The Maw's Appetite (PM for Invite)

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7sK5OiJHHQ[/media]​

Silence hums in my ears, lilting in the crackles and radioactive pops of the nebula’s debris aching with arthritic creak into the singularity. My crew is gone. Whether they perished in battle, or fell to old age, or drifted to other pastures I cannot remember.

I strike my temple, scratch the healing skin of my arm. The memories do not live in concussed temple or traumatized skin. Memories are strings well woven. Drawn taught. Cut by a dull blade. A rumbling in my gut betrays the hunger pangs of time and distance to supplies. Cabinets lay barren. Refrige emptied of all but a single irli fruit, bobbing in a bowl of milk. White liquid drips from my hand as I shake it off, splattering it on the mess wall.

The nebula calls are as loud as a choir screaming in a burning cathedral. As spurious to action as the shards of glass under one bare foot. My gait limps. This shoe is too big. Irli juice slinks down my lower lip, stinging into a cut I did not know was there.

Still, the call. The throng of voices shuddering in their retreat from this mortal plane. A shiver radiates down my spine as another strand of the nebula and the slag of former industry is swallowed in the ever hunger of the singularity.

Black hole. Black as his eyes, my first Master who guided the shaking hands of a novice wife and failed mother to the throat of my first victim. His voice filled every atom with terror and delight. He, the Betrayer. The long dead.

My irli pit clinks to the ground as I walk to the command deck of my ship, the Isdihar-i-Tiamad. Silver eyes drift shut. Another strand of the nebula descends into the maw, wreckage filtering with it.

Destruction in its’ purest most ascetic form, is beautiful. The old falls away, leaving nothing but the ancient or the recreated as with the opera of the singularity lilting in my ears, I dance.

Stardust and slag shudders. Cast offs from the wreckage fractures into base molecules. Slowly, the nebula contorts and ascends round my ship, pulsing and moving with the breath in my lungs as I dance without limit.

I am the Starmother, destruction’s bride and mother of giants. I am an Echani dancing in rags I don’t recognize. I am a woman dressed in white, barring the wrecked bodies entrance to Eden, so they might never return home.

[member="Darth Carnifex"]

 

[Darth Carnifex]

"We've arrived, your Excellency."

The Crestfallen II reverted back into real space over a black hole in the middle of nowhere, the light from nearby stars distorting as they neared the event horizon of the consuming mass of darkness. After punching in several new sublight coordinates, the shuttle began its cautious approach towards a ship moored above the black hole. Normally, the Dark Lord of the Sith would never have bothered traveling this close to such a destructive product of gravity, but he had been called to this place with a melodious siren's song through the Force.

"Maneuver to dock with the ship, I will board alone."

Knowing better than to disagree with their master, the pilots did as they were instructed and anchored the bottom of the shuttle to the ship's docking ring with magnetic moorings. The excess vacuum was vented and replaced with a stable artificial atmosphere, allowing the Sith Emperor to travel between the two vessels and end up on the other side of the unknown ship's hull. Walking along the empty halls, he was unsurprised to find the whole of the ship abandoned save for the bridge.

So that was where he traveled to, his steps filled with purpose as he made himself known to the strange entity before him. "Curious."

[member="Ahani Najwa"]​

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

Muscles and joints fluctuate. Particles inside and out of the ship shatter, flowing round the coiling dance. My body is one with the chaos, my body is the chaos as the nebulous miasma surrounding the ship becomes me. A presence docks, a secondary singularity to the primordial black hole outside my ship. The gift-ship.

The last tether to tear down.

The ‘I’ of this communal cloud opens my fingers, expanding around this pulsing destructive corpse-star. I hold its’ eternity in the palm of my hands. Its’ gravity is mine, as I stream and lengthen and curl.

It is the absence of warmth, I am.

Age, like structure, I know not at all. Peace I left to my son and his ilk, I know peace not at all. A heartbeat thunders in the pulsing cloud, jagged and physically immaculate as it strikes out at the space around us.

“So this was what you wanted? I lay all at the temple gates and you send me a bomb?” Laughter radiates into the vacuum, unconfined and spilt from my throat. My body jerks in wanton array. Panels around us explode into dust, which pulses, spirals, joins the motion of the spheres. Curious man, his beard thick and long, his eyes the familiar tempest of a life in the Dark.

