Trial of a Lorrd: Fury
Posted on Sat Oct 6th, 2018 @ 8:43pm by Amare
Edited on on Wed Jun 8th, 2022 @ 2:01pm
2,214 words; about a 11 minute read
Chapter:
Additional Stories
Location: Black Rock Desert, Lorrd
Timeline: Day 1, late evening
Tags: Dark Herald, Irrikut
OOC Author's Note: This part of the tale of Coda's travels on Lorrd was related to Thane and Bomoor during their trek through the Valley of the Dark Lords on Korriban on the way to XoXaan's Temple...
ON:
There was silence in the wasteland. The air was almost arctic, but its flow was perfect stillness. There were no sources of light in the late night darkness, and the moon spared no solar reflection upon the dry desert expanse. Even the stars themselves could hardly be seen, yet the skies were naked to the universe lacking in cumulus clouds.
Zaracoda felt the shiver-inducing bite of Lorrd past twilight, colder than anything she ever experienced. It cut through her clothes, made her fingers and head tresses feel numb, and not even Bomoor's worn Jedi cloak was enough to fend the chill from her tender blue skin. There was no shelter from the freeze. There were no means to produce a fire. Even the Force technique of Tapas she learned from Thane on Irrikut seemed to have no effect. The environment spared no options; it yielded little hope of survival.
All she could do was keep walking and breathing. The faint huffs of her breath that slipped past her dry and cracked lips of which she could see intrigued her sight, having never visibly seen her exhales before. It was the only distraction she had to take her thoughts away from the Damoclean spectre of her failing health hanging precariously over her.
In a moment where her body aimed to misbehave, her legs began to feel wobbly and unstable whilst the rest of her began to shiver uncontrollably. The air seemed to feel even colder, and the flat desert itself gradually appeared to be fading, even from her natural low-light vision. Her right foot dug into a narrow riven in the ground, and she tripped over and tumbled to meet the kiss of the desert floor face-first.
For a few moments, she didn't move, her pain and exhaustion overriding her instincts to rise up and press the advance, but there was a gleaming caveat next to her which commanded her attention. She could see its faint golden glow in the din of a descending, imperiously darkened night.
The crystal called to her, beckoning her attention. It somehow slipped from her robe's pocket when she fell, and it dared to shine its faint light. She reached out to it, heeding its eldritch summons, and it leapt through her Force pull to her hand. She could feel a degree of warmth she never noticed from it before, and its aura gave her much needed respite from her pain and exhaustion. She gradually pulled herself up, but did not rise, rather sat on her knees and cupped the crystal in her hands in front of her. As it reflected against the oily black sheen of her large Nautolan eyes, she thought about its importance, and how it served as the catalyst of her entire journey. A man had died simply because she wanted it back when it was taken away from her, and now she was all alone in an endless desert, gazing into crystalized mineral depths, feeling herself captivated by its haunting otherworldly glow, her mind laser-focused and drawn in by its power...
When the veil of darkness lifted, the crusted Lorrd desert floor was replaced with cold hard stone of an ancient pathway. A brilliant flash as blinding and hot as the surface of a star slashed at the earth some distance away followed with an ear-jarring blast of thunder that sent shockwaves all around Coda. She flinched, dropped the crystal, and covered the sides of her head where her auditory slits were, shaking with terrible fear at the unrivaled power of nature. She held her eyes shut for several seconds, expecting another electric hammer to drop from the heavens shrouded in an endless hazy sea of grey mist, but instead, two beams of coloured light lanced out from behind, the tips stopped just short of the sides of Coda's head. She could hear the constant, loud humming of the lightsabers as she slowly opened her eyes, and could see them glowing in a very aggressive crimson red from the periphery of her sight.
"Do not look upon us," demanded one female voice behind and to her left.
"Do not speak a word," said another female to her right. "Proceed through the portal ahead and attempt no escape."
"You are expected," said the first voice. "Do not keep the mistress waiting."
Coda retrieved her crystal and slowly rose up to her feet. There was another flash, this one further away, and Coda looked skyward just as the thunder rolled across the plains. Directly ahead was a tall and very familiar plateau where she had descended into depths filled with skulls and aquatic Force manifestations that sought to kill her. It was hard to forget that environmentally chaotic world, but she had no doubt where she was...
Irrikut.
The passage wound deeper into the forgotten earth faintly lit only by the red glow of the lightsabers at her back. They passed by a familiar subterranean waterfall she had seen when she escaped the ancient dungeon, moved through old torch-lit corridors lined with mildly warped wooded doors leading into side rooms with stone walls covered with strange green bio-luminescent algae, and descended a tightly spiraled staircase that led further into the depths.
"Speak," said the first female guard. "Who are you to our mistress? What makes you so important to her?"
"I don't know why I'm here," Coda answered honestly, "or how I got here. I was in a desert on a planet called Lorrd just now, abandoned by my master. Where are we going? Is this the--"
"Be silent!" the second guard snapped at her as they reached the bottom of the stairs, and stopped Coda in her tracks by bringing the red blade around and perilously held it in front of Coda's throat. "You do not get to ask questions unless given the privilege by the mistress. Understand?"
Coda nodded a few times, swallowing her fear down hard.
"Continue," said the second.
