A frigid gust of wind was the first to greet Fell as the cargo ramp lowered. That single blast was all it took to turn his eyes dry as bone. He rubbed at them with the back of one hand, burying the other deep inside his robe.
Cinder scoffed beside him. "Best get used to it," she said. Her black robes were quickly turning white as the snow kept coming down. Though her hood was drawn up, several golden blades of hair tried to sneak their way out. She let her hands rest inside draping sleeves. "Come. There's a ways to walk."
Fell let her go first after the cargo ramp cut into the ground beneath them. Snow exploded outwards in a great gust of white. Fell crept out after Cinder reached the bottom. He hoped the howling winds would have stayed in space, yet their shrill song on Rhen Var's surface was even more grating. His own footsteps could not even penetrate the wailing din.
Halfway down the ramp, the wind picked up and grew louder still. His cloak rippled as the gale smashed into him. The bitter cold forced Fell to clench his teeth as it pecked his face. Cinder was already on the snaking mountain path now. She turned back to stare at him. Whatever glare she may have worn was invisible under the hem of her hood. Grimacing, Fell forced himself to take another step.
He plodded his way down the cargo ramp with stunted steps, the wind fought back against him at every one. Just a hair's breath away from the end of the ramp, he felt his leg twist. His breathing quickened to the point he thought his heart would come crawling up his throat. No, Fell remembered. I am a Sith Lord. The fear slid off like water and the wind died away with it. His last few footfalls were loud and clear until they were masked by the crunching of snow.
Cinder led the way, and Fell was glad to let her. She took little interest in their surroundings, as far as Fell could tell. She's been waiting too long for this moment. Fell took in every little detail to distract himself from the cold. The ground beneath the snow was a harder stone than he had ever felt, one that surely would not break underfoot. For that, he was grateful; they were atop a crag that towered two hundred standard meters high.
The landing had been precarious enough. Fell threw a glimpse back to The Ashen One. The snow already formed a canopy of white atop the ship. Its landing gear ran edge to edge on the precipice. If Kregg had been so much as a millimeter off...
But he hadn't. Kregg upheld his end of the bargain without a hitch. The how of it was the only part where Fell was concerned. Bestia chalked it up to scoundrel's luck. Cinder gave him a lecture about not looking a gift iriaz in the mouth. Even HK-47 had little to offer but snark. "Commentary," the droid had said, "Perhaps there is a reason why some of you organics take to the bottle." As far as Fell could tell, HK-47's assessment was probably the most truthful. Marcus Kregg had done piss-drunk what most of the Republic's aces could do after years of training.
There's a tinge of it in him. There's gotta be.
Fell once believed in the phenomenon of scoundrel's luck, as a boy on Ord Mantell. But that was before he had been trained as a Sith. His extraordinary feats were always chalked up to that spacer superstition. Cinder took the mystique away when she revealed the Force to him. It was still an explanation rooted in ancient superstition, but at least this one had the backing of thousands of years of study. Scoundrel's luck was an old spacer's tale, concocted by the same peasants who would be more than happy to prattle about how droids were sentient creatures with souls, how ships were bound to their owners, and how the devil was the dealer at a pazaak table in Hell. Childish nonsense hardly fit for a boy, let alone the man Fell was now.
They left Kregg aboard the ship; there was no point in him coming down to meet the Dark Lord with them. Bestia had been given the task of keeping him under watch. For the better half of an hour, she had fought, pleaded, begged, and screamed at Cinder to let her go with them. Cinder stood her ground. "I need someone to watch the ship," she had said. "Someone I can trust."
"Then why not the droid?" Bestia had shouted back.
"The droid has his own task. I need a person." Cinder whispered something in the girl's ear then.
Bestia didn't look convinced in the slightest, but she let it go after that. She slunk back off to the cockpit, muttering curses under her breath. Cinder said precious little about the ordeal, not even when Fell thought to probe her.
"What did you offer her?" Fell had asked while sitting on the lip of a plasteel container.
Cinder did not look at him. "If I wanted you to know, I would tell you." That was when she had opened the cargo doors. "HK-47 had plenty of information to offer concerning our new companions. What happens next remains to be seen."
He could understand Cinder's mistrust in Xira Morr. She was a last minute addition, undisclosed and unknown. Fell had not even seen her since he led both her and Kregg back to the ship, after the massacre in Durgulla the Hutt's palace. She had done little but tease him with glib remarks.
But Kregg? Fell couldn't fathom why Cinder would have lost her trust in him. When Fell had rushed into the bargain with the Fat Minister, Cinder went running off to Kregg to figure out a way to salvage the situation. He wondered if the two had history together, and how far back it might have gone.
