Title: The Wise
Author: 1Yodimus_Prime
Timeframe: An undisclosed point in time between Darth Bane’s death and TPM. Somewhat closer to TPM, relatively speaking.
Characters: OCs: The Lord Darth Averus, a young boy of twelve, and someone else..
Genre: Dark Action. Call it a coming of age maybe. Or a celebration of death…*cough* I mean life. Sure. *shifty_eyes*
Keywords: Sith, pre-TPM, OC, angst (<– if you call horrible death and destruction ‘angst’…)
Summary: A young Sith Hopeful is brought to an out-of-the-way planet to continue his instruction with his soon-to-be Master. Things work their way downhill from there.Notes: Don’t be fooled by the first chapter, this tale gets really dark, really fast. But what did you expect? It’s about the freakin’ Sith.
I need to thank Alion_Sangre for reading through the enitre ~100 page story in, like, twenty seconds, and using his encyclopedic knowledge of the GFFA to pick out all the in-universe continuity errors. That was cool of him. And I also need to give props to Oqidaun, who is going to be my beta reader for this story (hopefully for the entire duration, yes?). And I also need to give another prop to Jennifer_Lyn, for writing the vig From Humble Beginnings, which served to motivate me to get this on the page, and also serves loosely as the backstory for one of the characters.Chapter 1: Questions… The night was cold and rotten.It engorged itself on the small cabin’s heat, slow and steady – perpetually devouring, never satiated, never ending. The wind carried all the warmth away with it to the Western Canyon, to drop into oblivion over the nameless waterfalls that danced about the Cliffside. Darth Averus lay gently, gracefully upon the cot. It whined softly, but accepted the new weight easily. Averus was not in any way frail, but there was certainly less there than had been in younger days. Yet even at this age, the chill air had no ill effect upon the Sith’s health. In fact, it was a welcome comfort. Averus enjoyed the alertness it brought to the body and mind.Nobody could possibly disagree more than the young boy across the room, shivering at the entrance. All but his eyes and hands were wrapped in a thick dark cloth of a rough weave, but the wind had exploited even this minimal exposure, drying his skin red and raw. He put his back into squeezing the door snug against the uneven wall, desperate for the relief of the calm and quaint interior.In a click, the wind vanished into a suggestion – a subversively silent motion that commanded all the creaks and knocks the meager cabin pleaded with. He bowed his head in deference and stepped forward, presenting himself. Darth Averus did not rise or acknowledge the boy…she merely said, in a clipped whisper, “Sit.”He did so.They remained still – she on the cot, he on the floor – for a long time. They listened to the moaning walls and felt the dying warmth in silence. The shutters on the sills were the only thing that moved. It was an unspoken trust. He would know when to speak when it was time, with neither sound nor gesture from Averus. He would just know. Until then, he looked inward, and meditated.
In his meditation, the Shadow Beast came back. It plagued his nightmares ever since they left Dolus, only several weeks ago. Pitch and furtive, the creature was menacing not in size or shape, but in its motion. In the jungle of shades – black and gray and purple and blue – that shifted about in his clear mind, the actual presence of the Shadow Beast could never be pinpointed. It was there…but no, it’s there…or not? It hid, it ran, it stalked, it growled. Boy did it growl. Many a day, when that terrifying snarl – a jarring treble howl – rang startling in his head, he was snapped out of his meditation and was abruptly ordered into isolation by Lady Averus. She had little patience for those who could not concentrate. It was the one rare thing, surprisingly, that did try her patience in fact.
Yet the beast continued to haunt him.
***
He had since learned to control his fear, but it never quelled the sensation that the unseeable demon wished him harm…that it hated him for some reason. Or…was it jealous? He could never be sure, it was too fast, too evasive. He did not dare to reveal his demon to Lady Averus, though he did mention it to her obliquely, in reference to unrelated topics. She merely told him to ignore it, that it would go away in time. She seemed to know best. He trusted her.
She loved him, after all. Darth Averus wasn’t just his teacher, she was like a grandmother to him. More than that: a mother. She taught him all about the hidden intricacies of the Force, but she also taught him how to talk to people. How to be civil. How to get around his cold, analytical nature by studying how others talk and interpreting it quickly and correctly. It wasn’t simple lecturing that helped him through such problems. It was attention, it was empathy, that helped him start to break through those social barriers. She cared about him. She loved him.
He opened his eyes, “Lady Averus?”
“You may speak.” She said.
“I…I have a, well, I’ve got a qu-“
“You have many questions boy, I know. And you may ask of me whatever you wish tonight. You may ask until you lose breath or pass out or both. If you can, you may continue spending questions ‘till the northern sun rises. And…if you raise me off the cot and speak without that stutter, I may even bother to answer some of them.” She never let him do only one task at a time. There was always something else. She told him that, without distractions to test us, we would never truly learn. Reality is filled with them, she had said, and to be unprepared for such things could mean failure.
He reached out with both hands, the Force spreading away from him as ethereal tendrils of nothingness, its invisible energy firmly and solidly in his grasp. With that energy, he touched the meager frame of the cot, then beyond it to the solid mass of Averus’s body. The energy then moved outward to the free spirited molecules of air, ignorant of the woman lying there. But…maybe not so ignorant. Maybe those little molecules would prefer to gather under the mattress of the minimal bed and become a weightless cushion of pure lift. Yeah, as a matter of fact, that’s exactly what they want to do.
Then, his eyebrows furrowed, “How high?”
“You decide.” She felt a momentary wave of fright as he pondered the implications. If he raised her too low, would she find him disappointing; if he raised her too high, would she see it as foolish overconfidence? She quietly reveled in the short period of mental terror, before that unseen energy began lifting her off the cot.
She came to a slow stop just four feet from her original resting space. Averus gave no hint of appreciation or dissatisfaction, only stoic calm. He cleared his throat, and he concentrated hard on keeping her aloft while mindful of the clarity of his words, “Why do you hate the Jedi?”
“Why do the Sith hate the Jedi, you mean?” she corrected.
He nodded, uncertain.
More slowly, she offered, “…Why do we hate the Jedi, you mean?”
He didn’t respond.
With a tweak of her lip, betraying the smile she hid, she said, even slower and more purposeful than before, “Why should you hate the Jedi. You mean.”
“…Yes.”
By anyone else, on any other day, this would have been an insolent and punishable question. But today, for him… “Long ago, boy. Long, long ago, the Sith were more than what you see before you. We were a grand empire. We stretched half the galaxy in glory and splendor. Our palaces shone as the sun, our temples were revered, our fortresses unyielding. Our subjects loved us and honored us, as we brought wealth and peace to any planet we touched. We counted in the billions.”
“And what happened?”
“The Jedi saw what we had done, and grew jealous and fearful. They took it upon themselves to attack us, just as they had done innumerable times before, in wars long past. And we fought back, of course. But they had greater numbers, and they had the support of planets. Even some of our own.”
“They made whole planets of people traitors? Through the Force?”
Averus shook her head solemnly, “If only it had been that simple, boy. But no. For you see, the Jedi would never do such a thing with the Force, because the Jedi fear the Force. It is in their nature.”
He did not want to be sidetracked, but this new information had piqued his curiosity, “I don’t understand. What aspect of the Force do they fear?”
She almost undetectably shrugged, “All of it. Everything they use, they regret using. Even if it’s for the good of others, they consider it regrettable – a necessary evil. Two inches higher child, you’re waning…good. They believe the Force is inherently dangerous. Close your eyes.”
He did so, “What happened in this war, then?”
“We were systematically killed. At first, the battles were like those in any war: confusing, bloody, chaotic, a theater of the absurd. The Grand Comedy.”
“The Grand Comedy.” He nodded, remembering the earlier lesson: no great war in history was ever fought without someone existing who might come out on top no matter the outcome. Anything else was mindless slaughter; violent population control. But war was never about which side won; war was about who benefited the most and why. There would always be an inevitable happy ending for the person in control.
“But eventually, after years or perhaps decades, the war quit being a war and became a massacre. We were picked off person by person ‘till all that was left…” she rolled her head ever so slightly in his direction, “…was one. Birth name lost to the ages, his taken name was Bane. A Lord, he was an intelligent man who knew when to fight and when to run. He understood that if he ran out to the enemy for honor and death, it would mean the death nail for our Order as well. He was it, and its entire history lay with him. So he hid, and survived. That is why I even exist. It is why many people exist who would otherwise not. It is why you are here with me and not withering away on Dolus, laboring in that sweatshop.”
If this affected him, he managed not to show it. She took this moment to give another order, “Slide the cot across the room. Gently.”
She nearly fluttered in midair as his control was nearly lost between his thoughts and the new concentrations. It should have been a sign to move on, but he bore it and pressed forward, “And so Bane was the first Darth, Lady Averus?”
“He was the first of the new order.” The color of her voice told him that her patience was still intact. The colors of voice. That was one of the many details he’d learned from Lady Averus, under her wing. Digging the true meaning out of someone’s voice required that one listen not simply for the tone, not simply for the volume, not simply for the pauses, not simply for the accents or the pitch shifts or the intakes of breath…but for all those things at once. Like a painting – often you can predict the artist’s intent at first glance, simply by squinting and taking in the whole canvass at once. Doing so, Averus had explained, would give you a single patch of color, and from that color – which the artist rarely noticed – you would find the true intent. And so it was with the spoken word. Lady Averus had taught the boy to “squint with your ears” to find the color of someone’s voice. With the color came the truth, even when the words had none.
But the colors of a voice did not reveal facts. Those had to be pried out with questions, and there was nothing the boy was better at, “But why did he take only one apprentice? Why not two or three? Why not…why not a whole academy?”
“Because he saw how the Jedi used their numbers against them. Unlike the Jedi, who operate better as a mindless collective of enforcers, the Sith embody the ideal of the Individual. He had seen his foes turn this into a weapon, and wished to avoid a repeat occurrence. Darth Bane doubted that the Order could survive another massacre. Not everyone, you see, could be trusted to be as smart as he.”
“Of course.” He knew how that felt, to be the only smart one in a room. To be alone.
“So he distilled everything down in favor of proficiency and survival, over coherency and propagation.”
He let this idea bounce through his head a few times. The concepts were toyed with, mentally poked and prodded, and then shifted into logical categories of priority and value. It did not take long.He said, “You mean, that while the existence of only one student meant the lessons would get changed many times over, they were rarely forgotten or ignored. …Because the student would always be at least a little interested.”
“Hmm.”
“And even though almost nothing was spread – or is ever spread – about the Sith today, their presence will never vanish, because finding two people in a galaxy full of people is impossible.”
“Good. Very good.”
“A couple months ago, you started teaching me swordplay…”
“Begin moving me over to the cot, child.”
He wanted to open his eyes, but dared not. This would be tricky. He picked up his previous sentence once she began to move. “If we need to stay hidden, why are you teaching me this? What use will I have for a skill I’ll never use?”
“Mere application is never the only use of knowledge. Remember this. But you get ahead of yourself; being skilled in good swordsmanship will come in quite handy in a practical way. Jedi are not your only enemy. Some are nemeses from ages past. Some are new and temporary. But, you must know how to dispatch them all, and efficiently.”
“What other enemies do the Sith have if they stay so well hidden?”
“Child, we hide but not in holes. Our presence is felt often throughout the galaxy, and strongly. Just not in connection with our religion. We prefer to make our difference within the playground the Jedi play in, rather than against it. The political arena.”
“That is why you are a baroness?”
“It was a fortunate title, which I inherited. Others in past generations have had to work for their status. You will find soon enough that great good can be done through seemingly inconsequential acts – if done in the right place…and with the right title upon your name.”
“But…how does that make enemies?”
“You ask as though you fear this, boy. Don’t. It is a natural occurrence. You can make no public decision without someone disagreeing with you. And you can make no successful public decision without someone hating you. It is a fact you must embrace and exploit, for avoidance will only make things worse. Avoidance is the Jedi way. They have enemies they do not even know, and still more. We have few, and we know each and every one…even,” she looked him square in his closed eyes and it was such a stare that he could tell even without seeing, “when we don’t realize it.”
He knew that was meant to be poignant – she had a wonderful way with words – but he wasn’t sure how to take it. He eventually decided, as this special occasion allowed for it, to be forward, “You mean even I have an enemy?”
“Of course you do, boy. More than even one, in fact. You know this, even without knowing it. You are suspicious and tense, and it is because of your enemy that you feel this way – speed up boy, you’re taking too long.”
His forehead broke into a sweat. He dared not accidentally float her into the wall. It would be the pinnacle of embarrassment. He did his best to lower her closer to where he felt the cot was, and he did so as fast as he could without becoming reckless. It was a tightrope of a task.
The old woman waited till his confidence built, then said, “When you meditate, you see a shadow creature.”
She nearly fell right out of the air. Had she, the hard edge of the cot would have connected with her hip, breaking it easily. Or so the boy imagined, his eyes being closed. But she hadn’t, and Averus’s perfect calm did not so much as flutter. Not even in the darkest, truest regions of the Force.
“It is always there. Every time you close your eyes. Even now.”
Dare he ask? She knew, so it was no longer simply a personal concern. Whatever both knew, both shared equally and freely. That was her first rule, though he couldn’t recall many times when she held by it. He gently – ever so gently – landed her in the exact center of the cot. As he did so (rather than after – she would have considered that cheating), he asked, “Is it real?”
“Real enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“I said I’d answer any question you ask, and I intend to extend that courtesy for the duration of this trip, starting tomorrow. There are some things that are better explained by the light of day. Furthermore, you need your rest. There is much about combat that I intend for you to learn this week. Much.”
“Understood, Lady Averus.”
“You may sleep. Turn off the lamp first.”
Without moving a finger or even opening his eyes, he flipped the switch embedded into the small lamp’s side. The musty room was ambushed by darkness and quickly the boy’s universe became the sounds of that predatory wind and nothing more.
Chapter 2: Give and Take
It was the touch of an icy morning sunlight that woke him. He shivered. The dead-still air hung cold as frost about him, but this was not what made him shake. He’d dreamt of it again. The Shadow Beast. And this time, it did not hide in the Darknesses of his mind. This time it attacked. Faceless and terrifying, it leapt fiercely from the dark and crushed him beneath its weight. He remembered vividly how it sliced open his stomach with its inky black claws. Then it bent down, not to pick at him the way he’d seen predators pick at newly killed carcasses, but to deliver a bite so large and so strong that it severed his spine, ripping him in two. It continued its savage assault going for his face. And when all he could see was the Shadow Beast’s gaping, slavering maw, he awoke.His Master was already up. She seemed cheerful and bid him to get dressed for a trek outside.“I had a dream last night,” he said forcing evenness into his voice.“I know. We’ll talk about it on the way. Today begins your real training with the sword. After this week, I suspect you may even be ready to wield your very own lightsaber.”All thoughts of Shadow Beasts left his mind. All at once, his heart both leapt for joy and shied away. He wasn’t stupid. He knew what she really meant: that he’ll become her Apprentice. Not that this mattered since he was her apprentice, in all but name. More frightening and wonderful to him, it meant he could finally take his name; it meant he would become a Sith Lord, “Lady Averus, do you really think I’m ready?”“We’ll see, boy.”
They spoke of much as they hiked through the forest. His Master made sure there was something to split his concentration at all times: balancing equipment, a sudden ‘think fast’, a last-second order to levitate brush out of her path – and when they arrived at the clearing she was searching for – katas with a training staff.
The staff itself was made of a light wood, balanced so that nearly all of the weight was near the end he held. He guessed it was meant to simulate a lightsaber. It was almost as long as he was tall, and performing Averus’s katas with it felt awkward. Yet she added strings of them in swiftly progressing complexity. Not a second of understanding went by without a new challenge being thrown into the training to up the difficulty. Averus was acutely sensitive to the boy’s ability to learn fast, something everyone else he ever met seemed to miss. It was the one thing, above all else, that made the boy so attached to Darth Averus: she saw his potential.
And boy did she. No matter how foolish they sounded, she answered every single question he put to her that day, always giving him abundant information and then some. Nobody, in all his life, had ever been this open with him. Especially not those selfish, ignorant monks who’d raised him.
He never knew his parents, and he never wanted to know his parents. If the Force could only damn one kind of person to Hell, then he hoped it would be the kind that left their children on doorsteps.
In his case, that doorstep led to a temple of the Shimuran Order. The Order was composed of a collection of monks who practiced what they called ‘The Way Of The Ka’. Their devotion to this particularly strict interpretation of the Force had caused them to split from the Jedi many centuries before. So they had about four long centuries to create and refine a solid philosophy, happily free of Jedi interference.
He had it torn to ribbons in under seven years.
They knew from the moment he said his first words that the boy was bright. But they were never able to appreciate just how bright. When, at four, he began picking up and reading texts about The Way Of The Ka, left carelessly on the floor, they called it ‘playing’. Playing! It took him two years to read everything in their library. They never noticed.
He became a problem child exactly one day later.
It had been an innocent enough question, posed to the abbot after meditation one day: “Why does the Force let bad things happen?”
He smiled warmly and laid a hand on the child, “The Will of the Force is mysterious to us, young one.”
“But what would its Will be, that it requires the suffering of others?”
“I dare say, child, that the Force never requires anything. It is our’s alone to either choose to do its Will, or not.”
“Is it also the weather’s choice to cause hurricanes, then? And the mantle’s choice to erupt volcanoes?”
“Of course not,” he said without hesitation, though his response had been a bit startled. It was doubtful that before this conversation, the abbot had even realized the boy knew the word mantle, let alone its geological meaning, “Those things have no free will to make choices with. They are just a few of the side effects of our beautiful universe, and they must be respected and understood.”
“But…what if you’re a tribal village that doesn’t know anything about hurricanes and volcanoes? How can the Force expect us to respect and understand what we don’t even know exists? If those things have no free will, shouldn’t the Force step in and be their Will, and do the right thing by avoiding crowded beaches and populated islands?”
…It went downhill from there. He got sweeping duty for the rest of the week.
His photon-fast advances in knowledge made him impatient and arrogant. He grew angry with the Monks more and more often and they rebuked and punished him more and more often. When he brought up carefully worded, intelligent explanations for why he was right and they were not, those rebukes and punishments were simply more severe. When they discovered he was Force-sensitive at six – a fact he’d been trying to tell them for three years by then – they openly held him back, a decision made even more infuriating because he didn’t think their ‘The Way Of The Ka’ was even a trillionth of what the Force truly had to offer.
Three months before his seventh birthday, after one rebuke and one punishment too many, he walked out on them. He never looked back. And even when, alone and naïve in the city beyond, slavers captured him and sold him to a vile creature from a distant world, he had no regrets. Those fools weren’t worth regretting, and after all, what was a slaving imbecile compared to someone with power like him?
Sure enough, with what little he knew of the Force, he managed to escape the stupid creature not a month later. It took him several weeks after that to navigate his new city, find his bearings, learn who to trust, learn who would give him food, learn where to avoid. He learned the planet was called Dolus. And he learned, above everything else, to hate it.
There were too many other urchins on the streets and too many were bigger and stronger. Sweeping floors, reading and meditating had been poor ways for the Shimuran Monks to keep him in shape. Furthermore, the other cities were too far away, and the fares to get to them were too expensive: too much competition, no way to escape.
Hiding was out of the question. During the day he could walk openly in the streets, so long as he appeared purposeful and kept to the neighborhoods that tolerated him. But at night, they all came out. Violent, territorial gangs of children, older than he (always older), who sniffed out every safe place in the town and called it their’s. He had no protection, he couldn’t sleep, he was terrified and cold and exhausted from always having to keep moving, every night and every day so he didn’t look suspicious to the merchants or look like a target to the gangs. They didn’t even offer their victims a chance to join. They just surrounded them and beat them up until they bled. Until they bled a lot. Until they became wrecked little heaps on the dirty ground.
