iv.
THE ANATOMY OF WAR
✶
"You live in me. Malignant."
— Louise Glück, Firstborn
Violence begets violence. Hate brings hate.
It wasn't a difficult concept to grasp. In a galaxy that had been ravaged by one war after another, for aeons and aeons laid end-to-end, the trajectory of violence was encoded to memory—for some more than others.
It was a cycle, a circle perfectly-drawn and sharply cut: it began with anger, like a snake slithering through the grass, stomach swollen with a rodent feast, fangs bared and dripping with venom. And like venom, anger attacked the systems of the body, triggering all sorts of unsavoury reactions, affecting aggression, a primitive urge, in every muscle, tissue and cell, in every fibre of one's being.
A corrupting and compulsive force, it led to action.
And action leads to consequences.
And if you were the right type of person—or perhaps, the wrong type—those consequences would have you find yourself right back at the beginning of it all, at square one. At anger.
At the serpent, just before it strikes.
Ancient and reptilian, that cosmic ouroboros was what Mandalore had come to know. As constant as a planet's orbit around its sun, it did not come without its casualties—casualties that could be seen, immortalised, on Mandalore's surface, in the way that the planet's terrain had been rendered so barren by battle after battle that any city, any attempt at civilisation (or recuperation) had to be constructed within the safety of glass domes. In the way that Mandalore's neutral alignment was considered laughable by most, who didn't consider peace to be a word that even existed in Mandalore's vocabulary, let alone a word comprehensible by its people.
In the way that, even now, when no blood is shed on Mandalorian soil, the sight of a Beskar-steel helmet could still strike fear into the hearts all across the galaxy.
Fallon often wondered if the generations before her had been warriors from the very start. She had been lucky, she supposed—although Mandalore's militant days were long gone by her time, her connection to the Force, present since birth, had guaranteed her a life of indoctrinated purpose in the Jedi Order. Fulfilling the Mandalorian legacy—or creating her own—had never been a burden she was expected to shoulder.
But some fraction of Fallon—some sliver of a shadow self, some stray shard of mirror broken from an otherwise perfect reflection—wanted to know if that desire for destruction was hereditary. If her forebearers had left the womb with their hands, their hearts, aching for bloodshed. If they were natural-born killers, their fates already carved into the cosmos as dictated by the savagery of those who had come before.
Some fraction of Fallon wanted to know if that savagery ran through her veins, too; if it lay dormant, just waiting to be awakened, readied for the strike of a match.
On second thought, maybe savagery wasn't the right word. It suggested disorder—something carnal, uncontrollable. And if Mandalorians (or what Fallon knew of them) were anything, they were methodical. Meticulous. To them, combat was an art form: it deserved to be exhibited in all its glory, in all shades of red, violence, viscera.
Yet there was no way anyone could look at the Temple archives on Coruscant and admit, without lying, that there wasn't something barbaric about the ways of Mandalorians past. Something beastlike.
Semantics aside, there comes the next sequence in the natural train of thought: if Mandalorians were expected to be violent, was that the reason they grew to be?
Likewise: if you tell a child they are a monster, is that what they will become?
If you tell a child they are a weapon, is that what they will fashion themselves into?
The self-fulfilling prophecy returned to Fallon often. In her head it was the end of all things, a doomsday device, deep and cavernous and shaped like a grave.
With that grave came the fear that one day she would find a way to fill it—with either her own body, decaying, or someone else's. In her nightmares, the fear was articulated in decomposing bodies, once recognisable, lying limp on the battlefield in shallow, half-dug graves. They were broken and burnt, swallowed by fire. She always tried to join them, to feel the flames lick her bones as it licks theirs, but the inferno slices itself and separates at her approach, parting like the sea before a prophet.
Sometimes she could see the throne room on Sundari. On most days, it was filled with sunlight, the only shadows cast by the feather-thin frames that held in the glass windows in place: even then, it was still so bright, so welcoming, so warm. It often felt like the sun in four walls, trapped between glass like a fly in amber. But unlike the warzone lingering in Fallon's subconscious, it never burned. It never caught fire. Instead, it resolved to bring warmth. It said, I am here, and I am trapped, but I will keep you warm. I will make things better.
