If I knew any Kryptonian constellations, I'd probably have used one of them for this chapter title.
Beta'd by Sesparra.
It took a moment for Faay to register that the pain had stopped.
In her defense, she had dragged herself so far along her stunted, malformed connection to the Force in order to try to hold the concealment around herself and her two fellow clones of the immortal Jedi Master that the sensations of her failing body had all but faded into the background noise of the universe.
As such, it took a moment for her to register the silvery chunk of crystal, an almost perfect quartz-like hexagon in shape marred only by way that one end was jagged, like it had been roughly wrenched off of a natural crystal formation, that had neatly landed in her palm. As it did so, her body- a body that had not reacted well to forced growth- drew in enough energy to detonate a star, repairing broken metabolic pathways, reinvigorating failing organs, and rejuvenating prematurely aged tissues as it built in new structures in organs and cells that, some distantly rational part of Faay thought, she shouldn't be able to feel nearly so well as she did.
Even after healing the sheer amount of damage that her body had accumulated over her too-brief life, she was still overflowing with energy, and while some of it could be absorbed by the new structures, most of it thundered up her connection to the Force like a herd of nerfs, flattening what had been there before and making it much easier passage for anyone who cared to follow.
In Faay's case, it allowed her to reach out and touch the Force with greater ease than she had been able to since… ever. Sure, she had memories of the Force whispering in her ear like an old friend, but those memories were but snatches of her template's life, and they were unfortunately all but lost to her.
Except… they weren't, not anymore- suddenly, what memories she retained from Fay's life dredged themselves from the hazy morass they'd languished in and snapped into razor-sharp clarity.
More than just that, her own memories were as immediate to her as if they'd just happened, and while they were, on the whole, painful, boring, or other assorted flavors of miserable, they were her memories, and her newfound acuity of recall would prove to be a profound asset.
If, of course, she managed to survive this situation.
The lone Jedi who had come into this charnel house was… not visibly flagging, but Faay could feel that she was… diminished, through the effort of condensing such a staggering amount of energy into such a small space, and though she'd managed to dispatch the Magnate and the Duelist with panache, she likely couldn't stand up to the fact that she'd just drawn the attention of nigh on every sentient in the room with that stunt.
How fortunate, then, that Faay had recently become much more capable of fighting off the various Sith chrysalides and assorted other clones that would seek their lives.
The lightsaber that had been hanging from the Jedi's belt seemed to explode, each and every individual component expanding out into an orbiting cloud around the abomination that was the artificial kyber crystal, grown for the sole purpose of being bled at its heart, which winked into the peace of nonexistence under the weight of Faay's regard. That done, the lightsaber components started to swirl around Faay, and as the most daring (or, perhaps, most foolhardy) tuk'ata lunged in to introduce them to its slavering jaws, they lunged in, sealing themselves around the crystal that had catalyzed Faay's recovery just instants before igniting, the abrupt appearance of another lightsaber blade casting a silvery sheen over everything in the room.
As Faay floated up, rotating upright through nothing more than the Force's power, the silver blade swept around, as much an instrument of her will as an expression of her frustration. It bisected the first tuk'ata with all the ease of a Trandoshan's claws sinking into an overripe fruit, as well as the one that sought to hide behind it, all the while letting out a resonant hum that she couldn't help but allow deeply into her heart. As she did so, she could all but feel the Force gathering around her with the weight that her template had recognized as a moment of supreme import, one that the galaxy itself could pivot about.
She opened herself more fully to the Force, allowing it to guide her heart and inform her thoughts, and-
Two paths, diverging here and now. One, where she allowed the pain and misery that had been her lot in life, just as it had been for so many others in this facility, to drag her in its wake. Blood, both her own and that of others, spilled often and deeply, flashes of all-consuming hatred that brought even more blood, until eventually the Jedi, one-armed and more exhausted than even the oldest of elders that she'd seen, cut her red-stained trail short in a blur of violet light that, in the end, Faay saw herself thanking her for, an image that would haunt the red-haired Jedi for the rest of her days and echo in her ears at the moment of her own passing into the Force.
The other was a hard path, one where she pitted herself against the might of the galaxy assembled, and worse lurking in the shadows, grasping tentacles and gnawing chitinous mouths as well as the shadow that had been cast over her future by the way the Darkness had engendered her growth. Despite that, despite all the weight on her shoulders and the forces arrayed against her, she stood straight-backed, standing shoulder to shoulder with her fellows, blue and green and violet blades glowing as she raised her own silver lightsaber into a high Soresu guard- and, in the end, one where the Jedi who had saved her looked far less weary, her will not tested nearly so hard and her faith in the Force vindicated.
It was not easy by any stretch of the imagination, clearing the red tint from her vision through willpower alone, but for that dream, for the prospect of the most malignant abcesses on the dark underbelly of the galaxy dragged into the light and lanced…
Well, no Jedi worth their training would turn their back on that possibility, no matter how far beyond impossible it might seem, so who was she to do any less?
If not for her ability to defy the very idea of cost, Mara wasn't sure that she'd have been able to create any Platinum Kryptonite, let alone enough to drag the dying clone out of the death spiral her health was taking after the other two had been slain.
As it was, she felt thoroughly wrung out, and if she didn't have the Force to keep her awake, alert, and ambulatory, she probably would have collapsed onto the duracrete of the floor, hostile territory be damned, and left the clone to fight the vornskr, tuk'ata, and various other chrysalides and assorted clones of Jedi and Sith alike on her own.
