Duel Making of Monsters

[Lirka Ka]

ANOTH

Anoth was a pitiful, broken, world. In those most ancient of days, the planet had been shattered and left desolate. Kept together only by fickle gravity as its trio of earthly masses forged some semblance of a planet. A world made to be mined for anything of value and discarded, a world that existed in abnormality.

Lirka had found some solace in it. A kinship with these floating hunks of stone, metal, and mineral for she too existed in abnormality. It had become a place of meditation and contemplation - for in the triumvirate of masses Lirka had found similarity with the Sith. Here, on the only chunk of the planet capable of supporting life, she could see the path forward. A path of monsters.

Officially, Lirka had arrived here on Ministry of Order business - Anoth was the perfect world to begin the set up for various labor camps and holding cells. Remote, primarily untapped, and for the Once-Sephi’s tastes: away from prying eyes. A perfect place to fill with the poor unfortunate souls that would soon be snatched up by the Order, fuel for the fires of industry heralded by the soon-to-be “Administrator of Incarceration”. In the glowing violent sky of Anoth, black shapes loomed into the atmosphere, Dungeon Ships waiting to be let loose. Here on the ground, spider-like walkers scuttled over the sharp, jagged, mountains lugging large crates of materials and pre-fabricated structures behind them. It was boring work. Necessary work if Lirka was to see her ambitions realized.

The commotion in atmosphere made for a good mask for her the meeting Lirka had beckoned for today. Serina Calis the girl who had earned Lirka’s ire and curiosity in equal measure. Once, a fair time ago, she had asked to the shown the path to become a monster. After deliberation, it would be here, on the dead world of Anoth that Lirka would attempt to reveal the path. In truth, she was far from confident that the girl would even listen to her: yet she would try regardless.

So did Lirka wait, with clawed hands clasped behind her back. She stood upon a barren plateau, half-cape billowing in the wind. The cliff face offered a nice view of the happenings on the world now, a quaint backdrop for matters of philosophy, theology, and bloodshed. For Lirka knew she would come, such was the rarity of a summon from the former-Slavemaster General - a summon from another of the strange creatures that walked the lands of the Sith.

 

[Serina Calis]

Making of Monsters.
Location: Anoth
Objective: Victory.
Allies: ???
Opposing Force: Lirka Ka
Tags: ???

"Deputy."​

The wind of Anoth howled with a voice like tortured metal. It cut across the jagged plateau in screaming gales, dancing around the broken world like a dirge for all that had once lived here. And from that wind, she emerged—Serina Calis, draped in shadow and splendor.

Her cape whipped violently behind her, its violet and pink lining flashing like a wound beneath the stars. The glowing heart-shaped crest upon her armored bodice pulsed gently with a rhythm that felt disturbingly close to breath. Each step she took onto the craggy surface echoed not with weight, but with purpose—as though the world itself were forced to recognize her presence. The Ebon Requiem was slung across her back, its massive haft gleaming with the faint shimmer of etched obsidian and phrik-dust, the curved blade humming faintly in resonance with the Dark Side.

She did not bow. She did not speak at once. Instead, she observed Lirka in silence, like a predator sizing up a rival beast. Her blue eyes shimmered behind her hood, and the smirk that curled across her lips was both amused and venomous.

Finally, her voice came—a silk-slick thing, smooth and laced with unspoken threat, decadent with malice and pleasure both.

"Lirka Ka," she said slowly, deliberately, savoring each syllable like a sommelier appraising a vintage poison. "What a desolate throne you've chosen to crown yourself upon. Fitting, I suppose. Anoth is so deliciously shattered. A pity it isn't sentient—it would weep to be seen in such company."

She drifted closer now, her steps languid and unhurried, eyes dragging over the plateau's jagged cliffs, the scuttling machinery, the looming shapes in the clouds. The air tasted like rust and soot. She smiled wider.

"I must confess," she said, as if whispering to a lover, "I did not come for the view. Nor for the screams of soon-to-be prisoners echoing through these rocks. Though—" she lifted her chin slightly, sniffing the charged air, "—the scent of suffering does rather agree with the complexion."

Her hands finally unclasped as she stepped into proper distance, one arm crossing beneath her chest, the other bent to lightly touch her chin as she regarded Lirka like a philosopher would an animal in a cage.

"You summoned me. Curious." Her voice dipped lower now, more intimate. "We've danced around the edge of blood before, you and I. That lovely little moment on Iridonia, was it? No, Rakata Prime. Ah, but the galaxy turns, and monsters are patient things, aren't they?"

Her fingers fell from her chin, brushing across the rim of her halberd, the way another woman might stroke a beloved pet.

"You've always smelled of control, Lirka. Iron shackles, iron rule, iron soul. But the Dark Side is not forged of iron. It is silk and smoke. A touch. A whisper. A breath on the neck. Control is a cage. Power… is seduction."

She leaned forward just slightly, her voice slipping into a velvet purr, though the edge never left it.

"So then—what is it? A lesson? A lecture? A sermon from the ashen pulpit of Anoth?" Her eyes glinted dangerously. "Or perhaps you've simply tired of torturing the weak and wanted to see if your claws still drew blood from something alive."

There was no illusion in Serina's tone, no courtesy or warmth. Only amusement. Dangerous, dark amusement. She had come not for wisdom, nor for warning. She had come because Lirka's summons was an oddity—and oddities, if not dissected, might grow troublesome. That, and she had to admit: there was something utterly exquisite about watching a monster try to teach someone to become what they themselves could never fully embody.

She took one more step, so that their shadows nearly kissed upon the stone.

"Well, Deputy," Serina said, her voice honeyed poison, "you have me. Now show me this path of yours, if you dare. But know this—if it bores me, I'll leave you in pieces more broken than your world." Her smirk became a grin. "And if it entertains me? I just might let you think you taught me something."

 

[Lirka Ka]

Perhaps Lirka had noticed the whispered arrival of Serina Calis , perhaps she did not. For the Once-Sephi stood as a silent sentinel, gazing out upon the vast, craggy, emptiness of Anoth. When the girl's words finally hit her audio-receptors, Lirka did not even turn. With this being this being the pairs proper meeting thrice, Lirka had come to understand what to expect.

Its why she had called for Calis, after all. Yet, even despite her preparations, Lirka still found the way Calis spoke to be nearly gag-inducing. A temptress's caress was wasted on the cold, heartless, steel of Lirka. Everyone had their faults, Lirka had told herself as an excuse to keep herself at least initially cordial.

To stand in opposition to the purrs and whispers, Lirka spoke with cold certainty.

"You should know there is use in desolation - considering your stockpile within the ruins of Rataka Prime."

Of course, for Lirka, desolation had far deeper meanings than merely staying away from the various prying eyes that littered the Galaxy. It was a holy thing, that slightest of connections to the Primordial Dark to clear her vision and provide that ever illustrious clarity of purpose. Perhaps it was that very clarity that had beckoned the Once-Sephi to herald bloodshed to this world.

"You did not come for the view. But you will look regardless. Beyond the horizon, across the fissure."

It did not take a genius to understand what the Once-Sephi meant, the plateau gave a rather nice view of one of the other chunk of Anoth floating lifelessly - trapped in the gravitational anomaly of the planet's core. Despite that fact, Lirka clarified anyway.

"Anoth-2, they call that chunk in the reports. Lifeless, for now. Desolate and destroyed by whatever ancient cataclysm turned this world into what it is."

After Lirka's small statement, she let Calis prattle on as she always did. Lirka responded in the only way that felt fitting for their inevitable bloodshed - let the young Dark Sider talk to the metaphorical wall that Lirka Ka could turn herself into. After a silent moment of letting Serina's various words hang in the air, Lirka finally spoke again - cold as ever, and of course beginning with a correction.

"Administrator."

She continued on.

"Do not debase yourself so quickly with petty goading. You will get your bloodshed, Serina Calis. It is the inevitability of our meeting now that we are free from the confines of the Malsheem. It is a lesson, if you allow it to be. It is a lecture if the impossible happens and you do not speak. And a sermon is wasted on the ears of someone who can not believe."

Truly, Lirka was quite the odd creature indeed.

"Like it or not, Serina Calis. We are, unfortunately, similar - outsiders within the domain of the Sith. Forged of our own ideas, heretical or otherwise. That makes you an outstanding variable, yet unburdened by biases of internal Sith religious strife. Yet you know the end result of this already, you said on Rataka Prime you wished for me to show the monstrous path, if you are not already on it. As you already stated, Serina Calis, monsters are patient. So let us be patient, no?"

