Sunlight flickered in cheery brilliance across the canopy of leaves, sending dappled shadows chasing one another across the blue-tinted grassoid that was so prevalent on this world. The park was a lively enough place even this late into the afternoon, with twilight whispering around the corners. Beings of a variety of shapes, sizes and colours meandered through the park, hastening on their way home for the evening, or lingering with companions or associates. Here, a couple arm-in-arm wandered idly down a curving path. There, a mother pushed her daughter on the swing set, the child’s delighted laughter drifting on the light breeze. Further down the walkway, a collection of somber-looking, conservatively-clad beings clustered in conversation.
“Mommmmmmmy! Higher!” the childish voice broke out gleefully over the peaceful afternoon. The girl was perhaps 8 or 9, though delicately enough made that she could pass for much younger, and sweetly garbed in a bright crimson dress. Her night-black hair flew behind her like a streamer as she squealed with delight, her mother obligingly pushing the swing harder so she flew upwards into a higher arc.
A smile flickered across the mother’s face… almost an older clone of the child on the swing, matched in the same pale skin and raven-hued hair, though the mother’s was cut far shorter, barely making it past her shoulders. There was no doubt of the relationship between woman and child; the stamp of inherited genetics lay firmly marked between them, the only clear difference shown in the eyes. Emerald in the child, sapphire blue in the mother. They could have been any mother and daughter, on any world in the galaxy. Innocent, inevitable… and invisible.
Cerulean eyes glittered in the fading sunlight as Kyla Mim gave her daughter one last push.
“That’s enough now, Elaysia. We should head home, your father will be waiting for us,” Mim advised, turning and shielding her eyes against the setting sun. The shadow of her hand above her brow disguised the sharp squint of eyes as she narrowed her vision in on the trio of grey- and brown-clad businessmen not far away. The wind was tugging their words in her direction, haphazard and intermittent, but it wasn’t their conversation she was concerned with.
“Moooooooooooommmmmmmmm….” The child’s protest escalated upwards into petulance, as the swing flew back and forth in slowly-diminishing arcs. Elaysia twisted in the plastic seat, looking over her narrow shoulder towards her mother, her young emerald eyes also locking for a bare moment on the group of men nearby. “Do we really have to go right nowwwww?” she demanded, the swing slowing enough now for her to kick her black shoes sullenly in the dirt.
Her mother glanced back towards Elaysia, and a wide, open smile shaped itself upon her lips. “If you want to beat Daddy home, we do,” she told her daughter and allowed a laugh to escape as Elaysia eagerly leapt off the swing. She spun around towards her mother, the dying sunlight painting her crimson dress in bloody hues as the emerald of her gaze met the glittering cerulean of her mother’s.
~The other two are collateral. Irrelevent.~ The thought slid between them, from mother to daughter, with a silent, chill determination that painted a lie of the sweet innocence, and peaceful park. The child’s emerald gaze glittered acknowledgement, her smile widening happily.
Elaysia bounced eagerly away from the swing set and stopped to pick up what could have been a treasured toy, carefully tucked away while she flew on the swingset. It was polished and white, long and thin, and looked remarkably like an oversized fang. A peculiar toy for a child to have, perhaps, but children picked up such things….. particularly when their father was a former Dark Lord of the Sith, and wrestled the tooth in question from a rancor’s mouth with his bare hands, when the child in question was barely an infant. Children and their toys.
“Mommy, I need a drink,” Elaysia said aloud in her brightest little-girl voice. She’d been practicing for weeks on Daddy, charming him with her childish sweetness. Elaysia had been taught to understand the need for deception, for artifice until it was time for truth. The ways of the Sith were steeped in deception, manipulation, half-truths…. She had been learning to wear masks such as these since she was born, and her Mother kept her constantly practicing at it, learning to utilise the asset of her apparent innocence while she still had it. She tugged at her mother’s pale, calloused hand and pulled her towards a water fountain behind where their targets stood.