In Fallon's nightmares, she was the complete opposite. I am here, and I am trapped. If I rot, you will rot with me. In Fallon's nightmares, the sun was nowhere to be seen. In Fallon's nightmares, Satine still sits upon the throne, but she is cold and lifeless; the mural on the wall that held her likeness in rich and mosaic colour is cracked and worn down, weathered and forgotten. The steps that lead up to the throne, like an altar, are strewn with bodies—some, Fallon can recognise as members of the New Mandalorian government, while some are obscured beneath the heavy helmet and gorget worn by the Royal Mandalorian guard. All are angled up toward the throne, both protector and politician alike, hands outstretched and clawing for something unattainable, their last acts of living to protect the Duchess—to protect what she stood for.
What she died for. Fallon is always at the foot of the steps, eyes level with the throne—with Satine, cold and unmoving—and although she holds no weapon in her hands, she knows that this was her doing.
If her ancestors acted out of anger, Fallon acts out of fear. Like a noose around her neck, it afforded her no breathing room, no reprieve. Like a puppet's strings fixed to her wrists, she could only move to serve her fear.
But as she waited in the darkness of the cargo bay as Kil piloted the Faultless to a safe landing, as the sounds of chaos and conflict filled her ears through the starship's walls, Fallon shed that fear like a snake shed its skin. The casualty of inner conflict, her body too often felt like a husk, all hollow with no purpose, no allegiance to anything but survival. (Always living, but never quite alive.) But this—combat, commonly found in compact warzones on planets like Jalid where the light of the Republic couldn't quite reach—is how she wakes.
The moment the stepped off the Faultless, the moment the soles of her shoes met the snowy surface of Jalid, the moment the bubble of safety the ship provided was decimated by a vicious cacophony of blaster-fire, explosions and screams, Fallon unfroze. The moment that chaos reared its ugly head in the plane of her calm and decidedly disciplined existence, the ice that kept her cold and dormant and docile—and separated from Hiro and Chrysaor—thawed. It melted, pooled at her feet, and resolved to wait for winter once more.
And Fallon came alive.
It took her a minute to get her bearings as she and Nadya descended from the Faultless. It became clear that their main adversary was the world around them, blindingly bright and unfamiliar. Light and noise converged upon the pair on all sides—Fallon closed her eyes for a nanosecond, forcing the excitement that thrummed in her chest to calm as she felt for the force around her.
It was honey-thick in the air, almost tangible to the point that Fallon was surprised she could even breathe the atmosphere, let alone move within it. Of course the Force would be strong on a planet like this; she could sense it in the snow, in the cloud belt lingering in the skies overhead, in the crystals above the surface and below. It hummed like a chorus, melodic and eager, welcoming her onto Jalid like she was an old friend.
Fallon opened her eyes as Nadya activated her lightsabre. The weapon emitted a gentle hiss as Fallon glanced around.
Jalid felt like the inside of a snowdome: although she understood its geography as akin to a tundra, with snow covering permafrost soil so cold and hard only the overlarge crystals growing beneath the surface could pierce it, from where Fallon stood it felt like she was trapped in a glass jar, stranded between cloak-like crystalline fog and icy slopes peppered with tufts of frosted grass. On both her sides and behind her were the remnants of concrete fences and metal watchtowers, blasted to rubble by enemy fire. Smoke wove its acrid miasma through the air, dancing over the patches in the terrain where the snow had melted away under the march of unwelcome visitors.
Fallon's gaze followed the permafrost paths, tracking them far ahead to a barricade, constructed from scrap metal, debris, and what appeared to be the still-smoking wreck of a hover tank. Behind the makeshift barrier she could see the familiar garb of snow troopers, and if she squinted, she could make out the forms of a few Jali, their ice-blue skin playing the part of camouflage that evolution had intended. Blaster shots soared through the air, rapid-fire in exchange between those behind the barrier and those attempting to conquer it; a dozen droids had congregated before the barricade, having reached the base under the cover of fog. Playing backdrop to the firefight was a forest of crystal columns, set far back in the snow behind the barrier. They stood tall and proud, protecting the mouth of the Republic base like an old guard.