It was not often Lirka didn't immediately jump to bloodshed, evidently her mood had fallen upon contemplative today.

"Only power is real, and the only power is the power to destroy."

A mantra, doled out with a bored tone masked under Lirka's coldness.

"What makes power seduction, what forges the Dark Side of silk? Because you speak pretty words and think highly of yourself? Or something greater, something deeper? Look out upon the view, Serina Calis."

Ever so slightly did Lirka beckon to the desolation of Anoth-2

"What do you see, Girl-Who-Calls-Herself-Weaver?"

It was the eyes of a monster that were truly the most important step on the path.

 

[Serina Calis]

Making of Monsters.
Location: Anoth
Objective: Victory.
Allies: ???
Opposing Force: Lirka Ka
Tags: ???

"Deputy."​

Serina did not answer immediately.

Instead, she turned her gaze toward the floating corpse of Anoth-2, letting the wind tug gently at the hem of her cape. The storm-choked skies above painted the shard-world in flickering bruises of violet and gold, lightning splitting the heavens like veins of divine fury. In that awful theater of cosmic violence, Serina saw nothing new. She had seen worlds die, and seen others beg for death long after they should have collapsed. There was no poetry in the death of planets. Only opportunity.

But Lirka Ka had asked a question. And Serina was always eager to answer.

Her lips parted slowly, a breath of amusement escaping them before she spoke, her voice like wine left to ferment in a forbidden temple—dark, rich, laced with poison.

"What I see," she began, each word a slow unfurling silk ribbon, "is a failed promise."

She stepped toward the edge of the plateau, heels clicking delicately on fractured stone, her hands behind her back as if standing before a painting she admired.

"I see a world once whole—once radiant with possibility, with purpose, with ambition—broken apart by something far greater than it. A force that neither asked for permission, nor offered explanation. And yet…"

She leaned forward ever so slightly, eyes glowing with quiet reverence.

"…it still clings. Pieces adrift, orbiting an invisible wound that pretends to be a center. That, Lirka Ka, is the essence of power. Not destruction. Not annihilation. No. What you fail to see in your righteous clarity is that true power does not end things—it forces them to live differently. Bent. Twisted. Reforged in a shape pleasing only to its wielder."

She turned back, slowly, and her smirk was back again—sharp as broken glass, glinting with secrets.

"You speak of power as destruction, and yet here you stand, dragging crates and machines and slaves across a dead rock in hopes of building something. Something for you. Is that not seduction, darling? Is that not the slow, exquisite corruption of stone and soul alike? You do not destroy this world, you redefine it."

There was a pause. Just long enough to let that sink in. Her voice softened, nearly affectionate.

"I never said seduction was weakness, Deputy. I said it was truth. You misunderstand me, as so many do. I have no need of flattery. What I am is not an act. I speak sweetly because I enjoy the taste of words on my tongue. I corrupt because corruption is the most intimate form of control. And I speak to you as I would speak to any worthy beast—one who understands pain, but not yet pleasure. One who knows steel, but has never felt silk tighten around their throat."

She brought her hand to her chest, resting it gently on the glowing crest of her armor, letting the faint pulse of the dark heart beneath shimmer into view.

"You and I are not the same. That is your first error. You see yourself as an outsider. I see myself as inevitable. You carry your burdens like chains. I wear mine like jewels. You seek power to crush. I seek it to reshape. We both build prisons, yes… but mine are velvet-lined, and they beg to be entered."

Her gaze cut through the air like a dagger now.

"Tell me, Lirka. You speak of monsters. Of patience. Of seeing with monstrous eyes. But do you feel the hunger? The ceaseless ache that gnaws at the root of your spine when something resists your will? Does the flesh burn to be known, to be feared, to be obeyed? Or are you simply playing at being a monster because you were too broken to be anything else?"

She let the question linger, rot in the air like sweetened poison. Then, almost playfully, she shrugged.

"But perhaps this is your version of foreplay. If so, I'm flattered. I truly am. You ask what forges the Dark Side of silk?" Her hand slid slowly along the haft of Ebon Requiem, caressing the etched surface with reverence.

"It is not I who wove the silk, dear Lirka. It was the Force. I am merely what happens when the weave becomes aware of itself."

She turned her eyes back to Anoth-2 one last time, lips pursed in something like thought.

"I see no sermon in the sky. No holy vision in the void. What I see is opportunity. A world broken into pieces. And each one, waiting to be shaped."

Her head tilted. Her smile returned.

"I wonder how you will be shaped, when your piece breaks off the whole."

And with that, Serina Calis fell silent, her presence a crackling storm barely contained in flesh, her words a slow erosion of certainty.

 

[Lirka Ka]

Lirka offered Serina Calis an opportunity even rarer than a summoning, the Once-Sephi pondered her words fully. Another string of belief to be woven into the tapestry - a contemplative mood could subside the violence for a time.

"A failed promise..."

It was an interesting prospect, certainly to some extent Anoth was a failed world. The Dark had tested i, and it had failed...yet it continued on, the transience of a new form. Yet, as Serina spoke Lirka only responded at first with a slow, disappointed, shake of her head. Her words poured out of her helmet, full of consideration and correction.

"Broken apart by Primordial Darkness, which does not ask nor explain. Anoth is a microcosm of the cosmic truths of obliteration, and yet it persists."

When Lirka spoke again, it oozed disappointment.

"You reveal your naivety to me, Serina Calis. Though...I suppose it is not surprising. It is a big galaxy, and you are still of youthfulness. Only power is real, and the only power is the power to destroy. Existence is fleeting. Destruction is eternal. Fundamental tenant of the Way of the Dark, and the supposed-truth that the rotting Sorcerers of Rhand preached. Of which I am not. Yet, as you already note this is an inaccurate belief system. Lest the Sorcerers wipe themselves out entirely and become one with Primordial Darkness."

Her insults fazed the Once-Sephi little this time around. Preparation did wonderful things for fiery tempers, sometimes.

"You are correct, power begets change. You have changed, I am have changed many-a-time, and all the great lords and ladies of history have undergone some meaningful changes. Or suffered obliteration. Why does being mighty demand transience? Because the Dark bids it so. Change staves off the inevitable, change is what allows a world like Anoth to have no life, or cling to existence as it still does in this new, desolate, form."

She continued on with her own prattling.

"What is the truth of seduction? Domination by the mind, rather than domination by might? I fail to see the truth of it, compared to the fundamentality of the end. Seduction is control, and you crave control as all would-be-Sith do? What I do here on Anoth is not seduction, it is domination: they are at times one in the same, but I do not coax this world. I simply do."

Ever so slightly did her temper begin to flare, a small kernel of rage that was yet to explode into something fiery.

"If you and I are not the same, then you must be walking the path of the Sith finally. What an interesting change of pace, no? Or have you simply allowed your arrogance to blind you once again? Inevitability, outsiders, they are not mutually exclusive. You are an outsider, admit it or not. It matters little. I know you are not a Sith, nor will you ever truly become one. So what do I misunderstand, o-great-one, are you not a girl who whispers soft-nothings of uncouth vulgarity to the touch-starved morons that riddle this Galaxy like pests, hoping they will dance to your tune?"

It was a cold, nearly disinterested venom, but venom nonetheless

"What are my burdens, Serina Calis? Since you evidently know me so well. Who understands that I have never tasted pleasure, as if pain and pleasure are not one in the same to the mind enlightened by Darkness"

So did it come to that ever important debate, what was a monster?

"I talk of the monstrous path, because it is the path of true survival. Beyond the scope of what the natural world commands. I feel hunger the likes of which you could not possibly understand, what you describe is the mere machinations of Dark-Siders. Every acolyte feels the same, that drive to be known, feared, respected, obeyed, and so many other things. My hunger is that of transience, the melding of flesh and blood, interwoven with the machinations of all who call this Order home. I can become whatever I wish, for the flesh if malleable. I walk this monstrous path of my own will, not out of whatever misguided attempts you play at to define me."

Another shake of her head. More disappointment.

"You elaborate poorly. No, Serina Calis, Girl-Who-Calls-Herself-Weaver. I see no silk before me. I see but cheap linen."

