When Serus Met Amare

Posted on Sat Aug 18th, 2018 @ 4:20pm by Amare & Thane
Edited on on Sat Aug 18th, 2018 @ 5:49pm

3,452 words; about a 17 minute read

Chapter: Chapter V: Unbound
Location: Yavin 4 temple ruins
Timeline: Hours after "All Roads Lead to Yavin...", night

OLD

Not for the first time, Thane wondered just how many lives he was corrupting through his choices - and how many more.

They left Coda alone in the torrential downpour, monsoon winds slashing across the open field where the ships were parked. She had half-expected Thane would demand the scuttling of her new ship; it was a gift for him to do as he pleased, she reminded herself. When she turned to go make preparations to carry out her orders much to her own chagrin, she had an ominous feeling as she turned back in time to see Thane boarding the Raptor with Bomoor.

It was a very bad feeling...

ON

The Silver Sigil, for whatever reason, had a self-destruct mechanism built-in with charges made of highly stable explosive composition planted near auxiliary power conduits and the hyperdrive core. It was a simple matter of unsealing the secure safe in the cockpit with a lightsaber, using the printed access codes stored inside, and executing the program on a time-delay. The ship's A2 droid had protested, and when Coda failed to convince it to cooperate with lies and reason, it actually resisted her by attacking with its tools. She retaliated with the Force to disconnect its power. She took it apart using the technique Bomoor introduced to her and further refined by the Rift Jedi, reprogrammed it to yield its memory into a data dump she transferred to a slicing computer she found on board--as well as the ship's memory banks just as Thane demanded--and to execute the self-destruct.

Coda stood outside in the din of dusk as Yavin's latest monsoon storm was waning to a light shower. She watched as the Sigil took off, and could feel Bomoor's eyes from behind as he watched from within the Red Raptor's cockpit. The former Rift Jedi starship arced upwards sharply towards the sky, and then in almost a flash became a blazing red ball of destruction and waste followed instantly by a visible shockwave. The howls of the wild denizens of Yavin were whooping and cawing chaotically in fear of the unwelcome disruption to their normal mindless lives.

Coda closed her eyes and looked away from the light of the blaze, and took a long, mournful breath, and looked back up one last time.

That takes care of the cremation, she thought bitterly with a heavy sigh. The remains of the Fosh padawan she slew were still on board. It wasn't exactly the kind of funeral she wanted to mark the end of her short-lived friendship. Such a waste...if only the padawan gave in and accepted her plea to join her. They could have explored the galaxy, the dark side, and their uncertain feelings for each other, together.

As the fireworks subsided after several seconds, and metal bits and chunks fell to the jungle floor below, Coda shook her head and swore to herself that she would disobey Thane the next time he ordered her to destroy a valuable ship that she rightfully claimed as her own. She had thought several times of betraying him while emptying the Sigil of its useful valuables, and just simply leaving Yavin behind. The Sigil was customized for intense speed in normal space, and, with A2's guidance, could've handily outflown the older Raptor. She even considered powering up the weapons and opening fire on the Raptor, but she couldn't bring herself to do either because of Bomoor, and because the Force enticed her back to Thane's command.

She still needed the Caanan to complete her transformation as a true Dark Lady of the Sith, and that meant ensuring his complete turnover to his true dark self as well. There was no room for compromise, no gray area, no contradictory in-between balanced nonsense; they were either Sith, or they might as well be dead. As for Bomoor, she only hoped he would stay out of the way when the Sith rose again, or she would have no choice but to carry out the unpleasant task of slaying him as she did the Jedi, or even going so far as to turn Thane against him if that's what it took. None shall stand against the dark side, even good friends that she genuinely still loved.

Her trials on Lorrd taught her that the desires of the Force trumped feelings and relationships every time. The dark side sought eternal vengeance against the light, and for saving her life when she should have otherwise perished, she swore to be its unyielding instrument of justice and wrath no what it took to achieve. It was her life now. The dark side was all she had left...and Thane. Her dear confused Thane.

