A Fragile Shard of a Dying Past

[Darth Fett]

Axl, age 8

The shrill, pathetic whimpers of the damned creature were sieved through the multiple layers of mesh grate, clashing and blending with the bassy rumble of the engine and chatter of loose bolts.

The Morrow Wind was not known for spaceworthiness as most would define it. Each lurch of the “veteran” freighter had become an oddly comforting and all too predictable soundtrack to young Axl Fett’s travels. The boy’s mother had forbidden him from entering the cargo hold, but had issued no such prohibition of gleaning what information he could from simple, covert observation. Afterall, she demanded he maintain a perpetual awareness of his surroundings, as they were frequently on the run from “various interested parties,” as his father had vaguely and fliply undercut the looming danger many times with a wink, much to Axl’s mother’s audible yet inarticulate vexation.
Much like those breathy grumblings of discontent, these murmurs from the hold aroused an immutable curiosity in Axl, a curiosity that had an agenda of its own. He was wriggling headfirst through the latticework of vents before his mind had even caught up to his fluid, instinctive action. Taking stock of this dissociation, which Axl had experienced with alarmingly heightened frequency, he inhaled the stale dust and rust filled oxygen around him and reclaimed his agency. He could proceed in the sightless and narrow labyrinthine path before him, or shimmy backward, return to his studies or some odd chore (of which there were seemingly countless) as if he had never set out on this tiny adventure. The answer was obvious, a realization that only reinforced the disturbing nature of his dissociative behavior; it was as though his actions were determined by an external force, a script that was not of his design. Perhaps it was most disturbing that he had found this philosophical groundwork so easy to digest at such a diminutive age.

He finally exhaled and allowed his breathing, a function on autopilot we all took for granted, to return to normal. Of course he was going forward, “come hell or highwhatever,” as his father had re-coined the phrase more than a few times.
Axl closed his eyes and reached out through the living Force, visualizing his consciousness rippling outward from him, filling the space with more than his physical self, cascading off of the walls, even radiating through them. He was searching for something other than the empty, boring space between the walls. He was silently calling out to any living creature ahead of him. His parents and infant brother were safely at the bow of the ship; he could feel them instantly, reflexively as he concentrated. Their life forces were entangled, for lack of a better word. Unlike whatever was in the hold. Be it merely unfamiliarity or actively obscuring itself, the creature eluded him at first attempt to feel it. Allowing his thoughts to aimlessly flow until they blindly stumbled onto his target was exhausting. He needed a new tactic.
His mother had taught him it was often a waste of time and mental resources to simply assess anything and everything around him if only seeking something specific. Instead he could filter out the negative space rapidly, calling out to other living cells, other consciousnesses. It was more aggressive an approach, to be certain, and if the creature had any real awareness to speak of, he had no doubt this approach would alert it more than it likely already was, exposing him as much as it exposed his target.

He turned up the dial on his determination. His sense of awareness did not gently ripple from him now as before, so much as jettison violently. Instead reaching out like he was gliding his fingers across a surface, seeking a disturbance to his touch, he visualized his reach like branching, countless tentacles, gnarled and jutting out violently, ignoring the space between, confident they will catch their prey. His first attempt connected! To, what he quickly sorted out was a lone rodent of some sort, certainly not what had been making the noises he’d been investigating. He released his imagined tentacles, the manifestation of his awareness of the Force, untangling it from the tiny creature. He struck outward again, to no avail. Disappointment set in. How was he going to become strong enough to protect his family if he couldn’t navigate his own ship and locate a specific, sizable beast?

He channeled his every thought, each ounce of frustration into an appendage so real in his mind it was almost tangible. With it, he tried to commune with the Force, to whisper his intention. He lashed out again, and like a punch to the gut, he latched onto something. Only that thing also latched onto him, or his mind at least. It was crude, and defensive. Axl didn’t quite sense its thoughts, but he certainly felt its existence, and while it remained alien to him, he gleaned its will to live. That wasn’t nothing.
Pleased with himself, ego properly inflated, he grasped the grate in front of him, this time with his actual hand, dragging his body forward. He now knew which branch of the vents to take.

Grasp, slide, grasp, slide. Each meter felt a mile, a parsec even. Eight year olds weren’t built for patience or monotony. Now perhaps it was that he’d made contact with the creature, or perhaps it was because he had made it deeper toward the hold and could hear and smell the thing, Axl knew he didn’t have long to wait. Now was time to formulate a plan. Honestly, ten minutes ago would have been better, advice from himself he’d take under advisement before forgetting next time. Grasp, slide, grasp, sli-- NOPE. The flimsy sheet of metal beneath him buckled and immediately plummeted. Axl’s undersized frame followed, swallowed by the darkness.
He landed on his right shoulder, a thrilling wave of pain erupting as his socket dislocated and flailed the opposite direction as he tumbled over it. It flopped like rubber as he tried to regain motor control and his bearings. The former came more easily, as he rolled his arm with the aid of his left hand. It whipped back into place, as if being sucked into the vacuum of space. A grin crept to his face. He knew it wasn’t normal to enjoy these sensations, but he nevertheless took small vacations of ecstasy with each new injury. Said vacation was short lived, as he snapped back to his current reality. He was in the pitch black of the cargo hold. He felt movement, swift wisps of kinetic energy changing direction through the stale air, stalking him in his utter blindness.

Axl instinctively flexed and wiggled all the fingers of his right hand as he weighed his next move. He had suspicions, but still wasn’t certain exactly what he was dealing with, and even using all of his training was likely at a physical and environmental disadvantage, particularly if he couldn’t see. Undoubtedly this wild creature outclassed the young Axl in stature and in senses. It would be difficult not to. Axl certainly was scrappy in his own right, but scrappiness only took one so far when a surprise disembowelment or decapitation was within the realm of possibility. The thing was hefty, he could feel that in the air and sensed its substantial size when he had made contact.
He knew he needed to at least see what he was dealing with.
His fingers, still juggling some nonexistent tool snapped to a purposeful attention. The sore, loose tendons further up his arm grudgingly followed suit.

Axl twisted the air around his palm, as if sculpting a snowball. He pictured the particles around him. He forced the energy from within and without into those particles, feeding them to the brim, mentally whispering to the Force his intentions-- no, his commands. Whether it was a byproduct of his manipulation or simply circulation returning to his hand, he didn’t know, but his fingertips tickled with a warmth and a-- soft glow? Swirls of luminescence danced flatly atop his finger, cascading down, dripping off the back along his fingernails and vanishing. As the radiance drove away increasingly large blobs of invading darkness, Axl steadied his hand, before jutting his fingers toward the ceiling. The twirling wisps congealed into a solid shard of light, small streams of hazy white perpetually feeding it. Axl guided the intangible shard outward from his body, extending his arm as far as it would go and peering out as far as he could see. A sea of nothingness. The shard cast a stark shadow across the otherwise gleaming floor in a circle around him. His shadow stretched, in the shape of a man, perhaps the man he was destined to become. His distraction at the thought came at the cost of the shard quickly extinguishing. He snapped his fingers twice, in an attempt to recreate the magic. Just like that, although requiring more of his energy than he’d have cared to admit, a new shard sprang into being.

A proud Axl smugly waggled his eyebrows to himself, and nonchalantly turned the other direction, toward where he remembered the exit to--
No fewer than four razors shredded into his chest, claws coated in venom penetrating his skin and thin layer of muscle from lower abdomen to collarbone.

Axl collapsed, folding onto himself as his light shard faded, its impermanent brilliance flickering across the striking, snarling angular facial features of a Corellian Sand Panther, before it all faded back to darkness.



( Life Sense and Create Light)

[Darth Fett]

He came to, enveloped by the complete blackness normally reserved for death. He would not have been certain he had actually awakened if it hadn’t been for the sharp focus that erupted, a sputtering cascade of agony. His arm was once again dislocated and crumpled beneath him; he only became aware as it recoiled back into socket on its own.