Then he would creep over, after they’d gone, and concentrate on the little cells and fibers that couldn’t be seen, help them get reoriented, find their way, make them want to reconnect, regenerate, seal up, get better. When it worked, the being for whom all those little cells and fibers made up would awaken feeling better than ever, wondering if the gang’s actions had been nothing more than a bad dream. The boy, of course, would be out of sight by then.
Except, sometimes he was too scared to go near them afterwards, to help. Maybe because of what the older kids had said, or because they didn’t run off far enough. And sometimes, he didn’t help them because frankly, he didn’t think they deserved it.
In those cases, he’d just sit there behind a parked speeder or a dumpster or looking out the shattered window of an abandoned building, and he’d watch the wrecked little heap as it shuddered and shook and mumbled wrecked little things from its wrecked little mouth…and sometimes, staggering, they got up and limped off…and sometimes, to his regret, they stopped moving altogether.
Eventually, he knew in his heart that such a fate waited for him here. It was only a matter of time. If he didn’t find a way to get off the street, as soon as possible, he would die. He would be ganged up on, and would die. And no amount of intelligence and no amount of pure brilliance would stop that. He had to get out. Any way he could, he had to get out.
So on his seventh birthday, he got a job in the only place that would take him: a sweatshop. He knew what it was, but what choice did he have? Dolus had no regulations, was beyond Republic control, and was ruled by vicious monopolies, as far as the boy could tell. It was a way out. That was all that mattered. That he wouldn’t earn enough to pay back the debts he would eventually owe them…that the mindless labor was likely to drive him crazy…that he was only going to receive one meal a day…those were hurdles he would get to later, after he knew for sure that he wasn’t going to die tomorrow.
He managed to set a record on the first day: not an hour after being hired, he’d pissed off his overseer so much, he spent the next four days in the hospital. When he returned, they put him to work at the toughest part of the line. At quitting time, sixteen hours later, his overseer strutted over to him, and let him know that he’d be putting in some mandatory overtime. The boy’s response got him a loose tooth. They kept him on the line till mealtime…of the following day. One of the more well-rested kids stole his food.
When he came back from his foodless break, he passed out. The overseer saw it and slapped him awake. They had another discussion. It was colorful. He found himself back in the hospital for another couple of days. Broken arm this time, among other things. The nurse joked that the staff would know him by name if he kept being this clumsy, always falling down stairs and such.
That’s silly, he thought, I don’t have a name to know.
When he returned, they dropped him right back into the tough part of the line, without so much as a ‘howdy’. Then, a few hours later, his favorite overseer stormed over. He waved a medical bill in his face. There was a gleeful sneer on his own.
“See this?! We ain’t doin’ you no favors, payin’ this for you! You’re gonna be here till you’re sixty paying this off, ya hear me?!”
The boy didn’t even flinch, “Ha. Looks like I got you then,” he smiled wickedly behind his pale cheeks and exhausted eyes, “at this rate, I’ll be dead by ten.” Which landed him back in the hospital.
When he returned the third time, he was assigned to a new overseer. The supervisor had apparently decided that productivity was ultimately more important than obedience. This overseer was different, but the boy couldn’t really pinpoint why, save that the guy didn’t beat him quite so much. It actually took him several days to realize what it was: he already had a reputation. The overseer was scared of him.
And when he opened his eyes and the Force to the other supervisors and overseers, he realized another thing: so was everyone else.
In fact, most of the children he labored with were just as frightened of him. He found himself sitting alone during mealtime. He was given a wide berth at the sewing tables. He heard them talk about him in whispers. But they were different, because they weren’t just frightened of him. They respected him, too. But why? What had he done that was so different, so special?
Oh yeah. I stood up to an overseer. He had so taken for granted his stubbornness – his ability to hold his ground no matter the threat – that it never actually occurred to him that it might be unique.
Now, all of the sudden, he had new weapons. Now he had fear. Now he had intimidation. He used it to scare the biggest kids into becoming his ally. With them followed their cliques, for he only targeted those who surrounded themselves with others.
With his new mob, he went after the meanest bullies – the kids who, for instance, stole food from other kids – and pressured them to join. If they refused, that was okay. At the end of the workday, his mob would corner the kid. They would have rocks. He’d simply nod toward the bully cornered there and he would casually walk away. The kid would not return to work the next day, or ever again. And when overseers started asking where they went, nobody knew a thing.
Word spread. Soon the whole factory knew about him, soon the whole block, the whole neighborhood. They called him Ten, because by now, his famous comeback had become legend. Now everyone tried to sit with him, practically gave him food when they would have taken it before. Now everyone tried to work near him, to gather around him. Now when he spoke, they hushed and hung on every syllable.
When he put word on the street that anyone from the factory not in his gang would regret it, he suddenly found a surge of support where there had been none. Now the urchins who would have killed him only a few months ago simply for being alive, now they were his enforcers on the outside. Now they only killed for him. And now he had everyone’s attention. It was time.
One hour. That’s how long it took him to build up the concentration. He watched that overseer – his first overseer – intently the whole morning so that he didn’t miss a detail. He turned it into a scene in his head, like something out of one of those holovids he’d watch through the windows of other people’s houses: the overseer walks by the third story window, then a sudden gust of wind from out of nowhere knocks him off his feet with such force that he crashes through the glass to his death. Repeat. Repeat. Concentrate. Repeat. Concentrate. Repeat. And wouldn’t you know it, an hour later, that’s exactly what happened.
The police force couldn’t for the life of them figure out how the guy managed to end up ten meters away from the warehouse. And the mess: he looked like he dove from a skyscraper, rather than the middle floor of a six-story building. But everyone gave the authorities the same answer: it seemed like he jumped out, officer. And it did seem that way to them. That was the beauty of the Force.
But the kids all knew better. Ten meters? That’s a sign. Who else hated the guy more…who else had the guts…who else had the power, but Ten. He became more than just a hero or a legend. He became an icon. An anchor. A rallying point. Every child there hated at least one of the overseers just as much as Ten had hated his, some even more so. Every child who ever threw a rock for him, who ever knowingly led a kid Ten didn’t like into the wrong part of town, who ever voluntarily gave him half of their already inadequate meals, each one was calling for blood then. Each and every one was calling for War.
And the day he planned to give it to them, he met Baroness Sarogga instead.
And she took him home.
And she fed him, and gave him a bath, and let him rest.
And she promised he would never have to work ever again. She even went down in person and had the factory shut down; had every single employee fired; blacklisted each one personally.
Just for him.
***
She did not coddle nor did she dote. She smiled rarely. She hardly did so much as put a hand on his shoulder. What she did do, all the time, was treat him with respect. This woman – with long loose hair so thin it was nearly transparent, with wrinkles that hid decades of wisdom within their creases, with dull brown eyes that looked worn and weathered yet sharp enough to notice even the tiniest guesture, with hands that had the finesse to play instruments and the raw strength to shatter solid stone – she never looked down to him. Never. Not once.
She never looked up to him, either. When he needed her to be patient during a lesson, she was without complaint. But when he grasped something instantly, she moved on and actually expected him to keep up. She let him choose the course of his studies, choose where in the spectrum of possiblity the lessons would lead, never forcing any particular doctorine on him. She had the wisdom to care about what he thought, and the authority over him to correct what she disagreed with. It was bewildering to him; it was alien. He couldn’t imagine what had made this magnificent person pick such a small and unimportant kid out of the planetary crowd. Her intentions were beyond him. She was scary. She was brilliant. She was ancient and unreachable. She commanded respect without even asking for it.
She was Baroness Tira Sarogga: the most powerful woman on the planet – the most powerful anything on the planet – and she had chosen him. But more importantly, she was Darth Averus: the most powerful Sith Lord in the galaxy – the only Sith Lord in the galaxy – and yet still, she had chosen him.
Her estate was humble; understated. It was a cozy place, full of life and history. And people. She had guests all the time, at all hours. Anyone could walk in: the wealthy and the powerful, brilliant scientists and engineers, politicians and senators, great military leaders and rulers of distant planets. Everybody loved her. And she seemed to love everybody in return.
He expected her to give him a name. Everyone his whole life had given him a name except the parents he never met. The Monks. The Slavers. That stupid creature. That damn overseer. The other children, of course. He owned none of them, and accepted each one the way you might accept a gift you know you’ll never use.
But she didn’t.
“Names are not given, boy. They are found at birth, or they are taken. There are no other options. One day, perhaps you will be ready to take one. But not today.”
So she called him ‘boy’ instead. It didn’t bother him, but at the same time he couldn’t help but think of it as just another name being given to him again. Another gift he’ll never use. He didn’t have long to consider this, though. She began training his Force powers the very next day.
And now, four and a half years later, two weeks after his twelfth birthday, this. A new form of training was about to begin. He would take a name soon…he could feel it.
Chapter 3: Nightmare
By the end of the second day on that snowy world, Averus was sparring with him – showing him how to block and counter. As with everything, she was patient when he had trouble and quick to change when he caught on. She even took care to wrap their sparring sticks in cloth, so that when Lady Averus – a strong, spry woman for her age – inevitably got too into it, he would only leave with minor bruises. Surprisingly, he found himself with relatively few in comparison to the number of sparring matches they had.
The two walked back to the small cabin together that evening, and after regaining his strength from the workout, he ventured some more questions. There was one in particular that he was keenly interested in, though he dared not jump directly into it.
“So…” he took a bigger breath, “the Jedi. Do they do this stuff too, or is sword fighting just something a Sith bothers to learn?” it wasn’t all that important a question, but he needed a lead-in, and out of everything he could think of at the moment, this question sounded the least like a lead-in.
“Oh, the Jedi learn this. In fact, they devote most of their lives to mastering one martial art or another. Even some very aggressive ones. Never underestimate the Jedi, boy.” She eyed him, “Carry my pack,” she tossed it to him seconds before giving the order. The boy did not lose his balance so she continued, “There is a datapad in there somewhere. Find it without looking or putting your hands inside.” She flipped back to the subject at hand, “You see, sparring with sabers – no matter the kind – is not actually an art the Sith created, or will truly ever own, to be honest. It has always been a Jedi thing. Their way of feeling superior to the masses, I suppose, given that they restrict themselves from showing off their own obvious arrogance in every other way. We simply use it as another tool in our arsenal. This one specific to dealing with other Jedi, of course.”
He thought about the implications of this, “So these lessons are really unimportant then, outside of keeping me on par with what the Jedi can do.”
“Careful boy, these particular lessons may not be some exemplification of the Sith Way, but they are still drastically important.”
“But…the purpose of this trip couldn’t be explicitly for training me in the sword, could it? You would want me to learn something deeper than that, wouldn’t you?”
She regarded him silently for a moment. A while passed before she said anything, “Have you found it?”
“Right here. I think the batteries are dead, though.” He handed the datapad to her, “You told me the other day that you knew about my Shadow Beast.”
“I did,” she waved off the device, “You can keep it. Make sure to recharge it when we get back and it’s yours.”
He ignored the stuff about the datapad, “…What do you know?”
“As much as you, dear. That is where it hunts you, is it not? Inside yourself?”
“Uh, yes.”
“Then how could I possibly know any information outside of what sits within that clever little brain of yours? The answers are there, waiting. You need to take those answers yourself; you can’t rely on me for that. Because, if you let me find your answers…if you let me do it…” she tore her pack out of his hands, “I’ll keep them all.”
They hiked the rest of the way in silence. That was the last question he asked her for the rest of the night.
At the beginning of the third day, she forewent katas altogether and spent the entire afternoon showing him the nuance of battle between two swords. She showed him what to do if his opponent was faster, if his opponent was stronger, if his opponent was more experienced, if his opponent was all three. It was frustrating for him, because she would put him into situations that seemed unwinable. He nearly gave up, but she predicted his breaking point and relented just before. From there, she showed him how to actually manage these fights where he found himself in hopeless situations. What to do, in other words, when it looked like failure was certain – stuff like fighting an opponent while disarmed or tied up or blindfolded. She showed him the dirty tricks that would keep him alive if he was ever at a disadvantage. Then she left him there in the clearing, and allowed him to practice on his own.
Walking back to the cabin by himself in the twilight of that third day, the boy was pretty sure he’d just been given a whirlwind tour into a vast new world of the Force he’d never known before. But even with the speed at which he was picking up these lessons, and even with the openness his Master was showing him, he still knew deep down that this was no way to teach him. It took more than a day to learn a new tactic, and far more than a week to master it. It didn’t take someone older than twelve to figure that out. He felt like she was distracted.
But distracted with what? And then a flicker in his mind’s eye reminded him. The Shadow Beast. There was something evasive in the way she’d answered his questions. Like she was protecting him from something. But there was the night before that. The first night. She had said the Beast from his nightmare was “real enough”.
Real enough to what? To be real? To hurt me? To hurt her? Was it here? Was she distracted because she felt its presence somewhere? Was she leaving me every evening because she was tracking it…or trying to hide from it…or laying traps for it or following it to a den or trying to lead it astray? But what if it’s too strong? Would it kill her? Would it then go after me?Or am I letting my fear rule me, instead of ruling my fear. The Shadow is my own, not her’s, just like she said. Why should she care where it is and what it’s doing. That should be my job.He returned to the small cabin feeling stiff and cold and miserable. And sore. He didn’t speak to her outside of a greeting. She didn’t press for conversation either, choosing to meditate quietly on her cot. Since he wasn’t allowed to turn off the light without asking her first, it remained on when he curled into the blanet on the floor and slept. In the mottled darkness of his mind, the Shadow Beast ate him alive again. And again. And again, which jarred him awake with a cold sweat in an even colder room. The lamp still burned. Averus still meditated. He slid on boots and cautiously went outside to relieve himself, wary of the night and the hungry things that stalked there, in the shadows…or that were shadows…When he woke up the next morning, the lamp still burned, and Averus was still meditating. Still alert, too. Her eyes snapped open the second he turned in her direction. She welcomed him to the new day with a curt nod. They ate breakfast surrounded by the empty, isolating sound of wind gusting over the snow-covered ground. In silence, the boy gathered their supplies and covered himself with his cloak. In silence, they made their way to the clearing.The fourth day was the same as the third: she taught him new, clever things, then left him alone to practice what he learned in whatever way he wished. But instead of immediately returning to the cabin after practicing, he chose to explore a little. His mind was still on that conversation, and it felt like an infinite loop whirling inside his head, burning into his other thoughts; reminding him that even after three consecutive nights of dreams – a whole series of them last night – he still had no idea what the Shadow Beast was, what it meant, or anything. So, mind swirling with doubt, he took an aimless walk into the deep green forest.
The further he went, the more paranoid he became. Even with the sun still in the sky, the woods were foreboding. They were littered with places he couldn’t see, and the glut of living creatures surrounding him choked out most of his Force Senses, dropping him into an invisible but impenetrable fog of life. Icicles stared down at him like a thousand deadly promises. The sound of wind against branches intermingled with the sound of paws breaking twigs, forcing him to second-guess everything he heard. He kept going anyway.
He didn’t consciously know the purpose of the walk, but he found one. Stopping in his tracks, he suddenly felt the chill wind brushing against his face, rushing toward the nearby canyon. That was beside the point, and didn’t bother him right now, distracted as he was. In front of him stood the largest, thickest, most tangled and gnarled tree he’d ever seen. It was so out of place in this forest full of thin needley evergreens, he had to look twice to even remind himself it was a tree. It was strangely beautiful, sitting there, alone yet protected within its crowded world. An outsider, taken in by strangers who weren’t so strange after all. The tree was like him. This was why he took that walk; this was the reason.
He returned home that night with a feeling of self-assurance and confidence. It turned out his mood was being projected loud and clear, because Lady Averus caught it instantly. She noted that he was making amazing progress, and that she was very proud of what he’d been able to accomplish in the past few days. He went to sleep that night, and for once, no demons haunted him.
On the fifth day, little changed in the process. The lessons were more complicated, but she taught them with the same patience. Then she left him to practice on his own, like always. This time, though, the day was much colder than the others and the wind picked up long before the sun went down, making him wish he’d brought along his cloak. This time, the clouds didn’t rush forth from the eastern jet stream as they always did, instead leaving the sky empty and desolate. This time, as the afternoon shadows began marching into the clearing, there came, without warning, without suspense, without a hint from his Force-enhanced perceptions, a hideous, familiar sound. It was a jarring treble howl. He knew at once: his nightmare had come true. The Shadow Beast was here.
It attacked from the edge of the glen – a wild, vaguely humanoid beast, covered in black fur, who sprang at him from out of the darkness of the forest with a roar of hate so piercing, so carnal, so terrifying, so beyond any sound his mind had ever imagined the Beast to make that he nearly froze in place and let it kill him.
But only nearly. Behind the thick, opaque clouds of terror his mind had let bloom, he found a hole and passed through. His vision cleared. He saw that the Shadow Beast was armed. He saw the long stick in its claws – a spear, sharpened into a cruel looking point – aimed at his chest. And he ran. And the Shadow followed, as shadows always do.
Chapter 4: Survivalism
The figure shrouded in black fur, charging that clearing, was not a mindless apparition but a living, breathing, intelligent lifeform. Like all intelligent lifeforms, this one had a past, had interests, pet peeves, accomplishments and regrets. And like all intelligent lifeforms, this one had a name.
She called herself Mouse. And Mouse was just a fourteen-year-old girl. She was not an invincible Shadow Beast spawned from the mind of a troubled kid, just a plain old human. There was nothing supernatural about that. The only thing truly out of the ordinary, was how much she had in common with the boy.
In certain ways, Mouse was exactly like that old woman’s charge. She was young like him; she had no parents, like him; she had the Force, like him; she had a mentor, like him. But there was one particular difference. You see, Mouse was an acolyte to the real Darth Averus.
Mouse’s mission here was simple. The orders her Mistress gave were very clear. If Mouse did this one thing, she would become Darth Averus’s Apprentice. She would become a Sith Lord.
All she had to do was find the false Darth Averus’s apprentice, and kill him.
The catch was, the boy had to be separated from the impostor’s protection. If the old woman were present, she would kill Mouse for sure. Baroness Sarogga might not be a Sith Lord, but she was still dangerous. The old woman fully intended to do everything in her power to protect him, Mouse had no doubt. She would be a considerable force and paranoid to boot. However, as long as Mouse caught the boy alone, it wouldn’t matter.
The forest here was different from what she was used to on Ferros VI. It was thinner above – the trees full of needles instead of leaves. She could see lots of sky. There would be no upper layer to move through. The ground was filled with brush and nasty thickets, all hidden within blankets of snow. The night wind was constant and unyielding. Ferros VI was a cold and harsh place too, but that seemed to be the only similarity. Close, but no death stick.
That meant the preparations had been a little off, since Ferros VI was the planet Mouse had been primarily trained. That was the place where Darth Averus put her in the middle of the forest as the sun set, with no protection, in the midst of a whipping blizzard, and then set a starved predator after her. A test. Mouse would be left alone with a single order: “come back at the first light of the following morning with its head, and I’ll let you in.”
The first time Averus did this – without giving any prior warning, of course – Mouse didn’t return with the creature’s head until late afternoon, because even though she managed to outwit and kill the thing before sunup, she still had to remove the head from its plated body, not to mention drag that massive skull for a quarter mile over what may as well have been a mountain.
In response, Averus simply left her outside till it was morning again…then scolded her when the medic explained that he would have to amputate one of Mouse’s toes. The next time she was given such a task, Mouse put an enormous effort into killing the beast as quickly as humanly possible.
One thing she learned about that tactic: ‘quick’ and ‘successful’ were mutually exclusive. She was nearly killed the second time, and, though in sight of the massive front door to the Sith Lord’s castle and, though she had in her possession the severed head of the hideous beast sent to kill her, Mouse was such a mess that Averus had to go out and drag the girl in herself. Obviously, this did not go over well with the Sith Lord.
