sand stone sun and two sith

[Hark]

Darex would awake on top of a Sith statue four stories tall, some important figure’s tomb from long ago. About six hours had passed. Dawn light was trying to break through the clouds, but the stormy clouds had swelled and covered the whole valley, the sky streaked blue and gray with pockmarks of yellow. Every now and then a rumble of thunder shook the valley, the stone statues trembling a little.

Darex would be incredibly thirsty, raspy voiced and gasping for water. Two liters of water would rest by his side. Ashley had refused to sate his thirst herself while he slept. If he had died, he’d die, and that would’ve been that. But it appeared the Sith Acolyte had more in him than she had estimated. Maybe the darkside had pulled him back from the shining white light.

“Awake huh? I wasn’t sure if you’d make it. After you fainted, I carried you up to the tallest statue as a sacrifice. Here you slept for six hours while it stormed all around us. Imagine the fireworks, the smell, if it had struck you, the lightning that is.”

He lay on the statue’s big bald head, the scalp a flat surface, large enough to lay someone down. Ashley hunched on the statue’s ear, scanning the desert below, the smoldering mounds of Pelko bugs.

“The lightning helped you once with the bugs, too bad it didn’t finish the job.”

Of course the lightning hadn’t struck Darex. The lightning had already chosen her. Why would it strike him and choose another? A light rain began to fall on them.

“Dream about anything?”

 

[Vilado]

Darex gasped awake, half expecting to see insects clawing his innards out. To his relief he saw nothing and was safely atop a statue. His thirst was unbearable and he gulped the water he found greedily. His Master had rescued him, partially. He was as safe as one could be in an ancient cursed valley with a trained Sith.

"I did. I dreamt of the lightning. It saved me, it killed the bugs. In my dream I saw it flash and crash and it consumed me yet empowered me. Did you not mention lightning earlier?"

The whole thing was weird. Of course it could be explained scientifically, if the Force had not been involved. The lightning had been attracted to his power. It struck as if to aide him. He had so many questions, he would be sure to look into it.

 

[Hark]

"It saved you? How do you know that it's not just saving you for later? That the bugs weren't just an appetizer and that you aren't the main course?"

She was annoyed at the whole scene. Only Ashley should have divine intervention, not some random Acolyte.

"We aren't done with the lightning yet. No, no, but we're going to call it to us this time. No miracles involved."

Nothing moved on the ground below them. She looked to the sky and stuck her tongue out, tasting the rain. The water droplets seeped down into her core, every wrinkle and crease of skin, rejuvenating her, and then it stopped. The wind swept through the valley drying their clothes, swirling up sand and bug guts into little dust devils. The darkside still skulked alive down there in the form of mutant animals and nameless things, but that part of training was over. They were entering the last phase.

"The thing about lightning is... you should never use a power you can't handle. An overconfident Sith especially. Very soon, you will know what I mean when I say that. You will know what true power is."

 

[Vilado]

Darex stood and began to draw upon the Dark Side. Her words hinted at something malicious. The human was weak from the previous battle but he was strong enough to hold his own. His hilt flew to his hand but he did not ignite the blades.

"Power destroys the weak, I am not weak. The bolt was called to my Force lightning. I do not believe in coincidences, my lord. I am ready to call it back when you are, I will master it. I will control the lightning, it will heed my command as it did before."

Darex stood defiantly. He would tame the dark power thundering in the sky, or he would die. He was ready.

 

[Hark]

The sky simmered like an Earl Grey Tea, searing up the wind which ran leaping over chasms of canyon and hurdles of boulder drinking up the rainsweat land in great inhales of gust and squall until it came to the valley and here it stopped and saw it for some bottomless trap from which it'd not reel up from again if it fell into and so like a skinny child hopping from one rock to the next across a stream so it started. The statue heads of the Dark Lords peeked up the top of the valley like some prairie dog standing eternal guard against the sun and the wind leapt to these heads teetering a droughtdance of balance atop a totem pole before skipping to the next and in such a way crossed over.

Tentacles awhip in the gale, Ashley climbed back onto the platform from the statue's ear. She unzipped her pack and rummaged and produced a diamond shaped thing tarped with taut nylon. Copper keys hung like earrings from the thing’s flat body and jingled. A thin wire weaved between each key before becoming a thick balled winder that drooped down. She untangled the wireball into a single individual strand of wire and curled the end around her wrist and into her hand, the middle slacking against the ground, the first of it attached to the kite, the wire bare and unsheathed.

"This is a kite. Ever heard of one? People use it to fish for lightning."

She held the thing above her and pressed a button on its spine and it jolted out and expanded as an umbrella or engorged vulva would. Now it looked like a true kite, big as the Sith herself. She tossed it off the statue into the shearing air below their nest. The wire tightened and jerked her a couple steps and clenched shut her jaw and then she knew she had hooked some ancestral antediluvian entity that really ought not be hooked, a Sky squid with wind as endless tentacles. The kite drew up sharp into the yonder in some short violent arc of war. There it flew against the mountainline of clouds, bulbous heads of Collosal squid, fluttering as if dodging a barrage of blasters and lasers and cannon ferocious enough to raise the dark dead themselves up for this final battle. Lightning zagged and etched a crackedshell sky capping a desertboiled planet. Yellow power enough to reanimate all those who slept here and raise an army of Sithensteins to decapitate the force bloodblack in a new prophecy for a new era.

“I’d go ahead and ignite the lightsaber dear.”

The wind twisted cloudward still farther and the many horned lightning reared up and saw the kiteling bait and charged haywire. Zaps of white ziplined down the wire and into the hand which held it. The Sith Crusader screamed in throes but crumple she did not. Indeed, the electricity seemed to melt into her like wet into a paperbag. Sweat steaming off her in some Leyden jar sauna. She squealed, eyes rolled white and mouth a delicious curve, then turned and with her free hand shot at Darex a lightning bulk and bent like long crooked fingers laid overtop each other.

