Ession, Gulag Era, Week 4 of Makashi Training.
Morris lay awake in the simple bed within his ship, a dynamic class freighter. He never got any real sleep whenever he came back to Ession. Maybe one and a half hours a night if he was lucky...
When the alarm went off, he rose, dressed in fresh training robes, lent by the students of Elaine's Chapter House. They had the patterns and gold threading of ancient Essonian robes, and he couldn't stand wearing them. Stuff from the Kaiserreich sickened him. But her cared about his people more than who ruled them, even if he possessed a distinct level of contempt also for them for listening to the Ashlans, who he considered heretics in how they tried to "personify" the Force through a False Goddess.
He was barely off the ramp, heading to Elaine's small, humble looking chapter house, when he saw one of the students, a young man who looked remarkably similar to a young
Percival Io
.
Morris's eye twitched. Arthur. Her favorite student. He was thirteen, nearly the same age he had been when Elaine laid siege to Castle Bloodscrawl.
Morris disliked him just for being Elaine's favorite pupil. Perhaps that was what had subconsciously driven him to such aggression when first meeting Percival in the modern era: he was slowly getting bits of his past coming back, and Percival had the unfortunate luck of reminding him that, on a major level, he would be responsible for Arthur's death after Elaine was chewed up by Darth Phyre and spit out as The Battalion.
"Master Crownwraithe! Come quick! We need your help!" Arthur called out.
While the Narrator desperately tried to get the RDR2 music out of their mind while typing this, Morris only raised an eyebrow.
"What's the problem?"
"Something is attacking one of the farms in the southwest. Elaine has her hands full. She requested you, specifically."
"She doesn't go to her own apprentice for help?" Morris questioned.
"Well...Master Tear feels I am not ready for whatever is at the farm."
"I see. I will be there shortly."
Morris was running back up the ramp to get his regular blue lightsaber wondering what could be so dire as to get her apprentice running for him.
He then doubled over as he felt a pulsing of suffering in the distance. A suffering terribly familiar to him.
Not wanting it to be what he suspected it was, he nonetheless ran back out of the ship, got the directions from Arthur and began running as fast as he could, until he saw smoke from a farm in the distance. Blaster fire rang out across the fertile farmland and his lightsaber activated, shining blue and fierce as he bounded across the plains.
He spotted Elaine in the distance, her own lightsaber a lighter shade of blue than his own, her elegant swings and stabs felling what looked like a man, in rags, wielding a cortosis weave vibrosword. There were more, and a terrible smell entered his nostrils the closer he got.
They were attacking with a variety of weapons, and three surrounded the elderly Elaine, firing on her. Despite her primary style being Makashi, Elaine expertly deflected the blaster pistol shots directed on her. Her hooded green gown billowed in the wind, her whirling style reminding him of how she had cut down his mother.
He went to join her, running and cutting off a hand before he could fire a shot. Morris wanted to vomit, as he realized the smell came from the person whose arm he had severed.
The flesh on the man was rotting.
For a split second of actual, genuine fear, Morris wondered whether the Gulag Plague had found purchase on Ession at last and had mutated. But the empty dead stare from his opponent told him otherwise. He was dead already. Had been for days.
Morris cut the dead man's head off without a second thought and uncomfortably found himself using Makashi as he joined Elaine as she defended the son of one of the farmhands.
His movements in the style were not as refined as Elaine's, yet he still had elegance to his swift cuts and thrusts as he waded into the thickest crowds, compensating for his relative lack of skill in Form 2 with aggression and athleticism. Limbs of rotting flesh and bone flew past him as his blade economically passed through them.
The horde of undead attacked not with thoughtlessness, but with menace and calculated hate. Knowing they were already dead, meant it didn't matter.
While he tried to figure out what was controlling these corpses, Elaine dashed into another, dismembering it. He was nearly overwhelmed, but Elaine's training had kicked in, and he intercepted most of their attacks, save for a blaster shot that got him in the arm.