Consummate Lord, his dying humanity is as beautiful as the wreckage fading into the Event Horizon, never to be seen or felt again. My steps take me to my tip-toes, left hand reaching up toward the crest of his nose. His age is writ on his soul, that despicable pulsing enigma in this borrowed bone-cage. He walks as the Lord of his Domain, and that domain is vast.

Royalty is easiest to see, in the Dark.

“You’re so young… so early in your becoming. Barely born.” My chest heaves in this place, the cacophonous cloud frothing over, disintegrating more and more of the Isdihar I’tiamad, “You have so many centuries yet to live.”

Life and its’ extension is mystifying most of all, when encountered as one who’s seen too much of it. My fractured centuries open before him, as I have nothing to hide. Centuries upon centuries stretch out, play in the artificial atmosphere the ship filtered unceasing for my body’s consumption. What is time, but a state of constant flux? What is gravity but a fabric draped upon interstellar avenues?

What is a first meeting, when its’ cessation exists not at all? I do not mention something as paltry as my name, for the action is unnecessary. He can see who and what I am. The syllables that make out the siren call are not my essential pieces, yet those syllables too, the sound regurgitated as my name are open to him as all is open.

“Why do we search for ways to live forever, when eternity is in the palm of our hands?” Shifting to stand dwarfed by his massive body, shoulder bumping harmless against his side, I reach in front of us. The Isdihar shatters, becoming nothing but a bit of platform, and the trail down to his shuttle, left unharmed in the tumult. The glory of the spheres shines around us, conflict without ceasing.

My fingers wrap around the singularity and pluck it from the vault of stars. Frigid object, Destruction be thy name. Volatile and lethal, it turns in my hand, consuming the dancing wreckage around us in tendrils like ribbon in the breeze.

Fingers unfurl, and present the lesson of life and destruction incarnate as my best gift to the Butcher King.

[member="Darth Carnifex"]​

 

[Darth Carnifex]

He stood before her, witnessing all of her glorious wonders with curious intrigue.

And he did not flinch before her power as the vessel disintegrated around them, metal peeling to expose circuitry before that too was torn away to join the floating debris amidst the darkened vacuum. She spoke to him and he listened, his brow knitting in thought as she bumped against him in this dance of devastation. And lo, she unveiled herself to him utterly, leaving very little to hide from his prying eyes.

"Your sanity is weighed down by the years of your life, but in death and destruction, you find lucidity. An interesting paradox."

He too reached out, weaving his own dance of eradication with her own, bending reality to his will as he gleamed her name from the myriad of thoughts she presented to him. "Ahani Najwa, Matron, and Warrior. I am Kaine Zambrano, Butcher, and Sorcerer. You stand in the presence of the Dark Lord of the Sith, though I have never known you before now I would ask that you come with me to my Empire, a mind as brilliant and eccentric as yours does a disservice to the galaxy confined to this realm of nowhere."

The Emperor reached out with a hand, an offer to join him. "What say you?"

[member="Ahani Najwa"]​

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

“You swap bodies like clothes in a vain Queen’s bower. Echoing the vibrations of a soul gone and returned. Elegant... it alone will not save you.” Swaying into the space between our collective atomic clouds, I hear words whispered through a mouth I momentarily forget. “I don’t want to sleep.”

A once and constant king takes stride to my hand. How I have seen others as him. Ambitious, graceful of tongue and horrid of soul. The singularity pulses, shattering and reconvening in the combined heartbeats of Those Who Hold Dominion Over All.

“I felt the skin of Palpatine’s palm, once... doting downward on the Crimson Guardsman’s Daughter. A swollen bellied teenager on Byss. Will you feel as he did, of hubris and eventual defeat?” Dry lips contort into an unabashed grin as laughter bursts from my gut. “Will you feel as comely as the Gulag Plague, of which I rested and watched from my vantage in these stars?”

The pulse of the singularity threads through the back of my neck, pulling silver hair at the nape like a passion bound lover.

Passion.

The true fount.

“Will you feel of lemon and irli pits stained in a rabid mouth?”

He glares. His eyes, black and red, his eyes, the Betrayer’s eyes glare at my neck.

“I DIDN’T CONJURE HIM!!!” The floor beneath our feet disintegrates. A gifted ship donated by one who would control and coddle my dignity into inaction dissipates in the shared destruction of this man. No. Entity.

He is no man, but a self-proclaimed god. It’s writ on his body, as all things are written to my ilk.

I am... nothing but consequence. An event horizon stretched without ceasing.

The Butcher King calls me by name. He reaches through chaos to give not the bars of a cage, but a focus to the raucous outpouring which creates disorder and illness out of too many centuries without the galactic brawl.

