Madness Grins
Posted on Mon Jul 16th, 2018 @ 9:05pm by Bomoor Thort & Thane
Edited on on Thu Jul 19th, 2018 @ 1:13pm
3,631 words; about a 18 minute read
Chapter:
Chapter V: Unbound
Location: Vaa, Thaal system (Moon of Caanus)
Timeline: After "The Vaa-Thalda"
Tags: vaa, vaa-thaalda, thaalda, darth cabal, cabal, staff, caanus, sithspawn, elenca, ithorian
OLD
Within moments, more creatures leapt forwards; he could sense them and flung several away, but he could not defend on all sides and, before he knew it, two more had latched on to him. They too, were biting and clawing, this time at his back and Bomoor could do little but slice at them while attempting to fend off even more coming from in front of him. He was quickly being worn down and the creatures could sense it. They became more bold and flew at his face, battering him relentlessly, spitting and snarling as they weakened him.
He felt his head getting lighter and his ability to resist waning but, even as his guard fell, the creatures seemed not to go for killing strikes but rather continued to bleed and bruise him until he could not hold himself up any longer. Then, as a final Vaa-Thaalda sprung right atop him and whacked his head with a rock, his knees buckled and he fell to the craggy ground, unable to resist the temptation of sleep.
Lost to the mist.
NEW
It was a cold and quiet space; darkness spread out in all directions and yet it felt enclosed and claustrophobic. In the centre of it all stood Bomoor, glued to the spot and immobile. He wanted to move his body and yet it did not respond. He wanted to cry out but no air passed his vocal chords. He was just frozen.
A panic set in and he felt as though he was sweating; anxiety taking over and a fear that he would never move again and be trapped in this nowhere land. His eyes darted about in the darkness and settled on two glinting shapes ahead of him. There was a horrible familiarity with those little points of light; it was these lights he had seen before the Vaa-Thalda descended upon them: before he lost Thane and Coda, before he had been set upon and mauled, before…
He could not remember anything else after that. What had happened to him to lead him here now? This could not be death, could it? Had he been denied his chance to become one with the Force? Was this that great absence fromeverything that sickened his stomach to conceive?
But then again, he was forgetting the eyes ahead of him. As he strained to see them, another shape arose below the eyes: a horribly demonic grin and, with it, the slow rise of a nightmarish cackle, which seemed to pierce his very core no matter how much he tried to block it out. Strangely, as the laughter grew, so did the grin and the orb-like eyes, until they seemed to encompass all of Bomoor’s forward vision. The laughter stopped abruptly, leaving the pure and uncomfortable silence, but the smile continued, hanging there in the air with no discernible body.
The haunting eyes began to dart around Bomoor and, in response, countless smaller eyes and grins began to appear and, thousands of lighter, piercing laughs erupted. Bomoor could do nothing but stare, feeling his spine turn cold as though a glacier was eroding down to his depths. With a final deeper chuckle, the centre face unlatched its jaw even further and crept forward; its spine-like teeth crept around the Ithorian until he was completely within the non-corporeal entity’s jaw and, with a swift stroke, the teeth collapsed down on Bomoor and he fell apart.
Feeling a sharp scratch, Bomoor’s eyes flung upon again. He knew immediately that he was back in the living universe as the pain he felt now was much more acute than the chilling pain from the unpleasant dream; that world now became distant where, moments ago, it had seemed like the only reality. His body hung, suspended in a web of knots tied to a cave ceiling, where numerous other oddments were also strung up around him: corpses of some small creatures and dried herbs Bomoor presumed were native to Caanus’ moon. Around the floor were various other items such as knives, bowls and rags.
The cave’s features were dimly lit by flaming torches that had been dug into cracks in the wall and the darting of the flames made it hard to see whether anyone was with him among the scattered items, but Bomoor was fairly certain that there was a lone living being with him as he could feel the faint whispering of a mind, although that same Force concealment was present with this being as it was with the other Thaalda on the moon.
The Ithorian wriggled slightly and felt the stinging of his still-open wounds rubbing the course fibre of the ropes that held him. His movement also rattled some of the other hanging objects around him, which seemed to capture the attention of the being he was sensing. It was then that Bomoor spotted it: an old and lanky Vaa-Thalda rose from the corner and slowly shuffled along the floor, supporting itself with some kind of indistinct staff. The creature was wrapped in some basic clothing but, from its form, it was clearly a female, but the years had eroded away any smoothness that her femininity may have granted her in the past and, as her full features came into view, she appeared even more skeletal than her brethren with her drooping jaw and glaring eyes gazing just like the face in his nightmare that had consumed him.