He forced himself to function through the pain, a skill gained over a lifetime of hardship. He dismembered more of the thinking corpses with crudely replicated versions of Elaine's own tactics, to the point they found themselves back to back, fending off attacks. His internal shame at helping defend the killer of his family was a humiliation he would never get over.
"Where are they coming from?!" he shouted.
"A cemetary for slain criminals!" Elaine answered. "Whatever woke them up is close by!"
"How many corpses we talking?" Morris asked as he bisected another hate filled corpse.
"Well...we did have to crucify a TON of people last week So...quite a lot I'd say."
Morris suppressed his disgust and focused on keeping these things from destroying the farm.
The pair fought ferociously to defend the farm. Morris didn't dare ask how many of these corpses had been made by Elaine herself. He didn't need to. Old habits die hard with her type. Her zealousness matches that of Cultists he had dispatched through severe difficulty in the past.
Eventually, the last wave of corpses fell before them, and Elaine comforted the small boy who was crying, helping him up. Morris said nothing, lest the pain of his own dead family enter whatever words he uttered. Moments like this were where the modified temple guard training he had been subjected to by his father was at it's weakest.
Morris went to the barn, checking on the animals. The Nerf had been slaughtered in a horrible ritual. So it went in this era of plague. Chaos and Evil, reaching out to even the few relatively safe spots left in the Galaxy.
He checked on the farmhouse itself. It was eerily clean looking, but he felt a pulse of darkness within.
He headed upstairs, and as he opened a slightly ajar door fully, it would be the first time he would hear the voice of the woman that eventually killed his wife and then him shortly thereafter.
It came from a recording amidst a bedroom splashed with blood, photos of a happy family defiled by spilt viscera. No visual representation. Even back then the Cult had been savvy.
"To the friends out there listening..." came a sultry, seductive voice. "The Cult feels your pain. Your suffering. And while we relish it, we also believe in teaching you to harness it to constructive ends. Just think: Someday, this Pandemic will end, and the ghosts of the old powers will try to reassert their dominance. They're stuck in the past, no matter how much disease ravages their reality. I'll tell you EXACTLY what will happen when the Plague is ended: Those same fools, who were completely incapable of stopping it's spread to begin with will start fighting the exact same wars that everyone hated them for in the past. The entire galaxy caught in a never ending quagmire of revolution, endless squabbling, 'these' factions claiming to be successors to 'those' factions, each proclaiming themselves the inheritors of a Galaxy that will quickly grow tired of them. It's doubtful most will make it past two or three decades. So much for grand dreams of galactic unity--"
The recording was telekinetically crushed from behind by Elaine Tear, who had entered the room.
"I've heard this voice of theirs before..." she explained. "I believe that's the voice of Darth Phyre. Don't listen to her Morris. Her words contain only poison."
"Affirmative." Morris replied, for once not inherently disagreeing with Elaine.
"Did you find any of the other family members?" he asked quickly to break the silence.
"No." Elaine answered. "The son told me the rest had been snatched by a gang of these corpses we fought. My guess is they will be at the cemetery."
"Then that's where we are headed, then..." Morris replied without looking at her as he left the room.
As they left the farmhouse, Morris spotted Elaine's students, Arthur among them, comforting the boy who had survived by hiding.
"Arthur! Take him back to the Chapter House! Lock the doors and get any Knights in the area on your comlink." Elaine instructed.
Arthur nodded. "May the Force be with you, Master Tear. And you as well, Master Crownwraithe."
"I'm no master." Morris replied bluntly before moving on without a word to the trail left by the thinking corpses, Elaine quickly following.
"Thank you for coming here in Arthur's place. I really felt he wasn't ready." Elaine spoke as they headed to the cemetery.
"Terrible about the boy. No child should have to see his world destroyed like that."
Morris didn't respond as they got closer and closer to the Cemetery, where they both felt the horrible pulse of evil...
That pulse was sickeningly familiar in itself.
