― ✧ ―

𝐨𝐧𝐞.

❝Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.❞

― WALTER KURTZ, Apocalypse Now

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𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐘 𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐃 𝐈𝐓 the scarlet river.

A trail of rusted ichor slicing through the center of Corellia, it gouged into the planet's ancient, metal-brushed skin as if inflicted by the sharpest of swords. Violent cerise ran aflame with the divine incandescence of liquid rubble, like the pulped tomato foam of a demigod's vein. Atavistic wound. Forgotten anomaly. Writhing scar. The stream flowed almost lazily, nearly tranquil save for its gruesome appearance - deemed so by the lurid pigment of deteriorating iron oxides, unidentifiable pollutants, and mutating ruby algae which permeated its existence.

Perhaps on another, more affluent mass of gravity, hordes of scientists and labor droids would flock to observe such a 'remarkable phenomenon', sampling and testing and researching for days and nights on end. Glass vials and beakers would line the shores like hungry scavengers until the inevitable at last occurred - a pointed source of its garish color would be identified and eliminated without another thought, as many problems are. Pure, crystalline water would pool and glisten in its place, almost false in its perfection; even a once-in-a-century miracle cannot defy efficiency of the opulent and the comfort of normality. But Corellia is no such place, and the eerie liquid continued to glow with crimson vengeance, even after dark.

Eryn was one of the few who liked the river, watching it edge forward as not-quite-lava and not-quite-blood with an unwavering, awe-filled gaze. It was impossible to tell if she still remained blissfully unaware of the cyclone-brewed rubies that her eyes became, reflecting with the disturbingly demonic light, yet no one could blame her for being drawn to the morbid efflux - it was exhilaratingly different compared to the otherwise monotonous winter-grey dust. And for all its wretched warfare and crudely constructed evil, she's always loved the mesmerizing hue of red.

Her infatuation with such fervor and foreboding was just one of many misplaced adorations that began as special quirks, and grew to unfortunate habits, before finally becoming what they truly were in the form of dangerously flawed liabilities. Eryn still could not seem to find where she belonged in the liminal space between freedom and apathy; she'd long since given up on restraining the mangled nuances that made up her twisted being, for why hide the distorted, injurious, unhealed parts of her if the world would pick her to pieces either way?

Perhaps this is what accounted for her strange comradery with knives: sharp, streamlined, stunningly precise in one second and terrifyingly brutal the next. Even as a giggling, rosy-lipped child Eryn had been drawn to the blades, mesmerized by the way they shined and flashed like silver-scaled sea creatures battling through turquoise-satin depths. By the will of some innate, golden-fanged ghost - those who are born under its crisp, honeyed shadow never cease to brim with primal recklessness - her fingertips always found their way to the weapon's lethal edge, slowly running over the impossibly thin, acute surface. It was nearly comforting how similar the supple memories of knives always were as they expanded among her own: keenly forged, cunningly sharpened, doused in blood, caressed by a heedless tearaway of a girl who cannot seem to stop frolicking a breath away from demise.

Redalur ti kyr'am. Dance with death. Satine had always hated Eryn's compulsive fascination with the ancient phrase, born of a calloused warrior lips and vocal chords ravaged by crusading cries, but she wasn't there to stop her daughter now. No one was.

It was a minor miracle that the young woman had not once cut herself - or so Eryn would have acknowledged if she believed in such ethereality. The wonder within her own existence was something she couldn't help but take for granted, as those carved by the battering winds of an invisible thaumaturge will never know what it's like to live without their tracing scintilla of the beautiful incomprehensible. The fortune of those in the face of doom yields no miracles, only marvelous truths. Even so, her collection of knives only grew - as if reaped from a blacksmith's graveyard to be welded by infinitely tangible despair - and her reputation swelled with it.

The Corellian Mandalorian. That's what those on the streets called her, voices alight with the strange pride of this industrial planet. We may be the worst place in the galaxy, but we have soldiers, the elevated inflection of their words silently whispered. We survive on nothing. She had to admit that the innocently granted denomination had a nice ring to it.