He… rejoiced internally, his lip curling as he bit down to conceal his masochistic revelry. He had trained to repress this side of himself, even with no one else as witness.
Only-- no-- had there been a witness? His hazy consciousness lurched out of complacency, along with something physical in the obsidian void ahead of him. The tiniest pockets of shifts in air pressure and the queerest of pheromones wafting through the stale air pranced around his admittedly dulled senses.

He felt the creature passively stalk him, likely waiting for him to pass out again before coming any nearer.
There was more to worry about in the short term than the predator lurking just beyond his reach, more than even is substantial and perpetual blood loss, more than the exquisitely searing pain.
He allowed his eyes to roll back and his lids to gently shut, the little good they were doing him in this drowning darkness. He focused inward. His pulse slowed, lengthened. Each thud of his heart sent a chain reaction sending Axl's precious blood outward, pouring from the multiple breaches in his flesh. More importantly and less outwardly apparent, he felt the same heart drawing in blood through his arteries-- only this was clouded, corrupt. His mind perceived the toxins as a burning pollutant, racing through his body at an alarming pace. Every heartbeat drew it in like the tide.

Axl could feel he had precious few moments to neutralize the threat. Were he to ignore the venom coursing through him AND manage to escape this hold and the apex predator between him and the door, it still wouldn’t be enough to save him.
The child used his training, reaching outward through the Force, only instead inverting his gaze inward, speaking with the midichlorians within. His only focus was the burning, thickening intrusive agent. He mentally pulled at them, crudely as it was, in an attempt to combat their progress.

He felt two components to the venom. A neurotoxin and a hemotoxin. His understanding of these compounds were rudimentary-- his father had introduced him to similar agents, regarding weapons, primarily relating to the man’s proclivity to poison darts. Neither had ever met his father’s genetic donor Jango Fett, and one could only speculate as to how much similar tastes were inherited or merely incidental.
Axl’s thoughts were now twofold: to slow the spread of the invading compounds, physically retarding or even reversing their journey, and biologically or artificially negate their effectiveness should he fail to any degree.
He knew his body was unlikely to naturally produce sufficient antibodies for these toxins, least of all swiftly and flawlessly enough to save him. Additionally, he did not have that level of control or knowledge of what he needed chemically.

The sickening, agonizing effects had already begun to present themselves. Red blood cells began to rupture. It was a matter of time before the toxins bound to his neurons and the pathways were irreversibly damaged.
His perception was a crude illustration of what was happening at a cellular level, but effectively, he through the Force (admittedly much of it in a seeming autopilot) had rallied his body to manufacture a crude antibody. The antibody was not specific to the toxins, but bound to them well enough to prevent their onslaught of healthy cells. This binding, however, was tenuous, artificial, and a considerable strain to maintain and reproduce.

Axl more consciously focused on forcing the toxins out. He could generally feel them, and although their effect had dulled, his heightened perception via the Force maintained that strained, crude but instinctual awareness.
He pictured these bound toxins as tangible items to be dispelled from his bloodstream, forced and squeezed out of him.
Over precious minutes that felt like tiny eons, his meditation gave way to other concerns. The burn signifying the venom subsided as the bulk of it oozed from his still open wounds.

Those wounds, while effective as an exit pathway for the venom, were now only a liability. One becoming increasingly likely to be fatal by the moment.

(Detoxify Poison)

[Darth Fett]

The boy had precious moments to determine his fate, the last of the beast’s venom having been purged via his grievous lacerations-- along with it nearly the last of his dwindling, thinned blood.
The indelicate process of forcing out the toxins had swiftened his acute anemia. While it had saved his life, it ironically risked being the ultimate cause of his death.

He felt the droplets invading the abyss around him, the byproduct of the creature still stalking him. The small, fine mists of saliva and pheromones that rode in on small wafts of carbon dioxide did not quite betray the panther’s exact location, but suggested its narrowing proximity to its prey. The moisture and warmth reminded Axl of lessons his mother had given him.

The Seventeenth Sister, known to Axl as “Mother” was a haunted, calculated creature. Coldly complex, she repressed her trauma and channeled her energy into exerting control of her surroundings. Where Axl’s father played fast and loose with life, she was always planning for the next five catastrophes and ten escape routes. She knew nothing of her birth lineage, having been abducted and raised in a compound with other… talented children. Cruel children. Fodder for their relentless conditioning. She had been forged into a bloodhound of sorts, a hunter of assets best described as fugitives of the Emperor. She had established a swift and promising record of hunting down Jedi, witches, and other undesirables. It was on a mission to terminate an escaped failed experiment, a clone imbued with Force sensitivity, that she abandoned her order of Inquisitors. The target she whisked away for a life of exile on the run soon after became her husband. The pair, being products of parallel lives, reclaimed their identities and their destinies, or rather forged new ones. Her husband chose the name Fett, after the man whose face glared back at him in the mirror, a perpetual, intentional reminder of a family, a clan he was born into but could never have. A name to set him apart from the countless sea of faces exactly like his own. It served more as a symbol, an in-joke than a serious point of pride. Sten “Fett’s” wife, this Seventeenth Sister, conjured her own identity: Vasilisa.

One particular evening a year prior to the Sand Panther incident, Vasilisa had spirited away with her eldest son. She instructed the child to exercise for hours, while she silently meditated just out of reach. Her statuesque posture had been the most striking image, lingering in the boy’s mind as he finished his regimen of pull ups and fluidly took the opposite stance, balancing with one palm flat on the grate floor under him, lifting his torso, hips and legs straight above him. His mother was noticeably pregnant. Her protruding belly often seemed to be her center of gravity, staying in place while her uncannily slender limbs and upper torso nimbly revolved around it. Her alabaster flesh and pointy ears were a result of being mixed race, half a near-human species called Nagai. She knew next to nothing of her people’s heritage, doing little to seek a reconnection to it. In truth, she typically took care to hide her eartips with her thick, wiry jet black hair or any matter of head coverings. She never discussed the matter, but if she had, Axl surmised she’d have deflected and excused her style choices as a means to better blend into crowds and avoid being more memorable than necessary to anyone she might encounter. It was now the era of the Galactic Empire. She and her husband were both fugitives, their children at worst abominations, at best leverage against them. In short, the freedom and individual agency for which both she and Axl’s father had risked everything was still their greatest liability.

“Axl,” she began at a near whisper, her hushed voice floating on the air, “the galaxy is such a frigid place. Do you know why?”
Perhaps it was his inverted stance and the blood rushing to his head, but he scrambled for a sufficient answer.
“Entropy,” his voice belonged every bit to the seven year old he was, though his words and perspective skewed decidedly older. “The energy and warmth we cultivate ultimately leaves us, spreading out to the primordial void.”
Vasilisa smirked, keenly aware the boy was repeating what he had overheard one night as she and his father discussed their philosophy, assuming Axl had been fast asleep. Axl’s father had an inflated sense of his profoundness after a heavy night of drinking. Nights without heavy drinking were admittedly sporadic. The pair typically ended evenings draped around one another, limbs as effortlessly entangled as puzzle pieces. It was times like those the man became his most poetic. Said poetry was bloody awful, but endearingly so.
“The cold you feel inside, blustering, robbing you of your spark is a universal truth, son, a force of existence,” she raised her hand and the boy found himself dangling a meter off the ground, still upside down, “like gravity.”
He lingered, floating in the air as did her words.
She released her grip on him, her hand gracefully returning to her side. Axl thudded to the floor. He knew better than to complain, gently rubbing his soon to be bruised forehead and counting himself lucky his exercises were, for the moment, seemingly over.
“It is up to you, my dear boy, to bend those universal forces to your will, to tame them as a wild beast, into your servant.” The air carrying her velveteen words began to crystallize. Her controlled, regulated breaths were increasingly visible. She extended her milky white hand as the boy was dragged toward her by an invisible compulsion. She caressed the bump on his head, the back of her palm colder than ice. The relief combating the initial swelling was immediate.
“Your servant,” she reiterated, frost dusting her flesh and spreading to his.

