The Bastard Hammer
Posted on Fri Mar 22nd, 2019 @ 10:02pm by Thane & Bomoor Thort & Amare
3,088 words; about a 15 minute read
Chapter:
Chapter V: Unbound
Location: Inside the Mind Prison
Timeline: Unknown
OLD
The aura of the room suddenly flared to life and an energy once again flowed into the deceased being before them as he drew himself up again, “But you can!”
The two former Jedi felt a mighty tug as Nihl whipped out his hand and activated something within the stone casing of the ancient box. But their bodies stood still, almost calm, as the energy in the room faded and fell into darkness. The displaced spirit faded away until nothing was left but a Human and an Ithorian gawking at the silence.
But Thane and Bomoor were absent.
NEW
The word ‘void’ was often used to describe the vacuum of space: a lifeless expanse of emptiness. But, in reality, the space between worlds was filled with so much activity: starships, travelling cosmic bodies and even creatures that made it their home. But the place where Thane and Bomoor found themselves was truly a ‘void’: barely a place at all, but an infinite expanse of white nothingness with the only anchor in that nothingness, being the forms of the two displaced mortals.
A moment before, they had stood in the temple of Xoxaan, alongside the withering ghostly apparition of Darth Nihl, who had described to them the fate of an ancient Empire and how a long-forgotten war might have been the key to saving the Sith of his time. But the dead Sith had turned on them and, somehow, they had found themselves transported to this place.
The pair looked about themselves with some confusion, both finding the blinding white light around them quite uncomfortable after the darkness of the temple halls. It was a strange light: equal from all directions, rather than having a fixed source. Seemingly as a result, no shadows were cast upon the ground, which itself was that same gleaming white colour. They turned to face one another, “Are you okay?” Bomoor queried, fairly certain the pair of them had not simply died, “We don’t seem to be in the Temple anymore.”
"Astute," Thane replied, eyes narrowed and brow creased in both confusion and alarm at their rapdily-shifting predicament, a faint fury simmering behind a controlled outer veneer.
He looked down to his hands, turning them over as he examined both his limbs and his clothing for some answer to the questions racing through his mind. "I'm fine, thank you, but I confess; I am at a loss as to what has exactly happened." He looked either way at the endless white void, and then back to the floor, which in itself was absolutely perfect - there was not a single blemish, and the surface was devoid of any grooves or inclination.
Thane clapped once, and then once again a few seconds after. "This place... is wrong," he said, locking eyes with Bomoor as he continued giving voice to his thoughts. "I can still feel the Force - I can still feel you - but... I don't think we lost consciousness. It was instant. There is no technology that can do that that I know of."
Bomoor ran his long fingers along his trunk and then patted his large form. His fingers found flesh, but it was not as he remembered it: something was wrong with the world, wrong with him.
“I think,” he began, “It was no ordinary technology. If that spirit, Darth Nihl, was right, then the box was somehow imbued with the Force in a way that goes beyond the natural traces of the Force we felt elsewhere in the temple. A hybrid of machinery and Force essence, somewhat like a holocron, but even more complex.”
There was some sort of shift around them, or perhaps within them: it felt as though they had been pressed flat onto a sheet, which someone was bending and shaping. Then came the sudden sound of metal being flung against metal, but the vibrations were dull and muted like Thane’s clap. They turned around and saw, a short way off, a gathering of pillars and other objects, seemingly carved from the same sandy stone the box had been made from and bearing similar inscriptions. At the centre of the objects, stood a figure, working steadily at some sort of anvil. Had the person been there a moment ago or had he or she, like them, simply materialised in this void?
From where they stood, they could not make out the humanoid being’s features, but their skin had an rusty red hue, like a Devaronian but without the distinctive horns or bumps that protruded from their forehead.
“Hello there!” called a confused Bomoor, “Do you know where we are?”
The being raised his head a little to stare at them before beckoning them over with his free hand, before continuing his work with the other.
Bomoor turned to Thane, “Excellent,” he proposed, with sarcasm flowing through his now-less-echoic voice, “Well, this couldn’t possibly lead to something disturbing. Shall we?”
With a raised brow, Thane gestured towards the mysterious figure and his anvil in the white distance. "Please," he said in his own sarcastic tone, encouraging the Ithorian to walk first, following in Bomoor's wake apace.
As they strode across the empty void towards the man, their footsteps silent, a stark contrast to the muted thuds of his ceaseless work on the anvil, it became clearer that the stranger's skin was in fact not red, but rather a deep and unnatural-looking charcoal, a striking sight within the endless bright brilliance of their new environment.
With whatever light source illuminating the setting reflecting off of their target, Thane could see why that at first thought him to be red-skinned. Although it was less obvious as they closed the distance, he could now make out a crimson hue, which had an almost iridescent quality on the figure's skin, making the towering man's form appear even more foreboding than he had first considered.