Before Coda could return to her quarters on the Raptor to begin sorting out her ill-gotten gains from the Jedi, she felt a "call" from some distance away. This was the moment she was dreading since Thane had mysteriously vanished into the jungle some hours earlier. Dusk gave in to night, but the Force sent its clear message to her thoughts, flowed easily through her blood, and made her path through the ruins clear. After several minutes of trudging through a patch of jungle and skirting past shattered pillars and broken slabs wrought tirelessly by many calloused hands millennia ago, she found herself standing before an opening that led to some underground ancient corridor. There was torchlight at the bottom of the stairs leading inside, and a portal sealed with a heavy slab of stone.

She used the Force to slide it aside and unblock the way, and felt the stinging wave of Thane's omnipresent influence sweep over her. She couldn't see him beyond in the gloom, her low-light vision adjusting easily to the encroaching gloom in the halls before her.

"Master?" she called out to him, but there was no verbal response, only the deafening tyranny of his deepening rage; he heard her, was most definitely nearby. She raised her right hand above her, and it became a beacon of bright glowing blood-red light, a small faint column of waving red energy coiling into her palm. "I can feel you, my lord," she said, ignoring her fear and taming her anxiety as she approached the next blocked portal. "You are filled with rage. Good. You are not yet lost to the light. I have returned to help you. Do as you must. Channel your power. I am not afraid."

She removed the hood of her cloak, slowly gestured her illuminated hand in a wide sweeping motion to cast aside the next stone barrier, ventured through, and never expected the full intensity of power that ambushed her out of nowhere.

Unable to resist the invisible tight grip that now clutched her every limb, the rudimentary Force barriers Coda had developed since the commencement of her training shattered by the furious blast of telekinetic power, Zaracoda Wolph was plucked from the ground and thrown with great momentum into the rocky face of the far wall, nothing slowing or softening the impact.

Any attempt to recollect herself was torn away in the next instant, as the young Nautolan then found herself flung across the decaying chamber once more, this time into the opposite wall, and with perhaps more force than the previous impact. Several ancient stones dislodged with the collision, tumbling to the floor alongside Coda, who fell to her knees in a crumpled heap. Although her assailant was known to her, his dark rage permeating with thick, unseen tendrils into every crack of the chamber and every fibre of her person, he offered her only a brief reprieve before she was dragged, body stiff and upright, across the entire length of the room towards her host.

Paralysed and her body slanted, Coda's forward-jutting heels scraped unceremoniously through the saturated grime and dirt of the temple's once-regal flooring. The bottoms of her shoes tore and cracked with the speed she was Force-fully dragged as she finally faced the inevitable reveal of her attacker.

With the wind knocked out of her and her breath barely having returned to her, Coda's unnatural flight was finally halted as her neck collided into the outstretched palm of Thane, who, with the might of the Force, lifted his erstwhile apprentice's feet clean off of the ground, both his physical and telekinetic grip around her throat tightening. As was becoming a more common sight for the former Jedi Knight, his eye's were flashing golden with the fuel of the dark side.

Whilst Coda had witnessed Thane's ire before and sensed his palpable rage within the Force, on this particular occasion he was doing little to restrain the frustrations bubbling beneath the thin veneer of civility he maintained, allowing it to flow forth with an unbridled fury at the defiant woman.

"Is this what you want, girl?" He hissed, his voice imbued with a sickly-deep tone, giving his voice an aged and mystic tone entirely alien to the young man, and dark circles creased the sockets of his apparently-sunken eyes.

"Is this what you think it means to be a Sith?" Thane did not blink as he said the words, but only tightened his grip further, restricting nearly all of the airflow to the bloodied and beaten woman he had perhaps considered a friend. "Do you wish to lead your life like one of Axion's devotees, crushed and pitiful, a complete slave to the darkness and its many pathetic temptations?"

Thane flicked his hand forwards, sending Coda careering backwards into the jagged wall behind her, its various points digging into her back as Thane advanced upon her, his black cloak billowing with each menacing stride. The closer he drew towards her, the more pressure he exerted upon her, and his eyes appeared to almost glint brighter in the darkness of the long-forgotten Massassi temple.

