― ✧ ―

𝐭𝐰𝐨.

❝A ghost can be a lot of things. A memory, a daydream, a secret. Grief, anger, guilt. But, in my experience, most times they're just what we want to see... Most times, a ghost is a wish.❞

― STEVEN CRAIN, The Haunting of House Hill

✧･ﾟ: * ═══════════════ *:･ﾟ✧

𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐒𝐎𝐌𝐄𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆 rather haunting about the unfamiliar. 

The faces of strangers flickered by Eryn's desperate gaze, a river of fading holograms without a single memory or name. Gaunt cheeks, calloused lips, hollow eyes - like a row of ghosts, their shrouded presence was thick with the ashes of fallen revolutions. Each feature seemed two dimensional, as thin and blank as parchment without ink, as dull and vapid as the stagnant pools which used to glisten after Sundari's rare days of artificial rain.

A face says more than a thousand words.

But even in an indefinite, savagely capricious universe of transience and brevity, the stagnant faces of the half-dead told Eryn nothing at all.

The girl's world rumbled, held in the umbra-metal fist of some ancient thunder deity, the rage of its churning, iron-wrought power echoing through her bones. Her skull shook, a chasmal swirl of quaking thoughts unable to grasp recognition of a single person before her. Like Eryn, their feather-fingered hands were suspended in the air above their heads, caged birds covered with the slate-grey skin of corpses and bound by cutting chandeliers of chains. Seismic tremors rippled through the cargo transport which whisked them all across Corellia, unsteady motions underlined by the live-wired heartbeat of a sputtering engine.

Each of her fellow prisoners had once been free at the girl's side, prowling the streets as a subtle reminder that she was not alone. Their footsteps had fallen in the same shadowed places, they had breathed the same sulfur-choked air and stared up with swallow-tailed longing at the same dull sky, eyes landing upon sickening streaks of citrine-infested clouds in perfect synchrony. Like fledglings with scorched wings they had fallen together into one doomed nest, as if drawn by the magnet of each other's withered suffering.

Yet Eryn had only ever truly known Qi'ra; all others were an obsolete milieu, a decaying matrix, a waning backdrop. Futile brushstrokes on deteriorating canvas, never quite able to paint a full picture. And it was Qi'ra, the girl who could never stop moving, who had brought them all down. (It seemed that the few Eryn chose to love were always the ones who reaped tragedy in their wake, trailing translucent sorrow like a bride's spectral veil.)

The first of the many 'last times' she would ever see Qi'ra was the moment that Eryn discovered she hated goodbyes. In truth she had always despised how they eluded her, for valedictions were one thing the Mandalorian never got to have - those who left her fell without warning, without final whispers, without another half-breath of mercy. Which was worse? A temporary, precursive mystery drawing out inevitable separation or a fundamentally bare, final farewell? An aching vow begging to be broken or a simple, unforseen end?

She'd never imagined that each could be as devastating as the other. Hugging her friend for a final time, weakly waving her hand as twilight pounced on its diurnal prey, watching two people become specks in the ravenous distance; it was just another kind of unkeepable promise, another kind of loss that wallowed in perpetuated grief and the same whispered lies which have been repeated since the dawn of time. It's all for the best. We'll see each other again one day. There is nothing else to say when emotion can be shown to none but the dead and dying. There is nothing else to say when someone is never supposed to come back.

And there was no rejoicing as Qi'ra returned alone, tears in her eyes, Han Solo gone from her side, the weight of cannonading failure and shattered oaths dragging at her steps. As the armored girl searched her friend's expression, she was startled by the emptiness in it, the stillness of one who no longer had the will to keep fighting. A human wasteland, the brilliant tenacity of an eternal sunset replaced with bare desperation. People like her didn't break easily, but in the end it's the indestructible who fall before all else - fate has a cunning sense of irony, a cruel mastery of finding one's weakest spot. It was only moments before everything crumbled at their feet, slipping into ruins.

Imperial troopers split open the air in which they stood, materializing like menacing crustaceans in their ivory exoskeletons, Corellian hounds at their sides. Their armor gleamed far too brightly in the splintered light, screaming pearlescence tearing through a wretched field of whispers and dust. The planet seemed to inhale, staggering through a single shuddering gasp as Eryn's hands fell to the familiar touch of her knives. She was already searching for the gaps between each helmet and chest plate, the potent vulnerabilities which all clad in an invincible shell could never quite hide.

