Star Wars Roleplay: Chaos

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Bad Bad Bad

She could still taste it, smell it.

Putrid iron, coppery and sickly sweet, in its viscous red ichor. Black walls around her in an unlit hall, stone beneath her feet, and the disgusting filth dripping down as the only source of light. Screams that came from every direction, silenced one by one with the nightmarish squelch and pop that made them disembodied - it was just a dream, only a dream, but it felt so real. Memories of someone else's life, echoes of a distant past that didn't belong to her, haunted her every moment while she slept. Terrifying as it was, however, she'd lived with the scene for the last two and a half decades, ever since the woman she'd lost half of her lifetime to started killing. It was how the sith lord had coped with all of the murder, with every face she killed, none of them she could remember: because they all went to her instead.

-

Dromund Kaas was exactly as she thought it would have been from the holos she read and the holocrons she had consulted. Her mother had made it out to be so much worse than it appeared to be, like a desolation absent of whatever it was Braith thought made a world livable. It had been scarcely two weeks since Amara had made certain the nation she lived in knew she wasn't the dead strandcast that had taken her name and borrowed her face for a time, Vesta, but the steps her fallen sibling had left, faded as they were, were ones she'd nonetheless been retracing and to the cradle of the Sith it'd taken her. That wasn't entirely accurate, however, because Kaas itself wasn't the cause of her arrival - Darth Carnifex Darth Carnifex was.


"Amara Zambrano."

There was one last point of security left before she'd cross the threshold into a world that there was no coming back from, and the final bit of information she'd needed to give was little more than a string of words - a name, her name. There wasn't a verbal response to what she'd said, only a subtle nod and a gesture for her to continue through. A tall, towering really, steel door slid open for her to walk through and into a hall that wasn't quite so different from the one in her dreams. This was where her heart would have lurched and pulse quickened, only the thing that occupied the cavity in her chest was an object of gem and stone and the veins that branched out like roots through her body had no 'pulse' to speak of. In the back of her mind she knew this was something that should have caused her to turn back but if it gave her pause then she didn't show it. There weren't any familiar sounds except the echo of her footsteps as she walked down the hall, no blood dripping from the walls, and like staring down one's fear and finding it less intimidating than expected it only emboldened her. The tiny piece of her that had recognized the start of a terrible scene was silenced by the calmness that finding her nightmare absent from the waking world brought her.

Then, at last, she was there.


"What do I call you? Cousin?"

-

"She's here." The disembodied voice of Irina, Darth Ananta, said to the Dark Lord of the Sith.

"The other Vesta."


 

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Bountiful regality paved Amara's path through the Citadel, grand mosaics carved into every bare wall, flowing tapestries fluttering from every one that was not. Everything was edifice, everything was monument. To past glory, to future conquest, to the splendor enjoyed in the moment. But it was a mask, one that could barely conceal the darkness that lurked just beneath the surface; like a predator waiting in gloomy waters. The eyes of the guards watched her every movement, but it was the gaze of the unseen that was felt more keenly.

The door to the Arcane Library was a monolithic thing, twin doors each exquisitely decorated with symbols and fetishes that evoked the mysticism hidden therein. As they opened, Amara would find her eyes engulfed with the sight of the library, the endless bounty of knowledge that now stretched before her in all directions. An orrery of immense proportions hung from the ceiling above, tracking the movements of the celestial sphere around Dromund Kaas, with the sun Dromund at the center of the contraption.

She would find the Dark Lord waiting for her further in, several tomes of arcane lore spread out across a large table, the wood carved from the wroshyr tree of Kashyyyk. A partial symbol had been left etched into the wood, one that had once adorned the Jedi Temple on the planet where the Silver Jedi had headquartered. That it now resided in the hall of the Dark Lord of the Sith was evidence enough of that temple's ultimate fate.

"Thus she comes," intoned the Dark Lord, rising from His seat to stand before the much smaller woman. "The living image of she who was not meant to be, whose time in our world had always been a fleeting notion." He studied her, His gaze not necessarily malevolent, but intense all the same. She was like Vesta given new life, but there were so many small, almost unnoticeable, differences that set her apart even at a glance. The Dark Lord was an excellent reader of expression and posture, even those that were brought on subconsciously.

"You may call me Kaine," He paused for a moment, "You gave the name Amara to the guard, is that the name you have chosen for yourself?"