Clad in shining plated armour only a few shades darker than his skin, the man stood in excess of eight feet and was far broader than any standard Humanoid. An angular but tattered red cape hung tightly from the oversized pauldrons that encased his thickset shoulders. The armour itself, the two former Jedi could now see, had a peculiar ripple effect in its design, and small Sith glyphs could be seen etched into the edges of each of the thick plates, and they, too, seemed to glint with an iridescent red glow.
The man now made no sign of stopping his work as both Bomoor and Thane reached him, instead continuing to bring down heavy strikes of a large smith's hammer into the gargantuan ebony weapon that rested atop the anvil. Each strike resonated within the Force, shudders of dark side energy cascading outwards with each powerful impact.
The weapon itself was unlike anything Thane had ever seen in person. A warhammer, it easily dwarfed any description the Caanan had read in historical texts, and was clearly designed to be wielded by a giant of a warrior. Aside from its size, the warhammer was unremarkable in its appearance in all but one other feature: a shimmering red jewel was encased within the centre of the hammer itself, where the shaft of the weapon met with the huge blunt instrument atop it.
Thane's eyes narrowed in recognition, just as he knew Bomoor also recognised the fabled stone.
As if sensing the pair's realisation, the hammering stopped, and the towering figure, who even made Bomoor appear diminutive, finally turned his huge frame towards them both. Perfectly in-keeping with the design of his armour and weapon, the man's features were dark and square. Piercing eyes of molten-gold, indicative of the alien's dark Force power, locked onto the young pair without so much as a glimmer of emotion.
Thin, fleshy tendrils lined the bald man's square jaw, and a series of spear-like bony protrusions framed his eye sockets and forehead - along with a series of deep and ancient-looking scars, all of which seemed quite at home on the being's warrior visage.
"It has been some time since any have trodden within my domain," he said in a deep, heavily-accented baritone voice, grasping his warhammer with one hand and lifting it as though it weighed no more than a few pounds. He brought it to his side at an angle, gripping it firmly just beneath the hammer, its length touching the immaculate white surface by his feet.
Despite the creature's appearance, Thane actually felt no violent intent emanating from him - not that he currently trusted any sense of judgement (Force-imbued or otherwise) after their supernatural transportation to this realm.
"I am Thane of Caanus," he introduced himself, "and this is Bomoor Thort of the Öetragan Ithorians."
If the names and planets meant anything to the man, he made no sign of acknowledgement, his glowing eyes betraying nothing of the man within. "What empire do you serve?" He finally asked. "Who are your masters?"
Feeling he was starting to understand the nature of their location, Bomoor cautiously answered the muscular being, “Depending on just how long it has been since you had visitors, the political powers that we speak of may have little meaning. As it so happens, we serve no masters but ourselves and the Force. We are citizens of the Third Galactic Republic but our travels often find ourselves outside the reaches of Republic space.”
Further eyeing the gleaming red stone that shone a deep red that now seemed to bathe them all, much like the light of Krayt’s holocron back on the Red Raptor, the Ithorian added, “For instance, the place we just came from was a temple to some of the earliest Lords of the Sith.”
Bomoor’s dark eyes, flitted back to the unknown figure’s own, wondering if the mention of ‘Sith’ provoked some reaction from him.
The alien's gaze rested on the speaking Ithorian but for a moment, and lingered a moment longer upon the pale Human beside him, who simply glowered back silently for the time being, sizing up this peculiar entity they had encountered. Already, Thane had suspicions about the origins of this newly-encountered spectre - for that is what he was, if the aspirant dark-sider's assumptions were correct.
Without saying a word, the charcoal-skinned man lifted his hammer and smashed its pole against the floor, an almighty cracking sound rushing from all directions at both Bomoor and Thane, although their host's visage did not deviate even a whisper from its stoic grimace.
"Another approaches."
A short time earlier in the Temple of XoXaan, a decrepit and blemished statue of an ancient Sith warrior performing its motionless sentinel watch over its assigned domain--a sculpture unremarkable and easily missed--was abducted from sight where it had stood for countless generations. The floor had rotated taking the statue with it to the other side of the trick wall, and what rotated in its place stood a Nautolan acolyte of the dark side emerging from the wrecked dungeon that had been the lair and laboratory of a Sith Lord that was fated to be forgotten by history.
Amare stepped off the part of the rotatable floor and spun around to see it slowly twist in place again, the mechanism turning the wall grinding heavily and on the verge of breaking as it turned to return the warrior statue back in its place like it had never been moved. There was a loud locking sound signaling that Amare was most certainly going to be Darth Archonus' final visitor for all time. It was also a tomb for her past; a girl named Coda had fallen into that lair with veins filled with a monster's poison, and a woman named Amare rose from that place victorious.