But before she could act further a blaster pressed against Qi'ra's head, muzzle ready to swallow life whole as it glinted dangerously, like a shard of ice swirling within a hurricane. The message was clear: if you move, she's gone.

Not for the first time, Eryn had wished that she could defeat the woes of loyalty. Adamantine threads of transcending morality and devotion held her impossibly close, binding yet another shivering victim to a reality of open wounds and tears shed in faith's sacrifice. Perhaps it was the Mandalorian in her, perhaps it was the humanity - either way, Eryn could never seem to let go, fingers locked around everything her open heart couldn't have.

Suffering was immortal under the guise of golden-hearted purpose and divinity, and so her tragedies bathed their fractured pieces in benevolence, saturated their wounds with loving intentions, disguised their imploding grief with beauty and virtue. At the zenith of it all, loyalty shone ever so harmlessly, gleaming more precious than gold until challenged for the first time - then it became a monster, fanged and bloodied beneath shredded skin of moon-dusted deceit. (It's no secret that even the deadliest of sorrows like to make themselves irresistible).

She hesitated, pausing in the claws of eternal conflict between entrancing fidelity and the unreachable release of betrayal.

And hesitation was all it took.

Ringed stun blasts cocooned every living soul left on the desolate street, blessing them with the ephemeral wonder of impermanent darkness.

When Eryn woke up, muscles aching with remnants of paralysis and tendons straining to lift herself above the floor, she was no longer free, captured by Imperials and crushed by the guilt of sacrificing every ally she had for a single friend. (If she were a silver-lipped senator perhaps she would have shared that friends and allies are not one and the same - that very mistake had rotted on her mother's grave, and even in silence she did not intend to repeat it.)

The nameless Corellians trapped against the quivering wall at her side were as lifeless as ever. Eryn wondered if they knew what she had done, if they understood that her moment of uncertainty had led to their capture and the suffering to come. Street rats, the Empire called them, those who had survived through the wrath of the galaxy's roughest corners only to be taken down in a moment of jagged sacrilege, exterminated by a girl from Mandalore who didn't belong.

The transport shook with sepulchral resonance. Chains clattered. The curve of a helmet bit into the the arch of her spine where it was lodged uncomfortably. Eryn dared to glance at Qi'ra at her side, bending her neck past a bundle of metal links only to find the other staring right back. She suddenly wished that there was something covering the pale, sleepless moon of her face, masking any unwanted feelings that cratered its fickle surface. Wide blue eyes met wearied hazel ones, like oceans washing against solid earth, azure waves crashing into amber shores with no remorse. Blood trickled down Qi'ra's lip like a rusting scar cleaving her chin in two, a scarlet river unable to be wiped away.

Pain is never as beautiful as the poets say.

"I almost made it out," she whispered, filled with so much broken longing it was easy to believe she was born with tears in her unfurling eyes, eulogies on her budding lips, rosy fingers counting down the time slipping by from the moment she took her first breath. "It was so close I actually dared to imagine..." Eryn could hear her friend's unformed words as they reverberated through the hidden layers of their interlaced existence like music, a chorus of tumbling notes that no one else could hear: I had actually dared to hope, to see myself in a future far better than this. And hope has brought me down.

The Mandalorian had no time to think of a response, wrapped in prescient failure as the transport shuddered to a stop. Time was something she never seemed to have enough of.

Troopers burst through the doors, flowing like streams of festering parasites through splintered tree bark. They wrenched the prisoners to their feet, unclipping their chains and murmuring rough instructions to each other. Eryn felt herself pulled into daylight, wrists wrenched in a soldier's grip and a bare hand clenched over her mouth far too tightly to be taking any chances. Beskar clanked against plastoid with a hollow echo.

But it all fell away as her eyes met the horror revealed by devastating, Corellian mid-morning, thick with mirage and disorienting smog. Each breath she took boiled in her lungs, a hurricane blistering with despair and the sharp taste of fear - like salt and ash and unspoken promises dissolving into screams.

