Trial of a Lorrd: Genesis

Posted on Mon Oct 29th, 2018 @ 4:38am by Amare
Edited on on Wed Jun 8th, 2022 @ 2:02pm

2,075 words; about a 10 minute read

Chapter: Additional Stories
Location: The Sands of Time, Lorrd
Timeline: Midnight, Day 2
Tags: Amare, Sands of Time, wisps, young Zaracoda, transformation, lightsaber crystal, Thane

OLD:

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.

ON:

Coda braced herself for the impact, but no harm came upon her. Rather than the end of her life, it was the end of a dream. The dry parched crust of the desert flatlands could be felt pressing against her knees, gradually breaking down bits of the skin on them and feeding off the trickles of water from what little capillary blood it could draw from the weakened Nautolan woman. She found herself staring at her amber crystal in her palm again, a small beacon of living energy that cast a tiny font of light in the impenetrable Lorrdian darkness.

She blinked a few times at her heirloom, the intended heart of what was to be her first lightsaber, then looked up slowly and found that she was surrounded by a swirling storm of gusting sand and twinkling magick. Thick billowing currents of dust were intermixed with pulsing wisps of small indigo orbs with bright white cores each the size of her eyes. As she followed their seemingly random movements in the air, completely enamoured with their strange haunting ethereal beauty, she heard what she thought was amused giggling a short distance directly ahead.

“Hello?” Coda called out but received no reply. As she forced herself to rise to her feet, she felt her knees buckle under the soreness and pain of having knelt for what felt like hours on the hardened dry crust. There was further joyous chortling heard, and the voice became clearer. It sounded very much like a female, and very young as well. “Is someone out there?” she cried out with a heightened tone.

“We’re not afraid of you!” said the unseen child, her voice almost lost to the low howls of the sweeping maelstrom of desert sand. “We’re brave Jedi. We will stop you!”

Coda followed the sound of the voice through the gusts of sand that blasted her face. “Can you hear me? Hello?!” she repeated whilst shielding her face from the ravages of the sandstorm.

“Grrrr! Curse you bumbling robed fools! Raargh!” the child said in a playfully deeper tone, mimicking the stereotype of a classic weekend morning cartoon villain. “The galaxy will be mine! I will have my revenge! Ha, ha, ha!”

At first Coda could only see a vague silhouette of the child, but as she pushed further through the dusty haze, she found herself in the eye of the storm, a part of the ground transformed nigh flawlessly into the floor of her old bedroom in the Wolph family home on Glee Anselm. Seated upon that floor was the embodiment of her lost childhood, her innocence, her gentle and pure spark of hope.

The little Nautolan girl, dressed in the same long beige nightgown Coda remembered making by hand with her mother all those years ago, stopped playing with her little stitched toy dolls--including one that looked a lot like good old Kit Fisto, and another of a blue-skinned Twi'lek woman whose name escaped Coda...Aayla-something; the funny looking bad guy seemed to be a Zabrak with the little spikes on his head, black skin and red tattoos all over his face whose name she also couldn't remember. The girl paused to look up at Coda, and smiled with recognition. “Hello, lady,” she said warmly. “I told Capo you weren’t imaginary. You’re real! You’re my best friend.”

“I-I’m…” Coda hesitated to say, and offered her greeting as a friend would, “Hello, Zaracoda. It’s…been awhile?”

“Huh? I’m confused,” young Zara said as she warped her smile down to a frown. “You were here yesterday, and the night before, and…um, I see you like almost every night. And wow! You look so different this time. I like your dress. You look so pretty in it!”

“I-I do?” Coda asked as she looked down and saw her old clothes had indeed changed to something much looser and far more elegant. A long silk flowing dress of an unknown make and style coloured a deep purple that hung from her right shoulder and bound by a gold medallion in a toga-like fashion. Her left upper arm was adorned with a narrow golden armlet, and both forearms were fashioned in shimmering gold bracers with strange sigils engraved on them. She saw a strange obsidian black ring with bright red esoteric markings on the right index finger, and a gold ring with odd red symbols etched on it with a bright crimson red crystal as its centerpiece on her left ring finger.

“Here, look,” the child offered up her coral encrusted hand mirror that Coda recalled having often borrowed from her mother for girly narcissistic reasons. “Are you trying a new kind of makeup? I like how your face shines now. And how do you make your eyes light up like that? I wanna do that too.”

