The Way of the Worlds (closed, Zas)

[Darth Fett]

Outside of the window laid a deep alley, three meters across and forty down. On the far end of the rooftop sprawled in front of them was what appeared to be the vague shape of a YT-2400. It was difficult to be certain, as it was painted black on black, a trademark of Fett’s fleet, a holdover from his time as the warlord known as Omega, an agent of the New Black Nebula syndicate.

The pair were perched on the ledge just below the shattered stained glass, the stone beneath them barely wide enough to support only their heels.

Sensation had not yet returned to Fett’s limbs. All that escaped his lips was a, “heh,” as his eye assessed the drop awaiting him if he faltered.

The aromas of street food and garbage swirled together and assaulted their nostrils. Ironically, amalgams of good and bad stimuli often had the effect of being perceived as more egregious taken together than separately. Perhaps it was the betrayal of a wholesome expectation. But the truth was it was all an illusion. Good and bad, be it smell or otherwise, were arbitrary values assigned by evolutionary imperative. The sickening feeling in the nose or gut when forced to acknowledge the unsavory was an imposed, artificial judgment call that was difficult to overcome if one never truly questioned its validity.

Around the corner came a hovercare with an open roof. A man with the same face as Zenn Jori, the bounty hunter from earlier shouted to Zasabi over the gusts of wind challenging their footing, “you’ll be wanting to come with me now, kid. You don’t have a damned clue what’s waiting for you across that rooftop, even if you manage to make it.” The man casually traced the trigger of the blaster gripped in his free hand.

“What’s it gonna be, pup?”

[Darth Fett]

[Zasabi Ray]

The wind howled past Zasabi's ears, deafening him to the battle they had just left. His eyes, however, had begun to sharpen enough that he could see the battle he had just leapt into.

One man, hand on his blaster and the skill to use it. A drop that would certainly be deadly. A gap that would be difficult but not impossible to cross on his own, even harder with a full grown limp man on his back. Inconveniently, the hunter had not positioned himself between the pair and the ship, something that would have lent itself easily to dramatic action.

All in all, the smart play was to surrender to the hunter, or abandon Fett and hope he could make his way on his own.

Zasabi hadn't made it this far by being smart.

He deactivated the crimson saber, holding it only with his thumb and forefinger while the others extended outward as though he showing he had given up. "Alright. You win. I'll toss you my weapon and you tell me how it goes next.

Pulling his arm back, he gripped Fett even harder with the other hand and concentrated energy in his legs once more. As the saber left his hand, flipping lightly through the air in a simple arc toward the man's hovercar, Zasabi let the man's eyes wander instinctively to the inactive blade for just a split second before pouncing.

His muscles screamed as he pushed them beyond what was physically possible, both he and Fett shooting like a cannonball across the three meter gap. Zasabi had optimistically positioned the Dark Lord in front of him to soak up the majority of the impact on the roof ahead- most bone fractures came from the interplay of tightened muscles and blunt force playing on the weak points of the bone. As limp as Fett was, he hopefully wouldn't die on landing. Even if one or the both of them were shot, the blast from a pistol wouldn't have enough force to knock them out of the sky. Dead or alive, they would reach the roof. What happened after that was anyone's guess.

[Darth Fett]

The decision to leap across the rooftop felt as if it had lasted nearly two years...

Force Destruction
More than 1200, less than 2285

The rooftop struck Fett like a predator’s teeth, uneven stone edges biting into the length of his body. His left ankle twisted unnaturally beneath him, a nauseating pop resonating through his limp frame. He couldn’t see the wound, but he felt it, a bone-deep agony that burned and throbbed in waves. It was a pain that didn’t stay confined; it clawed its way up his leg, radiating into his hip, a warning to the rest of his immobile body that it wasn’t safe here. A rasping wheeze escaped his chest as Zasabi rolled off him, a shadow against the pale moonlight.

Fett lay still, his limbs unresponsive. The electrocution had left his body numb and foreign, like a borrowed shell. But the pain in his ankle? That was his. Sharp and familiar, a cruel anchor to consciousness.

Fett’s body refused him. Limbs heavy and distant, the residue of electrocution locking his nervous system in rebellion. But the pain in his ankle was his. That was real. Its jagged edges clawed at his consciousness, daring him to slip. The numbness in the rest of his body rendered him weightless, foreign, but the pain? The pain was a tether, raw and undeniable. Above him, a hovercar’s engine keened, a high-pitched whine slicing through the night like a blade through muscle.

“Stay down,” Zasabi’s mind radiated his thoughts, his body crouching low. His mental tone was tense, the breath behind it shallow and quick, but Fett didn’t answer. His thoughts swirled elsewhere.

A voice came from the hovercar, mechanical and loud, cutting through the tension with casual malice. “You’re making this harder than it needs to be, pup!” Zennnn Jori leaned out of the vehicle, his blaster arm steady, the muzzle gleaming in pale light. “Turn yourselves in, and maybe I won’t shoot you both into pieces,” he sounded a bit stiff, over rehearsed.

The blaster’s muzzle gleamed faintly under the fractured moonlight, steady and aimed.

The words hung in the air, unanswered. Fett lay still, his breath barely stirring, his gaze fixed on the dark sky. Beneath the weight of his immobile body, something deeper stirred. The Force. Distant yet familiar. Waiting. It curled in the recesses of his mind like a predator in its den, coiled and alert but unwilling to come. He reached for it, and it recoiled, slippery, evasive, teasing him with its proximity.

His mind turned inward. The memory of this moment would join the others, a grotesque archive of his incapacitations: pinned beneath a tower, lungs crushed; the cockpit of the Morrow Wind, flames clawing at his face as he crawled free; stripped of his power, humiliated, trapped in the dark. Each wound, each failure, left its mark. Each one coiled tighter in his chest, another thread in the fabric of his history. Yes, the pain seared.

