“I cannot stay here Sandr, those weren’t Imperial, and you know that.” Kowani stated as she tried focusing on the source of the question through the meandering conversations all around her, wishing he had chosen somewhere other than Capital City commons to parlay his debriefing.
“Of course they weren’t Ani, I am not here to argue with you, only to ask you to consider giving us more time.” Alexsandr Kallus pleaded with her, Kowani doing her best to tune out the obnoxiously charismatic voice, it’s depth always tugging at emotions she didn’t have time for.
“Ani, we are only now beginning to compile the information N’dali sought fit to filter to us. Let us complete that task so that we are able to formulate a best course of action.” Areti’s voice scorched through Kowani’s mind, her instinct directly conflicting with her emotion as she fought for subjectivity through the statement. Kowani turned directly toward the exiled Imperial certain that her expression conveyed the malevolence that tore at her own soul.
“Best course of action for whom?” Kowani stated, “that team was sent here with only one objective.”
“And you will now assume yourself the target of course.” Kallus replied, a slight ruffle of durable fabrics told Kowani the man had crossed his arms in front of his chest, the scratching ruffle of facial hair under the slight pressure of his thumb and forefinger enough information to undermine his feigned sarcasm.
“Sandr, they were of Keno. If Hera were the target, or anyone else, they would have killed her immediately. There is no negotiating…” the scent of powdered Leinn seed and the fresh ripened Meilooran flesh upon the Twi’leks breath told Kowani Hera was just over her own shoulder. She turned slightly, “and they would have Hera.”
“That is nothing new Ani, they have been trying for some time.” The Twi’lek answered, her voice wavering slightly to Kowani’s ears, assuring the Mirialan that Hera didn’t believe it any more than she did.
“You misunderstand, in the past, the attempts were Imperial. Keno was never Imperial, as you would understand it.” Kowani replied, containing her frustration as best she could.
Kallus blew out a slow breath over the murmurs of conferring parties several tables over, Kowani able to identify their discussion revolving around the necessary quantities of daily fishing excursions to trade for ripened crops in the Semel district, kilometers removed from the rocky lowlands to the West. The overpowering and constant murmurs determined to drive her to the brink of her own sanity. “She is correct, but to that particular point Ani, we will always remain stronger when we are able to watch each other’s back.”
Kowani felt her own waves of desperate exasperation crash against the walls she had to erect to prevent the erosion of her soul, “of course I understand that, but even in the depths of space, N’dali and I still could provide that…” she stopped herself before the comment ripped her from the roots she had tentatively planted, “and I will not sit idle while that threat remains.”
“Given your actions on the Reaches, Ani, you are anything but idle.” Hera said quickly, bereft of any form of malice Kowani could identify, although she was quickly beginning to determine nascent or offhand glances by the sound of twitching orbital muscles, ‘which are being nullified by all this damn noise…’ she thought to herself.
“Understandable, but tactics cannot be argued Hera. I am the target of Sylde’s actions, that is a point I refuse to concede. None of you know him like I do.”
“And how well is that exactly?” Kallus asked, taking a sweeping step through the door Kowani had opened.
“Enough to understand what Keno meant to the man Sandr.” Kowani admitted, turning toward Kallus’ voice, “despite the fleet under his command, that facility will always remain the most important thing to him.” She continued, relaying some of the least memorable attachments she had also found difficult to relinquish. “If he has imposed some self-directed motive to hunt down escapees…”
“Surely he is not motivated by self-directive…” Both Hera and Kallus sought to question her statement, cutting Kowani off.
“He answers to only one person, you cannot tell me that Sidious has some sudden concern, some heartfelt inkling, to bring the family back together as it were. O Two Six is proof of agenda, I saw her….” Kowani interjected but fell suddenly silent as memory itself interceded, reminding her, yet again, of what she had lost, “I saw her escape that night. So don’t waste any more of our precious time, Sylde is acting on his own behalf and the longer I stay here the more danger the rest of you are in.”
No one said a word for long moments, the deal consummated several tables over with firm handshakes and pleasant farewells. Numerous sips of cafe and sweetened teas as patrons sipped from porcelain mugs, swirling the noxious scents about the room to an olfactory crescendo amid the clanking of dinnerware on hardened clay and glass alike. The undertones of constant murmurs and raucous laughter tearing at the fabric of the tides of anger Kowani was singlehandedly suppressing begged to implode within her.
