Oath of Enmity

Posted on Fri Jul 29th, 2022 @ 7:52am by Rusasha Djehuti-Lahan & Rynseh Lahan & Zenarrah Sozo & Amare
Edited on on Fri Aug 19th, 2022 @ 12:49am

3,765 words; about a 19 minute read

Chapter: Chapter VI: The Last Bastion
Location: Corellian YB-series Light Freighter; Jedi secret hangar, Coruscant
Timeline: Follows "The Sound of His Voice"

OLD

Moments passed, and when the message was over, Amare found herself reaching a hand out to the image of her biological father as it winked out. She wasn't sure whether to let herself slip into a motionless state of apathy, or slash her own throat, but the decision was made when she felt a peculiar sizzling in the back of her head. A neurological surge down her upper spine briefly alerted her within the space of an eye's blink, her body's way of responding to a profound shift in the Force nearby. It was just like it was back in the Bogan Archive in the Reborn Temple.

Another Jedi! she thought in recognition and fear. They've found me again. No...not here. Not now! Do I leave without mother, or make my stand? Don't dawdle like a stoopa, Amare. Do I run, or go down fighting like all the dark legends before me? Make your choice...

NEW

Several minutes earlier...

Three jarringly loud industrial alert klaxons sounded heralding the unsealing of something that hadn't been opened in a very long time. Rotating yellow caution lights further enhanced the automated warning to nearby workers that weren't even present in the rarely visited water pump station. A three inches thick reinforced vault-like steel airlock groaned as its locks snapped off their hinges allowing the portal to roll aside within an alcove in the wall in which it was installed.

Out came a rushing torrent of water and a single being in a navy blue diving suit washed out to the floor face-first. The cascade pushed Rusasha Lahan several feet across the slick oily floor until coming to a stop. She groaned and struggled with sore muscles to turn and flop over onto her back. Her arms were spread at her sides as if she were preparing to make snow angels while she gasped for air. Frantically, she reached up, grasped the sides of her diving helmet, and twisted it off and threw it aside. She hyperventilated several times, then began coughing as her lungs attempted to process the ripe industrial air. She had heard numerous subsurface areas of Coruscant were experiencing major sanitation issues due to lack of maintenance caused by budget shortfalls in public works projects, but she didn't know the air could be quite this foul.

"Ugh, we have to get out of here," she said as she forced herself to her feet and looked around for her friend. "Zen? Zenarrah?! Where are you?" She turned to the drainage gate from whence she arrived and ran towards it. "Zen--! Ahhh!" The slick oily algae on the concrete floor foiled Ru's reliance on friction to keep her footing and she found herself flat on her back yet again.

She was more than a little concerned that she allowed herself to fall in spite of her instinctive precognition through the Force having warned her and attempted to help her compensate. However, she was already worn down and exhausted from her ordeal swimming through well over a kilometer's worth of Coruscant's treacherous water supply system. She didn't even want to think about how many times she nearly lost limbs and her head to big spinning turbines and laser security grids. Cathar were not exactly water adverse in spite of their fur-covered bodies, but the experience made her not want to take a dip outside of hygiene purposes for a good long time, if ever again.

She groaned again with thanks to the Force that she managed to avoid hitting the back of her head from the fall as she gingerly tried to hoist herself back onto her feet. She slipped somewhat before managing to find her center of gravity and steady herself.

"Blast it, Zen," she muttered, smarting from the pain. "You went back in to cover our escape, didn't you? Now what am I supposed to do?"

Ru pulled her palm-sized holo-comm discus from her utility belt and switched it on to get her bearings. The image displayed a schematic of the area she was in and showed a pulsing green dot indicating where she was. There was now another pulsing dot, a red one revealing the location of the low frequency beacon installed on Zen's ship. She then recalled Zen's instructions before the water pipe journey began.

"'Start the engines and wait no more than seven minutes'," she recited to herself. "Why seven? Favorite lucky number?" She shrugged, coughed some more and cautiously made her way out of the drainage room to pursue the signal.

---

Zenarrah couldn't believe her stroke of bad luck.

My relationship with bombs... she thought to herself as she swam through the flooded public works pipe that was about ten feet in diameter. ...There always seems to be a dud. Rynseh wouldn't be alive today if the bomb near him on Balmorra went off as it was supposed to. Must be the damned Force. I have a bad feeling it's leading me into trouble right now. I hope Zara made it to the ship safe and sound. I wonder if she'll be accommodating to Rusasha when she gets there.

