Private Bleed Out

[Darth Daiara]

The Aftermath

​

Her feet moved through pure will alone. The city felt like a dream. Sounds reached her at a delayed rate, her heart beat drowning out all else.

Someone charged at her, their form blurry through the smoke and her darkening vision. She released her shoulder and extended her hand, throwing him back with a pulse of the darkside. It wasn't an ally, she had no allies here.

This had all been a trap.

A gleam of red reflected off her fingers. Blood, she realized belatedly. She took the panic and compartmentalized it with the pain, willing her feet to move again.

Another form charged at her. Fire spit from her finger tips and engulfed. It collapse to the ground, the details of the imperial helmet coalescing through the fog. She stepped around the thrashing body and let her eyes draw close.

Zaavik was close. She could feel him-

A scream of the force alerted her to another threat. Her saber caught two of the shots, then missed the third. Her leg gave out, dropping her to her knees. A scream of pain fueled her, the helmet of an imperial solider crushing the head beneath it. It wasn't enough.

Her vision cleared, the dazed acolyte realizing too late that she had walked straight into the beginnings of an imperial road block. And Zaavik... Zaavik would not be able to get through in time.

They had not planned for this.

Four more shots pierced her body, their momentum sending her careening onto her back. The world slowed. She could see the buildings close in around her... and their roofs... on top was a ball of fire.

She reached for it in a desperate bid, the last of her strength used to yank it down... and chuck it at line of men that had formed around her. A last hit, for what might be her last breath.

Darth Mori

 

[Vesta]

HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO​

Her descent was a free fall - from the exit she'd made from Castle Bast there was only the ground far below with the siege approaching from every side. There was only one singular thought in her mind, a single purpose, and it was to move. Move on from here, leave the fight behind, take herself and the dagger she so desperately needed for her impending ritual with her off of Vjun and away from anyone or anything that could jeopardize its safety. Beneath her, as she fell, there was death everywhere, death that called out to the Sith that had named itself for the reminder of its permanent place in the cycle dominating the galaxy, and death that came from both the final moments of Sith and Imperial alike; and panic, panic at the remembrance of those that lay injured of their own mortality.

Even in this swirling maelstrom of pathetic insects that could do little but hang onto their last threads of life, however, there remained some desperate few that refused to accept what seemed evident, even through the force. A tug, not a weak one, grasped like a slipping hand against the front of the falling Shi'ido's robes, snagging at last at her collar as it flapped against her chest in the wind as she fell. It pulled her down faster, like perhaps a Jedi might've recognized there was a Sith reaching for the ground and gave into their darkness to crush her with an accelerated approach, but then directed her to the side like she might've been mistaken for falling rubble thrown instead.

And thrown she was.

Angered, if not through frustration at being treated like an object than at the realization that she was being tossed right into the center of a rather well put together group of soldiers and certainly off-course, the Sith Lord reignited her lightsaber as her feet hit the ground - tearing herself free from the grip of whomever had redirected her with little difficulty. Soldiers turned, their crescent formation around a fallen acolyte of the Sith revealing who had reached for her, and directed their weapons to the Shi'ido as she rose from the crouch she'd landed in. Red light bathed her and the ground around her in the glow of her saber, a saber which hummed with far more malice than it had any right to - a malice that was all-consuming when she leaped to the right and out of the way of a cluster of blaster bolts fired her way, her body carrying her like a freight train towards the soldier at the center of the pack that had decided that their closeness in distance warranted approaching her directly.

"Pathetic." She growled, her voice carried across the air and echoed through the minds of each and every one of them as she seemed to accelerate and close the distance between the two in far less steps that ought to have been normally possible. The blade thrust up, its edge coming into contact with the man's blaster and slicing clean through it while her free hand reached out to pump his body with a sudden burst of lightning generated with the force that killed him on the spot. Already triggers were being pulled but she was still in motion, her blade cutting back down through the falling soldier's corpse without any sign of prejudice or hesitation to separate it in two so she could move right through him and towards the next - a hand, the same that had sent lightning through the previous man's body, holding the blaster bolt in mid-air as if contained in stasis while her lightsaber struck up again, tearing through the woman's face and wide out to Vesta's side.