Countless creatures of vastly different species were scattered throughout a hastily constructed plaza like pebbles tossed into a sea of doom, bruised stares strangely human despite their visibly unrecognizable origins. Limbs lay tangled in bondage, blood sprawled across stone like wine pouring from shattered goblets, ravaged throats cried out in pain as whips lashed and masses were shoved into waiting spacecraft. A slave market. Eryn had seen violence and torment before (the thousands of living moments inside of her knew little else), yet the spectacle's atrocity remained one of overwhelming delusion, bathed in vaporous citrine light like that of faded photographs and spice-laden regrets. Wealthy buyers walked upon the rotting ground as if they owned each grain of dust which dared to twirl in their wake, marked by strangely impassive expressions among tear streaked faces. Aloft with the same distant coldness of marble statues behind sheets of glass, their wrists were shadowed with the blood-red tattoos of Crimson Dawn.

If those around her had been strangers before, Eryn suddenly knew them even less. The rust-smudged, hardened faces of the young Corellians were laid bare in incomprehension, once barren tundras distorted with crevicing scars and blizzards of confusion. Rumors of hidden slave markets in the planet's isolated Imperial district had echoed through the depths of shrouded, paranoid alleyways for months, yet true belief evaporated as it spread to the masses, accepted by most as popular myth.

She should have known better than to discard the fact that even the most fantastical of legends are rooted in truth.

Arms and legs as limp as dew-laden reeds, the girl's eyes fixed upon a shaking Twi'lek child curled up upon the ground, pale lilac lekku twitching in terror. Yellow haze drifted across her heavy vision, the trooper's hand like ancient stone against her lips. A whip fell upon the Twi'lek's back and Eryn felt it blaze against her own, lungs blistering with flame, tearing in two, turning to dust. Her breath was whisked away into the arms of thieving spirits as the lashing cord reared into the air once again.

Of all strange and wonderful things to remember, it was her aunt, Bo, who came to her then, flaming red hair - which had always left a selfish part of Eryn prickling in envy - whipping against the woman's sharply cut jaw. Her emerald eyes glowed like warm, verdant coals as they reflected with the abyss of Eryn's imagination. If you want a person to snap, they will snap, the woman said, voice barely above a whisper though her words screamed with conviction. It was a peculiar feeling to be so full of memories that they burst into the present, sharp and clear, more alive than the numbness of reality itself. Human flesh is weak, that's why we have beskar, our second skin. The evocation's voice was fading as a final utterance replayed through the girl's mind, actuality, imagination, and remembrance binding into unidentifiable resolve. Otherwise, willpower is all it will take to break us.

Eryn bit down, feeling feeble joints crack beneath her teeth with the sickening echo of breaking bones. The trooper's helmet clattered to the floor. Spitting the blood from her lips she turned to see the agony upon their features, all sympathy evaporating with the momentary bliss of her wrists being released.

A face says more than a thousand words.

But Eryn's expression was as blank as Tatooine's untouched sands, her knives launching towards unprotected Imperial throats with a steady hand, each blade finding its mark like confetti drifting inevitably to the ground. There are no consequences when it's impossible to tell what's real at all - violence fractures its desperate acolytes, leaving fissures and perforations far deeper than remedies can touch, but there are no other options in a world where one must break others or become irreparably broken themselves.

And chaos brought its children home, eclipsing over the waning copper sun.

Clashes of weapons rippled across the planet's skin, hordes of fighters materializing as they pounced upon the market with a sudden fury that spoke only of destruction. The hell-bent raiders, faces masked, limbs clad in leather, and arms brimming with weapons, took down Imperials and Crimson Dawn's associates with the intricate ferocity of a planned attack. Like philosopher's preaching their greatest ambition, they were beings of ruthless passion.

There seemed to be three types of people left in the world: helpless slaves, mindless soldiers, and vicious marauders. Even in a million years Eryn would never have determined where she fit in; she could only hope that the hundreds of unseen intents swirling through the conflict didn't see her as an enemy. But hope, she was quickly learning, was a thing of fools.

