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Post by Alkor Centaris on Jan 10, 2016 23:12:54 GMT -8
Rules:GBA Standard, Top 10 Powers, Armors and Weapons as listed on profile.
A modified Arena with high walls and a flat floor, no obvious exits.
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Andrew James North
The Jedi Order
Posts: 12 
Affiliation: The Corellian Jedi Order
Traffic Light: Red
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Post by Andrew James North on Jan 12, 2016 0:12:04 GMT -8
:: Nameless Arena, Unknown Regions - 1830 Hours ::
All Done in Vain - Alkor Centaris, Andrew North
Now young Willie McBride, I can't help wonder why, do those who lie here know why they died? Did they really believe, when they answered the call, did they really believe that this war would end wars? Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain, the killin' and the dyin' it was done in vain. For Willie McBride, it all happened again, and again, and again, and again, and again. - No Man's Land (The Green Fields of France), Eric Bogel.
An old stone door, wet from that kind of subterranean humidity partial to old buildings, slides shut with a groan and click, merging perfectly with the room's curved walls. There would be no leaving. Not yet, anyway.
The room spans twenty feet in diameter with rough walls made of hewn stone blocks running up nearly fifty feet sheer. It opens to the air at the top, just enough to illuminate the worn stone floor below with the ruddying rays of the afternoon sunset. Yellow-orange light pools on the floor, leaving a circle of shadow at the perimeter. It was toward evening, wherever it was.
A silence hangs in the empty room, a hungry, heavy, silence. It swallowed the grating of the door as it disappeared into the wall. It would have no such impudence, not here.
On Coruscant the city-world, they pray for it. Silence. They beg for anything to make the concussive, suffocating noise lift, anything to be alone with their thoughts, their dreams, their fantasies. Craving quiet like winter in midsummer, when the air sticks to you, and you feel like you're drinking, rather than breathing.
They have no idea what they're asking for.
In midwinter, the wind claws its way down your throat. It suffocates you, pulls the breath out of you. We're not meant to spend time with only our dreams for company, only our fantasies. Echoes will drive you mad. And in this small room, cloaked in silence and arrayed with sunset, lived a palpable madness.
Its floor, while rough and earthen, bore dark brown-red stains. Old scars, or knife-edge tattoos. Several great stains marked the center of the room, and others marred the granite-grey walls. Whatever they were, they spoke their purpose clear enough. For the silence, the old oppressive silence, was the hang-man's silence, and this room then, was Golgotha's antechamber. The threshold of Sheol.
He couldn't so much hear them, as feel them.
Muted voices calling up from the earth. Some calling up "how long? How long until someone avenges." They joined a dizzying, concussive, chorus of regret, of weeping anger, of mourning. "How long?" "How could you do this?" "I didn't deserve this!" "I didn't do anything!" But mostly, but loudest of all, "Why?"
He blinks back tears as the vapors of human pain seeped out of the ground in a kind of wailing miasma. Why so many? Why here? To that, he had no answer, to their questions about why the died, why they had to die, he could give no reason. What he could do, was feel them, welcome them into his own heart. No one should die alone, and so many of them, so many now just old stains and stricken memories, had. He could weep with them, they deserved that. No, they deserved more than that.
"I'm sorry," he whispers. "I'm sorry. You were forgotten, dead in the unknown. But know that I will remember you, and now, even for a moment, you aren't alone."
With that, he extends out through the living force, pushing out an aura of understanding. Whatever faults, crimes, or misfortune brought them here, he didn't care. Even if they were only memories, they deserved some measure of comfort.
He stands about five feet into the room, head down and eyes closed. Hands at his side, not really noticing that the door had closed, and not knowing why he, like the others had been brought to the circle. He was an old man, a scarecrow of a Echani, a knifelike six feet tall, wiry and gaunt with weathering and age, with 45 years of training and wandering. A mane of shaggy silver-white hear covered his bowed head, blending into an equally shaggy bead. He wears loose black shirt and pants that seem to hang off him, and over the shirt, a black armorweave vest with a collar going about two inches up his neck, open under his chin.