Axl snapped back to his present, grim reality. With the vivid memory of his mother’s words and her command of the elements, the air presently around Axl had become markedly cooler, as if reflexively. Small crystals formed in his short, shallow, pained breaths. Just as quickly as the crystals formed, they dissipated, melting as they crossed the threshold into the space outside of his unconscious influence. His fingers, like his mother’s before him, were frigid. Partly from the bloodloss and the medical shock his body had drifted into an out of multiple times, the lower temperature and ghastly, almost translucent skin of his hand reminded Axl of Vasilisa’s. He typically saw, or chose to see, very little of his mother in himself. But now, circumstantial or otherwise, the similarity was too striking to ignore. Recalling the soothing touch he’d received, Axl brought his fingertips to one of the bloody trenches along his chest. With even the lightest of contact, his body lurched and he nearly retched in blaring agony. As the searing pain retreated, he noticed the lingering coolness remained. It was slight, but it was a tiny mercy in a wave of torture. He brought his palm back once more, steeling himself this time. The sting was overwhelming, but manageable compared to the first unanticipated wave. While Axl normally delighted in his suffering, he knew this threat was existential. He focused, and the chill spread like a glacier washing over him.
“Entropy” he thought.
Cold was not a thing. Cold did not exist. It was a lack of heat, a descriptive word for a relative value. As such, the thought of summoning “cold” had limited effectiveness. While it was more of an illustrative thought than literal, addressing the matter at hand would be more directly instrumental in saving his life.

‘Existence robs us of our warmth,’ he subconsciously chanted.
‘Bend it to my will.’
He pictured the energy, the warmth and movement of the atoms around him. He shut his eyes. Although the pitch black cargo hold was no less visible by doing so, it better prepared him psychologically, perhaps out of mere repetitive comfort.
The boy’s mind called out to the Force. He wasn’t yet aware of how to think of it-- as a benevolent entity? A tool? A friend? No matter. An overall sentience or otherwise, the Force had certainly proved responsive and instrumental to his survival on numerous occasions. His mother had seemed to believe it was a part of every action in the universe, whether they acknowledged it or not.
The boy imagined vibrating atoms, teeming with energy, vainly grasping to their fleeting warmth.
He needed merely to hasten what the universe was wont to do, regardless.
The more rapidly and effectively he could draw heat out of an area and disperse them elsewhere, the more extreme the result. As he beckoned the flow of energy to his will, minuscule tingling sensations assaulted his flesh. The fine hairs along his hands and arms snapped to attention. He continued to beckon the withdrawal and rechanneling of energy. It was like a second wind, like squeezing more breath from one’s lungs after holding a note so long one thought they had none left. His command over the exchange took him by surprise, like unexpectedly discovering a new gear while accelerating, opening a new world of the possible.
Harsh, bitter crystals sparked and danced along his wrists, rushing forward to his knuckles. Jagged ridges formed, branching forward; they felt like claws, digging into him and anchoring themselves beneath his punctured skin just as much as they pierced the air ahead of him. Fine swirling mists wisped around the void in front of him, seemingly revolving around and getting pulled into some arbitrary black hole, the nexus he’d inadvertently created.

The boy brought his digits once again to his chest. By the time his palm made contact with the bloody mound of flesh, both were covered in thick, slick layers of ice. The pain largely vanished as his nerves shut down. The escaping blood froze, slowing and sealing what remained inside. The shifting energy cauterized the wounds, perhaps causing permanent damage.
Axl slumped back, as spent mentally as he was physically.

Axl had no time to pass out again. He had to regain his bearings.
He flicked his wrist and the sound of fracturing ice echoed through the tundra void. He attempted to snap his fingers as he had before, only to have his slick figures gently glide across one another, landing with more of a muted thud than a snap. Delicate wisps of luminescence twirled about his fingers, then erupted outward, illuminating the space around him half a meter in every direction.
He glanced down at the sorry state of his mangled body. The clear and translucent patch of ice blanketing him twisted and clashed with the splatters of thicker red streams, frozen and jutting outward.
The shards of ice that had torn open his hands had just as soon sealed them. The stalactite claws lurched and lightly fractured as he clenched his fist. He inhaled in anticipation of having to attempt to stand.

Without warning, the creature leapt from just out of sight, and pounced down onto Axl with all of its beastly momentum. Locking eyes with the snarling creature just as its voracious maw came upon him, Axl slammed his jagged fist to the floor. A brutal tidal wave of ice shards erupted from beneath the creature, impaling it from a dozen directions and suspending it in place, as if frozen in time. It whimpered and twitched, pathetically. Its paw reached forward, in yet one final desperate attempt, its claws extending as it scrambled to make contact, undeterred by the death gurgles escaping the panther’s throat. Axl wasn’t sure if the cat was actually attempting last ditch revenge, was still instinctively trying to secure a meal, or if it was reaching out for any sort of contact, comfort as it processed its mortality.
The boy cocked his head, his mind drinking in all the possibilities of the creature and the significance of the moment. He was lost in this sea of misplaced fascination. The cat’s eyes were drowning in forming tears which froze just as soon as they trickled outward. The frozen tears collected on themselves, working their way up until glassy domes formed and its lids were forced permanently open. The creature’s fear and lack of understanding arrested his full attention, to the detriment of anything else. He was lost, locked into the panther’s fading soul.

A furious crimson haze erupted from between its eyes, lunging forward violently and stopping centimeters short of Axl’s own face. His normally pale complexion had been near translucent, and was now burning with the glow of the blade. The cat’s eyes retreated, rolling back, finally at rest as its light extinguished.

The boy’s eyes crossed as he processed the baffling tableau sprawled out before him. The trauma of the day and the bloodloss had surely not helped in his confusion. His body, currently by coincidence genuflecting, gave out beneath him as he collapsed once more, this time onto a bed of jagged ice. The crimson lightsaber blade retreated, the ice around him suddenly robbed of its brilliance and warmth.
His eyes darted around, catching the familiar yet in the moment alien face of his mother, making her way from behind the panther’s corpse. She knelt and cradled his neck, light from the outside spilling in and backlighting her, as everything once again faded as he drifted.


(Cryokinesis)

[Darth Fett]

Years later.



Axl, AGE 16

Axl, clad in looser-than-intended medium combat armor, crouched behind an abandoned landspeeder. Garbage adorned the vehicle inside and out, a respectable array of discarded waste one might expect in any actual receptacle. As Axl slammed his back against the speeder, bottles and trays tumbled out, smacking him across his thick skull. He tightened his death grip around the barrel of his Prax Arms AXM-50. He thumbed the ridges of its power pack, his fingertips adhering to the metal from sheer force and the humidity of the damp midday suns. Five midday suns, to be more precise, scattered at varied angles. Finding shade had proven… difficult. Although he hadn’t kept a strict count of how many charges he had fired, he was well enough aware that he was running low and had no replacements. The fallen bounty hunters strewn around did not have weapons with compatible ammunition.

The spot he was now hunkered in would have been entirely inhospitable a mere few years earlier. The terraforming of Bar Neth was an arduous, ongoing process, but industry had found its way here as soon as the first settlers ventured here. And with industry there came an economy. And every economy invited crime. This particular makeshift town was more of a gangster haven than anything, a dugout in the frontier away from the emerging attractions for future tourism. Smugglers found spots like these invaluable, as they carved a piece of the emerging market here before there was any real competition.