“Yards manager Kell says the ‘Morai’ will be flight ready in a day’s time Ani...CZ has begrudgingly offered his services…” Hera said as she moved from behind Kowani’s seat, her soft footfalls circling to the Mirialans right as Kowani felt the Twi’leks warm hands upon her knee. “What else do you need?”
“Sabine…” Kowani blurted without thought given to the question.
“That was settled before you even had a choice sister…” Sabine said from Hera’s former position, startling Kowani outright. ‘I didn’t even hear her…’ Kowani thought as the Mandalorian placed a hand on her shoulder.
Kowani smiled in acknowledgment, feeling the bond as it tightened even more, firing the roots of her own resolve deep into the ground at her feet and swatting the stewing rage within to the side for the time being.
“...Why CZ though….?”
“He’s the only droid willing Ani...it appears you don’t make friends so easily.” Kallus laughed in return.
✦
Every level within the Capital provided the same scene, citizens thronging to escape from some unseen terror that had gripped every last one of them. Kowani knew she should share in the collective fear but balked outright at the thought, leveling the subconscious sentiments and emotions under the weight of the power that coursed through her veins. Klaxons overlapped one another as Sundari’s meager kept up, stride for stride, with the city’s elite, each heading for respective armories after assurances that their progeny were being sequestered into bunkers built to withstand the most aggressive attacks and bombardments. Directives in Mando’a beckoning the warrior race toward battlement, anti-airborne batteries, and specific wings self-propelled fury.
The long-awaited Imperial incursion was at hand.
“Tristan, take to the Southern battlements, Rory, direct your battalion to the Sentinel Reach!” Ursa Wren unleashed, her voice a strong contention for authority over the city’s Klaxons themselves as it reverberated, “bombers approach!”
*Kowani felt a child in the cluster of such chaos, looking frantically around for any sign of the sister she had chosen, “Sabine?” She shouted, the weak attempt squelched immediately by the continuous string of barking orders from the mother that had chosen her, “To arms, to arms!” Kowani’s mind torn between the awe she could not ignore as she watched armor clad warrior after warrior take to the skies on rage fueled jet packs based solely on the demands and orders from the clan Matriarch, and soul gripping fear for the impending doom she knew the Mandalorians were ill equipped to contend with. *
*Kowani scanned the scene over and over, from left to right and back again, relying on the bond that secured her knowledge in the fact that the purple helmet would not be far from her. *
“Kowani, you’re with me!” Rory shouted, her own voice aggressive and commanding as the familial cousin, Cordon’s sister, held a hand of invitation toward the Mirialan while the soldiers within her battalion jumped from the balcony’s edge, engaged their packs, and tore through the openness of Sundari’s central hub on their way to the top most parapets and offensive gunnery. Rory gripped the offered hand firmly as Kowani wrapped both arms tightly around the muscular woman beneath layers of Beskar and watched as Ursa nodded lightly before diminishing quickly into the throngs of the living sea of furious residents.
As they neared the lower port, Kowani realized Rory was angling for the central access shaft, knowing it would take them to the small circular platform that stood at the very pinnacle of the city’s dome. The view would provide optimal vantage for any incoming threat but also leave them exposed to the worst that threat could dole. Several of the city’s offensive countermeasures were launching through tubular silo’s entrenched kilometers distant from its borders, belching thick clouds of exhaustive smoke across the plains. Search lights, built within each parapet circling the city, raised their incandescence above the roiling smoke that was quickly rendering the planet’s surface invisible through its thick haze.
‘This is chaos!’ Kowani thought to herself as she swung her A-180 off of her shoulder and entrenched herself beside the family cousin.
“Lay down arms...everyone….Lay down arms!” The woman’s voice did its best to steal attention away from all else. “We have assurances that the Empire will not occupy!” Kowani wasn’t sure who owned the voice, only that it commanded respect on an intimate level. “They are here to assist in our defense only!” The voice continued.
Kowani looked around again after an unsuccessful attempt to locate the voice’s owner, torn between the seething rage within to extract its own unseen vengeance and the will to comply with the booming voice, loosening her grip on the blaster’s hand grip. “Drop that weapon Ani, and I’ll kill you myself!” Rory spat the words, the rage within them directed toward the source of treason barking for attention.