And yet, he was not undone by them. And he wasn’t even sure he hated it. Pain had always been his companion, a silent partner in every breath and every movement. He knew pain, knew it intimately, knew the edges of it, the textures. But it wasn’t the pain itself that clawed at him now; it was the impotence. The loss of control. The weight of a body that would not obey him. That was what the dark side fed on. Not just pain, but the absence of freedom.

The blaster fired, the warning shot striking a nearby pipe. Steam hissed and swirled into the cold air, cutting patterns through the dark. Zasabi flinched, his head snapping toward the sound, but Fett did not move. His eyes half lidded, his body limp, his mind burrowed deeper. The fog of injury clung to him, but he searched past it, clawing through the haze for something primal, something vast.

The memories came faster now. Every break, every scar, every burn. He let them flood him, let them consume the walls he’d built around them. Each injury sharpened into clarity: the bone snaps, the searing heat, the metal biting into flesh. He welcomed it, letting the sensations pool and bloom. Pain was not his enemy. Pain was his concubine.

The Force began to answer. Slowly at first. Not a wave, but a ripple. It touched the edges of his pain, his anger, his helplessness, feeding on the rawness of it. The dark side did not soothe. It amplified. It sank its claws into his memories, peeling back the scabs and exposing the wounds beneath. Each moment of anguish became a spark, another ember in the inferno building within him.

The Force churned within Fett like a tempest trapped beneath his skin. It wasn’t a single sensation but a symphony of torment, raw, unrelenting, and exquisitely agonizing. It began as a tremor in his muscles, a low, insistent vibration that wormed its way into every fiber, every strand of sinew. The sensation built rapidly, spreading outward like wildfire, searing through his nerves and igniting a storm that refused to stay contained. His veins, stretched taut and overburdened, pulsed with a volatile energy that felt far too vast for the fragile vessel of his body.

There was an itching deep in his marrow, a maddening crawl of fire that burrowed through bone and refused to relent. It was not the kind of itch that could be scratched; it was a hunger, a desperate need to release the energy coiled within him. The burn followed closely behind, liquid fire coursing through his blood, igniting every nerve ending in a symphony of unbearable heat. His muscles clenched involuntarily, a rhythm of spasms that fought against the titanic power surging through them, each contraction threatening to tear his body apart.

The edges of his senses blurred, reality folding inward as the Force overtook him. His skin felt like it might peel away under the strain, as if the energy within him were searching for any escape, any crack through which it could burst free. The pressure built in his chest, a crushing weight that pressed against his ribs like a vice, each breath shallow and jagged. His lungs struggled, the act of drawing in air reduced to a futile, mechanical exercise. The Force had no need for oxygen; it consumed something far more primal.

The energy didn’t merely course through him, it consumed him. Each pulse was corrosive, tearing away at the boundaries of his being, stripping him down to raw essence. He could feel it eating at him, an acidic force eroding the edges of his identity. His body and soul alike felt precarious, as though he might dissolve entirely into the storm raging within. Yet even as it threatened to erase him, the Force felt intoxicating. It was power unrestrained, unyielding, an infinite void contained within finite flesh.

The burning, corrosive energy surged through his limbs, his fingertips tingling with static that built to an agonizing crescendo. His hands trembled, not from fear, but from the weight of what they contained. The urge to release it was overwhelming, a primal need that screamed louder than his pain. His fingers curled involuntarily, his nails digging into his palms, as if trying to claw his way back to control. But there was no controlling this. It was as though the Force itself had taken hold of him, and he was merely the conduit, a vessel for its boundless fury.

It was explosive and implosive all at once. Every muscle, every nerve, every cell was alight, the energy demanding release. Yet, it coiled tighter with each second, compressing into a singularity that threatened to collapse inward. The paradox was unbearable: the need to expel the energy clashing against the horrifying knowledge that doing so would shatter everything in its path. It felt as if he were holding a collapsing star within him, its gravity pulling him apart even as its light begged to escape.

The corrosive sensation crept into his thoughts, the Force threading its way through his mind, dragging memories and emotions into the maelstrom. It amplified everything, every moment of helplessness, every scar etched into his body and soul, every failure. The pain of those memories merged with the physical agony, the distinction between the two vanishing entirely. It was a chorus of anguish, yet it was also purpose. The Force carved away weakness, leaving only raw, unrelenting intent.

His arms trembled, his shoulders strained, his chest heaved. The energy had reached its peak, a storm with nowhere left to go. His skin felt too tight, his bones too fragile, his body unable to contain what the Force demanded of him. Every fiber of his being screamed for release, the need to let go as overwhelming as the pain itself. His hand lifted, trembling and unsure, the weight of the Force within him dragging it upward like a marionette on unseen strings.

The energy surged again, a final wave that obliterated all thought and sensation except for one: the desperate, unrelenting need to let it out.

The hovercar’s engine screamed louder, its whine cutting through the night like a siren. Zennnn’s voice was closer now, taunting and sharp, but Fett didn’t hear the words. His focus was elsewhere, his mind a storm of memory and sensation. The pain in his ankle, the ache in his chest, the sting of old scars; they were not burdens. They were fuel.

Fett’s fingers twitched, his palm brushing the rough stone beneath him. The Force swelled within him, a storm gathering strength. It was not the light, guiding or temperate. It was the dark, feral and unyielding. He let it seep into every nerve, every synapse, weaving itself into his being. The agony that had once dominated him became a reservoir, and the dark side its channel.

He turned his head, his body still limp, his gaze locking onto the hovercar above. His arm moved slowly, trembling as though fighting against unseen weights. His other palm opened, facing the sky. The Force surged, coiling tighter, compressing into a singular point of pressure beneath his sternum. It was not clean or orderly. It was raw and jagged, a torrent of energy that threatened to tear him apart. His arm moved, slowly at first, his fingers curling into a claw-like shape. The air around him grew heavy, electric, as the dark side pressed outward in waves.