Fallon took a deep breath and began toward the barricade, with Nadya at her heels and the Faultless disappearing in periphery. As far as she could tell—aside from the corpses slumped in the snow, equal of both metal and flesh—the Jali and clone forces had been holding the line decently.
But it was concerning that such action was required in the first place; Fallon had hoped for pirates. Gangs of the mercenaries lurked on the outskirts of the Ilum system, monitoring the trade routes that threaded through the Kyber-rich planets with as much organisation and vigilance as they could muster. Opportunists of questionable calibre, they ambushed transport ships as they passed through. Fallon had heard of occasions where the pirates had raided Republic ships, unaware that the vessels were carrying a resource significantly more valuable than a Kyber crystal: Jedi younglings. Though Jalid was rarely used for the Gathering, the rite of passage known to all members of the Order wherein a youngling claims a Kyber crystal and constructs their first proper lightsabre, the planet was still along the trade route, and thus at risk.
As far as Fallon was aware, none of these encounters had ever ended badly for the Order; rather, pirates were a nuisance more than anything else, and their attempts to intercept and impede the Order to further themselves in the pursuit of financial gain were largely ineffective.
This did not negate the fact that they were still irritating and innumerable. But ultimately, they were an infestation easily dealt with—not unlike insects, pirates could be crushed under one's heel without effort nor ceremony.
Separatists, however, were much more relentless, and much more of a threat. Fallon imagined that upon their return to Coruscant, Kil would disappear into a meeting chamber flanked by members of the Council, and they would discuss whatever had unfolded with burning urgency hidden under hushed tones.
"Come on, Kryze." Nadya said sharply. The crystalline fog that clung like a silk scarf to her body leapt apart at the touch of her blade, the dispersing vapour casting light pillars into the air as it reknit itself again and again and again. The light coalesced around her, like the fading embers of a fire, like a halo. (Lilac and lovely and nothing like Nadya, Fallon noted.) "They need us."
Fallon picked up her pace, the snow slick beneath her shoes. "You know, I assumed it'd be pirates. Florrum is pretty far from here, but the credits you can make from even a single Kyber crystal would be worth it." She looked to Nadya for a response, but none came, so she cleared her throat and continued. "On the trip over, I read that planets in this system are raided often—except for Ilum, because of its excessive Republic presence, I imagine. Pirates make easy pickings of the transport ships that come through."
Nadya gave a one-shouldered shrug. "Well, it's not pirates."
"I can see that. I'm not stupid."
Nadya slanted Fallon a look that strongly suggested she thought otherwise. Fallon cleared her throat again. "Anyway," she said, her bun tugging tightly at her scalp, "I wonder why they didn't just contact Coruscant directly."
"Or Ilum, for that matter. How difficult would it have been to send a shuttle?"
"Exactly. Or even just a single message. It's been silent as the dead between Jalid and the rest of the system for the past few cycles." Fallon looked ahead. She and Nadya were practically running now, and her cloak felt like dead weight, hanging heavy on her shoulders. "Maybe their subspace transceiver is broken. Still, they should have been able to contact us by hologram—"
Nadya grabbed Fallon's shoulder and pulled her back, cutting her off mid-sentence. Fallon snapped her head to look at her, pain shooting up her neck. "Stop," A pause, as Nadya slackened her grip and cocked her head back the way they came. "Look."
Fallon pivoted, her eyes narrowing. In the fog behind them, adjacent to where the Faultless had briefly landed, she could see the dark shadows of an approaching squad of droids, their silhouettes uniform and identical. She cursed to herself in Mando'a as she turned her attention back to those behind the barricade. When they had first arrived, she counted a dozen Jali and about half as many clones—and even though it had only been a few minutes, their numbers had dwindled down to nine altogether, while the droids' seemed to have doubled.
So much for holding the line.