Eryn! Her name danced at the crest of a scream, sending the girl's head spinning in search of its devastated source. It was Qi'ra, eyes wild and hair scattered, a caged animal trading her last breath for a plea. She pounded on glass windows of the starship that was locked around her, it's wing branded with the bleeding sun of Crimson Dawn. Other faces pressed around hers as the craft lifted heavily into the air, already yearning for a forsaken destination of doomed servitude.

Qi'ra. Eryn shouted her name but no sound escaped from her throat, muted with disbelief as she stumbled towards the accelerating ship. Qi'ra's face disappeared into a crowd of unfamiliar features, blurring into a shadowed abyss as the distance between them grew. The Mandalorian's feet dragged upon the dirt, eyes straining to catch sight of her friend once again, to hold the other's gaze and never let go until both of them were saved from fate. But a heavy hand on her shoulder brought all plausible motion to a halt, freezing her where she stood.

The girl turned slowly, as if directed by a wound-up spring coiled within pearl-stained bones, a marrow-needled compass pointing to curiosity's most fatal desires. A marauder stood behind her, face clad in the skull of an ancient, hollow creature, a cape of animal fur fluttering in their wake. The fight seemed to stop around the pair of them, each from different worlds, about to collide.

"You can't save her." Their voice was mottled, deepened with mystery as it echoed through fluted, skeletal plates.

"Yes I can." Eryn hissed at the stranger, daring them to challenge her though she already knew the truth. Reality dragged the world downwards, pulling it apart at the seams as it tore away all rose-petaled layers of delusion to reveal the dull brutality of thorns beneath. But even flooded with awareness of the lies she allowed to wash over her entire being, Eryn still liked pretending. One was never disappointed when they always remained a few steps behind imagination, letting their turbulent woes smooth over into glittering perfection before drowning in the malevolent tides of regret. 

"She's gone." The masked figure spoke bluntly, each word as devoid of emotion as those of a cruel politician. The starship pulled into the air, assaulted by hordes of the raider's shots which darted towards their target like schools of plasma fish, yet it only ascended further to reunite with its fellow transports. "But you aren't." Around Eryn, the bodies of stormtroopers piled higher, crushing the few representatives of Crimson Dawn who hadn't escaped. Corpses upon corpses, death upon death, fears upon fears. The remaining slaves were helped to their feet by the faceless marauders, unchained and herded onto waiting speeders, zipping away into the unknown.

Remnants of a battleground seemed to make the world clearer, permeated with the too-familiar smell of rot and blood and spoils. Many tales speak of battles between gladiators and warriors, castles of gristly paradise constructed through the glory and the gore, smiles gleaming like silver-mirrored swords on crimson-oozing lips. Rage can be rather beautiful when passed down through generations of artists and liars. They never tell of aftermaths which brim with rusted sands and the terrible silence of nature reflecting on the relentless destruction of its cloven disciples.

It was that thespian stillness which chose to strike then, a taunting lack of anything at all. You wanted blood, it whispers, words slithering like golden-webbed honey and tarnished silver, now drown in it. But the girl no longer wanted anything at all.

Perhaps it's a reckless sense of whim, perhaps it's grief - either way, here stands a truth of the broken: there is nothing more impossible than resisting the promise of a newfound adventure. So when gloved fingers wavered into being like a piercing omen of splayed raven's feathers, captivating mystery pulsing through the air, it was irresistible. The marauder held out their hand. And Eryn took it.

✧･ﾟ: * ═══════════════ *:･ﾟ✧

𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐀𝐋𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐀𝐍 𝐂𝐇𝐈𝐋𝐃𝐑𝐄𝐍 𝐃𝐈𝐃 𝐍𝐎𝐓 fear death. Their bodies had always been unbreakable, shatterproof, everlasting, spirits shining like iridescent diamond in a world of ancient salt. They spilled the crimson beneath their skin, split open suns with their scorching palms, challenged dynasties with electric ivory grins. Courage is alight with invincibility - in the tender arms of youth, all believe that they can rule the galaxy with nothing to lose, that their armor can withstand the blows of a thousand warriors, that gods chant their name.

Even the youngest of Mandalore's birthright would have chased after their best friend no matter what stood in their way, loyalty in their hearts and steely, infrared vengeance in their eyes. They would live as a hero and savior or perish for another as virtuous legend - the difference barely mattered when a blazing crown of bejeweled honor could be guaranteed. It was no secret that most Mandalorians never grew old.