A moment later, they reached the end of another long dark corridor of front of a stone portal shaped like an isosceles trapezoid with a strange arcane symbol carved on it that bore the face of a feminine Nautolan with her head tendrils spread out in all directions, almost akin to the image of an ancient goddess her species once worshiped whose name escaped her recollection.
"Enter," ordered the second guard.
Coda stepped forward, but the passage would not yield her entry at her approach. She glanced over her shoulder, "It won't open. Can you--"
"Do you always expect others to open doors for you?" the first one said with a tone of seething contempt. "Spoiled little twit."
"If you do not open the door, we will end you right here," the second one promised with malicious delight. "And believe me, it will not be a quick death. You will suffer."
Coda's multiple heartrates were skyrocketing, and she tried her best to keep herself from crying as she turned to face the door. She reached a hand up to touch the engraved Nautolan image.
"Do not touch her!" said the first. "No one defiles the mistress' image and lives."
"Don't be an idiot, girl," the second added gruffly. "You have intuition. Use it, or die. This is your last chance."
Coda closed her eyes, half-expecting to be skewered at any second, and half-searching for the secret to the door. There was a way...there had to be a way...and then the words from a certain Ithorian friend flowed back into her mind:
Telekinesis, in all its forms, involves no physical connection with the objects you manipulate, allowing for far more subtle manipulations to be made.
She held up both hands and projected her power upon it, plying just shy over the texture and seeking a means to force it to yield under the pressure of her power. It resisted her, and the engraved Nautolan image began to ignite and glow in a distinct cyan light.
"Open the door," the first guard said more calmly, almost sounding motivational and less hostile. "Break the line. Uncover the truth."
"Expel your fear," said the second, her tone also changed to an almost coaching voice. "Don't you ever give up. Surrender is death. Open the way...do it!"
Coda groaned under the pressure which pushed back hard at her, and she began to feel an overwhelming urge to give up and cry. She then felt something...a slap? It struck her across her face once, and then again.
"Stop it!" she cried out. She was met with another light strike to the face. "I said...STOP!" The sigil from the door gradually shifted from cyan to viridian, then to violet and amber before finally sparking a small fire along its outline when it reached blood red. Coda kept pushing, fighting, and threw all her feelings into a defiant fit of rage. She screamed out her anger, her contempt, her hatred. She hated feeling so weak, hated feeling like she was always under someone else's control.
No more barriers.
The stone slab slowly sank and grinded into a slot in the floor.
No more threats left unanswered.
She whirled around, her eyes ablaze in ruby red light, the swirls in them streams of shimmering gold. All her power was directed into her hands, both aglow in crimson light, and she bashed them with her blind fury sending both ashed-faced females nearly a dozen feet back. Coda marched forward, reached a hand out, and made a pull motion at the first guard who saw her lightsaber fly into Coda's hand. The saber was ignited and then thrown like a javelin which seared its way straight through the guard's heart, ending her almost instantly.
The second guard fired up her blade and lunged with an overhead slash. The effort, however, was futile as Coda reached out with her other, made a grip-like gesture and stopped the guard in mid-air. She was flung into an adjacent wall, then violently slammed into the opposite wall where she dropped her weapon. Coda opened her hand, let the guard fall to floor and set herself upon the grey-faced woman. She savagely raked at the guard's face with the pointed tips of her fingernails, slashing lines of blood to and fro, then gripped the sides of the guard's bald head with both hands and began plowing the occipital bone of the skull hard on the stone wall until smearsh of blood were pasted at the sites of impact. Coda's hands hungered, and she physically gripped the throat and began to drain the remaining life energy through her power. The guard's skin began to warp and wrinkle up like a prune and change to a darker gray colour. She finally let go when the skin on the throat became so brittle that her fingers were touching exposed vertebral bones.
Coda rose up and backed away, breathing rapidly like a lone beast still flush with adrenaline after a pitched battle with a pack of wolves. She stumbled and fell back on her side almost drunkenly as the walls in the corridor rumbled for a couple of seconds from the direct impact of a bolt of lightning far above on the surface. She stared at the victim she just tore up and sapped clean, started to smile, and then was struck with the horror at what she'd done.
She looked down at her hands, covered in blood, and felt for a brief second that it seemed like they didn't belong to her. "Wha...what have I done?"
In the distance beyond the open portal, echoing from the darkness in the room therein, came a series of retching phlegm-filled coughs. Startled, Coda rose up to her feet and turned to face in the direction of the coughs. Then, behind her, was the sound of a whirling current of air. She glanced over her shoulder in time to see a coiling column of what looked like black smoke descending effortlessly down the long twisting staircase. It was shimmering with faint sparks of green light, each looking like clusters of stars in a dark gaseous nebula.
There were the sounds of sinister laughter coming from the dark room mixed with short coughs. "Are you afraid, child?" asked a voice from that room that was almost identical to Coda's very own. "Yesss...I think you should be."
The snaking column of smoke conflated into a larger mass that completely blocked the only means of escape from the dungeon that Coda knew of. It approached her slowly, stalking her, threatening to envelop and consume her whole.
"When you dare to look upon your inner self long enough," said the faux-Coda woman, "that part of which you have denied and scorned for so long will gaze back upon you with great vengeance, and a righteous fury. The truth, Zaracoda, shall no longer be ignored. The truth will have justice upon thee!"
With a howling tornado-like roar, the dark cloud attacked Coda with the rush of a freight train.
TBC
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