My pale skin aches into his palm, fingers sliding to his pulsing wrist. Knees bend, the artifice of gravity a false echo as I leave it too behind.

Nothing remains but a shuttlecraft and two Sith Lords holding each others’ hand. Pulsing energy swarms the space, it’s radiant crackles and pops a symphony of rejuvenate succour.

“Kaine Zambrano. Contain me and I will dissipate. Free me and I will worship for you.” Things like oxygen and radiation pass my subconscious as toys of the over-aged. Crystalline structures begin to form round us, the desecration of destruction giving rise to a slim space in our image.

“Take me home, Kaine.”

[member="Darth Carnifex"]

 

[Darth Carnifex]

How truly interesting.

The rest of the ship vanished into the abyss, torn asunder by the power of the Dark Side held so deftly in the hands of this mad woman. And thus his hands reached out to grasp her own, holding them in a tight but not uncomfortable embrace. "Containment is unbecoming of a Sith, Ahani. Under me you would know no such thing, your powers will be free to exercise against the enemies of our people. Through me, you would revel in such destruction that you would never want forever again."

He led her along the crumbling path that twisted and turned through the vacuum of space, their steps leaving behind ruined metal that tumbled away into the event horizon beneath them. As they entered the shuttle, all that remained of the wasted ship would be blasted away into oblivion, leaving nothing behind of its coming.

There was only them now, the Dark Lord and the twisted Sith Lady.

And he endeavored to learn more about her, "Show me the wonders you have learned from the Dark Side, my dear, and I will reveal what I have mastered in return."

[member="Ahani Najwa"]​

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

He feels like none of my hypotheses. His skin punches through my body, clawing to marrow and sinew. Part of me, as the nebulous miasma is now part of the singularity.

The Isdihar is gone.

“I need to see it!!!” Panic turns my neck, where the assurance of future promise brings me to the shuttle. My body floats, tethered to [member="Darth Carnifex"]’s hands.

The Isdihar is gone.

A barking cry echoes through the remaining cloud, and only after do I recognize its’ self-created origin. The energy which made up my ship’s particles were cleansed by a black hole, ripped apart quark by quark by my hatred of where I’d been.

There’s a clarity to destroying everything you were, a psychogenesis of my next incarnation.

The destruction is mercy.

Upon mercy. ​

​

Upon mercy,​

​

Without limit. ​

He speaks as if I have a concept of servitude under a boot. My laughter banished the image in my head, a gigantic yellow boot with Under on the sole. I defy such definitions, as I know them not, as I know nothing but the calling of destruction’s balm. As I know the delight of creation through dross and pain.

A petition for mastery settles in the shuttle. It smells clean, antiseptic and fastidiously maintained. A good ship.

“My feet are tired.” The ship is warm. Devoid of the cold in the vacuum. The pulse in his wrist calls to me, black blood the ichor of the warlock before my relatively diminutive body.

The black hole outside jitters and quakes, nothing but the outline of the Event Horizon sputtering as I float in eye level with the Dark Lord. Things such as this can only be done when tremendous power reigns, and I, feasting of the destructive currents of the Singularity, so freely close in proximity to Kaine, something which has not been done by my hand in six hundred years takes place.

The singularity shakes and the energies of my soul shiver loose. I am ephemera, a storm in its’ own right… and in a flash of the destruction of the sum total energies contained on the other side of the Event Horizon…

… a wormhole opens in its’ place. Red and black, pulsing with the delight of space-time itself ripped to ribbons bathes my skin and hair in crimson light.

On the other side, the ships of the Bastion Defense Fleet begin to react to the apparition, and I grin at this Dark Lord, the horror of Bastion. The fleet reminds me of the place of my birth.

Bastion… Byss… I lost my ship to gain another throne world. My fingers climb up his arms to rest on his shoulders, lips closing distance to whisper in the shell of Kaine’s ear.

“Your turn… wondrous enough, Kaine Zambrano? Don't be frightened. It won't close before we go through.” A throaty chuckle releases from this destructive lucidity, I don't want it to end, I don't want the horror of my insanity. Was it true? Would he keep me rolling in conflicts so vast my mind reconstructs? He smells of brimstone and power. He smells of black water from a fountain I've never known.