The thoughts went away with the wind as he followed Cinder into a cavern black as pitch, save for a shining bed of crystalline icicles looming overhead like a bed of spikes. Nature's own knives. All it would take is for one to fall. That would be enough to skewer them both.
A thick stalagmite ran up through the cavern's center, gnarling and twisting from top to bottom. Cinder walked around the left and Fell took the right. Far off in the distance was the blue hue of the open sky once again, with faint silver streaks of sunlight trying to pierce through.
They waded into the light together, and were accosted at once by a ceaseless torrent of snow. All Fell could see was blinding white light pouring from all directions. The snow caked on the ground glared and stabbed at his eyes; the downpour from above made it certain he could not see. There was a crackle beside him and Cinder's orange blade attempted to cut through the boundless mist to no avail.
"We're standing on a cliff with no way forward," Fell said. He tried to reach for his own blade but when his fingers touched the hilt, the biting cold made them jerk away. Besides: white on white? It would make a poor torch.
"In the distance," Cinder said, raising her voice, "there's another cavern." Only a few scattered flecks of black could be seen underneath the blanket of snow draping her. She pointed her blade forward and for half a heartbeat the orange light pierced the veil of snow, revealing a cave mouth far ahead. "There. Do you see it?"
"Well enough." The wind was nipping at him again. "I'm more concerned with getting there."
"Where was this concern when you ensnared us with the Hutt?" Her eyes were nowhere to be seen, but Fell could feel her cutting stare all the same. "Come."
He let her lead the way. Perhaps she might fall. They were flanked at both sides by sheer stone cliffs and the path ahead had been whittled down by years of erosion and exposure. Occasionally, the snowfall would taper off just for a moment, just long enough to show how far there was to fall. He resisted the temptation to look down as she crossed the narrow path first.
He stepped forth into the frothing white void and came out the other side, but not beyond the narrow path. He was in a field of green and yellow, tinted with the auburn and umber hues of an autumn that should never have been. Ord Mantell? Shards of rusted scrap stabbed up from the dirt. More and more crept into view the longer he walked, until they flanked him in slipshod rows. He drew his lightsaber and flicked the blade to life. The silver provided little in the way of light; the sun's own white rays ate its beam and rendered it useless.
Fell's feet went out from under him after he took another step, nearly falling atop his saber in the process. He switched off the blade just before it could run him through. The hilt slipped from his hands and started rolling. A whorl of dirt formed around it. A devilish little thing, it howled and screamed before spitting a pebble at Fell's face so violently that it dug into the meat of his palm when he shielded himself. Fell dug the little rock out as a fat bead of dark blood bubbled from the peephole in his flesh, then drew the saber back into his hand as the whorl dissipated.
He turned to see what caught him underfoot: an object, gnarled and twisted, browner than the dirt below and cracked like old leather. He stooped down to get a better look. A root, nothing more. Curiosity slavered at him, though, and Fell stuck out a finger to touch the root. It was cold to the touch. This is not mere cold. He grabbed the root with both hands and began to pull.
Fell gagged when the smell hit his mouth. Noxious and rank, it formed spears that jabbed into each of his pores. He kept pulling until he heard a meaty squelch. Fat burgundy beads splashed down on the ground. The smell... The smell grew fouler by the moment, the ripe stench of decay in bloom. Fell averted his eyes for a moment. You're a Sith, fool. Look at it. Held in his shaking grip was the three-finned hand of an Aqualish, emerging from the tattered remains of what was once a spacer's jacket.
"Lord Fell," Cinder said somewhere off in the distance. Fell paid her no mind. His focus was all on the limb in his hands. He loosed his fingers and let it fall. He curled his fingers, then threw himself to the ground. All thoughts left his mind, save but one: a compulsion to dig. The dirt caked under his nails until they cracked. Welts and blisters formed and burst in a ceaseless cycle. Through the pain, Fell dug.
The smell blasted outwards from the hole so hard and so fast it set his nostrils ablaze. Fell had nothing to retch up, so he heaved instead. The bodies were arrayed in a mass burial, haphazard and uncaring in their placement. All four had decomposed considerably, all of them reduced to dry bones with a few papery strips of flesh flapping in the wind. Only the Aqualish still bore his face. Fell stared into the four hollowed out holes where the Aqualish once had eyes of wet black. It was as if the dead thing reached into him. Fell screamed as the memory came back and he became a boy once again
"Forget the boss," the woman said. She'd told him before she was a countess, from the far-off backwater of Bläncz-Ut, in some system of which he'd never heard. In her hand she twirled a lightsaber. Its hilt was rosegold, dotted with flecks of silver. Its scarlet blade parted the thick, black smoke that coursed through the air in the Scraplands. "You've too much potential for this place. How long have you been holding back?"