It bat away a shot that would have otherwise taken her off-guard.

"You're going to die here." One of them said.

"I am death." She replied coldly, the lightsaber suddenly thrown from her grip to bisect the soldier that had shot at her moments before while lightning left those newly outstretched fingertips to take down yet two more. Her right hand was not without purpose, however, and the sudden crushing gesture of her hand reduced a man to a squelching mass of blood, flesh, clothe, and metal on the sand where he'd stood - crushed by the force. Still, with one more to go, a panicked soldier began firing as many shots as they could, believing, falsely, that the Sith had been disarmed and could no longer face their own ammunition sent back towards them.

She frowned.

A hemisphere of iridescent light erupted at her left to guard her from much of the fire, a partial bubble of the force, while she tugged on the saber she'd thrown and brought it back to the hand it had left with a much firmer grip than had held it before. The light fell, but her saber did not direct the shots back to them. Deliberate, heavy, strokes of the woman's blade sent green bolts into the ground, into a piece of rubble, up into the air, and more while she stalked closer and closer to the man as he slowly backed himself up against a fallen wall until she was close enough for him to see the whites of her eyes. "Run." She commanded, at which he turned in fear to follow - only for her blade to lash out mercilessly and tear him apart from shoulder to hip.

Slowly, her anger beginning to subside, the shapeshifter turned towards the one that had pulled her from the sky and saved herself through the single greatest stroke of luck she might've had - or the greatest mistake to bring a close to all the others. Her empty hand lifted to tear the wounded girl from the ground, pulling Darth Daiara towards her with a certain degree of swiftness and control not often seen with telekinesis. Dark energy sapped itself from the Sith lord's body like tendrils of smoke and snaked through the air to wrap themselves around the acolyte's before forcing their way in through her nostrils and open mouth. "Death will not claim you today, acolyte, if you open your eyes and convince me of why I should not let it do so." She said, the dark miasma a painful act of healing that traded some of the Shi'ido's health for the acolyte's without sparing the redhead any of the pain her injuries would've forced her to endure.

 

[Darth Daiara]

Aradia's eyes opened. Awareness was sporadic, those blue hues trailing up to the sky in a palpable protests. The dark infused with her, and for a moment there was resistance.

Never let it consume you. It was one of Kaalia's most prominent lessons with her. Every time she had over-stepped, every hint of the corruption finding its way into Aradia's responses, Kaalia had pushed back.

Control it.

Aradia tried. She did so because it was what she knew. All she knew. The tide of dark energy crashed through her, making her resistance feel like nothing but a hand slapping at the sea. Soon she was drowning in it. Just as quickly, she found she didn't mind. It infused her body with pleasure and agony and life and relief.

She surrendered to the power. She took it. It was hers.

"Death will not claim you today, acolyte, if you open your eyes and convince me of why I should not let it do so."

Her head lolled down to Darth Mori for the first time, no fear felt for the Sith Lord that held her life in her hands. There was defiance where there should probably be gratitude, but it was a shortcoming she was willing to stake her life on. This wouldn't be it. She would never let it be it.
"I don't need anyone's permission to live," she rasped.

The Sith Lord would feel her tug back. Energy that wasn't intended for her began to be syphoned. Hunger awoke inside Aradia's core, the force drain she enacted growing stronger with each moment she was allowed to continue. She wasn't suppose to do this.

The care had died on that street.

Veins of black grew across her face, reaching those blue eyes and bleeding them orange. Her shoulder began to reknit.

