Not Anymore

[NightSister]

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[member="Matsu Xiangu"]​

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Four years.

Four years since when she'd let herself say no, she did not want the Jedi anymore. Left Voss with the knowledge set deep in her mind that she wasn’t going to return. I want strength. I want more. Set me free.

She thought a lot on those times. Her last days with the Jedi, her first days with the Sith, everything in between. Because it hadn't been a matter of flying away to ask for her freedom back. Freedom was not free, and earning it meant giving something up. It meant pain and loss and some part of you left behind whilst the rest grew on. She had lost her Master when she had chosen freedom over the twisted price for his power. She had lost her mentor and it had been beyond her control (she had watched and had done nothing, because what could she have done?), but it had told her at last that she was going to be alone now, and it would be alright because she was free.

It didn't get easier - and truthfully, she was glad of it. Easy meant cowardice. Weakness. Easy huddled in a corner whilst the storm blew by. She had grown to appreciate the storm. To dance in the rain. There was beauty in the rain.

At some point, in some way, it had worked. She'd found a storm and chased it and hunted down freedom.
It wasn't the end.

_______________​

Beneath the fierce skies of Maena, Aria Vale was waiting.

She never worried about meeting Matsu. At some point she had started holding a certain trust for the Sith Lord - not that she would always be safe, not that she would never come to harm.

(After all, wouldn't that be so very dull?)

But enough words exchanged had given Aria some semblance of understanding that seemed to make everything less messy. Danger could be overcome. Harm could serve a purpose. Bad things were never so bad.
And she'd stopped worrying, lately, how bad things were. Surely it would have been useless.

Would was a funny thing.

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

And the sky was indeed fierce.

Usually, one the side of the planet most densely populated, the sun could be seen quite easily though it was usually somewhat reddened by the ash-choked atmosphere of Maena’s turbulent ecology. But lately, and for reasons unknown to Matsu, the ashmounts that spewed much of the planet’s dusty spawn had become more active. For weeks the Maenan people had been dealing with it. Usually it wasn’t so bad and most of the time it was barely noticeable - a way of life to sweep one’s porch in the morning in the slums, or to avoid white if you were in a level of the New City where you could see the sky and the ash could ruin your fashionable clothing. But for the last month it had choked the atmosphere, falling in massive piles wherever it wasn’t cleaned up fast enough.

It was almost like snow.

Matsu’s boots cut along the ash, creating twin lines as she glided through it. It had almost no substance, a light cloud that puffed away from her movement only to settle once she’d passed by. The sky was redder than usual where it peeked between dark stormclouds. Said clouds had not opened up to rain, though if they did it would surely wash the land clean for a time.

Lately she’d been spending nearly all her time in the New City, but Maena was a vast and mostly unexplored world. Therefore it seemed fitting - perhaps poetic - to meet her apprentice on dry, grassland bordering the Wastelands. The New City’s volcano loomed over them in the background but it was far enough away for the two of them to feel completely and utterly alone.

The petite Atrisian came to stand at Aria’s side, amber eyes looking out over the delineation from grass to cracked, blackened plateaus that made up the other half of the planet. Somewhere out there her abominations and experiments roamed, resupplied rather constantly by her endless curiosity when she wondered about another possibility. But that was not the reason they had met there today.

“I think you are almost ready,” Matsu said, offering words that every Acolyte, every Knight, craved to hear after years of work. “Do you agree?”

[member="Aria Vale"]​

 

[NightSister]

The stillness was a beautiful sort of unnerving.

It stretched out across the ash like miles of isolation that longed to rip in two down the center. Life within the New City had her used to the buzz of a thousand voices that lived their thousand lives, and it had become familiar to the point of comfort. This was quiet and loneliness, and it was different. Strange, unnatural. Aria liked it.

Dark eyes that swirled with amber and lifetimes turned to fix on Matsu.

I think you are almost ready.
An eyebrow lifted.Almost surprise. Not quite.
Do you agree?

"I-"
don't know died on her tongue.

Because she did know.

She had started to call herself Sith some time ago (she had taken all those lives but in the end, what did it matter? Aria didn't live her life for honor, for glory - they held her back and she wanted to be free. Aria lived life for her.) and the name had fit easily. Perfectly. It hadn't stopped her from questioning herself, because it was in Aria's nature to question everything. But when she wasn't busying herself thinking of other things - when she wasn't doubting how much change was enough - when she looked at herself through a lens of perfect clarity, she knew.

Almost ready.
Yes, that was right.

Aria smiled, a thing that was glad and mirthless at the same time. Satisfaction. Determination. A sort of hunger that felt as though it could scorch her throat and burn her down to flakes of white if she let it.

The Knight had wanted for many things before, but better than wanting was getting.

And now her lips curled with the knowledge that she had nearly gotten there. Nearly ready.

"Yes." The pause had been longer in her head. Within reality only a heartbeat's span of questions had delayed a nod of her head and words undercut with the satisfaction of almost. "I think you're right."

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]​

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

There were a few breaths worth of silence between the two women after Matsu nodded to Aria’s reply. A busy Apprentice indeed, she’d already been of learning when she’d sought Matsu out. And the Lord was not so covetous (at least not in that way) that she prevented her charges from learning from others. The true path, the one that would carry a student farthest, was often hidden. She had not known of her love for the workings of the mind until she’d been forced to look at her own. Aria had done much more than most.

The silence was broken by the deafening explosion that rocked out of the space around Matsu. Unspoken words, quiet curses that when released tugged on her sorcery’s connection to the Dark. The air held its own breath lest it be swallowed, a strange ear-tugging silence stagnant over a patch of earth that depressed, turned, and exploded outwards. Huge clods of packed dirt, rocks, fire-worms, beetles, the deep roots of scrubgrass brushing like fingers over sharp features as it was expelled in sudden exhalation of everything held. In the eye of her explosion, Matsu stood unaffected, the sound of dirt raining off her cybernetics a hushed counterpoint to the steady drum of her heart as the outward push drove Aria towards the flat volcanic plain that lay so sharply demarcated from their grassland start.

Love was, as she well knew, not something that could be cured. It was not, as so many Sith assumed, a failing, flaw, or illness of spirit. To deny it was to deny oneself, and to assert otherwise was cowardly, was it not? Sith believed in harnessing their emotions. To deny one seemed ignorant - seemed like something their hated Jedi might believe. As if being an island were the only way of being. As if it were just a trap or a pitfall on the way to true timelessness, a thing to be edged round or bridged. Matsu was loyal to those she loved without fault. Aria’s sense of safety within her presence wasn’t misplaced. There was a love there, a pride, in the way a Mother might love her children. But Matsu could never abide weakness, and so for the last time, she would test.

And cull.

When the dirt and dust and detritus settled, Matsu stood in the center of the crater left behind. Short and unassuming, she checked a sharp nail on one of her cybernetics.

But it wasn’t Matsu that stood in the center. The real Matsu was pressed up against the dirt on the side of the crater nearest to the volcanic plain, making herself even smaller against its earthy press, digging her arms in to its clutch out of sight. In wait, predatory, at the edge of her web watching her illusion in the center.

[member="Aria Vale"]​