Rain dragged the would-be Sith master's hair down across his forehead, having assaulted his pale visage through the large gaps far above the two Force users where something akin to a spire must have once stood, but he paid it no heed, his hand still gesturing maliciously at Coda.

"Do you not wonder why the Sith of old failed? Why they were stripped of their power and are so vilified by not just the Jedi, but by history in its entirety?" Thane brought himself within arm's reach of Coda, her body crushed against the wall but still hovering above the ground, his hand just an inch from her narrow features. "They were malicious fools, doomed to failure by their own greed, rancour and megalomania, allowing themselves to be mired within their own petty power plays, locked within an endless cycle of triumph and defeat with the Jedi. That is not who I am. That is not what my Sith will be!"

Although his hand did not move, Thane now brought his face and body in closer to Coda's, his pale lips resting beside the Nautolan's auditory organ as he whispered, antipathy dripping from every utterance. "If this is what you think power is-" he said, adding more exertion against the woman within the Force to punctuate his point "-if this is your vision for what the Sith should be... then you are just a disappointment."

Struggling to take back the breath she lost, her entire existence was now a world of pain. She wheezed and heaved, feeling pain just to breathe, and spat blood away from Thane. She had every reason to cry, to whimper, to give in...but she had already sacrificed most of her sorrows to the sands of Lorrd. She didn't have tears to spare on pitiful regrets, no fear to paralyze her body under duress as it once did. Her lips struggled with each hellish breath to curl into an expression of...amusement. She began to chuckle, but ended up coughing even more sanguine spittle.

"Th-there's...m-...my...master," she barely managed to say before adding, "W-...we're more...alike than..." she coughed again, wheezed and added, "...you know. You wish to avenge...th-those...Jedi? Or...perhaps slay...me...just like...L-Lor...her...?"

The last comment caught Thane off-guard, but he quashed the feeling quickly, but still wondering how the other dark-sider had divined his most exclusive secret. He released Coda and spun on his heel, turning to face away as she recovered herself. The Caanan let his shoulders heave slightly as an exasperated breath escaped him. "Then you still do not understand," he said, his voice still not quite having lost that arcane timbre.

Coda took a moment to catch her breath, uncertain if she had broken anything, or if her Nautolan constitution--combined with the bits of Force-imbued resistance she applied to herself to subtly soften the impacts after the first wall strike--spared her from becoming a cripple yet again.

"I don't..." she remarked with another coughing fit, her voice raspy from all the irritation of the blood in her airways. "And...I do...those two...weeks...haaangh!" she cried in pain as she tried to stand up, but failed, her entire spine racked with stabbing pain. "Ngh...oh, ohhh...the sky beast...and...and the herald who said things...'Zara, oh Zara, go to Rakata'...I remember the nurse...said I died on the table...heh...hard to believe...and I saw it...the maw...the end of all things. Wolves...Wolphs...the mad doctor...bastard used me...made him pay...saved lives...and...ohh, my Fosh friend...I'm so sorry...didn't want to kill...sh-...she...she was..." She tried to force tears of mourning and regret, but none came.

The shoto ignited in Coda's jittering left hand as she studied its captivating chartreuse-hued short blade as she sat braced against the wall. "...beautiful. Just...as you were...to me on Vaa." She disengaged the blade and let that hand fall limply at her side, the shoto rolling away a few inches from her grasp. She stared fondly at the small metal Jedi masterpiece, and while it wasn't originally her creation, she had taken it apart and modified it enough times with the Force to where it might as well had been hers from the beginning. As she regarded it with a cavalcade of mixed emotions, she was feeling as if she were on the verge of losing consciousness.

She wondered if this was the final sum of her life, if the predictions and instructions from the dark herald in the Lorrd desert were never meant to be fulfilled. Perhaps it was just another tease to give her false hope; a miserable twenty-year existence comprised of a long string of failures topped with confusion, terror, wonder, and peppered with such empty promises of a better tomorrow...of great accomplishments...of rebirth.

"Master..." she said weakly, barely more than a whisper, her eyes failing to remain open, but there was just enough of her old self to push a single tear free from her tainted soul. All of her travails, all of the anguish and exhaustion from the last two weeks, and now this brutal punishment...she was falling from the edge of her extreme physical and spiritual limits. It was far beyond anyone like her could take. She slowly reached a shivering hand out to him, using all she had left just to hold it up "...please...forgive me..."