"Go to the barricade," Nadya said. The authority in her tone was tangible, a well-worn slipcover put on to hide years of anger. It was like static, white noise—sometimes, if you listened hard enough through all the electrical hissing and humming, you could hear the animosity. Clear as day, clear as a line drawn in flesh. "Get the troopers and the Jali civilians inside the base—and get them to brief you on whatever's happened here. I'll do what I can, then I'll try to regroup with Kil." She dropped her hand from Fallon's shoulder, her eyes glowing bright like embers. "I'll take those approaching."
Fallon knew better than to argue. "Don't die."
"When have I ever?" Her resolve concreted, Nadya had already turned away.
"It only takes once."
Nadya stopped in her tracks and flashed Fallon a leonine smile over her shoulder, all teeth and gums. Then, she sprinted off towards the oncoming squadron. She didn't look back again.
Fallon arrived at the barricade, welcomed by sighs of relief and scattered salutes. With her, she brought a symphony of light, a quick but graceful sequence of sabre strikes that cut down half of their attackers. Fallon's careful dance was almost in synchrony with Nadya's: in the corner of her eye, she could see the viper-fast movement of Nadya's lightsabre as it made itself a home in the chest of droid after droid, flashes of purple reflecting upon the snow that covered Jalid like a cataract. She was mesmerising.
Fallon blinked her attention back to the survivors as she climbed deftly over the barricade, twisting as she hopped over, throwing her sabre like a javelin towards the few foot soldiers she'd left standing. Like the fangs of a serpent it sunk into the metal torsos of three droids, skewering them one after the other. They fell in a neat line.
A flick of her wrist and her weapon came soaring back into her hand, its hilt warm through the well-worn leather glove that protected her palm. Deep inside her chest something sprouted, something prideful and thick with thorns.
Fallon ducked beneath the barricade, curling up behind a panel of scrap metal. Those still standing dropped down, following her stance, and she took the moment to cast a glance around this side of the barricade—a few seconds of apt observation told her all she needed to know.
Amongst the living: Five Jali, four clones.
Amongst the dead: more than she could count. Both blue-skinned and armour-plated corpses littered the snow, skin covered in frost, already preserved in an icy ectoplasm that would leech what little heat Fallon had in her fingers if she were to touch.
Her expression darkened, and she forced herself to focus on those still standing. Two of the clones she recognised as Captain Knives and Hitch—good men she'd fought alongside in campaigns at the very beginning of the war, back when they were as much a stranger to galactic conflict as most of the Jedi were. The others she couldn't put names to.
"Commander, it's good to see you." Knives saluted Fallon as he crouched beside her. Then, he took off his helmet. His visor was cracked. "You've come just in time."
"You too, Knives." Fallon offered a smile, swift and sweet. It disappeared as quickly as it arrived. "Down to business. We—Master Vizsla, Padawan Saxon, and I—weren't aware of the situation here. So there's no reinforcements. Just us. Hopefully my master called for backup, but for now, we can't rely on it." Fallon felt the remaining droids' barrage of blaster shots against the metal sheet, a thud thud thud in tandem with the beat of her heart. She turned to one of the clones she hadn't recognised. "What's your name, soldier?"
"He's a shiny," Hitch answered for him. The clone in question, helmetless, nodded in sheepish agreement. "He doesn't have one."
Fallon flicked the unnamed soldier a look to address him. Though she was no Nadya—no nuclear weapon, perpetually frozen in the moment just before it decimates a city, awaiting detonation at the hands of men a million miles from the front lines—Fallon's words bled conviction. "Lead the Jali into the base. Be ready to recount to me the events that led to this." She turned to the others. "We'll cover their exit."
From what Fallon understood, the Jali were not fighters. There was a way that war settles into someone's body, a way it makes a home of limbs and innards and skin, parasitic and greedy and devious. It permeates every inch of existence, hollows out muscles and sinew and bone, and interrupts the continuum a body—alive, if not living—tries so hard to maintain. All is left is the spine, and that is all that carries the body from one place to another, all movement fuelled by memory alone. (Not purpose. It was never purpose. That was the anatomy of war.)