 

[Darth Carnifex]

He watched in wonder as the very fabric of time and space was rent, a portal to the Empire's capital shorn open where there was once a seething singularity. This was a power that he had only read of, studied intently but never attempted to replicate. His hands found themselves across her shoulders, fingers lightly digging into her flesh as he pulled her close and willed her gaze to meet his own. "A powerful display of the Dark Side, my dear, and one that I would greatly like to understand better."

He then looked towards the two startled pilots, "Take us through the threshold." Whatever their misgivings or reservations about going through the gaping wormhole, they voiced none of it and merely did as they were instructed.

And that allowed Carnifex to fixate his stare back on the smaller woman, "Now watch and behold." He reached out and summoned a spare space suit to his outstretched hands, balling it up with the Force until it hovered as a sphere of bundled fabric a few inches above his palm. Then the Dark Side swelled within him and expanded outwards to infect the suit, the material melting into a pool of scalding hot liquid at the base of his palm. Once it had been completely liquidated, then the exerted his own influence over the puddle and took hold of the molecules that held it together. Shifting from a liquid to a gas, the pool evaporated and rose up into the air as a visible cloud of smog.

Then he flexed his fingers and the gas reconstituted itself as a liquid, falling down to the floor to again pool into a puddle. But this time the Emperor will into it the dark fires of creation, sparking a conflagration along its surface that began to take more solid form and shape. With it, he changes the rapturous fire into a small animal, a rodent from his homeworld of Panatha, and then into a coiled serpent, a swarm of angry insects, and at last back to liquid before it again transformed into its original form.

He hung the suit back on the rack it had come from and turned to Ahani, "A small display, I know. But I do hope you enjoyed it."

[member="Ahani Najwa"]​

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

Mighty fingers dig into my flesh, anchoring me not to a specific action, but a place. His place. A place where most he was secure and oh how men need their security. Their kingdoms and battlements. Without the tumult of war and strife and defence and aggression, males would have nothing but the hope to rut. To be taken in and kept.

How I’ve missed seeing the Echani menfolk strut about in their disastrous attempts to overtake their betters. How I’ve missed seeing a man who was capable of such things.

“Mmmh.” A pull on my senses. The jerk of engines rousing to life under a pilot’s hands. Fingers tugging me closer, black and red eyes searching for my gaze. Claiming it, with a desire for innerstanding. “Under my teachings, you will, in time. You’re young yet, to understand such things, still tied to this time. I can lead you down that path, if you desert others.”

Where the cosmos was my lullaby, transmogrification splays before me in [member="Darth Carnifex"]’s constant shifts of state. Each one is perfect and impressive, the shifting of states complex beyond most without destroying utterly what one intended to modify. The play between destruction and transformation is a symphony in the Dark.

Dominion, once more his repertoire.

“Bring it back! The rodent, the rodent!” My hands clap and I feel the muscles in my cheeks pull in my glee. I jump to grab his arm and shoulder in my hands, tugging lightly.

“Make them play. Make them live then take it back!” Whimsy fills the cabin, as the pilots venture on… and I don’t want to lose the moment in the cacophony of the planet below, and its’ vast populace. I don’t want to shatter. Grin dissipating, I turn my eyes to Bastion.

Unworthy raffia before the eventual fire, the citizens of the Imperial capital mill about in their narcissistic attempted passions, the slim pleasures they think make them little kings.

Behind us, the wormhole closes in a shockwave of energy that shudders up my spine.

 

[Darth Carnifex]

"All pathways are open to me, Ahani. Divination of the future is an art that I have bent to my will, to my purpose and design."

The Emperor had gone to great lengths to assemble as many oracles as he could under his control, from the astropaths of the Attendants to the soothsayers of the Voss Mystics and everything in-between. They served him and scryed the future for his benefit, informing him of events that have yet to come and allowing him to plan around them and weave them into the grand tapestry of his intent. Though the future was ever shifting like the dunes of a desert, Carnifex nonetheless found such prophecies advantageous.

"But yes, learning from you will be a magnanimous boon. Even with all the power at my disposal, there are still sacred arts that have escaped my grasp. Though I am Master, there are times where I am again an apprentice."

His words coincided with the shuttle's descent through the miasma of defense ships and orbital platforms that wreathed Bastion like an iron halo, the continent-spanning city rushing to meet them as they dipped down through the clouds. It was a wondrous landscape of progression and domination, the Dark Side of the Force permeating every aspect of creation down to the tiniest detail. This was the capital of the Sith, the true successor to Palpatine's hidden throneworld of Byss, which emulated all of his successes while scouring itself of his weakness. A monolithic pyramidal structure, three kilometers in height, dominated the center of the grand city.

