Chapter Seven
When the white fireball stopped, Hyperion found himself realizing something about how to reach Morgana and how to beat her when he did. Each time he was confronted with one of his more wicked sins of youth, he would have to witness it and atone for it somehow. He had already demonstrated this by admitting that Crassus had scared him as a child in the first test he'd seen as well as the pain he experienced in watching his parents die again. Now, he found himself suspicious that because Morgana was influencing what he saw in this realm somehow, she would be saving Patricia's torture and rape for last in the hopes of utterly breaking him long before he saw it again. So when he was next confronted by some of the victims he destroyed in his gladiatorial days, he wasn't too shocked as to the identities.
Where some of the warriors had marched straight into their deaths without another thought, Hyperion remembered these ones. One was an undernourished man who was crawling away from Hyperion on his back, desperately holding his intestines together. "Please, don't kill me. Show mercy!" begged the starved novice. Hyperion heard the sharpening of a blade he knew to be the unfolding of his old gauntlet's wrist blade, preparing to deliver the fatal blow.
"You realize that begging me to kill you and begging you to show mercy are contradictions, do you not?" asked a more youthful Hyperion. The older man saw himself looming over his prey like a panther waiting for a wounded herd animal to die. And he also knew what was next, having lived the life the spectre before him played out. The novice begged for his life, screaming until his killer sliced his Adam's apple clean from his throat, simultaneously constricting air flow down the windpipe and severing the vocal cords with the blow. His prey died in agonized silence, choking on the blood that also gushed forth from his neck wound until his spasms ceased and the soul departed his eyes, his life ending there and then.
Then the spectre of Hyperion's youth in the gladiator rings raised his arms in triumph to the jubilation of an audience that had long since faded, like dust on the wind, from memory. It was when the jubilation died that the spectre saw the real Hyperion and looked on him with disgust. "Look at you," it said in Morgana's voice, "in your heyday, you were a killer. You showed no qualms about taking what you wanted without thought to how it destroyed others. In the days that have long since past, you were a true warrior!"
"I was a fool in my youth, a misguided idiot led down a dark path by worse men than myself. Now, I am as old as some of them and can only hope that in time, even a fraction of the repentance I have attempted to put forth can be accepted by those I've wronged. I do not expect to be forgiven, even with raising Menelaus as my own for eleven years," Hyperion told the specter.
"Yet when he was an infant, you initially wanted to abandon him to the elements, did you not? You wanted to leave him for predators to eventually find, only taking him in when you realized that the path you walked had gotten you nowhere except to your squalor on Ando Prime. Tell me that is not true!" Morgana said, speaking through the specter of Hyperion's youth. Hyperion chuckled and rather than fight it, he told her the truth of how he had initially felt about Menelaus.
"Yes, it's true. My training advised that because he was weak, he was undeserving to survive. But something in the back of my head told me that he was only weak because he was an infant. He could be made strong with training and good rearing, this could be certain if I just gave it a shot. How was I to know I'd grow to... to love him along the way?" Hyperion admitted.
"Love? What do you know of love? Who have you ever loved!?" Morgana snapped back at him. Hyperion didn't change tone nor did he show any sign of weakness as he spoke of who had touched his heart.
"I loved my brother. A part of me that remembered when we'd play hide and seek in father's gardens always spoke to me, telling me not to kill him or I'd have nothing. As time went by and my so-called rational mind trusted the Dark Side more, I tried to stamp out that part of me that loved him. But I couldn't do it, I couldn't bring myself to destroy my ties with the only family I had left even as I had believed him my truest enemy at that time. And now, he has given me a shot at freedom, a chance to earn his forgiveness," Hyperion stated.
"Do you really believe that, Hyperion? How do you know that your brother isn't simply using your connection to the Dark Side so he could gain unprecedented repute as a Jedi Knight?" Morgana countered, the spectre of youthful Hyperion weakening as the real deal stood firm.
"It's all I have, Morgana. To believe that my brother has sensed good in me for all this time has always been possible. And whether he wants glory for himself or not is something I'll deal with when our bargain is complete," Hyperion replied. Admittedly, he sometimes wondered if his brother had become a glory-seeking hound of the Jedi but dismissed it. If Dantius cared for glory, he would've been much more active in the military much sooner than he was in his career with the Jedi.
"And what if your daughter becomes a potential cost in your need for absolution. Suppose the Jedi decide to show her no mercy and kill her when she fights back against them to save the very Empire you are working to destroy. What will you do then?" Morgana taunted, throwing the hardest question at him that she had asked yet. Unfortunately for her, as a father, Hyperion knew the meaning of sacrifice and knew what it meant to lay down his life for his child as his time with Menelaus had proven.
"I would kill, torture, regress to my old ways, die by the blade of my own brother, and waste as many lives as I could in my path of destruction before I allowed that to happen. Damn the fact that you poisoned her into trying to kill me when we first met, damn the fact that she didn't want to believe I'd reformed when she first gazed on me because she is still my child!" he snapped.
"If only you had been this protective of your brother when you first gaze on my sister. Perhaps none of this would've happened if you'd been such the gentleman that you portray yourself now," she said, finally relenting for the moment and letting the spectre finally dissipate. Again, it dissolved into a white ball of fire that showed the path Hyperion was next to take.