Black Iron

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Nui Akona"] was a distant if frenetic presence in the back of his mind; more pressing were the voices that tried to ooze their way out of the metal. He both accepted and deflected them, unwilling to eradicate them -- not only might it weaken the metal, it might draw down something nastier. Nadd's soul had been annihilated, but Seren had never found out if the souls of Ommin and Amanoa still slumbered. And those were shades he didn't dare cross, not unless he had to.

Either his blood circle or the somnolence of ages kept the shades of the tomb from interference, so far, but he would have to work quickly.

His mastery of heat and cold, of thermal energy's ebb and flow, of flame and forge, was pretty fething good. He'd used rapid heating and cooling to make escape tunnels through hundreds of metres of rock. He'd fought tutaminis/pyrokinesis duels against Masters, burned men and women to ash, melted the knives in their hands when he'd felt like it. For all that, there was something intrinsically new and unfamiliar about applying immense heat to beskar. A lightsabre's plasma was no joke; the plasma at the surface of your average sun could reach ten thousand degrees. Beskar took special forges, special techniques, all secret.

He would, he soon realized, need outside help.

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Nui Akona"]

The fabric of memory lay upon the metal lattice like thousand-year-deep psychic sediment. It smelled like rituals and greed, stemming back to the days of the tomb's creation. This place had become the embodiment of vain ambition; he sensed that now just as he'd seen it then, sixteen years back, when infiltrating Nadd cults had been the job.

Only very rare, very powerful spirits could bind themselves to locations and actually remain themselves, and it took immense sacrifice and strength. Exar Kun himself had only managed it by killing off a civilization. The vast majority of the spirits anyone encountered were shades of what they once were -- echoes of personality, imprints, no more. His lips twisted in amusement as he thought of the initially alarming but ultimately hilarious thing he'd learned on his emergence: that twentysomethings were claiming that kind of power. Having been through it himself, and not on his own strength, and having wound up as a slave because of the technical details inherent in this kind of thing, he rather suspected that the children playing with what they called Transfer Essence were copying themselves. He suspected they'd all died a long time ago and hadn't realized it yet. Echoes in empty brains.

Echoes, however, contained memory, and memory he could use. Among the many deaths imprinted on the metal of this place, a few were neither the cultists nor their victims. A few, a very few, actually pre-dated the first dark rituals performed here, and they smelled very different from all that had come after.

He slipped into the memory of a sleeping shade, and was no longer on Dxun, but a place that felt as much home to the shade as Hellgotha or Coruscant or Dxun ever had to him.

"Su'cuy gar..."

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Seren Ordavo"]

Five meters. Matukai could punch through steel, and make their skin impenetrable to it too. All things considered they were the natural warriors of the Galaxy, using techniques and mystical energy to push the boundaries of their bodies to and above the apex of any simple mortal.

Four. Sardun could see its teeth, as big as any human’s arm. Its breath was foul. Its eyes filled with uncanny malicious intelligence. Two. One. Sardun said hello.

​

Fist met the center between the two talons of the predator. Flesh clashed against flesh, vibration ran up and down his arm, feet digging into the ground. tendons, muscles and bone groaning against the abnormal pressure.

Had this been natural Nui would have flown back into a tree. But he cheated, using the breath to root himself to the ground and stay staunch. The beast didn’t have that luxury, head knocked backwards it’s form flew off into the many trees behind it.

Part of him wanted to tame the dazed beast, flying around the place sounded cool. But where the hell would he put it when leaving the planet? How would he feed it? Also a good question.

Instead Sardun started for the beast. He’d rip out the spear he had thrown into its flesh and then finish the job.

 

[Velok the Younger]

MANDA'YAIM​

(IN MEMORY)​

CIRCA 4000 BBY​

​

A pit mine yawned before him(her), the Seren/shade. The sun outside the village of Keldabe beat down on an operation far larger than the modern era would ever have supported. Four thousand eight hundred years ago, beskar had not been so rare. He(she) looked down, examined his(her) hands, arms, chest, all sheathed in golden beskar'kandar, gold for a field marshal. Sequential memory gave Seren(the vod) an overview of the vod's future life and death. In time, he(she) knew, he(she) would assist in forging the tomb of Freedon Nadd at the request of the Jedi Master Arca Jeth, and would die there defending the worksite from drexl. Twenty-four years later, one of the last Taung would name himself Mandalore the Ultimate and start the sixteen-year Mandalorian Wars.