 

[Vesta]

SHAKE THE GLASS​

It was fortunate for the girl that the Sith Lord she so recklessly drank from was an ocean of darkness in the force and not a mere presence, otherwise she might've met death despite her rather audacious display of defiance. Independence, determination, and a refusal to acknowledge anyone else as superior, however, were the exact qualities Darth Mori most desired in Sith. To see all of these and more expressed in a single string of words, coupled by the hunger that soon followed, were convincing enough for her to give and give until the acolyte was whole again - though there was much pain to herself in shedding this much of her own health to provide what was necessary for her to live.

"Sith do not seek approval, they take it." She said with an undertone of approval.

The moment the acolyte was outside of death's reach, however, the flow of power from the Shi'ido to the human halted so abruptly it could've been felt in the force as her will exerted. "Just as life will not give away its bounties." She remarked soon after. Releasing her grip on the child without any further consideration for her well-being, she did not turn to leave as she might've had things gone differently. Red eyes were narrowed to near slits as she studied the acolyte, weighing her potential in her mind. "So much hunger in your eyes."

"Like a starving child." Mori mused, her lips pressed thin now curling into a rather subdued grin.

The Shi'ido wouldn't pretend to know more about her than she could take at face-value, she knew as well as anyone that appearances were only skin-deep. Still, with this concentration of Sith principle in a single person she was surprised that, age aside, she wasn't much further along than a fledgling Sith. "Why are you alone?" She asked, curious to the whereabouts of her master - she hadn't encountered a dead Sith upon her arrival to indicate that they might've fallen, and the clear potential she carried was much too blatant for her to have simply been passed over as an acolyte.

Darth Daiara

 

[Darth Daiara]

Aradia remained too enthralled by the power to catch herself. She had been searching for answers for months, and she had found nothing but months of her own shortcomings and loses. They had all taught her one thing-- she wasn't enough. She needed to be more. She understood what that looked like now.

All that power... She could do so much if only she had it.

She had barely gained a taste before it was cut off. She peeled herself up and resisted, substantially , against the will of the Sith Lord that had decided no more. Those hungry eyes turned spiteful as she was left wanting. A glance towards her dropped saber was all telling, but reason found its way back to her in a set of cold, honest words.

"-Like a starving child." Mori mused,

She flinched at the statement, awareness seeping back into the parts of her she had traded to survive. She knew how she looked to this sith lord. The attempts to pull and drain had all but abated, humanity finding its way back to her features her in the form of shame.

"My master is dead," Aradia finally answered, her nostrils flaring at the confession. She clutched at the parts of her that hurt the most and forced herself onto two shaky feet. She was a mess, but she was a standing mess. An alive mess.

She wanted to take from the woman again-- take and take until that smile was gone.

Aradia met her eyes with that same obstinance, the color quickly leaving her cheeks. Her very aura faltered under the exertion of her show, but she did not back down.

"And who the feth are you?"

 

[Vesta]

WONDERLAND
​

Dead? Curious.

The line of sight the young Sith had directed towards her fallen weapon hadn't been lost on her and in fact she'd silently hoped she might've impressed her further and tried something with the saber, though she showed no outward signs of disappointment when that wish went unfulfilled - or that she'd even noticed. Defiant still, admirable in the eyes of the Shi'ido who knew quite well the toll it'd take on her to stand up so boldly, the acolyte asked a question that she should have perhaps expected and yet appeared to be one she hadn't anticipated, at least not as the first of what she assumed might be many questions to follow.

"And who the feth are you?"

She smiled, not out of some weird sense of appreciation that she might've outwardly shown earlier but rather because she was glad that her face, this one at least, hadn't been known enough in the empire to change. Honestly she suspected the appearance she'd taken before, even its male expression, likely was forgotten as quickly as she was when she took on a Sith name and left behind her given identity in place of one created by herself. "I suppose that depends on who you'd ask, but as you're asking me you deserve the full picture, I think." She said as her expression shifted briefly from the bemused look she'd wore before to curiosity, wondering, and at last settling on a slightly more confident smirk.