The cemetery, a virtual island of paupers graves reserved for the worst of the worst by Ession's standards, had been violated. Viscera splashed wooden planks that served as tombstones with crudely inscribed names, dates of death, and the reasons, all of which were quite heinous.
At the center of the cemetery was someone in a white robe, meditating as the thinking dead bound bodies wrapped in white cloth covered in strange red runes locking with pentagrams.
Morris and Elaine approached cautiously, guarding with their blades.
The hooded figure in white rose and Elaine gasped.
He was young, with a face that had high cheekbones. His eyes looked like they had been burnt out. His hair had been done into a knot on his head, slick with blood.
"I know this man...he's Terill, one of the farmers from further down south..." Elaine spoke.
In a lower voice, she added; "His wife was guilty of sabotaging the crops of other farms so her own crops would be more valuable. Purposely destroying food supplies in a Pandemic is a capital offense on Ession. I was left with no choice but to order her hung by the neck until dead."
"Anybody else here that's got a reason to be pissed at you?" Morris asked dryly, remembering how she had beheaded his Mother during lightsaber combat.
"It's a big cemetery, and admittedly I DID fill a number of spots here..." Elaine admitted with an embarrassed eye roll.
"Perfect." he muttered sarcastically. "Think we can talk him down?"
"He slaughtered their whole family. I think he's way past reasoning with."
"Really." Morris said dryly, hiding the way his eye had twitched at the answer.
"Now's not the time for flippancy." she chided. We will give him one opportunity to surrender, as is custom."
Elaine then handed him a strange Gold Dagger.
"A Blessed weapon of ancient crusaders of our people." Elaine explained. "The workings of these Brain Demon worshippers are so foul that I have found this helps in destroying things they have corrupted. May the Force be with you, Morris."
Elaine moved forward across the rotted, defiled ground a few steps.
"Terill!" She called out. "Whatever you think you're going to accomplish, it will only result in your own destruction! Surrender now, and I promise a merciful, swift death by beheading."
Terill scowled. "You hanged my wife!"
"Your wife was guilty. It was proven beyond all reasonable doubt at the trial. You had no part in her scheme. That was why I argued for the courts to spare you the same punishment she got." Elaine argued back coldly. "Is that why you've inflicted all this suffering and death? Just to get back at me?"
He whipped out an ancient looking lightsaber hilt.
"I have found someone who offers me the power to crumble your precious Kaiserreich to its foundations. I will tear down your world, as you did mine!"
Morris, obviously, could not allow this. Not because he wanted to save the Kaiserreich, but because all the people that would suffer as a result.
Terill pointed at the carefully wrapped bodies.
"With their suffering, I shall tear open a wound in the Force, allow the darkness, to wash over the very atmosphere of Ession! Madness and death shall take hold across these lands, in a self-reinforcing feedback loop!"
"Who has taught you this wickedness, farmer?" Morris asked icily.
"A great priestess of the Bogan. Her name...is The Arena." Terill answered. "She visited me in my dreams. Promised me the strength to find my retribution."
"We'll give you only death, heretic." Elaine snarled passionately and dashed forward with the Force, just as his red blade activated and he shoved her back with a massive Force Push that she barely managed to catch with her own considerable power.
Morris started to run to aid her, only to have the thinking dead sprang up all around him clawing for his flesh.
Elaine's elegant dance of the blade entered him as his blade spun through multiple limbs and torsos, using combinations he would not have dared used on living targets, lest he be accused of excessive force. They piled on from all sides, arms and teeth trying to reach his body.
He side stepped some, diced through others, free fist crashing through rotted torsos like some aggressive bear as he fought his way to the duel taking place.
"Morris!" Elaine called out as she parried a vicious strike from on high. "Get those people off that altar!"
Morris had diced his way through and heard her command. Deeply annoyed, he nonetheless heeded her command and changed his direction to the altar, where he saw some of the corpses preparing the wrapped family for sacrifice.
Bastard had better NOT kill her, he thought to himself as he cut his way to them.
