Private Returning the Keystone to the Arch

[Efret Farr]

Thread follows
Efret's last post in the DE invasion of Coruscant chapter two​

The Great Hall was probably the best candidate for a ground evacuation zone, so Efret had brought them here. Temple Guards as well as other Jedi and Alliance soldiers had fallen back from the formal entrance outside. Dark Imperial troopers had followed them, bringing the fight from the front steps inside.

The master rushed to take cover behind a table that a few Alliance soldiers had overturned before she and Magdalena arrived. She stumbled shortly on the way over some debris she hadn't noticed in her Force sight. "Master Jedi!" the highest ranked in the group exclaimed as she recovered and put her back to the perpendicular tabletop beside him. "Are you alright?" She nodded, not having seen but rather anticipated the question. When he spoke again, she turned her head just in time to lipread. "Are the upper levels overrun?" he asked, indicating with his head in the direction she had come.

"Not as far as I know," she replied. "I came down to evacuate a young one. Now we—" she glanced over to Magdalena, "—would like to extend the staging ground here."

"Good choice, Master Jedi."

"Only if we can secure it," she admitted. "How do you suggest we do that?"

"My guys are losing their gumption. Can you battle meditate?"

"I can't." Hiding behind archeology since soon after her knighting had limited her skill set. Still, what she did know was useful, so perhaps... "But I am an Empath. I can try to produce a similar effect by swapping their emotional states with mine. Do I have your permission to temporarily alter your team in this way?"

"Yes, ma'am, you do."

She looked again to Magdalena. "I expect to need a recovery period after doing this," she told the sorceress. "Do what is needed to clear the Hall once I have."

Efret closed her eyes, sensing the men and women allied with her, both Force sensitive and not, throughout the entire Hall. Her brow furrowed under the weight of their emotions. On the whole, they were allowing the encroaching fear of defeat to steal their remaining hope and courage rather than using it to drive their resolve.

Relaxing the muscles in her face smoothed out her forehead. She called on her newfound determination to be brave, which had sprouted the moment Astri Elyse reached safety and Magdalena asked for help. Sometimes in great fear hung the greatest opportunities. Efret would like very much to teach that that to Astri one day. There was pride too in the master's chest, just as deeply rooted as the other emotion: pride in finding her own ways to help despite her personal limits.

Into the sea of the empyrean Efret's positive emotions floated like a seeping dye. Her heart felt empty and cold if only for a moment, and then a torrent of uninspired moods from those around her crashed into the void left in her chest. Her physical posture sagged and she sighed instinctively, relieved to feel something, even the unideal, again. In the next moment, the metaphysical tides around her shifted, projecting the mentality that had been hers into the men and women fighting for the Light throughout the Hall.

Hopefully, the emotional swap would help drive them on in driving the Darkness out.

Magdalena Bloodscrawl​

 

[Magdalena Bloodscrawl]

Wearing: Ritual Gown

Armed With: Purified Lightsaber

As the Battle outside had started to ease down--The Alliance was clearly winning--Magdalena Bloodscrawl, the secret adoptive Mother of Nathan from the Gulag Era, had begun turning efforts more to rescue than to slaughtering a retreating enemy. While the Clones she had brought had long since evacuated all the Jedi they could and we're still fighting invaders in other parts of the temple, the Sorceress of Ossus had used small drops of her blood to animate rubble into a humanoid shape to help rescue those trapped under debris, or to provide mobile cover for the fighting still taking place in some sections, tended to injured Jedi and Padawans with healing rituals that involved her glowing green blood in circular runes on certain sections of the floor.

When Efret Farr announced her intentions to employ her empathy skills, Magdalena, her mind still on Nathan due to his MIA status, had had to utter a strange, particularly ancient spell to shield herself and her wounded patients from it's effects while watching it play out.

At the same time, Magdalena willed a cut into her palm, chanting while little drops of glowing green blood slid out and splashed into piles of wreckage and debris, making it form a humanoid shape, but one crackling with the light side lightning known as Electric Judgement. They charged into combat much more aggressively, surprising various Sith Lords and soldiers, who, simply put where unprepared for the sudden surge of debris based reinforcements that towered over them. It was only a dozen but they soon began to rack up a body count on the enemy, giving those Farr had affected even more opportunity to attack.

"How's that for a first start? More complex tricks will require more prep time..." she asked Efret. "I can also help you with the strain you've just endured, if you'll permit me..."

 

[Efret Farr]

Efret looked at Magdalena blankly as she spoke. The light behind the archeologist's eyes had dimmed substantially as an effect of her recent application of Empathy. Just as the men and women holding the line here had felt a few minutes prior, Efret had at once lost her mettle and her hope. What little good sense remained in her body told her that this was too much to shoulder alone. She had thrown herself down a hole without knowing quite how deep it was, and now needed help pulling herself out of it.