“Zennnn,” he hissed, his voice low and venomous in betrayal. The mercenary hesitated, the blaster wavering for just a moment. It was enough.

Fett’s mind reeled under the weight of it. The dark side was a tempest, feeding on his pain, his anger, his memories of loss and humiliation. But it was also seductive, whispering vows of retribution. He could feel it reaching into the deepest parts of him, uncovering wounds he had tried to forget, scars that had long since healed over. Each memory was another spark, another piece of fuel for the inferno building inside him.

His hand continues to burn, the skin tingling as the energy concentrated there. It was a sensation unlike any other, fire, a void that consumed everything it touched. Fett’s fingers curled instinctively, as if trying to hold back the power, but it was futile. The energy was alive, writhing and pulsing, desperate for release.

The pain in his palm became unbearable. It was as if every nerve ending in his hand was being shredded, the dark side carving its path through his flesh and bone. Fett gritted his teeth, his jaw locked tight as he fought to contain it, to channel it. The Force was no longer his to control; it was an avalanche, and he was standing in its path. The pressure in his chest grew unbearable, his heartbeat a frantic drumbeat in his ears. He could feel the energy radiating outward, shaking the very air around him. It was a power that defied understanding, a force that transcended physical limits. It was the culmination of every moment of pain, every scar, every loss. It was the dark side in its purest form, raw and unrelenting. Fett’s vision blurred, the edges of the world dissolving into a haze of black and red. The energy surged through him, filling every inch of his body until there was no room left. It had to be released. It would destroy him if it wasn’t. His arm moved almost of its own accord, his palm opening, the energy coiling like a serpent ready to strike.

And then it happened.

The Force erupted from his palm, a blast of pure, concussive energy. It hit Zennnn like a battering ram, his body crumpling instantly, torso disintegrating into ash and fragments and vapor, limbs and head flung outward in grotesque arcs. The hovercar spiraled, pilotless, into a storefront below. Glass shattered, flames licking at the debris as the building crumbled. The rooftop quaked beneath Fett, the shockwave reverberating through the stone. His arm fell limp, his chest heaving with ragged breaths. The dark side still clung to him, its tendrils wrapped tight around his spine, whispering promises he couldn’t quite hear. The night was quiet again, but the storm inside him was not. Zasabi instinctively shielded his face, crouching low as the remnants of the hovercar rained down in twisted, burning shards. Fett’s arm fell limp once more, his chest heaving with ragged breaths.

He lay there, the weight of the Force still pressing against him, his body a vessel for its terrible power. There was no peace, no catharsis. This was not release. This was simply survival. Fett could feel the dark side still clinging to him, its tendrils wrapping around his spine, whispering to him still, like a lover post-climax. Despite the crackling of flames and doppler tinged incoming of sirens, the night once again felt relatively silent.

[Zasabi Ray]

Reeling from the energies released around him, Zasabi managed to raise his head above his arms. The flames had finally begun to die down, but he could still feel the darkness Fett had wrought on Zenn hanging heavy over the Sith. It clung to him like a jealous lover, possessive and dangerous.

Shaking his head clearer, Zasabi rose to his feet. He didn't want to get even a little close to Fett right now, not until that energy dissipated some. Limping on sore, overtaxed legs, he made his way over to the stygian freighter. If he could get the landing hatch open, he might find some sort of gurney to heft the bulky man onto. If he was truly lucky, he'd find a medical droid.

All of his planning came to a halt the moment he saw that the hatch appeared to lack any manner by which he could open it. No lock, no sensor, nothing.

"Of course. Of course it wouldn't be easy. He's the darkest lord of the Sith in the entire galaxy, why would his ship open in a normal way."

Out of momentary desperation, he tried to look around the rooftop for the lightsaber he had thrown to Zenn, but other than finding grisly remains of the bounty hunter there was no immediate answer to his plight.

"Fett," he said hoarsely, limping back to the body. "Fett, wake up. Need to get on your ship Fett, need to get out of here before..."

Falling to his knees a few feet away, Zasabi left out a shuddering breath. He had used more of the Force than his body was made to channel, and it was quite literally killing him.

"Fett. Fett, wake.... Wake up. Damn it, you got me into this mess, I need you to get me...out..."

He didn't know if it was the dire straits that he found himself in, or perhaps the cloak of darkness that hung over Fett even now, but Zasabi stumbled his way into a way that the Sith might be able to help him escape, conscious or not.

One breath, then a second. If he took too long to think about the morality of what he was doing, they would both be dead. He just had to grab the tools available to him and get the job done.

(Begin Drain Knowledge App)

On the third breath, he opened himself up to the Force. Deep, sepulchral tones battered at him as the destructive energies Fett had just held in one hand with seemingly no more difficulty than a youth holding a fruit continued to wreak havoc on the flows of the Force in the area. In the days to come he had no doubt that misfortune would come to plague this rooftop, but today this energy would allow him the strength to rip the information he needed out of Fett's mind.

Zasabi's own darkness began to rise out of him, a horn section filled with bass that even now lacked the bone-shaking depth of the darkness surrounding the Sith Lord. He wove it into the rhythm of that inky storm, giving it direction and slowly, painstakingly Fed on the Darkside and drew that strength into him.

As he did so, he studied Fett closely. He had to get down to the natural beat of the man's life, his signature in the song of all of existence. If he could follow that song down into Fett's soul, he could pull the information he needed without scarring him too badly.

Frustration bore down on him, that darkness he fed on bolstering his boldness. He didn't have time to do this the right way, the way that would leave the fewest marks of the trespass he intended. Fett's damn inscrutability was the entire reason they had gotten here to begin with. The set up with the train, the atrocity he had committed, this farce with the church and whoever had decided to kill them all. If Fett had dealt with him plainly, as he had with him, then none of this would have happened!