"My parents named me Vesta, and I am sure that is the name my cousin would have known me by if you'd asked him." She started to explain, her features subtly shifting as she spoke, her voice laden with a tone that implied what she said wasn't the entire truth, beginning with the lengthening of her black hair to a sleek, red, mane. Her skin was paler now, in fact she almost seemed fragile - the perfect look for a young woman that wasn't supposed to be anything but the daughter of two Sith lords. "That's how many people met me, just a little thing, weak maybe? I wouldn't think so, surely you know better than them that what we look like is often as deceiving as the stories we tell." She added with a discontented sight and a slight tilt of her head, though with a shrug of her shoulders - shoulders that were widening, broadening, while her soft features became more angular, masculine, and her red hair receded to short cropped black hair.

"I suppose this was a face I wore when I walked the halls of the Sith academy before Bastion's untimely fall, when I wasn't... when I had an apprentice to keep an eye on." She - or he? - said with a voice that was several orders of magnitudes different, distinctly masculine. There was a moment there where they seemed to stumble, perhaps realizing a detail was perhaps not something they were willing to disclose with the acolyte. "I still went by the same name, though - just dropped the family name, which I suppose I haven't mentioned yet, have I?" He noted, changing gears mid-sentence as he questioned himself in a manner that seemed rhetorical. Again changes were already appearing as his masculinity seemed to fade back out and short hair lengthened somewhat to about chin-length at the front and and shoulder length, perhaps, at the sides and back. His, or perhaps her - she, or he, hadn't quite disclosed a particular gender yet to make that clear - appearance wasn't exactly strictly feminine, however. Androgynous was perhaps a better description, as there were some clear ambiguity.

"Vesta Zambrano, daughter of Braxus and Braith Zambrano, cousin of Kaine and Mordecai Zambrano." She explained. "That's the name I was given, anyway. I'm sure by now you're familiar with the likes of Darth Prazutis and Darth Carnifex, my father and cousin's chosen identities." The Sith continued, again shrugging as she seemed rather unimpressed with her own given name. "Call me Vesta if you'd like, but I am Darth Mori."

"Sith'ari, Typhojem's chosen."

That seemed to draw some charisma out of her, though she didn't quite seem satisfied. "And who're you?"

Darth Daiara

 

[Darth Daiara]

Her curiosity was palpable. She forgot her own pain as she watched the body shift-- from a fragile form she know all too well, to something that commanded strength. Bloody hands dropped from her core as she took a staggering step forward.

"You."

Recognition had finally sparked, suppressed memories sweeping forward to steal her breath away. She could see his black whisps walking through the alcoved innards of the academy, tuff of blonde bouncing besides him.

She could hear the laughter, feel the energy... remember the taste of darkness as that life was ripped away from her.

She had been nothing back then-- a mewing shadow that seemed just as likely to die at trials than pass. It would be no shock that she had passed by him unnoticed then. But she remembered him. She remembered them all.

The series of titles did not garner a response. One might even wonder if she was listening-- her attention remained locked on a distant edge of her peripheral. Her muscles had began to quake in physical rejection of the strain. She didn't seem to feel it, a cold edge of acceptance settling into her as she finally looked their way.

If Zaavik returned to her now, he was dead. If she tried to reach him first, she was dead. She was not whole. This Zambrano had not restored her. He had rendered her dependent. Intentional or not, she could feel the invisible chains lay over the scars at her neck and she saw red. They might not have thought through this encounter, but she just did.

"I am nothing," she answered, a shift in her energy betraying her intentions before her actions could. Her saber whipped through the air. She jumped at Vesta, meeting her saber halfway in a sudden attempt to cleave the woman in two and force a drain herself.

When neither death nor servitude suit you, you carve options that do.

None of it mattered, because when the saber met her fingers, the crystal inside rebuked her.

It did not protect the dark.