She nodded simply, then extended a hand out to the sorceress.

Magdalena Bloodscrawl​

 

[Magdalena Bloodscrawl]

(OOC: The flashback was taken and assembled from previous posts of mine in other stories that are now dead or inactive)


Magdalena took the hand of Efret Farr , and linked her strange energy with Efret's.

She had exhausted herself greatly, so Magdalena began transferring some of her strength to restore her.

Focus on my presence Efret... Magdalena said calmly in Efret's mind as they linked.

Gradually, Magdalena reduced the strain in Efret's body and mind with her assistance. Efret could perhaps feel the other personas she was composed of swimming around in her head (See Bio for details), complex and powerful, yet each an important component of a greater whole. She might finally start to contemplate just how bizarre Magdalena actually was...

But due to the intense link, Efret also began to get glimpses into one of Magdalena's most intense memories, of a decision that had stuck with her for years. One she remembered at least thirty seconds of every day...

Through the link, Efret might perhaps catch a sensation of just how much she sincerely loved Nathan as a Son, because this particular memory was fraught with shades of guilt. Much of her existence had been her simply doing the Light's Will, and a familial connection had never once crossed her mind.

But that was before the imprisonment, before she had a chance to truly contemplate the nature of being alone, and singular.

In saving Nathan's life, yes, she had gained an apprentice of sorts, and yes, he was her only ticket to freedom. But that had not been the primary reason she recruited him.

She had done what she had done because she had never had a family before, and he had just lost his...and in that instant of seeing him wounded, lost, broken...she had taken a more personal interest than normal...for it was not until her imprisonment that she realized that for however many followers she had, she still didn't have a family. And being trapped for so long had finally made her consider the merits of the concept...



Ession, Gulag Era.

Nathan hadn't been good enough. He hadn't been skilled enough.

The Castle burned around him, as other members of the Bloodscrawl family, and their loyalists fell. He had seen enough that he wished to see no more. The explosion had obliged him and now he stumbled about blindly, his mental conditioning failing him and giving way to blind fear and panic as he tried to get away from the fighting. He had watched his own parents die, cut down by the Zealot with puffy, curly dark hair. Elaine Tear. He had heard of her, of course. One of the Kaiserreich's biggest cheerleaders.

His parents had died. His older brother had died. His younger sister had as well. soon all the remaining Bloodscrawls would fall, and the Ashlans would scour the castle for the secrets to a prize that they would never find. He had no idea what to do. The fourteen-year-old Nathan, up to this point, had been training to fight Sith.

He had never imagined the blow would come from his own side. His sense of betrayal and shock coursed through him like venom as he stumbled about the burning castle, going wherever the sounds of fighting were not.

He tripped and fell down a steep incline, scrambled back up with his broken temple guard lightsaber pike and walked carefully, feeling out walls and surfaces as the sounds of fighting grew more distant.

The musty smell told him he was in the crypts. He had crossed into there once, only to be immediately ordered out by his Father, warning him to never go there.

He had no choice now. Everything hurt. Better to face the unknown than to face certain death.

He moved deeper and deeper, body and head and mind wracked with pain. Despair clawed at him.

He didn't realize how quiet it was until he heard his own rapid breathing with crystal clarity...

"Poor boy...betrayed by his own people...."

Nathan wheeled around.

"Who's there?" he called out, eyes bleeding down his face.

"Someone who has been trapped here a very long time boy. Far too long. Step closer..."

Nathan guarded with the only working end of his blade, its yellow light shining in the darkness, making his blood covered face take on an unearthly quality to it.

"Do not fear, boy. If I was one of the Ashlans, we wouldn't be talking...and unless we aid one another, then neither of us leave...the ones after you would surely kill me as well..."

"You say you are trapped. Trapped how? By whom?" he asked, trying to think and focus on the pain. But it was his nature to try and survive.

"Antony Bloodscrawl." the woman answered. "He bound me to this place, with ancient Jedi Sorcery."

"Then you are a Heretic." Nathan concluded. "And a dangerous one."

"Perhaps. But I am also your only way out."

"If you are released, there is nothing to stop you from simply killing me."

"You are going to die anyway..." she pointed out. "So therefore, you have nothing to lose in letting me go free."

Little did the owner of that voice know that the reasoning she had just given him would haunt him at the very end of his days with Lysandra...
"Nathan Arnold Bloodscrawl..." the Blood Sorceress called out to a young, blinded teenage boy too injured to fight, having fled into the undercrypt of his family's castle after the woman who would someday become The Battalion had laid waste to the upper levels, backed by a small Army of Ashlan soldiers and likeminded Jedi.