The Jali wore it—war—too well. And it didn't sit right with Fallon, not in the slightest. Something was very wrong here.
Fallon rose to cover the Jali's exit as she had instructed, her knuckles blanching around the hilt of her sabre as she activated it. Her weapon seemed to move with a mind of its own, guided by muscle memory as she deflected enemy fire. Despite the cold—keen and vicious like teeth sinking into the flesh of her neck—her hands felt hot, like molten metal, filling a mould. (Filling the shape of a weapon.) In moments like these, she understood Chrysaor fully. She could feel that electrical current coursing through her bloodstream as it did through his, the echo of this is your purpose repeating again and again, reverberating off of every organ, tissue and cell in her body, setting her alight with a power—a conviction—she couldn't describe. Shaking out of slumber a Fallon that wasn't corpselike in the slightest. A Fallon that was anything but.
(No wonder Chrysaor could never be still.)
Once the Jali had disappeared between the crystal pillars, Fallon took cover again. Acutely aware of the clones awaiting her orders, her authority, she peered through a hole in the welding that kept the barricade in one piece. Through it she could see the destruction Nadya had left in her wake: the smoking wreckage of droids that lay in the snow like insects dissected, head, thorax and abdomen separated into perfect parts by the slash of her blade. The girl, a war god in fleeting mortal form, was nowhere to be seen.
Fallon closed her eyes. In the distance, she could hear it, the pounding of metal against ice, the sound of yet another squad approaching. One that would not meet the indiscriminate wrath of Nadya Saxon, girl-shaped fury, but instead the pathetic forces of Fallon Kryze and her triad of clones. The thud thud thud came again, a ceaseless drumline in her ears, heart, throat.
Something hazy began to take shape in her mind, burrowing its way through her skull like a parasite. Fallon couldn't articulate it as much as she tried to: the thought remained but an abstract shape, saturated in static she couldn't decipher.
All she knew was that something here, on Jalid, was wrong. Very wrong.
"Captain Knives," Fallon pushed her suspicions aside, her tone taking a few moments to catch up to her confidence, "How strong would you say this barricade is?"
Knives surveyed the barricade. The space between his brows creased as he knitted them together, his expression uncertain. "I can't imagine it would protect us for long, Commander. We built it as fast as we could—not much thought was put into how structurally sound it would actually be."
"Didn't think so." Fallon bit her lip. "Help me cut this metal sheet free from its foundation in the snow. I have an idea."
"Sir?"
"We use the sheet as moving cover—with us four, we can push it, and if necessary, I'll use the Force. We bring the fight to them, put space between the droids and the base. Hopefully, it'll give Master Vizsla and Padawan Saxon enough time to rejoin us." If they don't, we're dead anyway.
Knives brushed snow off his shoulder, carefully working his helmet off his head. "Sounds good, Commander. But there's a chance we'll get overrun, and we can't lose any more men."
"I know." Fallon sucked in a breath. "But we can get overrun here, too. You'll just have to trust me, Knives. I'm sorry."
"Always, sir." Nonplussed, Knives nodded, and put his helmet back on. "No need to apologise. Come on, men."
The three clones took to the other side of the metal sheet, directing their blasters in focused fire to cut it down at its base, while Fallon sliced her way through from the middle.
The metal creaked in the wind. Fallon looked up at the sky, scrunching her nose: the cloud belt was descending upon them, sleet-swollen and fit to burst, scraping against the peaks of the crystal columns. A storm was about to break.
"It's coming loose, Commander!"
Fallon's gaze snapped back to the barricade, and she unstuck her lightsabre from the metal, then swung, cleaving it free of the soil's hold.
"Come on," she called. The clones rushed forward to push the metal panel across the ice. Fallon sandwiched herself between Knives and Hitch, shouldering the sheet over the snow, past the still-smoking metal remains left in Nadya's wake, and to just about where she and the older padawan had first caught sight of the Jalid forces.
They came to a stop. Thud thud thud. Fallon inched back, electricity ebbing in her fingertips. "Shoot indiscriminately. I'll do my best to stop them from breaking past us on either side."