It was not quite the most painful series of trial-and-error she’d ever experienced, but Mouse put it high up on the list. In the end, it was patience that turned out be the ultimate key to getting it right.
And patience was needed in excess for this latest task.
Mouse had been tracking them, hopping planet to planet, for three weeks. The longest hunt she’d ever been put on, and against thinking beings no less. It was the greatest trial of her endurance, her persistence and her skill. She would pass it. And she had, so far. There was that moment on the outskirts of Nal Hutta where she overslept two hours and missed their take off. She nearly had a panic attack. She thought seriously about running away, somewhere far, to hide from the wrath that would be Darth Averus when she learned Mouse had failed.
But she did not run. Instead she searched, any way she could, desperately, creatively, carefully…never letting herself pick up too much speed. She swallowed her panic like it was a burning coal, but she swallowed it none the less, and calmly, methodically tracked down where her prey had gone. And she found them. Their trail picked back up for her at a pit stop on Malastare. And from there, she followed them closely to this place: a nameless planet laced with canyons and snow. A perfect planet – snow to help her find him, canyons to help her kill him. This was destiny.
She landed at a safe distance from their cruiser, and cut brush to hide her ship with the one small knife her Mistress had allowed her to bring. Then the night wind snapped at her face, and sailed through the thin fabric of her flight suit like it wasn’t even there, and raised goose bumps on her arms, and put sticky crystals in her hair and her eyebrows, and kissed her fingertips with the promise of frostbite. She wrapped a cloak around herself as tight as possible and began moving. Destiny was rough.
The night descended from a purple starry sky to cold charcoal black as new clouds rose and formed above her. The snow would start soon. That would screw up what little vision the darkness afforded her. But to sleep in the open, unprotected…she’d freeze to death. Mouse sat down upon the hard dry ground, swept of snow, her back to a tired tree. A place comfortable enough to meditate, and uncomfortable enough to keep her awake.
When the snowfall began, she would start moving again. She would likely get nowhere, but moving was more important. That was how she survived this situation before. That was how she would survive it now.
After all, if there was one thing she could say with confidence that she knew how to do, it was survive.
Ask her what her earliest, strongest memory is of, and that’s what she’ll say: of her surviving.
Chapter 5 – Part 1: Forge
She had been born Aeona Dray, to two parents she loved, and who loved her. They lived in a dangerous place, in the underlevels of Coruscant, and had little. But that didn’t matter. She remembered how they usually seemed concerned, worried. But sometimes without warning, they’d become happy and laugh and do silly things. Aeona liked that. It would be fun.
And often, people would come over. Strange people. Lots of aliens, too. Many of them were scary, like monsters. Sometimes the sight of them would give Aeona nightmares. Her parents would give them things, and that made them go away. And afterwards, her parents would take her out, up to the surface levels, and buy her toys.
Even with all those gifts, their house always managed to have neat things she couldn’t play with laying around. There were pretty tubes full of colorful stuff sitting in rows. There were glowing liquids in neat glasses she wasn’t allow to drink. She remembered how her parents would spend hours measuring white stuff that looked like granules of sucra, but she was never allowed to eat it. Then more strange people would come by and it would all disappear. Then they’d take a trip to the surface and she’d get a new toy.
Being on the surface was weird. The light was wrong, especially when the sun was setting. Everything got all orange and the sky turned red. The first time she saw this, she thought the world was ending. The world was ending, and even worse, nobody seemed to care. It was mortifying. Her father eventually explained to her that what she was seeing was “real” sunlight, and the “artificial” (what was that again? “ardavisual?” what did that mean?) sunlight down where they lived wasn’t able to turn red when it switched to night.
Aeona decided the real sun was stupid. It made everything hot, it hurt to look at, and it couldn’t even stay the same color. Must stupid of all, no one could control when it turned on and turned off! Every time they went to the surface after that, she would come home and make drawings of the Real sun getting beat up by her own “Ardavisual” sun. Her favorite was the one where the Real sun gets lost behind clouds and can’t see where he’s punching, and he ends up knocking himself out. Made her laugh every time she looked at it.
She took it to preschool and her classmates agreed it was funny, but they didn’t get it, “What’s…’autovisual’ mean?”
Aeona shrugged, “What my daddy calls the sun that lights up the underlevels.” Which was the first and last thing she said on the subject. After that, she stepped back and let the other kids argue over it.
“Whoa! We have our very own sun?!”
“Nuh uh! There’s only one in the world.”
“No there’s not, there’s lots of suns everywhere.”
“That’s dumb. You’re dumb.”
“I thought suns and stars were different.”
“Yeah, stars are big glowbugs that went too high!”
“No they’re not!”
“Yeah huh!”
“Then how come when I’m on top, I only ever see one going across the sky?”
“It doesn’t go across the sky, stupid. We go around it. That’s what my gramma said.”
“Well your gramma’s a stupid head, cuz…” which got everyone fighting. Aeona faded into the background, feeling detached and out of the loop. Nobody noticed.
Then she would stop home to eat, and then go wandering. She liked wandering. It was better than going over other kids’ apartments – she would always win any game they played, which got on everyone’s nerves. Playtime always ended in a fight when she was around. Wandering avoided that. Besides, it was more fun than visiting Uncle Zim, who slept all the time and whose holo only got dumb news stations, and it was better than staying home. She could only take seeing so many strange scary aliens in a week. Beyond that, there was just this drive to explore that she simply couldn’t explain. In fact, there were lots of things about herself that she couldn’t explain.
Once, when she was very young, they were visited by people in great big complicated robes. They looked just the same as anyone, except she felt something about them. Something radiant. Something beautiful and wonderful, and she couldn’t really see it or taste it or touch it, but she knew it was there, all around them. They wanted to know if they could take her with them, to become like them. They wanted permission. It sounded wonderful, but she didn’t want to leave. And in the end, her parents didn’t want her to leave either. The visitors left without argument, but their impression would forever affect her deepest thoughts. They had something special, and I could have had it too. I could have that.
Then one day, much later, something happened. She was stuck at home that day. It was raining and her parents wouldn’t let her wander in the rain. As her artificial sun gradated evenly from light to dark, people came to the door. Different people. Scary people. Not scary the way the aliens were scary, because these people were human. Scary because of what they said, and how they moved so fast, and made mom and dad shout angry things at them, and had long black things in their hands. And she knew, before she knew, that these people were bad, bad people. She had to hide.
But she didn’t run under the bed or in a closet or behind a chair the way other five year olds might. Instead she ran to her room, where there was a loose panel in the wall. At night, when the memory of a scary visitor made it hard to sleep, she would watch the bugs crawl back and forth from the tiny space it created, and she’d pretend to be them and crawl away with them to wherever she wanted. Wherever she wanted in the world. In the galaxy.
And in the back of her mind, she knew that was exactly what she’d do one day. So when the bad people started shouting and breaking things, before they had a chance to see her, she ran across the den to her little room. It took a lot of effort to force the opening wide enough to fit, and even then it wanted to spring back into place, which made getting in a gauntlet as the sharp edge scratched across her belly and her cheek and her legs and shoulders. But she made it, between the walls. Just enough room to stand in place, careful not to make a noise. Careful to be absolutely still. Careful not to lose her balance. Careful not to knock against the wall panels or the support rods. Careful not to cough or sneeze. Careful not to cry. Especially careful not to cry.
Seconds later, this became terribly difficult. Bad sounds. Bad, bad sounds came from the very den she had just left. The den just beyond the wall panel she was staring at. And then a sudden light. A red flash, creating a star the size of a credit. A hole. Heat radiated from it and carried the stench of burnt construction material into her tiny space. Careful not to cough… All the outside sounds radiated out of it too, becoming louder and clearer and more terrible than ever. With dread taking her breath and fear grinding into her stomach, she peered through the hole.
And watched her parents die.
Every detail.
At one point, just before, there was a single moment, a flash of understanding, where little Aeona knew exactly what was going to happen, and she could have looked away; could have spared herself the misery of seeing it. But she didn’t. So her gaze was locked in place as each event, each moment, each action flipped by in slow motion, like a slide show. Each action freezing another piece of her heart.
She stayed there, standing, frozen, wedged inside that wall, as the bad people huddled and whispered and shouted at each other, and then ran around taking whatever they could. She was there when they left, and the artificial night gave way to artificial day, and all there was to look at was the unmoving bodies of her mom and her dad. She was there as some distant part of her that she no longer recognized yelled for them to get up, to get up and say it’s okay, that everything will be okay, yelled until there was no voice left to yell.
She was there when knocks on the door went unanswered. She was there when mail was slipped through the door, never to be read. She was there when the Coruscant police swept in and taped everything down and covered her parents up and took them away. And she was there while those officers drank caff over the place they had fallen, talked casually over the place they had fallen, made jokes over the place they had fallen, made fun of them over the place they had fallen, that sacred place. She was there when they left. She was there when it was only her. She stood in that spot, absolutely still, for four days.
Getting out was worse, but she didn’t notice. She didn’t notice anything. After the bodies had been removed, she’d gone blank. Nothing registered. Nothing was important enough to register. Not in the universe. When she got out, her lungs found the fresh air and grabbed it, throwing her into a coughing fit, dropping her to her knees. On the ground, looking at her hands and her arms, she saw that all the bugs she remembered watching in the dark – they were now on her, crawling on her. She screamed and scratched at her skin and her clothes and ran. Blind instinct; nothing registered. Maybe she brushed them all off and stomped them dead, maybe she dreamt it. Maybe she ran into the kitchen and gulped down mouthfuls of water, maybe she dreamt it. Didn’t register one way or the other. What did register was when she found herself huddled in the corner of a different room. Her parents’ room.
It was dark; it was bedtime, but her parents weren’t there to tell her that, to tuck her in and tell her a story, or turn on her night light, or make more pretty things she wasn’t allowed to touch, or be silly with her, or buy her a new toy, or anything else. It was dark in her parents’ bedroom, but her parents weren’t there. They would never be there, ever again.
And then, finally, she cried.
When she eventually stopped crying, whenever that was, Aeona got up and left the house. Just left it. Why not? Nobody would ever tell her when it’s time to go home, or when dinnertime was, or when bedtime was, or when it was time to go to the surface, or go to school, or go visit Uncle Zim who she hated. So why bother pretending she would even try doing any of those things? So she left. She left and she never went back. If her parents could do it, she could too. It was time to wander for good.
Aeona spent her first week alone in crippling, mind-breaking fear. Usually, she found herself hiding in the most clever yet most horrid places. All the while there was a terror-stricken panic coursing through her as she watched all sorts of bad people – worse people – do bad things, and worse things, to other people.
She had no idea why she was there, why she didn’t try ascending higher to the levels that were at least nice to look at. Yet every time she started upwards, she remembered the “real” sun was up there. She would not let the real sun beat her. She would not abandon her sun. So she hid. And she survived.
Once Aeona got used to the scary sounds and the scary people, she quit noticing them. Her mind moved back to what she felt that night. All she noticed, all she could notice…all she wanted to notice, was her grief. It was overwhelming. It sapped her energy, yet replaced it with another kind of energy. An energy that made her break things she didn’t touch, made street lamps overload when she passed. More things she couldn’t explain.
But that didn’t change the fact that it was sapping energy, and it didn’t change the fact that she wasn’t eating. So day-by-day, hour-by-hour, moment-by-moment, her grief was being replaced with hunger. When the second (or was it third?) week ended, she began to realize she was starving. Grief was tossed out of the equation.
It didn’t happen smoothly. She’d find food here and there. Depending on how desperate she was, Aeona was able to find something to eat just about anywhere. But it was never enough. Crumbs, at best. Dirty, filth-ridden, inedible crumbs, at worst.
It was the playgrounds that saved her. The public ones the Republic had put up throughout that district in dedication to various philanthropists. Not that she would know anything about philanthropists or the Republic. To Aeona, they were opportunity. Enclosed, self-contained pens with lots of hiding places and lots of kids with food who weren’t paying very close attention.
She would hide somewhere and look for small, unaccompanied children. Weak ones who looked younger or smaller than she, but who definitely didn’t hang out with other kids; whose parents definitely didn’t care enough to stay close to them. There really weren’t that many who were actually smaller than she was, but they were there. She’d wait for them to get out their lunch – someone always brought lunch – and then she would run up, push them to the ground, and take it. She didn’t care if she made them cry. Hell, they didn’t know what crying was, as far as she was concerned. It got her through the month. And the next one.
Sometimes, police officers would walk through the area acting casual, but Aeona saw how they watched. How they studied each kid and traced some invisible line from them to a guardian somewhere else, or a birthday party off in the distance, or their ever-attentive parents, then marking them off in their head. Skinny kid in t-shirt…connects to dad – check. Sandy haired toddler…connects to grandma – check. Plankton things on the seesaw…connect to weird octopus creatures – check. Fatso with the candy on his face…connects to nanny – check. Little girl in rags with messy hair, hiding inside the jungle gym, staring back at us…
These officers weren’t just strolling without reason, they were looking for her. And for children like her. Children with nobody to watch them. Why they did this, she couldn’t imagine. She definitely didn’t like them. They were the people who took her parents’ bodies away. They were the people who laughed and joked on the place where her parents fell. They were the people who were supposed to stop the bad guys, but didn’t, because apparently they were too busy looking for thieving children in playgrounds. She didn’t just not like them…she hated them.
With every passing day, there were more of them. It made things difficult. More difficult, at least. The few others without parents weren’t making things any easier. She didn’t like them, either. They thought they were boss, or that they somehow ‘owned’ this part or that part of a playground. Sometimes, one would offer to help her, but she would see the devious glint in his eye – the one that promised to betray her, hurt her, abandon her. She didn’t really understand how she read all that from a glint, but she did. So she remained a loner.
After a while, it began to take a toll. The reality was, this was using more strength than it gave back. She was getting more food by stealing it, sure, but she still went to sleep hungry. She still woke up hungry. She still felt that painful, eternal crushing inside her stomach that made her dizzy and made her forever tired and broke down her thoughts and made her distracted and gave her headaches. But now she also lived in fear, because not every kid she went after could be small and helpless. There weren’t enough. Being five sucked.
And anyway, sometimes they fought back. Sometimes they chased after her. Sometimes, they shouted threats, and began to gang up on her when she came near. Sometimes they had wrathful older brothers who carried chains or vibroblades under the shiny coats they wore with strange symbols ironed on the back. So she kept moving, further and further from the place she was raised; deeper and deeper into the bowels of that city planet.
Coruscant is a big place. It is one of only three planets in the entire galaxy that qualifies as a City Planet. Of those three, it is by far the largest, oldest, and most civilized. But ‘civilized’ is a subjective term. Within its vertical world is packed no less than two trillion lifeforms, of every imaginable variety. No amount of modernization, no amount of policing or authority or enforcement can handle that size. It is not possible. Every day on Coruscant, a hundred epics and a thousand novels and a hundred-million morality tales and a billion short stories and a hundred quadrillion little vignettes play out in real life. Every single day. Nothing can keep an eye on that many stories at once. Coruscant can claim to be as civilized as it wishes, but it is too big for the claim to be true. It’s just too big.
It’s even bigger when you’re a little kid with no mom and dad, and no home. Monstrous, even. Like a living, breathing creature that wants nothing more than to devour small children. And not as a joke. Not like the games where, after the small children get gobbled up, they giggle and run off to be chased again. In this game, after the small girl is gobbled up, all that’ll be left is a bloody corpse for the police to outline…and then drink caff over, and joke over, and make fun of her over.
This was what she thought. This was what kept her alive. It’s what she learned watching the bad people and the worse people on the street: dead was dead. It’s what she learned watching her parents as they fell: you never come back.
As Aeona went deeper, she began watching different people. Especially other girls. Other street girls. There was a deep desire for a role model left vacant in the place inside her heart where her parents had lived. Where they still lived, in a way, frozen.
But her parents would never be there to show her how to grow up. So she watched the girls. She watched how they walked. She watched how they wore bright, obnoxious clothes, but pretended they didn’t. She listened to how they talked, how they shouted and cursed at each other, using their words like blaster bolts. She watched how they slowed and grew furtive when speeders went by. She watched them lean against the sides of swoop bikes or driver-side doors, talking suddenly so much quieter than before. She followed them to the places they would take other people. Ugly places. She watched them there, too. And then she decided she needed new role models.
Aeona had come to the conclusion that there was no real power there, with those girls. She was looking for someone with power. She wasn’t really sure why, but she was.
But maybe she did know. Because there was that whisper again from the depths of her memory, from when the people in robes had visited her: They had something special, and I could have it too. Except, now she had an inkling of what that special thing might have been. It might have been Power. And it kinda fit.
They had Power, and I could have it too.
No…not ‘kinda’.
As time wore on, she got sick a lot. It was inevitable – her immune system was a wreck. Always, she struggled through her illnesses without too many problems. And she never threw up. It was the one thing she thought she had control over, that she thought couldn’t break her. The one thing out of her entire life that she could be proud of.
And then one day, shivering violently on a warm afternoon under warm heavy blankets, deep inside an unused ventilation pipe that was even warmer, hallucinating within the grip of a fever, as something rotten in the pit of stomach dripped acid into her throat…she threw up.
She stared at it in horror as almost immediately after the heaving that painful crushing hunger doubled back onto her tenfold. Like someone punching you in the stomach, but then not stopping, or ever stopping no matter what. Not when you walked, not when you sat still, not when you slept. That was what it was like to be starving. And her eyes were locked upon the reason why, that product of nausea that she so believed she had control of. She saw it as the food she earned – that she’d toiled for, put herself at risk for – lost forever. Like her parents. Except this loss could actually kill her. And it was all her fault. She wasn’t strong enough – wasn’t powerful enough – to hold it down.
At that moment, where the darkness that surrounded her and enshrouded her seemed to penetrate every portion of her self, to suffocate her in despair, she found herself with a decision to make: she could either give up right here and just lay down and die…or keep living, no matter what it took. No matter what.
This, is how predators are forged.
Chapter 5 Part 2: Dragon
Stumbling, half blind with tears of anger and grief, away from that puddle with no sense of where to go or why; her legs were like sticks and barely held her up; her head pounded against her eyeballs, and disrupted every rational thought she attempted to make, her skin ached with flashes of heat and cold as her body desperately fought her fever. This was the state she was in, the first time she killed.
It was only a minor rodent but she killed it nonetheless. She spotted it, she watched it, she chased it and caught it and squeezed and didn’t let go until it stopped moving and biting. There was a second’s hesitation then, as Aeona was filled with an anxious triumph at the knowledge that she just took a life. That yes, she just did that. She took it. That made it her’s, didn’t it? Whatever. And then she bit into it.
A fit of dry heaving later, and her stomach finally managed to cough out the piece of raw flesh. At that point, seeing that even when she was successful she failed, Aeona was ready to change her mind – to just lie down and die. Maybe she’d see her parents. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. It had to be better than this.
“Y’know, it tastes better when you cook it, kid.” The words didn’t quite register, but the hand gently falling on her shoulder did. She flinched. She braced herself. The only physical contact she’d had in the past year was the violent kind, against other children. The voice persisted, “I just want to help. My name’s Level. See? I won’t hurt you. It’ll be okay, yeah?” and eventually, she let the hand touch her shoulder. And eventually, she let the voice pick her up and set her on the back of a big red machine. It looked like nothing more than a naked engine with a giant pair of vibroblades attached to it, and was dreadfully uncomfortable. Not that Aeona cared one way or the other.