But despite the armor pressed against her skin and the lineage billowing through her lungs like sea-mist and smoke, deep within the knot of doubts tied up inside her chest Eryn was certain that she did not deserve the title of Mandalorian anymore. Time had taken that too, for the evolution of a girl filled with broken glass is a spectacle revered by none. Her mother had died for their desolated planet and its devastated people, gasping in the sapphire-torn agony of her final breath upon the cradling floor of the very throne room where she'd fought for peace more than any other. Those who claimed their duchess to be anything less than an unfaltering warrior failed to grasp what true courage was, for the palace walls had wept that day as they echoed with her severed words: remember, my love, akay vi urcir tug'yc. Until we meet again. And taking the place of her righteous heartbeat was Eryn, a masquerading girl bound by the leeching horror of self-imposed cowardice, unable to return even if she tried. The demons pouring from her eyes remembered it all, and yet she was unable to reunite with the woes of the past which pursued each fleeting thought and unfiltered scream. Satine was gone, lost to a land where the moon never sinks below endless horizons, and the rest of Eryn's Mandalore might as well have been gone with her. The whispering nostalgic meadows and smiling embrace of human arms (what the wisest of romanticists called home) remained impossible for the girl to understand, for she couldn't even begin to recognize herself.

She was surprised, in truth, that the ones who had left her to Corellia's wrath nearly a year ago hadn't heard of what she had become; perhaps the only phenomena in existence which travel faster than light are darkness and words. But she would remain unaware of the deserters' last fearful act of kindness, of their claims to her death though they themselves had never cursed their unreachable, moon-dusted hands with murder's toxic stain. And if Gar Saxon believed she was no longer alive, she wasn't, especially not in a galaxy scattered with the ashes of those who will never be found.

And so Eryn, the death-noted anomaly of a living soul, sat upon an eroded balcony of one of her planet's many abandoned skyscrapers, finger at the edge of a blade, eyes tilted down to the scarlet river, and mind brimming with Mandalore.

The water churned with scorned, fuchsia foam in the clouded evening light.

How forebodingly peaceful it was.

But, like every secret ever told, tranquility never seemed to last. The entire building sighed through its many crumbling craters, sagging metal bars creaking with the acceptance of one giving in to the will of nature, fueled only by the bitter hope of returning to slumber upon the ground at last. Eryn didn't even have to turn around to know that Qi'ra had materialized behind her; the older girl's palpable presence in the air was instantly discernable, sprawled beside the tenuous scent of watered down lavender perfume. The quaint, nearly desperate trace of it was not quite enough to disguise the perennial aroma of iron and ash.

Gently gesturing to the mangled stump of metal that could almost be considered a chair at her side, for what felt like the thousandth time Eryn wondered at Qi'ra's constant attempts at glamor in a place where even the thought of finery was met with a slashing smirk. Her chipped nail polish and hand-made, baubled earrings allowed it to seem as if she had been vacationing from the upper levels of Coruscant and gotten terribly lost along the way. The former Mandalorian nearly smiled at the thought, simply because of how deceiving appearance could truly be. Surviving for this long without Qi'ra was an impossibility, and while Eryn could never quite understand why the other girl had spared her with such uncharacteristic selflessness, it was something she wasn't inclined to forget.

Once she had asked her companion about that anguished first Corellian night, when her blood had pooled in the shadow-scaled street and hope was lost. Why did you help me, of all people? I was just another stranger, you could have let me die, she had whispered, defiantly meeting Qi'ra's quizzical gaze. The savior's response could have won awards for being the most assertively confusing thing Eryn had ever heard: You looked like you needed the assistance. And besides, I know a fighter when I see one. There had been no further explanation, and though the unwavering pull of curiosity remained, for once Eryn was content to remain unaware of the inner workings behind the event that spared her life.

Now, as the dark-haired girl sat down with a springing flourish, she seemed far less elusive. Raising her eyebrows in a dramatic, unsurprised manner at the knife in the other's hands, she swept her bangs casually to the side. Even after so many months, Qi'ra was a person that was impossible to get used to; the way she laughed without restraint, the way she hummed to herself as she ducked through the streets, the way she was always moving. Knees bobbing, ankles shivering, toes tapping, eyelashes flickering. She could never sit still, always halfway gone to somewhere else (no other would ever quite know of the daydreamt adventures and unspoken dangers which called upon the hyperawareness of those shifting thoughts). But as her knuckles thrummed with the echoes of uneven balcony rails, echoing all the way down to the river below, her usual unfiltered smile was missing.