Knives nodded. Then, Fallon sucked in a deep breath and stood.
The next few moments happened in a blur—fractured moments of time, Fallon shattered through each and every one of them.
She lunged forward, cutting down the first line of droids like a knife through the soft flesh of summer fruit: she moved like a forest fire, eating up every inch of ice and snow and metal in flashes of platinum-blonde hair and blue light.
The girl moved through their ranks, decimating them like a cyclone does a shore, carving her mark in metal, fuses and circuitry.
But it wasn't enough. Like the heads of a hydra, with every soldier Fallon struck down two more seemed to take its place. Knives was right: they were being overrun.
"Soldiers, listen to me!" Fallon cut down the last of the initial advance, compelling the makeshift shield back towards the barricade with the force. Her movements had disrupted the fog for a brief moment, allowing her to glimpse more droids in the distance. Jalid's terrain seemed infinite and abysmal, stretching on and on and on, but she knew the droids would close the space between themselves and the base the moment she let down her guard. "Put the sheet onto your backs. I'll cover you until I give you my signal: when you hear it, launch the metal up. And then—" she deflected a blaster shot that nearly hit her by too small a margin for her liking, "—run."
"Commander—" Hitch began to argue, but Fallon cut him off.
"—I'll cover you." The sky grew darker by the minute. "Do you understand your orders?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good." Fallon flicked him a smile over her shoulder as she edged back to stand in front of them, protecting them as promised. In the corner of her eye, she saw them lift the metal sheet onto their backs.
Fallon took a deep breath. Power thrummed in her hands, impatient, aching to break free of the confines of her skin, of her fingers. She was surprised that a planet that felt so cold—so lifeless—could be so alive with the Force. It was trapped, but if she focused hard enough, if she persevered, she was sure she could break it free.
Haat, ijaa, haa'it.
She closed her eyes, extending her hand as if to invite the Force into her, as if to offer herself up as its vessel. As it had extended its welcome to her upon her arrival, it accepted her greeting warmly: Fallon felt the air around her hand shift and constrict, as if her body was siphoning something from the atmosphere. It hummed like a hive, waspish and writhing inside her.
"Lift—now!"
She flicked her wrist and felt the force, undeniable and unstoppable.
In the corner of her eye she saw the metal panel, suspended in mid-air for just a moment as the clones followed her orders. Fallon moved, fast as a bird set free from its cage and twice as desperate, flinging herself to the side as she closed her fist and thrust it towards the oncoming disaster.
There was a groan, a sharp and satisfying sound, as the sheet swung like an axe, moving in a perfect semicircle, severing in half everything it came across. A dozen droids—maybe more, it all blurred in her vision as the sky split open, sending razor-sharp sleet down upon Jalid—fell, their momentum sending more into the snow like toy soldiers in the hands of a clumsy child.
Fallon certainly felt like a child as a smile crept through her teeth, as juvenile pride flooded her body, striking triumph in her veins. She suppressed the impulse to celebrate and fell back, activating her lightsabre to ward off the cold. She risked a look over her shoulder, catching the sheen of snow trooper armour as the clones disappeared from her line of vision, slipping into the cracks where her sight couldn't reach.
One remained. Knives. "Commander, are you coming?" he might've said—in the symphony of sleet and robotic war cries and the hum of her lightsabre, his words were lost. Fallon had to stitch together the sound of his voice, fill the disjointed vowels and rain-saturated syllables with her imagination.
"Keep going, Knives. I'll be right behind you." Her words were drowned out, too. He must've heard her, because he didn't speak again, melting from sight like the snow did from the rain.
Fallon shed her cloak. It had become more hindrance than a source of heat. Blinking away the rain, she counted the droids approaching.
One, two, three, five, ten, fifteen.
Twenty, twenty-seven.
Fallon worked her jaw. Her weapon radiated heat and light, wicking away the rain and creating a circumference of warmth and surficial safety an arm's length in diameter. It illuminated old scars, casting them silver and silk-like, refracting blue light off the water lingering on her skin.