The voice steering the machine was owned by a giant of a man, dressed up in complicated layers of bandage work under a vest under a long brown jacket. A jacket so big it looked like a robe. It reminded her of someone or some type of person she couldn’t quite remember. His face, which she glimpsed whenever he checked back to make sure she was still there, was riddled with pockmarks, though most were hidden under his beard. His head was completely bald, or shaved, she had no way to distinguish. But what really stood out was the left eye, which was made of glass. It stood out, because it wasn’t made to look like a normal eye. Instead, it looked reptilian: a thin vertical slit surrounded by a soft red iris set within muddy, translucent yellow. It should have scared her, but it didn’t. He didn’t say a word. She didn’t want him to, either.
When they set down, the cyclopean man bellowed out in a language she didn’t understand. At once, rough-edged people of various species and ages ran out to him and talked and joked with him for several minutes. She noticed that they wore jackets, too. The backs had a symbol ironed on: a brown, squat monster of some kind. The kind of thing worn by the type of people who would run her out of the playgrounds. The kind of thing worn by angry, violent people with weapons. He gestured to her, in response to some question. She’d hold her ground this time. She had nothing to lose.
“Whaaat? It’s Republic Day!” the man named Level said, elbowing a Rodian, “I figured I’d be nice for once! Yeah?”
Nice to who? she thought with disgust, remembering the other girls and what they did, Me? Or them? She shuddered.
Her thoughts were answered almost immediately, as she caught the looks of annoyance and mute anger in the man’s friends. If these even were his friends. They clearly didn’t want her there. She didn’t really want herself there, either. She’d been all set to give up. Why did this man have to go and ruin it? A year ago, she would have cried. She didn’t.
She caught someone saying, “What the kriff are you doing draggin’ a useless nine year old here, eh Lev? We have troubles enough without this shavit! Grow some freakin’ durasteel over that damn heart of yours before it gets us kriffin’ killed.” The pale-faced speaker didn’t look like he wanted to joke about it either. She suppressed the urge to correct him and say she was only six. She didn’t think that would help.
“Lock, I found her trying to eat a dead rat, come on! Imagine for a moment that you’re in my shoes, walkin’ down the Fortieth, and you look down an alley, and what you see is a tiny little girl who looks so wasted away she could be picked up by the damn wind, and who is such a mess you aren’t sure if it’s a Human or a Twi’lek under that mud…and then you watch this poor little thing pick up a dead rat from the ground with a gleam in her eyes, and…”
“And what? Eat it? Good for her – lots of protein in rats, I hear. Is this shavit supposed to move me?” Lock ran up to her and bent down condescendingly. He was a formidable being, with scars crisscrossing his face and bare arms, and had rough leathery skin traced with the most frightening tattoos. She noticed he was also missing a finger. He immediately began mocking her, “Aw, boo hoo, I got no food. Waa, waa, look at me, I’m forced to eat rats.” Then without warning he turned furious and screamed in her face, “I lived on rats for three Nordus-damned years before moving up!” there was a sneer in there, along with the hope that he’d scared her.
Except, there had been a warning that he’d do that. Not from him, but from somewhere inside. She didn’t only expect it, she knew exactly when it would happen and how it would sound. So when it did happen, it wasn’t surprising or scary at all, and she weathered it without so much as a flinch.
In fact, if anything, she looked unamused and standoffish. Like she was perfectly capable of taking down this full-grown, hardened criminal all by herself. That wasn’t what she specifically intended to look like, of course, because she really didn’t care enough to intend to look like anything. That just happened to be how her lack of interest showed on her face.
“It seems,” observed Level, “That maybe the useless nine-year-old’s got some durasteel of her own, eh?”
The Rodian laughed, “Or she’s deaf.” he said, working his strange mouth around the alien words of Basic. She knew it was meant for her, that the others would have understood him had he spoke in his native language.
She at first wanted to say “I’m not deaf,” but decided that would sound stupid and childish, so she went with, “I’m not afraid of you.”
It came out sounding like she was, in fact, very afraid of them. It sounded to her ears just as, if not more, childish than anything else she could have said. Whatever advantage she had, in other words, was lost. On the playgrounds, that sort of comment would have been an invitation to attack her.
But they just laughed. That made her mad, that they’d dismiss her so quickly…but at least they weren’t killing her. In fact, Lev actually brought her into their home, and inside she got to eat a full meal for the first time in a whole year. She threw it up, to her embarrassment. More proof that she was weak. Except only Lock got mad, and only because Level insisted on cleaning it himself.
Once she was able to keep some food in her stomach – which took a while – they gave her Bacta. It got rid of her fever almost immediately. She slept in a bed. With a mattress. She woke up twelve times that night, convinced this had all been a cruel dream. Every time, she looked in panic around the strange room, tested the soft mattress, and breathed the musty air. When she was finally sure that everything was still real, she relaxed and laid back down. Aeona was so grateful, she could have cried. She didn’t.
She wanted to give them something in return, but she couldn’t think of anything except her real age. So the next time someone called her ‘that nine year old’ she corrected them,
“I’m six.” She said proudly.
Saying it now – after what she had done outside the other day, not cowering like she had – it was impressive to them. They ruffled her hair (which she didn’t like at all) and gave her more food (which she did), then Lev got them all together and they decided to let her stay. And that was how Aeona became a Kryat, and the youngest member of the most dangerous swoop gang in Coruscant’s western hemisphere.
“You need a good name to ride with us. This ‘Aeona’ business sounds too weak, y’know? We need something threatening, yeah? Yeah.” Lev thought about it a moment, “Spine? You definitely have one.” He laughed at his own joke. Someone had to, she supposed.
“How bout ‘Rat’?” said Lock, who laughed too, but for a different reason.
“Mouse.” She corrected. But it was too quiet and they didn’t hear, so she said again, “It was a mouse.”
Lock appeared skeptical, “Mice are poisonous mutants. You can’t eat them. And very hard to catch. So are you sure about that?”
“I know what I kill.” She said flatly.
“Well maybe so, but you did have a fever and – “
“Have you ever killed anyone or anything in your life where you didn’t care who or what it was? EVER?” she glared at him, a glare that he returned for a while…until he looked away, “I didn’t think so.”
“Mouse it is, then!” said Lev, and they drank on it, which made her dizzy somehow. She decided that, in the future, she’d stick to water and let them drink the weird stuff.
In Lev’s team – one of many teams within the Kryat Gang – Mouse flourished. They gave her back her energy, made things seem important, made her care. And she made them solid. Her presence filled in the blanks of a puzzle none of them had known was unfinished. She gave them a reason to do what they did that, for once, had nothing to do with spice and credits. They changed her; she changed them. They became a family.
Here, her name was never Aeona, and never would be. That was her mother and father’s name for her. Nobody here was her mother or father. But they were her family. And her family called her Mouse. So that was her name. And if you crossed that, you crossed them.
But ultimately, she began to realize that they loved her because she relied on them. It was her weakness that kept them together, not her strength. This made her feel aloof. She went back to wandering. Often, she would wander great distances while the team was off doing something dangerous, something the felt she was too young to do. Sometimes, she’d be gone for days at a time.
It was two years later that it happened. She found herself further away than she’d ever been before, in an area that was completely unfamiliar, and now she’d hit a dead end. The wall extended for easily half a mile in either direction, and looking up, it ascended nearly into heaven itself. But even as strange as it was, this wall was especially different. Because it was familiar. Not the wall itself, but what it emitted. That feeling of Power she remembered, it flowed from the structure like a fountain, like a flood.
Mouse didn’t know how long she’d been staring at it before the men came by. She watched them as they slowly walked the straight distance toward her. They were the only two people in the area. It was clear they were not out to harm her, but she put herself on her guard anyway. Both wore nearly identical brown robes. Complicated ones. That familiarity again.
“It’s the Jedi Temple,” said the first man, in a crisp, high-class Coruscanti accent, “You’re at the ground floor looking up at the largest building on the entire planet. It’s a sight few beings ever get to see.” He beamed, warmth rolling from him as though a geyser had burst, even outshining the giant wall – temple.
“Who are you?” she asked, suspicion rolling off her tongue.
His voice radiated calm, “I am Jedi Master Baruuk and this is my padawan, Sifo-Dyas.”
“Greetings,” said the padawan, who bowed, “And I suspect you have a name too?”
“Mouse.” She said.
The Master switched to a look of fatherly concern, “We sensed your presence from almost a mile away, Mouse. It isn’t often that a non-Jedi so strong in the Force is found wandering this close to the Temple.”
“What are you gonna do about it?”
He seemed to study her, “Mouse…not a name parents tend to give children. Do you have another?”
“Not anymore.” She winced after saying it – she gave away her position. Stupid.
He smiled. She hated it when people smiled at her mistakes. He said, “I suspect you lost it when you lost someone close, hm?” he paused, “An older sibling? A close uncle? …Your parents?”
She kept her face stone. This stranger would not get to her.
But there was nothing except sympathy in this man, “We can give you a better life, Mouse.”
Then all of the sudden, it clicked. These people…these Jedi…they were the ones who had that special thing. And this Force, it was the Power. The Power she’d been looking for, “I can become a Jedi?” it was almost too excited a question to be a question. More like a request.
His face sunk, “I’m…I’m afraid not. You’d be much too old. But there are many non-Jedi in the Order, some of whom came from a situation just like your own. We only want to help you. You would have a better life. I can promise that.”
But the idea of being with other children who had the same thing happen to them as she…it sounded too much like what she remembered of the parentless kids in the playgrounds. They’d be territorial and cold. And besides, what was the point of being surrounded with such power if she couldn’t use it? This is what she wanted, and this stranger was promising nothing less than to deny it from her!
Some speil, ha! What Boontas! Mouse thought. Boonta. That was slang she’d learned from The Rodian. He first told her it meant ‘know-nothing’, but she eventually got him to admit it was a religious slur that referred to Rodians who practiced within the Corellian faith. Learning that only made it more enjoyable to repeat, knowing that the word could actually do harm if said to the right kind of person.
But these Boontas weren’t worth it, “No thanks. I’ll take my chances.” she finally said, and before they could respond, she leapt to a drainage pipe, which she used to slide down to an even lower level before running away completely.
She felt someone follow her. She couldn’t see who, or where, but she felt it. Probably one of those Jedi. That Sifo-Dyas had looked suspicious. Probably, he was following her to see if there were others like her, to impress his Father or Guardian or whoever Baruuk was. Probably looking for others that were young enough. Figured! With the Kryats, she was too young. With them, she was too old. When was the world going to start spinning in her favor?
She got home quickly enough. Lev causally asked where she’d gone, as usual. As usual, she shrugged and went into the space they’d created to be her room. No one bothered to pry any further. Most of them were too busy discussing the latest job she wasn’t part of.
Normally she’d stay inside in the evenings and have Lev teach her more of the alphabet or how to patch up blaster wounds. But today she was too restless to stick around. Too angry. So she struck out again after dinner, and wandered aimlessly for a long time, brooding. She stuck to the shadows in the places most congested with pedestrian traffic, just watching. That’s what she liked to do most: just watch…to pick out the strongest…pick out the weakest…pick out the prey.
When she returned, the door was locked. They never locked the door. The Kryats didn’t have to. Nobody in their right mind came anywhere near being close enough to warrant locking the door. But maybe someone had today. She went around back. That door was still open. She walked in. It smelled odd. She turned on the light.
Everyone was dead.
She didn’t stand there paralyzed with shock, she didn’t scream, she didn’t drop to her knees in despair, she didn’t run in terror, and she definitely didn’t cry. Mouse knew it would happen sooner or later. She’d been ready. Lock had died a month ago, in fact. Caught a bolt to the head. So instead all she did was regard the bodies of her loved ones with the callous eye of disinterest, at their festering blaster wounds, at the carpet soaked with blood, and then at the walls riddled with holes. A straightforward job. Where they screwed up is, they missed the little one.
It didn’t even need a decision. Someone was going to die for this. She picked up Lev’s Hold Out, still smoking. It was heavier than she expected. She nearly tripped over some cowering old woman just outside the back door. She stared up at Mouse, looking so weak and in need. The woman’s eyes were glassy with fright. A trembling hand stretched out and pointed north, “They…they went that way, into those apartment buildings. You poor thing, you must be – Oh! Oh, child, come back!”
But Mouse wasn’t listening. She was already inside and running up the steps. She knew this apartment building like it was her own home. In a way it was. It acted like an overly tall fortress that encircled their base on three sides. There were a thousand exits, but only one led straight through to the other side. And she knew the shortcut to it.
When she got back out into the open, she saw them. Five guys with carbines, laughing, running down the street, their backs to her. Five pairs of identical shiny jackets with symbols ironed on them revealed the men to be from a rival gang. Not that it really mattered to Mouse who they were, other than guilty. For a second, the sound of Lock’s voice flooded her mind and called her a hypocrite. She reminded herself that he was dead, just like the rest of them now, and she ignored it.
She kept up her run and lifted the Hold Out. She brought it up so the sight was level with her eyes and at that moment, every transgression that ever befell her poured out. Every single moment of fear and misery, from the very first – from the death of her parents. Ten times, she remembered counting. Hate Ten times, the bad men shot her parents. Fury Ten times. Rage It went like this:
One, BLAM!
Two, BLAM!
Three, BLAM!
Four, BLAM!
Five, BLAM!
Six, BLAM!
Seven, BLAM!
Eight, BLAM!
Nine, BLAM!
Ten, BLAM!
And they all fell down.
Chapter 6: Kindness
The return home to the Kryats’ base was mechanical. It wasn’t like a dream or anything eerie like that, just…routine. Like Mouse had expected this to happen. Had expected to shoot five men in the back, killing them in cold blood. If something inside her was absolutely horrified, she didn’t notice. Or give a damn. Not anymore.
When she returned, the old woman was still there outside the door, weeping. Coming closer, the girl noticed that she’d been hit. Her shoulder and the shawl that surrounded it were covered in blood. At first, she wanted to just leave the woman there. She had more important things to think about, like the fact that she had just killed five men. Then she remembered Lev, and how two years ago he came upon a similar situation. Mouse was alive because of him. More importantly, Mouse was Mouse because of him.
Mouse took the woman’s hand and led her inside. Once there, Mouse went into their Bacta stash – nobody would be selling it now – and tended gently to the wound. It was the one thing she knew well from being in the Kryat gang – how to patch people up. It was the only cool thing they let her learn.
It hardly took an hour. The bolt hadn’t even hit the bone, and the woman seemed pretty resilient for being so old. Then again, some of those bag ladies could really hold their own when they felt threatened, so maybe she shouldn’t be surprised. The woman was endlessly grateful, thanking her and stifling sobs and thanking her again. Mouse wasn’t in the mood for being appreciative, though. Her thoughts were on her future. She’d have to start over. Again. And they were just about ready to start taking her seriously, too. There was no way any of the other Kryat teams would be willing to take her in, either. Not now.
…shouldn’t I be sad for them? Weren’t they my friends? My family? But no matter how she tried, they stirred no emotion. Nothing save disappointment, and that was for herself, not for them. She had nothing for them. It felt…selfish.
“…and I want to help you bury your friends. You should not have to do such a terrible thing on your own.” Mouse caught the old woman saying.
She hadn’t even thought about that yet. But it was true. She’d have to do something with them. She couldn’t let the police find them, or they’d flood the level. She most definitely couldn’t let the rival gangs find them, or they’d desecrate their bodies somehow, and she didn’t have to feel grief for their loss to not want that to happen. They would always be her family, just like her parents. You protect your family, even when they die. Especially when they die. This was, in fact, the only way she could imagine that the whole team would ever need to rely upon her. So it had to be done. But bury…?
“Maybe we should…creme…uh, cremate them.” Mouse said, “This building’s mostly wood inside anyway…”
“Ah. Good, good thinking. Less effort that way.” She replied, smiling.
That stung, hearing the woman say it that way, suggesting that she didn’t care enough to go to the trouble, “Well… maybe I should bury them.”
“And I shall help.”
Mouse couldn’t imagine what help she’d be. Resilient or not, the woman still looked frail under those old clothes. Then again, what good would Mouse be – an eight year old burying full grown men? This was ridiculous, actually.
“Come, child. Let’s start.”
“But, how’re we gonna do it?”
“You tell me the place, lead me. And I carry them there. You must know of someplace were bodies can be sealed up, yes?”
“…I know about the Old Techno Union Smelting Pits. That’s the only place I can think of, but it’s, it’s so far…and how – “
“- Will I carry them? Ohhhh, you’ll see. Come, help me with this and show me the way.”
And so they cut the bloody carpet and wrapped each body in a section. Such macabre work, Mouse thought she should be horrified, or at least disgusted.
I don’t feel anything. Why don’t I feel anything?
It scared her, this lack of emotion. Like she was empty. Then again, it meant she wasn’t panicking. She remembered how Lock panicked when those smugglers surrounded them over at the meeting house. He just wasn’t able to believe that a peaceful rendezvous would turn so violent, he couldn’t believe it. He panicked and it killed him. He felt emotion and he died. She felt no emotion. Maybe that was a good thing.
Maybe they panicked too… stone-faced, she looked down upon her family, all covered cloth.
When the deed was finished, they stood back. Then the old woman performed a miracle. At the bidding of nothing more than her hands, all of them rose weightless into the air. Wasting no time, they traveled through all the back alleys and corridors, the wrapped up gang members floating behind them like balloons. Mouse smiled in spite of herself. She showed her the place, and each body was effortlessly placed into one of the enormous drums, which then sealed itself as though by a ghost.
“I saw you marvel at my gift.”
Mouse had a thousand questions to ask, yet she was at a loss for words.
“You saved my life, child, when you could have easily left me to die. I want to reward you. What would you like? What do you want?”
“I…don’t know.” Except she did know.
“Yes you do.” The old woman peered at Mouse, her face deadly serious, “Child: What Is Thy Desire?” Each word she spoke seemed to be backed up by a hundred generation’s worth of greatness, seemed to be backed up by rolling firestorms from a thousand planets, seemed to be backed up by God. The very question exemplified her want.
She let herself absorb it a moment; take it all in. Everything. The ancient smelting plant surrounding them like the hive of titanic insects, the distant fuming towers of illegal factories processing new drugs, brown clouds hugging everything like the fog against a seaport, all ceilinged within a dome of steel twilight to support buildings miles above, the entire thing a feat of millennia-old engineering, the entire thing now the final resting place of her second family, a family that raised her when no one else would…it was all nothing compared to this old woman, who now stood at her full regal height with bright eyes and square shoulders.
“Power.” Mouse said, breathless, “I want Power.”
“Then power, you shall have. Come.” And so she did.
And now she was here, crouching behind a pair of boulders, snow piled on herself as camouflage, the fur of a dead animal – killed with nothing but a small knife – wrapped around her, and watching her prey learn how to fight with sticks against his teacher. How pathetic. Such a child. I bet he calls her ‘mommy’.
She saw that his form was clean but mechanical; self-conscious. He caught on quickly enough, but if he continued to treat his katas like holy writ, he would have no way to improvise in a real situation. In other words, he was screwed. Because he was going be in a real situation very, very soon.
And his teacher! The impostor taught him wearing her full ‘Sith’ robes. Even the hood. In other words, she wanted the appearance of control, which meant she was insecure. It also meant she wasn’t in control. Also, Mouse saw that she let the boy speak too much, and question her lessons too often. Good thinking, idiot. And what would happen if I sprang on him as you both walk home? When you tell him to ‘move,’ he’ll ask ‘why?’ and I’ll kill him, that’s what’ll happen. Serve him to me on a kriffin’ electrum platter why don’t you?
She didn’t understand why this was making her so indignant. She should be happy this woman was so incompetent, not mad. What were these people to her that she might feel this way? She watched them closer. She had to be missing something.
The lessons continued, out of earshot but close enough to read their lips and piece the conversation together contextually. The impostor showed him something new. He challenged the point of it. She generously explained the move’s purpose. He then performed the move until it was memorized, which didn’t take him long. Then they sparred with the move so he had a feel for it. Then she attempted to explain where the boy might go wrong, where his weaknesses were. Then they moved on.