If she wished to goad, then Lirka would as well. It was a frustrating thing, ultimately. She had hoped to divine something of import from a wayward philosophy, but alas. She knew what the girl wanted, ultimately. And Lirka would give it to her in full, in a moment the hilt at her waist snapped into her hand as the buzzing crackle of her electro-whip flared to life and lashed out at her form. Lirka always craved the first blow. If she were to divine something today, she knew it would be from combat, not from words.

"Unfortunately, I think you will be disappointed."

This was the only way it could've ended. Another test, the Dark would see, and it would judge - and Lirka would see just what this girl was capable of.

 

[Serina Calis]

Making of Monsters.
Location: Anoth
Objective: Victory.
Allies: ???
Opposing Force: Lirka Ka
Tags: ???

"Deputy."​

The electro-whip hissed through the air with a shriek of violence made manifest, splitting the distance between them in a crackling arc of power. It came for her like a serpent eager to sink its fangs—but it met only emptiness.

Serina Calis was no longer where she had stood.

Like a specter woven from smoke and dark delight, she had moved—not hurriedly, not with panic—but with the grace of someone who saw the blade before it was ever drawn. One foot slid back, her frame tilting at an angle that made her silhouette flow like her cape in the wind. The whip screamed past her with a flash of red lightning.

In its wake, there was laughter. Low. Amused. Intimate.

Then Serina reappeared at Lirka's side, closer now, her movement more suggestion than step, the Ebon Requiem sliding into her grasp like a lover returning to its rightful hand. She didn't strike. Not yet. Her voice came first.

"Ahh, there she is…" she whispered, the edge of a smile curling her lips with something wicked. "I was beginning to worry the monster had gone monastic."

Her halberd hummed as it completed its arc into readiness—held at an angle that made it a line between their breathing bodies. The obsidian blade glimmered softly in the murk, its etchings pulsing with light in rhythm to her heartbeat, or perhaps something far older.

"You crave war like a starving thing, and yet you call me naive. I speak of the power that seeps between words, that writhes in silence, that coats the skin like oil. You speak of fists and blood and ruin—as if they are ends unto themselves. But destruction, my dear Administrator, is not the final truth. It is the prelude. It is the door kicked open so that something greater may walk through."

Her tone deepened, rich and slow and maddeningly calm.

"Your 'Primordial Darkness' is an altar to a god you cannot name. You worship entropy like it loves you back. But it does not. It does not care that you suffer for it. You paint obliteration in divine hues, when it is just another brute's tool—like your whip. Like your claws."

Her eyes gleamed like twin sapphires in a firelight dream.

"You think I seduce the weak? Darling, I build them. I show them a reflection of what they might be, and in doing so, I make them dance. Not because I whisper—though I do—but because they want to be reshaped. That is control. Not coercion. Not force. Desire. When a man dies for you with a smile on his lips, that is power. When a world begs to burn because you promised it meaning, that is dominion."

Her halberd twitched slightly, not attacking—just breathing in her hands.

"And as for my place in the Sith Order?" she said with mock concern. "Do you think I ever desired it? That I need their robes or rituals or rites? No. The Sith is a chrysalis. One I may emerge from—or consume from within. I am not on their path. I am the thing that walks beside it, dragging the path itself in chains."

Then, her expression changed—subtle, but chilling. The smile faded. Her voice cooled.

"Do not mistake performance for ignorance, Lirka Ka. I do not need your sermons because I wrote them before you scraped the rust from your armor. You want to believe pain and pleasure are one, and so they are—for those who lack the imagination to tell the difference. You need this suffering to mean something. You cling to your monstrous path because it's the only name you've found that excuses the thing you've become."

She stepped forward.

"And now, you raise your whip like it's a question."

A sudden pivot. She surged forward—not brute force, not speed—but precision, a dancer's grace behind the weight of a war-scythe. Ebon Requiem came in a slow, rising sweep—not to kill, but to challenge. The curved hook of the blade sought Lirka's weapon-hand, not to maim, but to command. To disarm her confidence before it could land another blow.

"If pain is your pleasure, then take it. But understand, Administrator—"

Her voice grew low again, the purr of thunder before the storm.

"—I do not play the monster. I simply wear the skin better than you ever could."

And with that, Serina turned her body with the follow-through, halberd spinning once in a slow spiral of threat. She didn't press. Not yet.

There was something worse than death in her presence—anticipation.

Serina Calis stood ready, regal and radiant in her corruption.

 

[Lirka Ka]

Lirka was completely unsurprised to see her blow miss. It was a statement far more than a proper strike, she knew how these sorts danced. All liquid and flowing wind, a good exercise if not a slightly annoying one. As quickly as the weapon lashed out, it slithered right back to its master. Yet, it was a foolish venture to bother getting closer. Lirka was a brawler at heart, at the end of the day: she cared little to land a blow, yet her metal elbow lashed out regardless.

If the "Weaver" wanted to yammer away, she'd do it on the move.

Yet with it, another head shake of disappointment. Lirka expected too much of her "fellows" evidently.

"It has always been there. You know me less than you think. Theology is wasted on a child as I have been so graciously reminded. Yet, I will amuse myself regardless."

The readiness was met with a similar amusement; Lirka had grown used to lightsabers and the like during these long years in the Sith. But weapons like these? Well, those were Lirka's domain. Perhaps Serina Calis would impress her after all, perhaps she would not. It mattered little. Today was to be a day of simple violence, wearing the veneer of intellectualism.

"War is the litmus test by which nations are tested of their worthiness to continue existence. An aspect of primal truth under Darkness. I call you naive because you are. Words spoken confidently, yet foolishly. A grasping hand close to the truth, destruction is a herald of change. You are at least, somewhat, accurate in that assessment."

A mechanical sneer escaped her helmet.

"You speak of waxing poetic concepts, to feed your ego. Fists, blood, ruin, tangible concepts. Foundational to the Galactic society and perpetuation of life. There are no gods, Serina Calis. As much as they would like you to believe it. There are forces, perhaps. Powerful forces, that are so alien so as to mystical. But there are no gods."

Theology was wasted on stubborn minds, but Lirka prattled on regardless.

"Kanzer Exiles - foundational sect of the Rhandites, since you seem so interested in my devotions to Darkness. Demon worshippers, who venerated such concepts like gods. Inaccurate, and incorrect. Demons are but manifestations of the esoteric aspects of the Force."

Another name.

"The Rhandites worship entropy, as the form of their "Dark". Entropy does not love, and that you consider so little of me to think entropy is capable of love is pitiful. You misunderstand suffering. The entropic forces of the Dark grant the sorcerers foul powers, hence their ability to live on in a nearly undead state of being. But, yet again, simply another aspect of the Force. A power not unseen within the ranks of the Sith. A perversion of the Primordial Dark."

The various cults had been something of an interest, though one Lirka very rarely spoke aloud in this day and age. Serina's calmness was matched with Lirka's own. It nigh teetered on disregard, though Lirka would never be so foolish to disregard a creature like Serina.

"Semantics. The mirror offers a seduction of possibility to those unwilling to take the necessary steps to bring about the change themselves. Weakness, ultimately. You can consider me woefully unconvinced, Serina Calis. They want to be reshaped because of whatever future you show them, but I do not put weight in the statements of oracles. What men have died for you with smiles, Calis? What worlds burn because you have promised them meaning? Or are you a child playing in theory and hypotheticals?"

The coldness and calmness between the two was broken by a hearty mechanical laugh from the Once-Sephi.

"Oh of course, how could I forget. You are the mystical outsider that shall become greater than the Sith themselves! Yet, I see you walking on the Sith's ark, handing out datapads. But, you are not walking their path, of course. Just like the Rhandites. And the Tundites. Or perhaps the Knellites too! I wonder how many children in the academy say the same thing."

She paused, now making no attempt to hide the humor in her tone.

"Of course I suppose I should stop talking, shouldn't I? You wrote my ideas after all! Share me a Sermon, weaver, help this poor lost soul."

And that is what Lirka did. She simply went silent, she hadn't been entirely certain what enlightenment would have been found today. Perhaps another soul on the path, perhaps a new strand for Lirka to add to the weave of whatever ideology formed the foundations of so many a cult-of-the-strong. Yet it was, with maybe the slightest bit of disappointment, that Lirka only found another enemy to add to the long list. Serina Calis was a lost cause, a cause that had yammered enough to earn Lirka's eternal ire. Lirka had walked a long path to preach her "sermons". She would not have it so gleefully disregarded by a child.