It was in that moment, inhaling the same air XoXaan once breathed long ago, that she felt almost perfectly...normal. The ever-present feel of the Force was still oppressively noticeable, but the feel of the azoth in Amare's body had grown entirely calm, the tingling having ceased as if it wasn't there to begin with. In spite of her near-death experience, falling into the pool of blood and being miraculously restored to health, all the fighting and abuse she endured, and the taxing exchange of words with Archonus and Alyndra having just happened...it all felt like a lifetime ago. She knelt to check the grav sled and made sure all of G2's vital droid parts were still there, placed her hand on the dome for a few grateful seconds, her lips curled ever so slightly into a half-smile, and rose to find her way back to her human master and Ithorian friend.
Such was her familiarity with the power and essence of Thane of Caanus by this point that seeking him through the halls of the temple was almost as simple as following a trail of breadcrumbs. Even though the scent wasn't there, her nostrils could emulate the flavour of his musk, and her mind could conjure the way he walked, always a straight posture with deliberate steps and strong hands never too far from his beautiful lightsaber. Everything about the man practically screamed confidence and ambition.
She was not accosted by Sith ghosts, yet she could feel their gathered presence, and knew that her sojourn was monitored by a gallery of envious and bitter "eyes" hidden and trapped in the ether, clinging desperately to their hold on the world that was their collective tomb. She spoke not a word to them, had no fear of them, and they mutually refrained from waylaying her progress towards the future and the fates that awaited her.
It was only a matter of time before she found those whom she sought... on the floor, unconscious.
"Master!" she called out to him as she rushed to kneel by his side. She turned him over on his back and started to shake him. "Master...Thane! Wake up!" She shook him again, and when that didn't work, a sudden temptation came over her, and she slapped his face hard, but received no response. She placed a hand on his forehead and could sense there was indeed life in his body, but thoughts were entirely absent, at least from what she sensed on the surface level. She turned to Bomoor and prodded and shook him as well, though more gently. "Bomoor, no...not you too." Likewise, the Ithorian was seemingly devoid of his mental presence as well; only the physical brain was there, but the contents were not.
It was then that she took notice of something odd nearby, a curious object particularly esoteric in design. Afore her eyes could focus on it, she was ambushed before she had even the faintest chance of reacting. Seconds later, there were three unconscious Force-users on the floor.
"What empire do you serve?" The powerfully built ebony-skinny warrior had asked. "Who are your masters?"
Shortly after Bomoor had delivered his response, a feminine voice interjected from behind her masters, "We are the heirs of the Sith legacy. You may call me... Amare." She sauntered casually towards them, a relaxed sway to her hips, a teasing smirk across her dark blue lips. It was clear beyond a shadow of a doubt to the former Knights, even in the strange new realm they found themselves trapped in, that something was distinctly different about their young Nautolan charge.
Despite the urge to address his apprentice, Thane said nothing for the moment, his curiosity with the alien tempered deeply by the unexpected and startling arrival of Coda. Or Amare, as she had introduced herself, a troubling but confident swagger having claimed the young woman's gait. Putting aside an instinctive frustration at her having befallen whatever trap Darth Nihl's spirit had led them into - whether intentionally or not - Thane still could not deny a certain sense of satisfaction at Coda's survival.
Yet again, Zaracoda Wolph had proven her mettle as his chosen apprentice. She had come a long way since the first lessons of Irrikut.
Bomoor too sensed the deep change within Coda. Her aura flared with great intensity, even in the muted world they found themselves in. He was relieved that she had not perished to the terentakek in the tunnels but sensed that something even more devastating had occurred but could not ask her now. Either way, the reunion of the three of them brought some strength to his being.
"You, mere grotthu, use words and speak of a legacy you could never comprehend," the man's deep voice resonated dismissively, his heavy brow dropping even lower over his sparkling, menacing eyes, which regarded Amare with a deeper malice than he had previously offered to Bomoor. He then turned away from the gathered trio, rose his mighty warhammer back onto the anvil, and continued working at the ancient, immaculate weapon. "My people are ash," he declared between metal beats upon the hammer, "consumed by time and false kings. You use false names. There are no Sith. We have no Lords. Only the Sith'ari remains." One heavy pummel sent another great shockwave of Force energy spewing from the anvil. "Only I remain."
Thane had braced himself against the rush of energy that had erupted from the being's work, whatever reality they found themselves in now doing a convincing job of simulating wind as his outer clothing rippled from the effect. His mind raced, alternately eager to address Coda and to engage with the ebony alien, humbled by yet another connection to those he was growing to consider his ancient forebears - even if the being did not agree.
"I would know your name," Thane announced, drawing some of his own darkness to imbue his voice as he took one step forwards, intent on deciphering the meaning of this entire venture.
A final slam of metal echoed after Thane's last word, the huge stranger silent and hunched over his work, not turning to face the group addressing him. "The Hammer, Bastard Brother of the Sith'ari Adas, and Scourge of the Infernals." The alien lifted his hammer once more and spun on his armoured heel, towering over Thane and his compatriots. "Little Dark One, I am Hazzarah Talmuz, King of All Sith and Bane of the Builders." With his free hand, Hazzarah made a small gesture to the infinite white void that consumed all about them. "This is my tomb."
TBC
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