That’s not how you teach someone where their mistakes are. He’s not listening to you, you stupid hag! He’s going to keep making the same damn mistakes until you come to your senses and show him where they are, personally. He needs to feel the sting of his mistake himself.
What was wrong with her today? This was good news, not bad. What was making her so angry? She shook it off and kept watching, but all they did was repeat the same process over and over with different moves until the sun was past noon. Then the woman left him to work alone for a while. Convenient.
Too convenient. The woman might not really be gone. There was a lot of evidence that the old hag was deeply possessive of her little protégé, and paranoia was the best friend of possessiveness in Mouse’s experience. There was a better chance the woman had only gone out of sight to draw someone like Mouse out of hiding. Mouse could actually, then, be in greater danger if she attacked now than had she attacked while they were practicing.
But Mouse could afford to be patient. All the clues pointed to an intention to stay here for a while. She had all the time in the world to kill him. She might as well find out more about this impostor while she could.
She waited for the sounds of the woman’s exit to fade into nothing, then followed after. She left the little boy to do his thing.
Apparently, the old woman was more trusting than Mouse thought, because she did, in fact, set out for their cabin. There was something else. The woman kept her robes on the whole way back. Even when the path became hard to navigate, she did not remove them. Maybe there was more to her wardrobe than Mouse had assumed. The way she hugged it…this wasn’t an item representing imagined power after all, it was an item of imagined power. The woman wasn’t afraid to lose control of the boy – she wasn’t even close to that level of security. She was still afraid to lose her own self-support. Mouse wondered if the woman slept with a stuffed Bantha, too. It would fit the profile.
This was too good. There had been no indication the impostor was this incredibly pitiful. Perhaps there was a chance Mouse could even take her on, after the boy was dead. Two kills for her Mistress. Because clearly, Mouse had overestimated this woman.
Actually, now that she thought about it, it was Darth Averus who’d overestimated this woman. Not she. And that said something about her Mistress, didn’t it? Lord Averus had maintained such an impenetrably perfect mask of genius and power and fear these past few years that Mouse looked at this misstep as a floodgate. Could it be? Could the great Darth Averus have misjudged someone for once in her life? Could she have made a…mistake? Mouse could have laughed.
And so the tables begin to turn. I won’t be your slave for long now, oh dear Lord Averus.
The old woman walked stiffly into the log cabin that served as her home on this world. Stiff from the cold so soon… She turned on the only light. It had bare floors, not even polished. A single open room. A meager cot for her and a small mat for the boy. A fireplace for cooking. Nothing important or pretty or even useful on the walls. The woman sat down to rest, with her back to the only window, and removed her hood. Thin, loose white strands as stiff as hay fell to her shoulders, so unlike Darth Averus’s thick silver hair that was always carefully pinned high over her head. And so modest a place. What kind of example did she think she was setting for this boy, acting so content within a place so meager? Where was the drive for ambition?
You two should be inside a castle villa at the edge of the greatest canyon on the planet, peopled with an army of servants. Then, from the minute you arrive, you should treat him like a minor servant the whole time, yet give him small chances and openings every once in a while so that he can steal levels of authority on his own. Then, only once he is back at your side, beneath you and only you…then you begin his training. And not one minute before. That’s what you should have done, you hag, you old fool.
Well…because that’s what was done to me…
It was four years ago. Lord Averus had been training her deeply in nothing but pure combat – running Mouse nearly to a physical meltdown with long, unforgiving strings of brutal training exercises that seemed less about testing her endurance than simply breaking her. “Breaking her” was probably not far off from the truth, either. But Mouse didn’t break so easy.
Averus told her it was time for a change. Mouse couldn’t decide if that meant things would get better or worse, but it would definitely mean she’d get to sleep normal hours for a few days while they traveled. Sleeping would be nice at least. That idea alone was enough to make her excited about it. And a change of scenery. That would be good too. Ferros VI was so cold and featureless outside the jungles…and inside them, there was such little variety of plants and animals that it did little to help.
“We’ve arrived. Mouse, this is Wayland. Up ahead is the fortress I’ve had built,” the ancient woman gave her a subtle, but prideful smile, “What do you think?”
Mouse studied the structure as they flew nearer. Her mistress had talked about it several times before, but never explained what it looked like. Seeing it from above, it appeared to be nothing more than a featureless military compound, except built one hundred times larger. Not very inspired and definitely spartan. She imagined the walls were probably thicker than most buildings were wide. From overhead, she could see that the top was not covered, but was instead a skylight that maintained a massive courtyard, which contained within it enough space for a miniature town. In fact, a number of small structures could be seen near the center, which seemed to be grouped in the manner of a primitive farming village. So she had someone make her an oversized barracks, big deal. ‘What do I think’? What kind of a question is that, oh dear lord of the Sith, when there’s nothing of value to say.
“It’s…” she shrugged, “…big.”
“You’re talkative today.” Averus said, slathering it with sarcasm.
Mouse didn’t even look at her, “Yes, Lord Averus.”
“That’s not what I meant it to…” Averus stared at her, but Mouse gave no hint of the truth: that she truly did want to talk with someone. Desperately. Just banter and joke, and not play at roles for once. Just act like friends with someone again, like she used to with the Kryats. But…not with Averus. Anyone but Darth Averus. And Mouse had patience. So Mouse stayed silent. Averus had no choice but to drop it, “…never mind. You will land ahead of me. I have business to take care of at Wayland’s capital. Give this letter to the door guards, and they’ll relay your instructions.” She always had business somewhere, that wasn’t anything new. Mouse thought nothing of it.
When she arrived, she dutifully handed the flimsy to the door guard. Her instructions were apparently that she was to be called Aeona here – could the woman have chosen a more painful alias? Intentional, of course – and that she had no connection with anyone or anything important. In fact, her job here was to be the girl who hauled the manure wagon…and she’d have to be interviewed for it.
It turned out, though it came as no surprise given the job description, that she had landed upon the lowest possible rung of this self-contained community’s hierarchical structure. Even the people who everyone else beat on, beat on her. It was like the playgrounds on Coruscant again, but worse, because here she had nowhere to hide. It was too small and isolated, and the lowest servants always knew exactly where to go to dump cold water on her if she didn’t show up for work in the morning. Of course, this only happened once, on the third day, and only because she was testing their boundaries.
When Averus returned from her ‘business’, a week later, she made no indication that she recognized Mouse. Though Mouse expected that by this point. She knew when to play along, after all. At first nothing happened, but by being extra alert, she began to notice the changes. Jobs being rescheduled, supervising servants suddenly switching positions, tasks Mouse originally did in isolation now intersected with other people’s tasks. These were important details, because much of this was opportunity being created by Averus, just for Mouse.
Well that just wouldn’t do. Mouse could put up with everyone calling her by her birth name. She could put up with drudgework and hard labor. She could even put up with everyone beating on her for even the slightest transgression – Force knew she was put through far worse by Lord Averus back on Ferros. But she would not sit there and act like some wamprat who heels when her owner beckons. So, when an opportunity arose that just looked a bit too convenient, Mouse ignored it. Just shrugged it off; called the bluff. Then she watched and waited, and when she thought there was a better way, a less obvious way, she went for it, and advanced up the ranks without Averus’s invisible hand guiding her.
Take that.
It took a little bit more than a month for her to find herself next to her mistress again. The old woman looked at her indifferently. She asked her Head Servant who this girl was.
“Aeona Dray, Lady Averus. She shows great promise, and I’d like to take her under my wing, if her ladyship approves?”
“…I do.” Obviously, Darth Averus wished to see this game to its bitter end. I guess ignoring her help wasn’t the nicest thing to do. Not that it mattered. Within the second week “under his wing,” after gaining his trust and alienating him to the point that she’d become the only person able to do his job, the Head Servant found himself taking a nasty fall down the compound’s main staircase. Dropped the whole way down. Broke his neck, sadly. In such a crowded space, it was obvious it had been nothing more than an unfortunate accident.
Mouse made sure nobody was looking when she cut the sewing thread tied, for some inexplicable reason, to the base of the railing. Oh, she could have easily been more underhanded than that. She could have spent extra time alienating him even further, driving him to suicide. She could have tapped into his perversions, which she had no doubt were there, and pulled a role-reversal. She could have poisoned him slowly over time. Those sorts of things would have been quite clever and possibly even exciting, but there was a major flaw that all those plans shared. All those plans were too complicated; too much was involved with too many risks. The most important lesson Mouse had learned from this: being creative was dangerous. The simplest, most straightforward – most brash – solution would always be the best.
Darth Averus promoted her that very day. “Good,” was the only praise she gave Mouse on her achievement. That, and she never called her Aeona again. And that alone was more than enough for Mouse.
They remained there a short while longer, doing nothing much. Averus eventually began explaining the fortress, its purpose, some of its history. She said that the Fortress itself wasn’t really her’s. It was the Sith’s. It had been started and abandoned four generations ago by Darth Enimitar, a Cerean male – the last male Sith Lord before the string of, in Averus’s opinion, much more competent women took reign of the Order – using plans drawn up by the Venerable Darth Bane’s first Apprentice so many centuries before. That particular Sith Lord had been a woman as well, incidentally. Darth Zannah.
“It is fitting that the building was completed by one.” Averus said.
“A Sith Lord?” Mouse asked.
“A woman.” Averus smiled to herself, “Never mind. Honestly, I never really cared about the project much.”
“You dedicated a lot of time to it, for something you don’t care about.” Mouse observed, remembering how often her mistress would leave her completely alone on Ferros VI for this dumb structure.
“Because this wasn’t about me. This was about our Order, and showing respect to it. For that, we dedicate our lives. Respecting the Order is the most important thing you must remember, child. How long our memories will live on in history will depend entirely on how much of that respect we show. And that is the Truth.”
Mouse doubted that.
The two bounced back and forth between Ferros VI and Wayland for the next four years, and the lessons only got harder, and Darth Averus only grew colder and less generous with her praise. When Averus began setting her loose in the jungle with those dreadful creatures, it was even worse. Even when Mouse pulled off the impossible, all the Dark Lord did was not scold her or thrash her till she passed out. Silence became the woman’s only compliment. But it would be over soon. Mouse was already thinking of how her new lightsaber was going to feel, impaled through her Mistress’s stomach. It drove her.
The light inside the cabin went back on. Something was happening. Then, the sound of snowy footsteps explained it: the boy was back. He returned with the twilight. The impostor bid him to go out and cut some wood for a fire, which he did depressingly close to the little house. They cooked something minimal over the coals in a primitive cooking vessel. Mouse watched as they set up their table, and she absently peeled open a ration bar as though to join in. She noticed that when the boy referred to his teacher, he called her “Master.”
What insolence, to presume such a thing! She really tolerates being called that by someone who isn’t yet her Apprentice?…god, she does! So pathetic.
She watched them begin to eat.
She gives him food first? What’s the purpose of that, save to train a sense of unwarranted entitlement into him? And if he refuses to be served first, you lose all authority! You truly are a fool. The only damn thing this old hag has done right is choose a dynamic, hostile planet to train him on. And even then, I will not give her credit for the planet’s natural environment. That’s cheating.
Again, she was doing it again. Why?
Mouse watched as the boy and the woman stood up, their dinner over. The woman placed her hands on his shoulders and said something quiet. Mouse couldn’t make out any of the word-shapes, except for one: ‘proud’.
And it hit her like jab to the gut, like starvation. The reason she was sympathizing with them. The thing she was missing. Not just what she was missing from observing her prey, but what she was really missing. What she never found in anyone, save a single person for a single moment, when he picked her off the street, out of her own filth, at the lowest moment of her childhood, of her life, without ever asking for anything in return.
It was kindness.
She wasn’t sure if that was really the word she was looking for. Probably not. Probably, it was something more pragmatic, more cynical. But ‘kindness’ would do for now. She had a name for the thing, and that was enough. And since these people were enjoying something she was in need of, it meant she also had a name for what was going on between her and her prey: she was jealous.
How kriffin’ sentimental. What’s the point of thinking this? It’s not like naming the problem is ever going to fix it. So what if the boy’s “Master” prefers winning his heart over being a good teacher. Maybe there’s a reason behind that. I need to be figuring out why, not feeling sorry for myself!
But even as she thought this, she knew it wouldn’t work. Something dark whispered from the depths of her mind, and it said, “You will never know why she is kind to him, because you’ve never known kindness.”
Yep, this train of thought was going nowhere but down, “I need to just kill him and get this over with,” she breathed, setting her forehead against a rock.
Inside, the cabin’s light went out for the last time. The sky rolled again, right on schedule, from deep purple to charcoal black. She was gone before the first flakes touched the ground.
Chapter 7: Predator
She kept her camp a mile away from her prey, inside a cave, her animal skin draped over the hole as a cover. She got there just in time. The nightly snowstorm covered all evidence of her tracks. They would suspect nothing. Things were falling into place. The boy would be dead before the sun set tomorrow.
Mouse woke up in the pre-morning darkness. She woke up the way she normally did. The same way she awoke almost every single day, for the past eight years. She woke up screaming. It was a soft scream, rendered mute through the sleeve of her flight suit. A sleeve which she had deliberately tied around her mouth before going to sleep. It helped maintain her stealth. Even this far away, even within the cover of a cave, even with a snow-covered animal fur concealing the entrance, there was still a chance she might give away her position. The impostor might be incompetent…but that could easily be a ruse to fool someone like her. Mouse recalled the time Averus taught her how dangerous underestimating an enemy could be. It could be embarrassing. It could be painful. Most importantly, it could completely reverse the upper hand. The last thing she needed now was to lose all her advantage, and any chance of becoming an Apprentice, simply because one stupid part of her head was still out of her emotional control.
The sleeve trick she learned a year ago (or was it two?), while spending the night on the roof of an apartment complex full of people, as a desperate way to keep from being noticed, were she to fall asleep on accident. She had, and it saved her. It had yet to fail. One day, Mouse hoped to wake up and find herself quiet. To wake up without terrible and unspeakable things retreating with the nightmares of her seemingly diseased subconsciousness, that would be nice. One day.
That ordeal over, she sat up and patiently let the dark resolve into shape, and from shape into color. Somehow, she found herself awake much earlier than planned – not a very normal occurrence for her. Her internal clock was incredibly precise, sometimes to the second. Something was wrong. Was there someone outside? Had she felt an intruder? No. So what was wrong?
She was wrong. It was her. She felt distressed…or was she frustrated…or was she angry? Or was she all those things? No, she was none of those things. It was a connective feeling, tying her to someone she didn’t want to be tied to. Someone better, or maybe worse, than she. Now she remembered. She felt jealousy. She was jealous of the boy, of that connection he had with the impostor. Mouse wanted to talk to someone.
Needed. Not wanted, needed. Anyone. A person, an alien, a stranger, an enemy, a mouse. Hell, even her Mistress. She cursed Darth Averus for ordering her to keep radio silence. ”They are more clever than you think. Do not test their perceptions frivolously.” the woman had told her.
Well to hell with that! What did she know? What did she really know, anyway? All Mouse asked from Averus was Power, and she had yet to deliver that, as far as Mouse was concerned. The least the woman could have done was give her kindness as a consolation. Or yeah, how about some consolation? An embrace once in a while that didn’t turn into a grapple. A hug, a pat on the back, a handshake. Hell, I wouldn’t mind if she ruffled my hair, and I hate that! At least when I was with Lev’s- And then she quickly stopped that train of thought. Her eyes burned, her face was red – she was about to… I’m about to c…. Stop it. She sat up and went through some breathing exercises until the feeling passed.
“I’m hungry,” she announced.
The hollow echo of her voice offered little comfort.
She left the ration bars alone. She had to stay in practice. Especially now. It was time to hunt for something. Definitely something small. The over-sized three-legged fur ball that used to own this cave had taken forever to die. Some things just didn’t know when to quit.
The animal fur came down from the entrance without a sound. The nighttime snow fluttered to the rocky floor as it was shaken off. She got dressed, strapped her boots on, wrapped the fur around herself and took her knife. It didn’t take long to find something worth hunting. That is, it didn’t take long for her: she knew where to look and how to look for it. Downwind, and at a safe distance, she found herself stalking a little six-legged, mammalian tree climber. It was only now waking up, tucked snuggly under a shabby evergreen. She noticed it had very big ears; she noticed it had a nest to protect; she noticed it had claws. This would be fun.
Even though her footsteps were naturally soft, Mouse carefully removed her boots to make her approach even more silent. Who knew what this thing could hear. Maybe the effort was wasted because every step sounded like a beating drum to the creature. Those ears might be able to pick up the crash of snowflakes as they landed for all she knew. Or maybe not; maybe they were no better than her’s. Maybe it was deaf and they were just for show. Didn’t matter. Better to be cautious than hungry. And either way, the thing was probably stupid. If she moved slow enough, there was a good chance it wouldn’t notice she was moving at all. There would be no need for anything frivolous and showy like the Force. Not for this one.
The snow burned, but that only made things even more fun. Anyway, Mouse knew all about how long a person could walk around in the bitter cold, and all the different terrible ways it felt after you’ve been there longer than you’re supposed to. There was an odd space at the end of her left foot to back that up. I wonder if that makes me the logical opposite to Lock, with his missing finger? Would they have started calling me Key? she thought idly, then shook it off, Stop thinking about them, damn it! Not everything comes back to them. I need to let them go, they’re ancient history. My life is here; my future is here and in what happens in this place. There is no room for the past in that. None.
She concentrated on nothingness. Things always went her way when she let her mind wander.
So it wandered.
Back when she first landed, while she was still scouting around for shelter from the deadly cold wind, Mouse remembered seeing her first native raptor. Well…she didn’t ‘see’…
It was just her and a collection of living black dots in the dark field, somewhere just outside the forest. The bowl of a small valley. Black impenetrable trees surrounded her, and ascended in every direction into shade. It gave her a sense of foreboding – she hated natural environments. Too many holes, not enough order. They were always too loud for her, with creatures shouting at each other and unruly wind currents knocking things over at random, rocks tumbling over one another, plants butting against everything, with no sense of plan or purpose. In the dark, it was even worse. It made her paranoid. But those little dots, they were even more paranoid than she. Aside from poking above the grass-line to get their bearings, they never stopped moving, always furtive, always second-guessing their chosen direction. They looked seemingly impossible to catch.
Then, the sirens of Hell screamed out. The noise wasn’t loud, but it was long and it echoed from every direction. It didn’t sound like a voice. It sounded like a knife sliding against glass, projected through an amplifier. Everything around her heard it. Everything stopped.
Even Mouse. They just stopped and stared, searching for the source. Silence and fear. Silence and fear and stillness. Then a blur sprang from the mass of trees and picked up one of those black dots. It was amazing to watch, for what little she saw.
There were several similar moments during that trek, where a raptor cried out, silencing the world, and then easily snatched living prey off the ground. Each one stunned her. It was bewildering. The instinct to be careful of birds had to be ingrained into every little creature that lived in that forest, yet the raptors still caught one every time. How does someone catch her prey, when she announces herself every time she nears? The next time it happened, Mouse studied the event, and came to this conclusion:
The announcement itself was her weapon.
The birds had figured out that the little things were afraid of them. That searing cry of her’s, it brought to those creatures’ eyes the image of not just death, but the prospect of being impaled on countless talons as they’re carried for miles to wherever the nest is, hanging, their entire body-weight being supported by a set of spikes lodged through their abdomen. It meant a rough, bone-breaking landing many agony-filled hours later into a nest full of tiny beaks. And it meant the promise of a slow and excruciating death as they’re eaten alive by the raptor’s children. They would probably save their small, still-aware heads for last, ensuring that every moment of their prolonged death was felt, ensuring there would be plenty of time to think about how you’ll never see another sunrise, you’ll never grow old, you’ll never find the mate you were searching for and you’ll never have children to pass on your genes, to pass on your legacy. You will be dead, and everything about you and all of your future will die with you, in a nest, to feed infants. You don’t run from that. You can’t. It’s too much to take in. You have to take it in first.