"What's wrong?" A tiny smirk of irony danced in Qi'ra's eyes, undoubtedly due to the fact that a perpetually wide-eyed, shell-shocked girl who couldn't seem to stop obsessively stroking a knife had just asked about her welfare. Eryn slowly set the weapon down as her friend's silence continued, fingers twitching with a bitter reluctance to part with the blade's broken familiarity. "What is it?" She pestered further, tucking a pale blonde lock slowly behind her ear and refusing to draw away from her overt, opalescent stare. Qi'ra's shoulder twitched

"It's impossible to hide anything from you, isn't it." There was the laugh, the one that sounded like music. Eyes crinkling like gold-rimmed tissue paper, head dipping in disbelieving amusement, paraffin skin alight with relaxed certainty. But a shadow of doubt remained hinting at the corners of her lips, not lost under Eryn's observant gaze.

"Qi'ra." The stressed tone in her voice was enough to startle her companion, accented by the lingering tone of Mando'a that growled in her words. "You don't have to lie to me like you lie to Han."

Instantly Eryn knew she had brushed on the real problem, as the other girl stiffened, spidery hands continuing to make little echoing taps against her makeshift chair. They jittered with a captivating sense of uncultivated control.

"Han's going to try and get us out." Qi'ra began slowly, but soon the words began to pour out in gushing, shrapnel-pierced streams, building momentum and consequence as they often do. "He thinks he has something to bribe the Imperials, enough to get us freedom. I told him you had to come too." Fierce loyalty was glinting in her hazel eyes, nearly magnetizing as they glittered like the caramelized resin of trees, filled with the potential to harden into amber jewels which could trap and preserve even the most stubborn of wispy souls for eternity. But Eryn could still see the truth in them that both of them knew. Eyes always held the truth, always. They were like cavernous, magnified windows, peering straight into the deepest of secrets and memories - a pair of keys with the power to unlock all that has ever been condemned to hide in the human heart.

And this was the reality that Eryn could see in them now:

Han was too good. His optimism glittered like the sun upon the sea, as undeniable as his complete unawareness of the spark of gold beating within his own chest. Corellia didn't have anything as self-revealing as mirrors - Eryn would never quite know how perpetually traumatized she appeared - but Han's oblivious devotion to cynicism despite his evident hope remained almost laughable. Perhaps that's why Qi'ra liked him, for little could resist the way he rose above endless darkness with almost no effort at all. But if Han's grand escape had been planned for two, it would barely succeed at even that. For all the years he had scraped by on nothing save for his rather inconsistent 'talent' of talking his way through the most desperate of situations, his shield of luck could only last for so long; even the stars shall die when their time has passed. His nescience, however, continued to prevail, especially when it came to matter that half the gangs on Corellia would've been after his head if Qi'ra and Eryn hadn't set them straight with far more than silver-tongued words.

"No, I'm staying. You have to go without me." The finality of her own words turned Eryn's lungs to stone, pressing heavily from within her ribs. Ever since the Empire had locked down Corellia with the choking grasp of an iron fist, squeezing its people tighter and tighter until every last use drained out of them, there was no way to leave. The hordes of hopeless - caught within  networks of factories and mines that lay hollowed beneath the surface like catacombs - would chuckle darkly to themselves, thinking of how a planet renowned for building starcraft held so very few who would ever be able to reach the sky. Doubtful mutters and irony-laced scoffs would cloud their self-assured minds at the thought of such an opportunity as was being offered now. But this one chance, if it truly worked, was one she would sacrifice for reasons much greater than skeptical disenchantment. No matter how feeble the attempt, she had to try and repay the vulnerable mass of debts which curled within her conscience, feasting on her sanity with its guilt-laden maw. The unnecessary vulnerability of owing another felt like a regrettably gaping wound, one that had to be stitched over at all costs if honor was to be conserved. 