Her attempt to command were met with cold, hard, steel. Lirka's free hand had launched out, grasping onto the weapon's shaft with mechanical might, before pushing the thing right back down. This was Lirka's element, the clash of blade upon blade: and an old dog had plenty of tricks tucked away. Once Calis broke away, Lirka let her machete unfurl itself and jump to her hand as the plasma filament roared to life.

While Calis may not have pressed, Lirka did. The whip lashed out again, aiming next to the girl rather than at her, wasting no time to let the first blow even land before moving up with a low sweep of her mighty blade - aiming for the girl's knees.

 

[Serina Calis]

Making of Monsters.
Location: Anoth
Objective: Victory.
Allies: ???
Opposing Force: Lirka Ka
Tags: ???

"Deputy."​

The lash of the whip cracked beside her, searing the air with the sound of thunder barely restrained. But Serina Calis did not flinch. No, she welcomed it. Her posture remained elegant, statuesque—one hand loosely holding Ebon Requiem as the other reached up to draw her hood back, letting the full cascade of her golden hair spill free like liquid light poured down from the stars. The wind caught it, lifting strands in an eerie halo around her face as her expression finally shifted.

Gone was the smirk. Gone was the amusement.

Now, her gaze was narrowed. Predatory. And worse still—interested.

She didn't respond with words at first. Instead, she moved.

The halberd came to life in her hands, not with brute might, but a sinuous elegance, spinning in a perfect arc just above the whip's trajectory. It caught the motion of Lirka's advance before the machete could even howl its promise. The flat of Ebon Requiem's haft met the swing—not to stop it, but to redirect it, catching Lirka's strength and sliding it along a curve that let Serina dance back, barely centimeters away from those brutal, plasma-lined edges. Sparks flew, not from contact, but from tension—gravitational forces of will colliding in proximity.

Then came her reply, breathless not from exertion, but from ecstasy.

"Oh… yes. Now we begin."

She spun the halberd once overhead, grounding its haft with one hand in the cracked plateau stone with a reverberating thud. The obsidian and phrik shimmered in the violet light as she leaned into her next words, every syllable sharp as the blade she wielded.

"You monologue like a rusting preacher in a forgotten temple, Lirka Ka, cobbling together doctrine from old stones and dead names. Rhandites. Knellites. Exiles and cults and the Tund. You wield their ideas like relics in a mausoleum and call it philosophy. But I—I am now. I am the knife that slides between dogma and tears out the rot."

She circled slowly to Lirka's flank as she spoke, letting the wind and the Force guide her steps, keeping just outside the range of that blade—not in retreat, but in rhythm, reading, watching, probing. Her voice remained level, sultry and dangerous.

"You want a sermon? Then listen closely, Administrator. You are not half so clever as you pretend. You wear your rage like armor and expect the galaxy to mistake it for wisdom. But I see through the plating. You claim to embrace destruction, yet you build. You invoke the Primordial Dark, yet lecture on the nuances of cult ideologies like a particularly bitter librarian. Your whip lashes, but your mind drags behind it."

She smiled now—not with derision, but promise.

"You ask what men have died for me? What worlds I've bent? And yet, I have done it without lifting a finger to announce it. Because the most profound change, Lirka, happens in silence. In whispers in the dark. In the slow erosion of certainty. I do not need to rule the galaxy to own it. I need only to make it crave something it doesn't understand—and then tell it what it has always wanted."

Another flare of motion—Ebon Requiem snapped upward into a narrow parry, catching a feint Lirka had barely begun. The contact sent a vibration along the shaft, and Serina's fingers sang with it. Her grin deepened.

"You are force incarnate. I am inevitability. Do you see the difference yet?"

A flick of her halberd sent its hooked edge downward, not to cleave, but to hook behind Lirka's heel—an attempt not to wound, but destabilize. Serina pressed close again, her face inches from the armored plating, her voice a dark caress.

"Your flesh may be malleable, Lirka Ka… but your mind?" Her tone dropped to a chilling whisper. "So terribly rigid. So breakable."

And then she was gone again—vanishing into a blur of cloak and motion, reappearing a few paces off to the side, halberd twirling once in hand as she pointed it low and extended her free arm outward, fingers splayed like a dancer poised for her next step.

"I'll give you what you want, you stubborn, armored wretch. Violence, yes. But more than that—clarity. Because unlike you, I don't need to win to be right. I only need to leave a scar."

She gestured slowly to her temple with a gloved fingertip.

"Up here, where it matters."

Then, with no further warning, she attacked—not with brute strength, but with a sudden, spinning lunge, the halberd's blade carving upward in a deceptive, rising crescent toward Lirka's left shoulder. Her movement flowed with impossible grace, the halberd a ribbon of destruction drawn through the air, its luminous etchings lighting the battlefield like glyphs written by some obscene hand.

There would be blood. Or metal. Or both.

And through it all, Serina Calis smiled, not because she believed she would win—but because she knew she had already begun.

 

[Lirka Ka]

For a moment ever so brief, Lirka pondered if she she remove her helmet so the pair could brawl face to face. Just as quickly did she decided that was a stupid idea. Let the flesh be a thing for her to batter at till something bled, she could remained the cold certainty of steel today.

And perhaps in rarity, Lirka actually listened. She pondered, she digested the words Serina Calis put before her in that attempt to perhaps glean some knowledge of actual worth. Yet, in even greater rarity, Lirka only let a slow mechanical sigh hum through the air.

“That wasn’t one of mine.”

As the halberd’s hook sought some quarry within the Once-Sephi’s footwork. Lirka gave it the slightest acknowledgement, perhaps had she not been a power-suit wielding brute she would have stumbled. But the thing only let the clink of metal upon metal. Her boots were a thing closer to metal bricks than feet. Yet, Lirka did not respond with violence yet. She waited, as you so often did with dancers.

“Me. Me. Me. You give poor sermons.”

Well, she had gleamed some sort of enlightenment today. Serina Calis was a lost cause - just another dark sider to add to the list of foes within the Order. Another ideology of potential divergence axed off the list, though Lirka noted the little bits and bobs that had fit into her research. Today would be a day of violence, not learning though.

As Calis brought in her strike, Lirka quickly shifted one of her Beskar gauntlets to move in front of the sweeping blow. And did the only thing that seemed reasonable, pushing her mighty metallic bulk forward to shoulder check her newest of foes. Serina Calis should’ve found some pride in this all, really. She had succeeded in shutting Lirka up, at least for a time. Such was the disdain that had bubbled to life within her wretched form. The hatred of a nonbeliever, rarely did Lirka “give into the hype” of the various lords and ladies, and this had ended up no different. Yet, Calis had that wonderful way with words to truly invoke Lirka’s wrath.

 

[Serina Calis]

Making of Monsters.
Location: Anoth
Objective: Victory.
Allies: ???
Opposing Force: Lirka Ka
Tags: ???

"Deputy."​

The shoulder came with all the subtlety of a meteor. A slab of cold, crashing fury that bore down like inevitability wrapped in armor and scorn. It was not elegant, nor clever—no twist of finesse nor poetic duel of blades. It was violence in its basest form, and it hurt.

Serina didn't resist it—she let it hit her.

The impact sent her reeling, her boots skidding backward across the shattered stone of the plateau as a dull crack echoed through her ribs. Her body folded momentarily with the force, cape billowing out like dark flame behind her. Pain lanced up her side, sharp and immediate—a bruised blossom blooming beneath her armor's ornate beauty.

And then she laughed.

It bubbled from her lips like dark wine, low and rich and disturbingly pleased. A purr of agony turned to amusement. She straightened, slowly, her spine unfolding like a drawn bow. Her blonde hair had tousled from the blow, the golden strands spilling wild across her face, and her lips glistened with the smallest smear of blood—bitten upon impact. Her tongue swept it away, savoring the copper with a soft, delighted sigh.

"My dear Administrator," she said, voice husky with reverent thrill, "you hit like a woman who's finally realized she's not going to win the argument."

The halberd spun once in her hand—not as a threat, but an extension of her body, a gesture as effortless as breath. Serina took a languid step forward, one hand rising to smooth her hair back with composed grace, even as her other continued to cradle the massive weapon like a dancer preparing her final, sweeping movement.

"You accuse me of 'me, me, me,' yet you summoned me here. You struck the first blow. You raised your whip, your blade, your voice—and now that I refuse to sing from your hymnbook, you snarl." Her smile sharpened. "Tell me, Lirka Ka—what part of you wasn't this all along?"