 

[Vesta]

VOODOO IN MY BLOOD​

She'd ignored the sense of recognition, it wasn't all too surprising that one of her identities could have still been lingering in the back of someone's mind, and had continued to prattle on as if introductions were still in order. Turning the whole of her attention to Darth Daiara her question had been posed without interruption, but it was not the answer she received that told the Shi'ido who, or rather what, it was that she had given a second chance to. There wasn't truly a way for her to understand the rationale behind the shift in the acolyte, but she could have recognized that bone-chilling urge anywhere.

Her grip tightened around the hilt of her lightsaber, her arm flexing as she prepared to shove the blade in the way of an oncoming strike, only for her brow to raise as the acolyte's lightsaber seemed intent on disobeying its master. It suddenly clicked in her mind how someone like this might not have kept a master about them - that conflict between sentient rock and fledgling dark sider all too revealing. The Sith Lord, for her own part, deactivated her own blade and clipped it to her waist while her other hand raised - the force exerted on the younger girl like a wall of gravity to weigh her down, keen on driving her down to her knees.

"I won't mince words, I admire that you'd take from me what I have stopped giving." She said, though the look on her face did not seem to quite reflect that admiration.

Red eyes studied the acolyte further, eventually their gaze finding itself settled on the hilt in her hand. "Your restraint, whatever it is, would have been the death of you if I had any desire to kill you." She added, her lips twisting into a frown. Lightning erupted briefly from her fingertips, arcing through the air towards the acolyte, but disappeared just as quickly as they'd appeared - a painful tease to emphasize her point. "Subjugate everything beneath you, acolyte. Your humility is weakness, and weakness gets you killed."

"If you cannot dominate the crystal in your lightsaber then you will never have the chance to be what you aspire to be, whether it would have been Sith or not. You haven't the resolve, the drive, to want it enough to do what it takes to get there."

The Shi'ido's eyes narrow, disappointment layered in her voice, and she let her hand fall down while relinquishing her hold on the force. "I don't think I quite understand why you want me dead, of all people, but if you really want that then you need to make your choice now. Darkness or Light, there is no path in-between."

 

[Darth Daiara]

Aradia fell forward, her hands catching her as the weight relinquished her from its hold. Her hair curtain over her face. Strands stuck in her mouth as she heaved for breaths.

Stay conscious.

Don't do it.

She pulled herself back into her body, the veins of black growing deeper around her eyes. Her blurry vision solidifying on the cylinder pinched between her fingers and the ground. She pressed the button again. Nothing.

She didn't understand. She couldn't make her thoughts line straight. She tilted her head to the side as the lightening shot out, only for the pain to never come.

Had she calculated wrong?

They had done it all wrong-- just two children playing at war. The Shi'ido's assessment of her character cut deep, wounds laid out with a few pretty words. He had cut to the quick of her. It was the final nudge.

The shift in her energy deepened. Hints of loathing began to show, notes of insecurities and grief found their way into the force. Bit by bit, the neat little box that held her together unraveled. She looked up, her hair parting.

"I don't want you dead," she enunciated, each word chewed and spat back out. "You can't give me anything dead." She pushed her way to feet, her movements growing steadier as the agony continued to unfurl. "I. gave. everything for your family."

"Everything. It was an oath. We made it in blood. I bend the knee and your family-- you-- prepare me. If I am failure, then you are to blame. Look around you. Do you see anymore great academies? Do you see anymore of my peers?" She screamed, her voice thundering with the force. Shadows cast across her cheek bones, creating ghostly illusions of demons at play.

Her chest heaved, a chilling calm finding its way to as she smiled.

"I am your legacy, M'lord. I guess that makes us both chit."

 

[Vesta]

DOWN SO LOW​

Her head tilted, like a predator confused by its prey, and arched her brow at the outburst. 'So it is a matter of my name?' She thought, eyes narrowing in disappointment at the revelation, although she wasn't horribly surprised either. Blame laid at her feet, blame she supposed she had some degree of responsibility to shoulder, but much of it was far more personal than she could associate herself with, comprehend. Grief? The scream sounded something like what she knew it to be, though she was never quite empathetic to understand the lesser emotions that surged through the minds of people she didn't know. In hindsight that was likely why she was alone now - though she was certain that was not why this acolyte was so distraught.