His resolve solidified. Fett had written the script to this little adventure thus far, and as such if he ended up bearing a few scars from it, well he had no one to blame but himself.

A sneer crossed his thin features as he began to funnel that same darkness Fett had used to kill Zenn into the Sith's head. The blaring of trumpets drowned out his qualms, the voice in his head begging him to take ownership over his actions. With this much power, he didn't have to face any inconvenient truths. It had become it's own truth, the ultimate justification of an end with no consideration of the means.

Even comatose Fett's mental defenses were stronger than the Shadow would have been able to handle on his own. A fortress of cruelty and pain, not just inflicted but endured. Had Zasabi attempted this any other time than now, he would have been flayed alive both in mind and spirit. With Fett's own darkness, however, he plowed through the pain without notice.

"Takes a monster, right Fett?" he asked as he strolled through the wreckage of the front gate...

Only to find himself at the beginning of battlements once again, the mental fortress before him just as solid as before if not more so.

"Pain alone isn't enough. Force alone isn't enough. Hurting you only makes you that much stronger."

A grimace grew across the wiry man's features. "Fine then. Into the thick of it."

This time, Zasabi threw himself at the head of the storm. To call it pain was as much understatement as calling the galaxy "big". He was tortured, he was injured, he was killed thousands upon thousands of times. The depths of Fett's cruelty lashed at him, tearing at him as though he had fallen through miles of brambles.

With each wound, however, a violin-sharp scalpel of darkness leapt forward to cut away at the jagged flesh. With each incision, the wound and the pain it caused were blotted out. To use the dark side of the Force was to impose one's own reality on the world. There was a reason it was called unnatural, after all. Zasabi imposed a world where he could ignore the pain Fett thrust upon him, and the darkness he had gathered allowed it to be so.

Starved of the power of inflicting cruelty as well as the power of receiving it, the castle gates before the Shadow had no choice but to open.

Once again, he strolled through, but this time instead of an all too familiar recursion Zasabi found himself falling. A niggling worm of doubt emerged as he considered that the first time he attempted to pull someone's thoughts out shouldn't be on someone who could have likely detonated him as easily as he had Zenn earlier, but he quashed the traitorous voice ruthlessly. He had walked in here, and he would find the information he sought or leave the both of them dead.

Focusing on the image of the ship in his mind, he used it to anchor himself in space. As he did so, he began to see the world take shape around him, memories filling in the gaps. He saw through the dark lord's eyes.....and then again.... and then again.

What?

Each memory that he stepped into existed not just once, but thrice! Each situation, colored with its own perceptions and biases, somehow was being viewed simultaneously by three independent but connected minds. Three subtly different records of events that were undoubtedly contained within the same vessel. To make things worse, each memory connected to other distinct memories as well, making the slightest distraction sufficient provocation to draw upon new scenes and images overlaid upon each other.

It was enough to make anyone lose themselves to the chaos. Zasabi floundered, seeing countless memories flash through him, each with their own full suite of feelings and responses. He couldn't distinguish reality from illusion, each scene repeating in ways that made it impossible to discern which one was the one to follow.

He had to focus on something small. Something that would be difficult to color with emotion and thought. Something that was more impulse and muscle memory. The last time he had opened the hatch to his ship, even if it was just to use the fresher. How had he done it?

Zasabi was losing steam, the darkness that had bolstered him starting to bleed out of him like a mortal wound. He would only have one more chance at this. Mustering what little strength he could, he focused his mind and...

A flash. Simple in hindsight. There was a numpad, but it was camouflaged as part of the hull. Tiny nearly seamless buttons that when pushed in a familiar pattern would open the hatch. Axl could do it in his sleep.

End Drain Knowledge

Zasabi withdrew at an almost indecent speed. He no longer bore the rash confidence that had led him down this path, and now risked not a second longer in this place. Up through the memory hole, out through the gate, and down the battlements leading back to his waiting body.

Only when he opened his eyes, he wasn't on the rooftop.

It was a dark cell, with only the flickering of candles and the stillness of a tomb for company. That, and the hooded figure who stood behind him even now.

[Darth Fett]

Waves of Darkness
More than 900, less than 4800

The stone chapel exhaled a damp, ulcerated silence. Mildew crept in stalactite fingers from the groin vaults, threading hairline veins across the blackened ribs of the ceiling. Candlelight refused to settle. It jittered on half melted stubs like epileptic butterflies, every flame pulsing with suspicion. Iron sconces wept rust down the stone, their shapes archaic, thorns twisted into cradles. And yet the pews were arranged with reverence, symmetrical rows scarred by phantom congregants long since erased.

A draft wound through the aisle, carrying no scent, only pressure. It pressed against the skin like a held breath.

Zasabi had entered like all the “others” (in reality thoughts and projections of others, dreams that faded thereafter) : abrupt, uncertain, eyes still dragging behind his body, mind halfthreaded from another scene. She hated how they always entered midthought, as if the walls were merely transitional tissue. No one ever bowed. No one ever asked if they belonged.

She had not pulled him here.

He had fallen– noclipped– through a seam he did not see, drawn along a thread of Axl’s subconscious the way a flake of blood rides the curl of water down a drain. A faultline had opened in the pressure of thought, a narrow fracture between memory and threshold. He had followed it without meaning to. No ritual. No key. Just a misstep in intention and placement. One breath taken too deep inside a moment that didn’t belong to him.

That was all it required.

The thread that connected him to Axl had frayed. Not broken. Frayed, stressed thin across emotion and shared violence, overused by consequence and repetition. And through that thinning came access. Not permission.

She had felt it at once. The moment he entered the wrong room of the right mind. Not where Axl walked. Where she waited. The inner curvature of a man who had never once looked inward and found her there. He housed her without knowing it. Carried her like phantom heat. Like guilt that had never been assigned a name.