She stepped again, slow, fluid, feline.

"Do not speak to me of poor sermons. You are no temple. You are a tomb—stuffed with failed ideologies, the bones of forgotten gods, and your own bloated certainty choking the altar. And you—you—dare to call me rigid?"

There was a flicker now—her voice lowering to something more venomous, more deliberate. Not the sultry invitation she often wielded like a dagger, but a precise, analytical cruelty honed to pierce.

"You wear steel because you cannot wear skin. You wrap yourself in philosophy because your soul is too quiet to scream on its own. All that power, all that strength—devoted to proving your truth by hammering it into others. You seek obedience, Lirka. I? I cultivate desire. And that, Administrator, is why I will win—not today, not here, not in this brawl of beasts and brutes, but when the world forgets your sermons and still whispers mine in bedchambers and war rooms alike."

Her stance shifted suddenly.

Gone was the relaxed coil.

The halberd snapped forward—not to slash, not to cleave, but to entwine. The hooked end lunged for Lirka's whip arm, aiming to twist and pull—not disarm, but disrupt. Serina pressed inward, not with force but flow, circling once more, her body moving like ink across water.

"I struck a nerve," she breathed. "Oh, you hate me now. Good. Good. Let that hatred be the first real feeling you've had in years."

She ducked beneath another anticipated sweep, her halberd gliding under and up—feinting toward Lirka's flank but spinning wide at the last moment, tracing a burning arc through the air instead of committing to contact. She didn't need to land a blow. Not yet.

She wanted to burn the rhythm into her memory.

"You sought me out for meaning. And when I showed you your own reflection, cracked and flickering, you did what all zealots do—called it heresy and reached for your blade. Predictable. Pitiful. But oh… so very fun."

Another sidestep. Another whisper.

"I will scar you, Lirka Ka. Not with blade, not with fire. With doubt."

And then she moved again, her halberd sweeping like a ribbon caught in the wind, the elegant death-dance of the Weaver in full.

And she was still smiling. Always smiling. Even as the plateau cracked beneath them and the Dark Side howled with joy.

 

[Lirka Ka]

At the end of the day, no matter how much fancy bladework Lirka practiced, or whatever little Sith tricks she could pick up and remold into her own brutish image. Lirka lived in the primal scrap of it all, animals set upon each other in savagery. The violent simplicity upon which so much was built, sometimes a crude hammer was more effective than the finest of blades. She had trained herself to dance between both in her long years.

Beneath her helmet, Lirka rolled her eyes. Giving herself a kick in the ass for thinking this could have gone any other way. Primordial Darkness allowed mistakes, it was mistakes that either killed you, or allowed you to grow into something greater. Time would tell if Anoth would be her grave, though with so much work still be done - Lirka had little intent of letting this life be snuffed out and the next face begin.

By all accounts, Lirka should not have dignified Serina Calis was a response. But alas, Lirka enjoyed to talk a bit too much.

"And here, you were just calling me Deputy. Interesting."

Lirka strummed over the girl's words barely, she had decided they were not worth great consideration. An unfortunate string of potentiality cut, though one that the Once-Sephi felt no great burden departing with. The power of self was a very real thing, and one Lirka drank from heavily. Yet, it was a thing to be tempered. Perhaps Calis would understand as she did, perhaps she would not. To Lirka it all mattered very little now, her bout here had been a failure. And with words that danced closer to boredom instead of scorn - she'd tell her as such.

"A mistake, admittedly. I had hoped there would be some...substance...behind all those words you speak. Alas, I was fooled. Yet, I suppose I can understand enjoying the sound of your own voice."

Lirka watched the hook lash out for her hand, the tightening of servos followed as she let the thing be guided. It was far from the most important tool in her possession, a quick slash of the blade met with Serina's expected duck. A slimy opponent, willy and fluid. Lirka had seen them all before. Lirka granted the girl one last curtesy, a shake of the head and a response.

"No, Serina Calis, I do not hate you. There is nothing in you worth hating."

With that, Lirka let her helmet crackle and buzz as static took over her hearing. Lirka would let herself be lost in the dance, what use was there talking to a wall? Her strikes were fancy, Lirka could at least offer her newest of foes that. But she remained as unimpressed as ever. Noting the growing cracks, Lirka followed the destructive nature of this world. A quick twirl of her blade to send molten slag between them, another impression of bulk shot out a foot to try and stomp on her opponent's own - though in truth, her intent was but to shatter the earth beneath them even more.

 

[Serina Calis]

Making of Monsters.
Location: Anoth
Objective: Victory.
Allies: ???
Opposing Force: Lirka Ka
Tags: ???

"Deputy."​

The foot came down with thunderous force.

Stone screamed. The plateau split, a jagged seam tearing open beneath them with the sound of a world exhaling its buried fury. Serina leapt back—not in fear, but with grace, her form flickering across the edge of the collapse like a specter skipping stones across death. Dust plumed, and for a moment the battlefield vanished beneath a veil of gray.

And in that moment, she stopped.

Amidst the settling silence, where most would press the advantage or stagger from the blow, Serina Calis simply stood—half-shrouded in the mist of fractured Anoth, her form outlined in violet firelight and ruin. The Ebon Requiem rested at her side, not as a weapon but a totem. Her breath came slow. Measured.

She tilted her head.

"No hatred? How… pragmatic of you."

She lifted her hand.

The bruises beneath her armor, the hairline fracture laced across her ribs, the sharp ache in her side where the earlier shoulder-check had bruised flesh and bone—it was all real. Felt, known. Embraced. Serina did not recoil from pain. She invited it. But what came next was not a suppression of that pain. It was something far more… perverse.

The air around her hand shimmered—not with the red venom of the Dark, nor the blue gold of Light—but something else.

Violet. Fuchsia. Pulsing like a slow, decadent heartbeat. A fusion of beauty and sickness, of serenity and rot. It bled from her palm in tendrils of twisted benevolence, a corrupted hymn that hummed against the Force like a siren's melody chanted underwater. The Light—once pure—now clung to her like a possessive lover, in love with its own defilement.

The wound along her ribs knit itself shut. Not through sterile cleansing, but with tendrils of shimmering pink that writhed like petals closing over a venomous bloom. The bruises faded beneath her armor, not healed by mercy, but by adoration. The Light did not punish her for the Dark within—it desired it.

Her eyes glowed with it. Not yellow. Not red. But something far stranger. Like moonlight spilled through stained glass.

And she smiled again.

"Oh, Lirka… You called this a mistake. I call it revelation."

She let the glow play along her skin, along the angles of her jaw and the corner of her lips, until it faded back into her body like a tide returning to sea. Her voice was softer now, slower—less mocking, more reverent.

"You see brute force and call it clarity. You see a lack of interest and confuse it for wisdom. But what I just showed you… that was heresy, wretch. Blasphemy made flesh. A gift from the Force that does not ask what side I serve, but opens its legs to whoever dares to touch it properly."

She took a step forward. Not as a fighter, but as something else now—a phenomenon, walking in flesh.

"Tell me, did your books speak of this? Did your doctrines warn of wounded creatures loved by Light and Dark alike? No. They would not. Because they fear what cannot be defined."

Another step.

"I do not need you to be impressed, Lirka Ka. That would be far too… common. But I wonder."

She brought her fingers to her lips and exhaled a breath of violet mist, letting it spiral upward into the air like incense off a sacrificial flame.

"Does it frighten you, just a little, that I heal without remorse? That I take what should purify and turn it to pleasure?"

Her voice dipped lower, intimate once again.

"You retreat into silence, and that is fine. We can make violence our new dialect. But know this…"

Her hand lowered, the last shimmer of her corrupted healing fading to nothing.

"I will speak again when you are on your knees, not in pain… but wonder. And when that moment comes—when you finally see me—I will not speak to break you, Lirka Ka. I will speak to invite you."

Then, as if the moment had never happened, Serina surged forward again—halberd rising, not in defense, but in devotion to the dance. The corrupted glow still echoed faintly through her armor's lines, like veins beneath porcelain skin.

And in her wake trailed not shadow… but the color of sins given divine permission.

 

[Lirka Ka]

Static buzzed in Lirka's ears as if it was music. The jumble mess of nothingness to tether Lirka to her primeval "god", a rhythm of chaos to dance to between in the rancor of battle. Meaning had drifted away in the tumult of Anoth, for the Once-Sephi this had become a matter of pure, simple, and animalistic violence. Power clashing against power. Strength tested against strength. The crude contest upon which reality had been founded under Primordial Darkness. It was calming in its dullness, and Lirka craved a calm moment in the storm of her existence.