You have to stand there, frozen, between wall panels, and let the whole weight of that horror sink in completely before you can ever hope to move. Mouse knew that could take a long time. Fear. The raptor had chosen her weapon well. Mouse took note of this tactic. Soon, when Mouse finally confronted her own prey, the raptor’s weapon would come in handy.
She put her boots back on. The little six-legged animal was lifeless in her arms.
Mouse put together a small fire and let it burn to coals. She took her time, gave it the feeling and respect of a ritual. The boy wouldn’t be alone until the afternoon, so there was time to prepare. She got out two of the sticks that were stored in the cave, which she had found exactly for this occasion. She took out her small knife, cleaned it in the flowing water of a nearby stream, and began peeling layers off one end of the thin-but-sturdy piece of wood. If it was narrow enough and angular enough, the stick’s point could be made to break skin as easily as the steel on that tiny blade. With one weapon, she could make a thousand. But this would surely be enough. She spent more than two hours, carving slow and methodical, getting it perfect.
The meat from that little animal was the only thing she ate, charring each morsel individually from the end of her knife within the white depths of the fire, when she could be bothered. When the spears were complete, she passed them through the fire as well, just long enough to harden them. It was a process she had gone through before, and the actions came easily to her. As a final touch, she tied the animal’s tiny ribcage to the lower end of the first one, just beneath the center of balance, for a grip.
She took the spear, and the spare, and took off.
Watching him today would give her no new information, so she didn’t. She shut down her alertness, her anxiousness, her fear, her excitement…her presence in the Force. She made it so all she was, was the collection of proteins and tissue and carbon molecules that seemed to work together really well somehow, like an ongoing series of contrived accidents, coincidence after coincidence, chance encounter after chance encounter, making heart beat and lung expand. That wasn’t her right now. She was nothing that existed.
She got very, very close to them.
They never noticed.
And she waited.
And waited.
Patiently.
The boy was left alone, to do his thing. She let him go for a while, let him get worked up, get a little tired, a little careless. The sky stayed clear in every direction as the sun began to dip and the shadows crawled out. There would be no snowfall tonight.
It was odd how even though the planet was upright, her compass told her North was where the sun rose. Is my compass broken, or is this place really that confused? Is that the reason it’s so cold here? Because, last time I checked, this place is really close to its star, close enough to touch it if planets had arms…that close, it should be a tropical paradise. Or is that really what makes tropical paradises? Maybe there’s some other ingredient that’s missing? Or…maybe this used to be a tropical paradise, and now it’s not? Her mind was wandering. It was time.
A distant creature snapped a twig. The kid’s boots crunched in the snow as he practiced. The trees rustled in a short-lived breeze. The forest line began to settle into gloom as dusk crept in. A raptor took to the sky above them, heading home.
She sprang, screaming, summoning the Force to instill terror into her battle cry, to instill a little bit of that hellish call. She was the raptor, he was the little black dot. But he would be lucky. The boy would fall right into her spear. It would be over in seconds – before the sun even turned red, dipping toward the southern horizon. Hell, before that bird was even out of sight. Yet, not a moment after her boots touched the ground, the boy was at a full sprint toward the other end of the clearing, out of reach of even her best throw.
How is that possible? It’s like he knew I was coming somehow. but these thoughts were unimportant, Well, at least he’ll be worth killing…
She screamed again, not to try the same tactic twice – if it didn’t work the first time, it would never work – but to misdirect. Using the Force, she attempted to make it seem like her voice was coming from further to the right. That way, he’d adjust his escape to take him west, away from his cabin…toward the canyon.
It seemed to work, but not well. He didn’t change direction immediately, but instead waited until they were both scrambling through the brush that littered the interior of the forest. Then, he turned a little bit toward a northwest direction, but not anywhere near enough to make a difference.
Well, she’d just have to catch up to him. That would be easy to do. She was gaining on the boy even now. And from the way he was slowing and speeding up like he was, she could tell the kid was getting tired. In moments, she was close enough to take a stab at him.
She hefted the spear into her throwing hand, concentrating on aiming it just right. A clean launch, directly between his shoulder blades. He’d drop to the ground, paralyzed. Then she’d take him in her arms and snap his neck. Nothing fancy.
All of the sudden, the boy stopped dead. She ended up too close to throw, too close to even avoid him. Then he took off again, and in his place a branch snapped at her from nowhere, striking her right in the face like a lash. Missed her right eye, but it was dreadfully close: caught her in the brow instead, and sent dust and debris into both eyes.
She couldn’t tell that at first. It was just a general stinging everywhere and her eyes had snapped shut of their own volition. For all she knew at that moment, she’d been blinded. Mouse crouched there and seethed, tears pouring down her face as her body responded to all the bits of dust that had struck her corneas. She even dropped her spear. Idiot! Pick it up!
For a few seconds, then, she was completely vulnerable. Helpless, even. Would the boy have the sense to end this now? Stupid mistake. Stupid, stupid mistake. But all she heard were his receding footsteps as she rose, her right eye still clenched tight. If she had been chasing someone more like herself, instead of him, she’d be dead right now. That put her at an advantage, even half blind and disoriented. Because she was willing to kill, and he wasn’t.
The boy was now out of sight, but it didn’t take long to find his trail. The needlely evergreens made for poor cover, and he obviously knew nothing about hiding the route of his escape. Once she caught back up, she found him halfway up the biggest tree she’d ever seen. It didn’t even look like it belonged to the planet, let alone this forest. It should not have existed, yet there it was.
How did he know this was here? When did he even have time to find it? While I was stalking his “Master”? Bit too convenient, that. Was he just lucky? Did he know I was going to attack him somehow? Is this a trap he’s leading me into? What would Lev say about this situation?Stop it!Just. Kill him.
She got up to the base and looked up at the vertical labyrinth. She spotted the boy, staring at her as he climbed. She stared back, and he climbed faster. She couldn’t hide her smile; didn’t want to, The moment I catch you, it’s over kid. This was going to be easy.
She took off the fur and set own her spear – figures I go to all that work and don’t get to use it – then ascended after him. Mouse wasn’t sure how he got up so high so fast, though. This tree was so full of gnarled and curling branches with sharp offshoots and icicles hanging in sheets like walls, it was a wonder anyone could make any progress at all. Not that it mattered. The top was a dead end. She was the one with time, not him. So she took it.
And she made good use of it. The way he was ceaselessly watching her ascend, it was painfully obvious he was planning something. She imagined, with a roll of her eyes – they didn’t sting so much now – how he’d probably do something irritating but ineffective, something that would be nothing more substantial than a show of power. Use the Force to shower her with little projectiles: icicles and loose bark, easy stuff, obvious stuff. Whatever it was he did, it most certainly wouldn’t kill her. She didn’t even know what his plan was yet, and it already sounded pathetic.
She made a token effort to look evasive. If he was going to watch her every move, she might as well put on a show for the hell of it, act impressive. Not like he’d be alive much longer anyway. Then Mouse dropped fifteen feet.
She landed hard but rolled with it. Mouse hadn’t been looking out for rotten branches. One now rested between her and the ground, splintered against the small of her back. There was a second of embarrassment after the initial shock, but it subsided quickly. She had been humiliated worse than this. This was nothing.
Except now the knees of her flight suit were torn up and her elbow was bleeding and getting everything stained. Annoying. A quick inventory revealed nothing was broken, or even sprained. Possibly her nose, which had been bloodied, but that was a small matter. Bruises and brush burns mostly, a few cuts here and there. Good enough. She stood up, shook off the soreness, and began climbing again. Faster, and this time her evasiveness would not be for show. This tree was more dangerous than she thought. It would not happen again.
This seemed to really frighten the boy, climbing back up as she was. Certainly way more than she expected. It frightened him so much that he quit even watching her, choosing to hide himself behind the massive trunk instead, like a scared little kid.
Well…he is a scared little kid. He thought that I would cry and run away scared after I fell. Why?…Because that’s what he would have done: run home to mommy. To “Master.” He couldn’t imagine anyone doing anything different. Me climbing up this tree, I’ll bet, is the scariest image in the universe to him right now. That poor kid.For a split second, Mouse felt powerful, and it put a genuine smile on her face. She imagined that this must be what the raptors felt, whenever they looked upon their prey all frozen with fear.
Then she got back to business. Whatever the kid was doing behind the trunk, it wasn’t actively defensive, because she had no trouble climbing up till she was near his position. It would only be a few seconds, and then her knife would be at his throat, then it would be across his throat, then she’d push him off and let him fall, and that would be that. Nice and humane, she supposed. They were now at the same level, with only the trunk holding her back from ending it. All of the sudden, he said something.
She couldn’t quite make it out, but it didn’t matter. It was the dumbest thing he could have done – give away his position. She lunged for him, wasting no time. But…he wasn’t there. In fact, he was a level beneath her. Stupid Force tricks! I bet he thinks he’s a real genius. His hand lashed out and grabbed her ankle. It was enough to knock her off balance and slip.
Mouse was prepared this time. She flung out her arms and legs and latched onto the first thing that came within grasp. Anger boiled through her veins. The boy was now a good couple meters above her, and staggering. She had to act now, while he was distracted with success and still getting back his balance.
So she maneuvered herself to be just beneath him, her arm centimeters away. A good tug was all she honestly needed…but it was her knife hand that was closest. A deep, angry temptation welled inside her. Without a thought to the contrary, she acted on it.
Her knife drove straight into his foot, and kept driving till it stuck to the branch. HA. Take that, you brat. The act of stabbing him did two things: first, it pinned him in place so he couldn’t do that annoying running around thing any more. Second, it put his mind on something else while she went about killing him. She twisted the knife until she heard little bones crack. This act did nothing useful; she just wanted to see his reaction.
Actually, now that she thought about it, killing him was going to be extremely easy from this position. All she’d have to do, in fact, was take out the knife. So she did. He couldn’t control both his instinctive reaction to grab at his wound and keep his balance. Not with so much pain clouding his mind, distracting him. So he fell like a brick. Crashed through a good forty feet of tree.
See, that’s what a real fall is, little boy. Because there’s no ‘run home to mommy’ here. Just ‘keep going’ or death. Then she looked at the knife, dark with his blood, threads of boot dangling from the edge. A tiny piece of bone still clung to the sticky guard, from its violent removal. Instantly, she regretted what she did, Damn it, I didn’t want to torture you like that. Why didn’t I just grab his ankle and pull, like I planned? It would have done the same damn thing. I’ve hated Averus for so long now, I forgot to not be like her. And now it’s too late. Now I’m Darth Averus. So when I eventually kill her, nothing’ll change, will it?Oh well.…At least the mission’s over anyhow. I’ll worry about changing myself later.
Mouse cleaned the knife on her sleeve and sheathed it. She straddled the branch and set about cooling down from the rush of the hunt. Gratefully, she rested her head against the trunk, which slowly swayed with the barely-noticeable wind, and she breathed. She closed her eyes and listened to it rush in and sigh out of her mouth, acting like the right hand of a drum solo that her pounding heart completed. Almost imperceptibly, they both began slowing. Calm. Her future was ahead of her. Respect. Vindication. Greatness. Power.
A lightsaber was the next step.
No. The next step is moving the body. Lord Averus wants evidence. She counted out the distance in her head, I’m probably three miles from my ship now. That’s a hell of a long way to carry someone. She groaned, wishing her mistress had at least bothered to teach her telekinesis. There’d been too much focus on dissecting her stealth powers, sensing the future, and probing minds in her training. Complicated, dangerous things. Not enough of the basics. She cracked her eyes to glance over the side, You better be as light as you look, you kriffin’ brat.
Which was when she heard a shrill scream of pain, so weak it carried simply by virtue of coming from the high voice of a prepubescent child. She craned her neck, finding a clear view to the ground. Sure enough, there he was, on the ground, but not dead. Nope. The fall should have been fatal, but was it? Of course not. That would make way too much sense.
The branches. The kriffing branches. He fell through so damn many of them. Kriff.
This was becoming a really annoying ordeal. The kid was moaning or something, maybe crying, whatever. He was even moving around a little. How frustrating! So frustrating, in fact, that she couldn’t control herself anymore.
“Just die, damn it!” she yelled.
Mouse hated the idea of talking to her prey. It felt dumb. Those action stars in holovids, they always looked like idiots making some wisecrack in front a dead man. Even if the target’s still alive when he says it, what’s the point? It’s nothing more than a waste of breath and time, when he should have been planning his escape. How people found those vids full of flashy hacks enjoyable was beyond her.
She half-climbed, half-jumped down the tree to the boy. It still took a while for the size and complexity of it, especially now that dusk was nearly through, but the descent was fast enough. He wasn’t going anywhere. Her knife was back out before she landed on the snow-covered ground. One motion, into his back, between the shoulder blades, through the spine, and it would be over. She stepped forward.
The boy turned and, somehow, her spear was in his hands. He stabbed, clearly drawing false strength from the Force. Not that the strength’s legitimacy changed the outcome. Luckily, the boy was too short for the reach to be any danger to her stomach or chest. But it did lodge pretty nicely into her thigh. So. Frustrating.
Stumbling and quiet, the boy disappeared into the woods. Again.
She turned her attention to the spear. It was too big to pull out. She’d bleed to death if she did that. Instead, she used her knife to help her break the stick near the wound. She picked up the animal fur from the base of the tree and tore it to make a bandage she could tie off. Mouse cringed as she thought of how that leg was going to feel with every step she took. There was no way she’d be able to get up to a full run now.
Then she heard the boy stumble, and take dreadfully long to recover. She remembered he was in no better shape. In fact, he’d have even more trouble walking than her, with a hole in his foot. This could still be done. All she had to do was catch up. His retaliation would never be fatal, so killing him would just be a matter of time. He was going to die tonight. One way or another, the boy was going to die.
Chapter 8: Prey
In the days before a young boy was taken under the wing of the woman who called herself Darth Averus – known locally as Tira Sarogga – things were extremely tense in the tenement neighborhoods of Dolus’s capital city. The authorities seemed to struggle enough as it was, trying to maintain order – or the appearance of it, at least. Keeping track of the rampant networks of organized crime – constantly nebulous, forever changing allegiances, forever dividing and increasing – was, by itself, more than the poorly-budgeted city could handle. Now though…now it seemed like unrest was building from everywhere. People were unhappy, they were quiet, and they only went outside to demonstrate or do something aggressive. All bad signs.
To make it worse, the young ones were growing more bold, to the point of acting like the real gangsters by threatening store owners for protection money, or by managing drug operations. Some of them had even formed a solid collective. They called themselves “Ten’s Enforcers”. The authorities didn’t know why they chose this name, because there were more than ten of them from the start, as far as they could tell. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that this fresh new gang was a serious deal. An eleven year old in Enforcer colors, openly carrying a holdout, was now a common sight. The Authorities dared not confront them, because they knew from experience that there would be another one, hiding somewhere clever, holding a sniper rifle, and waiting. To Dolusian Security, these Enforcers weren’t kids; not like their sons and daughters at home, at least. They were more like…soldiers.
The best detectives in the city were tailing the gang 25/7, trying to figure out the inner structure in the hopes of finding out how to break it up. It was difficult to the point of nearly being impossible, because there was no way to get someone on the inside. Not without having a child on the force, and that wasn’t happening. So everything came second-hand, and it was slow. Around the precinct, these detectives started becoming the butts of jokes with officers on the outside. Officers who didn’t understand, didn’t get it. “The force’s highest paid babysitters,” became a popular one. This only served to motivate them more. Not that it helped. The only detail they managed to figure out for themselves was how the gang always talked about their leader in the third person, like he was never around. It meant that perhaps the guy in charge secretly worked another gang. Or maybe he was operating this collective from prison.
Though it was a major lead, and significantly narrowed down the field, they never did figure out who he was. A couple days later, the unrest tapered out on its own, the Enforcers made a stupid mistake and got themselves caught. All they ever learned was that their leader had mysteriously disappeared. The detectives decided this meant he got caught up in a bad deal with another gang, and was killed. It made sense. It was logical. Most importantly, it was simple.
The truth, on the other hand, rarely is.
Ten didn’t see himself as a mastermind. He was just an indentured slave in the hands of a sweatshop. He had no real power. The things he told the kids on the outside were nothing more than suggestions, in his mind. Just helpful tips. That’s all. The kids around him, stuck like him in that terrible factory, making low-tech goods on low-tech machines, they were his people. They understood what he understood, suffered the way he suffered, thought on the same track, with the same priorities, for the same goals. The overseers were in trouble.
Ten’s own Overseer – not the current one, but the first one – that cruel, stupid man from his first days there, who had plagued his nightmares…he was dead. He was dead, and every kid who surrounded the boy wanted to know how they could do it too. Ten had a mob behind him, hanging off his every word, his every action. Listening to every instruction he gave. Acting on his every command. They were quickly becoming an army. A real army. Not a collective, or even a well-organized gang. They were becoming an order-following, drill-performing, solid, obedient, efficient, march-in-formation, kill-you-where-you-stand Army. And they were his.
It made him feel powerful. But it also made him anxious. He hated that he’d killed that Overseer. He hated the morale-boost it caused, even as he celebrated the same. He hated the way he used it to motivate people. He hated how it looked just after, when he peaked through that violently shattered window, eyes tracing the fatal arc to the solid ground below. He remembered what it looked like: the body remorselessly embedded in permacrete, one leg bent in half sideways, the back of his head a puddle, a bone poking through an arm, his eyes still open. The eyes open and staring. Staring at him. At Ten. Accusing. Making him look away stupidly, superstitiously.
And he remembered thinking to himself, I did that. That was me. But could he control it? Would he be able to stop himself? It scared him that he didn’t feel bad about it. In fact, he actually felt proud. Like it was some sort of accomplishment. Was that wrong? Did that make him evil? He wanted to say no. He wanted to answer that question by saying no, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t, because whenever he tried, a Shadow flitted through the mottled dark of his mind and said, sweetly, viciously: “Maybe you are.” All he could really do was try to ignore it. Thankfully, there was little time to brood, anyway.
Everything the boy had done inside that sweatshop in the past months was about to come to a head. Emotions in everyone ran hot, but it was he who held the power to make them boil. He didn’t know exactly what, in the end, would put them over the edge, only that it would come from him. What he did know was, it had to be done right, or it would be a disaster. They were in shape and they had the skill, but they were insecure. They needed him, and he needed a way to make sure some part of him was with them at all times. He had a responsibility for these kids, after all. They looked to him as a leader. A seven-year-old leader, but a leader all the same.
So the night before everything was taken out of his hands, he wrote a list. Rules. He had seen plenty of similar lists within the history books inside the monks’ library, back when they fancied him their student. The greatest warlords had them. Emperors used them constantly. Strategists of every species and race imaginable, spent entire lives – entire family legacies – on crafting a perfect version. Every great warrior who ever lived exemplified at least one or two of the best rules on these lists. The Republic militaries had twenty official versions, many directly contradicting others. Even the Jedi used one, though theirs hadn’t changed for eight hundred and ninety-two years.
That night, he crafted a list of his very own: his Rules Of Engagement, he called it.
Ten of them, though the last four were stolen from the Republic’s Special Operations division, which he’d read off the holonet. They were just for show anyway. The number was symbolic, after all.
But the six most important ones were his. He opted for a more general, philosophical approach to engagement than other militaries. Stuff about levels of hostility and details about standing orders just sounded too technical and uninspired to him. What sort of child would follow that? He needed clear, blunt phrases. He needed it to be instructive. It couldn’t just tell them what to do; it also had to tell them how to do it. And it had to be simple. So that’s exactly what he wrote.
