Ask Their Dark Materiel

[Nakoa Singh]

Exploring part of the Witch-King's tomb had been informative but not entirely fruitful just yet. It was an extensive complex, by all accounts, and other work had called them away. But now there was time. Particularly as Nakoa believed they'd found hints of even more of worth hidden in the depths. Not just for himself or Arla, but for Apex. Time and effort would tell.

And maybe he just liked spending time with Arla and exploring the galaxy. It could be both.

A camp had been arranged around the main entrance they'd previously found. As always, Nakoa was busy arranging little wood-and-bone totems around a far perimeter. 'Wards' they'd called them, but they hadn't really come into play in a good, long while.

"I suspect this will be an interesting experience," he commented airily in Arla's direction. That wasn't sarcastic or anything, either. Nakoa was genuinely excited so see what Force-wrought nonsense the Witch-King had woven through his dwelling. And, of course, the prizes to be won when the threads were cut.

@Phoenix

 

[Arla]

These days, Arla felt like she was less busy than she used to be. There had been the passing thought of taking over the Corporate Sector, but she hadn't really capitalized on that. Ruling wasn't really what she wanted, and it sounded like so much work to take over.

She had decided to accompany Nakoa out to some weird world mostly because they'd asked. Wasn't much to it beyond that as the two went back a long way. It had been oh-so-long that the two had been in business together now, and with that came a bond that was difficult to break.

Still, Arla had mostly occupied herself with whittling rather than actually helping with the runes or wards, passing the time on her latest creation.

What are we actually here for? she asked, not actually looking up at Nakoa. It was a testament to that trust that she didn't even really know why she was here. She just kind of wandered in and relied on him to give some sense of direction to this whole shindig. Honestly, probably the best part of her life these days was just getting to do whatever she wanted. It was like being a Sith but with a different set of red tape and a whole lot less backstabbing.

 

[Nakoa Singh]

"For the adventure, of course." Nakoa paused. "And also, from what I can find, some very old original magic and, potentially, a sort of war machine." They shrugged. "When the Witch-King was alive, no one went entered and lived. All I've got are old, half-buried historical records and partially blocked scrying." The Wrean snapped his fingers. "But! I believe this section is where he was buried. Or, died in battle. One of those."

From a pack of Stuff he pulled out a scroll that suspiciously looked like it was made from human leather. Or something similar. A pair of glasses were pulled out and perched upon Nakoa's nose. "Allegedly, one attempted assault was met by a machine that struck terror in the invading forces and moved too quickly for the soldiers to track. I'm paraphrasing, but..." The goods were put away along with the glasses.

"Sounds promising, no?"

@Phoenix

 

[Arla]

Arla continued to whittle away at the wood in her hand, carving what was very slowly turning into one of the fathier back on her ranch. She thought about everything that had happened over the last decade and what she had built.

She listened as Nakoa talked about the witch-king and some war machine he had built. She thought about whether she could have killed said witch-king once upon a time. Then she thought about Raze, dead and gone, but... perhaps not? Sometimes she felt like she could still feel that pull. Like he was out there somewhere calling to her.

Unexpectedly - and frankly, relatively unlike her - her mind wandered to the point that she didn't actually hear the rest of what Nakoa said. They would have to nudge her again to bring her out of her thought, and she shook her head to bring herself back to the present.

Do you ever think about where we came from? About what would happen if we decided to try to set up our own Empire? Conquer the galaxy with Apex? Or kriff, even not with Apex, she said. There were few - if any - people in the galaxy that she trusted as much as Nakoa. Proven himself time and again as a reliable person in her life. And yet there were things even he didn't know about her.

Maybe it was the fact that Raze was gone and there was now a power vacuum or maybe some piece of his spirit had clung to her. She didn't really know where the thoughts came from.

 

[Nakoa Singh]

Arla's spaciness didn't go unnoticed and, at some point, Nakoa paused their infodump to poke them with the notebook and a questioning stare. The return question wasn't one Nakoa anticipated, and he stared even harder for several long, quiet seconds.

Then he blinked. "Naturally," he replied with the air of someone answering an obvious question. "Have several outlines for different methods." This is what Nakoa did when he was bored. Invent nonexistent future puzzles and then solve them. For fun. Unlike Arla's spacing out, this was entirely in keeping with his character. Nakoa's talent for planning tended to span farther out than most might consider reasonable.