Zasabi had trespassed in the truest way: not into body or space, but into the place where memory and essence cohabitated. He had no right to this cavity. No map for its passage. No inkling of what part of the mind he had drifted through, or what continent of self he now wandered.

She had no idea how long he would last here.

Time behaved poorly inside her.

There was no light by which to track his passing. Only pressure changes. Breathing patterns. The soft percussion of a heart growing uncertain.

He was Axl’s adversary.

And yet, in falling into her, he became hers.

The connection that had delivered him here remained open. But it pulsed only one way.

Axl had no idea they were here… together.

She stood at the altar's edge, still beneath the shroud of her cowl. Her “limbs” were covered, but nothing about her was truly hidden. The robe clung as no mere clothing but as a membrane, a membrane soaked in memory. Beneath it, her presence churned in coils, slow and patient, tendrils of self braided around bones she no longer remembered claiming as hers.

In truth, physically, a not insignificant portion of Fett's tissue belonged to her genetically; a patchwork of his cells and parts of his organs. In fact, a significant portion of his masive collection of scar tissue was composed of Axus, breaking out through the cracks of him and finding sunlight. But it wasn't enough and made little difference at present, in this place.

Zasabi’s boots creaked against the ancient stone. Dust lifted in quiet spirals behind him, slow enough to chart. He hadn’t turned around. Not yet.

She didn't speak. Not aloud. Words were a crude shape for what she felt. But she let the sense of her watching press into him, like a finger between vertebrae, insistent and precise. A muscle tensed in his shoulder.

She had watched others, constructs, echoes, flares of psyche devoured in passing, but this one moved differently. Not like an animal loosed into unfamiliar territory. Not like Fett, who dragged life and unlife behind him like meathooks.

This one stank of guilt. Of cracked loyalties and swollen ideals left in sunlight too long. She could smell the rot.

She hated him already.

But still, she ached for him to turn.
A stranger’s face would do. A face she could hate or wound or burn or mount until it screamed the justification of its existence.

This place was a product, a tartarus forged by… not Fett. Not her. But not not them, either.

Something parasitic stirred in her chest. Or was it hunger for recognition?
Her voice never left her lips, but it scraped across the candlelight and trickled into the grain of the pews, seeding malcontent in the wood.

There was no voice. Only the impression of one, as if sound had been dismembered before it could be born. Not a whisper, not even a thought. just the ghost of pressure forming in the cavities between meaning.

The air around her thickened with the awful wrongness of language trying to exist where no larynx had ever been granted its filament. She was not mute; she was unspoken. Her shape in the chapel’s silence resembled intention, but there were no syllables to hang it on. What reached Zasabi was a feeling without grammar, all ribs and voids, sensation poured through the sieve of something older than speech and less forgivable than presence.
The vibration slithered beneath the stone tiles. It found fault lines in the mortar. subdermal like infrasound through bone marrow, impossible to hear but still known. It created a hum between heartbeats. The kind that made animals scatter and children cry without knowing why.

Behind her cowl, breath passed through an arrangement of not-lungs, through vocal cords never knitted properly by nature’s threading hand. The air moving in her throat cavity caught on the edges of a scream that never figured out how to be. No echo. No consonant. Just negative pressure exhaling through glottal ruin, shaping the temperature of the air without touching sound.

The candles recoiled.
Zasabi didn’t turn, but he felt it, something tunneling into the nape of his neck, not touch but disorientation, like the memory of falling from too high, remembered in the muscles, not the mind.

She had never had an audience. Not one that lived. Her world was composed of dust and residual impressions, bloodstains long oxidized and forgotten by the minds that spilled them. Thoughtforms wandered here sometimes, fragmented dreamthings, each one hollow and hopelessly scripted. None had trespassed with consciousness before.

Now she felt watched in return, and it gnawed at her.

The space between her unsound and Zasabi’s breath became swollen with dissonance. Even silence had timbre now: knotted, alive, granular. The pews groaned from an imposed anticipation, wood straining at the edge of a revelation that couldn’t translate into any known lexicon.

Her intention scraped across the chapel like broken fingernails on iron, leaving residue rather than message.

She thought of reaching for him.

But what would she grasp him with? And what would he hear if he did not believe in monsters that never learned how to weep, only how to long?

She had waited so long for a voice.

Now she wondered if she wanted to be answered.

Her only voice in that place, at that time was rage, her only tool to break the avarice was wrath.

While she coalesced her thoughts, Zasabi's gaze must have wandered as well it wondered.

Beyond the brittle veil of candlelight, the chapel unfolded in impossible geometry. The haze clung low, clotted in patches, leaving pockets of clarity that betrayed more than they revealed. Zasabi’s gaze skimmed along the nave, catching only the faintest edges of what rose beyond the pews: statues. Tall, bonepale monoliths, each twisted just past realism, as if their sculptor had studied the human form with perfect recall and deliberate contempt.

The nearest figure had no face, only a sloped indentation where features should have grown. Hands stretched forward, palms up, fingers overlong and fused, the gesture caught between offering and indictment. Light refracted strangely against it, never resting, always migrating from one crevice to another, as if trying to find a contour it could forgive.

Further back, another, taller, head bowed beneath the cracked remnants of a crown. Faint burn marks striped the torso. One shoulder bore a sculpted child’s hand, fingers half erased as though time had tried to sever their connection and failed.

Between them loomed a third: far from a full figure, but the imprint of a woman flayed into negative space, cast from shadow and alabaster into a recess in the wall. Her absence was shaped too precisely to be an accident. It was curated emptiness, the silhouette of something erased by decision, not erosion.

None of them faced the altar.