It was from such an environment that Axl’s current predicament had sprung. His parents had met with a local crime boss regarding arrangements to better evade imperial agents who had turned their attention to the Outer Rim, in exchange for covert work. Vasilisa and Sten had taken a meeting with the mobster in charge of this little hell hole, a particularly overly pleasant man named Tearka Ja’rn’an Tiln. Axl’s brother Erailic had rudely commented on the man’s rotund body, a faux pas especially offputting considering the boy had been around several Hutts. Tiln had glared at the young boy for a steady two seconds before leaning back on his trunklike legs, throwing his wrinkled head back and letting out a hearty guffaw. That groundshaking laugh allowed Domi, Axl’s girlfriend, to release her grip on Erailic, whose shoulder she had clutched while sliding her other hand gently toward her lightsaber hilt, in anticipation of trouble over the insult. Vasilisa and Sten had been unphased, or at least acted the part. Sten turned his head and winked at the boy, and gently gave Domi a reassuring pat on the back. Their host was an Askajian, and his round body contained little fat to speak of, but instead contained massive reserves of water. Water which heftily swayed as he moved. Axl had silently wondered if the men of the species also had six breasts, as he’d heard a drunken man rant about one night, long ago in the streets of The Vertical City. If it were true, Tiln’s conservative suit didn’t betray those particular details. In fact, Axl surmised the man was wearing either body armor or a girdle. Either seemed just as likely.

Tiln had taken Axl’s parents off to a private meeting inside his compound, leaving the kids to sit in the cantina, under Til’s assurance that they would be under the watchful eyes of his goons.
How quickly things could change. He wasn’t entirely sure how it had started. He felt a sickening tinge of fear, trepidation radiating off of some of the younger crew as they had approached. Then, perhaps by accidental nerves, someone had drawn their blaster a smidge too loud. Domi had reflexively acted, shoving a vibro shiv into the nearest bounty hunter’s left eye socket. The orb hadn't even burst by the time she was onto the next, a throat this time, then a groin. She had a way of battle that was part elaborate choreography, part an artist with a murderous brush, and part improvisational jizz wailer. Each stroke reminded Axl how much more deeply he was destined to fall in love with her. Her charcoal hair gently bobbed as damp ropes of ruby erupted from her victims and visually accentuated the absolute goddess summoning those streams.

Now Axl was pinned behind the landspeeder, his only cover in the dusty courtyard, surrounded by assailants with their blasters trained on his location, dozens of them spread across the complex. Most were at ground level, but several were on the second level balconies, making it all the more imperative that Axl kept his head down or the garbage pile behind it erect.

Domi was in lockdown in an adjacent office, barricaded with Erailic. Barricaded, of course, by the pile of corpses she had created. Under her protection was the safest place for the kid to be, until Axl’s parents returned. If they returned.

Even given the situation at hand, the group had collectively agreed that using lightsabers or blatant Force attacks in daylight or crowds would have put them at even greater risk. The inquisitors and imperial special agents were a mere tip off from anyone looking for a finder’s fee, to say nothing of other factions and interested parties. Axl’s family had been forced into lethal confrontations with Jedi who had recognized his parents from their early work, along with plenty of outlaws and rebels alike who assumed they were still in the Empire’s service.


Axl’s vantage point was rubbish. He was frozen, his back burrowing into the vehicle behind him. If he were to stick his head out to better assess his standings beyond a blind gambit, he’d just as soon have said head blasted into fried jelly. Even if he were to expose himself by brandishing his lightsaber and deflect every last blaster bolt, there were still plenty of solid projectiles, grenades, rockets, or dung.

Focus.

He narrowed his vision, as if looking just “beyond” the solid wall directly in front of him.
Dark. Blurry darkness. He reached out with the Force as he had done a handful of times before, mostly to spy on conversations that weren’t meant for him. But here, now, on this blasted pitstop of a planet, the world around him… detached? It lurched forward in a motion as if his perspective were gliding on a track, through a tunnel of distortion. The wall directly ahead did not prove the most visually interesting, but with the slightest tilt--
His view swallowed him, the world opening up like through a lens that made everything feel distorted. Drunk, even. Time dilated and a near imperceptible delay caused everything to trail by milliseconds. It was like a holovid when the feed dropped frames and sputtered to make up the difference.
His vision swooped and swayed as he worked to gain his bearings. He “swam” to the sky and glared down, like a bird of prey scouting rodents.

Thirteen hired guns were scattered across the upper balcony: conjoined twin Ithorians holding a disruptor pistol and a sniper rifle respectively, several unremarkable humans with their weapons hidden from view were joined by one of whom was holding his blaster tilted sideways suggesting his inexperience and overcompensation, a Kitonak that for some reason Axl felt to be female despite having zero awareness of the species’ gender dynamics, a Whiphid smugly sat atop an E-web, and a twitchy Pa’lowick in purple and teal striped tights with a metallic sheen.

Axl tightly pulled the mental reins on his visions, slowing down and pulling back around, snaking in the other direction before swooping down for a closer look.

A Kaleesh warrior clad in Salus Corp Stalker armor was the ranking leader of those on the ground level. Apart from him, a rodian in an obviously bootleg Darktrooper armor sans helmet or half of the joints one should expect, surrounded by a veritable rainbow of Nikto mercenaries of various skin tones, all with their blasters trained on Axl’s location.

He relaxed his eyes, as his tunnel vision sputterd like a deflating balloon, and cross faded into his natural, physical view. That bland wall. He took in the stale air through his nostrils. The lingering dust stung and clung to the remaining moisture of his nose hairs. He held the brackish mixture that was as much salt, dirt, and incinerated rubble as it was of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. As his lungs begged for him to exhale, Axl counted and recounted every adversary and their position he had scouted. He expelled the sour gas and pollutants, gulped in a new breath, and slung his body around like a ragdoll, his AXM-50 darting upward, arcing towards a deadeye lock onto the head of Mr. Wannabe Darktrooper, only…

Just as he had made a turn, Axl’s periphery caught three incoming warheads spiralling into separate points in the middleground between him and the office housing Domi and Erailic.

Well, shi--

Kaboom. There was supposed to be a world shattering kaboom.

In fact there were, the culminating fulmination beyond comprehension, not that anyone in a twenty meter radius could hear its full roar. The sublime initial shockwave blew out eardrums, resulting in a hollow ringing to accompany a distinct gutpunch and bassy rumble, resonating through every bone, muscle, and organ. Axl’s body flew back, through the trash heap, its components shattering in every direction. The last thing Axl saw before smashing into a beam and flipping, flailing in the other direction, was the entire facade to Domi’s shelter splintering out of existence.

(Surveillance)

[Darth Fett]

Domi’s normally deft fingers vainly clutched at loose fabric as Erailic darted out of reach. The child, not much younger now than Axl had been during the Sand Panther attack, carelessly and effortlessly bound forward, a hail of red, green, and blue blaster fire narrowly crossing paths on every side as dirt clouds and smoldering debris rose with each blast making contact with his surrounding environment.

Axl snapped to attention as the muted, chaotic world around him allowed one unmistakable sound to cut through the pained, false silence. He felt Domi’s unbroken bellow, deep in his gut. He regained control of his legs, which he found were slumped in front of his face. Apparently he had landed on his shoulders, neck stretched to the side, and torso folded up over him. He rolled his collar in a shrugging motion, tossing his weight to grant him the momentum to reorient himself. With his feet flat on the ground and his head once again above them, he whipped around, every joint in his body cracking and popping into place in rapid succession.

The posse that had summoned the blasts also seemed largely to have been caught in the confusion, reeling to regain composure and discern context for what had just occurred. Through momentary wafts of visibility in the waves of dust and smoke, Axl caught glimpses of those unremarkable humans on the balcony. It was their hidden artillery which had unleashed the rockets while Axl wasn’t looking.

Damn his hesitation.

Several posse members turned their direction in disbelief, while themselves recovering in the fallout of such recklessness. Others, including the young inexperienced human Axl had scouted earlier were busy firing wildly, inaccurately at anything that moved. Right then, that was namely Axl’s kin. It was a mistake he would pay for with compounding interest.