The Emperor's Palace.

And the shuttle swooped into land in one of the cavernous hangar bays near the pyramid's apex, a pair of turadium blast doors closing behind them to conceal the hangar's existence. "Welcome, Ahani, to the Empire of the Sith."

[member="Ahani Najwa"]​

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

How like a man to think he has all penalties avoided. As [member="Darth Carnifex"] gives me data and foresight to his paths, I feel the inner weeping of my soul. In the deep I thought I found some kinship, that the Dark brought me full circle to a companion once again. Kaine Zambrano is piecemeal locking away, losing himself to the fallacy that eternal life means losing sensation. Will he too be like Raien, my mocking betrayer, who flagellated me until I was nothing, then found that nothing ached back with a killer’s jaws?

“It is not your will, which bends stars, Kaine. Never your will.”

My hand drifts to his chest, how sad. How achingly sad that he becomes the mightiest being in the galaxy only to sour his ability to love. I sense the foreboding of a man, who gave sensation itself to immortality’s table. An ever freezing heart feeling now, but in future? As terrible as the stars. Sounds reverberate through the shuttle’s interior. Sobs? Cries? Ignoble outpourings of emotion for passion’s sake?

“I forget what I am… Perhaps one day I will be allowed to remember. Apprentice, Lord, Master… I am. That is all, that and only that.

I am. I exist, and the abundance of the universe is open to me, if I so enclose my fingers upon it. I build no empires, but desir-si-si-re.” A lost woman stutters, voice lost as the clouds separate before us.

A cold, salted tear slides down my cheek. How did it get there? Welcome, he says, this quiet redeemer. Welcome to me, she who ran. She whose father’s blood was spilt to escape Palpatine’s snares.

“Byss… he had no pyramids on Byss.” Manu… Manu, where is Manu?! Where is my son, he cannot be here, he can’t… Palpatine will take him, he’ll use him like a performing beast, he…

…

“He died… Kicked his corpse a couple of times in spirit, I tell you… the old villain. Oh they feel of fear here, on this cityscape before us. Fear and the cacophony of progress lest one die in pain or some ferocious arena…” The fear for my son becomes an unabashed hope for myself. I need not care for [member="Manu Xextos"] anymore, nor his kin.

“Wait…. you killed my great-great-granddaughter!!”

What’s a girl to do but slug the Dark Lord of the Sith? Probably anything else, if I stopped and asked myself for a second or three.

“I liked that one! She was feisty! Ish! Feisty-ish! She…. you boob! Slaughtering lives on Sabarene’ll bite you, Zambr— ooooh was that turadium?” The doors which shut behind the shuttle sparkle with a particular density.

“… guess I could make more…. a few spares, what with that welcome…”

 

[Darth Carnifex]

When the blow came, the Emperor was unperturbed.

He didn't even flinch.

The sensation of her knuckles on his flesh was lost on him, and what superfluous damage inflicted was quickly remedied by the cocktail of genetics flowing through his stained veins. He looked down upon her, his hand reaching out to grasp her arm by the wrist and hold it in place above her. "Sabarene was inconsequential, Ahani. The child you spoke of died easily, her blood staining the sand we fought upon. They were of weak stock, the ones that died, and if you intend to replace them... You need something heartier to gestate in your belly."

He released her hand, his fingers curling into a loose fist that fell passively at his side. "Now come, I will show you to your chambers." The interior of the palace's upper levels was resplendent in their opulence, all manner of rich tapestries and exquisite marble artwork lined nearly every corridor. The Emperor lived in a sanctuary of wealth, each and every aspect of his existence spent surrounded by the most expensive of trinkets and baubles.

Carnifex wore the trappings of a king in every sense of the meaning.

The chamber they came upon was less decorated than the hall it was connected to but was still filled with every high-class amenity that one could expect from the absolute ruler of an Empire as grand as the Sith's. A large bed, a holonet transceiver, wardrobes, recreational table, and an adjacent refresher were all there and accounted for. "This will serve as your residence, for the time being, my servants will fulfill your every need while you stay under my roof."

[member="Ahani Najwa"]​

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

Not a single atom of difference, that punch. He was as dead outside as his original soul, a being so consumed by the Dark that his blood probably tasted tainted. Not that I planned to stab the man and find out.

