Pain.
Red-hot flares of it, lightning forks of agony racing through her veins, pounding in her skull and throat. Again.
Her sunken emerald eyes fly wide open in bed with a scream that tears at her throat, tasting blood that bubbles with every wheezing, ragged breath through her bulky respirator. Writhing at the memory of the nightmare flames, Iskellia falls out of bed with a new flare of pain as her scarred left side runs harshly against the carpet.
Iskellia Sarken crawls frantically over to the bathroom of her run-down apartment. Pain, erupting behind her eyes, turning her already hesitant movements clumsy and fumbling as she grips the sides of the sink. She reaches up to the back of her head and slaps the release control of the connection nexus, undoing the harness of straps keeping her life-giving maks in place. A quick twist of the release valve along her jaw, and an accompanying hiss as the pressure between her negative-flow hospital-grade heavy medical respirator equalizes with the room. One last gasp – useless, sucking fumes – before the mask falls away, clattering into the sink. Iskellia doesn’t even take time to stare at her two-faced, ruined visage in the mirror. No time –
“Aaagh!!” her cry is little more than a breathless wheeze, a rasping whimper as another wave of agony pounds through her head. The bathroom swims in front of her, and she fumbles in her medicine crate by the sink, bloodshot eyes staring wildly at labels that swim and dance in her vision. There, that one - she lunges at a bottle, carefully emptying a measured amount into her hand even as her brain throbs and her hands shake, vision flickering. No matter how much she’s tempted to down an indiscriminate handful, with the amount of different medication she takes, she knows that adverse reactions and overdosing are very, very easy for her weakened system.
“Stupid girl,” a man’s voice suddenly sneers with venom behind her, Alderaani nobility dripping from every syllable of his accent. “You’ve done this before. The pills won’t make me go away.”
“Go… to hell… Dad,” Iskellia wheezes, her voice a breathless whisper outside the mask, tossing her dosage back with a gulp before scrambling for her mask. It repressurizes with a hiss, the negative flow pulling air into her remaining lung. Her head still swims, though, and she reaches up to its side and detaches the filtration container of liquid kolto - she can feel it’s empty just by weight before even checking the level indicator.
“Oh, I’m quite certain you’ll get there before I will,” the hallucination of her father observes with a chuckle. She raises her head, sunken and haggard eyes staring beleagueredly in the mirror as her father stands behind her: Tall, thin, black hair in a widow’s peak, piercing emerald eyes, and an outfit of understated elegance in blue and black and gold: the winter colors of House Thul, House Sarken’s closest ally and staunch Sith Imperialists. A shoulder cape tossed to one side, green and black – Sarken’s own colors. Fitting that he’d choose an outfit to emphasize the Sith over his own family.
Kandor Sarken purses his thin lips at her in the mirror. “With the amount of chemicals you pump yourself with, girl, it’s a wonder you continue to cling to life as long as you have.” He paces back and forth over her shoulder. Iskellia pays him little heed as she pulls a package from the cabinet, breaking the factory seal on a hospital-grade kolto canister. The blue liquid glows faintly, a sign of freshness, as she slots it into her new mask. A deep breath, two, three, and she feels the pounding lances of agony in her skull and along her body beginning to recede.
“I raised you to be many things, but never a painkiller addict,” Kandor scoffs. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, girl, that you would disappoint me again – as always! – and instead just add it to the list of your titles you’ve used to bring shame and ruin upon our House.”
“Shut up…” Iskellia whispers.
“Druggie. Idiot. Dullard. fffFREAK…!” He spits.
“Shut UP!” She snarls, the expression twisting the scarred side of her face into a mask of fury.
“Or what? Hmmm? You’ll yell at me some more? Oh yes, that’s always worked out so well for you,” he says sourly. “Then again, you’ve always substituted volume and emotion for wit and tongue. Like an infant, you think shouting louder will get you what you want.”
“I hate you!!” She spits, feeling her wasted frame heaving with emotion.