They never saw the list, of course. Never had to: not a week after Baroness Sarogga adopted him, she had the whole unethical operation disbanded personally. While alone, he would have had to fight, with her, not a drop of blood was shed. That was a far better weapon.
Under the Baroness’s wing, the Boy learned of all sorts of bloodless weapons. How words and attention to details could be like armor; how sensing the color of a voice could mean the difference between making a terrible enemy and gaining a lifelong friend; how certain bargains, certain contracts, if written just right, could do worse and more lasting damage than any bomb, any cannon, any nuclear weapon yet made. She taught him these things gently, subtlety, yet relentlessly, till their concepts became second-nature. When she wasn’t entertaining guests or away representing Dolus in the Grand Senate Chambers on faraway Coruscant, all her attention was on him…and all of that attention went toward teaching him these things. The old woman – so much like a grandmother, but a powerful, shrewd grandmother – made it very clear that if he mastered these lessons, he would never have to go to war directly, never have to pick up a real weapon, never have to so much as lift a finger in aggression to defeat even the most violent opponent.
But, throughout it all, he kept one copy of his List. His Ten. Because he truly believed the words he wrote, and fully intended to live by them, regardless of what his Master claimed. Sure, knowing the colors of voice was invaluable, but it wasn’t the same as his Ten. His Ten was more than a list of words, after all. It was a philosophy.
Rule number one: If you ever have the choice between fighting and running, running is always better.
When the boy came to his senses through that churning, roiling cloud of terror that was trying its best to blind him and paralyze him, he saw that the Beast was only now emerging from the snowy, evergreen forest. That jarring treble howl he had heard, that sight of his imminent demise…all of it had been a vision from the Force. A premonition. A warning. Now, hardly a moment later, it was happening for real. He needed to act on that, now or never. Part of him wanted to think about it, weigh the options….decide. The other part merely repeated itself: NOW OR NEVER, IDIOT! RULE ONE!
So he ran.
At first he stumbled and his fingertips skipped across the top of the snow, scooping it and sending the flakes passionately through the air. Then he gained his footing and set in for a mad dash to the other side. Close behind (too close) he heard the Beast crash through into the open field. Then would come the roar, that jarring treble howl, and for real. And it would freeze him in his tracks, penetrated with that cloudy blinding terror, and that would be the end of this game. And then came the roar.
But it was not a roar. The actual battle cry from his attacker – this supposed Shadow Beast – sounded…different. Even in its power, it did not sound nearly so frightening as the one his own mind had invented (or had it been the Force?). In fact, it sounded kind of like a girl. He’d never imagined his Shadow Beast’s gender, because he always just assumed it was his own. He imagined that the Shadow Beast was his own invention, created by a mind that hated itself. Compared to his Master, the boy was a terrible person, he believed. He killed someone, after all. Not only that, but he never felt bad for it. Sure, she told him not to worry, that it wasn’t his fault, but that didn’t change the fact that he was responsible. It didn’t change the fact that his Master constantly ingrained in him the philosophy that murder is unforgivable. That it can never be a last recourse: there is always another way. His Shadow Beast was supposed to be – or at least this was what the boy had believed – his mind’s response to this. It was his conscience, here to redeem itself for past transgressions by destroying its owner.
But this thing chasing him now, it could not be his Shadow Beast. Because his Shadow Beast was himself, and he was a boy. His attacker was not. It brought things back down to ground, to know his brain was not simply creating this thing out of thin air to kill itself. That was nice to know.
Also, she seemed to be using the Force to alter the direction of her voice. That was weird. She apparently wanted him to go west for some reason. He shrugged off her suggestion of course, and easily. But he let her push him that way a little, anyway. Make her think he was still susceptible, still scared.
I am scared, though. How is this different?…Because I’m not going to go along with it as far as she thinks, that’s why. He would need to make her underestimate him to get any advantage.
The trouble was, he had no way to stop the fact that she was gaining on him quickly. He just didn’t have the speed he needed for this game. But that was okay, because the game was about to change. He just needed a little more time, and to slow down just a tiny bit more…
Rule number five: The best available weapon will always be the environment. Make sure that weapon is yours, and never your enemy’s.
He bent back the prickliest, springiest branch full of icicles his eye could spot while at a full sprint. He pulled it taught. He recited the phrase one, one thousand, GO! in his head before releasing it. He heard her cry of pain almost immediately. Or was it anger and rage? Not that it mattered, he had a pace to keep up and ground to cover.
The tree was ahead. The one he’d found on his walk the other day. This was why he’d found it. This moment, right now. Because there was no way to get up any of the other trees, with their thin, spiny branches. And there was enough complexity that he could make his way back down, once his pursuer committed herself to climbing after him. It was perfect.
Rule number four: Always identify where the highest ground with the most exits is. If you need to make a stand, make it there.
With the aide of the Force, it took him only moments to ascend its massive, complex trunk. He was thirty feet up before the girl caught up to the base, hand on her eye. He slowed down to rest, and studied her carefully. She seemed normal, now that he could view her with less terror and shock clouding his judgment. Just a girl, a little older than he, wrapped in black animal fur, ropey hair, dirty hands, catching her breath. Not so scary after all.
Then she looked up.
There was something there he’d never seen before, not in anyone. Not even in those bullies on the street who would beat up on little kids till they passed out, just for fun, and leave them to their fate. This was beyond that. This was…this was something fierce and cold. Something dark and primal. Something calculating and intelligent. Something…murder. There was murder there, in that fiery look. And it was aimed at him. He closed his eyes, he took deep breaths. That terror was coming back. He had to stay calm.
He wouldn’t die if he acted rational. He’d be okay if he just stayed calm and acted rational and remembered his rules.
Rules I’ve never put into practice before. Rules I made when people called me by that stupid name and I was full of myself from all my scared followers’ praise. Who the heck am I kidding here?
Calm. Stay calm.
The girl began climbing. It was extra effort for her. Even though he knew she had the Force, she apparently didn’t know everything about it, because she wasn’t using it now. Dummy. You could be up here in seconds if you’d just paid more attention to your true power, instead of training to kill people or whatever. He shook his head, feeling disappointed in her. Who was the fool that taught this girl?
Then he snapped out of it. He should be taking advantage of this, not thinking of rebukes. What was he, a monk? She might be taking her time, but she had time to take. He didn’t have any. And now that he watched how she climbed it struck him: there really wouldn’t be a way out – an easy exit – from this situation. Not the way he’d expected. She was climbing erratically. Intentionally so. It would make anticipating her direction nearly impossible. There would be no way to predict where she’d be once he began climbing down. He was going to have to face her.
Or was he?
Rule number two: if you cannot avoid a fight, end it as quickly as possible.
He winced. He hated that one, because it left so much up to the person with nowhere to run, which wasn’t fair. Still, it was logical. And he’d had plenty of time under Lady Averus to think up something better, but he never did, so this would have to do. He searched around, his mind racing.
His Master had given him lots of lessons for his memory to pull from. There was one in particular that was about as clever as it got, though. He began concentrating on the branch she was about to step on. He concentrated on the fibers, woven inside, stuck firm to each other, holding strong. But maybe not so strong. Maybe a little bit loose, a little bit cracked. And oh, maybe they want to separate. Yeah, yeah actually, they do want to separate, they long for it. They want to be apart, they want to unweave. So they do.
She put her foot on the branch. It snapped. It fell. She went with it. He stifled a laugh as she lay on her back, groaning. Go ahead, try again. He smirked.
Except…she did try again. And faster, and more erratic and harder to predict, staring at him the whole way up with those cold, murderous eyes. He shuffled around the trunk, just to get something between him and those eyes. It occurred to him that maybe he should have waited a little bit longer before playing that trick. Long enough that her fall would do more than just knock the wind out of her. In fact, the boy suddenly realized, maybe he should have killed her. Maybe that was my chance. Maybe…that was my only chance.
Finally, it sank in, like the black roots of a weed, that this wasn’t a game. It didn’t matter that she was just a kid like him. Murder doesn’t care who it is, when it takes hold. He knew that, yet somehow he’d imagined this as another game while he had been chased – ‘catch me if you can, and if you do oh no! but if you don’t, I win and we all go home’. Except now it definitely wasn’t a game, now it was real. A sickening dread began to form out of those black roots like an infection deep inside his mind. Something worse than terror: inevitability.
Because he wasn’t going to be able to stop her like he thought. There would be no incapacitation, no ‘Okay, I give up’s. Hurting her wasn’t going to cut it, because she had no intention of yelling ‘mercy’ any more than she intended to give him any. This moment, right now, could be the end of his life. His breathing sped up again.
Calm. Stay calm. Stay calm. Stay calm. Think. Please, think. Stay calm, think, stay calm…
She was close enough that he could hear her own breath over his, but on the other side of the trunk. A few more feet and there would be nothing between them, not even that.
Calm. Stay calm…
His eyes were wide with fear. It was rule five he needed…but, but what was rule five? Why couldn’t he remember anything all of the sudden?! Why…? He paused. In the swirling calamity that was his mind at that moment, something stuck.
Rule number three: All you need to control your opponent is to have more information than him.
If there was one thing he had, it was information. He was the smartest person he knew. But what information would be of any use here? That he knew what the name of this species of tree was? That he knew how photosynthesis worked? That he knew that, thanks to the basic laws of universal gravitation, anything falling off this thing would accelerate at eight-point-eight meters per second per second until something of equal or greater mass interfered with it? That the air of this particular planet had a slightly lower percentage of carbon dioxide than other oxygen/nitrogen-rich planets? That holograms work by taking light and…oh, hold on…
He pulled out the datapad from his tunic. The one his Master let him keep. It had his voice recorded on it, from messing around with it last night. Gently but quickly, he set it on the surface of a nearby branch, keyed it on, then began carefully climbing down as it loaded.
The sound was loud and abrupt, and she fell for it. Only for a split second, but that was enough. Once her position was revealed, above him and to the left, he struck out with his hand and tripped her up. She dropped out of sight. Meanwhile, he’d lost his own balance and was in danger of falling himself.
He rounded on the trunk for support, but his hand caught the edge of a knot instead of the smooth bark, cutting him. He floundered for a hold, and found himself at an uncomfortable angle once he’d finally grabbed something sturdy. As if that was bad enough, his foot was throbbing now. Had he twisted his ankle at some point? He couldn’t remember miss-stepping anywhere, or tripping when he ran. And actually, it really hurt a lot. Way way more than a twisted ankle. Something was wrong. His foot was on fire now. Now it felt like it was being electrocuted, arcs of lightning seeming to reach all the way up his leg with a sharp sounding,, “Crack!” like balsa wood splintering. He looked down. What he saw, was a black hilt sticking out from the top of his boot. The girl was right there next to it, staring up at him like he was her final project in art class. His face went pale.
She began pulling it out and a thousand darts of pain shot pulsing through his foot. A million. A billion. He saw blood spit and sputter between his laces and the steel. He felt the knife slide up, between the bones of his foot. It made him sick. The cruel, thoughtless removal vibrated up his skeleton like a shock-wave of white hot pain. The world swam. He blacked out. He went weightless.
The weightlessness woke him, and not a moment later he found himself being hit in the back, in the legs, in the head, again and again. He dared not open his eyes. Was he dead now, and in Hell? Was the Overseer here, giving the boy his final, eternal punishment? His revenge?
But…isn’t that what I deserve? I killed him after all, even if I didn’t do it the same way that girl killed me. How can anyone ever be forgiven for something like that? Something so permanent? And I had been planning to do it again, to send other kids to their deaths simply because I wasn’t satisfied with just the one. If the Force wants me to suffer forever in death the way I suffered in life, the Force is only being reasonable. Good riddance, to the kid who could never stop pretending it was a game till it was too late. Good freaking rid- THUD.
Nothing.
Just nothing. Not even blackness. Just…nothing. No noise, no vision, no smell, no feeling, no motion. THUD, and that’s all. He emptied out of himself, like a broken water bottle. This was it.
This…
And then…and then this wasn’t it. Then he started to feel pain. Like a glow, like an ember, like an anchor, and then he remembered who he was and what he was and where these things were happening. The temperature began to come back a little bit (hot at first), and then sounds, and then the smell of stale minerals, of rotting iron. What he would later identify as the smell of blood. He still felt like he was floating in nothing, but slowly the concept of black was returning, along with the possibility that his eyes were closed.
Someone screamed. It sounded a thousand light-years away. A million. A billion. It took a lot of thought and energy to realize that he was the person screaming.
He sat up. Nothing actually hurt. In fact, he felt kind of pleasant, in a numb kind of way. But his vision was monochrome, it was a tunnel, it was the sky of hyperspace. Sparks spat off, illusions that made him blink. Red spilled in like the tint of stained glass, from nowhere. His skin looked and felt like the snow. Nothing hurt because he was in shock.
Rules. There are rules in here someone…some-where in my head. In my head somewhere. I know, I think ah….something, something up here to help me. What? There was a cry of frustration. It wasn’t his, though. Not this time. It came from above. Where the girl was.
He looked around, panic coming back, She saw me alive! I’m going to…I don’t want to die. Uh, okay. Rules, okay. They’ll help if I can find them. Okay. If I, if I list them I’ll remember. List them. Go. List them. Now. Okay. One: If you ever…if you ever have the choice between fighting and running, run.. Yeah, no choice. Okay. Two: If you cannot avoid a fight, end it as quickly as possible. Well I need a weapon for that, okay. Three: All you need to control your opponent is to have more information than…uh, well I don’t. Okay. Number four: Always identify the highest ground and…screw that. Rule five: The best available weapon will always be the environment. Make sure… He trailed off as his gaze rested on the girl’s spear, …UNLESS, that is, your best available weapon is a weapon.
He snatched her spear and rolled onto his stomach, laying on it. Just in time. The girl dropped to the ground and advanced. She didn’t say a word, didn’t gloat, nothing. If she was enjoying this in any way, he couldn’t tell. He let her take her time. He needed it to pull together some adrenaline.
A little twig broke under her boot, telling him approximately where she was. He rolled and lunged. He didn’t care what happened, where it went, or even if it stabbed her. He just wanted time so he could get away. Because there was one other rule he just remembered. Not rule six, or seven. The next few after Rule Five were worthless anyway. He stood and ran. She didn’t follow immediately, so the spear must have got her. That meant he would have time. Which was good, because…
Rule number Ten: Never, under any circumstances, ever go into any engagement without backup waiting.
And he did have backup, didn’t he? The relief of it made him aware of the intense pain in his foot. It made him aware of intense pain in his shoulder. It made him aware of his lightheadedness. The ground banked to the side, becoming a hill, becoming a cliff, becoming a wall. It hit him. He felt waves of nausea batter his stomach like a riptide. It seemed like he could see the blood vessels inside his eyes, pulsing, sparking, twisting his vision till it was double, triple, quadruple. His thoughts became jumbled again, he started repeating himself compulsively in his mind, like a droid’s restraining bolt – on infinite loop. He retched.
The act of retching brought him up to a kneel, which was when he heard the rustling sounds of the girl’s approach. He willed himself to get up. He didn’t want to, he truly didn’t; he wanted to just vomit and lay down and pass out. He didn’t want to put pressure on his foot. He didn’t want to put no pressure on it, either. It seemed to hurt going both ways.
Maybe it’ll feel better if I just cut it off. But it wasn’t funny, because the pain wasn’t going away, just throbbing worse and worse. There was no way he was getting up. He would just lay there and…
There was one way he could get up: if his life depended on it.
And it did.
He got up.
Chapter 9: Choice
He got up.
He got up and it was like standing upside down, like ascending a thousand meters, like falling into space, he got up and everything went dark but he got up, he got up anyway. He got up and his brain flew away.
His body stayed there, stumbling wretchedly through the dark woods, while in the meantime, his mind retreated someplace else. Someplace where the pain from his shoulder and from his foot and from the growing bump on his head could not follow. Someplace safe.
Someplace warm. Rainy. Sunny. Someplace…
A triple rainbow held strong just over the rarely-tended orchard. Three bands of all seven colors – the bottom band the most brilliant, the middle one the widest, the top one the most violet – spanned the tiny valley between two enormous mountain ranges. They seemed to stick together like brother gods: bright, strong, and all-knowing. The birds were out too, filling the entire estate with a chorus of sounds. All these things were pleasant, but at the moment, his attention was held firmly toward the ground.
The boy knows exactly where he is.
It’s a year prior, on Dolus, right at the sweaty, suffocating end of a heat wave. There is no nameless planet yet, no freezing fields of snow blocked in by canyons on all sides like a giant cul-de-sac, hemming him in, cornering him. No girl out to kill him. No tree to fall from. No endless dark forest stretching out before him, mocking his ragged, injured form with the promise of a long, hard, difficult, painful, impossible trek.
None of that. Only the hint of a Shadow Beast in the back of his mind, and the tail-end of a sweltering summer promising a whole upcoming season full of new things to learn about. That was all. Maybe this was a memory being lived in by a fevered, freezing mind…or maybe all this stuff about being chased to his death on a snowy night was just a bad dream, playing out in the back of his mind. That could be it. He’d been daydreaming and it turned ugly. The storm must have caused it – the first rainfall of autumn. The natives say the first one always brings about strange things. That was probably it. Maybe. Hopefully.
It didn’t matter. Right now, he was staring at the most beautiful lifeform he ever saw. He had seen them before, flitting swiftly in the distance, but never so close. He’d never known how brilliant and shimmering its large glossy wings truly were. He’d never caught how they swam with color, morphing those membrane surfaces into constantly shifting, complex patterns. He knew they were pretty, but he never knew they held such capacity for…depth.
As he watched those pretty wings with their complex colors and shapes, shifting fluidly, reshaping and reforming – his eye catching patterns that altered at just beyond the horizon of predictability – it struck him that these creatures might actually be intelligent.
He sensed his Master approach and anticipated the question she would most likely ask first, “I’m watching a Pixie Moth”
She did not so much as flutter in her step. If there had been surprise that her supposedly hidden creep had been easily caught, she hid it perfectly. That is, unless she had intended him to sense her all along, for some purpose he’d yet to learn. This was one of those things he loved most about her: nothing ever caught her off guard. He never felt bored around her, because she would always be a mystery still-unsolved.
Darth Averus – but right now it was ‘Baroness Sarogga,’ because nobody on Dolus knew her by any other name, and she insisted he help maintain that appearance even within her orchard, which was sometimes open to the public. She casually looked over his shoulder, presumably to get a better look at this creature he said he was watching.
“More like ‘gawking’ I’d say.”
“If I may, Baroness, but what is the difference?” he preemptively floated a couple stones into the air, knowing she would demand something like that soon. She always did, “It sounds like just a derisive way of saying the same thing I said.”
“’Watching’ implies the two of you are equals, each with his own Will; ‘gawking,’ on the other hand, implies that you are the better, and the other possesses no Will at all. You watch a ship take flight, but you gawk if it crashes.”
The boy forgot the rocks now and brought all of his attention to bear on the beautiful insect. He’d assumed it was just resting. Now he wasn’t so sure…
“You cannot see it, but there is a web there, pinning her. The Wisp Spider only eats Pixie Moths. Nothing else. A Pixie Moth holds still only twice ever in her lifetime: when she gives birth and when she dies. If she is still at any other moment, it’s because she is trapped in a Wisp Spider’s invisible net. There is never any other reason.” She crouched down beside him, “We are about to see the final moments of this poor creature’s life, I’m afraid.”