“Did you see a body? Cause if you didn’t, how do you know she’s dead? Hmm? Fallinassi trickery got her decades under cover on Atrisia and Mandalore. It wasn’t up to me who my offspring fornicated with. If it was, I would have chosen worthy Echani to keep the bloodline pure. The House of Vornskyrs was meant to be Eshan's teeth. Eshan's joy. Manu allowed it to become a den of unrequited half-measures. Would you do better, eight hundred years from now, with your own kin?”

Although with that one comment I wonder if he plans to stab me repeatedly. I yank my hand away and inspect the wrist. The skin buzzed, microscopic residue of him on the pale flesh.

“My dear Kaine, was that an offer or an invitation to nibble at your ear like a hungry rodent?” Can I feel guilty for checking him out? No. No I cannot. Because he’s a specimen of his own. “You haven’t proved yourself to me, yet.”

Ahani Najwa never took the first man she could get. The second? Well maybe not even the third. Tapestries on the walls, couches with resplendent pillows, a wardrobe of fine linens and chersilks guide my eyes in a tumult of colour and pattern that wrenches my belly to the side. We’re in the belly of the worst animal, a dragon built of greed. Places like this never ended well.

I stare at a tapestry and the fabric wilts like a cut flower out of water, threads re-weaving themselves to the destruction of a King’s temple, the pyramid crashing to the ground. Screams echo across my skin in terrible synaesthesia.

And I’m falling… falling from a spire.

The Dark Oculus disintegrates, and I don’t know what one is, nor have I seen it, but it’s there in my mind for a brief glimpse of catastrophe. Of a girl-child screaming the destruction of a planet in an evil place. My thighs collide with a couch. Cutting me off at the legs, until there’s nothing left of my thighs and knees and ankles.

I pant. Reach back to catch myself.

The couch disintegrates in my hands. My legs, where have they gone!? Where are my legs? Why am I still vertical? Why haven’t I fallen on the floor!?

But my legs are attached to me. The suite is not a battlefield disintegrating. I stumble back and smack into a pillar.

No.

Kaine. The pillar which must not be broken, lest the entire citadel crumbles down.

“Are you hollow?” My breath pants out of me in hyperventilating bursts. “Are you empty? Is there any passion left in you? Any danger of sensation? An—”

The images shift. Star destroyers soaked in red. A terrible silence after all the chittering voices are stilled.

The gaping maw.

A singularity without limit, where there should have been a bridge.

[member="Darth Carnifex"]

 

[Darth Carnifex]

The Emperor watched her episode with quiet apathy, lording over the entire scene as a silent witness rather than a participant.

"Indeed, there was a time when I was a hollow empty shell. But as my power grew I began to fill up that emptiness with something stronger than humanity, something far more potent than inadequate Human qualities." In his endeavors to prolong his existence beyond all mortal comprehension, he'd been forced to make great sacrifices along the way, each one stripping away some aspect of his being that had once tied him to the greater community of the galaxy.

"The power of the Dark Side. Hate, anger, fear, despair... These are the weapons by which war is waged, and the tools that I as master of war wield with impunity. I have hollowed my being of all impotence and replaced it with true strength."

At the cost of sense, the cost of taste, of smell.

Shorn of anything that resembled normality and humanoid sensation.

He gave them up willingly and with a smile on his face, for he knew that in return he would be spared the monstrous fate of blackness and eternal ruin. The ignominious end that awaited him in that hellish inferno that so often bled into reality.

To escape death, Kaine Zambrano would render himself a husk filled only with hate and fear.

And he would do so gladly.

[member="Ahani Najwa"]​

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

A cackling laughter besets the room, drowning tears which spill past my cheeks to the floor. The man carved his spirit in shreds, wooed by a piece of power which could have been his without the excision.

“How can I teach you, if there’s nothing left?” This monolithic man before me was consumed wholesale by grotesque promises of the demonic. It gave him power, near infinite ability but destroyed the originators of ultimate mastery. I fear he will forever circle the perfection he desires, a geostatic orbit impenetrable. Unyielding.

Aching eyes, which saw too much of hatred for its’ sake, study the cut of his beard, the sneer of dour lips.

“One does not order the Stars with hate or fear or raw power. If that was your cost, I fear you incapable… unless there remains some modicum of passion in you.” Was there any sensation left in the Dark Vessel? My fingers drift up his beard onto a cold, statuesque cheek. “Is there nothing left in you?”

My thumb crawls up his skin, feeling what he cannot, until pressing firm upon the temple of his third eye. I hope to unlock sensation, to temporarily reverse the cessation of physical touch from the Sith Emperor. A dangerous road.

