― ✧ ―

𝐳𝐞𝐫𝐨.

❝Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.❞

― RICHARD SIKEN, Scheherazade

✧･ﾟ: * ═══════════════ *:･ﾟ✧

𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐘, 𝐀𝐒 𝐈𝐓 𝐒𝐄𝐄𝐌𝐒, can only ever be understood by the half-alive. Perhaps it is the cruelty of fate that deems it so; the few who are granted the ability to see will fall victim to the fangs of fate before they have a chance to comprehend the slightest of miracles. Even death's doorstep, a place alight with the secrets and wisdom of the living, deems that those sprawled upon its iron shadow are too far gone to grasp such tantalizing brilliance or pass on its lore - and so existence itself remains a mystery. Truth, however, is far more unpredictable and far more dangerous, as all have the power to uncover its brutality. Veracity does not care who it hurts, it will never go back to erase its mistakes and untimely exposures as it rages through the universe on currents of sadistic agony.

When the at last truth reveals the scars which lie beneath its glittering mask, even the beginning is not always as simple as it seems. Lies are easier, so much easier, for they do not break the very notion of stability to pieces with no possibility of repair. Yet the glacial crust of deception, untouched ivory sheets brushed with blue and dusted with sands of diamond from joy's crumbled chandeliers, cannot remain blindingly pristine for long. Pockets of flame lie within the souls of those who remember the past, burning beneath the surface of time, melting through perfection with magma's hellish touch to reveal the charcoal scars beneath. Perhaps if memories didn't exist there would be no pain, only bliss and an endless cycle of unrelenting ignorance, no one truly knowing when finality would come. All could be bathed in the happiness of dainty falsehoods, far beyond the treacherous cage of trying so hard to prevent a disaster that you become one. But this cursed utopia does not exist; in its place, annihilation reigns.

And Eryn is nothing less than a catastrophe, one of millions of children born into destruction and shaped by ruins. She is doomed to rise while all else falls, wrapped in echoing reminiscence and alight with the woes of what once was. Yet she has not always been soaked with such endless torment, for long before destiny rotted to cinders there had been beautiful, golden days. Sunlight through palace windows, the gentle fingers of a soft breeze running through her hair, basking in what everyone called 'newfound serenity', though the girl herself had never known what came before. There could have been two people in the galaxy and Eryn would have remained happy, for who needs an entire universe when the bond of mother and daughter is bright and silver and unbreakable? She remembered all those afternoons when the two of them would dress in their finest silks and jewelry, pretending to dash out to secretive senatorial meetings before slipping into the gardens. Satine and Eryn Kryze would spend hours laughing in the grass and searching for glitches in the artificial, azure sky - while most of the domed metropolis' crowned underside was packed with cement development, above the palace simulated paradise ruled in grace.

It didn't surprise Eryn that, when she was young, she would often wonder why Mando'a was an entire language when the only words anyone could ever need were ni kar'taylir darasuum gar. I love you. But peace is rarely what one remembers; most are under the spell which deems life as an entity not set in motion until conflict rages through the sweet nothings that once encased a world of translucent crystal and loyalty. 

As much as Eryn wished to hold the warmth of sparking innocence in her heart, even she could not deny that the true beginning was the end. Though the girl herself never recognized the glory of her youth until it was lost, it only took an instant for the entire galaxy to realize that the Mandalorian throne was made of glass.

Doors shut, joy shattered, armed guards around her at all times; she was no longer the heir of House Kryze, the girl who looked just like her mother, the one who everyone in the city waved at in exchange for a winning smile. Eryn became the duchess' weakness, a creature who could be sold for a price, a liability who had to be hidden. If Satine is a traitor to Mandalore, what of her daughter? the people asked. What of the unfurling daisy that has become an unpinned grenade, throbbing with hurt and impending decay? For her there were only freezing nights waiting awake for a mother who would never come home, cotton sheets like sandpaper as she held her breath for hours, unsure if the absence would be a few days or forever.