On his belt hang two austere lightsabers, one standard, one shoto.
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Post by Alkor Centaris on Jan 12, 2016 9:36:15 GMT -8
All that breaks
must be discarded
even as the thunder
of faith returns
ever fading echoes.
-Prelude, Anomandaris
Steven Erikson
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The world ground in an endless cycle of futility. Like the gears of an ancient mechanism rusted and oiled into antiquity, it outlived its usefulness and perpetuated into stagnation. That was the nature of this place. In spite of their sweetest release, these souls clung in desperation to the only life they had ever known. As his footsteps broke the hard won silence, Alkor desecrated their memory with his very presence.
It was their fault.
Those spirits railed against him, decrying his approach as unfair. Their otherworldly wails came as whispers in the Force, rendered unto nothing by the vast expanse between their realities. The world of the Living was unkind to the Dead. Most men were deaf to even the loudest cries of the Fallen.
Not so for Alkor. His lips dragged down into a partial frown as he dug into the Force, consciously willing the voices quiet. The ungrateful wretches whined louder as his thoughts stifled them, and chains of forgotten and dark power shackled them, threatening to drag them slowly to hell.
The dying sun cast a bloody duality over the battlefield. As last vestiges of light yielded to impending darkness, Alkor cast a long shadow over the Jedi who wept across the room. Around them both, the departed danced as spectral lights. Their eternal battle became visible as the energies sloughing off of Alkor tainted them, offering both remarkable beauty and the tinge of deepest sorrow. Their last moments etched in the Force came to life, and they echoed their final sentiments for all to hear.
All who dared to listen.
He stood amidst the flowering sadness a bleak figure. Shadowed by black fabric and earthen tones, the Jen'jidai sized up the Echani in a single moment. From beneath the folds of his cloak, an ashen and skeletal arm rose to peel back his cowl, revealing a mane of messy chestnut hair and violet eyes. In contrast to their vivid color, his gaze felt distant, detached, and dead.
As the cloak fell away, he faced the man in confident silence.
Until the waves crashed against the shore.
Snap-hiss!
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Andrew James North
The Jedi Order
Posts: 12
Affiliation: The Corellian Jedi Order
Traffic Light: Red
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Post by Andrew James North on Jan 17, 2016 1:51:53 GMT -8
:: Nameless Arena, Unknown Regions 18:33 Hours ::
All Done in Vain - Alkor Centaris, Andrew North
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Some say the reason we hold wakes when our dear ones die is so we can see them, without that spark of life, without that soul that made them - them. We have wakes, viewings, so we can let them go, so we can part. Yet, in that room stained with the fading sunlight and the dark stains of forgotten souls, he witnessed the very opposite. When we die alone, we can't part the earth either, and we hold on with bleeding fingernails to the life we never wanted to leave. These souls bled a heavy sorrow as they gripped this world. They died alone, cruelly, slowly, obscenely alone, with no one to let them leave.
Their life had not been laid down, it had been taken, their sorrow attested to that. The air, though still, was restless, choked with an weeping, loathing, anger. It reeked of pitying questions, stale with "whys". Why me, why now, why did I have to die.
Water fell from his face onto the ground, mourning for souls who hadn't received even a half-decent burial. Who never said good-bye. No one should die forgotten, or alone. We are of too much worth, even the worst of us, to die without someone there.
"You aren't alone", he whispers again. The chorus still clawing upward.
"Whatever is keeping you here," he said, lowering a tear-stained face, "Let go. Don't let it hold you. There is nothing more for you here. Make your peace"
The whispers, the voices, continued calling, yelling in their own muted way "Why!," digging their fingernails deeper into the fabric of this life ripping small tears in the living Force. This room wounded it, even Ashla wept here. As tears fell, breaking against the bloodstained dirt below, the Jedi took a breath and reached out, pushing a quiet stillness into the room.