After much swimming against bursts of water currents that worked against her, Zen located the defective magnetic thermal detonator on the other side of a large junction basin a few dozen feet in diameter that served as an intersection for piping of water to the Jedi Temple and to parts elsewhere on Coruscant. She could see the mouth of the pipe on the other end where the explosive was placed, the very first in a series she had planted to cover her and Rusasha's escape. Its light-emitting diode was not flashing indicating that it wasn't properly armed, or that there was a short in the remote detonation receiver.

"Blast it," she muttered to herself, although her words were unintelligible in a water-filled environment. She began to swim to it, but then stopped halfway as something inexplicable came over her. She couldn't see into the gloom in the pipe ahead, even with her natural low-light vision, but the feeling she had didn't require her to. With eyes fixed on the failed bomb, it spontaneously shot towards her through the water at break-neck speed. With almost total reliance on the Force, she was able to reflexively wave her hand to deflect the pitch of the metal ball away from her, but upon impact with the other end of the junction container there was a concussive blast of fire and thick plumes of flash-boiled water.

Zen was thrown hard back towards whence she arrived, her back impacting the metal plating next to the pipe she swam in from. Her hearing was abuzz with loud ringing as she groaned from the punishment to her spine. Nautolans were a particularly hardy people, especially in their natural habits underwater, but a bomb was a bomb, and it turned out that it wasn't a dud after all. Fortunately, it didn't explode with its full yield. If it did, the entire junction would have completely collapsed. Instead, it was merely creaking and groaning under the pressure of lightly ruptured metal and water spraying out through the fissures.

As Zen struggled to regain her bearings, the Force once again was with her as she was barely able to spot and evade just in a time a powerful font of indigo light surging like a torpedo straight to her head. Having just barely missed her by inches with its initial thrust, she retaliated with a telekinetic push with the Force and beheld the man and his hands guiding the indigo lightsaber that fell just short of slaying her.

"I see the noble guardsman failed to stop you," she said as she activated her cyan lightsaber, seeing a man in a strange mask wearing a standard-issue diving suit with helmet. She saw the helmet was equipped with a device that enabled the man to hear her words and convey his own clearly as if they were speaking to each other in dry air. "Did you at least make his death quick?"

"If it eases your rotten soul," said the masked one as he managed to keep himself from being slammed into the plating behind him, "then know that he lives, but soon he'll wish we took his head instead."

"Your voice," Zen noted. "I know you. I remember when you were just barely an initiate. You joked to your clanmates the first time you met Master Quellus how ugly and mean looking he was after he left the room, and then you got scared when you saw a guard nearby who overheard your rude words. That guard was me, and I never said a word to anyone. I never would have thought you'd grow to become one of his foolish zealots."

"Where is Rusasha, traitor?" the masked one barked at Zen.

"Safe and leaving Coruscant by now," she bluffed, undaunted by the man's branding of treachery upon her. "We parted ways right here, and I made arrangements. You'll never catch her in time. She'll be somewhere in the Outer Rim soon, far away from you and that bastard father of her's."

"I'll be sure to remove your blasphemous tongue before I strip of you of your life," the zealot spat at her.

"Careful, boy," Zen warned him with a confident smirk and condescending tone. "Words like that will turn you towards joining the very darkness you morons profess to hunt. It could get you into trouble."

With that, the masked one growled with frustration and used the Force to propel himself through the water with the aquatic celerity of a vicious Karkarodon out for blood. Indigo and cyan energy blades clashed and locked both warriors into a perilous bind.

---

The atmosphere inside the Prowler's Pursuit felt heavy, more akin to a mortuary than a Corellian freighter. The daughter of Rynseh Lahan did not feel welcome.

"Hello?" Rusasha called out as she took her first proper steps inside the poorly lit ship's interior. "Anyone here?"

Her ears twitched from the reply of silence. Her feline eyes attempted to adjust to the minimal lighting provided only by light diodes from nearby wall panels and the emergency lights coming from the corridor leading to the cockpit. She placed her hand on her lightsaber hilt as she considered using it as a makeshift light source but then remembered the warning the temple guardian said about its damaged emitter, and so she nixed the idea and moved her hand from it. All she could hear was the low hum of secondary power units and climate control systems running barely above the standby mark.