She reached where Bomoor’s legs hung down, narrowly missing the floor and began to draw herself up, using the staff for support. To his surprise, she seemed to grow thrice the size she had seemed when hunched over on the ground and she drew a long, elongated limb forwards to touch her captive prey. As her bony hand touched him, Bomoor flinched and the creature briefly cackled again but did not speak. Instead, she began to gaze at him once again, and those whispers Bomoor heard began to take form and formed a screeching, crazed voice in his head. He shook and resisted, but he was already hearing it and it would not release him.
Elenca, seethed a long, drawn-out hiss within the Ithorian’s mind, a selection of the barbaric screams seeming to coalesce together against the background of the other screams and murmurs within his assaulted mind, a shredded strand of malicious intelligence calling out from the grim effluvium. Elenca… captive… Captive of… the Blessed.
The creature raised her gnarled staff, and Bomoor could make out small distinct bones, like those decorating the den, dangling from it at irregular points along its misshapen shaft, as its tip was placed onto the former Jedi’s head, perfectly between his eyestalks.
Immediately, another roar of agonised screaming hammered Bomoor and he began to feel as though he was being hammered back into a state of dreaming by the assault on his mind. Unlike Thane's attempt to breach his mind, there was no resisting as though the thoughts of countless individuals were beings thrown at him, creating a torrent he could not swim against. His vision became misty and the decrepit female Thaalda in her dim cave disappeared, replaced by visions of other places and other times.
There were flashes of great emerald plains, reaching far beyond the scope of the eye, meeting a mesmerising magenta sky at the horizon. For a moment, it was as if Bomoor were being carried at great speed across those very plains as the images zoomed past him, faster than a standard open-top speeder could safely carry any organic. The motion increased in speed, but suddenly the landscape shifted, spinning upside down from Bomoor's point of view as he was now forced to gaze into a starlit sky.
Where amethyst clouds had been spiralling by, great archaic ships were now descending, the likes of which had not been seen since pre-history. And, just as quickly, the ships exploded into wisps of smoke, replaced by the sight of burning forests. The screams of the Vaa-Thaalda in Bomoor's mind reached an even louder crescendo, the noise culminating as several dark figures, appearing distinctly Human, marched through the smashed remains of huts built into those very-same trees, littered upon a swampy earth beneath.
Demons! The intelligent voices croaked malevolently. Thieves... murderers!
New images shuddered in and out of Bomoor's mind's eye. More ships were seen, this time landed atop crushed fields, with numerous humanoid beings herded onto them in great swathes. Intelligent, sad faces looked all about, as babes cried and men fought futilely against a menace far outstretching their capacities. Bomoor saw emaciated members of the same species plodding along aimlessly through a desert in one vision, and through a dead forest in another. Children collapsed from starvation, as holy men looked up in fear and awe at a mighty violet globe in the misty skies.
Exiled, the voices seethed, narrating the grim tale of woe, intermingling both scorn and anguish adroitly. Reviled...
The visions ebbed away with that last hiss, the forms of the dying humanoids fading to be replaced by the horrific visage of the matriarchal Thaalda standing before him, her malformed and narrow crescent-shaped face just inches from Bomoor's own, the dark abyss of her eye sockets boring into the Ithorian. Seeing his horror, she cackled as she had before, only louder and with greater sick mirth, withdrawing her staff from Bomoor's head.
Barely finding his voice as his heart began to slow once again, Bomoor whispered, "The first Caanan settlers... It was far worse than I could have imagined for the Thaalda..."
His eyes, still fuzzy,tried to focus on the staff that seemed to project this creature's thoughts upon him. It could not be a natural force that gave the Vaa-Thaalda this ability to communicate through telepathy; the early Thaalda he had seen in his visions were tribal and on the brink of civilisation, but what he had seen of the Vaa-Thaalda was more primitive and primal. The strange staff seemed to emanate Dark side power like he had felt at the tainted temple on Tython. He could feel this power as the visions washed through him and that same energy seemed to permeate all the Vaa-Thalda too but most keenly within the elder female before him.
"What..." Bomoor asked, "...is this power?"
Again, she cackled in the Ithorian’s face, yellow spittle stretching down from her upper fangs to fill her jutting angular jaw. “The… Cabal!” The Vaa-Thaalda actually hissed itself, although its vile, real voice stretched the word out hideously, even though its mouth did not seem to shift in any way to shape the words.