Each time Eryn questioned how long this pain would last, eyes wide and mournful as they searched for any hint of hesitance or fright in her mother's melancholy smile, the response was always the same: Just until our planet heals. When there is peace I shall never leave you again, ner kar'taylir darasuum.

But even pinned to the ground and told of their progress, their outstanding equanimity and glorious growth from the crude, conflicted ways of the nearly-distant past, Mandalorians cannot seem to forget the way they once tore apart the sky.

Sundari, the enclosed city of Mandalore that spared itself from war, became a battlezone so quickly that no one could turn back; a life raft is never expected to become a casket. All those once lost for the gift of neutrality became calloused wounds, hidden by a smoke that told only of the ashes to come, of the truth that people with beating, warrior hearts cannot lie stagnant for too long. One bound by the violence in their legacy can never resist a fight once explosions bloom across their horizons, metal and flesh tumbling downwards in fireworks and thorns only to be replaced with the crusade of thousands searching to obliterate that which stands in their way. Mandalorians embraced the crimson battles raging in their veins, they welcomed all that yearned to break free of glazed beskar plates and guilt-laced conscience to slay the galaxy in their wake.

But after the heat, the glowing lava and crust of charcoal souls which define an era of filament and flame, comes the cold: the numb, shivering moment of her mother's final gasp, darkness and verglas crawling in Eryn's lungs and freezing her eyelids wide open at what she was never supposed to see. It was then that the girl knew time had a sense of evil, a hidden vengeance for those who indulged in its intangibility for even a few moments too long. For is it not the cadence of time itself that has the sole power to stop, to engrave the details of a grieving portrait into the crumbling foundation of a child's mind? 

Reality, as it seems, will never be understood by the likes of Eryn Kryze. The ink of destruction is etched so deeply into her spirit that the universe itself has become a reminder of the pain. All has gone: her mother, her father, her aunt. None of them can save her and she cannot even spare herself as desertion embraces destruction with open arms. Yet she is still living, breathing among her memories and evocations. Though everything else ebbs away with remarkable ease, they replay over and over until the the past and the present become one - like many things in existence, the two cannot escape each other.

But in spite of the countless broken pieces embedded in her soul, this is Eryn's only truth: history defines all things, for people always choose hurt. It's impossible for those made of pain to find anything different, for struggle is all they will ever know. Even when one tries to be something other than war, drawn to shimmering rays of prosperity with magnetizing desire, everything they touch turns to what they have already left; hearts of gold are destined to rust. And so Eryn's own end would never cease, for it is not a thundering detonation which blasts the stars themselves to oblivion all at once. Demise is long and beautiful and full of joy, and the joy, despite its thousands of blameless promises and millions of echoes of freedom, cannot help but lead to inevitable pain.

For nothing, not even happiness, truth, and time itself, will ever be able to resist the thrilling agony of falling apart.

✧･ﾟ: * ═══════════════ *:･ﾟ✧

𝐁𝐋𝐎𝐎𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐄𝐑𝐘𝐍'𝐒 𝐓𝐇𝐑𝐎𝐀𝐓, sharp and metallic as it suffocated her senses with hungry scarlet laughter. It seemed to quite enjoy betraying her weaknesses, burning savagely in her heaving, red-laced lungs as they strained to dislodge the kingdom of iron and ichor built up within her windpipe. Her head slammed back into cement.

"Let me go." She hissed, trying to put as much malice into her words as she could muster despite her rasping, saliva-burdened vocal chords. Claws only gripped her shoulders tighter, like artfully wielded knives as they constricted her trembling tendons. Eryn searched frantically for an escape through the Corellian backstreets stretching beyond her sight, peering into maze of towering metal skyscrapers and shadowed corners which slumped with enough twists and contortions to just barely shield the broken trusses of decomposing foundations. The air was drenched with the aroma of putrid smoke and burning rations - the essence of a city which never slept, sustained for eternity on fumes of perfidy. Each breath weighed heavy with industrial toxins, the whispers of the cunning, and the groans of the foolish.