A point blank Sith lightning attack aimed at his whole body, continuously lasting for 10 seconds, Ashley 10 feet away from Darex atop the tall Sith statue. Execution by electrocution if Darex wasn’t able to use his lightsaber to block or deflect near all of it. She had used Tutaminis to absorb much of the electricity which had traveled down the wire, that power a mere fraction of the lightning bolt itself which’d struck the kite. This was the best way to get rid of all that excess energy. If he survived, he’d try it next.

 

[Vilado]

Darex watched cautiously as the Twilek launched her kite. It twisted in the sky and Darex knew it would be struck soon. He ignited his blades at the Sith's command and waited as she controlled the kite.

The bolt that struck sent waves of electricity down the wire she screamed and Darex drew on her pain to strengthen himself. She seemed to be in some sort of ecstasy but Darex still held his guard.

Suddenly she shot her hand out and Darex sensed the gathering of Dark energy. It leapt from her hands and traveled at the man faster than he though possible. He raised his blade and caught the lightning on it. It traveled up and down and where his hand met the hilt burned. After ten seconds of grim determination and pain the lightning stopped.

He assumed that he was now expected to shoot lightning, his Master's face told all. He summoned forth his anger,passion and malice and let the dark power go through his hands. The blue lightning leapt from his hands and traveled the distance between them. He hoped this was apart of some ritual, otherwise he just threw lightning at his Sith master.

 

[Hark]

Force pull'd into that free exlightning hand was her lightsaber from out her pack. Clicking on in a blood squirt of red and meeting the lightning leaping toward her from Darex. The electricity crackled against the saber and she angled it downward so the energy would discharge into the stony surface of the statue they were standing on. Still, a few spectral fingers of it flung themselves past the defense and stung her like a swiping hand of beestinger fingernails across her left shoulder. Painful. The white of a furious sea crashing against a cliffside escarpment, it possessed her eyes and foamed her mouth and for but a moment she forgot the kiteling and the sithling and spoke tongues to some lightling god whose wrath she had incurred.

Calm down, she thought. Calm down. Be the eye of the storm.

"Darexxx. Please do not interrupt the lesson."

Careful to avoid crossing the lightsaber across the wire, a taut diagonal line going up into the sky from her other hand, she prayed the lightning would hold off for but a minute longer as she spoke. Using tutaminis to absorb the electricity from the lightning strike had drained her and she'd no choice but to block this way. Annoyed at her apprentice's brazenness and audacity. This wasn't a charade or theatrics. There was a point. There were several points. Perhaps she should have explained it all to him, but Ashley liked to lead by example. Oh well.

"You have to do what I did you kuncklehead."

She thumbpressed the lightsaber's off button, extinguishing it. Then she walked over to a pointy stone sticking up near the side of where they stood, some devilhorn eroded by wind and time, and tied the wire around it so the kite wouldn't fly off as she explained things. Nor would she be electrocuted now.

"Darecks, my peapod. When the lightning bolt strikes the kite, the electricity travels down the wire into the person who holds it. It's enough to kill 80 men. If you can't absorb or deflect away enough of it with tutaminis..." she wiped some rheum from her eye and flicked it off into the air.

"Take the wire, wrap it around your wrist like I did. Fly the kite for a minute into the clouds and wait for the lightning to strike it again and light you up. Feel the energy blasting inside you, the tide coming in. Then with the force, change or dilute as much of it as you can into a lesser shock, more harmless. Do this until the electric tide goes out."

She retreated to watch on the edge of their platform, standing on the statue's ear.

"Think back to your childhood. Didn't your folks have toys like this? Oh, that's right, asteroid... But still the solar wind blows far harder than these little breezes here. Well let's see, let me put this in your terms... Hold the wire around like you're walking a prisoner, some defiant, armless Jedi on a leash who's trying to escape from your grasp. Yeah! And hold on tight until the lightning strikes."

 

[Vilado]

Darex held the wire tightly. Fear wracked his being. Fear of pain. Fear of failure. He mastered his fear and made it do as he commanded. It built inside him as the kite took flight.

High in the sky the kite waved and bounced until....BOOM. Thunder shook the sky and pain gripped his arm but he was prepared. He called the Force to block energy. It was difficult as first but the lightning became depleted by the energy. What got through burned him to the core but he let the energy gather and build.

The agony was nauseating, and this was only a portion of the bolts power. With the power ready to burst he guided it from his center to his other arm. He raised it and the torture tracked from his fingers up and out into the sky. The biggest blast of lightning he had ever produced.

Darex fell to his knees. His hand was smoking and he felt as if the energy had carved a path from his well of emotion to his hands. He suspected it had forged a permanent path for his emotion to manifest as pure energy.

"So...incredible." Darex had to breathe deeply but he managed to stand as the Force flowed into him to restore his weary body. Indeed, Sith training was not for the weak.

 

[Hark]

How romantic, Ashley thought. Darex in a will you marry me position on his knees, his barbequed palm all anointed and holy like.

She climbed back onto the statue's head from its ear as Darex was busy firing lightning off into the sky, took off her small backpack and dropped it in front of her. Ashley sat down, crosslegged, exhaling and inhaling from the gut. A gust of wind picked up and swirled around her robe. Ashley focused on controlling it, leashing it to her will. Calm. Concentrated. The wind fluttered around her like a rabble of butterflies on string chains tied to each head tentacle, tentacles aflail like they had alien hand syndrome.

"What are you feeeling? What have we learned here today?"