Axl’s world slowed as he dug into the ground with his left heel, his body aligning straight and lurching forward with a pivot. The dust kicked up in the motion progressively slowed until it peaked in a near standstill. It was a proverbial calm before the storm.

His jaw clenched in anticipation. The strain on his bone and teeth began to buckle.

His target was Erailic, the child who had found himself in a hail of blaster fire. Domi was faded in the background, hand outstretched toward the child in her charge, neither foot presently touching the ground. Her lightsaber hilt peeked out from the folds in her robe as they floated indefinitely on the stagnant wind. It was quite the vision, the landscape painted before him. The setting, the people, the debris were all nearly frozen in time, relative to his perception. While the blaster bolts seared through the air with just as much fury as ever, their movement was still quicker than he could ever outrun. The light they emitted flickered, a hypnotic glow hidden from the world moving at normal speed.

His hind leg had been building traction, energy gathering on its way to becoming kinetic and blasting him off. His right pivoted again, one final course correction for guidance.

And it happened. He was off. As he darted out, the world around him didn’t retain its haunting stillness. It was as if letting go of that anticipatory state allowed time to catch up with his altered and relative perception. The world was now moving at regular speed, but he was moving much faster. Instead of experiencing everything in slow motion, it was more like riding on a heavily modified racing swoop. The details caught in his periphery turned to blurred streaks, with only what he focused on straight ahead remaining largely unfazed. His combat armor, still too loose pounded furiously back and forth, a battering ram to his ribs.

He immediately found while moving at unnatural speeds, the body tended to favor the direction in which the head was oriented. His legs disobeyed his commands to rush toward Erailic, instead taking a detour toward the huddled mass of Nikto mercenaries who were only vaguely aware of the blur now rushing them.

Axl’s mind hadn’t caught up to his hands, which had already independently found their way to the flailing hilts at his hips. Without consulting him, they instinctively activated the switches and unleashed twin crimson blazes of terror. He couldn’t have been sure if it was his subconscious deciding to violate his own rules made to avoid detection of his identity, or if the Living Force had intervened. Where his father had always treated the Force as a mere tool to be exploited, a beast of burden to be exploited and bent to one’s will, his mother had warned him that it was a feeling, if not fully thinking, interconnected web of beings with its own collective will, a will unknown to any individual member. While it was a well for power, it could also influence its users and alter probabilities. For all Axl knew, the Force was influencing the fool on the upper deck’s aim. For what purpose, he hadn’t the slightest clue, but perhaps surrendering control of his limbs was a cost of gaining this quickened pace. By the time he’d mentally completed the question, he was on the men, a whirring furious red wave tearing through them like a blade through sand. The wave consisted of both blades, one so low it was flirting with the shifting ground, gliding through ankles and calves. The other saber from his left hand was rigidly stretched across his chest, just making contact at its tip with whatever chest, neck or top of a skull that happened to be cursed enough to merely exist at its height. Axl’s legs hadn’t slowed, and to an outside perspective, the shockwaves of loose dirt kicked up with each step congealed into a massive column behind him.

His body continued to shift right, contrary to his intent, causing him to cross to the other side of the faux darktrooper, missing him entirely. Attempting to course correct with a tad too much zeal, he dug his left foot down hard, and pivoted so hard he spun into the air, his blades shifting as he smashed down.

He landed, blades having razed down into two separate targets: a remaining Nikto and the Kaleesh. Both lightsaber blades had torn down from their respective victims’ shoulders and were wedged in their lower torsos. Axl would have expected their eyes to have been locked on his, but as he glanced back and forth between the men, it occurred to him they saw a blurred specter. He fluidly ripped the blades straight out from their guts, whirred them in wide arcs, and beheaded them with an acknowledged exhale. Still moving swiftly, he dodged an incoming swipe from the darktrooper ripoff. The clumsy attack was slow and stiff, making it ever more obvious that the suit suffered from unarticulated or nonexistent elbow joints, amid other shortcuts. Axl’s pivots to avoid the attacks were far too swift, but came with their own challenges. At this potential speed, each movement brought with it a remarkable build in momentum. Even as he felt he was remaining relatively still, every step sent him reeling in another direction, desperate to regain his bearings. To recenter himself. His careless footwork found him unexpectedly far from the counterfeit darktrooper, certainly further than the rodian could make up the distance.

Axl’s tunnel vision once again found itself locked onto Erailic. He pushed off with a lurch, the ground lightly giving way beneath his left heel as he once again pushed forward. The strain hit him; his muscles felt like they were vibrating apart, loose strings on a faulty instrument.

He pushed forward anyway, his breath lingering just outside of his body. His sabers were already inexplicably back at his side, dormant but still teeming with the thrill of the kill.

It was a short, straight dash before he had scooped Erailic into his arms, allowing the momentum to swing his sibling’s limp body over his shoulder. He spun once again, changing course and grabbing Domi with his spare hand. In fairness, she had closed much of the gap between herself and Erailic, and in Axl’s absence would likely have valiantly saved the child and slaughtered as many foes as it would have taken to ensure their safety. Or at the very least, avenge them.

Axl, still moving, shifted Domi’s weight to his upper arm and shoulder. With his now semi-free hand, he activated his saber and with a flick of his wrist sent it backward, still moving away from the posse, and toward the clearing where they had left the Morrow Wind.

The blur of blazing crimson was undoubtedly the final thing the young, reckless human on the balcony saw before his feckless career came to a swift and suitable end. Axl’s lightsaber hadn’t cut the kid down, so much as it had hollowed out his head and melted his face from the inside. His comrades vainly scrambled to save him and to deactivate the weapon, as the boy’s body flailed, swinging the blade around behind his head, taking unintentional swipes at the rest of them.


Axl, Domi, and Erailic were at the foot of their ship by the moment that the world caught up to Axl. He collapsed and everything around him was spinning. His legs felt like ropes, more for show than for any sort of utility. His companions were no closer to grasping what had transpired over the previous twenty seconds as Axl was to planning his next move.


“Dom,” he gasped, “we’re going to need you to get on board and raise absolute hell. Then we find the old folks and blast whatever’s left of this trash heap from orbit.”

“Love that enthusiasm,” she started, “but we’re going to have to steal a ship that holds together before we even talk about that sort of firepower.”

“Just get in that trash heap,” he smirked as his eyes landed onto a nearby speeder bike, “but first, I’m going to need you to help me up.”


(Force Speed)

[Darth Fett]

Hushed disbelief and motionless panic gave way in favor of vain attempts to regain composure and prepare for another attack. The Whiphid stationed atop the E-Web housed on the upper level barked commands in Huttese, an oddity among his species. Likely a hint he had been born and raised in captivity outside of his otherwise presumed homeworld of Toola, this lingual signifier branded him as something special. Being so fluent pointed to a favored life in the court or service of a wealthy Hutt.

The Pa’lowick at his side was besieged with tremors, though it was unclear how much that was a matter of nerves or side effects from his obvious and active spice addiction. The unmistakable flakey remnants of his last several bumps clung to both of his mouths, distressingly becoming more caked on with each drop of saliva escaping and dissipating in the harsh midday.

In the center of the courtyard, the Rodian darktrooper found himself awash in an unnatural shadow cascading outward in each direction as if the ground beneath him was being swallowed by the obsidian of space. The abyssal blackness swirled around its ever expanding tide, appearing to inhale each particle of dust that had yet to settle from the earlier, still baffling altercation. The darkness, darker than the dingy and speckled counterfeit armor crept upward, like tendrils gripping the mortified Rodian as his panicked breaths gave way to full hyperventilation. He found himself unable to take a step and end the illusion. In reality the shadow was not a physical threat or unknown monster emerging from the sands. His inability to escape had nothing to do with the darkness, but was instead caused by a combined effort of the alien being frozen in fear and his armor’s locked, unlubricated joints.