Yet it was unfortunate that Serina Calis was as talented at yapping as she was. Every other word or so clipped in to glorious nothingness in Lirka's hearing, demanding her to pay at least some attention to what the girl was saying. However, it was the sight before her that mattered more, healing most foul. Some may have recoiled, some may have cried out in rage, some may have felt their spirit drain to see what blows had been landed disappear in flesh that reknit. Not Lirka Ka. Not she who walked a path most unnatural.

Beneath her helm, she let out a smile ever so small. Talking to herself more than actually responding in any meaningful way. Not yet at least.

"Good."

Perhaps they would fight till Anoth's distant sun turned, locked in eternal stalemate. Lirka was no stranger to healing. She had watched Carnifex reknit himself, in her own twisted ways Lirka had reknit herself time and time again. And now, Serina Calis had done the same. It was truth most primordial, and Lirka loved nothing more than to be proven right. The eternal struggle, the depths upon which a monster will fall to defy the natural of order of things to defy Primordial Darkness and its grasping deathly talons.

The specifics of it, well they were simply lost on Lirka's form. She was a void. Light, dark, the force. They existed in stories, things to be read about and understood like any other philosophy. They only tugged at her in pitiful little inklings of feeling. But she knew it felt her, it felt everything she inflicted upon the living world. And if the pain she brought upon Serina Calis heralded the perversion of reality that Darkness craved? So be it.

Piecing together the various half words as best she could, Lirka heard something about "light" "dark" "doctrines" and "defined". She hadn't expected the girl to care much for those, but idly she prattled out another bit of niche philosophy she had picked through from all the texts and tombs she had bothered to look at.

"The Tund believe the force to be a combination of light and dark known as the Unity. An odd thing, considering the Eternal Struggle - though likely not entirely inaccurate."

She spoke like something resembling a bored scholar, all these little piecemeal ideas blended together with Lirka's own woefully poorly described ideologies. Though, another word dribbled through the battle. Frightened. Lirka did not need to hear the rest to understand what the goading would entail, and Lirka of course had a mantra at the ready.

"Lirka Ka knows no fear."

Being delusional helped with that. Glowing lenses watched the halberd's rising swing, Lirka twisted her arm some - she was giving her an opening. Letting the weapon taste blood as it cut through the lesser-armored portions of the suit, that sickly chemical smell bursting into the air as whatever wretched liquid flowed through Lirka was set free. She knew she needed but a moment for it begin clotting, to force the weapon to stick ever so slightly. To stall for a moment.

And a moment is all it would take for Lirka to let her whip crackle out once again, aimed low in an attempt to wrap itself around Calis's leg. And test just how conductive her armor was.

 

[Serina Calis]

Making of Monsters.
Location: Anoth
Objective: Victory.
Allies: ???
Opposing Force: Lirka Ka
Tags: ???

"Deputy."​

The halberd tasted the flesh beneath metal. Serina felt it—that delicious, sickening moment when steel gave way to something warmer, wetter, and far more intimate. The scent hit her first—chemical, unnatural, some horrid cocktail of whatever ghastly substitute flowed through Lirka's monstrous veins. It wasn't blood, not truly. But oh, how it played the part.

The blade slid in… and then caught.

It was subtle. The kind of resistance you don't notice until it's already too late. Just a heartbeat. Just long enough. And in that heartbeat, Serina's eyes narrowed—just a fraction—just enough to betray what most would mistake for pain.

But Serina Calis did not bleed. She bloomed.

She felt the crackle before she saw it—felt the air change. That low, feral hum of energy pulling taut like a bowstring. The whip lashed low, the predator's trick, looking for a leg to tether—perhaps to burn, perhaps to humble. Perhaps even to drag her down.

But Serina Calis was already rising.

Her free hand, until then poised and ornamental, snapped outward. The glow that had once shimmered with corrupted benevolence now convulsed into something raw and divine in its wickedness. Gone was the slow heartbeat of amethyst Light. What erupted now was lustful fury. A bolt of violet lightning coiled across her fingertips—at first slow, caressing, as though the Force itself were asking her what she wanted.

She answered.

The air around her collapsed.

A vortex of crackling Force Lightning exploded outward from her upraised hand—no elegant thread, no surgical lance. This was a wave, a tempest, a cataclysm, channeled through her with joyous, wretched delight. Violet surged into white-hot fuchsia, arcing in jagged, sensuous branches that flayed the air itself, searching for anything—everything—that dared to be solid.

It wasn't rage that powered her. It wasn't fear, or even hatred.

It was ecstasy.

"Touch me again," she hissed through the tempest, her voice crackling alongside the lightning, "and I'll show you the sound your soul makes when it begs for mercy in a language it doesn't yet know."

The electricity whipped and writhed across her armor, her skin, her hair—making her appear less like a Sith and more like some forgotten goddess of ruin and temptation, reborn in a storm of her own making.

And yet—through the surge, through the madness—her form was controlled. Not wild. Not berserk. She guided it, molded it. Danced with it. As if the lightning weren't a weapon but a lover, coaxed into climax.

She pivoted mid-step, using the explosive backlash to spin her body away from the whip's grasp—twirling like a ribbon caught in the eye of a hurricane, Ebon Requiem sliding free from Lirka's suit with a sound not unlike a kiss departing flesh.

The ground beneath her shattered from the discharge, a web of fractured stone now radiating outward like a blooming flower of violence. Dust, ash, and energy clouded around her—but the silhouette remained: arms spread, halberd lowered, lightning dancing across her limbs in the afterglow.

And as the echoes of her storm faded, her voice returned—low, languid, dripping in velvet once again.

"Do you see, Lirka Ka? You wound me… and I become poetry."

She smiled. A terrible, beautiful thing.

"Now come, darling beast. Let us make each other divine."

And her stance shifted—welcoming. Daring. Tempting the next blow. Because Serina Calis did not flee the storm.

She was the storm.

And she wanted Lirka to drown in her worship of it.

 

[Lirka Ka]

Some would have recoiled from the blow. The feeling of a blade sinking within flesh, nerves firing. Pain. But Lirka Ka did not fear pain, nor did she shun wounds. Suffering was the foundation upon which the Galaxy was built, and Lirka was a beacon of suffering. She inflicted it, she bore it. Yet, perhaps it was the sensation of wretched “blood” and malign flesh already beginning the process of healing that made her so welcoming to dancing upon the edge of obliteration.

But the halberd’s strike was merely precursor to true agony. The force had been turned from healing, to destruction. Lirka’s bout had failed, flipped against her. For the dark plates of the Once-Sephi were most certainly conductive. The flash of energy, and Lirka could feel it. Lightning arcing across her body, the misery of parts of her undersuit melting and binding themselves to her flesh as armored plates heated and began to gleam with the orange hue of warmth. Yet, Serina Calis would learn something this day. Not of theology, or grand philosophical strokes. She would learn history this day, simple history - of a beast nearly forgotten.

Lirka was a monster, not made for the Eternal Struggle of light and dark. But the cannibalistic fighting of a civil war she missed. Roaring cries of pain echoed through the horizon, but something clacked in the armor. Upon her back, something popping out from a compartment, drawing the electricity that arced across her body into itself. And so came another. And another. And another.

Lirka Ka, Slavemaster General, Administrator of Incarceration, Liar, Murderer, Scum had been made to kill Sith who did follow the right creed.

Hunched over some, as Calis’s barrage finally ceased. Crackling arcs of electricity still firing upon the conductors that had appeared from her back. Lirka’s metallic form quickly snapped back into straightness, an arm shooting up as she released the energy she had stored up upon her back in crude mockery of the force. There was no grand designs her, of lustful powers, or calling upon primal hatred. It was brutish, simple, befitting of the crude warrior who wielded it: merely the transfer of energy, from one, back to another.

Lirka could feel the earth rumble beneath them in the cataclysm of their brawl. But she paid it little mind, not yet. Anoth would not give way, not yet, Lirka simply wouldn’t allow it. An exerted huff escaped her lips as her little contraption returned to its housing. Serina Calis’s words fell on deaf ears now, for Lirka had allowed herself to be lost in the static. Nothingness would give her the clarity she so desired. And so did she prattle, to no one but herself.

“Peace is a lie.”

