It had been decades since last the feet of man had trod through the ashen streets of this once vibrant and beautiful city, now a ghost town filled only with dust and bones. Treasures of those who once inhabited it still lay aplenty, but few dared to brave this land now seen as so cursed, still so dangerous in spite of its apparent abandonment. Massive bastions once brimming with powerful weapons lie in ruins, the bipedal walkers that once carried weapons to devastate continents struck down and still, their armature and weapons buried halfway in the earth as shattered mountains. Where once towers and city blocks stood, now only rubble remained, buried beneath them the priceless armor of the warriors who died fighting under their shadow as they came down.
A solemn sigh escaped weary lips as tired legs pushed a lone figure clad in naught but a tattered brown cloak through these desolate ruins, their eyes somberly taking each and every sight of this place they once called home. The people who once called this city home still lived on as scattered nomadic clans with no greater purpose, convinced by the events that drove them from their home that their days of glory and the age of their kind was over, ended when their Chosen One was struck down by his own possessed child in a moment that doomed the youth to a life of shame, and a people to civil war and a world to its end times. Said End Times were the only reason why the husk of this city had yet to be picked clean by scavengers from the Kingdoms who would've once been so eager to claim their lost technology as their own, and those few scavvers who had braved the city decades ago had found the city's automated defenses still awaken, still just as merciless as ever, warding away future attempts of the foolhardy.
As they carried themself deeper still into the silent ruins, they reached out from their cloak and ran a single pale hand down the breastplate of a fallen warrior half buried in the sand and ash piled over time, power armor specifically. Before the End Times as the rest of the world called it, one of their kind clad in this armor was considered virtually invincible to those outside their own ranks, bringing a small, sad chuckle to them as they brushed some more sand, dust and ash off the breastplate in hopes to see a clan signet. A quick sweep revealed the answer, but they couldnt help but feel a pang of sadness within themself as they took in both the signet, then activated the chain code that they were surprised still had any power left... enough for a few seconds, it told.
"Clan Leviathan, ARC Commander Ashley Leviathan... Udes jii, vod." A tired, feminine voice emerged from beneath the darkness of the cloak, but with minimal downtime the figure picked themself back up and looked further down the way, back towards their old home. It was at the center of this old city, at the center of their old glory, though it had been some twenty five years since last they'd set foot here, since they'd brought upon themselves eternal shame, since their exile. It was not an exile they hated anyone but themself for, but now...
They kneeled as they came to a statue of the one thwir people had deemed as their Chosen One, a man from a world not their own who rose the first clans up from nothing, and brought them not just unto glory but into a golden age where no other faction upon the planet, even if they should've banded all together, could've hoped to challenge them even remotely. He ushered in the Age of their people, an age that ended with his death at the hands of his own daughter... at her own hands.
"Mand'alor the Invincible. Dha Midnight... Father..." the voice spoke, steady pale hands rising up to draw back the hood, revealing a mature face that looked to be about in its early thirties, though such appearance was deceptive of the woman's actual age. "Twenty five years ago, you saved my life... and it cost you yours, struck down by my hand. Possessed by my Devil then or not, it was my hand that ended your life, and it was only right that I was exiled. I surrendered what I should've inherited from you, for I was unworthy of it, and I surrendered all my beskar back to the forges to be melted down and turned pure again for someone else, for I was a Mandalorian no longer. I had no qualms about my exile then, nor do I now, it was what I deserved in absence of execution being an option."
Her face turned upwards, looking up into the stony visor of her adoptive father's statue. Even as the rest of the city lie in ruin, the statue had remained untouched, none had dared to defile the monument to the one who had brougbt their culture into existence. Silently, she shut her eyes and allowed her mind to clear, the howling winds around her assisting in shutting out all unnecessary and intrusive thoughts before continuing.
"And yet... look what they made of our dream, Father! Not five years without you, and this is what remained of your great vision that we hoped- no, that I hoped to follow! New Mandalore in ruins! The Clans scattered! Our glories lin the past and our honors lost! Perhaps this was all a mistake, maybe it would've been for the better if we had never risen at all, better than having to face this joke of what weve become now! Perhaps it would be better now to just mercy kill what remains of us, our penultimate mistake, give them a glorious last stand at the very least rather than live to see the horror that is kept in my wake!" She roared out in anger and anguish, striking the ground with her fist and creating a small, condensed shockwave of darkness around the point of impact, blasting away twenty years of built up ash, dust and sand that had accumulated and revealing the shiny, albeit now cracked, black stone hidden beneath her. A low sigh escaped her as she lowered her head, a single tear running down her weathered face as she grit her teeth and continued to speak after recollecting herself. "Father, please... show me somethinng, anything, give me an insight to justify our fate, tell me our lives have not been lived in vain. I command attention, I demand that you explain, please... make sense of this for me... and tell me what I must do."