(Perhaps she was more Mandalorian than she thought.)

"Han wants to travel the galaxy." Qi'ra carried on if nothing had happened, nodding soberly, for if there's one thing to be learned on Corellia it's that questioning the heart's strangest motives is painfully futile. "I think he's always wanted to."

Eryn was suddenly struck by the fact that she didn't truly know Qi'ra. An aureate, blood-sworn bond of warrior's survival and alliance's debt coursed between them, deepened by the friendship of a sisterhood born of sacrifice and instinctual trust. Yet the Mandalorian remained unaware of where her companion had come from, of what had driven her to mastery of Corellia's harsh streets at such a young age. Such was a dangerous past to embrace ignorance of, but perhaps the other girl didn't even know it herself, having traveled so far along this tunneling journey that it was impossible to look back.

"... sometimes I think the only things he loves are ships and the stars..." Qi'ra continued onwards with a far-away expression, unaware that the other had stopped listening.

Normally Eryn would have been irrevocably drawn to all that echoed with the sanded gunmetal of her friend's memories, seeking the whisper of her pistols or corded necklaces like a moth drawn to blinding light in an unquenchable eagerness to reveal yet another hidden lifeline. But for once she had the power to suppress the searching greediness of her gift, restraining herself from the fearful possibility of tarnishing the person she owed so much to. Besides, trust was not the only thing that went both ways. Her only ally knew nothing of Mandalorian duchesses and oblivious Jedi haunted by dying confessions, of the silken web of tragedy that kept Eryn running from her own fate. With Qi'ra, everything was about the present - the past was something left to rot.

"Is traveling the galaxy a bad thing?" A future of drifting through vast expanses of unimaginable beauty with no true destination sounded rather dreamlike to Eryn as she snapped back into reality, yet the dread in the other's voice told a different tale.

"No..." she trailed off, as if worrying what Han would think about her uncertainty at his greatest aspiration. "I'm just worried about Crimson Dawn." Such a name was fitting for the ruthless criminal organization which had risen in the gruesome light of emerging bloodshed across the galaxy. Violent, ruthless, the followers of death; they justified Qi'ra's fears with ease. The syndicate's influence on Corellia and other materialistically valuable planets had grown in recent years, though the true extent of their hierarchical power remained bathed in the onyx shadow of slain deities. Eryn had heard stories of brands carved into flesh, victims mauled beyond recognition, entire villages slaughtered on whim; everyone knew something, whether it was a scattered shard of crystallized terror or an entire epic of tragedy. But the feather-haired girl with glass-splinter eyes didn't have a chance to respond as a high pitched whine began to dance through the air.

"Don't move." Her words could have made the oceans of Mon Cala stand still in static submission.

 Qi'ra looked at her in surprise but dutifully froze as Eryn slowly stood up, the suspended insectine hum growing louder in her ears like the snarl of a rapidly approaching storm. A clatter of claws scrambled up stairs, a hurling white mass streamed through the balcony entrance, a raw howl raged within the air as a scaly canine creature materialized in the trance-like crouch of a predator. Corellian hound. An ultimate engineered creation of hunting and defense, the ferocious tracker could trail a scent across an entire planet, not stopping for a moment until they found its source and tore it to shreds. They struck so quickly it was said that all one saw was a flash of swooning ivory, a rustle of arctic breeze, brushstroke of the pristine, fatal bliss some called snow. Used by bands of criminals as guard animals and untraceable assassins, the hounds were commonly set upon unwitting victims of quarrels and vendettas across Corellia - excluding the cruelest of bloodthirsty vagabonds, it was always easier to kill without looking into the sufferer's fear-stung eyes.

Flesh rippled upon a domed, bony ridge of a back, smooth muscle tensed into carved rose-tinged seashell, fangs rusted and hungered as they protruded from a sloping maw and oversized head. The demonic being towered over Eryn, its growl an earthquake across the thin metal box of a balcony which seemed to extend out higher than ever over empty air, like the skyscraper's twisted limb. But most frightening of all was the dull unconsciousness in the Corellian hound's slitted yellow eyes, the fire within them fueled by an unknown puppeteer's purpose as it charged forward.