The shadow beneath His feet seemed to move all of it's own accord, undulating in discordant patterns across the floor and walls; always accompanied by the same distinct presence. To Amara, it would have been like standing in the presence of not one, but two beings. But, to her eyes, there was no one else around. Only the Dark Lord and His shadow. The shadow that grinned morosely, whose form was more substantial just beyond the periphery of her sight.


 


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"It's what belongs to me."

Absence of confirmation was generally taken as soft-denial, but in this case there was a bitter undertone to her words that suggested it wasn't quite so much a rejection of the name as it was unsubtle discontent from a spoiled wretch for not having what didn't necessarily belong to her for any meaningful length of time despite not having suffered any from it. It was why she was here, after all, given how her covetousness had drove her to such lengths as tracing a trail set by her facsimile in an effort to recover a legacy that was never hers in order to make it her own. A library was, for this reason, quite the suitable meeting place: it was the wealth of knowledge amassed over an uncountable set of eons that she knew she'd never find herself looking through in earnest, uninterested in the body of the journey as long as her eyes were set on the prize far at the end of the road laid out for her.

"..But, yes, it's the name I've given to myself." She admitted several seconds later.

-

"Quite the mouth on her." From the depths of the Dark Lord of the Sith's shadow the witch-turned-Sith whispered to him. "Entitled, too." Irina added, scrutinizing the young woman.

-

Amara knew, even if only vaguely, why she was here but that didn't make it any easier on her as she wrestled with how to phrase what it was she wanted from Darth Carnifex Darth Carnifex . "You met her, Vesta. Didn't you?" She asked leadingly, almost rhetorically given that she already knew the answer. From experience she knew that simply being family didn't afford her any more interest from the rest of her family than the random passerby on the side of the road - her own father had been more interested in empire-building when she'd woken from her coma than being a dad for her, something that had changed rather sharply as of recent but not something that didn't linger in the back of her mind still as a reminder for situations like these. "Before she became that.. thing, I mean." Amara clarified, suggesting a period before her shapeshifting 'sibling' had been consigned to a monstrous existence devouring everything in reach.


"My mother gave her everything, a life for a life, when she knew she was going to die - I want what was meant for me."

-

"Ah, there it is. The little harpy wants to use you to get what her clone worked so hard for and was given."

If she had a body to laugh there wasn't a shadow of a doubt that Irina's shade wouldn't have been cackling, though the sensation of an urge to do so was surely felt by Kaine as their thoughts were shared ever since she was discorporated. It wasn't lost on her that this was the daughter of the very being she'd tried to take root in - Braith - very much so ripe for the taking as her mother, then, had been. Circumstances had changed, however, and she was much more interested in maintaining the cycle Kaine had, as Carnifex, perpetuated than she was in destroying civilizations.

Instead of consumption another thought occurred to her instead.

"We could use her."

The desire for embodiment was floated, an impassioned Amara with Irina - Ananta - as her shadow, as she had been for decades now behind Carnifex, a conjured mental image shared.

"Keep her close, unlike her rebellious twin."


 

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"I did, I had known Vesta since she was created. Her will was unmatched by most, even at the end. She chose her fate, she never once let others choose it for her."

His form radiated power, a veritable font of the Dark Side in it's own right. But there was something darker in that swirling maelstrom, some infinitely more ancient than the man -- who many called a God -- that stood before her. He hearkened to that ancient darkness, letting it coil around His form like a lover's embrace. In His mind, her voice cooed and coaxed with a malevolent cognition all it's own. It advised Him, even directed Him, but it never controlled Him. They were symbiosis.

In His mind's eye, He beheld the woman once known as Irina; Darth Ananta. Her slender, beautiful form encapsulated by shadow. His hands intertwined with hers, becoming almost indistinguishable. He listened to what she said, absorbed it into Himself. Together, ensorcelled within one another, they mused upon the existence of this discarded child, her ambitions, and the potential she bore therein.

~She is eager to define herself as a person, to not just be a shadow of who was made in her image. This want can be guided, can be sharpened. We will not lose her like we lost the other.~

"All that Vesta was is now yours, Amara. Her legacy, whatever remains, is yours. There are those in this Empire and beyond who recall Vesta's face, who have memorized the sound of her voice. They will try to find in you what they could not in Vesta." It went unspoken, but the implication lingered. She could, if she desired, manipulate others into doing what she wanted, taking advantage of the memories others held of Vesta. But Amara was not Vesta, she never would be. Just as Vesta would have never been Amara. So it goes.