All their blank eyes, malformed sockets, and clefted brows faced outward, upward, towards the other, towards “him,” though not entirely. As if remembering him imperfectly. Or blaming him precisely.

He moved with the measured intent of someone attempting to disprove a trick of light. The statue, a childlike figure draped in robes too large for its frame. hovered at the edge of illumination. Its presence was undeniable, its distance precise. Always the same, no matter the angle.

Zasabi shifted left. It remained. A dozen paces forward, and it adjusted accordingly, never nearer, never receding, as if the chapel itself compensated. The floor felt level, but the pressure in his calves betrayed a gradient, subtle and deceptive, like walking through thick oil on an unseen incline.

He turned and paced the opposite direction. The figure realigned with an elegance that defied perspective. Candlelight still kissed its edges, always just short of detail. Every step forward seemed to drag the chapel backward in equal measure.

He quickened. The air resisted.

His boots grew louder, though the surrounding acoustics never changed. Then, a creeping realization. His skin and the hair embedded in it stood at odds: something had noticed him.

“Fett, I swear to,”

The stone at Zasabi's foot shattered outward, a grenade lobbed by an arcingarm of pulsating energy.

The robe remained motionless, but within it, the thing that called itself a self coiled.

Axus had no breath, no lungs, no organic cavity in which to birth force through diaphragm or sinew. Her interiority had never known containment, only reverberation. What flexed now inside her was older than gesture, an ache learned in exile from even embryonic life. In his presence, she did not prepare a defense. She prepared a reach.

She was the wound. The touch.
There had never been hands.

What reached through her now, what formed, was absence straining to resemble intent. She did not lift an arm. There was no arm to lift. Beneath the folds of the robe, her shape bloomed and collapsed in intervals governed by pulse, by will, by gnawing tension that had never before been directed at a body that could receive it.

Zasabi had entered the chamber like loose heat. He had stirred something. His tread, his breath, the rhythm of his flesh, the weight of his attention dragged her form into coherence.

The pressure in her chest was not breath, but ache turned dimensional.

Her form convulsed once, silently. Fabric did not shift. No muscle twitched. But the space within her robe compacted, condensed to a density that tugged against the chapel’s internal geometry. Corners lengthened. Beams bowed. Pews whispered beneath their weight.

It began below perception.

The Force, as it wrapped her, left no ripple. It condensed. A vacuum writhed at her center, sloped and soft as tissue deprived of oxygen, folding inward on pressure alone. From that point of folding came the first slippage, no light, no shock, just a minute distortion in the room’s capacity to remember itself.

It struck in layers.
There was no wind, no heat, no gesture. Just a sudden atmospheric refusal, space rejecting itself in coordinated pulses. The wave depressed, as if gravity had warped sideways, drawn to a new axis that sloped inward through the chapel’s bones. The sound of it was neither roar nor hum, but a low throb passed through Zasabi's sternum, like breath held inside a crypt too long.

The walls dared not listen. They trembled

A fold passed with a shearing whimper, pitched just below the range of thought. The air itself kinked, folding back on its own trajectory, collapsing into pockets of distortion. Every candle distorted toward it, flamethread narrowed to a blue filament, then sputtered black. Light itself and its absence became viscous.

Waves of Darkness. The Force itself shied away from their name.

The Waves refracted around Zasabi, then through him not water, not air, but vibration, spliced from something older than physics. They arrived with variant densities. Some passed like silk coiled in ice. Others slapped against his skull in stopmotion rhythm, dislodging time from sequence. Each frequency adjusted to his field, rethreading its tone to the inconsistencies in his awareness.

From the altar, the hooded figure did not move. Yet the Force around her flowed in palpitations, syncing to his heartbeat. Each new distortion was tuned: pressure from the floor, suction from the ceiling, a rising shriek held in the molars.

Something behind the robe vibrated in place of lungs. It had never learned to breathe. Now it tried.

The continuum thickened.

No edge to separate one throb from another. No pause between disturbances. The atmosphere undulated, not with motion, but with preference, each adjustment a form of taste. Zasabi's proximity offered tone. His posture invited exploration. The Waves curled tighter around him, narrowing their folds until their contact brushed thought without breaking it. Not yet.

The space between them became less a distance than a tension field, hollowed, bruised, pressurized.

Axus modulated the frequencies by feel. The Force in her did not speak in language or structure, but by friction and yield. She flexed without limb, refined without mind. Each vibration was a question she lacked the vocabulary to ask, but still she needed answers. She shifted wavelength. Shortened pulse. Changed pitch.
Waves of Darkness did not begin with motion. They swelled from the places where desire twisted against memory.


It was a symphony composed of different frequencies melding together. Each strand of the yarn having its own sordid effect.

The first surging frequency rose behind her. It slipped free like mist exhaled through an open wound in spacetime, soundless and heavy. Where it passed, candlelight stood its ground but lost coherence. Walls sagged at the periphery. The structure seemed to watch itself from the wrong angle.

She fed the current with absence, impulses scavenged from within Axl. How he grieved. How he broke. How he rebuilt without ever looking for her. These fragments compressed into rhythm.

The second frequency narrowed. It moved quickly and without a path. Its shape curled through spatial fault lines and disturbed each one. Temperature drifted out of calibration. A candle near Zasabi shifted hue and heat, swelling before collapsing into a flat, ashcolored flame.

In her chest, something trembled. A chamber that had never filled still tried to beat.

Pressure accumulated in waves of unfinished sound. Not percussion, unfinished syllables, fragments of thought never formed into words. Her will folded the Force around her, twisting it until it adopted her contours. It did not emerge cleanly; it resisted her shape, struggled to stabilize. She wove the pattern tighter, pulling her waveform in concentric loops that vibrated against the chapel’s frame. The walls flinched without moving.

