Cato Fett
Character
O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xulOCPkcxqQ
![Kyu_Seok_Choi_13.jpg](http://www.art-spire.com/wp-content/gallery/2013/Mai_2013/17-05-13_Kyu_Seok_Choi/Kyu_Seok_Choi_13.jpg)
Deep CoreKuar
Kuar took kindly to none. It loathed visitors, detested passerby, and especially hated Mando’ade that dared coming back. After all, Cato thought, we murdered them.
The world was stuck off the main lanes leading between Foerost and the Empress Teta systems, in an isolate alcove of navigable space that was decrepit with disuse. From orbit, Kuar appeared vastly unremarkable. Past atmo, with boots to the soil, it’s landscape seemed infinite and undistinguished, the skin of rock, barren except for depthless fissures that eventually conjoined into stitched ravine and canyon systems. The Kuaran, sensitive to light, prospered below ground. Where the mesa’s met the canyon edges, spires of carved stone jutted brokenly. Heat and solar wind, the absence of almost five thousand years of living care, had reduced many to emptied stubs crammed with vulture roosts. Angry shadows fizzed and hissed with the breeze. It was well past dusk, and Cato walked alone across the floor of a monumental ravine.
Light came from a pine-pitch torch he held aloft in his prosthetic gauntlet. Cato paused, at fifteen pace intervals, to light forgotten bronzer braziers swamped in frayed cobweb. The coals accepted the fire after a pause, old embers and coals warming bright. A wake of fire trailed behind him now, casting shadowed glows up the warped, rosy sandstone, changing the ravine from a lightless scar to a livid wound pulsating against an overcast night.
Prior to realspace translation in orbit, Cato had borrowed resources from RESINT to covertly transmit a general message through the ShadowNet:
See attached coordinates.
Come if you wish and if you can.
Rediscovered a spot. Quiet, out of the way, with history.
It’ll do in a pinch. Could make something out of it.
C.
The ravine soon opened abruptly into an enormous river-rapid confluence that’d been converted into a once stately courtyard. Orbital fire, dropped ordnance, had pulverized and glassed the yard floor. There were skeletal basilisk left fallen where anti-air fire had smashed their ventral plating, their pilots equally dislocated and scattered, buried under column rubble beside Kuaran fighters washed to the bone by age and erosion. Fragile bone cracked under Cato’s boots as he gently crossed to the remains of a great jade plinth set where, maybe, there had been a dedicated chapel. A Crusader and defending Kuaran were locked in an embrace atop the plinth, mutually pierced through by spear and falchion, collapsed at the foot of a desiccated marble effigy. Cato knelt, studying their faces drawn to naked bone under shattered helms.
Pride, shame, honour, ignominy. He turned and sat against a busted rock, kept company by the dead and a sputtering torch. The long Kuar night waited with him, as starry and endless as his private ruminations.
“’A warrior knows nothing of surrender,’” Cato quoted in the deep silence. Ire, a strange, thick anger boiled up his throat, and he looked to the stars for a ghost to answer back. Yes, you carved your way to immortality on the backs of your warriors, Indomitable, honourable to whatever vicious end claimed you. With your example set for millennia and beyond corruption. Except you were an ego-driven animal that witlessly bowed our necks to the Krath, but no one dares breath it. I don’t know what to make of you. If I’m simply naïve and stupid in my ways. Or if I’ve a right to hate you. I do not know. Ancestors forgive me. You had your honour, and I own mine now.
He pulled Oilseller from its scabbard, watching torch light and moonbeams play upon its steel polish.
[member="Alaric"] [member="Connory"] [member="Davin Skirata"] [member="Dracken Pryce"] [member="Ember Rekali"] [member="Ijaat Mereel"] [member="Kade Kol-Rekali"] [member="Talia Fett"] [member="Zeke Farthen"]