The young woman felt suddenly small and vulnerable for such a place, but managed to disguise the desperation on her features; it came easily for someone so accustomed to fear. She met her captor's lidless, violet-tinged gaze, the only part of the creature's figure that didn't seem to be covered in blunt, olive scales. Trandoshan, her conscious identified, just as she became aware of the blood matting her pale blonde hair to the back of her neck. Her skull throbbed with rhythmic echoes of a growing pulse, tearing at the edges of her vision and splitting the paraffin of her thoughts into a million flaming pieces. It was difficult not to wonder if she would ever get the chance to clear her mind again.

"I'll let you go when your Mandalorian friends give back the fuel you stole." The deep roaring sound in the trandoshan's throat barely arced over the dainty syllables of Basic, but it was more that enough for Eryn to remember how the vial of coaxium had felt in her palm, how it had hummed between her fingers as she snatched it from a copper-plated chest. The blue and red ribbons of substance had intertwined hungrily, boasting of their glowing power, their shining expense, their fickle threat. Most people thought such a material was stolen to power a fleet, but Eryn knew better than to assume that a resource so valuable had only a single use. If left unstable, the even the smallest of amounts could bring an entire complex to the ground.

She had passed the tiny glass cylinder off as quickly as she could, so that she wouldn't shatter its delicate frame - and so that it wouldn't shatter her. But perhaps she would have been better off facing the consequences of holding on, for at least then she could've had something of worth to the ones who had brought her here. Get the fuel and we go. It doesn't matter who gets left behind. The orders were clear, from those clad in white and red armor so shiny they looked like freshly hatched beetles, branded with the empire's sign and soaked in scarlet gore. All of Clan Saxon had looked at Eryn mockingly, not just because of the battered grey and blue beskar she wore. Every one of them knew that she wouldn't make it past this mission, and they didn't want her to. It was time to banish the last of the Kryzes from Mandalore.

"They won't return, and you know it." Eryn knew better than anyone that they wouldn't come back for her, especially not after she had been so conveniently separated from the group. It was pity that kept her alive, the satisfaction Gar Saxon himself got from possessing his predecessor's daughter, for they knew she would never say a word, only standing still and broken as another attribute of the Mandalorian throne. Perhaps once upon a time Eryn had been kept close so that she wouldn't become a threat to the Empire's dominance over her planet, but it soon became apparent she couldn't fight back against such insurmountable odds. Soon she had become nothing more than a show of power, a representation of the bold leadership it took to let a spark of their enemy's bloodline survive. Yet it seemed that her innate symbolism was no longer needed, for no one knew what Eryn really was, not even the girl herself. In this sense, Corellia could for once meet a living creature's need as a planet where people, discarded like failed ship parts, never come back from.

"You don't fool me. Mandalorians protect their own." Eryn stayed silent. If only that were true.

The trandoshan tilted its head, claws loosening as it shifted the mountain of moss-tinged stone that was its skull and drew a blaster. A whisper of last chance hung in the air as the hollow muzzle pressed against Eryn's throat, even colder than the cement wall which the vertebrae of her spine remained pressed sharply against. Yet in an instant the iciness was replaced with the warmth of connection and she was filled with binding energy, pulling her in through tunneling vision and whispers of a distant, forgotten reality. She let it come, welcoming its consumption of her being just as she had so many times before.