As before, she raised up the staff and she thrust its tip onto Bomoor with more force than before, and he was again dragged into a cyclone of foggy memories and broken realities.
Far-Fiends, the voices sang darkly, quieter and even more menacing than before. Slayers of Demons! And then, with more pronounced meaning, and with far fewer voices. Masters of Demons.
Bomoor’s swirling vision cleared, the fog separating to reveal a great gleaming palace, typical of Caanan design and an image Thane had shown the Ithorian several times of the years: his ancestral home. It quickly shifted to a large open room, and several dark robed figures advanced on a lone man clutching a sceptre, corpses strewn about him. Each figure wielded scarlet bloodshine blades. Before he saw its inevitable end, Bomoor found himself once more looking up to the murky skies of Vaa, the orb of Caanus hanging high above, until his vision was then dragged down into the earth below, as if being pulled down into the moon itself to be buried alive.
As he passed unharmed through the layers of ground, a thunderous cackling – not that of the Vaa-Thaalda matriarch – grew in volume, echoing all about him. The further he was dragged, the louder it became, until two glowing orbs of molten gold opened within the dirt before him, and a deeply malevolent presence could be felt, as good as being before Axion himself.
A laughing face carved itself out of the darkness, and the vision of the earth fell away, revealing a hunched, decrepit old man, cackling wildly as beams of lightning crackled from his outstretched hands, held upwards at either side of his tattered robes. Bomoor saw the Force-imbued electricity dancing around the chamber that had formed about him and this dark man, and saw that it was not so aimless; arcs of lightning were coursing into two fully-formed natural Thaalda, writhing on the floor and screaming in pain.
Bomoor himself then felt that pain, and the voices within his mind screamed, causing the Ithorian’s throats to clench in an involuntary reaction, the sound greater than any bellow he had ever mustered. He could see their forms shifting and their bones crunching under the might of the dark side. Their presences were being corrupted before his very eyes, the malevolence of this darksider spreading into their very souls.
The Cabal… The voices muttered, sounding weary as Bomoor continued to watch the spectacle unfolding before him, no reprieve or shifting visions to spare him the unholy sight.
The Cabal, Bomoor realised, was, in fact, Darth Cabal, the historic Sith that once ruled over Caanus, sitting on the very throne Thane’s family now held. If these visions were correct, then the horrendous mutations of the Thaalda here on Vaal were not the result of chemical exposure or natural adaptation, but instead though the flesh-warping power of Sith Sorcery. That meant that this aged Vaa-Thalda and all her kin were Sithspawn: corrupted husks of the true Thaalda that came before.
The former Jedi was forced to feel the corruption of their flesh through the ongoing connection and he began to shake and resist in fear that some of that corruption may pass to him. While many generations ago, the tainting of his people's homeworld Ithor still made him fearful of natural perversions: like a cancer, they spread and corrupted like the now-extinct Rakghoul plague, which survived and thrived for thousands of years after its creation. The legends suggested that the plague was brought about by a Sith talisman which, once destroyed, ended the curse once and for all. With that in mind, Bomoor thought of the staff now pressed to his temple; could a similar power be imbued within it?
He found it hard to maintain his focus, however, soon returning to images of the corrupted Thaalda being abandoned on the moon. In the cold and the dark, with what was once their homeland taunting them from the sky, filling them with such hate and rage. Bomoor felt it too.
“Release me!” he boomed, making the small cave room rumble slightly, before adding in equal anger, “What do you want!?”
Both the voices and the female Thaalda cackled at once, the matriarch throwing her head back in sick amusement. Elenca... released... they laughed, before the voices coalesced into a dark and intimidating tone once again. Elenca released... when Blessed released! The Thaalda raised its hand up before quickly throwing it down once more, a small object flying from her grasp into the dirt beside her. Immediately, a violet flame plume, licks of fire lapping upwards and casting ever more queer shadows all about the den.
In the smoke, the very familiar shape of a Corellian YX-1980 ship took form, just long enough for Bomoor to recognise it before the Thaalda swept the image away with her free hand, and with the other, she forced the staff harder against Bomoor's cranium.
"Eleeeeeeencaaaaa!" Release Blessed... to the Heavens! Free... from Misery... from the Cabal!