Two undead with rusted vibroswords leapt to meet him, and he was caught off guard by how crisply and efficiently their attacks were executed, driving him back, forcing him on the defensive as they attacked.
He remembered Elaine's lessons, even as he loathed having to employ them. Days of being relentlessly attacked by Elaine had steeled him against the relatively less skilled. After a moment to readjust, he began intercepting them better, their strategies no longer wearing on him. After a few moments, he neatly beheaded one of them, before bisecting the other soon after. He ran to the Altar, as they had begun a horrid chanting with dead mouths. His blue blade silenced them rapidly, yet the chains that bound the family to the altar were surrounded by swirling dark energy, and his lightsaber could not cut through them. He didn't dare touch them with his hands either, as they were almost certainly cursed.
"Elaine! The chains won't cut!" he shouted.
Elaine was caught in a blade lock with Terill, trying not to die from his relentless strength, fueled by his hatred.
"Only the light can break those chains!" Elaine called out as she forced Terill back again. "You must call on Ashla's aid!"
Morris blinked. Then he pulled out the golden dagger she had given him earlier and started slicing at the chains with it. They started to crack, but only slightly.
He ducked as Terill sent a blast of lightning his way, only to be attacked rapidly by Elaine again.
More undead came at him as he tried to cut the links, and he had barely destroyed a single link before they descended on him, forcing him to teleport out of the way and retaliate with wide slashes into the hoard from their Blindspot. But he didn't dare waste more time on them then he had to, instead grabbing the dagger and hacking away at the rest of the chains.
With mighty, brute strength he directed an efficient slashing arc into the corrupted links that cut through them cleanly, just as he heard Terill cry out as Elaine ran him through. The undead around them dropped where they stood as Morris cut into the corrupted wrappings, freeing one of the paralyzed farmers, the wife by the looks of it.
She didn't stay, in such a bad shock that she went off into the wilderness screaming, rendered quite unreasonable by her ordeal, and Morris quickly freed what looked to be the Husband, who was in a different kind of shock, unresponsive to Morris's attempts to rouse him.
"Elaine! One of them ran off." Morris shouted. "The other one ain't even moving. Looks catatonic."
Elaine left Terill's corpse where it lay and went over to the victim, examining him.
"The only ones who can help them are the healer's in the capital. I'll go after the one who ran off..." Elaine offered. "Here, help me with this one--"
She stopped, sensing great evil, and so did he.
"This ritual would taint an area, but not to the scale Terill was talking about..." she realized.
"What if it was a distraction?" Morris asked. "Draw our attention from something bigger?"
Terill's body leapt up, skin bubbling like rats were underneath as lesions opened up across his sickly, dead frame.
White blood spilled out and his body rapidly emaciated as he eventually crumbled in a heap, while the thick pool of white blood became ambulatory, taking humanoid shape, a Twi'lek female to be specific.
Morris was Force Choked off the ground by the blood Avatar of The Arena. Elaine lifted some corpses off the ground and flung it at The blood Avatar, which quickly dodged it, but dropped Morris and it retaliated, creating a Force Scream that blasted Elaine back out of the immediate center of the ritual site, destroying the altar, Morris shielding the captured man with his own body and getting himself and the man flung back for his trouble. He landed brutally on his back with the other man's weight on him and yet the victim was still catatonic. Morris dragged him into the relative safety of a recently emptied grave, as there was simply no other way at the moment of giving him at least some sort of cover. He belatedly realized he had lost the knife, part of his back left shoulder had been scorched by the scream as he went into a Makashi Guard against the Avatar that summoned Terill's lightsaber to it. A great barrier of red energy surrounded the ritual site, cutting him off from Elaine.
"Master Crownwraithe, a delight to see you again!" The Arena gushed. "And the Lady Tear as well, of course!"
"Be silent, Abomination." Morris spoke.
"Aren't you even going to ask my purpose for all this?" The Arena chuckled, angling her blade at him.