Sunlight filtered through a planet so infused with natural, oceanic tones that the world itself could have been carved of emerald and sapphire. Supple vines wove through trees, flowers blooming at the edge of meadow grasses to release their fragrant, comforting scent into the air. An older trandoshan with smooth, pale scales smiled down at the blaster's owner, yet innocence and bliss now spread across their familiar but much younger features. Both creatures possessed the same violet tinged stare, its former chill transformed into the soft serenity of mother and offspring which sparkled between the two. The child looked up at their elder with excitement as the blaster was pressed gently into its claws for the first time. Together they held the weapon gently, the mother whispering instructions and delicately repositioning joints around the trigger. Paradise. Rhapsody. Euphoria. The barrel kicked backwards like the nod of a tamed beast and the child looked so surprised and delighted that both creatures burst into laughter, their usual fanged grimace stretching into amusement. Time faded, shimmering, to reveal the same blaster snatched from a mantel of tangible tenebrosity in the dead of night; the offspring deserted their home. Then there was loneliness, so much loneliness within this creation of plasma, gears, and metal, bound by the explosive reaction within its core. And there was death as well, senseless and purposeful all at once, lead and blood mixing together until one couldn't tell the difference even if they tried. The moments flashed by quicker and quicker, as if there was too much to see and not enough time, as if the golden and peaceful beginning was the only thing worth remembering. Corellian gangs of brotherhood and betrayal whisked by, hundreds of adventures bound by smuggling and sin. The nostalgia of childhood was tarnished with longing as gunshots raged through the universe, splitting it in two. Yet everything was whole in silence once again as the past shifted and solidified, the blaster pressing against the neck of a girl who looked almost translucent in the shifting light.

Eryn slowly opened her eyes, unaware of how strangely wide and luminescent they looked in the otherwise shadowy depths of Corellia's polluted urban alleyways. Her perspective remained unbalanced in the murk, the blaster humming with a new connection, a sort of shared understanding that leapt over the guise of any natural bond. Feathery hair mangled and knotted, she gave off the impression of a bird shot down from the sky, trapped and frayed, yet her irises shone with the luster of every star system in the entire universe. The joy of the weapon's earliest memories lingered on her senses, so much so that a small, haunted smile came to her cracked lips.

"You're from Alderaan, aren't you. Rare for one of your kind," she rasped softly. The trandoshan stepped back, startled, it's forked tongue flickering with uncertainty. Eryn raised her eyebrows sharply and the reptilian figure jumped, it's neck constricting as if it wanted to cry out for help but there was no one left to listen. As the human girl stood in front of the reptilian hunter, she knew exactly how to deal the final blow. "How do you think your mother would feel if she knew had become Corellian scum?" The lizard-like creature lowered its blaster with haste, looking vulnerable for the first time. It's violet eyes swirled with shock, amethyst storms retreating quickly into greying mist. The regrets of the past had a particular way of paralyzing even the most hardened warriors.

"Who- what are you?" The trandoshan stuttered, slowly retreating into the smoking gloom of the city's night. Eryn's smile widened, until the wisp of a girl seemingly held aloft by a shell of beskar bridged the elegant insanity of one who had seen far too much and knew there was only more to come.

"Your worst nightmare." Was it a bit much? Eryn was convinced that she had overdone it, but the trandoshan didn't seem to think so as it ran off to what she hoped wasn't more of the creatures, though she already knew that those on Corellia didn't work alone.

But there was no time to consider that now as the girl scooped her helmet off the floor, tracing the wing-like symbol gracing the front with a familiar caress. It felt as if a missing piece of her was restored as she trailed her fingers over the reforged beskar, for each experience within its twisted past of death and rebirth was hers. Centuries of memories no longer swarmed her with no restraint, for she had felt them for so long that they were indistinguishable from her own, a beat within her center that pulsed alongside her heart.

The daughter of a disgraced ruler in the arms of death and a half-alive Jedi trapped in oblivion raced through the streets, footsteps echoing into the ears of those she hoped to never meet.

Where was the ship? She could see the Gauntlet-class starfighter in her mind's eye, it's dynamic shape stained by the Empire's symbol, confining Imperial tracking systems installed upon its extended, diamond wings. She strained her ears for a splash in the suspicious substances that pooled on the streets, for a clank of armor similar to her own, for a tiny speck of distorted light in this suffocating darkness. It should have been close, Eryn knew it, and yet there was nothing.

