I Could Stay Or Leave

[Matsu Xiangu]

[SIZE=14pt]Bastion[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14pt]Evening[/SIZE]

She liked silence.

So much of her life was spent in chaos, never-ending noises, the loud streets and sky of Coruscant and endless war. The sounds of Vong laughing filled her dreams. She relived screams, the way tension had a sound behind her ears when it started to fill a room. Every ship that split underneath her feet, every cracking ache of a bone broken, every hiss of a lightsaber snapping to life, every sigh when he bled, replayed in a mind that never forgot and was always expanding.

But despite it all, she craved silence.

When she looked up she felt at home. The night sky was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, eclipsing even the majesty of rot. When she was sitting on a ship, lapsing in to the white and almost imperceptible drone of massive engines, she imagined solar radiation. She could close her eyes and forget anything else in the metronomic melody of expansion, stars devouring their cores in the centuries-long race to eventuality. Here she often imagined the end, a mind that curled in and out on itself a thousand times over when she was alone, thoughts connected with the turning ease of the removed. Every body exhaled its last breath, grew soft with muscle breakdown, turned a sharp delineation of white and blue as blood settled. Eyes melted in sockets, skin dried and tightened over skulls and eventually succumbed to the sun, water, or time. Ashes to ashes. Even her body. She often imagined her teeth stuck in bleached skull, empty sockets watching the sky change as stars were born and died, a thousand years of motion it wouldn’t rejoin. Inertia and ennui. A final rest. The same everywhere, the ultimate fate for everyone from Luke Skywalker to Naga Sadow.

But not her.
She would never die.
She would ascend.

In her heart of hearts she was a black hole, meant to swing everlasting between thousands of star systems awaiting the unknown on the other side. If her body fell she would ascend, ripping in half and tearing apart whatever earth saw fit to catch her blood in a result unexpected, an entire system torn apart in the wake of her supermassive finale. Every victim was a planet pulled in to the spider-web of her gravity, ejecta siphoning until the core unraveled and flattened in the wake of her travel. They drained in the darkness, fueling her force of change. She would continue. And all in silence.

An almost imperceptible smile tugged on her lips as she considered thoughts she’d envisoned a thousand times, an unbearable urge to watch the sky even here on Bastion. It was a vacation after all.

It’d been her choice to move herself to the One Sith and it wasn’t a decision she regretted. She’d come for one reason and found many to stay, but even still her downtime called her to the space held by their allies. Matsu had no home but the stars. The Sith’s militant straightforwardness suited her craving for blood just fine, but the Primeval called to who she was at the end of the day – esoteric, unbound. It was as good a place as any to stand outside along one of the balconies of a towering temple they’d painstakingly restored on the fortress world. It was a mild evening, the breeze tangling gently through her hair. She was in no particular rush to do anything at all but look up and watch.

[member="Orkamaat"]​

 

[Orkamaat]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs3bG5RhHqo​

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Aeons of life had seen his chest rise and fall with feigned breath, and today of all days would be no different. The color of night seeped in through invisible cracks in his flesh, sutures poorly closed that would surely bleed again come morrow. Fate and experience made him less of a cadaver and more of a human today, the thin smiles offered by his lips unveiling not the grin of a skull, but that of a man.

Spidery fingers, bony and pale, would trace the red lines of pigment embedded under his translucent skin as his orange eyes stared back at him in the mirror. It was the only warm thing about his presence; the solitary flame dancing in the icy wilderness of a planet unknown.

There was nothing familiar about the spirit of Orkamaat, nothing that didn't speak of an entity not quite of this world. His very aura was alien, his expression odd and unsettling. Nothing the casual observer could pinpoint, of course, just that ancient instinct — intuition, if you will — that made your skin crawl and your hair stand on end. Nobody voluntarily kept the priest company, and they were hardly to blame in their paranoia, however far-fetched it was.

A shadow of a smile passed over his bloodless lips as he turned away from the mirror, his reflection shimmering in place for a fraction of a second more before it followed its owner. Like the flap of large, leathery wings in the dead of night, his coat followed, shifting the stale air with a single grandiose gesture. The three candles burning upon the mantle of a cold hearth were snuffed in an instant, inviting the darkness back into the room like an old friend.

