Just As Dead As It Is Now

[Matsu Xiangu]

Sorrow was a funny emotion. Not useless, like guilt or fear - sorrow had a purpose. But it was difficult to see that when one was acknowledging it so acutely. She’d started down that path, that one all Sith Lords of any consequence reached when they’d delved too deep for too long in the possibilities of the Force - things just left. Slowly but surely, as if she were the stone in the center of some great rushing lake, those things that made her human eroded, fell away. She supposed she was lucky - whatever she was becoming was still Matsu. She’d watched others become thoughtless, mindless...caricatures of monsters, driven by no reason - machines fueled by rage. She, in kind, retained herself; but things that held back humans were removed from her through the gift of the Dark Side. Emotions were weak. The ability to feel pain was weak. Fear of harm was weak. Half of her body was not her own, and with time she’d lost the ability to feel those emotions useless to the development of oneself in the Force.

And yet she felt it unrelentingly now, a sorrow without place, time, or reason.

She’d felt it before, after losing her arm the first time and nearly dying in the snow, after filtering through her friend’s memories once they’d been reunited. But this had no stimulus - it had simply come upon her unbidden. She pulled back in her mind, a mentalist’s trick. It was a form of coping, a ‘stepping aside’ as she’d come to call it that was surely her mind’s way of trying to shield her from something but instead left her feeling numb and unsettled. There was ground, but no matter how she placed her feet she never felt steady. There was air but it tasted different.

This Nexus was powerful. She had not yet found the entrance but already it sucked at her through the Force, trying to drain her. Let it. She moved forward, compartmentalizing.

[member="Korog Zordaal"]​

 

[Korog Zordaal]

Perhaps some strange kismet, forged in the primordial web of time and consequence. Perhaps, simply, some aimless toss of cosmic dice. No matter the theory or appraisal; Here stood Korog Zordaal, on this foreign World of Ancient promise long since broken. The population of Trismegis had, ages ago, found their futures blotted out. But the legacy of artifacts and materials they left behind, it managed to draw forth at least two:

[member="Matsu Xiangu"] and this fledgling Sith, himself.

Korog Zordaal did not fit the regular. . . affiche. . of Sith in this current playground of bedlam and anguish. No, the Muun considered himself a more learned individual than his compatriots. He did not posses bestial demeanor of a [member="Darth Carnifex"] or a [member="Darth Prazutis"]. No, Korog was of a tall sort, frame built with tight, almost anorexic, lean muscles and long limbs that were skeletal and lank.

His black cloak, undulating like some startled creature of great Sea depths, tightened around the slender sinew of his alien figure. Long, angular fingers, as stilt and fine as the legs of a spider, clutched the fabric securely. A bitter attempt to stave the heat inside from whispering off on the increasing current of wind that spiraled all around him.

Yes, as he trudged on, shoulder first in to the cyclone. He did ponder his place in the hierarchy. He was, after all, a mere fixture on the wall to this point. More interested in burying his all-devouring eyes in to any, and every, tome, book or mere simple scrap, of paper.

The mind would always be the most powerful weapon of any Warrior.

But now, his time was coming. Korog had every intention of becoming more than what he was. The proverbial darkness, that he wished to witness consuming the entire Galaxy whole.

That's what started his pilgrimage to this disrembered Orb of emerald. That's what carried him on through the cruel weather, ever further towards the ashen wastelands that skirted this terrible Nexus of gloom and black.

This is where his journey started.

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

Perhaps it was its ability to continually surprise her that made her love the Dark so. She had an overabundance of wonder and was always taken by a beautiful scene or the wild acts of her Undead. But so very little stopped her in her tracks.

The Dark however, always kept on giving.

In most ways she was a sadist, the greatest relationship of her life built on a foundation of pain where the reverent begged to receive and she needed to oblige. But in this - trudging ceaselessly towards a great black hole of a nexus that sapped her very will - was masochism in its purest form. She knew of its existence for she’d felt such things before. On Ruusan for example, the capital of the short-lived Sith Triumvirate, she’d known the main city itself to be a Nexus. Most felt like a wound, a great hollow nothingness conspicuous in its silence. That was the thing she loved most: the quiet after the genocide, the gritty emptiness of a galaxy wiped clean. And while this Nexus felt no different, it was amplified. She likened it to the purported effects of a black hole, drawing matter towards its doom despite the brainstem’s relentless insistence to turn around.

At some point, one just stopped being capable.

After a while she realized she wasn't alone. One long, sonorous wail of animal-song made her glance up and see another figure battling the strange weather. In the white noise of the Nexus the stranger’s signature must have been lost in the Force. Either that or he was Vong, but Matsu doubted that.

The volcano seemed to be the source of the Nexus, and so Matsu reached for the other traveler’s mind. She didn't speak to him, conscious that it was best to keep her presence quiet. But she made suggestions, pushed pictures of the volcano in to his mind in the hopes he would set his course towards the ancient giant as well. Either he would be useless or an enemy and she would destroy him, or he would be interesting and she would gain more than just knowledge that day.

