Trigger Warning: Trauma
A heart’s beating sets the rhythm. A constant pounding thrum that resonates like thunder throughout her entire body, as consistent as the copper taste between her lips. She feels hot, suffocated even, as she chokes out. A small green hand reaches out for help.
A pair of armored boots found themselves stuck in the muddy water and dirt; Grounded, sinking, unable to get free. A slave to the inevitable. A slave eternal. The gilded tattoos of chains that marred both of her wrists were heavy, tangible, as they grew from out of her flesh and tugged her pleading arms down to the swamps waters.
Pulled down, she was barely a torso-- And still that thrumming never left her ears. As her face pierced the surface of the swamps waters, her eyes, both real eyes, remained wide and open, unable to close.
The heartbeat’s pace quickens.
They didn’t peer into the murky depths, glazed eyes looked unto something more. They looked upon sundered corpses, ripped, torn apart relentlessly, some quivering in agony. Refused death as a means of further torture.
She could feel it then, a burning in her lungs, a racing in her veins. A darkness she’d touched before-- that she’d purged before, now choked the breath from her lungs. She could do nothing but seize and gasp in its grip. Her fingers turning, her bones twisting.
The thrumming of the heartbeat increases. It’s louder now. Closer.
A spasm to her back brought her low, face to face with a puddle. She faced the face of a monster, jagged teeth, three protruding claws, and eyes that shined with a mystic and knowing fervor, patches of hair as white as snow on its scarred scalp.
“The sky turns red, and fire rains from the sky. You are beneath it when it burns.” It would speak impossibly with its hissing maw. The clawed hand reached from the puddle, grasping her aching throat and tugging her in. Slowly, painfully, into the puddle that bore its reflection.
The sour taste of copper still lingers in her mouth, it’s impossible to get out. The heart’s beat is deafening, disrupting her thoughts.
Further in now she was elsewhere; the cold deck of a ship. Chains still, unable to move. In between where the cockpit and a room for terminals meet. She watches herself now, and a chestnut haired Padawan. Her lips move to speak-- to scream, but those impossible teeth prevent the notion entirely. They’re still there.
She writhes in her bondage, her chains, sinking still even through the floor of this ship. More show up, they celebrate, they cheer, and the ship begins to lurch. The floor gives way as she sinks through as easily as softened mud.
It’s frantic now. So loud, so fast, surely at this rate it will beat free from its confines soon. A desperate release.
A forested planet greets her gaze. It’s different, she watches from eyes unmoving. Trapped in the withering corpse of a beast. The bright red flesh of her cheeks all she could make out of her form. She was large, however, and still monstrous in scale. A hand eternally clutched for something that was missing.
Forcefully focused eyes fixed on a conversation in the distance. Four Padawan. An Old Man with a widely brimmed hat. The words she couldn’t hear-- She didn’t want to hear them. She knew them. Intimately, familiarly, they burned in her chest with the weight of failure, foolishness, and shame. The trapped mind couldn’t even scream in the body of this corpse.
The heart remained as it was. A steady tempo, like a rancor’s fist against the hull of a freighter.
The corpse too would begin to sink, as her vision became half obscured for a moment. In time for all those faces, her own included to look back at her; pity written in each amber eye forced into their sockets.
Another hard fall preceded her. Left on her hands and knees as those same four Padawan stood away, backs turned on her coldly. She faced a singularly extended hand that reached for her head, blackened, uncaring, fingers sunk into it greedily. Plying the flesh like a baker’s dough, her eyes wide with horror, soaked with tears.
She felt his fingers reaching for something strange, something that hurt. an ambiguous shape that couldn’t be made out. She could feel him trying to tear this shape out. Defiance burned in her breast momentarily, and she could see him being forced out painfully.
No, that wasn’t right. His hand was left in her mind, leaving clawed finger marks after being nearly dragged out, the rest of his arm disappeared. Severed at the shoulder. A saber moving too fast for her to see had left the shadow extinguished. She was sinking again.
Pound. Thrum. Shake. Everything was shaking, everything was burning. A violent ache that almost made her forget, but it was just on that teasing cusp, a painful precipice of madness.
Snow Capped hills met her gaze, and the feeling of darkness surrounded her. She could feel something was different, her right eye was gone. Half of her world had gone dark. Another figure shrouded in robes began to walk away with it. Her lightsaber was forced into her hands, and she watched, unmoving, as four dark figures took turns. Stabbing their lightsabers into her brain, one by one. A crown of blades weighing her down further.
A look cast over her shoulder saw a tuft of messy red hair, dropped to his knees. Head bowed as if waiting for an axe to fall. She watched as he rose suddenly, lifted by an invisible force. Thrown further down, creating a hole in the snow that expanded until she was swallowed with him.