Bomoor yelled, writhing and gasping as more images flooded in. This time, this time of Vaa-Thalda escaping the planet: first travelling to Caanus and laying waste to the population, finding and corrupting their lost brethren on Kaon and then spreading out across the galaxy purging any ‘demons’ they encountered. But to the creatures, they could not differentiate between the Caanans and the other humans across the galaxy: they would purge them all, given the opportunity. Bomoor and Coda would be permitted to leave, but not Thane - Thane who was of their 'Pale Demons'.
The pain was excruciating, although he knew it was the pain the Vaa-Thalda felt over all these years. Seeing these visions from their perspective, made a part of him want to save them and help them thrive. But Bomoor knew the pitiful Thaalda souls were not the ones that wanted that future, but it was truly the curse wanting to spread and conquer in the name of Cabal. These creatures might hate his name, but they were still his thralls.
“You can… never be free…” Bomoor growled, tears forming in his glassy eyes, “Your prison is not this moon… it is… your very flesh… twisted… corrupted. That curse must not return to the galaxy. The spawn of the Sith… must… DIE!!!”
With a guttural roar, Bomoor turned that dark power coursing through him to his own strength and fuelled his muscles to tear away the binds that held him. As he broke free, he sent a wave of Force energy outwards in all directions, throwing away his aged captor and shaking loose most of the contents of the cave.
Crouched on the floor, he took in several deep, violent breaths of air into both his lungs. He felt a great rage; he thought again about the walking nightmares on this moon and could feel them now crawling all about the cave like insects. There was one yet with him, still dazed from being thrown across the room but beginning to rise again with the support of the cursed staff.
With gusts of Force-spurred wind continuing to billow about from Bomoor's person, the ancient Thaalda struggled to steady herself. Her limbs rattling and wobbling as he rose to her full, horrific height, she thrust the staff in the direction of her former captive.
"Elenca..." she growled, apparently seeing Bomoor's thoughts, although her wretched voice was obscured by the accompanying screeches echoing her words and warbling both within Bomoor's mind, and throughout the den itself, heralding the oncoming Thaalda defenders. "Beast... of Genocide!"
Again, she used the name of his herd from Öetrago to describe him but, this time, she spat it like a vulgar profanity. It sickened Bomoor to think of this warped creature, this product of the Sith speaking the name of his family in such a way and it only enraged him further.
He tightened his hands to either side of him, still unable to halt the flow of dark Vaa-Thaalda visions into his mind. He began to feel that crackling sensation again as he had experienced on Irrikut when he last attempted to channel this darker power; only this time, he felt no resistance from his body; no strain to unleash this power.
Bomoor finally brought his head up only to see that giant twisted jaw and orb-like eyes stretching towards him, as he saw in his nightmare. Only this time, it was real: in the dark and the Force-whipped air of the cave, the aged Vaa-Thaalda appeared to summon more power from the staff to engorge to a haunting size.
There was no more hesitation as the enraged Ithorian readied himself, “Not genocide!” he shouted, unleashing thick bolts of purple energy across the cave straight into the monster before him, coursing through her flesh and killing the twisted cells in her body and forcing her back against the cave wall. The energy rippled around the cave and several bolts flew back at Bomoor, searing his trunk as he pushed forwards and into the attack.
When he could hold out no longer, the bolts began to diminish and halted, leaving Bomoor gasping at the floor. The voices were weaker but he could still hear them. He felt his heart racing as the thought of still being linked to the Sith magic. Forcing himself up, he stumbled forwards to where the Vaa-Thaalda now lay, her tall form now withered and curled in on itself as though she had reverted to an embryonic state. The source of the whispers lay before her: the staff.
Finding his lightsaber still at his side, he ignited it and cut a deep gash through the ground, cutting apart the staff and the remains of the creature. As the staff broke, a greenish light burst from within it and Bomoor heard a rasping cry through his connection before the light receded back and, with it, his stream of Vaa-Thaalda thoughts ended.
Looking down, panting still heavily from all four mouths, Bomoor concluded his thought, “Not genocide… but correcting… a very old mistake.”
Something further had changed without the staff: even with the connection broken, he could now feel the Thaalda Sithspawn far greater than he had before. Their ability to cloak themselves within the Force had diminished. He could feel them all outside, waiting but not daring to enter the cave. He knew that they all had to die. With them gone, Thane and his people would no longer be threatened by Cabal’s ancient misdeeds and a dark imbalance would be corrected.
He ignited his viridian blade once again, its pale green light seeping into the cracks in the cave and casting shadows over the scattered objects within.
Genocide? he queried again in his head, finding the notion absurd, This is only pest control.
BOMOOR THORT
▼ Dark Side Shift
▬ Force Lightning Increase
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