She rushed forward, as she so often did. Always pressing the offensive. Her blade lashing out, aiming for the woman’s midsection.

“There is but chaos.”

A feint. Quickly did the blade change its course. A strike not to kill, for killing would defeat the point. But to mark, to leave a wound. She twisted the thing as best she could, for all Lirka desired to see was a wound upon that girl’s ever-smug face.

 

[Serina Calis]

Making of Monsters.
Location: Anoth
Objective: Victory.
Allies: ???
Opposing Force: Lirka Ka
Tags: ???

"Deputy."​

The blade came swift—a song of steel and hatred—and Serina welcomed it.

There was no time to dodge, no space to slink like silk through the storm. The crude feint twisted at the last instant, and then came the pain—a true strike, clean and undeniable. It kissed her just beneath the jawline, sliding across the perfect, porcelain skin of her cheek and scoring down toward the curve of her neck.

Metal met flesh.

There was no scream. No sharp inhale. Only a slow, delighted exhale, like a lover's breath in the dark. The pain was exquisite, searing and jagged, and it left its gift behind—a wound, finally, carved upon the temple of her own divine self-image. Blood welled, dark and crimson, but where it dripped, it shimmered—tinged with violet, like ink in water touched by moonlight.

Her body reeled, thrown backward by the force of the blow. Her knees buckled, her legs momentarily faltering beneath the sudden loss of rhythm. She fell to one hand, Ebon Requiem dragging beside her like a wounded thing.

And she laughed.

Low. Shaky. Intoxicating.

"Oh, Lirka," she rasped, eyes gleaming through strands of blood-slicked gold hair, "that... was almost intimate."

Her teeth flashed, bared in something between agony and ecstasy, and for a moment, it wasn't clear if she was weeping or smiling—or both. The pain wasn't an interruption. It was a permission slip. An invitation for something far deeper.

Because pain, to Serina Calis, was never the end. It was the threshold.

Her fingers curled against the stone, her body rising again, slow but deliberate—and then, with a gasp like a drowning woman remembering she had gills, she summoned the Force.

It did not come in a blaze. No brilliant fanfare.

It came like pressure—a swelling, building thrum of power beneath her skin, like the vibration of a temple drum just before the chant begins. Her aura burned brighter now, ignited from within—not healing this time, no. Not seduction. Not elegance. This was will, sheer and incandescent. A ripple of distorted air swept from her form, warping light into hues not meant for mortal eyes.

Force Valor.

It poured into her bones like ambrosia, making her limbs light and her heartbeat deafening. Her body hummed with acceleration, senses sharpening to impossible clarity. Pain dulled—not because it vanished, but because it was beneath her now. A minor song playing under a symphony of righteous, radiant corruption.

And in that moment, she was no longer flesh.

She was conviction incarnate.

Her voice came low. Hungry.

"Do you think pain defines you, Lirka Ka?" she whispered, stepping forward with newfound speed, her form a streak of violet and shadow. "You wear it like armor, wrap yourself in misery as though it gives you meaning. But all I see is a coward dressed in suffering, too afraid to taste what power could be if she let go of her chains."

Her hand rose. The one unarmed. The one painted in her own blood. And her fingers clenched.

The Force bent around it.

A terrible, unnatural gravity pressed inward. Not from above. Not from below. From everywhere.

She tried to Force Crush her.

Not her armor. Not her blade. Her. Lirka Ka. The monster beneath the metal. The rot and hate and violence she wore like a crown. The thing that thought it was untouchable. Serina sought it now, with precise, horrifying clarity—probing with the darkened pulse of her will, with the caress of the Force so twisted it no longer knew mercy.

It was not destruction she offered.

It was dominion.

"Let me in," she growled, voice trembling with effort and desire. "Let me hold you. Let me show you what it feels like when even your own bones are mine to command."

Lightning crackled along her free arm, not expelled, but held in restraint—pure power coiling with nowhere to go. Her hair whipped behind her, cape billowing in unnatural wind, and still her fingers remained locked in that terrible grasp.

Her smile was gone.

What remained was hunger. Pure, endless, bottomless hunger.

For control.
For power.
For the soul beneath the steel.

"Break for me, Lirka. Or become something worth breaking."

And her grip tightened. Not on the weapon. Not on the body.

But on the will.

 

[Lirka Ka]

Beneath her helm, for only the briefest of moments did Lirka smile. A wound for a wound. If only for a moment, they would share the touch of steel ripping into flesh. Lirka had other matters on her mind, of cosmic potentiality swirling in front of her mind. As if she were but a girl again on Thustra, as if those memories were her own. Weaving away with all manners of threads, colors resplendent and varied. Yet today, what should have been pleasant nostalgia had been warped in the guise of cults, darkness, and the through-lines of ideology upon which Lirka deemed reality founded. That girl in her mind was not here. Only the monster was real.

The static roared in her ear like a thunderstorm, some would have found it maddening but to Lirka the nuisance of it all had become pleasant. And Lirka spoke again, in ironic response though entirely unintentional. She heard only the words from her own lips.

“In chaos, there is suffering.”

Lirka had suffered greatly in life, it was true. She would suffer more in the years to come, for comfort was to invite stagnation. Serina Calis for her probing jabs, twisting words intent to weaken the soul. She had landed at something nearly true. Lirka was a coward. Misery, suffering, all of it had given Lirka meaning. Deep, primordial meaning. Because…as the saying goes.

Suffering builds character.

“In suffering. We become transient.”

She had been right, and Lirka foolish. They were not the same. They could never be the same. It was an impossibility. Serina Calis let loose her chains, called upon perversions of the force to enhance herself. But Lirka did not have those changes. Lirka was a solidarity island, in a sea impossibly vast.

The force had been the path of power for so many, and those mighty souls channeled it in such a way as if to become gods. One day, the woman who stood before her may have joined that pantheon. But Lirka Ka did not believe in gods, nor messiahs, or prophets. For what use were they to her? The Force did not flow through her, not truly. Only in those proxy of little things that tethered her to this world. Her armor. Her weapons. The little mechanisms that churned in her body, bonding-joints, filters, and valves. Of Carnifex’s wretched ichor, whose power had allowed the Dark Side of the Force to be felt in her body once more for but a moment. A moment so brief, yet so enlightening.

And Serina Calis, for all her might, all her power, all her twisted strength, endless hunger, her hubris. For all the suffering that too, had transformed her. Would see what the Once-Sephi learned within the halls of Woostri.

Lirka Ka was alone. Always.

It was if trying to crush water within a fist, slipping, dribbling out. It did not matter how twisted the force had become, how great this would be dark-lady could pervert it. Lirka Ka, the soul beneath the armor was a void. Devoid of the Force. Serina Calis corrupted nature, turned it to her own ends. But Lirka Ka was simply…other.

“In transience, we become strong.”

And she pounced upon it, for her bones were free. It was all she needed to give a crucial wake-up call, her arms swung out in crude brutality: metals fists intent slam against the side of the girl’s head, to rattle her brain, ring her ears, break concentration.

“In strength. We survive.”

Yet, in the scuffle. The first fissure began to form, and rocks tumbled from the edges. Anoth was a fragile place, and the clash of titans was not a gentle affair.

 

[Serina Calis]

Making of Monsters.
Location: Anoth
Objective: Victory.
Allies: ???
Opposing Force: Lirka Ka
Tags: ???

"Deputy."​

The world broke before Serina's will did.

But her will met something alien—something wrong.

Her outstretched hand, clenched with all the promise of domination, with the power of corrupted radiance behind it, met… nothing. Not resistance. Not protection. Just emptiness. The Force reached, and there was no soul to ensnare. No web to tangle. No thread to pull.

Just the void.

Her breath hitched, eyes narrowing, not in fear—but recognition. The corrupted Light and the defiled Dark that coursed through her met no opposition, because there was no tether. Lirka Ka was not simply beyond her reach.

She was outside it.

For a moment, Serina stood still. In that stillness, she found… clarity.

And then came the retaliation. Crude. Brutal. So wonderfully Lirka.

A swing of metal—inelegant, fierce, unrefined—rushing toward her skull like the judgment of some forgotten titan god. The Force offered no insight. Her eyes were already swimming with violet light, blood trickling down her cheek, and now the world itself shook beneath them.

But Serina Calis moved. Not with grace. Not with poise. With desire.