"Be still, the hour hastens on when ye shall be forever with Ashla. The hour when disappointment, grief, and fear are gone, sorrows forgot, love's purest joys restored. Be still, change and tears are past. "
He breathed out slowly. All he could do, was usher them into the aether.
"We shall meet someday," the Ecahni said, "someday when this life is over. Until then, rest, and be at peace."
Yet peace was not to be had. Not in this room, not at the doorstep of the gave. As another tear fell and the words left his mouth, another presence broke the damning silence, and abolished any hope of willing rest.
The Echani felt before he saw. He felt the quiet, stilling, energy that pervaded the room wrench and twist as if the grave clothes he laid out had suddenly become bonds. Their purpose binding, rather than guiding. The voices, the souls that had begun to quiet, suddenly screamed, and the Force itself seemed to cry out in pain as peace became punishment, and a great darkness dragged the vapors down to Golgotha.
Peace be damned.
His body tensed and visibly shook as a crowd of voices, of souls he'd opened his heart to screamed out again. Chains of an energy that reeked of sorrow pulled them into the darkness, wailing and then, silence. He could feel the presence before him bending the flow of energy in the stone-walled room. It felt like a cup submerging in water, pulling the surrounding Force and the energies in the miasma of bodiless voices into itself, only without bottom, without end. A presence that existed to consume.
He lifts his grey head slowly, almost against the vacuum created by the darker, consuming presence. For a moment, the energies in the room quivered, as the vaccum began to pull not just the dying voices, but the peace the Echani had breathed out. Then, his grey eyes opened, and the energies steadied as he pushed more of himself, more of a calm, disarming, energy into the void. The void itself, the seemling unfathomable darkness, struck him with a greater sadness than the death and voices which had, until dragged to hell, pervaded the room.
No one hungers more than a being that has known unsated starvation. No one wants more than one whose needs were never met. No one becomes an abyss unless their world has been Golgotha, a place of death, emptiness, and smoke. The being that stood before him had seen, and had become, an abyss. A very wound in the force itself.
The presence approached as a man wrapped in rent garments of dusty, reddened black. His clothes showed signs of wear beyond their years. Clothes of a rover, clothes of a madman. Men of a single mind, dogged, bound by purpose to their own detriment, wear clothes his. Men who care not for their condition, but for their vision, their ideals. Whoever he was, Andrew knew that he had sacrificed much, so much, that perhaps only his soul was left. What had he purchased in his dealing with the devil, in his falling to darkness and madness?
He saw Alkor's ashen, skeletal arm pull back the cowl and reveal the youthful face of an wearied man. One his age, Andrew thought, should never have seen this. One his age should not carry these burdens, nor carry such scars. His eyes dropped to Alkor's ashen arm. What toll had he paid with that?
Andrew's eyes locked with Alkor's violet eyes as the calm energy shifted again, this time pouring into the very center of the abyss. Pushing like a river, steady, purposefully, against Alkor's mind. It sought out the core of the deep, consuming sadness, it sought out what made Alkor, what had created the man in tattered robes from the raw material of humanity. No one falls to darkness without reason, no one falls without great pain and great cost. Andrew sought the price Alkor paid, he sought for the sole purpose of understanding. He wanted to know the pain that created such a sadness, the energies wanted to heal the wound.
Then, the man's hand, his good hand(?), thumbed the emitter switch and a lightsaber burned to life.
The Echani's eyes remained locked with Alkor's, barely taking the saber into account, as the flood of calming energy poured into the abyss. Andrew had made his peace, and death, even in the unknown room, worried his mind little.
Why so eager? Why so eager to take a life, he thought. His hands remained at his sides.
"Wait, " he said. "Your soul cannot bear the weight of another life."
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