He shot his glance to his companions on the upper terrace. The Whiphid raised his arm as a signal to the others he now outranked. In a snap, he brought one wooly digit down toward his struggling cohort. One of the conjoined Ithorians, several humans, and the Kitonak immediately opened fire, their ammunition blazing through the muggy atmosphere, only to be sucked into the blackness, small tufts of dust escaping upward in its wake.

The Pa’lowick was as dazed as ever, his mouths both open wider than his eyes. His twitching fingers struggled to maintain a grip on his slugthrower rifle. The humans staggered, a few using their very dead and excessively faceless friend for additional cover, slumping his corpse over the rail.

Axl, unseen for the moment, was similarly slumped across his speeder bike. His vantage point allowed him to survey the scene he had crafted. He had used the Force to manipulate light, both to generate and to suppress its flow, just as he had the day of the Sand Panther attack, and countless times in the years since. Despite his comfort with the practice, a mere parlor trick at this point, he still found himself at a severe disadvantage. His legs were decidedly useless, his ribs undoubtedly cracked, and his body searing with pain, a fact he nonetheless found… delectable. The darkness he was presently casting was instrumental to surviving and successfully pulling off what he planned to do next. What he had to do, if he wished to reach his parents and make it back safely to the Morrow Wind with his entire family intact.

Axl swirled his fingers while cupping his right palm. All light retreated from existence in a ten centimeter sphere he continued to sculpt, his eyes no longer catching any reflection as they were transfixed: flat, lifeless, empty voids– not that anyone could see his face. Not yet.

The sea of nothingness beneath the Rodian lurched, as if in anticipation of what was about to come.

The thunderous revving of a nearby speeder bike snarled and roared through the courtyard, causing all but the Whiphid to lose their footing and a moment’s breath.

With a grunt, Axl jettisoned forward, like a ragdoll pinned to the speeder as it jumped a ramp, slammed and sputtered, careening through the courtyard, full force and straight into the furthest wall.

[Darth Fett]

As the sputtering speeder bike barreled into the building, just under the feet of the dozen remaining baffled mercenaries on the balcony, Axl flung his arm straight ahead, coming to a point at his perfectly extended index finger.

His arm was positioned as if a rigid lance at his side. He recalled his mother’s stories of gladiatorial games and trial by combat in which opponents would charge at one another on specially designed jousting swoops. Mostly for ceremony and challenges for power, they differed greatly from Axl’s plight. There was no pomp, no honor. This would be for blood– be it theirs or his.

The obsidian orb he had been cradling, bereft of all light and life left his fingertip and engulfed the wall in front of him.

What followed was a maneuver he was unsure would even leave him alive. Yet he didn’t wince.

He vanished into the uncertain, hollow darkness, swallowed whole into its two dimensional void.
Before his adversaries had the chance to register the fact the structure wasn’t buckling beneath them, Axl and his speeder erupted from the blackness still surrounding the Rodian.

He violently used his extended fist to clutch the rodian by the hand as the bow and hull of the speeder obliterated his chest plating. Shrapnel hurtled in every direction, but particularly worrying shards burst like scattershot into the tender green flesh of his face and neck.

Although Axl had entered one shadow horizontally, parallel to the ground, he was now rocketing straight up out of another, entirely perpendicular. As the matter of both Axl and the speeder was transferred, so too was their momentum. The teenager had been trained to use this obscure– Shadow Walk, as his mother had called it– technique for defensive purposes, sneaking his brother through alleys whenever they suspected unwanted eyes were on them. It was her and her husband’s insurance policy that when one day, her children would escape the fate she seemed certain awaited her family, be it at the hands of Imperial agents, rogue surviving Jedi, rivals, or random scum they had pissed off in any of their decades of misadventures and murders.

Axl had never tapped into this ability so aggressively, but it was a means to an end.
He was going to need a pick-me-up if he was going to see any more battle on his feet. And these mercs were a perfect snack.

Blaster bolts and slugs were already en route to him before he had even reached the paramount of his upward momentum before gravity would bring him back down. The majority of shots pinged and scattered across the side of the rodian and the underside of the speeder, both of which were between Axl and his assailants. For the moment, at least.

He exhaled as he completed his ascent, the trajectory of the bike beginning to arc backwards.

He felt them.

Their fear.

Their uncertainty.

Their– munchies, in the case of the Pa’lowick.

The buckled front fork of the speeder lurched and collapsed on itself as the mad descent began.

He felt in himself a keen cognizance awaken as to the full spectrum of emotion and agony of his foes–

No, they were no longer his foes. They were a sumptuous feast laid bare before him, ripe and stinking in the blazing suns. At his very core, in his very cells, he felt the pulsating need erupt, a parched battery whirring to life and becoming self aware of its destitute lust and gluttony. This insatiable pit cried out for something, anything, from panic to wanton carnage. Its tastes were decidedly fixated on unwilling donors.

First the invisible tendrils of longing lashed out and embedded themselves into the rodian, who still hadn’t passed out so much as found himself partially decapitated and very much, to his continued dismay, conscious and tender, counting each beat of his heart and the resulting torrent of blood spewing from his neck and chest, pooling inside his counterfeit armor. All of it, every eye twitch, every syllable of an unheard prayer, it was sustenance for the… longing.

They were barreling toward the ground below, and Axl flung his rubbery leg around the darktrooper armor, riding it like a mechanical mudhorn as they spiraled and abandoning the now obsolete speeder.

As Axl straddled the rodian from below, clutching to him like they were lovers, he locked glares with the mercenary. There was a galaxy alight in the alien’s bulbous eyes– glimmering star clusters, all his childhood dreams he had abandoned, exposed in this moment to a man he had been hired to kill. The hunger absorbed it all; the failure, the vain longing to survive and become something greater– it was all mere fodder for the aggrandizing rapture.


Axl’s legs tightened. His hip became sturdier. He thrust his pelvis forward, gaining leverage over their trajectory. Axl’s eyes remained transfixed, though his right hand formed a blasterlike gesture as he cradled the back of the fading rodian’s head. The alien’s attention, however, shifted behind Axl, at the rapidly approaching obsidian well corrupting the ground below them.


It certainly appeared to the alien that he and his armor may not survive the landing, but they would absolutely obliterate Axl in the process; the human teenager had fought like a beast, but did not possess the sort of mass needed to break his fall. The rodian was not prepared to die, but fully anticipated it. A flash of his own father, a memory of his youth on Betu, Rodia. The image and its accompanying fear of never seeing his father or homeland again, were yet another course in the hunger’s unwieldy repast.

Axl commanded the rodian’s attention back on his face. He winked, thrusted deeper with his pelvis, and shifted all of his sinewy limbs to invert their positions, Axl now atop them as they crashed into–

They were again descending, a flat disc of blackness above them, was this a trick? A punishment in some afterlife, reliving his final moments? No, the rodian could see the crashed speeder as the two flailed, Axl righting their course measuredly. The man atop him was growing more confident and physically more aggressive and stable. The rodian couldn’t be certain it wasn’t a trick of the suns assaulting his vision or if it was all a hallucination from the trauma, blood loss, and gravitational force, but the human’s eyes had turned to black with crimson rings for irises. All the color washed away from Axl’s face, his complexion resembling that of his half Nagai mother.

The blaster and slugfire had slowed by the time they once again reached the dusty black ground, again beginning their descent anew. Only they were perpetually gaining momentum.

Axl felt it. The hunger and its invisible tendrils were now sniffing out the other mercenaries who stood, slackjawed at the spectacle before them.

Consternation besieged the crowd, even the Pa’lowick catching up on the events as incredulous as they had become.

Four. Five. Six. Seven. By the twelfth full cycle, their weapons were no longer even raised. The rotten dismay and foreboding of what horrific perversion of nature awaited them froze their quaking legs to the balconies on which they stood. Not a word between them, their eyes darting and their stomachs sinking with each pass.

That deepening dread and needful sublimity of a coming resolution fed straight into Axl’s soul, carried like water and nutrients through a tree’s roots.