"But what kind of empire? And do you mean coming from the Sith, or our own traditions? Is this time for wine?" They sat in a folding chair opposite their decades-long friend and business partner, relaxed and curious as if this was just another philosophical discussion they'd run face-first into. They wondered, specifically of course, where Arla's thoughts were wandering to, and from. He couldn't really answer her question until he knew.

@Phoenix

 

[Arla]

Arla fell back into silence again. Of course, Nakoa had thought about it and made plans. The thought amused her and she had the equivalent of an internal smile at the thought.

He asked a lot of follow up questions - which was fair - and she didn't have great answers to them. More and more time spent in quiet reflection was probably the answer to where it all came from.

She snorted slightly as he asked if it was time for wine. Probably, she said, glancing up with the faintest glint of expectation in her silver eyes. She knew that he was always trying out some new vintage or tweak from his vineyards and it was always a new experience either way. Since they'd moved in next door to one another, she'd had a near-endless supply of wine samples, and she wasn't complaining.

And that was another question. Should she have just settled down and bred fathier... maybe raced them on the side. Drink wine until she had lost her edge to oblivion? It sounded mind-numbingly boring if she were honest. But wasn't it just a matter of time until her ticket got punched? She'd had more than a few close calls over the years. The truth was that she had spent most of her life chasing shadows of her parents and had only recently begun to accept that she was satisfied with what she had built.

So why now this sudden resurgence of these thoughts after several years of silence?

She glanced down at her hands and the blood she knew flowed through them. Raze may have been dead - she had felt it or something comparable to it - but she still felt like she heard his call. It was in her blood, and she knew more than most that blood was powerful.

I think it's in my blood. I just... think about it sometimes. Dark thoughts to burn worlds and conquer, she said. It wouldn't come as any surprise to Nakoa. It was the larger scale version of what she already did: she built Apex not because she had to but because she enjoyed the thrill of the hunt. It satisfied pieces of her that were the intermingling of Raze and Andruil.

Under any tradition we wanted, she said, looping back to the actual question he had asked. Call it Sith, call it a rival Empire, whatever we wanted, she said. Is it even conquest your want or just destruction? she thought to herself.

 

[Nakoa Singh]

Nakoa waved his left hand in a peculiar way and a bottle floated from somewhere. A soft stomp of the foot raised a flat-topped stone platform between he and Arla, serving as a table upon which the bottle and two glasses landed. Just as Arla remembered and very much a Nakoa thing to do, he was constantly striving for the next goal, the newest thing, the higher step. Including when it came to wine-making.

Even in so mundane a thing they never lost their passion or ambition for growth.

"Renfry was not a conqueror," he stated plainly. A fingernail rang against the still-closed bottle, then pointed at the drinking vessels. Rich, burgundy liquid drained from the container and filled their glasses, swirling to aerate as it appeared. He'd grown again in their time apart, always learning some new little tidbit or esoteric trick. The semi-dry wine smelled faintly of woody oak, tart elderberries, and sweet honey.

"She was an arcanist, a scholar, a ruler, a hunter, a killer. She built new things with old, dead bones. And, admittedly, burned a world or two in the process." The question there was inherent. Renfry hadn't been known for her presence on the front lines, but for her terrifying presence and sheer skill, for killing the Eternal at last.

Of everyone that Arla knew, Nakoa was probably the least likely to consider the importance of heritage. "Blood matters little," they'd stubbornly insisted, whether that blood came from kings or paupers. Simply put, they didn't judge others, positively or negatively, by their bloodline.

Even so, his questions and statements were for clarification, created from curiosity. Nakoa's ambitions had always been knowledge, skill, and power. They fought for the sake of fighting and learned for the sake of learning. The vessel by which they grew didn't much matter so long as they weren't made to stand still for too long.

It was known, though Arla had always valued Nakoa's opinion on things, that the Shaman would follow the Nightsister on whatever path she walked. Sometimes he just had to pick apart the situation first. Then, and only then, would he propose a plan. Besides, they both shared urges toward violence of some kind or other.

Nakoa shook his head. "Being called 'Sith' means nothing to me. The Order refuses to learn the lessons of its forebears. Our traditions haven't been theirs for years now." He spoke more softly. "What shadow's glimmer has caught your eye, dear Arla?" He paused.

"Is it that jewel around your neck?" It's not as if Nakoa had never the thing or the dead-cold and twisted aura about it. Arla had never brought it up so Nakoa hadn't felt the need.