[member="Korog Zordaal"]​

 

[Korog Zordaal]

Burn, Eruption, Ashes.

Wind roiled leaves and soot around the thin ankles of the tall stranger, his hands still desperately trying to keep Cloak from ballooning outwards with the terrible breath of Trismegis huffing upon him. But alas, something seemed amiss.

Now, Korog happened to be no fool. Untrained and unkempt, his true potential might yet be, but uneducated? No conversation would press weight upon the notion. No, the Muun possessed a persuasive, impressively robust intellect. Not so easily fooled, could this Dark newcomer be. Or could he?

Magma, Obsidian, Death.

[member="Matsu Xiangu"] plucked the strong cords of his conscious mind with utter ease. Even as his gangling gait slowed to pause, his head turning inside the wildly fluttering crevasse of his heavy hood, he could see images scurry from the corners of his gaze. They were sediment and cinders, blazing fire and heat. He could feel the very entity that was this woman's soul, but he could not fully perceive from where she stroke outwards at him with this trespass.

Warmth.

He could feel it beckon his stride onward once more. Further he flowed over the barren wastelands. Drawn to the heat, starved of his free will, at least, mostly so.

Smolder.

Images of a world, this world, Ancient and blazing. Torching life and green limb from it's face slowly. Abhorrent winds carrying the inferno on for miles, leveling trees, settlements, lives. So many lives lost, snuffed out in moments. Others left to atrophy and rot. Most destined to suffer. Doomed for sacrifice to appease Dark Gods.

The Nexus summoned him as brother.

He could taste the inebriant soothe of this harrowing energy. His feet somehow carrying him across the land with complete competence, despite the boozed high of this astounding gesture that cleaved his thoughts from function. Before long, he seemed to be approaching a volcanic crag of some design.

Perhaps now this unseen force would finally reveal itself.

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

She was careful.

Most of the galaxy knew her for her sorcery, for the Dead that inevitably followed at her heels. But first and foremost she had been a mentalist. The tiny little girl that had started out in the galaxy without direction or idea had taken to the art of the mind with alacrity. That most of the galaxy thought first of her Children was to her advantage. She was unparalleled in mentalism and that they did not see her coming only made it easier to sneak in to their thoughts.

So careful.

And yet she could sense that he knew she was there almost immediately. She thought of intrusion like a spider’s approach, quiet and unseen - only the most sensitive feeling sharp legs like a whisper against skin. And they did not call her The Spider for nothing. She was very quiet, especially when not actively attempting to control someone’s mind. Of course it wasn’t unheard of for someone to sense her. And it just made her intrigued.

Eventually Mount Bapho loomed directly overhead, its meeting with the sands below giving way to an entrance carved as if by drunken hand. Jagged and as dangerous as might be expected, the orange glow in its side seemed more like a wound. Despite it all, it beckoned.

And just within, she found the Mind that knew her.

He was one of the more gaunt Muuns she’d ever seen - which was saying something. The volcanic glow within the passage played off his features and gave her pause. Was he some apparition of the Nexus? His thoughts tasted too complex to be an illusion, but then again she’d spun enough of those herself to know they could be exceedingly layered. Her amber eyes glowed from within the shadows, the first sign of her as she strolled deeper in to the passage to join him. In the presence of the Nexus her corruption was obvious, features high and demonic as the Dark Side played with her features.

“I would ask what brought you here, but whatever is at the heart of this place is its own answer,” she said quietly. A heartbeat’s pause. “You knew I was in your mind.” It was more of a statement than a question.

[member="Korog Zordaal"]​

 

[Korog Zordaal]

"There was an old lady who swallowed a Fly, " Began the Muun, the sick pallidness of his skin hidden in the shade cast by ember glow. "I don't know why, she swallowed a Fly--perhaps she'll Die."

The invidious construct, her Web, it was indeed woven fine. An unerring portrayal of the threads she so incomparably could command. She had effected great obedience of the Force. He could taste the very vim of her abhorrent presence, feel the intravenous intrusion of her potent venom; it made his legs sag and his eyes slouch as he allowed the cosmic Nod of her influence affirm his suspicion.

Oh, he felt you, [member="Matsu Xiangu"].

Never be fooled by this loathsome stick of taut sinew, always assume Korog Zordaal had arrived with an expedient stratagem. Even when at his most aloof.

Of course, he felt her, how could he not. He let her voice carry over him, so calm and aphotic, it was. The power hidden within each spoken syllable only did more to further incite his own dictation of their crossing.

"There was an old lady, she swallowed a Spider." Korog continued, after lengthy pause, "It wriggled and wormed and tickled inside her!"

The heat from the cavern inside this great gash of rock was sweltering. An intense warmth that, despite it's inherent danger, so cruelly invited all explorers deeper inside. Come, surrender your lives, feed my Dark Hunger. Just as readily as he had appropriated her essence of fatal paradise, so too could he feel Bapho beckon inwards.

