Symmetry and Imperfection

Part 1

~

Three months later...

~

Ybarr had only two kinds of weather: Hot and wet, or cold and wet.

In the warm season, the place was ripe with gassy emanations from bogs and swamps that comprised the small scarely-habitable land masses. In the cold season, everything was covered with dirty, wet snow.

In a filth-filled alley, Darth Vader stood over the snow-dusted corpse of another Jedi.

This was nothing new for him.

What was comparatively new was that he had not killed this one.

It seemed that there was an intense power struggle among the fugitive Jedi. As far as Vader could determine, they were doing their level best to kill each other off before he could hunt them down and do it himself.

In the past year, seventy-three dead Jedi had been found in Mid and Outer Rim worlds. All had died in lightsaber duels, but those most recently slain were very different.

The angle of the cuts suggested a small opponent. A trail of bootprints leaving one location pointed to a petite woman. Poor quality holos managed to capture a cloaked figure near the areas where the two of the bodies were found. One security cam managed to catch the tail end of a duel, but no amount of image enhancement could reveal the face of the woman.

Vader had watched in appreciation as the woman took out her opponent's legs with a shallow nicks to the back of the thighs, doubled him over with a shallow slash to the abdomen, and ended with an enthusiastic decapitation. Her style was simple, graceful, elegant, and stunningly vicious. He had dueled with and killed hundreds of Jedi and had never seen anything quite like it.

He felt that he might be catching up with her. The corpse at his feet was only a day or two old and marked in her distinctive style.

Perhaps he would take this mystery woman as his apprentice.

If his own master could be circumvented, that is.

The Emperor had been distracted of late, leaving Vader to his own devices and Vader was only too pleased to take full advantage of the situation. Too soon, his master would tire of whatever it was that held his attention and Vader would be called back to Coruscant and the intrigues that brewed there.

Vader was of two minds about this; while he needed to be on Coruscant to keep a tally on the knives aimed at his back, he was at his most effective out here on the fringes of the Empire. He brought these people Imperial law and order, and he enforced it by piling up as many corpses as were needed to make the lesson stick.

He turned to the squad of stormtroopers that had reported the body to him. "Does anyone remember seeing anything?"

"No, my Lord."

Of course not. The residents - he could not call them citizens - of this mudball made the worst dive in the most scum-ridden part of Mos Eisley seem a bastion of civic duty and moral rectitude in comparison.

"Perhaps I should question some them myself." Fear and a touch of the dark side had shown a salubrious effect on many a faltering memory. In fact, Vader would wager that those whom he had allowed to keep their minds would likely never forget anything else until their dying day. "Round up your usual informants and bring them to me."

"Yes, my Lord."

Vader stepped over the decaying remains and headed back to the garrison.

~

Abhaia slipped from shadow to shadow as she stalked the man who thought he was stalking her.

Her grandfather had stopped sending ambitious young men after her and now sent members of his inner circle. It meant that she needed to move around more often, sometimes she would depart a given location mere hours after her arrival.

The grandiose fool who had been her last kill informed her that his orders were not to kill her, but to bring her back alive. If necessary, he was to ensure her cooperation with her child's life. Ke Te Sune died cursing her as she casually lopped him limb from limb.

Her would-be stalker stopped and turned. Abhaia froze, holding so still that a casual observer would question whether she was even breathing.

"Abhaia. Come out, girl. I know you're here."

There was a time in her life when she would have responded immediately to the authority in that voice. Not so long ago, she would have trembled in fear at his gaze, she would have made haste to do as she was told.

Now she would make him know fear. Cold filled her veins, ran up her spine to her brain. Everything in her vision seemed sharply delineated, even the edges of the shadows in the deserted loading bay seemed sharp enough to cut flesh from bone.

She held her silence, watching him turn about, feeling his eyes pass over her and move on.

Lip curled, she sneered at his back. She could read his tension without using the Force, see the first tendrils of doubt winding through the muscles of his arms, neck and shoulders. As he moved to continue his search, she rushed from her niche, tucking and rolling to come up behind a tank of liquid nitrogen.

The man jumped, drawing his saber and turning in mid-air, only to find an empty hanger behind him. Abhaia was close enough to see the sweat beaded his upper lip, and to hear his rapid, shallow breathing. Close enough to see the white hairs in the black. Close enough to see the wrinkles and the start of sagging jowls.

Close enough to smell his fear.

She was enjoying this game, drawing her grandfather out by killing his treasured warriors while leaving a trail for the Sith Lord to follow.

There had been a battle fleet dropping out of hyperspace when she had been leaving Ybarr. Maybe she had attracted Vader's attention.

A soft chime captured her wandering attention. Her quarry pulled a comlink from his belt and cursed in a deeply heartfelt fashion.

Tailing him all the way to an impounded light freighter, she watched as he popped an access panel. A few minutes later, he had wired the comlink to the communications array and opened the channel.

"Yes, my Master?"

"Have you found her?"

The sound of that voice, so arrogant and assured, rimmed her vision with red.

"I thought I had her in sight, my master, but it may not be her after all." The man desperately wanted to believe this, if his expression was any indication.

"You've been around the brat since she was in diapers, Melenk. How could you mistake her for anyone else?"

"For one, she's doesn't have her get with her. Do you really think she'd relinquish something she's killed to keep?" He hesitated then blurted, "And the Force signature is almost completely different."

Abhaia nearly stopped breathing for real. Age and maturity had an effect on the way a person resonated in the Force, yes, but though the years the basic signature was always the same. Only a change to the Dark side could scramble the...

The conclusion stunned her.

It can't be. I don't feel any different.

She looked down at herself, almost expecting to see black armor.

She remembered listening when the adults thought she was not. How they talked about Vader, and who he had been before. About how not one person knew that the Dark had swallowed Anakin Skywalker whole and spit out Darth Vader. No one had made the connection between Skywalker's reported death and the rise of the Sith Lord nearly two years later.

But her...?

Abhaia listened with half an ear as her grandfather berated his underling.

She was not proud of some of the things she had done.

Giving Arien to the Kin had been the last sane decision she had made. After that, the blur of planets and stations, the anger at the people chasing her, the exhaustion, hunger, grief, and fear washed together in her mind.

Stars exploded across her vision and she wondered why she was lying on the floor. When she tried to get up, it happened again.

"Don't move, you Darksider witch." The voice was rough with hate and triumph. Two pairs of boots filled her narrowing vision.

"We have her, my Master!"

~