He(she) removed his(her) helmet and caught a reflection in a mirrored knifeblade. A Taung reflection. The reflection of one of the first Mandalorians, racially speaking. Keenly, the part of him(her) that was still Seren -- the link was not permanent, though it certainly felt immersive in the moment -- empathized with the long-dead Taung field marshal and master beskarsmith. He knew something of what it was to be the last of the breed.

This was the source of the black iron ore that would become the tomb of Nadd, and the purpose appeared to be clear. The payment, the shade informed him(herself), was astronomical; the Jedi had been saving their money ever since their return to power at the end of the Pius Dea era, in the seven thousand years since the Battle of Uquine cast down the Order of the Terrible Glare and the Republic itself. For the deadliest Darksider since Naga Sadow, they could afford to pay to make his tomb impregnable. The terms were acceptable; Manda'yaim had beskar to spare, even in the quantities required to make a solid beskar tomb the size of a small capital ship. Distantly, as if hearing murmurs from a dreamer, Seren(the vod) felt his shade-self respond in anguish to his modern knowledge that beskar was depleted on Manda'yaim, and had been for centuries. In its way, the tomb of Freedon Nadd had been the last great beskar-working to ever take place, and it would be remembered -- had been remembered-

Temporal perspectives overlapped when hearing the memories of a shade, but Seren was used to it. He drew back from her, from the Taung smith, and felt the experience fade gently. Then he centered himself and subsumed himself again, more sure of his identity as merely a rider on the bone horse of memory, viewing time from her perspective but with his knowledge.

The tomb of Nadd would be remembered, not as a prison or as an obstacle, but as a shrine to the thing it would be meant to contain. It would become a place of evil, with no bearing on the intentions of its commissioner or its creators. That, too, prompted sorrow from the shade. So much money and beskar wasted. So much time and so many lives.

Great machines, equal in size and complexity to Basilisk war droids, tore beskar ore from the soil. The shade, in memory, stood ready to oversee its refinement.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Seren Ordavo"]

Ripping out the spear hadn’t been a good idea in hindsight. It shook the Drexl straight out of its stupor, still a bit woozy in the head, but a world of pain when you are as close to it as Sardun was. Was a good thing it didn’t have the presence of mind to simply take a bite out of the Jedi, instead it smashed its head into its assailant’s form.

Sardun only got a split-second warning, not enough to anchor himself, instead his body was sent crashing into one of the trees surrounding the clearing. His body strengthened by the breath was the only reason why he was still alive and breathing.

With a thunk he fell down groaning and trying to get his bearings.

The Drexl, for its part, was attempting to stand up and finish his own job.

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Nui Akona"]​

MANDALORE/MANDA'YAIM​

(IN MEMORY)​

CIRCA 4000 BBY​

​

But refinement was not the memory he needed. That was clear enough, even from the surface-level understanding he'd gained, the overview of all the memories that comprised the shade. Terms floated up; he listened patiently. Crystal matrices, harmonic nodes, vibration points and centers of percussion, some more to do with the metal's internal relationships, some with the way the metal structure interacted with the design of the beskad or the beskar'gam or the kal or the basilisk. He couldn't assimilate a lifetime's education from a shade four thousand years dead; even if that degree of information had been accessible, he'd had his fingers burned with soul-binding and memory-walking more often than not. A connection like this was as strong as he was willing to risk. Because echoes could bring memory, but less the details of the memory than the instincts.

Just like that, he was in a forge, a Mandalorian forge, a hammer in his(her) hand, a task on his(her) mind, forging one of the immense ingots that would become part of the tomb of Nadd. He twisted the memories again, and he was on Dxun, joining ingot to ingot to ingot, working the refined beskar into a seamless structure as big as a star corvette. Instead of seeking the specifics of memory, he focused on resurrecting skill, stealing her instinct and merging it with his own. In the tomb, in the modern day, surrounded by beskar that she had helped to forge, he had no hammer, traditional tools, resources; his were a killer's calluses and scars not a smith's. But he had his own tools, skills that had seen him through tougher challenges than this.

