Now why on Myrkr would a duellist be sitting on the beach waiting? Meditation was as familiar to the octocentarian as the fight, but how curious! How odd! How... Human to crave stillness before the scathingly wonderful series of motions which would define [member="Aaralyn Rekali"] in the elder Echani's mind. Puzzling still was the simple knife draped on the brunette's lap. Ahani cocked her head to the side and unsheathed her hand and a half broadsword in her left hand and kept the full basket bodkin in its sheath along her right upper hip. Who was Ahani without the Force?
A curious and thought provoking question, yet one with a litany of personal history. Ahani without the Force was the Ahani who was born under Palpatine, the Ahani who grew up as the fledgling daughter of a diminutive noble house, the Ahani who learned the art of combat from her mother (before she died in a duel) and her father (before he died saving her and her infant son Manu's life). It was the Ahani who raised Manu on a spacer ship for eighteen years, the Ahani who survived seven years of torture under Kashyyk. That is where the tale of Ahani shifted from an unspectacular young teenaged mother who just wanted to do the best for her miracle child.
Something unlocked inside her under Kashyyk. In the lair of Sith Lords her body was put to its paces and its limits. She wouldn't die, you see, and in that resilience awoke a slumbering, yawning power. Coddled and moulded by the very Sith Lords that murdered her husband and threatened her son, the power spread its knees to the ground before the Sith for one and only one reason: Manu's wife was pregnant with Ahani's first grandchild and if Ahani wanted the child to survive with her father intact, Ahani would pay the price for Manu's Jedi serving disobedience. She went insane. She razed planets and caused wars in the Sith's name. She babbled and quaked, reaching but never connecting with the family she desperately wanted to tend. Ahani with the Force was an overwhelmed sliver of lunacy, an insane and coiling beast far more wounded than she had right to be.
Ahani without the Force was natural. Free. She was sane and warm, curious and doting. She was a conversationalist and the blades were her nouns and verbs. A spring stole her steps, confident enough this Rekali woman wouldn't stay still with a blade coming for her chest, Ahani reached for that wonderful first hello, raised her blade in her left hand and sent the flat of it veering down toward the flesh of Rekali's right shoulder.
Come play with me. Come speak with me, that I might know you through the conversation of combat. I will teach you who you are.