As if in an answer to her plea, the darkness that had once held over her lifted in that moment, raising her brow as she opened her eyes, looking left and right to see the entire area not choked in dust, ash and darkness as it had been only moments before, but bathed in a cool, soft light from above. Turning her eyes upwards, she saw it there, a break in the dense overcast that had held firm over New Mandalore for decades now, and directly above her a full moon. It was the dead of night, or rather the namesake of her father, Midnight. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to bathe in the moonlight for a moment, quietly remembering all the times she'd spent under this same night sky with her father so long ago, from the night they first met to the night they said goodbye for the last time. It was enough of a sign for her, she'd long since ceased believing in coincidences, and if this was her father's message to her, then...
"The overwhelming weight of your legacy and our destiny upon me... It matters not! I will scatter all the chaos while we salvage this lost dream! We've lost our sights for too long and have strayed from our target, I'll realign our vision and make sure we never again forget our purpose and destiny! Never again will creeping shadows darken our doors, and never again will chaos reign and bar us from reclaiming our dream of conquering the stars! I'll not settle for waiting to wither and die in this state of decay and stagnation, we must be proud and unified for our Ascension!" She declared with a defiant cry, raising a fist to the sky as she finally understood what now she must do. Lowering her fost down to her chest for a moment, she exhaled slowly, her gaze leveling back upon the gaze of her father's statue once more. "This I swear... as your Daughter, Dha Ruby Rose Juggernaut."
After her declaration, she made a few last goodbyes to her father's statue, before making her way into her old home within the mountain citadel. The facility had seen better days, as some parts were entirely collapsed, others were littered with bodies and others were just... empty or in complete disarray, sometimes a mixture of all of them minus the empty part when mixtures of multiple elements were on display. It pained her to see her home of so long in such a sorry state, however it wasnt until she'd come upon the seals doors to the enclave of Clan Juggernaut that it really hit home to her just how badly everything she knew and loved was well and truly thrown into disarray or destroyed. Using her power to force open the doors to her family enclave, as she both lacked their signet to open it now and they likely would've updated it since her exile to exclude her buometric signature from entry via scanner. Gripping the twin hydraulic doors with her darkness, they were covered in a void black outline that absorbed the light around them, and Ruby with fairly little actual effort pried both doors open, just enough for herself to step inside before allowing them to snap back shut behind her.
Inside her old family Enclave she found about what she was expecting from the fact that the doors were sealed. An Enclave's doors could only be sealed like that from the inside, and that meant that some of her clan stayed behind to act as custodians for their family home... and their tomb. She didnt know how many of her kin remained behind, though she knew it was not all of them since only the skeletal remains of adults remained in their bunks or at the grand table, and Clan Juggernaut, at least when she was exiled, had a fair number of foundlings and apprentices, but there were still dozens of bodies all about the Enclave turned Tomb. It saddened her that this was how so many of her own family did go, but she supposed that it was enough that they at least went with peace, if the vials of poison were not evidence enough. From what she pieced together, they stood guard until the food ran out, then opted to end it with dignity in bed or at the great feast table rather than starve to death. She recognized the poison, one concocted specifically for this purpose. Painless, only effect was that it caused extreme drowsiness, then when its victim fell asleep, they wouldn't wake up.
"I hope more of my Clan yet lives on elsewhere... I hope I am not the last of Clan Juggernaut." Ruby mused under her breath as she rested her hand on a dead brother's pauldron. Nonetheless, she had to move on from her deceased kin, she hadn't come here only to relive memories, not that she was able to do so anyways with all the bodies laying about. No, she was here for something very specific... her Inheritance. More specifically, her armor, armaments and aura blade, the armor and sword forged for her father and all hos weapons that rightfully belonged to her. Even if she had forefeit her inheritance all those years ago, she still had legitimate claim to them as Midnight, even with his dying breath after saving her from her devil's possession, had only expressed pride in her, not admonishment. She knew the only place such woild be found woild be the Armory, her father's private Armory to be precise.
Midnight's personal armory was accessed via his personal chambers that he'd shared with her, and she was pleased to find that the codes inside had never been changed, and entering inside hit her much heavier than she was anticipating. Memories of the years she spent with her father, years of love and hardship alike, but years she missed dearly... oh, what she would've given to wind back time and relive those days again, to hear her father's voice once more. His old, favorite whiskey glass still stood upon the coffee table in front of the couch facing the reinforced and shielded transparisteel panoramic window overlooking New Mandalore. He always said that he'd share a glass with her when she finished her trials and was finally raised as a full, true Mandalorian as opposed to just a Mandalorin Apprentice under him... she couldn't help but shed some tears as she looked down at that glass now, remembering his words and knowing that she'd failed him, both in never becoming a true Mandalorian, and in never getting to share that glass with him.