He could make heat. He could work metal with his mind.

Not to the level of a true beskarsmith, of course. He'd only ever done this when in serious need of a weapon, when all he had was unsuitable scrap metal. Pyrokinesis to heat the metal, telekinesis to merge it, crush it into solidity, give it its final form, and pyrokinetic and cryokinetic aptitude again to adjust the rate of cooling.

Slowly, the invincible metal began to answer his call. Now he remembered her memory of making the huge urn, all in one piece by the end, and then bound to the floor. The urn warped, just so, and began to glow gently. Heat percolated through the cold floor. It would grow stronger.

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Nui Akona"]

MANDALORE/MANDA'YAIM​

(IN MEMORY)​

CIRCA 4000 BBY​

​

Her past overtook him unbidden, a side effect and a risk, but one that often bore fruit. He knew, he'd always known, that to make true armor out of this metal was beyond him. But he wasn't looking for true armor.

The first two pieces to split away from the urn were portions of the rim, acquiring new curves as they thinned and subdivided in midair. Memory filled him -- her hammer, her workshop, forging links in a chain to control the drexl of Dxun. A beskar chain, long since recovered and reforged into something new, or else lost under the forest floor. Complex armor was beyond him, but a chain, link by link, had been all he needed in deadly situation after deadly situation. Link after link formed courtesy of his telekinetic and pyrokinetic instinct, while her instinct buried him in a long-past forging session outside Keldabe, crafting drexl-chains that would be used for generations. From his temporal perspective and his knowledge of history, as far as anyone could know history after the Dark Age, he presumed her chains had gone on to imprison Jedi, maybe even become components in Palpatine's Mandalorian dungeon ships.

His mind's eye still on Manda'yaim, he made four chains, link by link -- two plain ones to wear around his thighs or waist, only a few wraps each, and two longer ones for his arms. The longer chains were half plain, meant to wrap around his forearms, and half studded with short brutal spikes, not prominent or sharp enough to entangle themselves beyond possibility of extrication.

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Nui Akona"]

MANDALORE/MANDA'YAIM​

(IN MEMORY)​

CIRCA 4000 BBY​

​

With a cold chill, all out of proportion to the warmth of the metal he was working -- the heat transferred readily into the floor, the air, the metal all around -- he realized something he hadn't though possible.

The shade was waking up.

He'd given it enough provocation, of course, but a shade was nothing more than an echo, comparable to a holocron's gatekeeper but more forgetful. There was no real person involved, not anymore.

And yet, somehow, the ambient Force within the unconquerable will of a non-Force-sensitive four thousand years dead had allowed her to make a far deeper imprint than he'd recognized. Her echo poured into him through his link, a link that was frankly insufficient to contain her while he spent his strength on forging the chains with his mind and only his mind. He felt her shade's amused condescension, tolerance, and mild indignation as the part of him that was temporarily becoming her perceived the chains he'd made. Rather than fade, the sense of being on Manda'yaim grew stronger, less extricable from modern reality. But strong as the impression was, powerful as her control over his personality was becoming -- feth, told myself I wouldn't take risks like this again -- the shade was only a shade, unable to control itself. The memory oscillated back to something she'd done nearly every day of her life: forge armor.

He could use that, and frankly, at this point, he didn't have much of a choice. In his day he'd favored high-necked Dark Armor in the classical style; what began to take shape from the urn, the only point of reality in this dream of Manda'yaim, was something else entirely. There was no formality to it, just the brutal, minimalist lines of an ancient beskarsmith's instincts combined with the bone-deep reality he'd lived for sixteen years. Practical was the order of the day: shoulders down to the blade, elbows, knees, the soles and toes of boots that hadn't yet been made. Shoulders and forearms and such for Sardun, too. Each piece forged in a floating ambience of telekinetic and pyrokinetic distortion, hovering above a melted-away urn and a floor that was becoming uncomfortably warm. But in another sense entirely, forged in the memory-world of a little mastercraft shop outside the village of Keldabe, five millennia ago.

They weren't what he would have designed, and much as this was useful, invigorating...he had no idea how to stop it, and he detested the loss of control. Frankly, he feared it too. Force exhaustion and memory contamination would be the results, if he was very, very lucky.