Both Mother and Daughter maintained their firm grip upon the Dark Side, wrapped in it and through it, and they felt the shifting tides of current that indicated the meeting would soon be breaking up.
“I’m going to go right over there and check the timetable for the transrail, okay sweetheart?” Mim replied with just the right volume and degree of ‘casual’ in her voice. She pointed clearly to the holo-display board of departure times for the nearby transrail station, on the far side of the cluster of businessmen now making their farewells to one another. Elaysia gave a nod, and made her way with a bounce in her step to the water fountain. And coincidentally, flanking their target.
~Now, Mim?~ Elaysia asked with the impatient eagerness of youth, as she leant over the water fountain to take her drink. The thought slid through the seething majesty of the Dark Side, smooth with the familiarity of years of practice between these two. Standing before the display board, Mim let her awareness of her surroundings sharpen. If their target moved off alone, further down the walkway, he would be almost invisible to anyone else and they could follow him, and take him at their leisure. Coincidentally sparing the lives of his companions. If, however, he went the other way, they would have to move now and take their chances. There were fewer people about now, and the leafy coverage of overhanging trees and shifting shadows of oncoming twilight would make their actions indistinct, uncertain. At least, until the bodies hit the floor and that would be long enough for them to move. It wasn’t compassion that made her reluctant to kill the other two; it was efficiency. Dispassionate necessity dictated Mim’s every action on a Hunt, and it was an approach she was firmly instructing her daughter in.
Mim waited, hands on her hips as she appeared to be gazing at the flashing display in front of her, fingers twitching over the hem of her powder-blue jacket sleeve, feeling the edge of her holstered weapon.
Their target finished his farewells, and turned.
The wrong way.
~Now~ Kyla sent to her daughter, quicksilver and firm.
Shadows flashed, black and crimson, emerald and sapphire, as mother and daughter spun simultaneously to face their targets. All pretence gone now, as their hands reached for the weapons of their kind… Mim’s leaping eagerly to her fingers and igniting in the familiar snap-hiss of a lightsaber being born, the azure beam screaming into existence. On the other side of the trio of men, her Daughter’s fingers clenched around the rancor tooth and a similar sound filled the air, a heartbeat after hers. Yet there was an echo, as her daughter’s rancor-tooth handled lightsaber flashed into life – an echoing, fading scream, the dying scream of a long-gone Imperial whose crystallised heart powered the weapon.
And even as that dual snap-hiss was fading into the breeze, Mother and Daughter were moving in synchronicity. The Mother’s movements were smooth and practiced, a lifetime as a hunter and mercenary and Sith Lord showed in the swiftness and grace of her blindingly fast approach; from absolute stillness to lethal intensity in the space of a heartbeat. The Daughter lacked the same decades of practice but showed skill for her age and size, the avid potential of a born hunter eager for the kill. In the blurring flash of crimson and azure blades, their target’s two compatriots were cut down, their screams gargling into silence before they could even be born. Only the sizzling hiss of instantly cauterised flesh filled the air as two bodies fell with an identical thump, to the shady leaf-covered ground. The man who remained standing stared in uncomprehending shock, his heartbeat staggering into overdrive as his fingers twitched on their first step to reaching for the holdout blaster in his jacket. And Mother and Daughter…. figures so barely impinging on this man’s awareness until now that he couldn’t comprehend what had happened… were suddenly both at his sides, their blazing weapons flashing blindingly before him, around him, behind him….
….through him….
Simultaneous strikes and counter strikes, diagonally slashed through his body and he fell.
It was all over in a handful of heartbeats.
Mim flashed a glance around, tasting the world around her with the Force. Nothing; nothing yet anyway. She shut her lightsaber off, nodding a silent approval as Elaysia did the same. The weapons were efficient, yet flashy and sometimes drew more attention than was necessary. But they were far more precise than a blaster, and in this case, the better tool for the job.
“The right retina, Elaysia,” Mim murmured softly, her gaze flicking constantly from shadow to shadow, one distant figure to another, her senses spread so deeply into the Force that she could almost feel the trees breathing.