"Tell me, dear Friend, " He never gave this potential mentor the courtesy of fully shifting himself towards her. He wanted such an important relationship, should it arise, to be equally intriguing. Oh, Korog was in the market for a Master proper. But, terribly picky, he was. . .

"Simple child's rhyme, or telling yarn of wisdom?"

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

Sweat beaded along her hairline. She listened to him quietly, unmoving. Her stillness was eerie - almost unnatural, statuesque. The only indication that she was even alive was in the slow rise and fall of her chest. This was an ancient dance. It seemed to be one few really knew the steps to anymore. She could hardly claim to put much stock in the old days when her entire life thus far had flown in the face of much of what the old bickering Sith council would adhere to unquestioningly. But this dance, this tasting of another’s strength before downing the entire cup, was one of her favorites.

Simple child’s rhyme? Or telling yarn of wisdom?

“Both,” she replied in the same calm hum that seemed to blend with the muted roar of magma flowing somewhere below.

She reached out, this time with a precision that spoke to years of practice as she gripped at his brainstem. If successful, his motor functions would freeze as she walked by. She did not attempt to get a glance at him - she enjoyed the game as much as he seemed to. Neither would truly see or know the other until they’d both decided the other was worth it.

She disappeared in to the darkness further on in the passage before she released her grip.

The Nexus drained her but could also be used to fuel her illusions. Sith Sorcery made them real, as corporeal as she was - and equally as capable of hurting anything around them. Matsu let her voice bounce off the cavern walls, her position mostly impossible to detect as the middle of Bapho yawned before both intruders. “From whence a thousand different colors rise, whose fine transition cheats the clearest eyes. And as each part in just proportion rose, some antique fable in their work disclose.”

If the stranger she’d left behind were to follow her deeper in to the mountain, he would find the first widening of the path to be complete with darkness. An unnatural sort to be sure - the kind that seemed to swallow light rather than just occupy its absence. If magma rested somewhere in here it was eaten by the blackness. And something or someone moved within it, waiting for him to run in to it without his eyes to help him.

One or both of them would reach the Nexus. Which it was just remained to be seen.

[member="Korog Zordaal"]​

 

[Korog Zordaal]

It was uncanny, in a way, the sudden rust that bound the mechanism of his conduction. Not pain, none that he could feel, just strong catatonia. It left him still as statues, his slight frame and sagging cloak at the mercy of Bapho's sweltering sigh. Perhaps another, lesser evil, would let ego chaw with disgust at this invasive meddling, but not Korog, no, the Muun instead was delightedly intrigued by such command and presence.

Then, to recite the wisdom of poetry?

Korog was snared in the Spiders web, with such little chance of escape.

That single line, that one exchange of syllables. The volume of it's murmur left the Muun in delirious stupor. In a Galaxy full of brigands and barbarians, this one got it! Power, true strength that fleeted greater weight than any sword, was wisdom. But not just wisdom, not on it's own.

Language.

The preeminent apparatus with which to strike and rule. More mountains had been moved, more lives taken, more backs broken; with mere whisper, than with all the atrocity and bloodshed of a Universe full of swords! The Galaxy was created by words, know with which to wield, and you could make of it anything you desired.

They were Art, they were Religion, they were History, they were Music, they were Power and they were War.

Korog, drawn to her flame--or, were it the fire of Bapho---stalked forward, unabashed, fortified and willing. Long before he even ventured through the craggy grin of this terrible Mountain, Bapho and his horrifying fever hugged every angle of his alpine lank.

"The lips of Wisdom and Knowing rest closed, dear Friend, except to the mind of the Understanding." He entered, his Will, her Way.

But alas, he knew nothing but black. His eyes could not see, his ears could not listen. The growling descent in to the stomach of this monster would only reward those of a terrible Faith.

He, and Her.

Cinders clung to his robing, burning down to flesh, he did not palm them. The cackle of flowing rock, ablaze and molten, would not slow him. He let the dark guide him, he let Bapho cradle and furnish his footing. But, this were just the opening, they had not even entered the throat of the beast.

For not far ahead, glowing tongue of the demon, churn wildly. Snapping and popping, it's heavy flow hidden in the shade of blindness. It's only path across, a winding trail of gleaming obsidian, with barely enough width for careful stride. A relic of a Cult of people long since lost.

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]​

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

When she reaches the embrasure, a finger’s width of land in which to cross a sea of magma, the darkness recedes from around them both. The natural light overtook, revealing just the back of her petite form looking away from him.

Something stood in wait just beyond the crack that let them in to Bapho. It was something angry, something more complicated than a Nexus. She was certain that when she crossed over the edge whatever it was would strike. For a moment she took the quiet to still her mind, reinforce those barriers against intrusion she never let down.

When she took the step, the presence left to guard in wait relished in its first victim in decades.

Death and lust had always been intertwined for her. There was something inherently beautiful about a thing that managed to outsmart all of them, that bided its time and took every single creature for its own given enough of it. Unstoppable. Equal in its hunger. The galaxy moved on past bodies being picked clean, the rolling faux-life of maggots cleaning bone, playing time-lapse decay in her mind as some spectre left behind by a Sith Lord long dead attempted to play with her mind. But she found it artful.