Thirty.
The rain didn't stop, and with every drop of water that rolled off the slopes of her body went her energy and resolve.
Then, she spotted it—them. Shadows moved in periphery, rough and rending like an ocean in a storm. Her chest felt like a faltering dam, waves of relief pulsing against her ribcage, leaking through the gaps between her bones like gasoline.
Nadya was nothing like Hiro—she could never quite be subtle, whether by principle or in combat—but she was fast, and she was smart. She kept her sabre sheathed until she was at the back of the droid forces—and then, in a blinding flash of lilac light, she swung her weapon. Again and again and again, strike after strike, slash after slash. She darted through their numbers, driving her lightsabre through every spare piece of metal she came across like a stake in the heart of something monstrous, the scary story you told your child at bedtime to keep them cowering, complacent, and out of the dark of the woods where your words and warnings could no longer be heard.
(The droids were just droids. Nadya Saxon was what you should be afraid of.)
Then came the blue, sterile and serene and seemingly endless in Kil Vizsla's hands. Fallon wondered how long he had been there—whether he had been waiting for her, his padawan, to act—but as he joined Nadya on the offensive, the thought slipped from her mind. Part of her wanted to freeze time and step away from herself, untether her soul from her body and float like a phantom to where her master stood and watch the Mandalorian general—a minefield in a man's body—fight. Memorise each and every manoeuvre, bear witness to his mastery, make notes of all his ministrations and track every muscle in his body as it worked to make him the perfect killing machine.
And part of her wanted to join in on the fun; the part of her that held combat close to her chest, that saw it as second nature. The part of her that was no stranger to violence or any of its consequences.
That part won—she would have many more chances to analyse him, Fallon reasoned—and so she unfroze, ignoring the chill that pressed goosebumps into her flesh and advanced. What had moments ago been hopeless had now become child's play.
Fallon made a sport of the next few seconds, pushing through the droids with reinvigorated and relentless purpose. Instead of counting those who would oppose her, she counted those she cut down. She reached Nadya and Kil with an involuntary smile on her lips—she opened her mouth to speak, but Kil raised a hand to silence her.
She wiped the emotion from her face in an instant, expecting some kind of scolding. Instead, Kil flashed her a hypothermic smile, his lips a pale blue in the light cast by his sabre. "You've done well, Fal'ika." He cut a look over his shoulder, icy raindrops sliding down the valleys of his face. "But you'll have to recount it later. There are more droids on the way. We're severely outnumbered."
Fallon nodded. With Nadya at her side and Kil at her heels, she began towards the mouth of the base, adrenaline shaking a phantom jitter in her legs. The light of their sabres leading the way, three beacons in the dark, they passed over the gap in the barricade and wove through the corpses with as much respect as they could. (Shallow, half-dug graves. Fallon was grateful for the sleet that the sky showered upon her, a million frozen knives against the skin of her neck, her shoulders: it drowned out the fire. Kept it locked away in her nightmares.)
They ran until they reached the cluster of crystals, until the pillars' tomb-cold faces brushed against the Jedis' shoulders. The structures had looked monolithic from a distance, but now, in close-quarters, Fallon realised they were only as wide as she was. It was at once like a forest and anything but: an image Fallon conjured in her mind was that of a monster's mouth, made of swollen red flesh and gums, hemmed by rows and rows of pale teeth that spiralled round and round, shrinking in size until it reached the pit of a throat, an abyss. Fallon shut out the image as best she could—monsters were for children, and she was no child—and with the others, moved quickly through the crystal thicket, the rain melting off their backs.
"Master, wait." Fallon called out, stopping at the clearing just before the base's entrance. The door was standard-issue, not built for invasions or anything of the sort. Whoever had built this place had thought Jalid too small, too pale in comparison to its sister Ilum to garner attention from pirates, Separatists, anything or anyone that sought to possess the wealth beneath its surface. What a costly mistake. "Master! Nadya!"
Kil turned. Nadya did not. Instead, she moved to unlock the door, ripping open the wiring panel, her gloved hands slick with sleet.