"Father... I swear to you... its not over, not yet." Ruby spoke softly as she kneeled beside the table, resting a hand on the glass. She could almost hear it, the sound of years past when she and Mercury would chase each other to and fro across the Enclave, train and fight, laugh and live under their reapective fathers' watchful eyes and wisdom. But the memory was over as quicklg as it had come to her, and she withdrew her hand from the glass, looking away from it and towards the shielded doors that barred her from her father's armory. The pass code was the date he'd found her all those years ago, on the snowy winter night upon the Island of Patch when her mother and father were murdered and she was separated from her family of blood, which she quickly punched in, smiling softly as the faint hum of the shields died down and the doors slid open.
However, her satisfaction turned from a saddened satisfaction to something akin to panic when she saw the armory was almost completely void of equipment. Where the full armature and arsenal of Mand'alor the Invincible should've rested, perfectly preserved in a stasis field for the last 20 years, instead only his sword remained, its shattered form still suspended in an artificial gravity well generator, the blade broken when her father saved her. She grit her teeth and bit back tears from flowing down and held her rage and anger back, instead reaching out with her power to grip the broken blade and all its fragmented shards.
She'd not been idle in her exile, not during her time wandering this world or the realm of Devils, and her mastery over Astaroth's powers had grown by no small margin. Using her power as the ascending Archduchess of Hell, repairing a shattered Beskar Aura Blade was in truth a rather simple matter, though it did help that the fragments of a soul within the shards of the weapon seemed to recognize and feel soothed by her power rather than reject it. Pulling the fragments out of their artificial gravity well, she suspended them with her own power, perfectly outlining each shard with her own darkness and delicately realigning each and every sliver back into place. With all pieces realigned back together, Ruby gave a quick nod, enveloped the whole blade in darkness, and crushed her open hand into a fist.
The light around the blade was absorbed in greater intensity, plunging the entire world around her momentarily into pitch darkness before eventually burning off like smoke, revealing the blade once more as one, reforged and whole once more, its bright blue flames burning like a star in the night sky once again, though this time a void black crackling pattern ran up the blade, revealing where once the blade had been sundered yet now found itself renewed. With a slight smirk, she took the blade in hand, and for a moment, just a moment, it felt as though someone else was there with her, guiding her second hand to the handle as well for a few slashes, as if teaching her how to wield her father's blade as he had.
An almost icy clarity set upon her with the blade in hand, and as she turned back towards the door, she exhaled deeply, closing her eyes and reaching out with her left and and feeling out for the presence of the other half of her father's aura blade, its Saya. It was faint, distant, but she could still feel it nonetheless, due East of New Mandalore... and crying out in rage. It was being used to house a common blade of normal steel, separated from its other half and forced to endure such degradation. Ruby opened her eyes with a certain fury behind them, swearing that she'd gut whoever so mistreated the other half of her father's weapon.
Nonetheless, she knew better than to approach this explosively. Perhaps many years ago she would've done so, but with age came both experience and wisdom, and with those came a certain appreciation for handling things in a less overt manner. So to say, no need to use a Thermal Detonator in melee when a knife would suffice.
As she walked out of her family's old Enclave and trekked to the top of their mountain oasis home, Ruby looked out over the vast landscapes and gave a soft smile, flourishing the blade of her father that felt so familiar in her hands, still burning with her father's trademark blue flames yet now emblazoned with her own mark as well. She knew the journey forward would be long and arduous, but she'd now cast aside any lingering doubts and accepted her fate. With her father's blade in her hands, however, the thought of it all was just a little bit more bearable.
"There's no time for doubt. I know what must be done." Ruby declared to herself, lowering the blade and looking out to the East, towards where the saya to her father's aura blade lay in wait for her. It would be the first Relic of Mand'alor she'd recover, followed by his armor and the rest if his weapons... then, once her inheritance was hers once more, she could go about rallying the clans once again. "Our fall from grace was a great and terrible one... but this war is not over. Not yet."
With but a nod and the fading of the moon behind the clouds once again, Ruby hopped down from the cliff she'd perched up upon, and set out for her destiny. With blade in hand, conviction in her heart and redemption on her mind, she set off into the night, and towards her father's first stolen artifact...
A/N: Hello everyone! I know this probably isn't what was expected, and I don't think its very high quality for what I normally made in the past, but i wanna gauge opinions on this. If you haven't read my story "Remnant ARC Trooper" already, this will be very confusing, but if you have, this isn't a hard-set future for the story, more of a "what if" scenario I've been thinking about. As always, thoughts and opinions are greatly appreciated, and I'd love your feedback on this story idea!