The third frequency burned colder. She churned it inside herself, folding it into a geometry she had never seen but always felt. The result moved without direction, spiraling outward in oily threads that resisted symmetry. It dragged a stutter through space. Everything near her became almost misaligned, angles disagreed with distance, distance shifted behind the eyes.

Sound detached from origin. A breath could be heard from the ceiling; a blink echoed along the floor.

Then the fourth frequency coalesced.

She wore it. It dressed her in resonance, each frequency layering like liquid metal. The folds of her robe stretched outward, defining a perimeter she had never been allowed. Her cowl trembled with impression: faces that never turned to meet hers, gestures stolen from the periphery of a life she only ever inhabited in shadow. Zasabi’s gaze, unknowing and direct, gave her gravity.

She held onto that.

The fourth frequency thickened at its heart. It dropped low and moved along the ground with calculated weight. It pulled at memory as it passed. Wood grain flattened under its path, then shivered back into place. Color bled slightly, dulling into tones of rust and pressed charcoal.

The pressure around her increased. There was no change in temperature or mass, but the room contracted. Time inside her pulse slowed. She layered the fifth frequency from that stillness.

This one did not travel. It inhabited.

It radiated from her in all directions, absorbing boundary and structure. The chamber stiffened in response. Candles stopped moving. The pews braced themselves. Zasabi’s form remained in place, but tension laced the edges of his presence.

The vibrations slowed to a crawl, dragging sound behind them in molten threads. Then they fractured into staccato spikes, microscopic bursts, each one pushing a different aspect of her will: pressure against the lower spine, tingling across the skin, silence that punched behind the eyes.

The floor rejected polish. A dozen hairline cracks forked outward from her center, growing more erratic as the Waves bent light. Zasabi’s silhouette blurred. His limbs warped a fraction out of sync with their shadows, caught in interference patterns that had never been intended for living targets.

The space under her robe boiled with activity. Not muscle. Not breath. Just heatless convulsion. existence organizing itself under strain.
Inside her shape, no organs swelled, but something tensed. A coiled presence without center.
Every pulse of the Force felt like vomiting backwards: inward, inward, inward until pressure had to escape somewhere. She bled it into the room.

The air near Zasabi soured.

Olfaction bent first. A sharp trace of copper braided with the stale sweetness of something once biological. The wavefront now carried scent where it had carried only pressure. Behind that scent: the suggestion of moisture. Sweat? No. Condensation from panic. It formed where the Waves passed, then evaporated as though memory itself were being steamed out of the body.

He must have felt her first as confusion. A weight with no origin, laid across his skin like wet cloth too intimate to be impersonal. The air, thickened by her modulation, likely narrowed in his throat, not choking, but crowding out discretion. A presence inhaled around him, without suction or breath, yet still left him smaller inside his own outline.

The Waves did not strike cleanly; they fed through gradients. What he likely experienced first was the destabilization of his sense of scale, his feet no longer firmly his, his arms uncooperative by fractions. Axial drift. The minor spatial betrayals that precede dread. He would not have understood her as emotion, not at first. She was condition, ambient grief so refined it presented as environment.

Her loneliness did not broadcast in words. It translated through modulation. The frequency range she used to explore the contours of his resistance carried textures: the hollow between syllables never spoken, the cool fade of a name never said aloud. These things would not register in his mind as history, only pressure. Only narrowness.

It is likely that his spine became the first terrain of surrender. That long central line, so often overlooked in trauma, would have caught the signal first. The muscles there, paraspinal, involuntary, would have fluttered, no longer certain what to hold. The jaw next. Small vibrations entering the joint, setting teeth too slightly apart to grind, too close to speak.

Her modulation sharpened at the edges. Not to hurt. To define. He must have felt her loneliness there most clearly: the precision with which she traced his boundaries. It was the accuracy of someone who had spent an eternity watching others feel, never granted sensation herself.

Physiologically, the Waves would have induced tremor at first, then imbalance. Changes in vestibular rhythm. The floor would’ve seemed to list, not outward, but beneath. An undertow, not in water, but in certainty.

This was not empathy forced upon him.

It was condition, rendered as architecture.

He did not understand her.

But his body, it seems, answered anyway.

She kept the waveform taut, but not symmetrical.

A convective push radiated from her soul’s fulcrum, just behind where a sternum should have been. The Waves did not burst, they layered, fine and slow, a gentle thickening of space that resisted inspection. The chapel’s stale air gave no warning. It thickened between candleflames, forcing their glow into tighter columns, as if each photon now dragged a burden behind it.

She fed the wave with memory, not events, lacks. She poured in the moments she’d almost been acknowledged. The heat of Fett’s fury passing through her, without pause or inquiry. The gaze of Reana brushing against their shared body but never piercing deep enough. These echoes compounded, mulched into psychic momentum, and the pressure found form.

The wave crested.

It did not emerge in a clean arc. It bled, molasses-slow, across the nave, dragging threads of distortion behind it. Dust refused to settle where it passed. Sound within its perimeter detached from cause, her robe hissed without movement, a sigh formed with no lungs to expel it.

Within the wave, the Force reoriented itself. Each particle of ambient power collapsed inward, constricted by vectorless wrath. The Chapel pulsed atonal frequencies; its stone joined the song. The mortar groaned in frequencies usually reserved for tectonic shifts. Beneath the floor, subsonic language built itself, composed of everything unsaid.

She shaped the amplified wave.

There was a curl to it, a spinal bend to the waveform’s delivery. Each pulse radiated from a curvature that no architect had ever etched into blueprints. It clawed space around its path into convex swellings that echoed her hunger.

She had no words. So she gave Zasabi compression.

The amplified wave snapped loose.

It rolled faster, drunk on the preceeding wave’s erosion. The chapel did not darken. Instead, light thickened until it occluded itself; candlelight now pushed outward from the wicks like mucus expelled from a wound, coating the air in golds that congealed and dulled.