And the girl clad in Mandalorian armor let it come, she let it come until she could smell the rot on the creature's breath and feel its three-toed feet scrape the floor in front of her, tentacled whiskers reaching forward with the ravenous excitement of spotting its prey. The beast could taste the vivid youth and plasma of its fierce target, quivering in the malevolent excitement of midnight's edge as it sprang forwards with momentum that could rip through dimensions. Eryn kept her feet planted firmly in place, hand on the stunted hilts of two more of her seemingly infinite supply of knives as she heard Qi'ra scream her name. 

The sound was drowned out by the inevitable.

Yet as the hound leapt towards her with the might of a deftly hurled spear, the predacious simplicity of its mind had failed to account for one thing: that Eryn was entirely ready. She rolled to the side with practiced ease, stabbing into beasts sloping back as it yelped in the surprise of paws scraping on empty air rather than warm flesh. The sheer force of its spring propelled the massive hound off the balcony and out into the oblivion of desolate space. It hung for a moment as a marionette suspended in time, the girl's petrified hands still glued to the blades embedded in its muscle.

And as the creature began to fall, she had no choice but to be wretched through gravity with it, kicking herself loose from the building as if she could break solidity to pieces with the soles of her shoes. Her wrists were locked - Eryn couldn't let go, and the part of her that terrified her most didn't want to.

She collided into the hound's massive, tumbling arc of a spine, the knives digging deeper and deeper as they bound her to the creature. Legs clinging tightly into its sides, her stomach dropped with the exhilarating sensation of reality's phantasmagorical release as the two plummeted downwards. In instant the creature became the strangest of reined chariots, indisputably bound for the scarlet river.

The cascading ruby stream would become manifested destiny all too quickly.

Wind whistled with rabid gusts as the water grew closer and closer, until at last she could see the specks of charcoal and carmine which coursed through it's grinning center. And with a sanguine wave of red Eryn went under, consumed without so much as a scream, choking on the thick, the warm, the metallic as it tried to pry open her throat and pool into her lungs until they burst and filled her empty shell. The hound went limp beneath her with the nonexistent struggle of brutal acceptance, beginning to drift downwards as its weight tugged towards the riverbed. For a moment there was a frightfully dooming peace, trapped within a place of no sight and sound, eyes and lips tightly shut and limbs frozen in a living coma of shocked confusion.  But her senses didn't remain dormant for long; closing her eyelids tightly and waiting for all to pass was no longer an option, for she was still falling, down and down into depths of no salvation.

 Eryn's armor pressed around her and dragged at her motions, sparks beginning to consume her lungs. Breathe. The one thought ravaged her mind as it burned black around the edges, everything above her becoming crushing abyss, as if Atlas had dropped the sky and it now lay to rest upon her shoulders. The creature below shuddered against the riverbed with the gentle collapse of death. 

Her wrists ripped upwards as they strained to pull out her knives from the stone-like corpse - it seemed that the girl's stubborn, oxygen-deprived fingers would rather turn to paste than let go. But with a final lurch she managed to wrench the blades out, letting the body of the beast who had brought her there crumble out of touch. Even writhing in the slow-motion dream of underwater ruin, she sheathed them carefully before attempting to pull through the sea of horror. 

Eryn had just begun to discover how water was crueler than most, for it washed all of land's security to dust in less than an instant, taking no heed of one's own perceived strength. Up and down were no longer known, only a suspended oblivion and a skull shaking with deluged inferno, a chest straining for the impossibility of air.

Breathe. 

The water isn't the enemy, do not fight it. Her fading consciousness was devoured by the motion of agony-stricken limbs grasping at the intangible, all sense of lucidity gone. And then there were the sapphire eyes of her mother, voice like silk as she calmly watched her young daughter thrash within a pool of crystal. It is us who disturb the water's peace; to know its kindness we must first return to its tranquil origin.

A senseless roar pounded behind Eryn's retinas, for this is what it's like to be submerged in an element where humankind is never meant to have survived:

It isn't to drown, it's to blaze.