@Phoenix

 

[Arla]

Arla watched as Nakoa summoned a table for them out of literally nowhere, finding a moment's amusement in the things that the two of them were capable of doing. Things that others wouldn't even believe possible were mundane actions.

Arla sipped at the wine that was poured, continuing to think as she listened to Nakoa. No, he didn't care much for the Sith, and she certainly understood why. Perhaps it was foolishness to want to return to the Sith, but there was no denying that they more than almost any other sects had delved into the powers of conquest and domination.

It was rare that Arla let anyone through this icy walls, but Nakoa was one of the few. One of the only people in the galaxy who she felt she could open up to and be honest with.

Eventually, his eyes settled on the jewel she wore around her neck. She never went anywhere without it, though these days she found her own power sufficient that she seldom had to tap into its power anymore.

She reached up and unhooked the clasp, setting it down on the table between them so that he could pick it up and touch it. He would immediately feel it tingling against his fingers, pulsating with a raw and pure power. Such a small thing but contained within it was the power to level the galaxy.

There's something I've never told you, she said. In all the years they had known each other it had been a complicated topic. The truth about Emryc and Raze was something she couldn't tell even him because it wasn't really her secret to share. Instead, she would have to broach this topic in an alternative way.

Mother wasn't the type to conquer, but she is only half of my blood. My father... she paused, trying to pick the right words for what she was going to say. She saw Emryc as her father, but Raze was tied to her.

Raze is my spiritual father, she said. It's complicated sorcery, she said, shaking her head to indicate she didn't want to speak of it.

I still feel him, she said. I was there with him the day he sacked Ithor. I helped him bring the city down, she said. It was a darkness that still clung to her all these years later. Thousands dead and she had helped do it.

 

[Nakoa Singh]

Long, slender fingers plucked the jewel from the witch-smoothed tabletop. Ever attuned to such things, it was more than tingles that spread up Nakoa's fingers like lightning. Impressions, echoes, fragments. The power in this jewel was immense, domineering, and twisted. And it was bound to blood. Amber-gold eyes examined it with a frown beneath, suddenly sharp and piercing as if attempting to stare straight through the material jewel into something some minuscule facet of its existence.

They eventually looked up again, the expression gone like the tide, as Arla spoke and Nakoa listened. She wisely cut off his immediate question of what a 'spiritual father' was and consigned himself to wondering.

His visible shock at hearing about Arla's 'father' was only somewhat more compared to learning about her mother. Which is to say, Nakoa's expression was best described as 'mild shock.' His eyebrows raised and he made an irreverent joke out of some habit or other. "I didn't expect that. Tiamat's not your aunt too, is she?" They didn't see how that could be possible, but then again...

Arla's participation on Ithor was surprising. Moreso that she was there rather than the death toll resulting. Apex was in the business of killing and the bodies Arla and Nakoa stood on stacked higher than mere thousands. Artillery bombardments, ship-cracking, and armed riots weren't cheap in sentient lives. "So it was the two of you, not Raze alone."

Nakoa returned the pendant to the table and paused to sip their wine. There were many questions. Too many. They didn't believe it was the death toll that clung in shadow around Arla. Rather, it was the reason for her being there at all.

"Why did you go? Did you find what you were looking for amongst the dead?" A second, longer pause, proceeded by a certain pensive frowning.

"Why not tell me before now?"

@Phoenix

 

[Arla]

His joke was met with a completely straight face mostly because she wasn't actually sure if he was joking.

Mother and Tiamat were very close, she said. Ah yes, the twisted family of Arla Thorne of the Forgotten Valley.

But not by blood, no, she said. Was Tiamat Arla's aunt by most measures... well, yes, actually.

Yes, she said as he confirmed if it was the two of them that had done it. Arla's own face had never been connected to the killings, but there was a time where she thought her lot would be irrevocably thrown in with her father.

It was the intervention of Jaikus and Mother and even later on the intervention of her father that had kept her from falling to Raze's influence for good. But there was no question that at the end of it all there was still that voice in her mind. The song in her soul that pulled her back toward the darkness.

No, I didn't, she finally said. She had found something among the dead. Some answers and more questions, she said quietly.

As for the final question, that was a more complicated question. She was a naturally secretive person and in no small part because she wanted to protect her family. She had only told him about her mother when it became relevant. That was Arla all over, wasn't it?

There was no real reason to discuss it, she said. Ever the pragmatist. Not to mention how do you even do that? Knowing Arla it would have just been blurted out the way it was now, but at least now there was a reason for it.

