Inversion Of Fates

by Zhahariah

A year after the battle of Sebbadon Eldon Ax is hunting an arms dealer across the galaxy and has finally tracked him to a frozen world, little does she know that Shigur Konshi is also tracking him. What does fate have in store for them in the swirling storms of this frozen world?

Inversion of Fates

Prologue

Hello! ^_^ I'm Zahariah, I wrote a prologue but, as I kept rereading it I was less and less happy with it. So I rewrote the prologue and am much happier with it. I hope you enjoy this chapter. ^_^

Battered, beaten, and bloodied, Eldon Ax gasped for air in the darkness. "Giving up already? Ha! Pathetic!" Came a mocking voice from the darkness. "At this rate I'll have my freedom within the hour." Laughter came from another direction, mocking the exhausted Sith apprentice. Ax took a deep breath and went still, focusing on calling upon the Force to sharpen her hearing. Drip, drip, came the sound of water leaking from the old pipes, creak, creeeak, from the rusted chains hanging from the ceiling. There! The gentle step of someone stalking prey. "Rah!" A Devaronian swung a large fist at her temple, Ax ducked under the blow and shot up using her powerful leg muscles and punched him in the throat which gave with a crunch! As he fell, grasping his throat she heard someone running towards her, having given up on stealth, "Die, dammit!" This time her assailant was a human male and unlike his companion he had a weapon. The man swung his makeshift knife at her face causing Ax to back up a step and trip over the gagging Devaronian. The man brought his blade down, intending to pierce her heart but received a powerful kick to the sternum and thrown back, dropping his knife in the process. As the man scrambled to his feet Ax snatched the knife from the ground and plunged it into his neck and was rewarded with a spray of blood. The man fell to the ground, gurgling and chocking on his own blood while the other attacker was still on the ground clutching his throat. She pulled the knife from the dead man's neck and stepped in front of the stricken being on the ground. "Are you ready to die you filthy, alien, scum?" She asked with a savage grin on her face. Just as she was about to bring the knife down on him he jumped up, attempting to gore her with his horns. Ax had been anticipating a final desperate act and simply side stepped his sloppy attack. She swung as he spun around and sank the knife into his eye. The Devaronian collapsed to the ground without making a sound. Ax stood there, breathing heavily in the dark, wondering how long her master was going to keep her in this prison.

Three months ago she had been tracking an arms dealer that had been supplying weapons to dissidents that opposed the Empire. Darth Howl had tasked her with finding this arms dealer, a Trandoshan named Trassk. She had been tracking his scaly hide across a dozen systems and had tracked him the desert planet Tatooine where he was making his latest sell. He was selling thermal detonators, body armor and a crate of disruptor rifles to a group of Kiffar, natives of Kiffu, a planet that had been annexed more than a decade before, Ax noticed that the woman she assumed was the leader of the Kiffar had a blue chevron on her cheek and briefly wondered if she had any connection to that Jedi whelp. At that moment a male Kiffar stumbled across her and was able to shout "HEY!" before she removed his head but, it was too late, that single word had been enough. Trassk jumped into a speeder and took off, the Kiffar were still loading crates when Ax pounced. She cut down three of their number before they realized she was there, and then things got messy. One of the scums decided to prime a thermal detonator but the clumsy fool dropped it just a few paces away from a crate full of munitions; the resulting explosion destroyed all of the parked speeders and threw a cloud of sand and dust in the air.

Ax ran through the cloud killing or incapacitating anyone she found until she came across the women with the blue chevron on her cheek brandishing a snub disruptor pistol. Ax leapt forward and severed the woman's wrist from her arm before she could fire. The woman starred numbly at the stump for a moment before screaming, more from fear than from pain. "My hand! My hand! You took my hand!" she screamed at Ax, "Unless you wish to lose more you'll cooperate." Ax growled menacingly. "Tell me where he's going and I'll kill you quickly." "I'll never tell you, Sith scum!" The woman replied, anger having overwritten fear and pain. "You monsters took my baby and enslaved my world! I'll never tell you anything, no matter what you do to me." Defiance burning in her eyes, she glared at Ax, as if daring Ax to hurt her. Ax thumbed the activation stud on her lightsaber, intending to kill the woman but stopped when she saw the blue chevron again. "You say you'll never tell me, no matter what I do to you. I can't help but wonder if you'll be more forthcoming after I've killed some more of your clan."