Unfazed, Fallon spoke. Somewhere along the way, her bun had come undone; she had only noticed just now, with a chunk of her hair plastered to the back of her neck, cold as if frosted. "They'll follow us in. These doors have no defences. They couldn't keep out a mouse."
Kil quirked a brow. "How do you suppose we change that, child?"
"Can our sabres cut through crystal, master?"
The corners of his lips twitched. Nadya finally turned, having bridged the gap between Fallon's words and the thought that had threaded a tapestry in her mind. She shook her head. "It'll trap us in. Bury us, like a tomb." A pause, and she shook her head once more as if to concrete her disagreement. "It's a death sentence."
Fallon's glare was a death sentence in itself, but Nadya seemed to relish in it. "If we die, the Order will remember me as the failure, and you as the one we all should've listened to. Does that satisfy you?"
"No."
"Well, it's all I have to offer." Fallon wove her hair into a quick braid, tucking the tail into the back of her robes. A chill had settled in her shoulders, in the spaces between. She needed warmth. "I've examined this quadrant of Jalid—they have holographic maps in the Temple archives. There are multiple alternate exits through the mines, which I'm sure we can use if we find ourselves entombed."
Nadya said nothing.
Kil nodded. "If you are so sure, then proceed. Padawan Saxon and I will follow your lead."
Fallon nodded, relief passing over her features as she angled her lightsabre to be parallel with the permafrost plane. "I figure that if we cut down the crystals, it'll hold off the foot soldiers until Republic reinforcements arrive. I didn't see any hover tanks, other than the one used to fortify the barricade, but I wouldn't be surprised if they've been dispatched. They'll be able to traverse the ice with ease, but over mounds of crystal? I don't think so." She paced the crescent moon edge of the clearing, one hand clamped around her sabre, the other running fingers along frigid columns of crystal. "But we should have no problem climbing them if we're forced to escape this way. Did you send a distress signal from our ship, master?"
"Unfortunately, no." Kil watched her with keen interest. Nadya turned back to her task, seemingly finding success: the door groaned and its two panels of dark metal separated like jaws, opening like a wound. "Our communication facilities were damaged upon landing."
"We'll have to rely on the Jali's, then." Fallon stopped at the foot of a particularly broad pillar: it stood by the entrance of the base, a pale giant, a canine tooth. Perfect. The mineral resisted her sabre at first, and for a few seconds, Fallon felt foolish. Then, it began to give way. She worked carefully, keeping her blade steady in its task, and when she was inches from severing the pillar from its base, it began to teeter.
"Fal, careful." Kil warned, but Fallon continued, shaking off all doubts and distractions. Nadya simply watched, like Fallon was a particularly interesting beetle in a bell jar.
The crystal trembled. Fallon felt a hand close around her shoulder and pull her back just as the column came crashing down. Forced along like a dog on a leash, she tumbled across the snow, through the door's metal jaws, into the dark.
The ramp leading down into the base had been shrouded in darkness, illuminated only by the few frail sunbeams that broke through the storm seething above. The collapsed crystal only served to make the passage darker; with the entrance now sealed, all that was left was the glow of Nadya's sabre. Fallon turned to face Nadya, who dropped her hand from the younger girl's shoulder, her expression impenetrable in the shadows.
Kil was infinitely more readable. He gave his padawan a smile—like they shared a secret, like they spoke a dead language known only to each other—and then disappeared down the ramp. Nadya went next, taking the light with her.
Fallon gave herself a moment to regain her composure. Then, she stowed away her lightsabre and followed the others down.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
if you saw my mb message, there weren't meant to be three jalid-based chapters. however, i didn't really like how long "where is the glory" was and this chapter was heading in that same direction, length-wise, so i thought best to split it now. thank you to those who gave me their input!
this chapter has been plaguing me for like a month and to me it feels very forced and just... redundant, but i feel like i'm getting back into the groove again so hopefully that doesn't last. + i'm sorry that this story is so slow >:0 it'll pick up soon, hopefully! fal returns to mandalore soon and not long after that she (finally) meets lux so please stick around!!