“Oh.” The boy was taken aback. It put everything into a whole new, and rather sinister, light. This whole time, he thought he was simply enjoying the beauty of nature. Had he known this little insect – this possibly intelligent lifeform – was actually struggling and suffering, well…
The Baroness glanced around, breathing in the moist air of autumn’s first rain, “This seems like as good a place as any to conduct today’s lessons. All that heat has kept us stuck inside for so long…so, shall we start back up on precision? I expect you to be able to target objects with the Force as far away as two hundred meters by Week’s end.”
“We should save it.”
“The Moth? Hm. Not with that tone, we won’t be.”
“Baroness, I do not wish to be impertinent, but if we do nothing, it will die.”
“Is that so?” again, no gasp or stammering or nervous chuckle – all things people have done after hearing someone so young effortlessly throw together such a mature, adult-sounding sentence. Averus though, she paid no heed. Instead, she looked at it critically, the way no one else ever did, “And tell me boy, do you think she would approve of being called an ‘it,’ after you do this saving? Perhaps this poor creature would rather die than be saved by someone so pretentious. Hm?”
“If I ever learn to talk to them, maybe I’ll find that stuff out. As it stands, I’ll have to content myself with being pretentious…if that’s what it takes to keep this one alive.”
“Well that is very noble of you.” She stood up, “the best way to do it is to remove the strands with the Force. Otherwise, they’ll stick and the spider will follow the scent of its net until it recaptures the creature.”
“Okay.” He began reaching out, preparing for the delicate task. It would certainly test his precision too, there was no doubt.
“Poor spider.” She mumbled.
“Hm?” his concentration wavered.
“The spider. It’s making its way up those little branches over there.”
“Yeah, I see it, I know. There’s a time limit, I get it.”
“You’re killing him.”
“Hm?” again, his concentration wavered. These little interjections of her’s were not helping one bit.
“The spider. It is a long and difficult task, you know, catching a Pixie Moth. I’ve studied them in my time. It could take weeks for him to find another. It probably took weeks to get this one. He is starving, and there is no chance he’ll have the strength to wait again.”
“Which means he’s going to starve to death after the Moth is free.” He felt his connection to the Force deflate, wither.
“I’m afraid so. Because of you.”
“Well…” he felt flustered. He didn’t want to show it, though. He hoped it didn’t show. He wasn’t sure, “…It’s not my fault the only thing he eats is Pixie Moths.”
“It’s not his fault either.”
Finally, the boy stood up and stepped back, placing himself next to his Master, “So, if I save the Pixie Moth, the Wisp Spider dies; if I do nothing, the Pixie Moth dies. Baroness, I do not think you could have invented a better moral conundrum if you tried.”
“That’s because conundrums aren’t my forte, they’re Nature’s. I’d rather just teach you how to get better at levitation and precision, to be very honest.”
“Yeah right.”
“Well there’s no good answer here anyway. You said so yourself. The only conclusions will result in death, requiring you to choose who lives and who dies, which amounts to playing God: something I’ve always been against. So there you have it.”
He looked at the little prey, trapped invisibly on the surface of that bush. He looked down at the little predator, climbing tiredly and wearily upward, “There’s always a third option.”
“The third option, from the way I see it, would be to go out and find a Pixie Moth you like less than this one, catch it, and replace that one for this one. You still play God, boy, and something still dies. Not ideal in the least.”
He put a hand up as a plea for patience. He was thinking.
She always had a way of settling back and staring, in this one particular way, whenever he was thinking hard. She would shift her weight backwards till all of it rested on her heels, and both lift and tilt her head, looking down at him – almost suspiciously, but not quite – while at the same time fold her arms and screw up her face like a mechanic trying to pretend she knows what’s wrong with an unusual droid. It sometimes seemed to him like she was trying to decipher the foreign language of his mind simply by sniffing the air.
“You said they only eat Pixie Moths, right?” he began.
She remained fixed in her pose, “Correct.”
“Why?”
She looked at him funny, or funnier, it should be said, “I don’t follow. It’s just another part of the circle of life or what have you, I imagine.”
“Yes, but shouldn’t there be a specific reason they absolutely need to eat Pixie Moths and only Pixie Moths? There’s something unique in their biology, or chemistry, or something. There has to be.”
“If you say so.”
“I don’t say so, the spider says so, every time he refuses to eat other passing insects! You said they could starve to death trying to catch the Moths, yet there are all kinds of life much weaker and easier to catch all over the place. If there is truly one specific thing they can only get out of the Pixie Moth, then what would happen if we provided them with that nutrient or mineral or vitamin or whatever? If we figured out what it was, and isolated it in order to manufacture it on a larger scale…perhaps fusing the data into the DNA of common fungus spores…then the Wisp Spider will never have to kill these beautiful creatures again!”
“Sounds…involved.”
“Yeah. This one would not live to see the benefit.”
“And his brothers and sisters?”
“Depending on how long they live. Probably.”
“Ah. So the real question is: will they survive the inevitable and devastating overpopulation, after their one and only predator has been made to lose interest?”
He didn’t have an answer for that. His contingencies only ran so far. His eyes wandered toward a tiny brook that, during the heat-wave summer, had been nothing but an inconsequential but long divot in the ground. Now it was bubbling and sputtering with snaking life, a prominent and noticeable fixture among the low-cut grass at the edge of the orchard.
During his short time as a slave, and at various moments while working at that warehouse, the boy had been convinced that he could predict anything.
Now, he would have to reassess that assertion.
The Baroness tenderly placed a hand on his shoulder, “The universe can be an exceedingly difficult thing to reshape.”
“I…guess it can be, yeah.”
“The Spider and the Moth – it might not have much to do with refining your precision, but it does serve as an important lesson, don’t you think? It is a good analogy to the greater world. I could almost imagine some kind of complicated children’s story being invented around the problem. But…you must understand something,” She knelt down to his level, “And this is in case you’re frustrated and think you should give up your little random thought experiments, because you shouldn’t. But you need to understand: If you become my Apprentice, this question will need an answer that does work. And on a much, much larger scale.”
“I know.” He said simply.
“Hm.” She gave him a penetrating look, “Do you?”
“I know, because the Sith Order expects no less than, uhm…than complete mastery of Power, in all its forms.”
“…Concise.” She looked bemused, “But do you truly believe this, boy, or are you just trying to impress me?”
He looked at her, his face incredibly serious. He involuntarily thought back to that moment when she had merely been a stranger who was saying things he had serious trouble believing. That moment in his life had laid an incredibly difficult choice in front of him: go with his original plans to save his friends, or go with this person he doesn’t know, who claims to have the power to fix everything without a drop of spilled blood.
So he looked at her, more sincere than he’d ever looked at anyone in his life, and said, “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”
I wouldn’t be here… his brain repeated, mocked even, You wouldn’t be here if you ignored her, if you chose another path. If you ignored the Old Woman and sent the Sweatshop Kids to riot, to war, maybe you’d be a hero instead of running for your life, about to die. Maybe already dying. You’re bleeding, your brain is swelling out of your eyeballs practically, you’ve probably got frostbite too but you can’t feel it because you can’t feel anything. You’re gonna die. Even if you live you’re gonna die, thanks to that girl that insane girl out there, who’s pretending to be a Sith Lord, or who’s pretending to be a Jedi, who knows, it doesn’t matter. She’s gonna make double-sure you’re dead. No matter what, you’re gonna die. You’re gonna die because you decided to give all your problems to Averus. Like an idiot a weak idiot you gave in and let someone else solve your problems for you. Like a weak stupid idiot child who can’t do anything on his own. Even now, you can’t even solve this on your own. You’re weak. That’s what you are. You…I mean me. That’s what I am.
The boy was still pushing through the pitch black forest, blood and wet hair blinding him, branches coming out of nowhere and slashing him; Icicles biting him; His shoulder flickering with pain like a broken light bulb. The ground rushed up every now and then, bruising his knees, giving him a face-full of snow, slowing him down.
You would have been a hero, you would have had an adoring army surrounding you. You would have been safe…
“And…outside of that…little group…” he got up again from a fall he couldn’t even remember, “…I’d…be power…less.”
Never mind that he’d be responsible for any kid who died fighting for him, and he’d hate himself for that. Never mind that he’d be despised by the authorities and solicited by criminals that he would despise in turn. Never mind that he now considered such actions abhorrent. Never mind that those kids are better off now, safe and away from that place, than they ever would be with him, fighting back everyone forever, until they eventually lost. Never mind that. Never mind all that. Those were excuses. Even now, he knew some part of him might swear up and down that those were the real reasons that he chose Averus over them, but that would be a lie. That would be equivalent to, and as pointless and wrong as, replacing one Pixie Moth for another on the web. No, this is what made the difference that caused his choice in the end. This was the thing, and nothing else. No other virtue mattered. This was the one and only dealmaker:
“I’m here cuz…” he let out a rough cough that seemed to single-handedly destroy his throat, replacing the smooth lining with rocks and nails. He slowed down even more. It felt like his feet were in glue. Freezing cold glue, “I’m…I’m here cuz…I want…”
Power.
His throat dried up before the word could come out. It stuck to his tongue like sandpaper. The next time he fell (it was not a long time after), he grabbed a handful of snow and ate it greedily. It was beginning to feel cold again, to the touch. Was he pushing out of shock through sheer will? Maybe. Or maybe it was the Force. He still had no idea how much of the Force he had the potential to actually control, only that it was a whole lot more than he currently did.
This time when he got up, he noticed the tree-line was thinner. He could see his hands again. They looked scratched, and where they didn’t look scratched, they looked red anyway. He brought his head back up and kept moving. Then he saw them. Stars. Beautiful, twinkling stars. See? I’m not gonna die.So? You’re still weak. You’re weak and the Pixie Moth died. You never did save her…
He was back. The clearing was only a few steps away, and so too would be the cabin. He dared not call out, though. If the girl realized he was running for help instead of safety, she’d disappear. Leaving him alone…maybe that was a good thing in the short term, (OH, how he wished she would), but what if she didn’t give up? What if she followed them to another planet? What if she never let this go, never stopped, not ever, until he was dead in her arms? He couldn’t have that. He didn’t want to live in fear for the rest of his life. You’ll live in fear anyway.
He staggered to the door – it was no change in his step, he’d staggered the entire way through the woods – and smacked his palm against it, with no particular rhythm. He couldn’t decide if he was starting to recover from the dizziness, or about to black out. His mind was so confused, even his own self-assessments were getting crossed. Then again, maybe that was a good argument for the ‘about to black out’ side. On the other hand, he could still reason, and his vision was focusing again.
At this moment, it was focusing on a girl in a ragged flight suit with a bloody leg, holding a bloody knife, half-limping out into the clearing, staring back at him with murder in her eyes. She looked like the archetypal Killer from a horror vid: lopsided, grisly, forever approaching, never quite in the light.
But then, just as he thought it, there was light. From the window. Averus must have heard him. The door opened. He looked up at her, but she was looking at the girl and, for perhaps the first time since he met her, Averus was truly angry. Good, kill her. Show her who’s boss!
“I see you’ve brought a friend,” Darth Averus said, almost snarling. She removed her hooded cloak, and the lightsaber on her belt glinted gently from the cabin’s dim glow.
The boy looked back at the girl, and he smiled.
Chapter 10 part 1: Monster
Mouse smiled back.
The first time the real Darth Averus hinted to Mouse that this would be her final test was over a year ago. It had been only a few months earlier that Mouse truly began to realize exactly how vast and complex her Mistress’s network of spies and contacts really was. There didn’t seem to be a limit to how much information Darth Averus had access to. Every sensitive document she could imagine was filed somewhere. There was even an encrypted collection of datadisks entitled “Jedi Council Meeting Transcriptions.” Most were unlabelled, but two had “1st Hand info” written in red, underlined.
Like, first hand…from a Jedi? Master?!? She dared not bring it up. She wasn’t even supposed to be there. There were lots of places Averus had explicitly stated Mouse wasn’t supposed to be, and Mouse always made sure those were exactly the places she went. It was that survival instinct of her’s. As much as Darth Averus talked about the dangers of the Jedi or the Republic or the Black Sun, Mouse knew the only enemy that posed any real threat to Mouse was Darth Averus herself. That was just how their relationship worked, even if Averus refused to acknowledge it as such. Maybe, she didn’t even realize what she was doing.
Her ignorance – honest or feigned – was irrelevant. The effect was the same: Averus taught her by being her enemy. Mouse understood this, clear as if it were written on a wall, and even though she hated it…it worked. By being her opponent, Mouse was learning much faster than she ever had when she was Level’s friend. Even with Lock – shut up about them. Shut up.
As someone who was incredibly familiar with trying to find the cracks in Darth Averus’s seemingly perfect defenses, Mouse knew there were some places where looking for weakness was futile. Like for instance, in the woman’s ability to find accurate information.
So when Averus came to her looking furious, and vented to Mouse about how this ignorant ancient hack of a Force Sensitive named Baroness Sarogga, from some backwater called Dolus, had stolen her identity and was strutting around the underworld pretending to be a Sith Lord, Mouse was only surprised that someone actually had the guts to pull such a stunt. That Darth Averus found this out somehow…that wasn’t so surprising.
The real question on her mind at the time – diligently looking for cracks, as any good opponent should – was why her Mistress had bothered to tell her that in the first place. The only thing such information could possibly do was undermine the Sith Lord’s status as someone who made no mistakes. What if Mouse concluded that Averus’s carelessness with her identity translated to weakness and decided the time was right to kill her? Even the most perfectionistic dictators in history couldn’t be on guard all the time. Surely she didn’t think Mouse was unwilling to kill her. There was no way Averus was that stupid. In fact, from Mouse’s experience, Averus wasn’t even a tiny bit stupid.
Maybe…maybe this had to do with those stories she told her. The ones about the twins who fought under one of those dusty old Sith Lords from way long ago. Something-Shadow? Naga Shadow, maybe? Whatever. They were called…the Eva Twins. Averus told her all about how they rose to be the most formidable and dangerous women in the galaxy, and how they used their identical features, identical fighting styles, and identical names to help them do it.
Averus had a whole handful of great stories about those two and the battles they seemed to win so easily. Their fighting style was unbeatable, because it was unique. Not only was it unique, it was irreproducible. For what they did was master a style that required two people who were exactly the same. Exactly the same in every way, down to the pores on their skin, to their very presence in the Force. No detail could ever be allowed to be different. If one got a haircut, the other got the same haircut. If one had to make a new lightsaber, the other would destroy her own and craft an identical blade. If one was wounded in battle, the other would wound herself in the same place. And so on.
For the sake of their ultimate weapon, their inherent advantage, nothing could be left unchecked. They sacrificed their own identities so that they could become one person. Their lives had been devoted to one unstoppable, perfect tactic. Yet for them, it truly was worth it. The way Averus described it, seeing them fight was like seeing a tornado. Two people who could move like one creature, twice as fast as the fastest, twice as strong as the strongest, twice as cunning as the most clever, a pair of eyes always looking in the right place and another always looking to the next right place. They were so blindingly quick and precise, survivors swore it had been one person with four arms who had attacked. Everything they did worked exactly right, like a supernaturally crafted machine. They leveled armies.
As the stories say, of course, this did not end without irony. The very tactic that made them so alike ultimately broke them apart. They began to hate each other, until they couldn’t even live on the same planet. In some versions of the story, they kill each other, but Averus would always temper those with the comment that reality isn’t nearly as poetic as storytellers would like us to believe.
Now, though, she wondered how true that was. If it wasn’t just Averus’s own way of being poetic, and hinting to Mouse the possibility that she, too, had a twin? Averus hated telling Mouse personal things, so it was possible. It was also possible she was a friend with Jedi Masters who were giving her confidential information about Council Meetings. That didn’t mean Mouse believed it, or that it helped explain anything.
So what if Averus had an rogue twin sister? That meant she always did. It didn’t explain why she chose now to say something about the woman.
Darth Averus was telling her this information for a reason. But what was the reason? Possibilities ran through her mind as she trained every day. Could the impostor be searching for Averus, maybe even on her way to Wayland at this moment? No. There’d be no way anyone would stand a chance against Darth Averus, not even a twin. Even with her age, my Mistress is formidable. If that was really the case, there’d be no reason to tell me, because the Baroness would be dead before I even knew she landed. Even if they were evenly matched once, Averus has only gotten stronger. My Mistress has nothing to fear. Unless……Unless Averus wants me to kill her.
So when, a year later, Averus sat Mouse down and gave her careful instructions about how the time was ripe: Mouse was to stalk the impostor and the boy she had in tow until they were isolated, and then kill the child without alerting his false master to the deed, and how doing so would gain her the title of Sith Lord – official Apprentice to the Lord Darth Averus…again, she was not surprised. Only relieved.
She was relieved, not because she wouldn’t have to kill the false Averus herself (her Mistress could have ordered her to kill the Supreme Chancellor for all it mattered to Mouse), but because it would mark the end of her childhood. To Mouse, being a child meant suffering. It meant misery. It meant watching helpless inside a space in the wall as her parents were shot ten times, even as they begged for their lives. It meant becoming so desperately hungry that she crushed a living creature with her bare hands until it died, and then tried to eat it raw. It meant shooting five men in the back, in cold blood, and not even being able muster up enough of a conscience to feel bad. It meant leaving Coruscant in the custody of an old woman with incredible power.
And the last one? That one, she considered the most miserable of all.
Darth Averus, Mouse had concluded, was not just her opponent, her teacher. That was the least of what Averus was. Darth Averus was, most of all, a monster. A Monster: a creature without compassion or sympathy, who hates so that it might see injustice, hunts so that it might see extinction, torments so that it might see misery, and kills so that it might see oblivion. That was how the old Sith texts defined the word. It fit Darth Averus perfectly. That needlessly cruel woman, who took such great joy in searching out people in their greatest, darkest possible moment of despair and pain, and finding the best way to make it even darker. The best way to make it even worse.
Take the man trying to hang himself after failing his village back on Ferros – a failure that Averus herself had a hand in. They walked in on him only moments before he went through with it, and Averus – all smiles – let him know she had taken the liberty of warning the elders about his suicide attempt.
She was “saving” him, she said. This was her “Good deed.” she said. Like she thought Mouse couldn’t see through it. Even though Averus knew how harshly they treated suicide attempts, even though she knew there was no reason to torment him any more – he had done his job, he should have been left to his fate – what does she do? She makes it so that he’s so humiliated and so utterly destroyed, he can’t even die. And at that moment, as his own legs give out from under him out of sheer emotional collapse…as he’s rendered speechless at the total undermining of not only his life, but his death as well…Averus mocks him. She mocks him. She mocks him like some cop, drinking caff over a chalk line. As he’s taken off to prison to be worked to death in the brutal suffocating ore mines they will surely sentence him to, the last thing the man hears out of the ‘greatly respected’ Averus’s mouth is how he’s pathetic. How he isn’t worth the dirt he walks on. How ashamed we all should be for breathing the same air. How he’s a lesson of failure. Mouse had been disgusted.
And that’s only one example. That is one example of thousands and thousands.
But it was more complicated than that, because Averus was a useful monster. To Mouse, Darth Averus was also incredibly, unimaginably Powerful. No lifeform could ever come close to matching her. If Mouse ever hoped to have a chance of having that, she would have to become the monster’s Apprentice. Only then would Averus give her the knowledge to be Great. And when that knowledge was given, Mouse would slay the monster and free the world.
She would go on to become the most powerful Sith Lord in history. She would unite the galaxy so that there would be no more wars. She would become the ruler of every planet, with complete control, and she would make it so nobody ever went hungry, and no one could ever own a weapon, and no child ever lost their parents, and no one could make fun of people who were weak, and she would be especially careful to make sure no lifeform could ever kill another lifeform, ever again.
Yet she knew, with a block of icy dread in her stomach, that a lot of people were going to have to die before that happened. For starters – that poor innocent little twelve year old boy who the impostor had chosen to mentor. Random, needless cruelty. Her path was being paved and it did not look good.