But in truth, Eryn Kryze was afraid. She was afraid of becoming a martyr like her mother, afraid of tears soaking through her rosy corpse, afraid of being forgotten. Barely seventeen, not quite new to this world and not quite grown, and the weight of centuries rested on her weakening shoulders. Perhaps that's why she now found herself traveling through the endless catacombs of Corellia's interior passages, alongside strangers who walked like masquerading ghosts.

The fighters didn't seem to find her enigmatic in the slightest, ignoring her with the elevated confidence of those who had collectively chosen to do so - it appeared that they were used to lost and unfamiliar creatures being picked up in their wake. The tunnels curled tighter and tighter, as pale and sharp as the interior of a spiraling seashell, footsteps and mutters echoing through the confined space. Eryn watched the beams of wood which geometrically cut through the passage's hollowed corners, mesmerized as they curved and widened until gradually splitting open into a vast cavern. Covered by a conspicuously constructed ceiling of interlaced planks, cracks of elusive sky were just barely visible, shining through the gaps to cast bars of brilliant light across the space. She marveled at the way the glowing, sepia-tinged reflections spread across her hands, luster-fused edges as straight and defined as scars.

Though they were barely far enough underground to be buried alive, the crudely-carved stone walls which sliced into the planet's flesh let off a vaguely caustic scent, musty and metallic as the girl stepped into the subterranean room. The marauders' camp - various temporary installments of cots, weapon racks, and medical stations - seemed to be built upon relics of rusted activity and equipment which hadn't been used for years, birth upon degradation. As with all of age's subtle tricks, the entire space echoed with impermanence.

"The old mine..." Eryn's thoughts compressed into a whisper as she barely withheld her awe at such blatant cleverness. (As much as she despised surprises, it was hard not to admire a rare devolution from humanity's legacy of mistakes). Perhaps the only truly deserted place on Corellia, the abandoned industrial site passed under the scrutinizing notice of Imperials and shelter-less wanderers alike. Those who had stolen all value from its cavernous maw had long since gone; no one chooses to settle where there is nothing left to take.

"Impressive, isn't it?" A voice joined hers, rough and lilting at the edges, a coarse symphony bringing Eryn's feathery breaths back to the ground. She swiveled to the side, balancing on her heels like a bird ready to take flight as her eyes fell upon the only other person in the hollowed shell of a mine without a helmet hiding their features. The Mandalorian could only hope that her shock wasn't palpable as a young woman, not much older than Eryn herself, gazed back. Messy dark hair arced around the other's face like a lion's mane, pale, satin skin framing delicately angled eyes which jolted with a razored sense of cunning as they glinted sharply in the half-light.

"Siranix. Nix is fine though." It took the Mandalorian a moment to realize that the other girl was sharing a name, her own thoughts staggering as she recalled an ancient form of Mando'a, one that Eryn only knew from the earliest memories of the armor cocooning her living flesh. Sira'nix. Poison. A part of her she didn't know existed couldn't help but smile.

"Eryn." The simple response quelled the expectant gleam in Nix's daintily serrated features and they settled into an eerily natural silence, as if they had known each other for so long that there was nothing left to say. The world around them began its slow transition from stagnancy to chaos, lulled by the gentle rhythm of medkits and supplies being passed into the hands of freed slaves.

"A lot of selfless sacrifice for marauders," Eryn murmured, struck by both a biting curiosity and the sudden urge to keep Nix stumbling as not to fall herself.

"We're not marauders, we're freedom fighters." The assurance in the other girl's response was infectious, fueled by the passionate kerosene-intensity of a greater purpose. "This is only a small group of us. The galaxy is full of people trying to stop the Empire and Crimson Dawn from taking any more than they already have."

Pride flickered in her merciless expression, shadowed by faith that told Eryn what she already knew: few remained who hadn't picked sides in this war, vowing to demolish all others even in a conflict far greater than a single, double-edged blade.

