Part 1: Strings Attached
Tossing and turning in his bed, Markus made his feeble attempts at sleep for the night. Drifting in and out of consciousness as his exhausted body seemed to fight against his restless mind.
But these weren’t the only disparate parts of himself that sought to wage war with each other. Deep in his mind, wrapped behind layers of subconsciousness and fully conscious walls, the natures of the man known as Markus Vienmann buzzed with questions, thoughts, and painful, painful feelings, brought to the surface by the fitful dreams filling his rare moments of sleep.
…
It began in a dark room, as it always did, or perhaps simply a room of pitch blackness…it had been hard to tell.
Markus could feel his arms and shoulders suspended in the air by long strings, reaching up into the sky, for here he was not a man…here he was a puppet, a marionette as he always suspected. Only now held up by wire and strings, rather than obligations, desires, or his own nature.
Slowly the strings began to pull him forward, pull him further along into the darkness. And equally slowly did the darkness give way to visions, scenes of his life preformed for him by marionettes, much like himself.
He saw in these curious performances his arrival on viscara, his friendships with Ira, Callista, and Sandra, helping Rai overcome the darkness that made her join the sith.
But he also saw his failures, his losses. He saw Viscara overrun with sith, he saw Ira’dana’s drift into darkness.
Most of all, he saw the face of Rai floating in her kolto tank, even as a crude facsimile he could see the peaceful resignation in her face even as her body was in tatters.
He could also see himself in the scene, angry and grieving, lashing out at her, blaming her…unable to come to terms with his grief, and tainting his last few moments with her.
He tried to hold his head down to close his eyes and not look at what was happening in front of him, but his head was held firmly up and his eyes would not shut even through the tears that were now flecking them.
It lasted for what felt like hours, as he was forced to watch his friend die all over again, forced to feel every bit of heartache and regret and loneliness gnaw at his heart once more.
When his puppetmasters ran out of painful memories to replay, they turned a sickly eye towards the future…Of friends dying on mission so horrifically, there would be no body to bury, of Ira’dana taken out of his arms by the mysterious collector, of his own certain death.
But most painful of all was the final sight at the end of the track…
An image of a sith trooper with their helmet taken off, in their home with what looked to be their wife and their teenage son, laughing, eating, enjoying one another’s company.
At the sight of domestic bliss, The puppet felt the bitter gall of envy rose up in him. Furious that this architect of his pain could have happiness when he’d spent his life denying it to others.
The Markus Marienette struggled and fought and thrashed…and for his efforts, one string, the string on his right arm…had finally snapped and he reached for the trooper, who now having finally noticed him, stared at his approach with wide-eyed horror, unable to run or even scream.
Then with one of his spindly wooden fingers, Markus tapped the trooper on the head, and from the touch the soldier’s body seemed to rot away, collapsing in on itself in a putrid mess of green bile and ichor as his family watched on in weeping and wailing, a sound which elated the vile puppet to no end, a sound that echoed his own miserable heart mired in tragedy and spite.
“They will know the price of their “Freedom” of their “Power”…they will know that nothing is free, that there will always be…strings attached.”