Plains. Viscara. She could see her Master, she was talking to him. The subject terrified her, even though the words never met her ears. It was like those fingers in her mind were squeezing her brain, preventing comprehension. The world began to dull, blacken, until the color was drained from it entirely.
The girl and her master stood, sabers ignited a dull gray. Surrounded by peers, monsters, sith, and the screams of a trillion souls being snuffed out simultaneously. They began to chant, a cold, haunting sound that seemed to revere, herald even. An avian screech pierced the thrumming of the heartbeat, it resonated with righteous indignation.
The crowd of people parted to reveal a wall of shadow. Something was walking inside of it. Something obfuscated forcefully. This figure stepped forward, cloaked entirely in darkness, flanked by several distinct figures. Old faces that looked at her with pure malcontent and a burning ire. Bearing sunken eyes that shimmered with a frustrated desperation.
The figure raised something in front of the smaller woman’s chest. He held it out, it was the only color in the room. Between his closed fist radiated a gentle lavender glow… His fingers would unfurl and it would fall into her awaiting palm.
For this moment alone did the heartbeat stop, the anguished cries pause, and the room was wiped clean by a wave of brilliant light that removed shadow entirely. The man in front of her smiled down at her, gripping the back of her palm and squeezing the crystal tight in her palms.
She knew him. She remembered him, even though she couldn’t see his face. Her eye softened with sorrow, with pity, pain, and apology. She began to sink again, even in his grip. Desperately she pulled to remain in front of him, to keep him in reach. As he walked away in robes as white as the driven snow, unburdened.
The thrumming returned, the screaming flooded back in to overwhelm her senses, everything was so loud. Intrusive and bothersome. It enraged her.
She looked to now be on a rooftop, her saber was drawn. Following its length saw that it pierced the heart of another, blackened robes and blanket of white hair. The figure had no eyes to weep. The saber was twisted and then pulled free, satisfaction nestled in her breast. Betrayal answered with blood.
The saber disappeared, and the injured figure suddenly burst forward and launched her off the building. She fell again, a free fall. Until her back met something solid, painful, but warm.
A cursory glance saw that she lay in a puddle of blood, her blood, the blood of others. Among a mountain of bodies. She could get up, so she would get up. Crawling through the mud on her fingertips. Now she could see it. Blaster fire all around, bodies burning, her fellow Jedi dying.
Her palm extended to help, but she found them once more woefully bound. Tugged by a chain further into the pile of corpses. The taste of blood lingered on her lips, the sound of blasters firing, and people calling out for help-- Her help. They needed her and she couldn’t do anything.
Further she’d sink until she was somewhere else. Somewhere familiar. A cage that she’d called home many times before. A shock collar framed her neck, and she felt she was a Jedi no longer.
The woman tried to tug herself free, but she was too weak. All she accomplished was the well known pain of high voltage running through her body, and the smell of her own flesh cooking under its relentless shock. She screamed out, cried out, and bleary eyes looked up to anyone she could ask for help.
Her palm extended once more and those old faces stood before her again. Well robed men and women of refined mystic qualities. Seniors in status and stature. And then she saw a face she recognized, her master. These figures of contemptuous gaze drew their sabers all at once.
Fear filled her heart as they slowly leveled their weapons around her shoulders. A momentary regard of respect, before they raised their weapons once more. All poised to strike. Finally words began to reach her lips.
As the executioner’s axe fell, and the heart’s beat was at its loudest, a crescendo of voices cried out in unison with her own. “HELP ME!” Desperation met with a deafening silence as her skull was split into several pieces.
…
The Padawan shot up out of bed with a palm extended desperately. “STOP WAIT-” She’d cry out full of fear. Looking around she saw her room, she felt the mechanical whirring of her eye. She could hear the sounds of steady breathing from the woman in the bunk above. She breathed a labored, relieved breath. She was awake.
Mireial stirred and leveled her gaze on her goldfish in the bowl aside. Her lower lip trembled, but still she tried to smile at him. Mire clutched her knees and pulled them close to her chest. The nightmare was still fresh in her mind.
And that fear came from many sources. The subject matter of her torment. The faces she saw, the way it tried to make her feel. How vivid each painful wound felt against her dreamed flesh.
The worst of it is none of that, however. What brought a tremble to her hands, and quickened her heartbeat was the realization of something. Perhaps more accurately it was something she’d already known and had just been returned to her.
Fear gripped her heart, the reality of it dried her throat. Glistening eyes wept openly. Her mind reeled and ached with a familiar resonating pain. A hollow feeling replaced with a familiar throbbing agony.
She remembered now, and from here there was no going back.