"I desired in Vesta someone who would follow the path of our bloodline, but she chose a different path and died because of it. Her destiny is not your own, your hands will forge a new one. Just the same, in the aftermath of Vesta's destruction, I accumulated what effects of hers I could obtain. I've kept them locked in vault ever since. It it my belief that they are yours now."


 


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They'd shared the same sight, at least for as long as she'd intended to kill - and towards the end that was every waking moment, eventually every second leading up to her death. Their death. "I saw." She said, quietly. It wasn't something she'd shared with Darth Prazutis Darth Prazutis , only her mother knew as if she somehow understood what it meant to be linked to something entirely other that was still as much as it was apart. In her dreams, at least, that's what she'd tell her, but in person Braith said little, if anything, at all to her. This was the most she'd heard of Vesta Zambrano from anyone who wasn't actively trying to kill her. Every last chance Vesta had to choose something, anything, that wasn't decided for her she did.

She'd watched her kill herself for it.


"No, it isn't."

In her heart she knew there never was another Vesta, there was no legacy she was set to inherit. She was hers, unique, alone, and they both were in their own ways. One chose it for herself, the other repulsed everyone else because she resembled something they hated or loved and lost. Amara yearned for what she had spurned, but she didn't understand it anymore than a child understood wanting what another had - envy. The love her parents had for her, the respect and admiration the dead had for that thing as she killed them and consumed their very essence, and the desire others had to keep her close even when she pushed them away - all of that came naturally to her, like she was made to be loved. Only the crystalline thing that had supplanted her heart was shared between the two, that and perhaps some DNA.

"But I will take it anyways."

Amara was born lame and alone, she could see even her cousin preferred the wretch that died over his own flesh and blood, or at least that was what her heart told her, its dark vice holding her together where the organ she'd been born with had rotten away. She'd lost lovers over petty spats here and there, it was always the same; another man, or woman, even just a friend who was too close for her to be comfortable. There wasn't trust, she was incapable. Eventually she was alone, like she was here and now, making a deal with someone else to guarantee she'd get something in return for a payment of some kind in the form of work from her.

There'd been a space between them, it hadn't been necessary for her to walk so close as she started to now, but the gap was bridged in a few short steps. "I just want.. to belong." She said, looking up at Darth Carnifex Darth Carnifex like a lost child to an adult - or a starving animal to a beast with scraps hanging from its teeth. Amara would play house with her parents, find people who'd pretend to be her friends, but it'd still ring hollow to her if she couldn't take back the life she'd watched another live for her through their own eyes. "If what you have of hers will help then I will do anything."


"I already told my father, I won't leave like she did. I want what was meant to be mine first."

With her father she would've sealed the deal with something like a hug, some form of affection a child gave to their parents to throw him off balance so he'd give her what she wanted. She recognized the craven eyes of a predator when she saw them, though, and his eyes told her that Carnifex wouldn't be moved by something so contrived.

"Whatever you want." She offered.

That was the only language the man would understand, and it helped that it was the only one she was familiar with. "Anything."

 

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~She knows not what she offers,~ crooned the mischievous shade, a sumptuous whisper in the Dark Lord's ear. ~So eager, too eager. A most willing servant.~

The Dark Lord stood motionless for a moment, smoldering eyes evaluating Amara as she stepped in close; too close. Had His Crownguard been present, they would have stepped forward with weapons drawn. But the Dark Lord had dismissed them prior, allowing the young girl to have her solitary audience with Him. Though, it was not truly solitary, as the shadow in His ear made evident.

"The belonging you seek," spoke the Dark Lord, breaking the silence. "Is not something that can be given, it must be taken. You have taken this first step, and Vesta's legacy weighs upon you now. In time, we shall see if you were worthy enough to receive it."

He stepped past her, the power of His presence washing over her in His wake. "Come, child, I will relinquish what was Vesta's to you." They would travel to the vaults deep below the Citadel, a plummeting chasm traversed by grinding lift. The vault door would only open to a true scion of Solomon the Black, a legacy that both Darth Carnifex and Darth Prazutis held. Much of the vault's interior was locked away, but sequestered in a small chamber was a single chest.

Unlocking it, the Dark Lord drew back the lid and stepped back. Whatever was inside was Amara's now.


 

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