Honoring the Fallen
Voikirium
SV's Estalia Guy
- Location
- Ruritania Illinois
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Honoring the Fallen
Red lekku are matted with blood and filth and worse things. Despite everything her eyes still shine with a keen, low, light, harsh in the absolute blackness that surrounds them. "You know, on Dantooie, there's...I have a journal. It has a few stories you might like to hear."
His only response is-
"Atton!" He wakes up, wiping some of the drool off of his face with the back of his glove. Not that he was asleep, but he wasn't awake, either. The archive is quiet, the journal is in his hands, and she was right.
It does have a story he'd like to hear-- her, the Jedi's, story of going to Ilum for her lightsaber crystal. She-- Ygarra, that is her name, he has burnt it into his brain irreparably at this point-- tells a simple story, as close to straightforward as Jedi ever get. The biggest problem of course, is that like most of the Jedi she's writing about it from the assumption that everybody already knows where it is, so they never actually put down the damn location.
Fuckin' Jedi.
He realizes at a certain point that Brianna is still talking, so he tunes back in. "-And furthermore, you are setting a terrible precedent for the Initiates, some of whom are in severe need of--"
"Alright, alright! I. Get. It. I will go to sleep, after I have checked the damn journal one last time. Okay?" Brianna stands there, her arms folded, looking for all the world like a father. "You aren't going to leave, are you?"
"No."
"Hrm."
There's just one passage he keeps going back to. It describes the ship landing, the stars already out and waiting for them. For obvious reasons, that's likely to be the place where he might find some clue as to its location, but so far she has focused on a singular detail:
And all the stars hang high over head, twinkling like little jewels, sparks dancing an intricate ballet, each a single dancer in the night. Except for the Black Heart, but I don't think we need him around, now do we?
And then she just wanders off, metaphorically and literally, and it's like she's trying to get revenge on him from the grave, or the Force, or wherever Jedi go when they kick off the physical realm-- not important. What is important is that he's five minutes from breaking his own neck so--
Wait. Wait, wait, wait one fucking second.
He knows that term. Supposedly, it's the code name for where Revan sent the real freaks and monsters-- the guys who would have known "Sleep with vibroblades" far too personally. Now, he doesn't know where that is exactly, either, but he does know what would cause that effect-- namely, a pretty damn close orbit around its star, which is the case on that world according to rumor; and while he's no physicist, he know that the gravity of two worlds so close together will have a real effect.
He inputs the coordinates that Bao-Dur already found. XY doesn't work unless Ilum is secretly inside of Tattooine, and XZ doesn't work unless Jedi can survive being pulled apart by a black hole. YZ, though? Brings the screen to a position that looks just about right, the Kaidos Run, where a thousand quasi-debris fields are formed for no, currently, explicable reason-- but, it sure would make a lot of sense if they were being pulled towards something.
"I think I found Ilum."
And he passes out.
--
He wriggles as the ship cuts through hyperspace-- they've chartered a new captain for this so they can focus on, well...
"This is something of a gamble, isn't it?" Mical shifts in his seat.
"What, you trust me enough to teach all the squirts how to lightsaber duel, but not how to find Ilum?"
"I did not say that. I trust you plenty. But-"
Before they can argue, Brianna vomits, which sort of cuts that short. The captain looks back from the cockpit. "Is she alright?"
"Atris-- she walked here. She-- it's here. Ilum."
Now that you mention it, uh.
You only really saw Atris once, when she turned herself in to you. You could sense, even then, the hurt she was screaming into the Force-- a part of you wondered how you ever been blind to it, how the Exile had been blind to it. If Meetra carried the deaths of Malachor, screaming, in her soul, then Atris carried a little death-- every loss at Katarr echoed in her, their melancholy, running far deeper than the simple betrayal that had wounded her at the start of the Mandalorian wars.
Since she does not know about the only other rock that might justify coming out here, and since this looks like an iceball and not an oversized piece of dirt, you think this is it-- Ilum.
It's...the Force here is strange. Not twisted, like on Korriban-- almost more like if Kreia was in your head, except not an absolute nightmare. Every part of this world, you realize, is carved to make you the best you can be-- much as Kreia sought to do for her students, except it has a very different notion of what the best would be.
Namely, you get the sense that Revan himself could not survive on its surface without...inner strength, yes, but more importantly the ability to work with others. You would need allies, connections, to endure the cold of its surface.
In any case, you have found Ilum, for what good that currently does you.
--
Ilum discovered
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