It all happened before we founded Apex. Back when I was still grasping for where to land in a galaxy where I'd just been thrown out of the Empire I'd been trying to build up, she said.

 

[Nakoa Singh]

Nakoa blinked. Of course, they were close. Was it a surprise at this point? No, not really. As for the rest, well...

The Wrean slapped a hand against his leg at Arla's very reasonable answers. "Just so! This I accept." Even with a shielded mind, deceiving Nakoa was a difficult prospect and he sensed none whatsoever. It wasn't exactly a matter of trust from Arla. Simply put, the subject hadn't been one that mattered until now.

"Then, a more practical question: Do you want to follow the urge, see where a road spoken into being by another might lead? Or, make it your own and build your own?" They sipped their wine and waved a hand to refill both glasses.

"Apex is situated such that a new form of 'Empire' could be built. But what kind? I'm confident you and I, in a month, could burn a city world down to nothing and no one would even know we were there. So my question is... Do you want a throne, or an empire?" It was probably a strange-sounding question, but to Nakoa they were completely different things. Thrones and crowns were just titles and symbols that meant very little.

Apex hadn't become famous- or infamous, perhaps- for an abundance of titles. It was where it was in the galaxy for practical reasons. With neither thrown nor crown, they influenced the galaxy in ways it wasn't even aware of. They didn't need to advertise their prowess, it was self-evident even if much of what they did was beneath notice. Nakoa felt this was the ideal.

"How would you choose to follow these urges?"

@Phoenix

 

[Arla]

She could almost see Nakoa having the realization that Arla's family was a convoluted one, but it all made sense in the end, didn't it? Renfry, Raze, and Tiamat had all been at the top of an empire at the same time. That proximity was bound to form lasting relationships. What's more, they were all at the top of the Empire together because they had been close before they got there.

She thought about Nakoa's question for a moment about wanting thrones or empires. She had power in great abundance, but she had intentionally maintained a great deal of anonymity within the galaxy. Perhaps that was what was bothering her. Stupidly, she understood, but sometimes knowing something was dumb and being able to overcome those ocmpulsions weren't the same thing.

Uncharacteristically for her, she didn't have all the answers. In fact, she had brought the topic up in part because she didn't have them. If she could have simply reasoned this out on her own, she wouldn't have needed to speak it out with someone she trusted, she would have just... done it. That had always been her way for better or worse.

There's power in anonymity. It lets us do what we do, she said, knowing the only reason she could travel so freely in the galaxy was precisely because Apex was neutral and she was a relatively unknown commodity outside of the PMC community.

But there is a level of fear and respect that my parents commanded that I probably never will, she said, realizing that explained nothing.

Since leaving Raze's side, I haven't bowed to anyone, she said. Not Kings or Queens or other royalty. She had set it in her heart that she would bow to no one any longer.

But I've been faced with petty insults and the likes that people would have never dared to raise against them, she said. She knew even as she said it how stupid this sounded, but the issue wasn't the insult itself, it was the lack of respect. And it was of her own doing through her anonymity. What she craved was power and subjugation. Submission.

I know I'm being foolish, she finally conceded so that Nakoa didn't have to be the one to say it, and yet foolish or not it didn't leave her mind.

 

[Nakoa Singh]

"My teacher would've called it 'wisdom', I think." Of course it was a foolish desire. Sentient life was, by and large, an existence of emotion, not machine logic. Those who insisted they ran solely off of the latter were delusional. Knowing oneself was more valuable than blind arrogance. As for bowing and insults, well...

He leaned forward and scooped sandy soil up from the ground. It slipped in an hourglass stream between his fingers into a neat little pile in his opposite palm. Nakoa had an uncommon view on all the humanocentric social niceties that plagued the greater galaxy. He'd bowed plenty, in the same way as a clever Sith might. Wielded like a well-crafted lie, stiletto-sharp. To the receiver, a sign of submission. To Nakoa, a meaningless gesture.

But then, they were an odd one, even in a sect that taught temperance of pride as a core aspect. What Arla described was a core need of most people. But her words didn't paint the picture of an Empire.

"It sounds to me that you crave recognition, not a throne. For your deeds, your effort, your skill," they stated bluntly, though not unkindly. "Just as Raze did." Gold eyes met silver from where they'd be observing the falling sand. "You want to shine brighter than parents' shadow. Is this not so?"

@Phoenix