Nix pointed to a Rodian across the room, slowly lifting off their mask to reveal green skin and constellation-studded eyes beneath. "She lost a brother." Her finger trailed over the crowd like a sword yearning to ring true, falling next on a male tognath equipped with a silver, ribcaged breathing apparatus. "He was imprisoned by the Empire for protecting children from the trooper programs." A melbu, a sabat, a former bounty hunter. Lost a tongue, lost a home, lost a daughter. "They took my entire planet," Nix whispered softly, silent grief screaming through every cursed motion of trembling fingertips and quake of her straining throat, though she continued with nearly rehearsed cadence. "Even Enfys lost her mother to Crimson Dawn's mercenaries before she began to lead us."

"Who's Enfys?" A wry smile twisted on Nix's calloused lips as she nodded towards a figure in the center of the deserted mine's encampment. It was the one who had offered Eryn their hand and gripped it tightly for the briefest of moments, as if testing the strength of the other's fingers before leading her through the dying battlezone with leonine courage. Her strides were bold and fearless, eyes disguised by a silver visor embedded into bone, voltage-ribboned staff humming with ventricles of steel. They had been sphinx-like in their enveloped obscurity, nothing but a helmet and a heartbeat which miraculously possessed the magnetizing presence of one destined to be worshiped. Once the entrance of the tunnels had materialized, an eclipse of shadow within the streets, the figure had instantly disappeared into the dark.

"She must think you have something to fight for." Nix nodded at Enfys, as if bobbing her head in prayer.

Eryn hadn't fought for anything in a long time. But the blossoming of some long forgotten spark of rebellion was beaten into silence by the appearance of a slaver, whip stolen from his side as he was dragged into the mine by two freedom fighters. His arms were pulled taut between them, feet dragging on the dust-laden floor like captured serpents hissing with displeasure. Mind racing, she sifted through the catalog of species slashing through her thoughts with tooth and claw, finding none that matched the bruised webbed fingers and thin, glinting fangs which curled just over his lips. A scar ran along his delicately effeminate jaw, cutting through cerulean-tinged skin like a cascading tributary of darkened ink. Eryn stared at the little trail for so long it imprinted across the interior of her eyelids, an etched tattoo tearing through her vision with a sinister smoke-skinned smirk. In a world where wishes came true, the long-healed laceration would've split back open just from the force of her animosity. Old wounds must be born again.

The dazed expression of a conquered soul was vague and translucent as it veiled alien features, the slaver's torso locked in place and tied against a lonely plank of wood. Before she knew what was happening Eryn found herself walking towards him, gliding through bars of light as her boots gripped the stone floor. No one stood in her way to quell emerging rage or dull the crimson tendrils of violence blooming in her core - the feeling built like a tsunami cresting over blankly alluring horizons, inviting her to swell with more fury still. The girl gripped the slaver's chin, towering over his disengagement and basking in ignorance of the fact that, even locked in a seated position, his narrow head rose up to nearly her entire height. Chewed fingernails stabbed small, rough indentations into his surprisingly delicate flesh as she forced his gaze to meet hers.

"Where are the ones you took?" Eryn's voice was the low pitch of something dangerous, an unpinned grenade about to burst without care for who felt it's shattering wrath.

"I don't know, Mandalorian," came a coughing rasp, a deep accent of elongated a's and sloping i's. Her fingertips drew the slaver's blood, electric blue seeping from blooming wounds which littered his cheeks like an arachnid's tear ducts. He was lying; he had to be.

"Tell me where Crimson Dawn is taking them. You sold them, you sold her. You know where they are and I will break every last bone in your body until you beg for mercy beneath my feet. Tell me." Anger laughed inside of her like it never had before, a burst of twisted joy roaring in her heart as the slaver's eyes flashed with fear.

"No one tells me where they take the slaves. I cannot help you." So many lies. Eryn was drowning in them, choking on ashen streams of deceit, lungs filling with imploding illusion. The truth flew above the surface upon tantalizing feathers of possibility, glimmering just out of reach.

"Then you'll wish you were dead." Hatred seared her soul, lining her veins with molten bronze and dripping pearls of wax.

Here stands another fledgling Icarus, wings far too close to her own burning sun.

Yet Eryn would not fall.