A flash of a thought danced above the rest, finding its place among the sudden ramping of her thoughts as she let it try. Violent star-death, the most brilliant of last breaths, a heaving implosion of sonic expression glowing for months with what once had floated beneath its surface. All colors were possible, superheated ejecta glowing the brilliance of their proximity to a now absent core. Green (cutting him open, blood spilling between her fingers, slipping a hand in the wound to burst organs with a twist), blue (the color of his flesh, hands wrapped around his throat, jaw struggling reflexively against her grip), purple (a symphonic crack of bone followed by an encore of labored breathing, thin through a broken nose and the mash of spit and teeth lodged in his throat), yellow (resorting to fists, slamming both down over and over, feeling the impact begin as a hard smack against bone and cartilage and get progressively meatier, a wet sound when she got to the bloom in the center of skull-petals), and red (sitting on the floor, cradling what was left of him in her lap, his blood flecked over her delicate features as she collected the bits closest to them back in the hollow, shattered cave of his skull, cooing to the rosebloom of the top of his neck. Oh you were interesting, so very interesting.)

It was strong. It manipulated her in to thinking in a certain direction but her mind was the one place she would not allow another living soul without her permission. Luckily...there was a conduit right behind her.

Without a word, she steeled herself and bounced the invisible Guardian’s power off herself and towards the Muun. A murderous rage might overtake him though Matsu got the sense that it wasn’t in his character. The Guardian left over from a Sith Lord who must have hid something worth protecting wanted intruding parties to kill each other before they even got over the threshold. And Matsu was just curious.

[member="Korog Zordaal"]​

 

[Korog Zordaal]

At long last, [member="Matsu Xiangu"]. Even the impersonal delineation of her backside, could not thrust shadow upon her identity. Korog Zordaal knew all Sith of certain comportment, of a certain, luster. This particular, monstrosity, this one had indeed occupied his appetite for some time. A thinking fiend, a knowing demon.

He let her walk on, forward, that small frame of hers seeking balance upon the obsidian balustrade.

From shoulders that seemed as though they could fracture under the slightest stroke of pressure, Korog cast his Cloak aside. Heat and vapor blurring all things that surrounded them. Thankful, he may had been, now that sight had returned within his eyes. But there was a reserved nature about the Muun. He could not celebrate, even the smallest victory, almost as if he already knew - the worst had yet to come.

Voicelessly he surveyed her, his mind attempting to venture with a silent intrusion upon her thoughts, to no avail. She, simply, was far beyond his capabilities.

That overwhelming warmth enveloped him entirely. Soot and ash fell as rain upon them, steam so thick it could be regarded as nothing less than fog. Bapho hungered. Beneath feet, the great mountains belly growled, trembling the ground they strode upon. But, [member="Matsu Xiangu"], did not fall and Korog Zordaal would not flee.

Could he, had the thought even crossed his mind?

No.

That was the terrifying fate they now found themselves wandering. For once the willing, entered the beast, only Bapho decided which soul would exit his paunch.

Black eyes, with white sandy islands adrift the onyx pools, peered across the swelter. It was breathtaking, even for an individual as traveled as he. Molten scoria, in defiance of Nature, Science and Belief, curled as a corkscrew through it's massive venting pipe; the throat and tongue of the behemoth.

A perfect spiral that drank more than eighty percent of the obsidian bridges length between it's bewildering coils.

Korog had become so impressed, measuring the size of this empty cavern and the riddle of it's inner-workings that he'd actually completely lost touch with what Matsu had been doing - what she had been shunting from her own mind, and feeding unto his.

Bapho gasped inwards.

The blistering suction urged Korog forward, on to the narrow foot bridge. Greedily the Ghoul under the Mountain began to feast. His power only growing ever more powerful the longer, and closer, he and Matsu came upon the opposite side.

Bapho's Thirst.

A Gatekeeper, of sorts.

". . The. . . 'Blazers. . . are. . dying father." Suddenly, Korog was no longer there.

It wasn't a memory, it was genuine, visceral. . . real. He was back on Devaron, they were in the Jungle, searching for the Temple Ruins of the ancient cult of the Devil King. It was [member="Six-O"], a IG-Series Droid of particular curiosity, two Devaronian brothers of the Solomon line, a number of Trailblazer's and Korog.

Some months after their Journey had commenced, the Jungle had gulped them wholly. In that wild chaparral of land many had taken to madness and flight. It was cursed, the two Solomon's had warned, before they fled. Even the Droid had taken to an outlandish sort, blaring music from it's vocoder, torturing simple Porter's under the suspicion of deceit and calumniation of alleged Restrainer Bolts.

Korog could still remember, with the Machines sensors blazing more red than the embers of flame inside Bapho, how it mutilated and tormented those poor men. This was before the Muun had taken down his own Dark Path, this had been where those seeds of Hate were first planted.