"Your purpose is the same as it always is: Evil for it's own sake." he answered back. "Let's get this over with. I'll not allow your filth any purchase on my homeworld."
"You have never bested even our weakest in single combat, Morris." she taunted, her body of blood rippling disgustingly with each laugh. "Always subterfuge and distance with you. What makes you think you can even take this watered down Avatar of mine?"
"I don't. But I am not alone like I usually am." Morris replied. "Let's get this over with."
"Yes. Let's." she said jovially.
She attacked him ferociously and with abandon, driving him back. Literally forced to rely on Elaine's style due to his injuries.
Her style was almost unpredictable, and his wrist shuddered at parrying every strong blow from the blood Avatar, rolling out of the way of slices too strong to party, dodging vicious lunges of her red blade. He didn't dare strike back, knowing any mistake would be punished and likely end with his beheading.
Elaine, in the meantime, had woken up, her gown scorched black on one side by the scream and spotted the golden dagger, grabbing it and channeled the light into the dagger as she slowly pressed it's point into the red barrier, watching as Morris's strength wore down the more he stayed on the defensive with the style.
He used every crudely replicated trick from Elaine he could think of to stay out of reach of her blade, side stepping, dodging, ducking, parrying, using the environment, until the the Arena managed to slice his thigh with the tip. He dropped to the ground, , belatedly blocking her savage overhead attacks until his blade was literally ripped from his grasp by a power swing from the Arena.
Morris could only look up as The Arena brought the blade down again...
...only for Elaine's blue blade to intercept him.
"FACE ME, HERETIC!" Elaine shouted rapidly going on the offensive, forcing The Arena back, attacking with the same ferocity she had employed the day she sacked Castle Bloodscrawl.
Morris pulled himself up as he watched Elaine fight the Arena back, eventually disarming her in a brilliant sweeping arc that cut through the emitter after feinting a stab, then drove the Golden Dagger through the head of the Avatar.
The Arena screamed as the blessed dagger caused the blood she was composed of at the moment to hiss and cook, eventually turning into carbonized red piles of sludge...
Elaine shut off her blade and then ran to him.
"Morris! Are you alright?" Elaine asked.
"I'll live. There's a man in that grave over there who won't if you don't get him out..." Morris replied icily.
"Of course..." Elaine answered and used telekinesis to lift the survivor out of the grave.
By the time she turned back, about to insist Morris head to the chapterhouse, she noticed Morris was already far away, looking to retrieve the woman who had fled, not knowing he was doing everything he could to avoid accepting the fact Elaine had saved his life...
Braze
wasn't taking the bait, and Nathan began to be certain he had made a mistake facing this Padawan in particular. He was a fencer, keen. Difficult to draw into a trap, even one that would have ultimately favored him.
"What are you
afraid of?" Braze asked.
Nathan stopped.
"I do not experience Fear as most do. My sensation of it is... extremely limited, like most of what you'd call positive emotions. This is not a boast, or some claim to a nebulous
toughness..." he added with a snort. "My worst fears came true a
long time ago. Any other fear that's come since cannot match those. They seem...trivial. Barely registered. Swiftly forgotten as soon as they appear. I was strangled to within an inch of my life not too long ago, and I felt...
nothing...at my own impending death.
That is how little that emotion can be registered in me." he explained, as truthfully as he could.
He went into a guard, altering his foot work, dipping his blade into a Fool's Guard.
"I live in a world where I was not smart enough. I ignored signs pointing to an offramp, swatted away hands that wanted to help because I didn't like the people those hands were attached to, for whatever reason or another. Everyone and anyone I was still capable of more than a shred of feeling towards suffered. Died. And others, people I had both met and people I never knew at all, suffered and died also... I can barely taste anything. Food is never filling. Water doesn't quench thirst. Sleep is only a period of inactivity, not rest. Sights, smells, sounds: None of these create reactions in me, positive
or negative. Being me, is like being more...
machine...than man..." Nathan answered emotionlessly.