“It is not by strength of force one moves the cosmos, Kaine. It is through abandon, wild and passionate. Through the act of manipulation. The agreement of mutual pains. Enticing a star to burn itself out so you might travel inside its’ grave. You must sway it. There is no commanding the ineffable… but these are lessons to continue with time, young one.” My lips smack as I gaze upon him. Graze my fingers softly up the back of his bare hand.

Can he feel it? Is he truly too far gone? My other fingers trail down from his forehead. Stroke to cheek and lip.

[member="Darth Carnifex"]

 

[Darth Carnifex]

He again grabs her wrist, gentler this time.

"Do not mistake my inability to physically feel for a lack of sensation, Ahani. I feel emotions just as powerfully as you do, but I am untethered to the physical realm. I exist as energy, primordial and formless within the confines of this construct of flesh, blood, and bone." He prevented her from touching his third eye, a small fear tugging at the strings of his mind that if he again felt what mortals felt then he might resent the path he had chosen, yearning to regain sensation in spite of the immense power he has been allowed to wield after sacrificing such things.

Instead, he brought her knuckles up to his lips and gently kissed her flesh, letting some of his passion spill out into her from such intimate contact. "And if you need further evidence to prove the validity of my words, look no further." He swept Ahani up in his arms, powerful yet careful to not crush her as he would an enemy. He held her aloft up to his face, letting her eyes see into his.

Then he connected his lips with her own, the floodgates of his passion pooling out into Ahani.

For despite his severance of the physical there was no shortage of raw passion burning inside his furnace heart.

[member="Ahani Najwa"]​

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

My hand’s motion cessated in mid air, caught up and pulled back from Kaine’s face. Eyebrows furrowing, I jerk against his fingers. Warm skin concerned with an eternal absence of sensation.

If this was what the Force demanded of him, his crux must have been the pleasure of touch. He risked becoming a kinetic statue, devoid of all which bound him to true power.

“You cannot move the stars with power.” Power for power. Lessening him to increase his dependence and strength on might. The Butcher King’s arms are enigmatically gentle, for the power raging within. Decimating crimson irises plunge into frenetic grey.

What did I give up to be as I am, the immortal starmother? I don’t remember.

“Sensation is my cost. The Force would not let me be rid of it.” My breath catches as he kisses cold fingers. Each brush of his lips sets patches of skin alight in a conflagrational fire. Sensation beyond sensation beyond sensation. The charisma of this Dark saviour yanks me in. Lifts me, feet dangling, to his bearded face.

“Passion is ever stronger than anger and fear.” Whispered words, first spoken by the master who imprisoned her beneath Kashyyk until she… no. I. Until I clawed through a decade of terrors. Shattered from her previous life to become a Sith vessel. Yet, his dominations did not create me as I am.

I created myself. I spoke and wailed and thrust my consciousness beyond the mortality of a frail piece of flesh and became as ephemeral as the primordial energy inside this fallen creation.

This beautiful machine.

His passions strike my spine and curl it. I shudder in his arms, shockwaves of uncontainable emotional energy trembling into the room. Anything not tied down bursts away from this passion’s kiss as arms dwarfed by the monstrosity of this Epicanthix Scion slide round his neck. Cinch me closer as the remaining furniture, the carpet, fixtures of this unholy begotten place blast away, caught and disintegrate.

A leg winds around his waist, anchoring to the beast, who crossed the Galaxy unawares of his deeper mission to bring the lost one home.

Darth Gyaumchem… my name. ​

​

The Great Mother. ​

​

In Exitium Creatrix. Creator through destruction. ​

In the kiss, my name returns to me. The wreckage of the couch, table, a few splendid fittings quiver in disarray and destruction. My mind expands upon this ruined room. It takes hold of the chaff. The raw matter. Fused by the passions of the Dark Lord, radiating in syncopation with my own, the matter reforms.

Crystalline matrixes line the ground at his feet, radiating from the only stability point I have with the floor. Red, crimson crystal so fine in filigree it creates a mandala of crimson crystal upon the floor.

“I will teach you.”

Locked in a temporary lucidity, my lips claim those of this dark redeemer. My [member="Darth Carnifex"].

 

[Darth Carnifex]

He embraces her fully, their powers connecting beautifully in a graceful ballet of darkness.

The room crystalizes, power exuding out from the pair as they embraced their passions for one another without hesitation or reproach. But, the Emperor pulled away and held her before him, letting his powerful scarred hands enjoy the contours of his new paramour's body.

