Ziost Academy |
Jend-Ro Quill
"No- wait-!" Aradia's words died in her throat, the boy crumbling into the jedi's hands. She looked on in horror, hot dread rolling through her as she expected to feel the life leave the boy's small form. It didn't.
The boy's chest rose and fell in steady breaths, peaceful as he slept. She stared on warily, her weapons lowering again.
"I put him here," came her clipped answer, trying to dissuade the jedi from further action. If Quill was already listening, he'd see the memory why. Tilon was no fighter, but he was a frighteningly brilliant alchemist. A genius, actually. It didn't stop him from being assigned to the war front. All of them had. This was their home, they were expected to serve and defend it. When said in such plain terms, Aradia agreed.
Yet when faced with the obvious terror of the child prodigy, Aradia had helped him hide. She didn't exactly know why, but the reason came in somewhere along the word 'choice'.
He needed her to concentrate. Her eyes locked onto his, a single word uttered tightly.
"Bastion."
She leaned into the memory, scrambling to piece together her overwhelmed thoughts.
It was a frightening day-- the first trial she had ever committed to. She had only wanted to please her master and protect the grounds. She had thought she was prepared. She wasn't. She told them to leave. They wouldn't.
They descended upon the school courtyard in a blaze of bolts. It had been the first time she had surrendered herself to the darkside, but her commitment had granted her the power to save herself. She shied from this, guilt redoubling as he was granted flickering images of the storm troopers whose essence she had consumed to heal a saber wound to her gut. She had never seen herself that way before. It was that, or death.
One might have expected her perspective to end there, but it didn't.
Kyber Dark was executed. The imperials turned on their sith comrades. The storm troopers turned on the school, slaughtering without reservation. Like the jedi of old.
She ended that day impaled to the courtyard wall. She hung limply, a statue's hand driven into her core.
She choked to death on her own blood, her vision going blurry as her peers died in the distance. Bastion fell.
Every other war was nothing compared to that one. It got easier
not to think, the memories less vibrant in her mind.
From her perspective he would see
Dantioone- the hatred in the jedi's eyes as they descended upon the temple with righteous fury.
Stop, she had demanded, throwing up barricades with the force.
They didn't.
Words did not halt them, though she tried.
She even begged.
They had come for vengeance. She wasn't strong enough to stop them, so she
made herself stronger.
Then there was
Korriban, and the bombs.
How could someone sacrifice a building full of people that way? An Academy, meant for children. She didn't understand. The jedi was her age, yet they claimed
she was the brainwashed monster. She had not been able to stop the bombs, but the darkside sang freely through her that night.
By their hands she knew death. She knew loss, injury, and pain. They ignored her pleas. They took from her with a sense of owed due. To her, they were no better than the slave masters of her past.
They were the monsters.
They took,
they slaughtered. They were relentless. Unmerciful. Killers.
And she was losing herself to it, her desperation to make it cease driving her down roads he'd know all too well. --She was planning something horrible, her desperation culminating into one, devastating strike ba--
She jerked her thoughts away, elbow slamming into the door as she raised her saber to his neck.
She didn't mean to show him that.