and it exploded harmlessly in midair some distance away. By the time Verne turned away from the explosion, their target had gone airborne.
In a spinning torpedo like charge through the air, her drenched ragged robes were thrown off from her body while she emitted a howling ear-piercing banshee's wail that caused the Dansens to drop their weapons and lose all desire to keep fighting. The lightsaber returned to its slumber at the shadow's side, and a pair of hands bathed in blood red auras of energy descended upon the chests of the bounty hunters.
Her diving momentum drove the men to fall flat on their backs, their helmets flung from their heads with an invisible kinetic thrust.
"When you are a mother," she softly told the men with a predatory sneer crossed over her face as her large beaming dark eyes grew with a raging red light to match the sheath of red covering her empowered hands, "you develop a willingness to do anything to protect your pups. You would destroy whole worlds if it meant assuring their survival."
The two men were paralyzed under the shadow's powerful ethereal grip. They had only seconds to see the malcious face and semi-nude tattoo-covered body of the mature nautolan woman that was to be the deliverer of their fate. She cackled with copious pleasure through the power of the dark side as she drained the life essence from their bodies.
"For now, this mother will settle with the two of you. Give unto the Force, and you shall be cleansed!"
In seconds, the Dansen Brothers' vision became flush with crimson red light which was followed moments later with the eternal darkness of death.
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