Then again, with how fast she was moving, that wasn't as terrifying a prospect as it would have been for any other Jedi, even Hoth or her own Master.
Once the fur stopped flying, Mara and the clone were the only ones left, the rest of the clones all either torn apart by slavering jaws, fallen victim to one another, or in two cases, having met their ends at her hands. The animals, both natural and subjected to some horrific means of making them "better", were in a similar state, albeit with many more having fallen victim to a flashing silver blade than my own.
Speaking of the silver blade, the woman wielding it finally blurred to a stop, extinguishing it with all the gravitas of a master craftsman putting away their tools after a major project, and Mara took a moment to look at her more closely.
The sickly pallor that she had sported earlier was gone, replaced by the kind of light tan that was a common tone across human and near-human species the galaxy over, although the pointed ears were something of a giveaway, with Sephi being the most likely candidate for her species (albeit not the only one). Her heart-shaped face had filled out somewhat, cheekbones only striking instead of protruding, and the matted, greasy mess of her hair had shed the grease over the course of her battle and arranged itself in the kind of casually windswept arrangement that the Imperial Court (or at least the ladies on their arms) were prone to swooning over, regardless of the gender of the person it was attached to.
There was a serene expression on her face, her eyes closed and lips creeping up into a contented smile, before she turned to face Mara, opening her gray eyes. "Thank you," she said, smile broadening into something more grateful. "I'm not sure I would have lasted much longer even in the stasis tubes- too much organ damage from being cloned from someone whose body relied almost entirely on the Force for metabolic processes, I think."
"I'm just glad I could help, Master…" Technically, Mara didn't know that the other woman was a Master, but given the aura of serenity she gave off, in spite of the thin hospital gown she was wearing, it was a safe bet.
There was an almost mournful quality to her for just a moment as she lowered the hilt of the lightsaber. "Faay, and at this moment I'm not sure I count as a proper Master."
Mara shrugged one shoulder, hooking her own hilt to her belt. "You fight well enough to be one, and you've got the presence of one… if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and looks like a duck, it's reasonable to call it a duck."
"If you say so." Faay looked skeptical. "I'm afraid that I don't know where we are, or who you are."
"My name is Mara Jade," she replied, gesturing and manifesting her cat-self in a dark corner of the room to prowl around and make sure there weren't any other surprises present, "and we're on Centax-2."
Immediately, Faay brightened. "Ah, so close to the Temple!" Her brows drew together as she visibly thought through the implications. "I take it that the war allowed for this facility to be concealed from the Order for so long?"
Mara managed to hold back a grimace, but something about her face clearly gave away gave away the grim state of affairs. "How bad was it?"
"To the best of my knowledge, the Jedi Order is all but wholly defunct. The Jedi Service Corps have disappeared into the outskirts of the galaxy, hiding beyond the reach of the Empire that supplanted the Republic, and the Order as you would know it was betrayed and slaughtered by the soldiers who fought alongside it for three long years, down to the last child in the creche and the last elder fleeing the Temple. I have reason to suspect that a significant portion of the Order of Shadows, or whatever its name is nowadays, has survived, and there are warrants on the heads of the handful of Knights and Masters known to have survived the Purge, but… for all practical purposes, the Jedi Order is no more."
Each Force-guided word was like a physical blow, and by the time Mara was done, Faay seemed half a second away from collapsing, and Mara found herself very curious about the prospect of getting in touch with the remaining Jedi Shadows.
After an unbearable moment of awkward silence, she spoke. "Which are you, then? The Ronin or the Shadow?"
"Neither." Mara paused a moment, but she'd already committed herself to this woman the very moment she'd torn the crystal into reality, so she soldiered on, the Forge guiding her words as much as her own instincts. "A relic of a bygone era, placed under the nose of the new Sith Emperor by the will of the Force, replacing the assassin he raised to try and supplant the apprentice that had already lost the qualities that made him worth seducing into the Darkness."
Faay's eyes flashed cherry-red for the barest of instants as she tensed, then relaxed. "And decapitating the Empire in one fell swoop would be doomed to fail, assuming you could do so in the first place I suspect there wouldn't be anything you could do ot claim the throne."
Mara inclined her head. "Darth Vader would be Emperor, and though he is an apprentice, he is a senior one, who's on his way to twenty years as a Sith and de facto head of the armed forces. He is one of the ones responsible for hunting down Jedi, with some rumors and non-classified documents I've been able to find suggesting that he led the sacking of the Jedi Temple personally."
The other galaxy's gravity tugged on Mara as Faay breathed the slow, deliberate breaths of someone releasing their anger to the Force. "Right. Okay, so, then, I take it you have a plan?"
"Not a full-on plan," Mara said warily, "but I'm hoping to be able to make contact with one small insurgent group or another on one of my upcoming missions and start working them together into a larger, more cohesive rebellion. Hopefully with other people who can handle the logistics, I can…" She trailed off, giving a vague gesture with her hand.
Faay sighed. "Listen to the Force, then. What does it tell you is the wisest course of action?"
Mara focused her mind, connecting first to the half-mournful sensation of the crystal in her lightsaber and then going deeper into the Force, past the surface and into the depths of the massive energy field that she'd been able to hear as far back in either of her lives as she could remember.
By the time she surfaced, it was with fear warring with new resolve in her eyes as she spoke the idea that the Force had impressed onto her very soul into existence. "Save Alderaan."
And that's that!
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