Dysentery, blood black as tar, he could remember the young boy whom had accompanied his father on this seemingly simply trek. He remembered how he withered to mere bone and tightly drawn, pallid flesh. It was a look the Muun seemed to mirror from then onward.

". . . F. .ther. . . .re. ... you pr. .od of . . 'e?" Korog was breathed further and further in to the chasm beyond the broiling tongue. "L. .e.. . ve. ...me"

The boy had begged, his body, so frail. Merely a gaunt skeleton, his eyes dark with baggage, yellow. His lips bleeding and gums receding up along dry teeth that drew blood from labium with mere syllable breathed.

IGa-60 had been dragging the child through the Jungle for weeks, all of them refusing to cease progress, refusing to turn back now that so much had been lost, they simply had to carry on. . . just as now, in Bapho's grasp, they had no choice but to move forward in to lunacy.

Korog remembered the end more than the middle, or even the beginning. The way the boy wheezed, the way he delicately cried as a machine, father and Muun of utter indifference tow him neglectfully alee. That distant, lost, look in his empty eyes as he gazed almost lifelessly upward at the thick Jungle canopy.

"I. . .'m. . weak." He sighed, it was during his last night, ". ... .cold. .." Korog remembered how he cruelly desired that this feeble boy just succumb. "M. .my han's. . . Father. . .I can't. . fe. . .l my hands."

The boys father mewl, holding the withered stalk of his only child.

Before Korog could recall even more of this, his eyes became the inferno that surrounded he and Matsu. Rage tingled through his veins like the poison of a mind altering Spice that whispered upon him this ride would be vicious and unkind. He tried to gather his capable mind, but before he could find himself again, he was coming wildly upon [member="Matsu Xiangu"] with murder in his eyes, and loathing aflush his heart!

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

With the exception of Maena, Matsu had lived on cities her entire life. From Atrisia to Coruscant she was almost always surrounded by people. And yet they were a mystery. She spent her days around creatures that looked like her and spoke like her and fought like her. Their blood was the same color. They could breathe the same air.

Perhaps it had been what drew her to mentalism in the first place. 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 things beyond comprehension, 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. When she left the silence she was surrounded by billions and yet alone in a way that had no resolution, sitting cross-legged on the other side of a gulf created not by her power or position but by a fundamental differing of biology and time.

It was a thing she couldn’t even explain to herself, but she felt caged by a million lightyears of galaxy to roam. Not enough.

In someone else’s head she could devour their memories too, assimilate tendencies, remember what it was to be real. As Bapho pushed them to turn so did it press them together - two animals forced to fight from instinct of personal space. (Memories of a child dying on some trek, a callous wish for the boy to just get it over with. Quiet fluttering of lungs, a patter against toothpick ribcage, wasted in the face of nature. They weren’t hers, but for a moment she might as well have lived it.) Though her collaborator in this journey muttered and moved forward, Matsu was utterly still, eyes looking at some distant place up in a ceiling obscured by shadow. Reverent and fascinated she watched some stranger die, wails echoing in her head. It was almost too late before she felt Bapho’s rage take hold in the Muun, sulphuric yellow blanking her vision as his eyes turned with intention.

Her first instinct was to create but she wondered if here in this hallway of horrors haunted by some lord who clearly had once considered himself quite gifted in the cerebral arts would allow her to further bloat it with yet more illusion. She took a few steps backward towards the pathway that continued inwards but felt her back press against something invisible. It would seem she had no choice. Break the ground in front of them in a telekinetic shattering? It risked killing herself with magma, a thought she wasn’t keen on. Wield a sorcerer’s flown spear? Too likely to kill him on impact and so far he was at least interesting.

So instead she threw the bulk of her power in to conjuring an illusion of the man whose son had died in his arms on that jungle trek so long ago. The beauty of a Sith illusion was the simple fact that it truly existed, for all intents and purposes. It could touch, it could hurt, it could kill until it was vanquished either by realizing it for what it was or killing it as one would a real foe.

His face wracked in nightmarish exaggeration of grief, pulled down too far at the corners with cheeks cut in sorrowful wrinkles by their tug, eyes unnaturally large and brimming with tears, he aimed for Korog mid-sprint. His breath stank of rot as he wailed, the same keening cry of hopelessness for something slipped from hands and unreachable even as his long fingers scratched to grab hold of the Muun.

“You just sat there,” he accused, the wail turning to something angry as his grief found purpose, a scapegoat, something to hurt. “You never once offered your ration, never once tried to help us even when it was obvious he might survive if he had a little extra!” Beefy fist grabbed for an unnaturally thin Muun arm, the other reeling back to punch the alien creature in whatever fragile limb he could find. He would break him in a thousand pieces for this, leave him twisted and unnatural for some other adventurer to find several decades from now - bleached, deflated, dry skin draped over the bones left behind.

[member="Korog Zordaal"]​

 

[Korog Zordaal]

For that one moment, [member="Matsu Xiangu"] and Korog Zordaal became one. Their individuality vanished, hurtled against stone and burning slag, lost to the flames, delirious from the inhalation of scorn and spite so powerful it became as smoke that the great Burning Beast of Trismegis exhaled.