"And I will be pleased to learn from you, my love. It was more than happenstance that you and I met above that black hole, it was the will of the Dark Side. There are few yet alive who could teach me more than I already know about the darkness, yet here you come... A powerful mistress of the shadows, able to rend tears in space and time; a feat unknown to me. Indeed, you will teach me this power and in return, I will exalt you above all contemporaries."

He again took hold of her hand, letting the power of the Dark Side swirl and pulsate around both of them. Perhaps she could sense his intentions, perhaps not. But there was no insincerity in his voice as he made his decree, "Ahani Najwa, I would take you for my wife. You would bear my children, powerful children of the Dark Side of the Force. Ones who would become the new rulers of the galaxy as it further descends into darkness."

[member="Ahani Najwa"]​

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

Lips tremble in contour with his swathing passion. Nose nuzzles into his cheek, my lips vacant as he pulls back. Familiar skin to the dichotic skin of one I both have never met, and know intimately. My mate lived and died in the infamous betrayer’s state. His name a warning. Now the Chaos, that glorious beginning and cessation of time brings my consciousness back to another. Well owned, but hungry. Well protected, but raw.

A past life disintegrated with the atomic particles of a ship. My only ship since awakening from my cosmic stupor scant years ago.

As to who gave it to me, or what events caused its’ destruction, I lack the cognizance. All life previous to the singularity was swallowed by it. Hazy images and flashes of memory. A son. I have a son.

Manu. The first man. I had a daughter, one after my own image. Dalia. Infants screaming. A streak upon my inner being. No.

There will be no memory of Dalia.

“I am but the cosmos’ heartbeat, desiring a strong enough will to guide my hand. I shall guide yours. Together we shall reform the cosmos itself to our wants and desires.” My legs wind around his waist. This mammoth creation of the void. And I know he was descended of giants, of god-Kings for me. For a wandering star, given flesh by necessity and the call of deeds yet to be accomplished.

“I would take you for my wife.”

A man who collected brides like warriors collected weapons. He would collect the Starmother, immortal Echani. Hold me close. I and his others.

“Me? A bride at my age?” Bride amongst a captured dying star. One, who held a singularity to his palm.

“I demanded the Dark give me Its will. That it destroy the dross so I might be free insanity’s meddlesome chains.” My voice lilts out, tender and fleeting. “I would expend my breath experiencing the destruction which formed me, an eon ago. Instead it gave me you.”

His hand holds mine. I slip my forehead to his, eyes shut and lips twisting in a smile. The Dark Lord’s voice emanates through my body. Rumbling with the precursor of our future hurricanes. My missing lucidity. “The Dark knew you needed an immortal to be your helpmate through these first centuries. Yes, I shall claim you. I shall be as you say, and you shall be mine. For although your all wives have right of you, I am a jealous keeper.”

His desire for children, more for his brood, does not go unnoticed. What is a mother without children to bear her line? What is a father without an infant to hold? A teenager to educate?

“Kaine… Najwa.” Legs firmly round his waist, for how else would I look into his eyes while he remained so tall, I feel the grin spread across my face. Laughter radiates out of my ribcage. I thrust my hands in the air and the crystalline mandala around us shatters to powder. Suspended in midair. A snap of my fingers fuses the dust into a sliver of crimson crystal, which I play through my fingers like a coin.

Ahani Zambrano has quite a lovely lilt.

[member="Darth Carnifex"]

 

[Darth Carnifex]

"And teach me you shall, but you will soon understand."

Again their lips met, fiery passion exploding around them as the room again shifted to accommodate Ahani's wishes. But soon it began to take shape according to the Emperor's designs, metal bending and warping to create a flat plateau in the center of the room. Carnifex brought Ahani up to the edge of the uprising and laid her back upon it, her legs still fiercely entwined around his broad waist. With both hands, he held down her arms above his head, his own mere inches away as his dark eyes glared intensely into her own.

"That I am a generous master."

With gentle movements, he pushed her towards the center of the upraised metal and ran the tips of his fingers up her muscular thighs until they latched onto the fabric fastened around her waist. With sudden fierceness he tore apart the fabric, reaching up to then tear at her tunic, casting aside her garment with wild abandon. Desire, hungry and tenacious, radiated out from his body in palpable waves, not unlike the blasting heat roaring from an open furnace.

"And that you are mine."

[member="Ahani Najwa"]​