“Yes, you do,” he agrees boredly, picking some lint off his sleeve. “Let me know when your hatred spurs you to more than spoiled tantrums, stupid girl. Then get in line. Many people hate me, and you’re so far away from being able to ACT on that hatred that I likely haven’t thought of you in years.”
“Likely…?” Iskellia pauses at that choice of word.
“Oh yes, you know I’m not real, not really here. I’m just your own imagination, your own feverish hallucinations,” He says far too cheerfully. “Isn’t madness wonderful?? You have no clue what your father Kandor Sarken actually thinks about, or whether he even knows you exist at all.”
The vision begins to laugh. “I’m just your own self-hatred, reflecting back at you in the same abusive voice that belittled and berated you all the rest of your life!”
“NnnNNNNGHHSHUTUUUUUUUP!!!” Iskellia’s cry rises into a scream, telekinetic throbs and waves of power leaking out of her, uncontrolled and wild. The mirror cracks within its frame, pill bottles and debris flying around the room. That scream was too much for her system, though, and a gout of blood pours into her mouth as she retches weakly, collapsing against the sink. Heaving, she drags herself up, unsealing the mask to puke crimson pain into the sink.
That same dream, again.
The same nightmare, again.
The same stupid visions, again.
“Cast into the fire…” she mumbles with a derisive snort, feeling the flame-scarred side of her body stretch and jab her with ever-present pain. " 's not that kind of fire, old man…"
Unbidden, the answer rises up from her mind even as she finishes the sentence, a fragment of memory, a half-remembered conversation. “It’s not that kind of fire, Iskellia…” Callista’s quiet voice. “The Forge fire heals and warms, it doesn’t consume and destroy. It soothes, not burns.”
“rRRrRRRI KNOW that!!” Iskellia growls at herself in the mirror. The cracks in the shattered glass crease and distort her face, vertically slicing her down the middle into human and monstrous reflections. She watches her gaunt, bloodshot eyes flare in anger. “It’s what you keep SAYING over and over, I GET IT already!”
But…do I? The counter-question immediately springs in her brain, reflexive self-doubt after years of belittlement. Stupid girl… A fading echo of her father’s sneer. She grits her teeth reflexively.
Her weary gaze catches on a square of flimsiplast on the edge of her mirror, and she reads it aloud. “Fan the flames. Strengthen the–” She coughs hoarsely. “–th’Forge.”
“Fan the flames. …They grow higher.” She hears her voice go dead and wooden at that sentence as she slumps over the sink, clutching her skull and digging her fingernails into the burn-scarred flesh of her left side. The weight of her bed crushing her, the endless screams, over and over and over, her flesh blackening and melting…
“…Th’fire…Flames grow higher…!” She gives a whimper, slumping against the sink, a sob and cough welling in her throat. She knows she’s having a panic attack, but the concern feels distant as her nightmare looms again, fresh in the mind, tasting the ash, choking on it, drowning in smoke and darkness and
NO. That tiny flame of determination flares within her once again, the one she clung to in the middle of that burning hell, the resolve that even if her body and the entire world burned to ash, she refused to die. Refused to give in. Not today, death. Not my time yet. I won’t let it.
“I won’t let it!!” The cry bursts from her throat even as she finds herself on the floor of the bathroom again, her mask still rasping harshly in her ears, wheezing from her panic attack. She squints, focusing past the throbbing of her head on the scrap of flimsiplast on the floor in front of her – knocked down in her fall? – and snatches at it desperately.
“I am the Forge,” she reads aloud dubiously. Stupid. When had she written this? Probably after hearing Callista recite it at training. Unbreakable, old man Beryn’s word for her whispers in the back of her mind.
“…I am the Forge,” she repeats in a whisper, hunched around the flimsiplast note. “The Forge is me.” An unbreakable forge. A crucible, the Artisan’s Guild called it. A container where impurities are burned away from ore, leaving a refined, stronger metal. She winces as a flash of her memory returns, screaming, burning, drowning, choking, melting– but not dying. Emerging from the crucible, weaker not stronger, but undeniably refined. Burnt to the bone. Flesh, dreams, innocence, childhood all melted away in the crucible. Her crucible.