"Not..." Nico was there in front of her, down on his knees. His eyes peered vacantly over the tips of his fingers as they rested against his face. His eyes were puffy, the eyelids chafed and red and raw from a few wasted tears. "What do you mean?"
"Do you not understand? Look at them." Her lightsaber deactivated with a hiss and the dirt crunched beneath her boots as she stepped over. She squatted down behind him and waved at the carnage. Nico's eyes never moved from the dead. "How long?"
"Shut up!" He whipped around and raised a hand towards her, but she caught it with such ease it made him turn red. "We can't tell anyone."
"Who says we're going to?" She let his hand fall. "How long have you put up with these -" she paused to look over the corpses, then rolled her eyes in disgust - "things."
"I haven't," he whined. "I've just-"
"Just?"
His head was about to burst asunder. "They trash my boss's shipyard, they harass the girls in the cantina, and they kill people out here. I've seen it."
"Justice, then?"
Nico sniffled. "Yeah, you could say that." A flash of anger shot through him. "Since when do Jedi care about justice anyway? All you do is come here, get a drink and a quick fix and leave." He sneered at her. "You're a countess too, you said. What do you give a kark about 'justice'?"
The countess stood upright and stared down at him. She had told him her name was Quay, though he didn't believe it for a moment. "I can offer you something sweeter than justice," she said.
"What's that?" Nico tried to look in her eyes, but the flash of yellow he saw scared his stare back to her boots.
"Revenge." She reached out a black-gloved hand and waited for him to take it.
He looked at her hand for a moment, then back at the heap of dead. There is no going back from this, Nico thought in Fell's voice. Would things have been different if I said no? "What does a Jedi know of revenge?" He gave his hand to the countess and she pulled him up to his feet.
"The Jedi?" She laughed at that. "Precious little, I'm afraid. I left them for a reason."
One day I would like to know that reason, Fell thought. Going on seven years now, master.
Nico's eyes went wide as saucers. "Does this mean-"
"Hush now, boy," the countess pressed a finger against her lips. "So, you'll come with me?"
"Yes, yes, yes, of course!" But his excitement disappeared when he recalled the shipyard. "Wait a minute. What about my job?"
"You'll have a new job, one that affords better dignity than a shipwright's apprentice." She started walking towards the skiff upon which the raiders had come and gave it a once over. "Surely you understand you're better than this?" She bid him come.
"Of course I do." Nico followed her onto the skiff as she took the helm and began the startup sequence. "But this is my whole life here. I can't just leave it behind."
She looked down at him with a gleam of sadness in her eye. He never knew it back then, but Fell had seen that look enough times by now to recognize it in a heartbeat. "I started over too, Nico. If I can, so can anyone." She gave him a pat on the shoulder as the skiff's repulsors fired. "Besides, it just means you get to start over on your terms. What's better than that?"
Her words trailed off and a sudden wind coursed through him as Fell's eyes fluttered back open. He heard the crunch of snow underneath as he shifted. The wet slush felt good against his fingers as he pushed himself upright. When he lifted them up, they throbbed and ached alongside his arms and shoulders. One stung; he brought it to his mouth to suck it, but recoiled when he tasted metal and salt. Ah, fek me. His nails were caked with permafrost and cracked from his little dig, and fat blisters were sprung up all along his digits.
He heard a faint hum beside him. "What the hell's gotten into you?" Cinder had her lightsaber in hand as she stood at his side. "I made it across but you didn't follow. I came back and saw you digging."
Even in the frigid cold, Fell felt sweat trickle from his brow alongside a surge of warmth from within. "I don't know, master. Genuinely."
She sighed and her words formed on the air. "Luckily there was nothing over there. A sheer cliff overlooking an ancient tower, nothing more. He has the last of the soldiers stationed there."
Fell shook his head. "So it's a dead end?" He rubbed his head with the back of his hand. "We can get down, you know."
Her look hardened into that same gleam of sadness from the dream. "I'm beginning to wonder if you're suicidal, boy." Cinder stepped away and started heading down the narrow path again. The wind was slower now, the wall of snow much thinner, and he could see the edges this time. There was more room than he thought, but it was still just wide enough for only one to cross at a time. "We'll shelter in the cave tonight."
Fell looked past her at the cave mouth. It was dark, though not solid black. He could see the hole on the other side, the one that doubtless led down and only down. He got to his feet and let out a deep breath. He inched forward on staggered steps.
Will she be starting over when Ruin is dead? He took another step, this one on the other side of the narrow path. Is that what this is for her?
Fell did not ask when he caught up with her on the other side, nor when they stood side by side on the overlook. They sat together in the cave as dusk fell and the horizon turned to some ugly mottled shade of purple, and the snow began to hammer down. There was the sound of water dripping from the stones above and nothing more. They exchanged no words.