Her body bent backward, spine folding like a reed in wind, her golden hair whipping behind her as the armored fist passed through the space her skull had occupied moments before. She dropped low, knees touching broken stone, her halberd falling to one hand. And then—

She twisted.

A dancer's spin, but born of chaos. Her leg swept out in a vicious arc, not at the legs, no—at balance. Her whole body pivoted like a pendulum given purpose, trying to slide beneath that monstrous form and erupt behind it, where strength could not face her head-on.

Ebon Requiem followed, trailing her like a black comet drawn through orbit. Its hook shimmered in the dusty air, gleaming like a predator's fang.

And as she rose from the spin, one hand trailing the floor, she pirouetted upright with a motion that was half-waltz, half-warfare. The halberd flipped in her grip, turning from an extension of her hand into a blade gripped like a banner.

"Of course you are void," she said, her voice not breathless but reverent, as if marveling at a corpse that refused to rot. "You are the graveyard where gods come to die."

She stepped lightly back, regaining her rhythm as she slid across the breaking plateau, feet gliding with a tactician's poise, and her voice rose with her.

"You mistake emptiness for power. You wield nothingness like a crown. But I see you, Lirka. I know your kind. You do not reject the Force because you are above it. You reject it because it never chose you."

Her words dripped with venom, but also awe. There was something sacred, even in Lirka's rejection. Something fascinating.

"You endure because you are denied. Everything. Even divinity."

She raised her halberd again, the blade trailing pink sparks as if the corrupted Force still clung to it like perfume.

"I become beautiful in power. You become ugly in defiance."

And her lips parted in a smile—not cruel, not mocking, but mad.

"Let's see how long you last before your defiance becomes begging."

Then Serina charged.

Not cautious. Not coiled. Relentless. Her form was a streak of armor and corruption, her halberd swinging with violent elegance—sweeping, thrusting, testing.

She no longer sought to dominate Lirka's soul.

She sought to overwhelm her flesh.

Let the Force falter. Let it recoil from the void. Serina Calis would not.

Because corruption…
is patient.

And if the divine cannot possess Lirka Ka—
Then it will bury her.

 

[Lirka Ka]

"In survival. We are free."

A simple mantra, an almost parodical code - not a particularly surprising fact, considering the decades upon decades Lirka had spent among the Sith and their offshoots. One picked up a thing or two after seeing a thing or two. With a code spouted, Lirka allowed the static in her ears to die away - perhaps foolishly, perhaps for her own amusement. She would actually humor the words of Serina Calis once more.

Maybe, in some little corner of her mind she wanted the girl to get it. But Lirka knew that might as well have been an impossibility, dark revelation did not come so simply by words. Only by action most cruel, by the uncaring annihilation brought about by the call of Primordial Dark. With the clang of her fists colliding, Lirka's emotionless lenses watched Calis's nimble form dance between her armored legs. She twisted, always quicker than an armored goliath like herself should have been.

Yet she did not strike, not yet.

Only perpetual disappointed as the first of Serina's words reached her ears.

"Serina Calis, there are no gods. Just men."

Just the self, the total assurance of ones own abilities that would propel them beyond nature itself. That would set them upon the monstrous path to transform themselves into something greater than what they were born as. To evolve into the strong. Lirka could feel the earth begin to give way under her feet, slowly but surely the frail rock of Anoth would collapse under their clash. Lirka would savor the violence as long as she could.

"You do not get it. Though I suppose, how could you? Nothingness like a crown? Acting as if there is power in my void? Foolish. Ignorant, even. I have felt the Force before, I was born with it. It flowed through me like water, and with the power of my Marriage I tasted it once more. That darkness that flows within the Sith. The Force is merely a distraction, a crutch, it blinds the senses and dilutes the Self in the cosmic force of the All."

Lirka spoke not with arrogance, not this time. Her tone bordered on nostalgic, reverent for those darker things in the universe.

"Since you enjoy mirrors. That is what the void is, ultimately. A dark mirror, yet one without a reflection. You see only what you wish to see in the void, you see only the path to becoming that which you truly desire. Unburdened. Vision, abyssal and clear."

And when Lirka let the last word slip out of her mouth, it was not with venom, not laced with the scorn that so many of her words dripped in. Her words were simple, matter of fact, a mother's honesty.

"Serina Calis, Girl-Who-Calls-Herself-Weaver. You are hideous."

The relentless dance she unleashed was one Lirka knew well, it had been her preferred method of fighting for nearly a century at this point, Raw, overwhelming, fury. Lirka matched it in kind, letting the pairs weapons clang and bang in the air as sparks flew the air around them hissed with the power of it all. Yet, beneath their feet fissures grew wider, and boulders tumbled from the edges as the plateau began to finally give way. Lirka seemed to pay it little mind, adjusting her footwork where necessary - yet with each mighty metallic footfall, it seemed to only compel the earth to collapse even quicker.

 

[Serina Calis]

Making of Monsters.
Location: Anoth
Objective: Victory.
Allies: ???
Opposing Force: Lirka Ka
Tags: ???

"Deputy."​

The plateau trembled beneath them—stone groaning like it remembered the pain of its birth, and now, at last, longed for death.

Sparks burst where steel met phrik, where lightning-kissed halberd sang its choral fury against the brute force of a void-walker's blade. Each clash was a stanza, each step a rhyme of ruin. And in that dance, Serina Calis did not falter.

She thrived.

Her movements were not frantic, nor fearful, even as the world around her came undone. They were devotional. Every sweep of her halberd, every pivot on crumbling stone, was like a gesture in a sacred rite—worship not of gods, but of herself. A ritual of motion, fury, and precision through which power revealed itself.

And still, as the cacophony sang, she listened.

Because unlike Lirka, Serina had not silenced the world. She devoured it.

So when those words came—"Serina Calis, Girl-Who-Calls-Herself-Weaver. You are hideous."—they landed. Oh, they landed.

She paused for only a heartbeat in their wake. Not because she was stunned, but because she chose to savor the moment. That word, spoken not in scorn, but in sincerity. Like a final pronouncement from a priestess before casting someone into the pit.

Serina stood tall in that heartbeat. The wind flared her cape like the wings of some dread seraph, her blood drying into threads of ruby and violet down her cheek, her breath slow and silken. The violet pulse of her corrupted Force Valor had not dimmed—it had deepened. Thickened. Coiled tighter around her frame like a lover's hands.

And then, she smiled.

Not cruelly. Not even mockingly.

Proudly.

"You think that's an insult," she said, her voice a velvet purr cut with static. "You think I would hear the word hideous and flinch."

She took a step forward, halberd trailing sparks as it scraped the stone beside her like a flame licking at dry parchment.

"Oh, Lirka…" Her voice deepened, warm and low and terribly intimate. "I worked to become this. Every scar carved into my soul, every drop of venom I drank like wine. The Force was not gifted to me—I wrestled it from the hands of Jedi and Sith alike. I shaped it around my will. I twisted it into something that sings when I touch it. Something that loves me for what I made it become."

Another step. The ground cracked, and still she walked, unbothered by the grinding teeth of impending collapse.

"You speak of the Self, but all I hear is a creature still begging the galaxy to notice it. You say you once felt the Force, and now call it distraction. But what I hear is grief. Loss. That power left you… and you called that emptiness clarity."

She twirled the halberd, its blade drawing a thin arc of pale light in the stormy air.

"You don't see mirrors, Lirka. You break them. Because if you ever stopped long enough to look…"

She pointed the blade directly at Lirka's visor.

"You'd see what I see now."

Her eyes shone—not with hatred, but revelation.

"You are not the Void. You are its prisoner. And everything you do—all your strength, all your screaming mantras, your romantic little philosophies about suffering and transience—are just prayers to a silence that will never answer you back."

Then, in a voice barely above a whisper:

"Hideous…?" She smiled again, slowly, terribly.

"I chose to become this. You… were left behind."

And then Serina moved.

Her blade struck not for the chest or the legs, but for the environment—the crumbling edge of the plateau, where Lirka's footing had begun to betray her. A sharp, downward cleave meant not to kill, but to force the land to make a decision.

A great thunder cracked across the cliffside as fissures raced like lightning through the rock beneath them.

And Serina—graceful, poised, fearless—pivoted back with the elegance of a ballet dancer and spread her arms wide, laughing against the rising wind.

"Come now, my beautiful brute! Let us fall together!"

And with that cry, the world beneath them answered.

Anoth began to break.

And Serina Calis did not run.

She embraced the collapse.