She felt like the first person in the universe to understand what psychometry truly was: an eternally weightless, deceptively halcyonian blade which could cut far deeper than any other had ever dared to imagine. Thousands of generations of the rare creatures born with the metaphysical transcendence that she shared had revelled in their supposed power. It was easy to dwell within the secret lives of each inanimate embodiment which they touched, failing to recognize that sentients were built of nothing but the very same emotions and memories. Why should one who can see through the chaos of time be unable to flay the perceptions of the living?

There was no answer for one who did not yet understand the torturous possibility of being too much alive.

Eryn needed nothing else to guide her as chains of nucleotides echoed within, colonial elements pulsing and clattering and screaming as one. Each built upon the next upon the next upon the next, molding into the raw, congealed power of an organism which could raze stardust itself. That's all she was, all anyone was: a million little pieces bound in memory.

Closing her eyes with the finality of a sun sinking out of sight forever, she embraced the hollow melancholy of emptiness, derealizing all resistance to let the slaver's experiences to reveal themselves. Life struggled against her will, its writhing, adapting barriers far more resilient than those of abiotic entities as it fought for the sanctity of freedom. But her own livid perseverance pressed on, tearing roughly through the battalions which fiercely guarded his hesitant secrets. Give them to me, her mind whispered.

It was impossibly easy after that - she had reached the blissfully arching clouds within a newfound dominion, and now all she had to do was shatter the ever-so-fragile, eggshell-blue sky. Sifting through his memory was like running through vacant air, nothing above and nothing below save for discarded thoughts written by insanity's hand:

A blue lipped boy with skin like the sea, not quite human but not anything more, born just before the Republic's fall and cursed to a childhood far better than what would come.

The week in which he aged decades and learned to be cruel, to let the hideous mask of rotted morality disguise all weakness; the whip-lash agony of another slaver's fury thundering in his ears; the first time he killed a child with his own hands.

(Her moon-bright eyes stared out from every corner of his conscience, glinting beacons in the gloom).

The soft silver caress of a lover's arms. The dramatically tearful but easily forgotten farewells as he was relocated to Corellia's depths. There were whispered deals made in the dark, of supplying the Empire's endless need for labor in return for enslaving its many prisoners, of slit throats and consequences, of selling directly to Crimson Dawn. A favorite peppermint stew beneath smog-shrouded stars; it reminded him of home.

Eryn searched deeper and deeper still, scraping his tenderly fortified insides bare for what she needed, entirely unaware of the screams tearing from his lips as she ravaged every inch of humanity within his skull, slicing through the golden honey and festering rot, battling through the joy and tragedy, tearing through the delicate webs which laced over wounds and triumphs. The memories flicked by faster, a waterfall of unleashed emotion. But there was nothing.

Nothing, nothing, nothing. Meaningless, all of it.

Crumbling walls closed off the sky, trapping her in a world that had no answers, only the brutal, familiar truth. She tried to reclaim herself, wrenching and pulling her way out of the twistingly futile labyrinth of his mind, but it held her like a spider's dew-glow trap.

You wanted us, the memories whispered, now drown in our misery:

Her lips were blue, her skin like the sea, a whip-lash scar stinging at her jaw. A child's moon-bright eyes stared up like mirrors as the light in them dissolved into ash.

Her mind was not her own.

Eryn tore away with a final heaving strain, shattering the sky, snapping back through the slaver's psyche as her entire body sighed with release. The flashing evanescent turmoil of visions turned to darkness at her eyelids, embracing shadow and succumbing to rhythmic abyss. She let the beige light of the abandoned mine return sight to her eyes, opening them slowly at first, slivers of cautious ice, and then all at once.

The slaver's soft, azure features, still caught in the bone-solid grip of her fingers, stared up blankly. Too blankly. She tore her hand away in horror as nonsense murmured from his throat, saliva at his lips, lack of anything at all in his cadaverous gaze. His irises seemed blank and colorless, decaying from within, monochromatic pupils seeping obsidian in macabre pools - she couldn't even remember if light had ever existed in them at all. His memories swirled in her core with a throbbing sense of vertigo, finding their way home to the darkest corners of her awareness. They were hers now; she had stolen them straight from his body, like some vicious spirit of the wind snatching the breath from a mortal's lungs. The slaver had been telling the truth, for no remnant of a path of Qi'ra had ever lived in his terribly vulnerable mind. And he had nothing now, memories as empty as a fissured vase, as desolate as a bloodless corpse.