Coda held it up apprehensively and studied what had become of her face. There were subtle shifts in the contours of her countenance, as if she had grown more mature, perhaps five or so years older. Her cheekbones were a touch more pronounced, her lips fuller, her tendrils longer with barely perceptible spots, and the skin had been augmented from its soft bright cerulean blue pigment to a somewhat more bluish-gray pallour. Even her eyes had changed from their normal oily black to dark blood red orbs with faint shifting swirls of speckled yellow. When she gazed closer, she saw trace spider veins around her eyes, cheeks, and bases of some of her tendrils. They were akin to tiny hair-thin cracks in an otherwise flawless visage. The changes were not so much that she couldn’t recognize herself, but they were almost enough to make her believe someone else entirely was looking back at her. She found herself growing attached to the changes; they seemed natural, more fitting, and tangibly bolder. She rather liked what she beheld in the mirror, admired the air of surety to it, and wanted to be her so very much. She looked experienced, content…complete. But those strange little varicose veins…what did they mean?

“She…I…look so…” Coda stammered in awe of what she saw as she lifted a quivering hand up to touch her new face. “Is this…me?” She wondered if the image she saw was what she was destined to appear as, if it was merely how she wanted to look through her own imagination, or if it was just one among an untold number of other possibilities.

“It’s not fair!” little Zara pouted in a sudden shift in tone. “You get to be so tall and pretty, and I'm just a kid. And I still don’t even know your name yet. You promised you would tell me! Mother says it’s not nice to say, ‘hey you’, or, ‘hi lady’. It’s your turn to tell me your name.”

“My…name?” Coda hesitated. It was such a simple question with the most basic and absolute of answers. She wanted to say it, but her voice struggled to give it up. Zaracoda…that’s all she had to say, and yet…it felt off, unbalanced, like a broken mainspring in an old antique clock. Saying that name felt like a cheap lie even though every gram of logic in her head said it wasn’t. She knew this had to be an elaborate desert illusion she was communing with, but she understood this little Nautolan girl was the real unsullied Zaracoda Wolph at seven years old, still very much innocent and full of genuine hope and wonder. The youthful face, the cutesy melodic voice with the Sabilon Nautila accent, the mannerisms...it was all so perfect, just as she remembered herself as. Time, however, took its toll. She'd grown up, became a woman after earning a long series of scars--most of which couldn’t be seen except in her mind--and was now marooned in a haunted desert crucible that tested her endurance, her perception, and the very core of her sanity.

“Yes, silly,” Zara said with a giggle, wondering if her lady friend was playing some kind of coy little game with her. “Your name. Did you forget it?”

“I’m…Zaracoda,” she finally answered slowly. The name felt hollow as it escaped her lips. It sounded almost as meaningless to her as if she had said nothing at all.

“No, that’s me!” Zara corrected her with an annoyed scowl, folding her little arms against her chest, losing patience with her guest. “Are you trying to be funny? I’m the only Zaracoda ever in the whole wide universe. Mother says names are special and have a secret meaning for all of us. She says my secret is the most special of all. I don’t know what that means, but she says I’ll figure it out when I grow up. I hope I’ll look just like you when I do, but I hope I don’t forget my name either. That would make me really sad.”

“My name…” Coda whispered to herself and closed her eyes, desperately searching for the reason why her given name felt so wrong to her. Her younger self was right; it was a name that no longer belonged to her. It was a worn and withered identity that was only skin-deep for a simpler time…but how did she know that? What in the Force were her instincts trying to tell her?

“There is power in names, child,” said a distant, dry, and hoarse voice belonging to what sounded like an elderly woman of extreme age. “What is to be her name?”

“Zaracoda,” said another matronly voice, considerably younger this one. “Her grandmother’s name. Zaracoda Sozo was our last matriarch before the clan…before we lost everything.”

“That is merely the name for her outward flesh,” the elderly one retorted. “What is her true name? What is thy daughter’s name which shall forever mark her soul? Call upon the Force. Petition it. Unleash your passion upon the rivers of time. Use the bond you share with your newborn. Demand the truth, and it shall cast it upon thee! Do it before the egg hatches.”

“I…I can hear it…feel it…”

“Good, my child. Good. Now claim it. Bless thy daughter with her birthright. Declare it unto the Sisterhood. Make known to them the true name of the heir.”

The Nautolan slowly opened her eyes and softly repeated to the eager child the truth she heard from across space and time through the Force:

“Amare…I am…Amare,” she answered with a smile whilst feeling a strange, yet pleasurable surge of icy energy quickly run down the length of her spine. For just a handful of seconds, she felt all her senses come alive with greater clarity than she’d ever known throughout her whole life. The sensation didn’t last long, but for that brief moment of time, she finally felt centered, at peace with whom she was, and felt great relief that she somehow uncovered a truth about herself that she never previously imagined had existed. Those voices…this new name. Was it truly new, or was Amare whom she always was, whom destiny had planned her to be all along? Perhaps, she wondered, this was what Thane had hoped she would discover on her own: the truth about herself, and to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the path she was meant by fate to embark upon.

“Hello, friend Amare,” young Zaracoda said happily to her future incarnation. “Would you like to play a game with me?”

TBC

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