His wounds were not healed in any sense, not even remotely, but he was so fortified with the terror and awe and sickness of those around him that he was ready to stand before them invigorated. Not mere adrenaline this time, the very midichlorians within him were dripping with darkness, teeming with power.

The rodian, finally fading, managed to whisper something in basic, pathetically, “please, now, we go.” Nonsense, but Axl felt the spirit of the request. The final descent had begun, they had reached terminal velocity a few rounds before.

He stood by shoving the rodian downward, heel on his collar, and shoved the alien in the bulky armor downward while using the force to jump back up above the now closed black portal.

The ground shook as a typhoon of dust blasted outward from the epicenter.
The armor shattered, buckling and scattering in every direction and bringing bits of the rodian’s jellied corpse along with it.

Ground zero saw the backplate of the darktrooper armor embedded into the crater it had itself formed. Axl came straight down upon it, force pushing himself again to soften his landing.

Gathering his composure he peered through the still lingering dust at his nearly captive audience. The color had not come back to his flesh. His eyes were very much black with red orbs; the rodian had not hallucinated.

“Die where you stand, or die at my feet, I care little which,” he barked in a bestial tone, dust swirling around him as he drew his sabers without igniting them.

[Darth Fett]

Silence. Disbelief. Shock. Trickles of urine. The survivors did not step up to Axl’s eleemosynary invitation to die on their own footing. In truth, he could have left them to scatter, scatheless. There was no further need for bloodshed, and yet.

Some fundamental forces of the universe could be bent to the will of the exceptional. Some simply demanded sublime surrender. Yet others could be lightly co-opted and exploited.

Some forces of nature were ever vigilant, unrelenting in their cruel grip on their lessers. Thus were gravity– and this boy.

He nodded to the group, accepting their de facto decision. Each of his hands were still gripping his unignited saber hilts. His right arm, still lightly clutching the hilt, found its way down and behind his back as if anchoring him in place. His left arm, likewise loosely gripping his weapon, came forward steadily and rose up above his head.

It remained, heavy with the anticipation of all present. At the zenith of the discomforting uncertainty of what was to follow, the spice-headed Pa’lowick managed to wrangle control of the E-web from his Whipid commander and produce one blast in their aggressor’s direction. The bolt passed across his body, missing him almost entirely. The edge managed to clip his outstretched shoulder, knocking it back.

Little did the drugged piece of garbage know in his single moment of triumph of what he merely exacerbated.

When Axl had raised his fist, he was reaching out through the Force, gripping tightly to the support beams of the balcony they were on. More specifically the giant wooden trunk running horizontally, held up by vertical ones which were already warped and nearly buckling from poor craftsmanship and dust storms leaving behind the worst of erosion.

Gravity, the cruel mistress, had already prepared them for the slaughter.

With the clip to the shoulder providing more of a violent jerk than anything and Axl not relenting in his grasp, the force upon the structure increased by orders of magnitude, tearing the face of the building clean off, and sending the beams tumbling end over end, each boom leaving a pronounced crater and polluting the air with spirals of large splinters and fine dust assaulting everything in view.

The armor plate across Axl’s affected shoulder had ruptured and peeled off in the chaos. His right arm remained steady, still behind him as the second shockwave of the building collapse hit. It seemed his instincts to anchor himself had been useful, afterall.

The facade of the building flattened the few who were sucked under by the pressure and had landed where the bricks had held together. Altogether three of the humans and their Whipid leader were flattened, leaving the conjoined Ithorians, four humans, the female Kitonak, and Axl’s new friend, the blitzminded Pa’lowick. They sprawled out, recovering and processing the miracle they were still alive. Axl was determined to prove it a curse.

His arms both made their way towards the sky. A stale stale queerness assaulted the air, like being sucked into the gentle void of space. The dust and wood particles dancing on the air stopped swirling and became as serene artificial snowflakes temporarily suspended in the thick sludge of a child’s toy globe.



A year earlier.


The entirely white stray Nexu dangled helplessly in the stale air, not held there telekinetically so much as stuck in some universal glitch in reality. Its individual strands of hair all fluffed outward and independently of the rest of the creature’s mass. Its body spun gently on an axis that was likewise not of its choosing.

The porcelain droplets formed along the tear ducts of all four of its scarlet eyes, pooling with nowhere to go, adhering instead to the creature’s corneas, magnifying its lost and pleading glare.

“You feel it, kid?” Sten side eyed his teenage son, still keeping the bulk of his attention on what he was doing. A momentary lapse could leave them both torn to shreds.

“Yes,” Axl leaned in, feeling his flesh enter some unseen field, like a permeable ring of a bubble. There was a haze to it, a slight tinge, although he didn’t suspect it to be any sort of radiation. It was a halo of the Force, rewriting and suspending fundamental rules. Axl’s own chin length locks began to float as if he was submerged in water. They pooled up in front of his face, obscuring his field of view.

“That imbalance,” Sten grunted, “what’s it make you feel, way down in the pit of you?”

Axl knew exactly how his father’s face was contorted in self satisfaction even with the hair blocking his sight line. It wasn’t merely because the man was a Jango clone and everyone knew his face. Axl had studied every wrinkle, deepening more rapidly every year. Time ravaged the man, his body giving way to the advanced aging with which he had been bred. His lifespan was indeed to be shorter than most, even if he were to survive every attack. Time ravaged that worn face. Time– and gravity.

“It leaves me,” Axl searched the ether for a word to properly capture the world dismantling sensation of simultaneously being tugged on, restrained by a world with gravity, ravaged by it, and one in which he was entirely liberated from it. And yet, bafflingly counter intuitively, the version of the universe with rules and oppression was the one of comfort and roots. The weightless reality in front of him was an experience of deep uncertainty, a lack of bearings. He considered, “it leaves me lacking.”

“Lacking?” the man laughed warmly with a ‘you can do better’ tone buried deep beneath it, coded in a way his progeny would understand implicitly.

“Lacking, yes, lacking any grounding. Lacking the words. Lacking the ability to decide if I want to live in a galaxy of rules or one where everything is flexible.” The boy nearly lost his breath, adjusting to the area his face, his hair, and the beast inhabited. The oxygen did not behave normally; it was far more a strain to get a gulp of air, partly out of panic in trying to rationalize what was happening.

“Gravity,” his father firmly stepped in sensing his son’s loss of composure, “is merely the truth that objects want to come and stay together. They can’t fathom being lonely, trapped only with themselves. Their thoughts. Their regrets. Their failings. Their mortality,” the subtext was rapidly becoming text, but intentionally so. Reframing the abstract and the cold as having sentient traits helped Axl’s mind to wrap around them, “We all want desperately to cling forever to what we love, to always remain together. But that isn’t sustainable, son. We’ve gotta accept our grip may fade, and we will not always be around. Enjoy what you have while it’s in front of you.”

Axl’s mind wandered to Domi, just as surely as Sten’s did to Axl’s mother, Vasilisa.

And in that moment of slipping control, Sten lost his command on the bubble.

Axl experienced a pop in his ear as pressure rushed back to his head. He stumbled forward. His hair which had been floating out in front of him rushed and tangled, erupting in his face.

A thud and roar assaulted his still muted eardrums.

The albino Nexu was free, reorienting itself. The sour and salty droplets of saliva and tears burst and flew at the pair of humans as the creature shook off the rush of normalized atmosphere.

“Now or never, kid!” Sten’s voice broke through as normal sound returned. The Nexu growled and lunged at his target.

In an instant and largely thanks through instinct, with the compounding aid of both having felt the effects first hand and relating to the experience in a deeper metaphorical sense, Axl’s self preservation and ever deepening command of the living Force kicked in. At once, he had suspended the snarling beast in a field of passionless disconnection. He fed that emotion through the force– a lack of desire for objects to connect. In this case, the Nexu’s jaws with Axl and its paws with the ground.