Nathan had watched his Jedi parents fall to her blade. With the amount of effort they were putting into destroying the Castle to get what they wanted...

He had gone down here in desperation, out of options and time, and come upon this Sorceress, trapped in a liquid state in a magical basin.

A Blood Sorceress...

"Are you ready to bargain?"

The young boy, barely 14, turned his head up at the living avatar of blood, fashioned in the crude likeness of an elderly woman, made of pure blood, standing atop the basin.

Nathan made his decision..

"I agree..." He snapped...
"There is a price for survival. There always is..." The Blood Sorceress told Nathan.

"You must be rebuilt. From the ground up. As you are, you shall never survive..." the Blood Avatar spoke as though her voice issued from underwater. The blood her whole body was composed of rippled and shuddered on the surface.

Nathan activated the broken half of his temple guard pike, the yellow, Shoto length blade sliding out and he jammed the blade against the wards that kept her imprisoned withing the basin, the runes burning up. The Sorceress of Blood flowed out of the Basin.

"You have released me, so I shall keep my word, young Padawan..." the Sorceress proclaimed. "The Force is strong with you. A powerful weapon, you shall be..."

The Sorceress stretched out her hand, and droplets of blood fell from her crude limb and hit the ground, causing the spots they hit to smoulder and burn, the ground collapsed into a boiling liquid slurry of dirt and Force Spawn Blood .

"Your injuries are too severe to escape on your own. You shall surely be cut dead by the Ashlans." The Sorceress said, her body of blood warping violently a moment.

"This is your only chance to escape Ession alive. But Nathan Bloodscrawl must be left here. The one who leaves Ession must have a spirit of stone and the strength of a giant.

The Blind boy listened to this.

"Will I become like you?"

"Even were I a Dark Side User, I would not be so cruel as to inflict such a fate..." The Sorceress said. "But you will not be the same person coming out as when you went in."

Nathan started to take a step forward, the creaking and thuds above signalling how terrible the battle had been above.

The Sorceress flowed to his side as a blood puddle, reforming her crude blood avatar.

She put her hand on his shoulder.

"Think very carefully before you step into there. The consequences can never be undone."

"What choice do I have?" Nathan asked.

"You can choose to die. Not a happy ending. But you will go as yourself."

"I'll not dishonor the ones who died to buy me time..." Nathan said firmly, the pain in his insides worsening. He realized he had internal bleeding.

"As you wish..." The Sorceress said, withdrawing her hand.

Nathan took another step forward, refusing to go back up and join his parents.
He waded into the boiling put of dirt and blood, yet felt no pain.

The Sorceress raised her hands, and multiple arms formed from the pit, pulling him down swiftly and silently.

After a minute, a hand silently stretched out from the enchanted pit. The Sorceress ripped an old red banner from the wall, ripping a thick square off and tossed it to the hand.

The hand caught it and slowly sank into the pit.

(THIS plays)

The boy that stepped out of the pit had a stiff, mechanical walk, the blood and dirt sliding off his form as though it had never been there. The makeshift bandana he had formed from the torn family banner covering the lower half of his face, bloodied, scarred eyes healed, but left a sightless, milky white, messy dark hair made messier. He did not speak, his walk silent as he turned to face her.

The Sorceress had used her magic to alter the rest of the banner she had torn for him. Forming through her magic a long red gown from the material that her bloody mass flowed into, reforming into an elderly, human looking blonde woman .

She approached, touching his forehead.

"I am the Sorceress of Ossus, Fragment of Natalee, who herself was a Fragment of Ersethy. I extract a Life Debt from you forevermore, that you will not slay me. You are sworn to honor to never break this debt. You shall travel as a Padawan-Errant, and quell the dark heresies of the Sith. You are no longer Nathan Bloodscrawl. The Ashla commands me to name you Morris Crownwraithe."

A red Alliance Starbird appeared on his forehead, vanishing just as quickly.

"From this day forth, you shall be estranged from the Religion of Ession. You shall always regard it's soil as a curse to walk on. The enjoyment of wealth, of prosperity, shall be anathema to you. You shall obey the Force and the Jedi Code. I declare you a stranger to all else save the others who follow me. You shall live as a bane to those who would follow The Dark Side. You will sleep, but your only dream shall be to wake to do your duty. You will eat, and drink, but derive no satisfaction. The sweetest air will be dust to your nostrils. The coldest water shall be tepid in your throat. The only language you speak will be the language of Toil. Even in death, your last thoughts shall be wishing you had one more life to live to serve the Force." She declared. "I appoint you my Deputy, and that all Enclaves that follow my teachings must open their doors to you. All libraries that hold my knowledge must reveal themselves to you. All Nexuses I created must empower you. All Sorceresses I associate with must also teach you when approached. Provided, of course, the Force should direct you to them..."