"He broke quickly." Nix's roughly toned voice burst into life behind her. Eryn was suddenly filled with shame - how could she ever have presumed that poison writhed inside anyone but herself? The mindless slaver's head lolled back, as if having been balanced on the end of an unspooled thread which now coiled at his feet, snapped and forgotten. A thief had tried to play with fate, and fate had stolen right back. "Now we know what you've lost," Nix continued. Yes, Eryn thought, I've certainly lost something. Yet she did not belong with the other broken pieces - a far too vital fragment of her being remained missing.

In its place was only emptiness. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

She slowly became aware of the eyes which had fallen upon her, drawn by the devastating intrigue of brutality and the captive's scream, like bloodsucking insects clustering to the precipice of their violent ideals. They scanned Eryn with no sign of embarrassment, finally deeming her worthy of their attention with the dauntless nerve of those who knew no harm could come to them. "Why are they all staring?" She asked, trying her best to appear composed and threateningly nonchalant even as grief took root in her chest, burrowing uncomfortably deeper with each breath. To think that for a moment she had defied the galaxy, only to feel it all crash down with the cruelty of her own gnarled hand.

Rubble piled around the girl clad in Mandalorian armor, locking her in its guilt-strewn embrace. A simple truth she knew far too well: people are nothing without their memories, just vacant, decomposing shells. And she was cursed to take them from everything she touched.

"They're staring because they've never seen a Mandalorian before." Eryn raised a brow, acknowledging the message beneath the other's words. The darkest edges of Mandalore's myths hissed with the ferocity of a culture built from the rusted foundation of warfare. And she was living up to the legends, as if they were carved into her bones and blistering upon her skin.

Nix's eyes still hadn't left hers, glittering onyx as they searched for a reaction, capturing, imprisoning, trying to consume the world raw - it was an expression that only one devoured by the past could ever understand.

And why are you? She asked silently, with a slight tilt of her swan-like neck. Nix understood quickly.

"I'm staring because I memorize the faces of everyone I've ever met." Eryn blinked in confusion, the world fading in and out. She'd never met anyone who wanted to remember so fully. "My sight will be gone in a few years," Nix answered softly, "maybe two, maybe ten. It's hereditary blindness, I cannot stop it. So I'm going to remember it all." Grimly intimate dignity spiraled around her, bursting with captivating defiance, echoing with the belief that death was far better than pity. "Do you have a reason you're staring?" She jabbed back, causing Eryn to rip her own sky-blue gaze away.

"I like eyes. They have a lot to say," the Mandalorian muttered, painfully conscious of how dull and vainly vapid her response seemed after Nix had spelled out her doom. It was impossible to put into words how every twitch and swirl of an iris, every dilation of a pupil, every shadow of a tear duct was full of the past - it hypnotized her even when she wished it didn't, sweet arsenic melting on her tongue.

"I think you might be someone worth remembering," Nix said, an expression that was eerily similar to one the slaver had once known playing upon her guileful features. Stifling the disembodied feeling of recognition with a pleasant shiver of surprise, a smile crept upon the Mandalorian's face. It cut through numb desolation like the slash of a knife.

And the world burst into flames.

✧･ﾟ: * ═══════════════ *:･ﾟ✧

𝐀/𝐍: imagine what would happen if i didn't update for over a month, post a 6,000+ word chapter and leave no explanation??

well.... 

let's just say that this chapter was pretty clear-cut until I dug through my chaotic brainstorm and found a solitary line that said "dude be like hehe i no remember, eryn snatch" 

we can all tell I'm in a great mental state when I plan these stories--

anywayys, despite the slow start I do plan on eventually making this the main story that I work on, I just love it so much and am really excited to keep going!! also, I'd love any feedback on the pacing so far! too fast? too slow? I feel like I'm rushing to get to Caleb (chapter four, and we'll be meeting the biggest pair of idiots you've ever seen 👀) yet I also feel like if I slowed down nothing would happen?? i don't even know at this point, but thanks to all sticking with it 😊

love ya!!

- Jynni

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