"I need to get this ship running," Ru muttered to herself, then proceeded to shiver as she noticed her breath in front of her face. "And why is it so bloody cold? I thought Nautolans preferred warm humid air." She rubbed her paws together to stimulate some heat on them and looked down at her bare exposed fur-covered feet, cold and damp from her trek through the water works. The diving suit felt much more comfortable to wear now that she was drenched, but while it did a decent job showing off her curves, it was made from a breathable organic second-skin material intended for competition swimming and was not ideal for abnormally low temperatures. The gaudy GalactaWerks logo on the chest wasn't exactly thrilling to see either.

As she started towards the cockpit, she froze in place as her sharp angled ears perked up upon hearing what she thought was a man's voice in a nearby room. She turned about and witnessed nothing unusual in the gloom.

"Is someone there?" she called out as she continued to hear the voice speaking as if he were having a conversation with another person. She cautiously followed the voice, her footfalls measured and silent just as Master Loren taught her, no louder than the head of a needle falling to the floor. Furthermore, her suit made no awkward rubber-like sounds much to her relief and thought something like it could be useful in the future if she needed to be stealthy again.

When she reached the room, she found the source of the voice. A projector table was displaying the holographic image of a young Nautolan man wearing a flight suit and jacket smoking a cigarro. Rusasha was only slightly late to hear the remainder of the message.

"...I don't have much time," the Nautolan said in a somber tone, "so before you start bawling your eyes out or go tearing things up in my ship in a hissy fit, please...hear me out..."

Rusasha stepped further into the room and took a seat on the stool next to the projection table.

"Your mother and I put our heads together," the man continued, "had a nice long talk, and we decided it was best to leave you with the Wolphs until the two of us could get our affairs in order. You see, your mother was in a dark place, mentally that is. Those Jedi blowhards sent her to no-man's-land...like, literally no place for a man. It's a red ball of hell called Dathomir, and her job was to rescue some Jedi that went there on a diplomatic mission and disappeared. Couldn't blame her, really, for volunteering. She was getting tired of standing around playing Temple security guard all day every day under a stuffy ceramic mask. So off she went to go play the hero, got shot out of the sky, survived, and the crazy witches there captured her, and...they, um, well...they did some pretty bad things to her, exposed her to things she said she could only describe as 'the stuff of nightmares'. And then, one day, after they broke her, they invited her into their, uhh...what was the word she used? Coven? No...coterie! Yeah, that's it. They said they used to be called Nightsisters, but times changed, things happened, blah, blah, blah. They showed your mother some ancient magic gateway, asking her if she could help them turn it on. Which, of course, she did, because your mother is a Jedi, not to mention she's smarter than your dad and she's really beautiful, but...heh, you might be too young to hear that kind of talk. It's grownup stuff; you'll figure it out soon. So, ahh...where was I? Oh, right! Some of the other crazy witches attacked the coterie because, well...they're nutty witches, I guess. Since you're a girl, this is my first piece of fatherly advice: be very careful around other girls. Don't matter the species. Nobody is more harmful or vicious to a girl than another girl. Right, so your mother led the coterie into the gateway and set off a bomb behind them so they couldn't be followed. By the by, I should warn you that your mother tends to have a thing for big booms. No idea where she got that from, but I admit it's one of the things that got me attracted to her. If you're anything like she is, I wouldn't be surprised if you already know how to make a thermal detonator from a roll of duratape."

"'Magic gateway'?" Ru softly questioned herself as the Nautolan paused to take a quick smoke. "Zen...a Nightsister of Dathomir?"

"Your mother and her weird sorceress friends went clear across the galaxy," the Nautolan added with a snap of his fingers. "Just like that. Can you imagine? To think of all the money and time I could save not having to use hyperdrive. Instant travel from one place to another. Amazing. I've been from one end of the galaxy to the other since getting my hands on the Prowler, seen some things that'd make your head pop like a bubble, but nothing like that. Anyways, she never really talked much about where she ended up, only that she found a nice warm pool there where you were born. She mentioned you had two brothers from the same clutch, but they didn't live long. That...really struck me, I have to say. She didn't talk about how she got back to civilization, but after more than a year of separation, we met up again on a little Outer Rim space dump called Andronikos Station. Good place to lay low when you're having, umm...let's just say, 'disagreements' with the law. That was when she revealed you to me. My beautiful little Zaracoda. Stars...I never thought an idiot like me could ever be so blessed. Well, handsome and charming idiot, that is!"

Ru smiled, deeply touched by the Nautolan's candor and clear love for his child. By that point, she felt guilty for overhearing far too many personal details between a father and his daughter, and so she decided to make her way again to the cockpit whilst the recording kept playing. Just as she was on her feet again, she heard a loud thump from outside the room, and an all-too-familiar voice nearby.