Intellect combined, for but the briefest, infinitesimal, moment of time, she became he. Not a human, not a near-human, not Atrisian or the Exorcist of a Thousand Ghouls and Phantasma. She was Muun. She drank his nightmare, horrid ambrosia for her fervid palate. By the time her mind had returned from infinity they had nearly crossed the entire distance of the great river of burning red and searing yellows.

By this time, too, Korog had nearly been upon her. Slaughter sneering his features, sputum fleeing from teeth and lips as he groaned mercilessly. For such a frail branch of tall and thin design, his forward bound appeared unstoppable. But Matsu was skilled in her ways, Queen in her field. Her will was terror and her mind wrought carnage stronger than a billion men and their wispy Armies.

The specter, brought to life, vividly found torture driven in to his soul as the evil Sorceress plucked him from the lost nether of the dark and enslaved him back here, living, or something quite sort of like it. At first this wraith was mere dust, a billow of small vapor and grains that bled from the very air that broil and cook both curious woman, and eager adventurer.

The Lost Two.

The Cursed Dyad.

Bapho's first feast in what seemed an aeon!

The Muun roared forward. But dust became as clay, and from clay did bones get wrought. Toes and feet, legs, pelvis, ribs, neck and head. It was a foul creature whom cry from jaw dropped skull, teeth thrusting in to bone one after the other as it's virulent bellow sang with toxic misery, unyielding pain.

Muscle, powerful red sponge with which to propel this beast, twirled and lashed across the crying figure of bone and torment. Blood sloshing, painting thick strokes of crimson that sizzled and burned upon each stone to which it did land. The demon of the Witch-Sylph, now did thrust fist down throat, gurgling great moans of agony, with fingers clenched, it yanked tongue up through throat and half out of it's mouth.

Terrible were the words with which it did slash and pummel the Muun with. The tall alien's progress towards this evil woman halted, stride dead. The demon spoke, wet and cruel. condemning the being of his utmost hate.

"You hired the Droid! You lead us astray! You brought us out there! You pushed us on! You!" Blood oozed and bubbled upon his skinless structure! "YOU, YOU! KOROG ZORDALL! ZYOR BLACKSKY! YOU HAVE DONE THIS! YOU ARE DAMNED! CURSED! DEATH!! DEAAATH!!! KILL HIM!!! AHHHHHH!!!"

More pain, more dolor. Flesh, slit to ribbons, thrashed and flogged this scaffold of meat and acrimony. Bapho amplifying the latent power of [member="Matsu Xiangu"] to catastrophic affect. Flayed and fixed, sliced and stitched. The process repeated over and over again as the monster spoke.

A punch, laced with presence of supernatural strength struck Korog not across limb or frame. But directly on cheek, the Muun reeled, lurched heavily to the side, he'd absorbed the strike surprisngly well.

"You killed your boy! Not I!" He suddenly howled, rasp so deep it could tear an eardrum.

The creature went to strike again, Korog leaned backwards, his shoulders giving tilt to the side. The blow barely cut by him, just an inch of separation. Hastily, Korog clenched, with fingers intertwined behind the searing hot head of the beast. Asserting every pound of pressure he could muster while pushing down, his left knee rising mid-process. It was a success, he dashed face against thigh and knee.

The man, the father, stumbled backwards. It's voice again given life by some horrific shade of hatred.

"I WATCHED MY BOY DIE! YOU LET A DROID DRAG HIM THROUGH THE JUNGLE! YOU LET HIM SUFFER! YOU WOULDN'T TURN BACK! IN MY ARMS I HELD HIS HEAD! HE WEIGHED LESS THAN 80 POUNDS! YOU TOLD ME TO KILL HIM! YOU MADE ME KILL HIM! YOU WATCHED ME HOLD HIS MOUTH! HIS NOSE! YOU LISTENED AND LOOKED ON, LIKE SOME SORT OF EXPERIMENT! I WANTED TO RETURN! i TOLD YOU WE HAD TO! THAT DROID THREW HIM OFF TRAIL TO BE LEFT AS FOOD LIKE HE WERE SOME MEAGER SCRAP, SOME ANIMAL! YOU WERE A MONSTER! YOU ARE A MONSTER!"

"Enough!" Korog growled, throwing his hands animatedly down to his waist.

But the shadow of his deepest nightmare, wanted not to hear it. It wanted only the death of this Sith. Again it started off for him, hands clenched, body bulging with malice.

"I SAID EEENOOOUGGGHH!!!!!!!!!" Slender fingers had tucked tightly in to palm, his arms again were threw downward below his waist as the Muun, started with back arched backwards, suddenly slung his shoulders forward. Voice quite abruptly reaching a volume that drown out even the constant churn of magma and pop of heat.

