Private A Morbid Taste For Bones

[Starlin Rand]

Necropolis, Dahrtag

It wasn’t midnight yet, but it was close to it. With the staggering gait of a drunkard, Starlin weaved between the pale tombstones of the cemetery. A dense fog—all of Dahrtag seemed to be perpetually shrouded in this damned mist—had settled over the yard, making it harder to figure out where one was going, let alone read the names of the dead. But even while intoxicated, Starlin knew the way by heart.

It wasn’t that he happened to be in the area and decided he would pay a visit to the Professor’s grave, just for old times sake. Oh no, this was a deliberate trip, a pilgrimage he used to undertake religiously in the dark days immediately following Tython. Errik Nimdok’s death had been a shock to all, including Nimdok himself. He had left behind only an incomplete draft of a will, which settled the matters of his estate (everything went to his little girl) but didn’t resolve the issue of what to do with his remains. His homeworld of Lao-mon was still under Mawite control, and likely would be for some time. Eventually it was agreed that his body would be temporarily laid to rest on Dahrtag, a graveyard planet where dead people from across the galaxy were buried.

At last, Starlin reached a modest little mausoleum hewn from smooth granite. Tilting his head back to read the name carved above the tomb upset his equilibrium, and he stumbled to his knees in the dirt. Groaning, he crawled over to the steps and shifted into a sitting position, leaning his back against the cool stone while he waited for his head to stop spinning.

“I just thought I’d stop by and say hello, Professor,” he said, not caring who else might overhear him. “I’ve got good news. Miri’s engaged, and she’s going to have a baby. Your little girl’s all grown up. I was a little worried for a while there that she wasn’t moving on the way she should, but now… now I think she’s the happiest she’s ever been.”

Sighing, he reached for the flask in his pocket and drained the last of its contents. “I certainly don’t handle loss very well,” he said, chuckling. His mirth faded. “Don’t you worry. I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure she stays happy. That’ll be my gift to you, after everything you did for me, my friend…”

Egon Canaan​

 

[Egon Canaan]

Grave dirt parted and seethed at the behest of a vibrospade that smote the ground with halfhearted vigor. Soil arced out of the grave and settled atop the slope of a taupe mound. Egon had counted exactly seventy-three individual digging motions in his head since the last time he looked up from the bottom of the pit. Simple as it was, there were few other ways to facilitate focus on the monotony, as Egon's mind wished desperately to wander. Seventy-four would be the final harrow, followed by the backside of the vibrospade scraping against the dirt to coax the pit's last corner into some semblance of evenness.

Stiff pain in his neck and shoulders from the dogged hunch of toil protested his eventual looking upward. Eyes met only a wall of dirt before him, with twinges of lantern-lit mist from above the precipice; an indicative sign that he'd dug 'deep enough'. There was likely an intended standard depth for graves on Dahrtag, but the only instruction the Necropolitans had given him with their limited knowledge of the Basic language was simply; 'Flat bottom, deeper than you'. The required length had been inconveniently omitted from that instruction, but a few weeks and several hundred graves later, Egon had more or less nailed an intuitive feel for that particular dimension.

Throwing his vibrospade up to the surface, Egon flattened his hands against the dirt overhead and hoisted himself from the pit with a grunt. Rolling to one side, he wedged a knee beneath himself and rose his ailing figure to its feet. A fusion lantern lit up the last three graves and the pile of dirt upheaved in their creation. His Necropoliton colleagues, having long since finished their graves, shoveled dirt from the collective pile into idle hoverbarrows, all the while laughing and spitting in their alien language.

Necropolitan as a language sounded far from eloquent, an aberrant vernacular of Galatic Basic and who knows what else. The way they heckled, clicked, and jeered at one another sometimes gave Egon the idea to bury his head in the dirt just to achieve peace. It added pain to the head where otherwise only the working muscles would ache. Egon groaned silently, rubbing two fingers into his temple as he scooped his vibrospade from the floor. As if contending with his discontent, the clicks and jeers suddenly pointed his way, another undertaker gesturing for him to take the full hoverbarrow to the landspeeder at the edge of the graveplots.

Egon obliged begrudgingly, lacking the linguistic skills required to refuse convincingly. Repulsors pulsed, undulated audibly as they struggled to stay afloat as Egon carefully toed the narrow path between graves. Shadows cast from his hip-clasped glowrod rippled against the labyrinthian surface created by the disorganized array of graves. Mental effort flexed not to mull over the philosophical realization that he had once been an inch in any direction away from lying in something similar back on Naboo. From gravebound to grave tending, the irony would be laughable were he not pained over nearly every inch of his body.

A voice pulled him out of his internal world shortly after he crossed the line from fresh graves to slightly-less fresh. Immediately he recognized it as not being Necropolitan, it lacked the sniveling, vexing quality he'd come to disdain it for. If it wasn't a local, it obviously had to be a visitor, but mourners almost never came here at this hour. Unless, of course, they were too drunk straight out of the memorial cantina to care if they fell into a hole obscured by unceasing mist. As the stranger's figure became visible on approach, appearances confirmed he wasn't a local, though the doubt was scarce to begin with. Not nearly ragged or ugly enough to be from anywhere within five light-years.

Egon simply steered his hoverbarrow to go around, and offered the stranger a polite, silent nod as he passed.

 

[Starlin Rand]

Someone else entered the vicinity. Starlin raised his head at the sound of boots and repulsors, meeting the gaze of a passing gravedigger. The stranger gave him a nod, which was enough to warrant a tipsy wave.

"'Sup."

Starlin tipped back his flask until it was nearly vertical to make sure he got the last few drops, then stood up. Or tried to. The world tilted, sending him staggering then sprawling on the ground.

Grunting and groaning under his breath, he waited for things to stop spinning... until another stranger entered his periphery. This one cast a long shadow over his perceptions, their presence in the Force bearing the all-too-familiar taint of the Dark Side.

What the...? He sat up slowly, eyes darting around as he rose to his feet. To the supernatural senses of a Jedi, he could practically smell the evil. Taste it. He stuck out his tongue, expression contorting in a grimace. It was enough to render him stone-cold sober, that was for sure.

Egon Canaan​