The Echani walked inside the decrepit and harrowed halls of the mining operation with a twinge of nostalgia racing in her blood. The raggedy shielding, the crackling rocks, the creaks and groans brought her mind back to the endless back-water pirate dens and old running space stations she spent the better part of twenty years flittering between doing odd jobs and wet work just to feed her one and only son.
Her husband had been little more than a bread winner, Urdu lept off on pirate's dens like these and was taken on as security by crews of ne'er-do-wells, concealed in the bastions of Rebellions, reapers and bundled up red cloaks until he sent word and Ahani made their tiny ship crawl through disused space lanes and open places to reunite. The life was a hard one, whispers of blue skies plagued her dreams and the desire to walk bare-foot in grass as green or purple as her home planet had festered into a distressing madness laying dormant until she threw her then-eighteen-year-old son off the ship. Why had Ahani lived on the precarious balance between falling rocks and explosive decompression?
Because a Force-Sensitive Echani infant born on Byss to the teenaged daughter of a member of Palpatine's Crimson Guard was a recipe for Imperial levels of disaster. A slip of a fourteen year old, Ahani had been a rebellious mother-less sinner. She'd paid for it with the birth of her firstborn, and in their escape? The death of her beloved father. Orphaned and new to motherhood, Ahani had fled to distant stars and space lanes, barely daring to touch down anywhere except places like this.
The Gods of Moross had chosen for the finale a place which brought Ahani to the one moment of grace the Sith Lady had ever felt.
A mother's love had saved the woman from a life of lunatic death. As she walked around the arena, Ahani's eyes watered. She looked up to the cameras and curtseyed low with a swipe of her Alchemically hardened sword. The beauty of decay wasn't that death itself became some mercy or full out joy, but the age lines crinkling around her eyes, the thinness stealing the once full lips of her youth. As this mine was once necessary to sustain the lives and wellbeings of potential thousands, the ravages of a mother whose children had grown had the capacity to be as empty and cavernous as the dregs left over. Yet, the Crusade and the billions watching would see what others believed derelict could do to the competition.
Ahani loved the idea of places like this. . . even if she was overwhelmingly glad she didn't have to live in them anymore.