He felt the strain of maintaining this stasis of connection. There was a cost to rewriting physical laws, just as there was a cost to keeping objects and creatures isolated from their desire to connect.

“Kill it. Bag it. Skin it. Cook it. Stew will feed us for a month if we’re careful. Credits for the pelt will feed us for the rest of the season.”

Axl nodded as his face erupted with a red haze and his ears filled with a death howl and pathetic whimper.


Back in the dusty, rubble strewn courtyard.

The remaining surviving mercenaries began to float, slowly at first. They shouted and grunted. Their fists clenched at the dusty ground which rose alongside them just as quickly as it sifted through their numb and bloody digits.

Axl’s knees buckled as he increased the radius, feeding his desire for these scum to be free of their connections. To the ground, to one another, to life. They all rotated gently, turning belly up like a fish past its prime.

Although the fear and pain he had fed on moments before still coursed through him, this was indeed quite an order on him physically.

There was always a price to pay for denying connections.

He glanced victim to victim, a childlike wonder overtaking his face.

His still black and red eyes almost resembled those of the Nexu he had killed as it processed how uncaring and disconnected the universe could be.

He cocked his head.

“Now,” his jaw presented the words as if pouring gently from a stream before floating up to meet them, “as promised…”

[Darth Fett]

Their muffled whimpers and petulant pleas between hastened panting did nothing to crack the young Sith’s spell or dissuade his unwavering warpath. One human began choking, drowning in his own bile after an unfortunate bodily reaction to his traumatic circumstances. Axl flicked an indifferent wrist and the man twirled around, spinning on his axis while still free of gravitational pull. His released fluids flew from his mouth and jettisoned in every direction, droplets forming and floating until they reached the edge of the affected area, and then simply flowed out and spilled straight down to the ground.

The boy turned his gaze toward the gathering clouds as they gradually faded the previously relentless suns. He pictured them as a physical manifestation of his rage, overflowing his own corporeal form and commanding the elements themselves. If each particle of vapor was an extension of his soul, the crackling static permeating the air was the levee of his better nature buckling under the pressure of the storm about to be unleashed.

He recalled the many times the weather inexplicably shifted with the moods of his mother Vasilisa. The Seventeenth Sister had a noted penchant for being cold and distant, but the air around her infamously took on her emotional state. This was a trait and ability that had not come innately to Axl’s father Sten. He had used each occasion as an opportunity to playfully prey on her otherwise opaque emotional palate and tease her as a witch belonging on Dathomir, which invariably only intensified each light fog into a localized tempest, albeit brief and easily diminished. Once the dust had literally and figuratively settled, she returned to being a complete enigma to the boy.

Domi had confided in Axl during one of the pair’s rendezvous in the cockpit of the Morrow Wind, staring into the vastness of space while wrapped around one another, that Vasilisa had discussed the phenomenon with her woman to woman. “It was something that predated her time with the Inquisitors,” she explained breathlessly and without eye contact, instead her gaze darting back and forth as if viewing an invisible tapestry or set of constellations detailing the matriarch’s exploits, drinking in each detail as her mind caught up with her mouth. “Not that she’d remember personally, but there was talk of it among the rest of the order. They weaponized it the best they could but treated it and her as a liability, as a measure of control.”
Their fingers tightened around one another’s and palms pressed deeper.

“It isn’t something that comes naturally to me,” Axl wasn’t afraid to admit, least of all to Domi, “no matter who my parents are.”

“Well, she taught me some tricks if you’d like to test them and work it out together,” her brows raised and she smiled as Axl rolled on top of her, forcing eye contact. The two chuckled after a pregnant pause, “no, wait, not like that.”


Here on Bar Neth, things were a far cry from that night aboard the ship safely clinging to one another, discussing the nature of the Force.


Now was a time of action, not mere theory.

Static surged through Axl’s fist as he clutched it and ended the spinning human’s rotation. He felt the electrons shifting inside of him and out. The small hairs along his body stiffened and stood erect. He might have written it off as a biological response, his body having a visceral primal response to the unnerving events of the day, but he felt the control he had over these phenomena. He was reassured by the Force granting him this stewardship, like a rancher breaking in livestock. The winds were calling and the still settling dust was rising to meet it as a high tide. The calm before the storm was at an end.

A burst of pressure rode in from behind, slamming into his back and flowing around him, barely dissipating as it passed. Wave after wave, each subsequent assault crescendoed at higher decibels. The pace of the gales hastened. Each assault his hair blew forward, then rebounded, forward, and back, with the cycle decaying until his dark locks stood up and forward indefinitely, swaying slightly in circular motions like aquatic plants beneath the waves.

It kicked the dust at his heel, eroding his stability. He adjusted, shifting his weight to the balls of his feet.

The waves of air pivoted a few degrees at a time until they looped back and connected to their own paths. The localized swirls were a portent of the hell that was coming.

Axl considered what he had discussed with Domi and observed with his mother. He reminded himself of all the feats he had accomplished and reassured himself that the Force was capable of manifesting his wildest fancies– even those his conscious mind had yet to process. For now the Force was on his side, or was indifferent to sides at the very least.

The sky darkened further, shadow engulfing everything they could see, although the torrents of dust assaulting their eyes made that nearly irrelevant.

The squall beared down on Axl and his victims as the storm clouds rolled in with a fury befitting the boy’s. He could smell the gathering moisture just as surely as he felt it physically and spiritually.

Fully formed dust spirals reached up into the clouds, pulling down and hijacking wisps of the black cotton sky above them. The crushing pressure they exerted began to pull on the floating mercenaries, at last giving them a renewed sense of connection to the world around them, albeit one they surely did not want. It tugged at their heels, progressively shifting them around, and inevitably some toward the edge of their anti gravity field. A second of the surviving human mercenaries was the first to breach the border. His leg unwittingly flopped out of the field only to immediately and relentlessly be clutched by the whirlwinds. His entire body was plucked like a fish on a hook and sent into the howling cyclone. His breath was stolen from his lungs in an instant as was any lamentation beyond a simple guttural death rattle.

Axl’s hand hosted creeping frost spreading across his fingers and conducted full, visible electrical arcs between the digits. He brushed them together and snapped his finger. As a direct result the storm clouds answered his battle command. A boom that shook the marrow in the bones was accompanied by a lightning strike which descended, immediately finding itself barrelling into the Kitonak. Her eyes ruptured and body burnt instantly and the electricity found its way to the next stop in its path of least resistance. Another human who outright popped like a meat balloon. The fourth human, and the Pa’lowik met the same fate in the next instant. Instead of the lightning grounding itself, it acted as a lance, impaling its victims and plucking them into the mouth of the whirlwinds.

It was in this beautiful chaos that Axl had not noticed the ship hovering over him, landing ramp vainly reaching out for him or perhaps his mercy.
The KRACKOOM as the lighting flung back into the sky, feeding the chum to the dust storm towers alerted Axl to an additional mechanical sputter. In the initial strike that had killed the mercenaries and now in its reverse course, the first casualty was this ship. The very ship Axl had told Domi and Erailic to board. It was impaled through the heart, and flailed wildly, having its bearings rocked and spun by the half dozen localized tornadoes. Hail pelted his face just as the realization penetrated his heart. The ship began to capsize as the lightning tore back through it and was sure to toss it with the same ease as it had the bodies. Paired with the dying embers of the thrusters now working at odds with their best interest, the ship was about to be flung well into the lower atmosphere.

Axl had no time to process his panic, drink in his deeds, or deal with the remaining conjoined Ithorian twins who were freed and fell to the ground with Axl’s lapse in care about his fate over those of the ones he loved that he had inadvertently but directly imperilled.

The weather would not subside on its own; it was then fueled by his subconscious emotional tumult.

[Darth Fett]

A teenage Axl on Bar Neth


Domi Bastion, aka Lady Bloodstroke


A young Erailic