Scalding, smoldering, burning alive. Wishing for a surface that is forever out of reach.

If we do not struggle, the only thing we can do is rise. Satine's softly graceful, indefinably wise words cut deliriously through the gloom, along with the memory of her guiding touch gracing the girl's shoulder. Every part of Eryn searched for the relief that seemed to no longer exist, her throat pulsing uncontrollably with the effort of holding it shut. Spinning. Slipping. Suffocating. Breath. All functions fell to trance of agony and suspended struggle. The surface will come, Eryn. With serenity it will come.

And then a hand grasped the crook of her arm and pulled her from the arms of death. The river let out a raging choke, the wail of one unwilling to release its prisoner, and the world was suddenly alight with gasps and coughs and fingers clawing at dripping eyelashes as Eryn tried to regain breath and sight. Eyes blinking furiously like butterfly wings under the cannonading blows of rain, throat repelling the suddenly unfamiliar caress of air, an ache of deprivation slicing through the lining of her skin. Beyond the red-tinged, onyx-speckled haze she could see Qi'ra standing over her with an expression that was impossible to discern, hand coated in a morbidly bright, scarlet sheen.

In that moment, Eryn considered herself quite lucky that she couldn't see herself and the way she glinted, entirely saturated in a layer of thick, flushed, blood-red pigment save for the orbiting pearls of her irises. A living nightmare, bound by horror's sardonic hellfire and wheezing regret. The river flowed cunningly beside the one it had painted with war and desperation without inflicting a single scratch.

"Oh, Eryn." The other girl looked close to tears as the one she had tried to watch over regained a sense of stability, spitting the rust from her lips and plastering her drenched hair behind her ears. Eryn winced as she looked at her vermillion-crusted armor, but hid her expression, refusing to mirror Qi'ra's concern. She ran her finger through the opaque, glossy substance in three careful lines, tracing a small smiling face upon the vermeil plate lining her bicep.

"See?" She asked, forcing a smile of her own though it stretched uncomfortably. "I'm fine." The dark-haired girl just shook her head, taking Eryn's crimson palm and letting it bleed into her own. She gently pulled the Mandalorian away from the scarlet river and towards the most secure illusion of safety that could be afforded on streets of flimsy alliances and Corellian hounds.

Sunset cast an amber glow upon the little that it touched, a small reminder of the fading time which warped around youth and survival. If the pair had turned around, they would have seen how the perilous ruby waters behind them glittered like molten gold.

But they didn't look back as Eryn placed her water-logged shoes in Qi'ra's footsteps, following the other girl without question, for if one cannot put trust in another they cannot move forward.

"What am I ever going to do with you, Eryn?" Sarcasm sighed in Qi'ra's eyes as she gently arched a brow, swinging their joined hands back and forth with ease. They could almost pretend that one of them wasn't drenched in scarlet atrocity and living like a ghost. They could almost pretend that they endured in a world where the other didn't have to keep one finger clutched around a trigger even in moments of supposed peace. They could almost pretend that everything was going to be all right.

Breathe.

"How should I know that?" She smiled, teeth miraculously not stained with red.

Eryn liked pretending.

But even drenched in tears of monsters and the reckless loathing of another ashen day's end, she didn't have to imagine that she had Qi'ra. Perhaps her innocent credence in the belief that such a beautiful thing could be ever permanent is what at last let Eryn Kryze fall.

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𝐀/𝐍: Not the most captivating chapter ever, but I wanted to show a little more of these two before I tear them apart--   [insert evil author laugh]

Anywayys, I should mention that Eryn scares me... a lot...

...and I know part of the issue is that I put some of my own traits in her  (I tried listing them here and it got too long yikes) but ahhh she's just kinda TERRIFYING (shhh who am i kidding though, she's also my favorite and I love her and i neglect my other stories at her benefit whoops)

Also, I know the chapter title isn't the most sensical thing ever but it's after the song by The Chantels, cause let's face it -- I'm also too scared to listen to depressing music as I write this (for now)

I'm having a pretty busy month school-wise so might not get to this story again for a few weeks, though I'll still try to update something soon. Thanks so much for reading!

- Jynni ❤

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