"My legacy?" She asked at last, shaken from her self-reflection, and suppressed the urge to laugh. "I was born hardly a year ago today, made in a vial to be the child for a couple that were incapable of producing one of their own." She said, her tone tightening, tense, like a cord, and stressed each and every one of her words to paint the picture of just how much that bothered her. "A facsimile, a fake." The Shi'ido spat, though she didn't seem any less real than she had moments before. "I could have wallowed in my grief, blamed a mother that died before I could see her face, hated a father that failed to keep her alive, and killed the people who took my future from me before I even was." Red had reached her face, spreading up from her chest and streaking across her cheeks as the anger rose. "I could have been an animal, rabid, wild, but I chose to become what I wanted, who I needed to be, not what my farce of a family had hoped for, not what this Empire desired of me."

She tossed her lightsaber to the side, into the dirt, and stepped towards Darth Daiara with a look of disgust etched into the features of her face. "I could have chosen to be like you and blame all of my own failures on someone convenient, someone who could have been offering me a path to greatness that would have given me all that I wanted and more - but I did not." An outstretched hand lashed out, open-palm, to slap the brat across the face. "Stand up, you wretch, and take what is yours. If you want strength, you can have it, if you want revenge, you can take it, but it must be you who walks down that dark path."

"Or I will force you down that road and show you why I abandoned this decrepit Empire to the rats that have been feasting on its bloated corpse."

"But you, you are not my legacy, not yet."

She turned, reaching out with the force to rip her lightsaber from its place and draw it back towards her hand as its blade erupted into a pillar of red. "My legacy will be an era of Sith that have remembered their purpose, not some sniveling brat that wants to cry like a Jedi over the single greatest inspiration for greatness you could have ever asked for. A ruined life? That is pain, that is anger, and you could be harvesting it for power."

"Look at you, a monument to all of your master's failings."

"Pathetic."

She paused at that, seeming as if she had intended to walk away, but instead she turned her head back, red eyes locked onto the figure of the young Sith. "But you don't have to be, if you come with me."

 

[Darth Daiara]

The slap brought clarity across her clouded mind.

Aradia knew what a crossed line looked like. She experimented with them all the time. When Kaalia removed the title master from their dynamic, it had opened her up to a world too wide to make sense of. She had resisted it. She threw her fits-- anything to get a reaction. It didn't matter the kind.

The fact that she had dissolved into such childish antics with a stranger in the middle of blockade would be no surprise to anyone. When Vesta finally bit back, she smiled.

She didn't shy back from the saber that burst to life, her hand only tightened on her unresponsive one. Vesta's explanations left her realizing how little she actually knew of the people she had once served, but she didn't care. They didn't matter anymore. She felt better for getting her shot in at all. She felt really good, actually. Like she could take back on the world.

She looked down, intangible darkness billowing off her form. It fueled her broken body, compartmentalized the pain, and almost... almost made her forget the person who would be waiting for her.

"But you don't have to be, if you come with me."

She looked up, past the keen gaze and to the distance she would need to cross. Everything about her softened in that moment, whispers of his presence reaching her through the fog. She needed to go.

"No." She shoved her useless weapon inside her beltline, a blaster pulled out and powered up instead. "I've bled enough for this cursed empire. And you-" she glanced at the Sith Lord, her words catching as she could feel tendrils of gifted vitality inside of her.

"We're done." She moved to step around the woman, driven back towards the tug of energy she had been chasing from the start.

Are you ok? It seemed to ask.

Yes. She was coming.

 

[Vesta]

KILL MY FRIENDS​

She had said her piece, had put on the face - the mask - of someone far more generous than she had any right to appear to be. That's how she'd been with Quinn, hadn't it? Put on a smile, promise a few meaningless, undefinable, goals, and everything just went her way - until it didn't. She'd tried to offer the least offensive smile she could when she'd noted how her involvement could have helped Darth Daiara rise out of the pit she'd fallen into with this Empire, an Empire she, herself, had long since abandoned in every way but name, but that smile slipped away as she heard that singular word - a word she was starting to hate more than she hated herself.