By this time the sand and dust had settled revealing several Kiffar in various states of consciousness. Ax spotted another with a blue chevron and dragged him over to the woman "Tell me what I want to know or I'll kill him, slowly." The woman just glared at her, "Very well, just remember that I gave you a chance." Ax then cut the man's left leg off halfway up the thigh. The man screamed in agony, but the woman stayed silent. Ax severed his right arm at the elbow, his screams reaching a higher pitch than before. "Tell me what I want to know and I'll stop." The man shouted "Don't tell this monster anything Mitha! No matter what she…" The man stopped talking and started screaming in a horrid, gurgling wail. Ax had severed his lower jaw, taking away his ability to speak. "Tell me and his suffering will end, otherwise he and the others will die screaming in sheer agony." Mitha was openly crying "Damn you! Damn all of you Sith scum!" "You still won't tell me? Fine, I guess he doesn't need his eyes." Ax brought her blade in front of the man's eyes and went to thumb the activation stud on her lightsaber "WAIT! Wait. I'll tell you, just stop hurting him. Please." Mitha glared at Ax with eyes full of hatred "Trassk is heading to an abandoned spaceport in the southern edge of Anchorhead, if you leave now you might be able to catch hm." "There now, that wasn't so hard." Ax said in the most pleasant voice she could muster before she swept her blade through the skull of the maimed Kiffar. "NO!" came Mitha's cry of anguish, "You monster, you didn't have to do that." "No." Ax said mockingly "I wanted to do that." Ax laughed as she turned to leave she dropped a beacon to signal the Imperial forces waiting just outside of the system, they would come collect the vermin while she hunted Trassk down. Ax jumped into her speeder and headed to Anchorhead but, she was too late. Trassk's ship was in the air as Ax pulled up to the spaceport.

Ax was forced to return to Dromund Kaas empty handed; Darth Howl was displeased with her upon her return and decided that this failure deserved an unorthodox punishment. So he threw her into a prison complex, one that housed force sensitives in particular. The cell Ax had been thrown in was deceptively decrepit, cracked floors and dented walls, a single flickering light and leaky pipes and rusted chains. The doors however were another story. They were well maintained and opened and closed with barely a whisper of movement, allowing Darth Howl to slip prisoners in at any time, who would attack Ax without warning, sometimes they were armed with improvised weapons. After killing the prisoners she would be left with bodies for a few days, forcing her to become accustomed to the stench of rotting blood, bile and decaying corpses. The rotting bodies came with another issue, bugs. Carnivorous beetles would bite Ax in her sleep and her cell was infested with mites and lice that came in on the prisoners themselves. After weeks of lice and mites crawling in her hair Ax used a makeshift knife to cut her hair off, leaving her with a short, red, stubble. Not long after that Darth Howl started sending in prisoners who had been trained to hide their presence in the Force. Darth Howl made a point of never having the prisoners checked for weapons before they entered her cell but, he insured that guards would remove any weapons from her cell whenever they came to remove the bodies.

Ax moved over to the pipe with that had the worse leak and stood under it. Her injuries burned whenever her sweat came into contact with them. She stood there for a moment, letting the water drip onto her head when she thought she heard something. Calling upon the Force to sharpen her hearing once more she listened for the telltale sound of an incoming attack. She ducked, more out of instinct then out of conscious decision making. A split second later a dark blade passed through the air where her head had been. The lights in the cell came on with a Ca-click! , exposing the room in a bright, glaring light, making her realize that the lights had never been broken but, had simply never been on. Standing in front of her was her master, Darth Howl. Ax knelt and lowered her head, "Master." Was all she said, Darth Howl stood silent for a moment before lowering the blade to her shoulder, she noticed with some surprise that Darth Howl was holding a physical blade, a long, wide, blade made from a black material. "Come Ax, it's time for you to continue your assignment. Our spies have located your elusive lizard." Ax stood "Yes Master.", was all she said as she started to follow him out of the cell that had been her home for past few months. Her Master paused "I know how you feel about Jedi but tell me." He looked back at her with a twisted grin on his face "How do you feel about ice?"