Corellia was deteriorating right through its tarnished, corroding core, that Eryn was certain of as she made her way through a network of barren streets, permeated with degradation and crevices so wide that if one fell in they would never make it out. Time seemed to pass differently, slowly and wrenchingly blurred all at once - like walking through a graveyard. Gnarled scrap metal and monotonously sloping asphalt became headstones and tombs, so eerie that the girl let out an audible sigh of relief as she finally rounded a protruding corner and set eyes on the freighter, dashing towards its streamlined structure. But something was wrong. The ship stood as silent as a currentless ocean, an abandoned children's playground left to waste away, it's former tenants having grown old and hopelessly brittle. Eryn crept cautiously towards it, every sense in tune as she searched for the slightest sign of movement before stopping on her tracks, rendered suddenly motionless by an unidentifiable wave of dread.

Yet she needn't have waited, for the inert silence was not sustained for long. The ground shook with vibrations as azure streams of flame propelled from the starcraft's thrusters, the beast within its engines awakening with a tsunami of noise and growling light as it unrooted and took off into the sky. The narrow transport danced through clouds of smog, not quite enough to disguise the silhouettes peaking through its upper windows. The Mandalorians had undeniably seen the girl stumbling towards them, and still, they were gone, ascending into a night permeated with smoke and betrayal. Eryn's lungs were brimming with it's brutal aura.

"They really did leave you." The girl whirled around to find the trandoshan once again, violet eyes jolting something deep within her core. What a strange feeling it was, to know one's entire life before they knew it themselves. But this time the creature wasn't alone. Hisses chorused into the air, claws clattering, tails slithering.

"Still afraid?" Eryn tried to summon more confidence than she had, her voice clipped and taunting even as it strained.

"Not of you, little Jedi." The girl couldn't couldn't help but laugh at such a ridiculous accusation, only implemented as the creature tried to excuse its own weakness. Laughter is far more frightening when it does not belong.

"I'm not a Jedi." Eryn slipped on her helmet though it rubbed painfully against the pulse at the back of her head, hands clenching around twin vibroblades.

"You'll die like one anyway." The lizards stepped forward with the screeching scrape of scales against cement, and the girl felt her heart clench. There were far more than she had thought, more than anyone could hope to take out alone. Trapped between a dead end leading to nowhere and almost certain demise at the reptilian claws of nearly a dozen trandoshans, her choices had never seemed so unfulfilling. There was a single option that shone through the gloom, one that Eryn was quite against, but all of a sudden she knew what she had to do. It was the Mandalorian way after all; the violent unexpected. Putrid wind in her face and a guttural scream in her lungs, she charged.

A small wonder: for all the times in her life that the young woman had been afraid, this was not one of them. There was a strange peacefulness about embodying the bold unpredictable, about knowing exactly what was going to happen in each moment before it did. Her breaths were calm, controlled, blooming in her chest with complete disregard for the poison of rash danger and unalterable fate. The world seemed to move in slow motion, for even if she were heading straight for inevitable doom Eryn Kryze was moving in a different dimension than the insignificant ones that stood in her way.

Her blades hummed with ultrasonic waves as she guided them through the air, slashing into the first reptilian with smooth, rapid motions. Its purple eyes grew wide with shock as the point of her weapon gouged into an arm before she spun over to the next creature and kicked up into their chest, sending them stumbling to the side. The knives twitched in approval, nearly rhythmic as they whipped past flesh and scales in ravaging silver blurs.

Just clear a path and run, her thoughts whispered, ever-insistent of their will to survive. Even charged with the overwhelming adrenaline of escape, fleeing out into nowhere had to be better than this. But she was outnumbered by far too many, and, for all its loyalty and endurance, her armor couldn't protect her from the wrath of twelve blaster-wielding monsters for long.

A streak of plasma arced towards her with crackling blue electricity, flashing with a thousand tiny shards of lightning as Eryn raised one of her knives just in time to deflect it away from her chest. Her wrist shuddered with heat and impact, pushing away a mountain of flaring, voltage-carved death with the taut blade. She twisted around with a calculated motion, bowing her head to avoid the shots of trandoshans closing in from behind as any element of surprise slipped down the drain, blazing fury crumbling into the cusp of a bleeding sunset. The hissing increased in volume, an angry nest of coiled serpents that crescendoed into an incendiary chorus as she ripped into the necks of two attackers at once, sweeping her arms out at each side. It was impossible to ignore the unsettling feeling of dense trandoshan ichor speckling her hands, bulging droplets of quivering verdant gore.