Thane felt it before he knew it, or even understood it - that which he was feeling for and from Zaracoda. Although he was still turned away, the grim darkness that had gripped his chest so tightly moments before was now giving away to a sense of achievement and deep relief.

After leaving the young woman sobbing in her pain and wretched emotional turmoil, he finally turned to her in her crumpled position on the floor, dropping to one knee and taking her chin carefully in one hand as he took her own hand in his other. All aggression had left him; whilst his eyes still glinted with the occasional spiral of starlit-gold, his eyes seemed young once again, and his voice was his own.

"There is nothing to forgive, Zaracoda." Although it took a great deal of effort to call upon the Force in such a way, Thane did his best to imbue the Nautolan with an healing aura, the technique spurred on efficiently by his own growing goodwill towards her in that precise moment. "It seems I was the one who perhaps misspoke," he half-lied with purpose. "You do understand, finally."

With the Force being used to assist him, he did what he could to soothe and assist the woman to her feet. Although the admissions of the woman had pleased him, he held no regrets for his extreme action, for it had been the catalyst, presumably, to revealing the true face of this 'new' Zaracoda Wolph. Whilst there was so much to learn about her time on Lorrd, as evidenced by the brief glimpses offered in her own pained words, such things could wait.

"That sense of ambivalence," Thane said slowly, the barest hint of a tear threatening to strike through his welling eyes, "and to make that terrible, damning decision, either for the galaxy or for your own sanity or self-preservation... that is what it means to truly comprehend the sick, sublime majesty of the dark side - to truly comprehend what it means... to be Sith."

As the rain continued to tumble between the desiccated and cracked bricks, exacerbated by their absent counterparts where the roof had once been, the two young darksiders weaved their way carefully through the ancient temple.

Thane himself felt heavy, struck both by the admission of his apprentice and his own welling emotion. With Coda having already threatened to utter the name of his own sacrifice on his path to power, he glanced to her quickly, sighting her damaged face as he did, and wondered at how she, the woman he had potentially erred with when electing to take her as a Sith pupil, was perhaps the only individual in the galaxy to finally understand what it meant to-

-to do what I had to on Jericho. What she had to on Lorrd. What we must do.

Even Bomoor could not comprehend that. Not now, anyway, either through words or through their nascent Force bond, which in itself presented innumerable complications.

"You have done what no ordinary being can," he went on softly, their footsteps drowned out by the echoing downpour and howling winds both inside and out. "But we should not revel in the glory of death. Instead, we are shaped by it; destroyed and rebuilt by it, and it becomes us. But we should not love it, nor should we mete it out ignominiously, for we are not barbarians. To love something, but be willing to sacrifice it..."

Thane then paused, the young pair now stood by the final exit from the crumbling Massassi temple, Coda leaning heavily on his dark-clad arms as he searched her dark aquatic eyes. "To risk being vilified for committing acts the mundane creatures of this world would not understand, that that they would deem horrific and unforgivable, but be willing to do it anyway... That is the ultimate burden so few would ever understand." A genuine, albeit small, smile played across the Caanan's pale features. "To be Sith is not to be cruel, not truly. It is to know pain and loss, and to care enough to do things that people such as the Jedi would call cruel, but to do it anyway. It is to be... more." He brushed some of the precipitation from Coda's face, his eyes a crisp blue. "It is to be what you are, Zaracoda. My apprentice."

Coda smiled softly and sought to give him the answer he deserved, but tried as she did, the words simply would not form from her breath. A stinging white aura in the periphery of her vision flared, and loud ringing in her auditory canals chimed with agonizing pain as the concussion she was inflicted with, but hadn't noticed before, was taking hold. Even with Thane's healing, the injuries were still quite severe. He had saved her from death, but there was an abundance of strength he applied in his telekinesis on her soft frame that he might not have intended. She began to lose her balance, but managed a single telepathic word to him just before she passed out in his arms:

Chrysalis...

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