The Sorceress of Ossus gathered the broken chain of a ceiling candle holder and handed it to him.

"Your shoto, Morris."

Morris Crownwraithe nodded to the Sorceress and he picked up and handed the broken half of his temple guard pike that still worked over to her. She then dropped it into the Blood Pit he had just walked out of.

"Focus..." she commanded.

He held his hands limply over the pool, as if in supplication, and he concentrated on the broken fragments of his old life, the Sorceress guiding him telepathically.

The weapon sprung loose from the pit, clean and new, a Shoto attached to a chain .

"This is where we part. It will be a long time before I contact you. Prepare for hardship ahead..." she warned, escorting him to the long forgotten ancient escape route from the Castle.

She hissed strange words and the door cracked open.

"Go forth..." she said gently to Morris, placing her hands on his shoulder.

"Punish Heresy..."

Morris Crownwraithe left the undercrypt and into the black of the tunnel.

Slowly. Almost like a zombie.


Magdalena at last peacefully undid the link and stepped back, not aware of the memory Efret had glimpsed being visible to her during the link...

 

[Efret Farr]

The master was well-used to visual Force links that she often shared with her guide convor, Nirrah, whom was keeping Astri company for now, but she was not familiar with similar emotional bonds. Her Empathy was typically not reciprocated, and her ability to sense and relive Force Echoes did not have the capacity to be two-way.

Yet...

...this sensation had aspects to it of both of those.

And it was also very, very slightly reminiscent of the mind meld she had experienced courtesy of Malva'ikh Dralidok .

Efret had remained calm until the moment after Magdalena severed the link. As the master opened her own eyes, her heart thundered in her chest, not because she had seen what Magdalena and her son were but because the unwittingly forced fragments of a memory had triggered the same biological flight response as her nightmares and waking visions of various Dark genesis did.

Her eyes slowly unwidened as she was able to ground herself, both through her breath and through the feel of the marble floor underneath one of her palms. "That," she began, searching for not a lie per se but a way to hide the true meaning of her reaction. They didn't have time to talk about it, not now. "Impressive."

She pushed herself to her haunches, feeling much more physically capable after so much emotional relief.

"More complex tricks will require more prep time..."

"How much time do you need?" asked Efret, remembering a comment she had made before the rejuvenation. "I'm not much of a combatant, but I know some tricks too."

Magdalena Bloodscrawl​

 

[Magdalena Bloodscrawl]

"At least fifteen minutes..." Magdalena answered Efret Farr as she stood up, flesh bubbling for a split second.

"My constructs continue to clear out the Hall, Master Farr. If you will permit me, I still have personnel on site. I can order them to divert some troops to reinforce your position here--"

Just then, a Clone Knight clutching a damaged Spear ran up to them.

"Apologies but some of our troops are reporting an...anomaly...in the room of a thousand fountains..." The Blue Armored Knight said. "Something got freed from one of the walls by an errant plasma grenade."

"The walls?" Magdalena said in surprise. "Well, what's it doing?"

"Well, a Sith Lord was turned completely inside out when he went near it so me and the Boys were thinking that that wasn't a good sign, so we went looking for you. Because, y'know, that seemed like kind of a bad thing."

Magdalena face palmed.

"I swear, you find Force Hazards in the weirdest places..." She complained. "This Anomaly...what is it?"

"It's bright. Non-Euclidian. Really traumatizes you just looking at it. Called off the boys until someone more... qualified... could take the reins..." The Knight answered. "It's sitting there. One Padawan who was near it was reduced to a babbling wreck.

Magdalena turned to Farr. "It seems an unexpected situation has developed in the Room of a Thousand fountains. Are you up for a detour? My men can help yours handle things in this section."

She turned to the Clone. "Ain't that right?"

"Oh yes! Very much! As long as we don't have to deal with a Force Anomaly!" The Clone answered back enthusiastically...

 

[Efret Farr]

Efret had stood up as well when Magdalena did. She had difficulty following the discussion between her and the clone as lipreading was much more challenging without Nirrah's to help her see and know when to turn her head from one conversation participant to the other. So, when the sorceress asked Efret about her willingness to take a detour, she was only partiality aware of what she way agreeing to. She, however, did it all the same, trusting that Magdalena would not lead her astray.

"Yes," she answered. "Can you lead me? By the hand?"

When she had met Nathan, Nirrah had been wearing her harness that advertised in Aurebesh that she was a guide animal, but he might not have noticed. Perhaps Efret's braid had been situated in front of the patch.

She just hoped that Magdalena would accept. If she didn't think any less of the master either, that would be the most ideal outcome.

Magdalena Bloodscrawl​