"No."

Vesta merely stood there, perhaps surprised, maybe offended, and almost appeared to be unmoving out of hesitant acceptance. Or, at least, that was the picture she assumed she had painted when the acolyte continued to prattle on and move as if she had any freedom to do so. She'd even made it to the point of stepping around her, which had prompted a steady shift in the skinshifter's appearance for what would likely be the last time if the tired expression on the Shi'ido's face was anything to go by. Oh, there was anger there, too, but it was too deep-seated for it to have been directed entirely at the younger Sith.

"What was given can be taken back just as easily."

Her words rang out like an echo from every corner of their surroundings while whatever wind there had been died in the limbs of trees that had not yet fallen. The grass at their feet withered and died, trees crumbled to ash, and the air grew stagnant and dry - life itself was being ripped from nature - and soon the weight of mortality would fall on the shoulders, and deep within, the acolyte herself as that borrowed time was slowly beginning to be torn away from her, just not all at once. "A starving girl without the nourishment of life, fitting." She rasped as she strode towards her, the tip of her red blade dragging along the ground loudly as it burned away everything it touched.

"Is this how you want to go?" She asked, her expression matching the disappointment in the tone of her voice. "Weak, an unfulfilled potential, and still clinging to that pathetic little shard of light like some kind of security blanket?" The Sith scoffed, her red eyes clearly looking towards the saber that had rejected the girl's attempt to use it just moments ago. "I gave you a choice because I thought you would make the right one." Lightning erupted from her spare hand as she ceased in draining the force, the crackling of electricity in the air emphasizing her words as it surged towards Aradia.

"Clearly I was wrong." She said, somewhat louder to be heard over the lightning tearing through the air from her fingertips - lightning that was surprisingly restrained in its strength, as though pain was the limit to what the Shi'ido desired out of this show of dominance.

Another step towards the girl, slower. "You are coming with me and we are leaving behind this doomed relic and its loyalists to rot." Vesta instructed, as if her words were a fact of nature that could not be contested. "I'd offer you the freedom of death, but I'm afraid you would be stupid enough to take it, so I am going to make this perfectly clear - I am your Master now, you will have a say in the matter when I am no longer able to kill you at my leisure." She explained as she turned away. "In due time you will thank me for this opportunity, though perhaps in the meantime you ought to direct your anger at your mistake of taking from me what wasn't yours to take."

Lightning ceased flowing, in its place a telekinetic force was directed like an invisible hand to lift the acolyte up - "Walk with me, let that hunger I've given you inspire you if your body is in disagreement with me."

"We have quite some time before we will reach my vessel."

 

[Darth Daiara]

So she had been right after all.

There had only been two ways out of here, and she had been denied the preferable one. Her anger lost its punch, her strength ripped from her body once more. Her resistance was futile. An attempt to run had barely gotten her two steps away.

"No," she insisted again, as the sith lord staked their claim on her. And yet... No strength to strike back was found. Only pain. Yes, she had seen this all coming. If looks could kill, her hatred for this new master would raze the world.

If only her saber hadn't failed her. She could have cut down this problem at its core. But it did, and she understood the cold hard truths of ultimatums.

One

foot moved

in front

of the other.


She could feel the vibrance of his presence grow dimmer with each street they crossed. She fell to her knees, her chest heaving wordlessly. Her anger didn't bring with it its usual strength. The world had grown numb, not even the liquid rolling down her cheeks was felt as she fought against the worn down resistance of her flesh. It did not want to move. She did not want to go. Want they wanted didn't matter here.

She looked over her shoulders for a final time, all color stripped from her ghostly expression. The grass around her finger withered as life was sucked away.

Her connection with Zaavik slammed shut. She pushed herself to her feet. Death trailed in her wake as she continued away.