“Of course, Mim,” the child replied calmly, kneeling beside their dead target. Actually… the child wrinkled her nose up at the crispy-human smell and reflected that they’d done more than just kill him. They’d nearly cut him in half. He wasn’t exactly an exciting target; a corporate data pirate, with more ambition than sense, who’d raided the wrong system. But he was a man who had killed before when necessary, so there was always the hope that the hunt might have gotten interesting. Elaysia tasted that faint disappointment at the back of her throat, and banished it quickly. Mim always got upset when she gave in to her impulsiveness, reinforcing the importance of acting, rather than reacting. A smooth Hunt was a successful Hunt. And in this case, the lesson being taught to Elaysia was in artifice and misdirection, rather than combat.
Elaysia flashed a quick, impish grin as she flicked out a slender blade from the sheath wrapped around her thigh, hidden below her knee-length little-girl dress. With all the focussed intensity that many of her age-mates might display when playing a game with their dolls, Elaysia took firm grip upon the blade hilt and pressed its point sharply below the dead man’s right eyeball. It was the work of a few moments to extract the eyeball itself, disconnecting it from his body with a flick of her wrist, the blade slicing smoothly across the cluster of nerves. Her Mother was already extending the container that would carefully preserve the eyeball, so its retina could be extracted by their client upon delivery.
When Elaysia had queried that element to their task, her Mother had explained it quite calmly. The eye itself would provide the necessary genetic information to confirm the target, and thus earn them the credits for this little job. But she had also remarked that she suspected the retina itself was a necessary goal for their client, perhaps to gain access to the stolen data files, or the dead man’s credit accounts.
All of this was part of the greater landscape of Elaysia’s training. Tracking the wild beasts of their homeworld with Father. Tactics with Uncle Caste. Live fire training exercises with Mim on mercenary jobs.
“Done,” Elaysia whispered, clamping the seal into place around the eyeball, the last grisly remains of their target.
Mim spared her a brief smile, nothing at all like the wide, laughing mockery of pleasure that she’d displayed earlier. But Elaysia preferred this one; it was real. And it meant that Mim was proud of her, that she had done what she was told and they’d succeeded. She had portrayed a child well, which was a feat for Elaysia, given how outside her usual experiences the behaviour had been. She was a child who’d been raised by Sithbeasts and learned to harness the Force before she could walk.
“This way,” Mim said quietly, tucking away the eyeball, as she’d tucked away the lightsaber hilt, and taking her young Daughter’s hand firmly in her own. “You did well, Elaysia.” The low-pitched praise made her Daughter tingle slightly in shock, an unnecessary addition to the nod and smile; usually all she received for a job well done.
“Thank you, Mother. Do you think Father will be satisfied? I could have used a more precise attack angle on that first man. If he’d resisted, I might have missed his heart on the first strike,” the child fretted quietly, as they walked with casual swiftness down the silent path.
Mim regarded the speeder bike parked at the edge of the park, as they approached it, emerging from the other side of the leafy glen. “As long as you are aware of the imprecision, and work to correct it in the future, your Father will be quite pleased with you,” she assured her Daughter. “You are still learning, Elaysia, and skill with a lightsaber is like all other aspects of your training. You will become more competent with it, as you become more confident.” Mim paused as they reached the bike, bending down to pick her daughter up and set her carefully at the back of the bike. “It was well done, for your first kill with the weapon.”
Elaysia sat up straighter, emerald eyes glowing with satisfaction as her Mother slung one long leg over the bike and started the engine. She wrapped her fists firmly into her mother’s jacket and hung on tightly as the vehicle shot off and up, heading straight for a long line of traffic to lose themselves in before circling back to the spaceport.
Where the Darkest Knight waited to carry them safely back to Almania. Where her little brother Anwyn waited in envy for his own offworld training. Where her father, Lord Kueller, awaited their return.
Back home.
Memoirs of a Sith Lord 