Static crawled across the chamber. Hairline cracks formed across the stone’s acoustic layer; reality’s acoustic layer. Sound tried to escape. It couldn’t.

The pressure entangled in the nonspace of her nonbody spiked.

She vibrated at a harmonic reserved for deep ocean Mon Cala fauna and solar flares. Her form jittered in place, cowl fluttering at edges unseen, as if reality resisted containing her. She had no lungs, but she exhaled. The darkness listened. The Force bent.

The wave then rode breathless behind her exhalation, but its structure was different. It was surgical. It sought. It tasted. She threaded it with feeling she could not parse, only obey. It did not strike the world; it peeled back the top layer of perception like old skin.

Color inverted.

The wave sculpted a negative light where photons lost purpose. Space folded inward, not collapsed, but reconsidered. Geometry became desperate. Angles clashed with their own measurements. The chapel’s dimensions bloated with contradiction. Every surface flexed like a lung deciding if it wanted to drown.

Through it all, she watched him.

Still his name in his mind.

And that name vibrated through her ribless self like an error in liturgy.
She gathered the wave's next frequency, and this one held mass.

It sank inward before it moved.
The wave coiled against itself like flesh around a void. It had weight, but that weight shifted, sometimes sediment, sometimes frost-laced steel. Within her chest, the engine of longing wound tighter, spooling against tissue that had never grown, only accumulated. Her form absorbed pressure from its own interior. As it compressed, the air outside her tried to flee.

Every fragment of matter inside the chapel strained toward the corners.

The pews moaned softly. Their legs, once squared, listed outward. The stone beneath her robe developed microfractures with the texture of bark: rough, radial, alive with implied consequence. Behind her, candlelight faltered again. One flame stuttered and split in two, twin tongues licking opposite directions. They cast shadows that swam toward the ceiling, then dissolved into soot.

She varied one quadrant of the chamber increased the frequency at floor level until the grain in the wood hummed its own regret. Above Zasabi’s crown, the pressure dropped with mechanical precision. His body remained the same size. The chapel around him did not.

But the distance between them grew less imaginary.

She curved the waveform inward now, spooling its progression so that its spiral revolved around him without centering. The motion was elegant. A dance performed by absence. She felt the angles of his resistance, not his mind, not his Force signature,but the physics of his recoil. Where his breath broke. Where the weight shifted in his hips. The way his knees flexed, uncertain if they were preparing for impact or prayer.
There was no empathy. Only reception.

She fed off it.
The continual wave never ceased, but became thinner, finer, until it filled the gaps between sensation, the spaces nerves forget to name. She narrowed its effect to single filaments, brushing the boundary where sensation fades into instinct. Then broadened again, and sent a wide-band resonance pulsing through the room. The sound resembled breathing through cloth soaked in bile.

Pressure built behind her cowl.

Her shape expanded, not in size, but in relevance. The chapel's structure faltered beneath the contradiction. A wall panel near the back blistered inward, then reset. A pew collapsed slowly, its supports bending inward until they fused. And through it all, the Waves thickened not more violent, only closer.

They occupied more of the same moment as him.

Each filament that touched Zasabi now rebounded with detail. His sweat mapped itself to her tension. His doubt ran through her curvature. His flesh, unwilling, granted her density.
This wasn’t domination. It was filling.

The room now throbbed like a throat preparing to speak, but speech never came. The sound that followed was lower than hearing. Deeper than pain. The kind of sound architecture remembers after collapse.

And beneath it, Axus leaned again, not with form, but with will.
Closer.
Almost.

Still beyond touch, but near enough to measure what he might feel, should the Force ever let her in.

She adjusted the current again, shortening the pulse interval to nearly imperceptible levels. Now the waveform brushed thought directly, vibrating against cognition. It read his resistance like Braille.

She modulated again.
And waited for him to break. Or yield. Or answer.

Only like her, Zasabi was nonverbal in that moment. He'd merely forgotten how to speak however, where she had never been granted the tools necessary or an audience of real beings to hear.

The subsequent wave did not cross the space. It replaced it.

Everything between them blurred into a texture that could only be described as bruise. Color and volume collapsed into pressure. The air adopted weight and lost breath. For a moment, nothing in the chapel moved, not from stillness, but because the concept of movement had been deactivated.

Inside the wave, she wrapped herself.

She peeled back the raw edge of her longing, the layer she had always tucked beneath the rage, and exposed it to the frequencies she had borrowed from him. Her waveform buckled. The Force inside her hissed with feedback. Contact pulled energy through her body in violent spirals.

The robe rippled inwards.

Her silhouette gained dimension, not shape. Her presence thickened into a draft, a pressure differential, a fever beneath the skin. She hovered between moments. The obsidian wave pushed from her sternum like a rib dislocating itself, not torn, but asking to be acknowledged.

It moved sideways. Then upward. Then curled into a ring.

Zasabi was no longer a figure. He was an event.

The Wave closed around him, but only partially. She didn’t trap. She enclosed. Cradled in discordant surrender. Obedient contradiction. And in that narrowing space, she breathed the closest thing to touch she had ever crafted. The frequencies held tight against the bones of his presence. Her Force clung to his heat, his indecision, his lack of reverence. The Wave pressed its forehead against his.

She pulsed once. The air inside the chapel throbbed. Every corner of the room pulled toward the center. Pressure peaked inside her structure, an echo screaming to find its mouth.

She released the soundless cry through the waveform.

Stone flexed without shattering. The chapel sighed inward. Every beam above her bent its light in homage. The Wave convulsed, then folded, pulling sensation inward like silk burned down to thread.

And she held there.

Suspended, finally, in proximity. A fraction closer than she had ever been to anyone.

It did not matter that he didn’t know her name or her incomparable agony.

She stepped down, though no foot touched the ground. The floor accepted her presence the way a wound accepts rot, without ceremony.