Death.

The end.

It.

Balagoth.

In their fear, men would give it a thousand names, and a thousand more if it meant they could sustain their delusion a while longer. One more second, one more breath, one more day of the same old routine. The will of mortals to keep a gift they didn't appreciate never failed to astound him; the lengths they would go to in order to keep the life they would inevitably squander had always amazed him, and even after millennia he'd borne witness to, Orkamaat couldn't help but smile.

Was it arrogance that curled his lips? Knowledge? Certainty?

It was of little import, in the end, for death came for all. The most indiscriminate of all the forces in the Universe, beautiful in its simplicity. The inexorable. One of the small comforts in existence, if one knew how to appreciate its gentle whisper.

Not arrogance, then; merely the eerie ease of knowing the day and the hour, and accepting it nonetheless. When it finally came for him, Orkamaat would welcome the embrace of his life-long companion, not fight it.

"They are beautiful, no?" he would ask, his voice woven from the stolen wails of a thousand unheard supernovae.

"The stars."

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]​

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X3vVkBimd8​

At first she wasn’t sure if someone had spoken behind her or if it was the wink of the supernova in some distant galaxy finding its way to her. It sounded ancient, like stardust floating on some stellar wind. Time was a relative concept to her, measured differently by different people and by perspective. She was tethered to nothing and the man’s voice made her want to dissolve and follow, a million grains of sand dissolving out of an hourglass with no bottom.

She turned to look over her shoulder, tracking a man just as strange as his voice. Dark eyes traced the red lines on his face, stark against otherwise deathly pale skin. (Dry, like a corpse without sun or humidity left to desiccate.) A glance at his clothes left her with the urge to purr in satisfaction – those with an eye for the finer things were sorely lacking among her allies, but it seemed not this night. It was not in her makeup to be wary of another creature at first glance – curiosity was her trademark, a sick need to understand that drove her to greater levels of depravity almost every day. It didn’t stop her from feeling what he was, from receiving the dead-space glow of his signature that must have driven so many others away. (The way animals turned from the edge of the woods or a certain house, tail between their legs and heads low. Something was just…other.)

But he liked the stars too.

“The most beautiful thing I know,” she returned, tilting her face back to the view. “I don’t have a view like this as often as I’d like.” Coruscant, for all its charm, was not a good place to gaze up at the stars. Only the brightest fought with the incessant glow of the city. Here on Bastion lights rose from the city streets but here she could still see the smaller pinpricks among the giants.

“I’m Matsu.” In one moment she felt like a child again, striking out to the galaxy with nothing but her name and the clothes on her back, stargazing with a stranger.

[member="Orkamaat"]​

 

[Orkamaat]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t01YuqqeppI​

His paper-thin skin seemed like it could break at any moment when his smile widened, lips pulling back far enough to show the gray of his gums. A good thing, perhaps, that it was as dark as it was, or even the curious woman might flee at the sight of that grin.

"Orkamaat," he offered simply along with his hand, the long fingers like five sharp tears in the fabric of the night.

"A pity, truly," the priest added after a few moments of comfortable silence. Time was moving slower for the unlikely pair, it seemed, or perhaps not at all; seconds oozing by like half-curdled blood down the edge of a blade, stretching out into infinity.

Or perhaps it was a deformation inherent to being a relic of a bygone era. What was a year, a decade, a century, even, to that which cannot die? He could stand still and watch a generation pass him by without so much as batting an eye.

"Had you arrived a few days earlier, you might have enjoyed the view in its full glory," he finally continued, taking a step closer to the edge of the balcony. The air was pleasant — nothing like the obnoxious heat that was wont to bear down upon the inhabitants during the day — and Orkamaat found himself humming with satisfaction.

"Lorkynd Racuvar," he enunciated every syllable with scalpel-like precision, the words cutting into the silence between them. "On this most hallowed of eves we honor that which others fear," he spoke as he turned to face her, two rings of fire that would hold her gaze. "We stand humbled before the panoply of Balagoth… and we pay homage to his oft-forgotten works."

