Melting Furnace | Darth Talon

The Charge I

Talon was fifteen standard years old and was crashing the assassin droids into scrap on the edge of a cliff. Over her head was the Sith Temple's boiler room, under the ledge – pikes of the stalagmites. Infernal heat ate out the air, large drops of sweat settled and stung in her scars. Talon was narrow-shouldered, scrawny abomination and just started to gain muscle mass, so she relied on speed, cunning feints and flawless orientation in space. Even armoured, her body was so agile that could slip through the most intricate traps the meat grinders built from their frames. She swung aside from the darts aimed at her neck, let the vibro-knife gash her cheek and spat in the face of the machine with her own blood, then with a laugh rolled back between the second opponent's legs to chop them with her saber simultaneously. The third droid rumbled: Talon shoved it with her feet against the stalagmite, pressing down with the Force so it would be penetrated for sure.

Her legs pushed off the walls and metal heads, loosening the mounts, her lekku snaked among the blades and shots, she spun and flied, drooling like an excited tuk'ata pup. Bashed fist ripped out the shreds of wires from under the shattered face plate, sensorily depriving the machine. It wasn't exquisite or picturesque in any way, yet Talon felt more than alive. Before she could mentally praise herself, she almost got smashed by the blaster fire. The moan of tearing durasteel bathed her brain in exhilaration and made her eyes burn from the blood pressure until the last opponent fell, sprinkling with black oil.

Slightly sooty metal under the torches reflected the triply slashed cheek, a shred of skin ripped off from the brow and a brass ring of her eye. The corners of her lips quivered, and Talon heavily kneeled down. She didn't regret coming here without her Master – his praise was false and useless. Sometimes Darth Ruyn got up in the middle of the night to circle across their quarters howling the lines of tragedies and slapped the floor lamps. Nevertheless, there was no need to act the rebel.

One infant memory, together with her own birth wail settled in her lekku, was of Krayt. Of his tan, aquiline-nosed face with narrow cut of the wise eyes. How that face, not forged in the horned helmet (Krayt hadn't taken it off since then), leaned over her and the voice uttered wistfully, as if softened by anguish: Amersu.

Talon knew she was to be the Hand of One Sith. She would sit on the steps of the Emperor's throne and wait for the order to protect his honour. Would destroy the most dangerous of his foes and command the legions against the Jedi and other insurgents. Would guard his fragile body in its healing stasis.

"We are One Sith Idea, embodied in thousands of faces, but only our Leader incarnates this Idea in perfection." Her Master reverently traced the large-scaled stained glasses of the Temple that portrayed the life and passion of Krayt. "This is the pattern we are going to sculpt you from!"

And why hadn't Krayt taken her as his own apprentice? Why would he entrust her to a senile idiot who did nothing but made her review his erotic daubing? And what daubing it was! Not even sure why, Talon barked loudly and hit herself on the nose.

Her speciality was not fixing but breaking things, so the droids could be left behind – the wandering mechanic mechanisms would still pick them up sooner or later. As for the damage of the Academy's property... Talon smirked. It would be a great adventure. She laid on her back and rolled down the steep slope of the cliff.

From the depths of the Temple to the Valley of the Dark Lords were laid catacombs, through which one could get to the graves of the ancient rulers. Where under the boiler room one of the passages broke off was left smoldering an old smithy, claimed by beasts as their lair. The Sith Artisans did often build the workrooms in cursed places, where powerful emotions took hold, and where spirits could speak. In the Sith civilization as a whole, as Ruyn told, material objects were merely channels for hearts and souls put into them, which are the genuine works of art.

The coals damped: Talon laid her palm on them and closed her eyes, recalling the memory of Master's nauseating 'art'. A discharge of thin white lightning cut through her hand and swelled up acrid clouds of soot and ash. While the fire ignited, Talon used a circular saw to detach a smooth rebar from one of the workbenches; wearied from sparring, her hands held the instrument with pure enthusiasm. Moisture covered the perspired eyelids, metal heated for a painfully long time, so the reeking creatures made it to their den.

Tuk'atas, the Sith hounds, knew Talon and didn't attack, even if they weren't welcome. They shook the needles on their spines at the sight of the fire and crept to sniff Talon's boots, exposing the bald-patched flesh imbued with augmetics and surgical stitches to the flames. The fire and the piercing sound of the hammer did not disturb them. They would gladly eat the Twi'lek and gnaw on her bones if they weren't afraid of her.

Pitiful beings. The areas of their brain responsible for rage were enlarged, their skins and bones were hardened, and the muscles strengthened. They had become slaves of the Sith many centuries ago. The Fearless. The Mindless.

Leaning the end of the rebar against the anvil, Talon bent it down with inspired blows of the hammer and fused it with the base. Tightly squeezing the tongs, she began to knock out from the resulting parallelepiped what would become the head of the krayt dragon.

Once, Talon had already portrayed the Lord of the Sith on canvas: in art classes, he had personally posed for the painter acolytes. The studio then had become darker and more airless from the eagerness and the spirit of rivalry, jealousy simmered in blood. Talon kept an impassive expression and kept her hands firm, as in battle, but the spectrum of her feelings was so intense and vibrant that it spilled onto the canvas in aggressive, unscrupulously arrogant colours screaming "me!". Krayt had visibly froze at the sight of his portrait of her brush, his eyes had widened for a moment, and he'd nodded peacefully. At that moment Talon, to her own horror, had wished to murder him.

She imagined herself from the outside perspective: a red-skinned devil with a burning look, flakes of dross and a deafening shriek flew out from under her hammer, her lekku danced predatory behind her, the clatter of her teeth made the tuk'atas tremble. Thunder and roar echoed through the underground forge, and dust fell from ancient furnaces and anvils. Talon clamped the armature in a blacksmith's vice and began to gouge out the dragon's eyes with a chisel.

Hasn't he chosen me as his Hand?

Boom! The chisel slid down, and Talon doubled over, inhaling and exhaling raucously.

Won't I be closer to the Emperor than his own regent?!

The growl from the throat of the Twi'lek and the clang of a white-hot dragon rumbled through the catacombs, the hammer flew into the tuk'ats, the rebar and the chisel – into the coals. Talon snatched up a bucket and generously poured water into the flame. Echoes rattled in her ears, the dogs guffawed rowdily. Warmth and coolness rolled under the skin, sending something life-giving through the veins.

"Foolish child."

Talon raised her head: ultrachromium fingers that smelled like bacta closed around her neck.

"You live to serve someone else's will," the holographic interference continued, forming into a figure crowned with sharp growths and dressed in loose rags, "and at the same time you dare to call yourself a Sith?"

At the Academy, instructors often clutched tracheas of negligent acolytes and filled the lecture halls with wheezing and crunching. It seemed humiliating. But being ripped off the ground with a hand of a defective training holodroid took Talon to a new level of shame.

"It's time for you to know the truth," said the proxy, "about the worthless pretender known as Darth Krayt."

It stepped into a dark passageway deeper into the catacombs, then tossed Talon into the blackness.