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Nui Akona"]

He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a trained smith. Whatever knack he'd acquired for reshaping metal in his years underground, none of it was formalized. He could approximate her instincts when it came to timing and temperature; he had that kind of control over heat and cold, and tied in as directly with his instincts as her forge had been with hers. To make anything large or complex -- gauntlets, breastplate, helmet, even a blade -- was beyond the combination of himself and the shade, but her frustration and sudden freedom drove him(her) on. Five thousand years without a forge. She might not be a person anymore, but did that make her desire any less vivid? If the memory-imprinted Force nexuses he'd encountered were anything to go by, the answer was certainly no, and perhaps even the converse. Awakened, the shade was nothing less than a pure hunger for work, for creation. He managed to keep enough control to focus on simpler things, or what he thought were simpler things -- crude kneeplates, and things along those lines. The chains had been only the first. Project after small project, undeniably flawed in execution, took shape around him. He snapped out of the Manda'yaim experience only once the last piece of armor was complete. The shade, spent, fled into silence within the tomb, and once more he was himself.

Kneeling on a very warm floor, surrounded by a ring of his own dried blood and a scattering of metal shapes that didn't remotely add up to a full suit of armor -- that would be how [member="Nui Akona"] found him when he returned.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Seren Ordavo"]

Barely managed to roll away, the beast crashed into the tree and half of it disappeared into the forest line. This wasn’t exactly going as planned. The fog was slowly receding from his brain, which meant that Sardine would be back into fighting shape soon - the problem was that he wasn’t sure how long he would have to wear off this thing in the meanwhile.

It was faster than him, stronger, faster? Was that already said? Sardun didn’t even know at this point, keeping his eyes on the target he started to step back, one foot at a time towards the other side of the clearing. He needed a few moments to get back into the game, let the breath flow thro--

Wow. What an idiot he was. Sardun breathed in and relaxed. The beast was stuck between the remnants of broken trees, some holding it in place for the time being. Wouldn’t restrict it for long, but just enough time for him to get a clear head again.

With the breath washing through him it would move fast enough, one of his short spears had died on him when he crashed into the tree. But the second one was still intact, its spearhead still on it too. Good. He would need it.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Seren Ordavo"]

Brushing the alchemized wood of the spear he could feel the soothing touch of the breath coursing through him, returning strength, adrenaline, the sheer spirit to fight again. It felt good and yet it reminded him how much he was actually reliant on it to do his work.

He would either need to find a way to make it easier to regain focus, or start training himself in not needing the Force entirely. His time as a Slayer had been different, always supported by a small squad of others, strenght in numbers; it was a real thing.

In the grand scheme of things Sardun was exaggerating, of course. He was facing down a Drexl entirely on his own, giving him probably a crack in the skull, before he was sent flying. Everything considered? He was doing just fine. But you know how it goes when you are in the midst of battle, tension rising high.

Eventually he regained composure, right in time too with the beast dragging itself free and starting for the tasty Dark Jedi treat.

Hundreds of pounds of pure malice and beast jumping at the Sardine. How would he ever win this fight?

 

[Arage Bao]

Nui found Seren within a circle of dried-up blood, a pile of roughly made armour-like things next to him, kneeling and softly manhandling the remnants of an urn. This would have made the vongshaped warrior scratch his head just a tad bit, if he wasn’t holding the chopped-off head of the Drexl in one head and its tail in the other.

A cough. ‘You eh… want me to come back later?’ pointed look at whatever all this was, if [member="Seren Ordavo"] needed a little bit of privacy, Nui would give it to him gladly.

Blood sprayed all over his body, ichor trailing his footsteps… it had been a glorious fight. Though he didn’t want to know how long he would be showering off this stench.

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Nui Akona"]

HERE​

NOW​

​

After a moment, Seren stirred for the first time in what felt like ages. His arms ached like he'd swung a hammer for days, but he hadn't moved since Sardun went into the forest. "No."

Aching viciously, he pulled himself upright by a decorative sconce. He stripped off his cloak and piled the still-warm scraps of beskar in it, then bundled them up and slung the whole thing over his shoulder with a grunt. Each piece would need to be fitted with straps and padding. He'd drained the shade, or rather used her up; this could never happen again, and that was probably for the best. His fist tightened around the lanvarok's controls. "No, we're done here."