The maze of alleyways beyond the figures seemed closer than before, and yet, though the blood of those behind her washed onto the street, like boulders they would not fall. The girl shrieked as a bolt grazed her exposed calf, like an inferno of vengeance stealing through the atmosphere as it her muscle on fire with razor-sharp, onyx fervor. She barely recovered her buckling knee, the smell of scorched flesh ricocheting through her nose. Eryn watched the ruby wildfire of her simmering skin bubble and blister as if she were staring at a lit fuse gradually receding, aware of the coming tormented explosion yet powerless to stop it. The worst kind of helplessness: to wait while knowing.

But there are few who truly know of the painful beauty in plasma, for it is a substance which permeates the galaxy in dueling forms. First is that of the most common state of energy in the universe: heated and condensed, it burns away all with ionized fury to fuel stars and nebulas with its arduous caress, harnessed by organisms as the ultimate weapon to tear through a muzzle and slice through space. Yet the two-faced, irony-laced matter that is plasma also courses and pulses with the heartbeat of liquid: that of molded human blood. Rivulets of cells and proteins through veins are luminous in the shadow of their counterpart's blinding, fatal wrath. There is, however, a weakness - as found in most humanistic creations - for some unfathomably small speck of empathy for its twin rival lies within the energy of plasma. By this defying factor of creation and rare kindness of time, it spares the one that shares its name, cauterizing tissues of tendon and skin into a sheath of char which holds life within, not spilling it to the floor. The victim does not bleed, its flesh only scars as a small reminder of the duet of plasmas who dance with each other to defy the laws of the galaxy but will never quite touch, forever just molecules away. And so Eryn continues her fight, for her wound may leave its mark but it does not condemn the esse within her to flee to oblivion just yet.

The knife has no such hamartia, save for its cripplingly limited range; it is only the savagely talented and the heroically ignorant who bring such a weapon into battle. Yet the girl no longer had to prove her stance on such an unfortunate spectrum, for the need to wait for each creature to come close enough to strike had long since disappeared. As the swarm began to crowd around her and the initial rapidity her movements faded, the fight fell into an insatiable tune of ascending notes: elbow crashing into the nearest trandoshan's face, tripping the next, hammering a blade into another's chest before ripping it out again. But her head was growing dizzy, throbbing with wounds old and new, and as she felt claws sink into her arms, limping appendage aflame and armor echoing with blows, she knew it was no use. The vibroblades clattered out of her hands, their hum fading with misery.

"You fight well, little one. But there's no escape." And the hissing mass before her was right, for Eryn knew that she would already be dead if it weren't for the will of a hunter's heart: to capture one's prey before delivering its final blow.

To fight is to dance. Yet it all means nothing if one does not accept defeat with grace. The words of her youth, of hundreds of fairytales idolizing the bravest of warriors, of Mandalorian mantras chanted alongside thousands, and of countless hours pacing the combat room floor echoed through her mind, each thought still suspended a trance of unfounded serenity. The girl's gaze fell on hungry yellow eyes of daisies and sandstorms, ripe grain and chrome nectar beneath layers of cold, crusting clay and serpentine pupils. Would it really be so bad? she wondered, a blaster pointed straight at the gap in her armor which revealed her vulnerable neck. Lack of consequence continued to fill her with a calm sense of being, for it had always seemed that those around the dying were the ones who truly hurt, and she had no one left to give pain.

The weapon's muzzle was a gleaming dark emptiness, a gaping black hole so devoid of life that if she stared at it long enough her entire existence could have been devoured by its maw. Not a trace would be left; no live-wired vein, no flake of sandpaper skin, no pearlescent tear. It held no memories, only a mysteriously blissful nothingness full of uncertain potential and crackling sparks. And Eryn was ready to accept that nothingness when a blur of motion flashed in the distance, a swiftly fluctuating shape soaked in stealth and looming intimidation. The trandoshans saw it too, thermal sensors glowing as they paused, muscular necks cracking with solidifying tension. That was all it took for the shadow to strike.