The pitch of his syllables strung with such strength and intensity that the walls shook and cracked, the ceiling buckled, dumping large cuts of multi-ton rocks from roof. The phantom wavered, trying to press forward, it leaned heavily in to the gale of Korog. Flesh began to tear, blood began to stretch backwards, until suddenly a shock wave of energy obliterated the creation, drenching [member="Matsu Xiangu"] in gore and filth.

Korog, after this, fell to a knee.

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

She had moved closer as he fought the illusion, using his responses as illustration of commitment. She hadn’t expected him to feel remorse. That he’d done it at all - and he had - was indication that he understood already the fundamental lesson that the Force had to offer: nothing mattered but oneself. And she was close enough that she could feel her own illusion imploding as if it were her, and then - warmth.

Sanguine, illicit.

Blood coated her skin, ran in the small lines of her cybernetic arms like ancient code.

It shouldn’t have, but as he tongue ran out on her lips the illusion seemed to turn back on her.

Some liquid hallucinogen.

And all of the sudden she was back on Manaan.

The Republic had reigned supreme then, back when the One Sith had just sunk its boot in to the first foothold of its domination. Manaan had been a strategic choice of planet to invade. The air had been thick with the ash of explosion, the sea roiling as the earth rocked under the unstoppable progression of the great Sith war machine. Her goal had been the generators that kept the central hub afloat.

On the way, she’d run in to the Jedi Grandmaster - Aaralyn Rekali.

Jedi had never much bothered her. She didn’t waste her time on petty, centuries-old grudges. She respected power in all its forms. She thought them deluded, unable to appreciate the most beautiful of things: the Dark. But this one had been in her way.

She was back there for all of it. Once more Rekali’s Mandalorian blade pierced right between Matsu’s ribs and in to her lung, leaving her gasping for breath as the pressure differential shifted entirely to one lung. She felt the Jedi Grandmaster’s blade slice through her arm at the shoulder, severing her once again. It burned like she’d stuck it in the lava (and where had Bapho gone?). Rekali was on top of her once more as the missile ripped apart the bridge they fought on. In that moment Matsu might have died, choking on microscopic rubble, drowning in her own blood. But instead she had used that moment of distraction to dig so far and so deep in to the Jedi Grandmaster’s mind that she tore her apart.

She’d seen Rekali’s daughter in that head.
Another thing to find.

And once more she was there, watching over the destroyed edge of the bridge as the Grandmaster had rolled off the edge and slammed in to the surf a hundred feet below them.
(She’d felt her die. She’d hung on to the last shred of Aaralyn’s consciousness until one of Manaan’s great beasts tore in to her under the surf.)

The pain brought her back to Bapho.
She gasped.

And with that she turned from Korog in the moment that they once more had their minds to themselves. Neither would truly see the other until the center. If they both made it there.

When she moved back again to the dark passage that would take them deeper it was now open, no longer blocked by the wall created by the Sith Lord’s old curse. The passage was winding, bringing them down instead of more central. That the ceiling could come down at any moment to pour magma on them wasn’t lost on her, but she didn’t care. Their current journey was more than interesting enough.

“Did you see inside my head? Did you see the memory that your destruction of my spell brought to the front?”

[member="Korog Zordaal"]​

 

[Korog Zordaal]

Could he take more? That expulsion of the Force had left him weary boned and exhausted, sunken to single knee the Muun gazed silent through smoke and soot. Even the mighty churn of molten stone could not register upon tired ear. Every ounce of his being said let go, relent, escape.

[member="Matsu Xiangu"], exotic, a pleasing eye full - in some way. Even at half kneel to the obsidian balance beam that barely managed to support them with comfort, he seemed as tall as she. She. The woman lost behind the welter of gore that lunge upon her as tidal wave over sandy coast. Ragged flesh glued like some nightmarish Papier-mâché work, artful, bloody, beautiful as great rivulets of water cried crimson tears across exposed flesh, lost in to the fabrics of her clothing.

His lungs drew air, smoke burned and choked him. Korog had been rising once more, his mind demanding more than his body wanted to give. But soon, soon, he was lost.

Pulled in to the black hole, Bapho stretched the lengthy Muun until unraveled like string and thread. Whorling on endlessly, he let loose cry as agony electrified every atom of his body.

"RRRRRRAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!" The pain, the agony, he felt it for all of an eternity. Never-ending, only amplifying.

He was being torn to fragments, grinded down to dust. Insufflated by this bloodstained woman before him like the finest line of the Galaxy's most rare and intoxicating Spice. A cosmic Drug, Bapho gave great howling laugh, the cavern rumbled and more rocks fell. But where was Korog now? Where had he gone?

Things felt peaceful, there in the dark, lost adrift time and space. . . somewhere beyond. Had he died? There was nothing but the empty hollow, total blackness that stretched to infinity and back again. Then all at once eyelids opened, his sight returned, but, it was not his eyes at all.

They were hers.

Korog, he saw what she saw, he felt what she felt. Hopeless pain, ineluctable death. He was drowning, because Matsu had been drowning. The vomit of blood and sediment inundating throat, one lung cried and struggled. Pressing the erupting gasp of surging liquid over the face like warm, thickly oozing, mask that was dark and red.