With a grand sweep of his hand, the priest gestured towards the star-spangled canopy above them, the embers of his eyes looking between the stars rather than at them. Oft-forgotten, never gone.

"Like all existence is by absence begat, so are we defined by that which is not. Without the void of the Universe, how could we ever hope to appreciate the beauty of the suns?"

He blinked then, once, twice, and glanced back at the curious female by his side.

"Would you care for some wine?"

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]​

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

His annunciation was a trigger, a splitting up her spine as she drifted to his explanation. When she turned her gaze to look at him the golden rings separated from his irises, great sheets of gilded indifference extending to draw their own auroras in her vision. There was something good in this detachment, of being with something other. She imagined that others shied from him either out of fear of his quiet intensity (born not of action but of sheer weight of knowledge), or the simple terror of his appearance. Matsu was simply happy to feel at home.

Planets and stars, interstellar clouds, brilliant glittering clouds of ejecta forming enormous shapes across miles of nothingness – it was all worthy of her fascination. But what about the space in between? Eternal silence, mystery, the place where she felt destined to spend eternity once she saw through her final moment.

Once again she thinks now is the moment when fear finally rips someone out of being frozen, urges them to move before it’s too late. But she would just like to reach out and share with him, spend hours eyes-closed and dreaming, building a galaxy out of experience and imagination.

How very sad that others couldn’t see, didn’t know…

“Wine sounds excellent.”

She followed him, eyes trained on the purple wave of wine along the curve of the glass when he poured, wondering if he didn’t emit some here-to-fore unknown pheromone. Something like a Zeltron’s allure but instead of arousal she felt some heady sense of understanding – perhaps understanding beyond her comprehension, for she felt the age in his bones, but she could bend her mind around anything he’d seen with those cyclic eyes.

“You’ll have to excuse my ignorance, but I don’t know of this Balagoth.” We honor that which others fear. Death? Gesturing to the stars did nothing to eradicate that from the equation – to Matsu, the universe was life and death on its grandest scale. A beautiful simplicity.

[member="Orkamaat"]​

 

[Orkamaat]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiZ7rNHi9mk​

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He would proffer his thin, wiry hand, then, quiet and undemanding as he was, waiting for her warm palm (though she did not look warm) to cover his. Their fingers would only brush, but never touch, like the the sharp legs of an arachnid monstrosity, elegant even as it gorged upon the life of others.

Each of them was like a gaping hole in the creatia between the stars, separated for centuries at a time until the angles of the Galaxy aligned just right, allowing them to gaze upon each other's depths, if only for a few seconds. Those moments would stretch into eternity as he found her black eyes with his own, holding her bottomless stare over the rim of a glass.

The surface of the wine lay perfectly — unnaturally — still, not a single sign of life breaking the rich purple mirror reflecting the sky above. As if the stars themselves would seek to drown in those unfathomable depths, so did his sunburst gaze gleefully lose itself in the Universe of her eyes, the fire diffusing into the void of her soul. It was a rare pleasure to resonate with another being on such a profound level, an act that he cherish and carry with him always even after the beautiful un-creature before him was long gone.

With a soft sigh, the taller of the two broke the all-consuming stare shared betwixt them, disturbing the waters as he finally rose the wine to his lips, staining them with color they so lacked. A hollow trickle could be heard in the quietude of the moment, almost as if the drink was cascading freely along the bones and cartilage hidden behind the deep mauve of his robes.

"I like the night," he finally spoke again, setting down his glass with nary a sound. "It is not just a period of time, it is… another place. We are not where we are during the day… we are not who we are during the day."

"A little less human, a little less… seen. Do we know the night?"

"Not… consciously, perhaps, but we know its nature intrinsically. There is a reason any and all possess a respect for the night. A reason why most choose to avoid it. A reason why only the… fair few dare embrace it."

"It is how you know Balagoth. You know it with every breath, with every step. With every grain of sand that measures our time, you are brought closer to its domain. As we age, so do we begin to shed our fears, the burdens that would weigh us down... the mortal coils."

"Existence ends where Balagoth begins, and yet… all life springs forth from it."

"A wondrous circle, is it not?"

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]​