Blaster bolts ripped through the air from all angles as a lithe figure flipped off a rooftop to the ground, whipping around as if one with the darkness itself. Eryn couldn't even tell if it was real, or simply a fragment of her cruel, delirious imagination. But the trandoshans were running and the girl felt herself released to the ground, scrambling for her weapons by brutal instinct, at once ready to strike once again. Perhaps that's why humans always fall, for even the ones cursed to remember could forget the inevitably of history in an instant. The young woman slashed at the tail of the fleeing, yellow-irised menace but missed; it was already on the run. Yet the shadow had disappeared, her worry rising uncontrollably in its temporary absence. What if it wasn't after the trandoshans at all? With prices of beskar only rising and false whispers of Jedi echoing through the streets, Eryn's mind jumped to the perilous possibility that it was after her.

But she only stood and stared, both unable and unwilling to run as soft footsteps padded the damp, creviced street, expertly navigating around broken stones and fractured asphalt that would send those unfamiliar with the route sprawling. The figure got closer, beginning to take on a more human shape as the void of stolen light condensed into a ghost of tantalizing misted greys. It was more than the ache in her muscles and the pounding burn of a cannonade against her skull that kept Eryn rooted to the ground, for she had moved through pain before. There was a strangely encompassing exhaustion that kept her anchored in one place, a weariness that came from the discovered struggle of constantly fleeing from the unknown future when all she truly had to do was lie still and let it come to her.

Nothing could stop it now.

Eryn had always presumed that as unpredictably horrifying as the past could be, the future could only hold so much (perhaps the cards fate had dealt her should have proved the young woman wrong by now, yet it seemed when destiny morphed into reality there was a certain numbness; the past had every detail screaming out in its passion and begging for pity). But she could not have been more surprised when a single girl materialized within Correlia's sparse, flickering fluorescence. Her dainty porcelain features seemed almost vulnerable, only aged a few years beyond Eryn's, but there was something in her eyes that said she was tougher than most. A survivor was hidden beneath those curious hazel depths, one that could instill such potent fear in the souls of an entire gang of trandoshans that they had fled in seconds.

The stranger holstered twin blasters, the two weapons creatively assembled with an assortment of spare parts, what appeared to be the product of weeks of scanning dusty street corners and an innovative designer. Nimble fingers swept dark bangs from her eyes with a practiced motion, a foreign grin spreading over her features as she saw the younger girl's surprise. Was it Eryn's imagination or did the world get a little clearer when she took the other's hand? It was soft, smooth, gentle as she clasped it gratefully, a rope lifting her above the jaws of ruin. She owed the dark-haired girl her life, and the first time in what felt like a millennia, a Mandalorian phrase came to her mind: jibr umtidagir. A bond that could never be broken.

"What's your name?" The savior's voice sounded as if she were singing, so pure and melodious that it yearned to rise into the uninterrupted galaxy far above. Eryn could have closed her eyelids and fallen asleep to it, letting the lush syllables guide her like a beacon.

"Eryn. And thank you." The older girl just nodded, not pausing for a further response. She seemed to lose sight of what she was waiting for the second it shifted away, already racing from one moment to the next as if forever caught in the treacherous glow of looming twilight.

"Qi'ra," she said. "I'm Qi'ra."

✧･ﾟ: * ═══════════════ *:･ﾟ✧

𝐀/𝐍: sometimes I really do want to give my poor characters a totally happy life like they deserve... and then I start typing--

anywayyys, I was really excited to have some fun with this prologue - for once i kinda liked my own writing so yay - and now that I've stopped crying over Rebels I'm also super psyched about writing this story (especially with all the badass duos I have planned!) 

thoughts, feedback? I love to hear it, and as always, thanks so much for reading!

- Jynni

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