“Cast my doubts into the Fire…” She draws a deep, shaking breath. Stupid girl! Can’t you see what you’ve done? Her father’s rant and pointing finger, melting into the fire.
“Cast my fear into the Fire…” The secret terrors of her other nightmares – Qyilisc electrocuting her to death, Beryn turning her away as unteachable, Callista’s friendship fleeing from her weaponized wrath – deep terror she had only ever admitted once to Callista and nobody else. Into the fire.
“Cast my–!” A wheezing cough as she sits upright on the floor. “–my hate, into the Fire…” Her father’s ever-present sneer, and a fragment of her first deep conversation with Beryn echoing in her mind.
“You don’t want to kill him.”
“Yes, I do!”
“Bantha shit. You just want to know WHY he did it.”
“Cast my hate into the Fire…” She repeats again, closing her eyes. Hard. Let it all burn away, melt into nothingness. That strange, frozen moment when she was trapped in the flames, too overwhelmed by pain to do anything but lie there and scream, frozen in an endless Now where there was nothing but survival. An almost meditative state of raw determination. Burn it. Burn it all. When fire grows hot enough, everything burns. Flesh, bone, wood, metal…even Hate itself. Even Darkness.
Everything burns.
And suddenly, with that realization, it clicked in her mind, like a last triumphant puzzle piece. The pain faded away. The screams drifted off like smoke on the wind.
“Burn away the Dark within…” she murmurs the mantra, her mind awash in the all-consuming fire as she barely makes out the rest of the little flimsiplast note. “Reforge the Blade of the Heart.”
The Blade of the Heart. She already knows what that is. That piercing determination, the drive, the animal urge to live at ANY cost, survival made so urgent and manifest that she would drag herself to a cybernetic body through raw telekinetic mind-power if it just meant she’d live another day. THAT kind of deadly drive frightened her in its purity, its intensity, for she’d only felt it in the inferno on the very edge of death itself. The Blade of the Heart was keen, yes, oh so keen.
“It is Light.” Yes, it is. The harshest, purest Light in the galaxy.
“It is Balance.” Everything burns.
“I am one with it.”
And for a long, frozen moment, she was. The pulsing of her respirator fading away. The pain, gone. Her body brimming, overflowing, flooding with the raw energy and power of the Force. Running through her veins like blue fire – strange to imagine it, that something intangible has a color? – roaring through her twisted bones and feeble body like a bonfire. A place of power, of energy, of limitless potential, of euphoric connection beyond that sad sack of flesh and lung disease sitting on the bathroom floor, where her sheer willpower can do anything, the Blade of the Heart shining from the center of the galaxy like the sun of the Deepest Core. Iskellia felt her spirits lift as she floated in the wild current of the Force. Such moments of connection were rare, but powerful. Intoxicating. Joyful.
…But always fleeting. Even with the Force roaring through her, biology cannot be denied as her asthmatic lung coughs hoarsely, and that’s all it takes to snap her back, draw her back down into her feeble, sickly prison of a body, the two-faced corpse of a woman too stubborn to die sitting on her bathroom floor. She coughs again, muttering a curse under the mask as the ever-present pain roars back, her burns flaring and protesting and agonizing with every motion as she slowly climbs up again, staring into her shattered mirror. Pale. Sickly. …Oh, yes, hungry too, her body helpfully reminds her as her stomach growls.
She gives a long, depressed sigh, still wistfully remembering the fading edges of that glorious Force connection. “Soup,” she mutters aloud, both weary admission and midnight-snack decision. “Some’a that Nuna broth wontons…”
Flicking off the light, Iskellia leaves the bathroom, shuffling like an old lady towards the kitchen, and something to do to keep herself occupied in the dead wee hours of early pre-dawn morning…