But when mortality had begun to catch up with the woman, he felt something so, so, much more visceral and horrid. Something so, so, much more tenacious and impressive. He felt the very potency of her power.

By the time they both were returned to the throat of this fetid Beasts burning throat. Korog stood before her. Together they began down in to the darkness, flashes of light sparking through the black as they descended further and further from the ember glow of slag and magma. It was, again, an all-enveloping dark, but their feet seemed to know sure path forward. Was it really them? Or were they guided by the sinister grace of Bapho the Beast?

Korog would reply, with but two simple words to the Necromancer, "I did. . . "

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

She should have killed him right there.

She imagined it. It would have been so easy to break him like kindling, that imagined sensual snap of thin bone echoing in her head. There underneath Bapho she would dig in to the earth with her fingers, blinking through the gore of the illusion he’d destroyed drying on her eyelids. And when his hole was dug she might place him piece by piece, a neat stack of forgotten things arranged in some obsessive compulsion that meant nothing to anyone but here - shaking and t w i t c h i n g, thinking about flies laying their eggs in his flesh. She’d cover him herself, almost lovingly, entombed in his place in the dirt.

Maybe someone else she might have kept the skull, pared the flesh, boiled and left it somewhere on display.
But not this one.
This one she would leave under a volcano no one ever went to.
Like he never existed.
Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, miiiiiiiiiiiiiiine.

She should have.

But curiosity stopped her. How many years had she searched for someone who showed even a tenth of the amount of potential she’d just witnessed? How many apprentices had picked up their first lightsaber and stopped there, so much possibility wasted in the mesmerizing mediocrity of something shiny and loud? Oh, it was a tool just like anything else. But the mind was the bastion, the place all enemies would consider a refuge that could not be touched.

Their gift was the most unnatural perversion, the ultimate violation, and the fear of realizing there was truly nowhere to escape was often all that Matsu needed before an opponent faltered fatally.

That the Muun might have the gift was too interesting a possibility to kill him. At least as things stood.

“Look at something long enough and you’ll find a reason to wish you’d never looked at all,” she said, matter-of-factly. Threats were trite. He did not seem a fool. The message would be clear enough. Try to look in my head, and I won’t let you escape it.

Bapho drew them ever deeper though she got the sense that time and distance were elastic. The geometry was impossible, dizzying. Her arms were burning where metal met flesh, some residual haunt of her recollection. It might have been minutes. It might have been hours. But at the end of the clock’s hand she found herself in some chamber, yawning wide in faux enormity. At its center, low-orange in the glow of Bapho’s stomach bile, sat a holocron. Perfect. Triangular. Quiet.

“Surely it’s not so easy,” she said to the Muun, tilting her head to look at him just out of the periphery of her vision. Just his profile. Despite shared memories she remained unwilling to gaze upon him directly until Bapho spit them out.

[member="Korog Zordaal"]​

 

[Korog Zordaal]

The Muun found no reason to offer retort to the testament of her words, the avowal of her lashing tongue need not require the breath of his lungs. She was the beast that sought the twine of the conscious mind, the Sorceress to coerce the dancing agony and woe. Korog, he found ecstasy in such catastrophic doom and curses. No horror could her voice ever utter that would make this thin vile thing falter his advance in to misery.

His mind had met hers. Somewhere in that eternity they had become one. Somewhere in this Mountain would a trial require them as two.

It did not matter, as they descended lower, driven on by some cosmic abnormality of venomous hate that fed their minds the staggering black vistas of astonishment and familiarity. Bapho did not need to feed or nourish. He drove them onward with vile lust and bitter spite alone.

It did not matter that they thirst and wither, that even despite their odd curiosity in each other that Korog, with eyes vanished adrift the vivid ebon ink, did witness his hands grasping her round curves solidly with ropy fingers. His jaw clenching spiked teeth upon her supple, nude, body. Head rearing and twisting red rivers through the yellow bark of this foul mistress.

Bite by bite he could taste her, cry after cry did he rend and divide the meat and muscle. His body bathing in torrential crimson that pulsed and spatted angrily from gashes and fissures that mutilated her down to bare bone.

A squirming feast that he ought devour for an eternity and back. The thirst of his frail shape quenched for an aeon by the oozing life flow of her tattered framework.

So close had Korog come to repast of Matsu. But suddenly, the small woman spoke, and sight returned to his onyx eyes.

"No, " He breathed immediately, seizing her left shoulder, "I have a feeling this has only just begun."

They had moved forward, in sync once more, daring Bapho to unleash his Will upon they. And the corrupted evil that reside in this mountain did not balk at their gambit.

The Holocron, so close had it been. [member="Matsu Xiangu"] and this slender alien could hear the delicate whisper of it's hideous cry.

But not now.

Not ever again.

Where were they? Not in the Mountain. They were somewhere new. Some place Ancient. Some World Lost. This was a Purgatory. And there, off in the foreground, the crumbling Village of the Damned and Suffering. Perhaps they could help them?