"Rusasha?" It was her father, Rynseh, calling out to her. "You don't have to be afraid. I'm your father...I won't hurt you."

Ru's eyes were wide, it was words from a very distinct memory, perhaps the only childhood memory that was still there in her head with perfect clarity. She had just been a cub at the time by her recollection. It was the day she first met her father...the day when he took her away from Cathar to introduce her to her new life as a Reborn Jedi youngling.

"Father..." Against her better judgment, she nervously went out to see him, as if she were that little innocent girl again with her Djehuti shaman marks still fresh on her face and arms. "Father, I'm...here?" She looked around in anticipation as her eyes adjusted to the darkness again but saw no one.

In her confusion, she heard more voices, this time from the dead.

"Don't cry, you'll be a Jedi soon, I just know it..." said a man's voice.

"You don't have to live this life, Rusha...being a Jedi isn't for everyone. You can be free..." said a deceased female friend.

They were voices belonging to those she was memorializing back in the Temple, before Rynseh confronted her. She could hear his harsh reprimands again, his bellowing voice thundering with disappointment and horrifying rage. She then started to somehow feel of the physical grip of his hand on her throat again, making it hard for her to breathe. Her dead Jedi friends joined in and began to relentlessly mock her as a failure.

"No...no...stop it...stop!" She cried gripping the sides of her head just as an almost paralysing chill ran down her spine.

In her torment, she felt the artificial cold around her grow to a bone-chilling freeze from behind, as if the vacuum of space had inexplicably seeped into the ship's central compartment. It was in that moment that she felt a keen rush of peace and serenity flow through her body, the Force's intercession very much upon her, its grand power dispelling the psychic noise. She closed her eyes and was pulled into a trance that defied the linear flow of time itself. Fractions of a second passed in reality, but her mind was righting itself, the restoration to equilibrium its foremost goal. It was the true strength that resided within her, her most precious gift, the one coveted by the more martial-minded members of the Reborn Jedi Order.

She took a step forward but not with her own flesh and blood foot. It had failed to make contact with the floor as she looked down and beheld feet, hands, and a feminine body belonging to that of a luminous being of swirling blue light. She was levitating above an infinite haze of smoking grey void, and turned to see herself, frozen in place amidst the haze, eyes closed and at peace. Rusasha's immortal essence reached a hand composed of pure Force energy to the cheek of her mortal face, but before she could touch it, she saw behind her body a terrible shapely mass of burning red corruption flanked by tiny fonts of floating blue light, like scores of tiny fireflies. Inside the red creature's form was something matching its shape from within radiating an orange glow. There was yet another being, a smoky featureless feminine shaped creature faintly blue standing closely by the red one's right, and to the left, a smaller entirely obsidian form, the size of a small child.

Upon returning to her body, Rusasha's uncanny battle meditation instinctively gave her a momentary burst of clarity. She cast aside all doubt, all pain and discomfort. In a very brief moment that passed faster than the blink of an eye, she understood the reality of what was lurking behind her. In one perfectly fluid motion worthy of the Jedi Knights of the Old Republic, she snapped open her eyes, took hold of her lightsaber, brought it up and behind her back, and managed to stop another energy blade crashing down on her, her own blade barely extending to full length to just in time to block the fatal blow. She whirled and swiftly brought her blade up at a defensive angle to slap aside a thrust and blocked an overhead chop counter.

Their lightsabers locked, and Ru could feel remarkable strength behind the single blade assaulting her, about as distinctively green as her own. The light of the green blades revealed a single hand on what looked to be nothing more than a shoto, a weapon meant to be used defensively, not for actual attack. Ru, with both hands on her saber's hilt, was struggling against her attacker's single hand, and was gradually being overpowered. As the bind of the crossed blades began to push closer and closer to Ru's face, her weakness forced her down to one knee just as the visage of her attacker leaned into view. To Ru's horror, she bore witness to a sneering Nautolan's face bathed in chartreuse plasma light flanked by two dangling tentacles. The large eyes emblematic of the species were undeniably alight in a dim glow of scarlet red while reflecting the green lightsabers like a pair of watery mirrors.

"Jedi..." the assassin hissed in a soft feminine voice and diabolical tone filled with pure unbridled enmity, "...you die!"

TBC in "Jedi No More"

---

Rusasha
☼ New Ability - Battle Meditation

 

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