“Lay down your arms!” The voice rang over the din of preparation, Rory’s grip on Kowani’s elbow loosening entirely as the woman at her side sprang to her feet. One of the launched countermeasure reaching its assigned altitude in a blossom of daylight that cleared her view. A massive flare that shone its brilliance on the throngs of incoming TIE/sa’s, each incandescent burst shining brightly with aggressive reflection through the mirroring surfaces of each circular forward canopy.
“Look Mi Lady!” Rory shouted in defiance, “those are not vessels of a peaceful envoy!” She continued, Kowani swiveling her gaze from the oncoming menace to view the unique helmet tucked under its owner’s arm, eyes, and a notable beak, portraying a certain nocturnal airborne bird of prey. She continued her gaze upward to lock on to the face, the deadly serious eyes framed by short cropped red hair and the scorn they conveyed toward those she begrudgingly led.
Kowani observed the woman as she followed Rory’s pointed finger toward the approaching threat, the opening eyes to their extent telling her that Lady Kryze understood fully that she had been usurped and betrayed.
“Gideon assured us….” Bo-Katan issued forth through the increasing murmurs of those around them all.
“Assurances mean nothing without the symbol of our people Lady Kryze.” Rory shouted in contention, pressing her hands downward, Kowani identifying the supplication efforts of those loyal to her cousin. “Where is the Dark saber? Unsheathe it and lead our people to battle!” Rory continued, spitting the words through the fury that birthed them.
Kowani watched the surprise leach entirely from Bo-Katan’s eyes, a well-known dejection taking its place as they absorbed an intense melancholy, her hand falling slowly to an open space at her belt. ‘She doesn’t have it….’ Kowani thought to herself as her heart skipped a beat within her chest. The anger that had taken rise to root out the confusion began to congeal into an ancient sorrow, matched only by her reaction to the fate of Keno so many years prior. She knew that pain, that sorrow, as it manifest across the face of the leader of her race just as the dull thuds began to hammer away at the air, ordinance finding whatever mark those pilots deemed proper. The thuds grew louder and with more frequency as they began hammering Kowani’s chest. A tear finding its way through the emotional barriers the Mirialan had erected as she turned toward the oncoming bombers once again, raising the barrel of the A-180 in compliance with her cousins’ pleas and in direct defiance of Lady Kryze’s failed allegiance. She locked the watery eye onto the high-powered scope lining up one of the pilots black helmets with the thin red cross hairs. Kowani felt a hand on her shoulder as Rory took to a knee beside her, “Let your tears fall free tonight Ani, I fear it will be followed by a thousand more.”
Kowani blinked her eyes in horrified amazement as the swarm of SA’s approached, the city’s defenses finding several targets only for their positions to be refilled just as quickly by a secondary wave of the same proceeding in the same vain only a kilometer above. The combined pulse and whine of the Ion engines began to tear at her hearing, blending into a monotonous drone that only increased the closer they came. Kowani primed the rifle and let it crescendo through to a full charge before she unleashed white hot hell from its muzzle, the scope conveying the destruction taking place well beyond sight as it tore through the forward canopy, discharging its payload only centimeters from the pilot. Kowani would never know how many proton bombs the vessel contained as each of them reacted beyond expectation to the violence of her shot, causing a resultant reaction that incinerated the TIE/sa and four more in close proximity. The heart pounding adrenaline surge, the rush of surprised victory, were snatched away within the same breath that bore them as she could only watch those positions vacated by the descending, mangled bombers instantly re-occupied by the reinforcing wave from above.
Within seconds, the static pitch of the SA’s whining Ion engines were overtaken by a much higher pitched version that punctuated the arrival of something even more deadly. Kowani knew the sound intimately. The last sound she had heard over the peaceful winds and blending rustle of Conum Arnia’s dense foliage before a single explosion ripped her mind from reality. “Rory, we need to redeploy...incoming Interceptors…”
“Ani, there is nowhere left to go….” Rory shouted through her helmet, lining up her next shot with a patience that could not be taught, the stock of her phase-pulse Amban as motionless as the durasteel crenelation it rested upon before it fired a violent discharge of its own, carrying its owner back a few centimeters with vicious recoil. Kowani could only silently observe the volley sail through the air between them and the firestorm of carpet-bombed explosions following the threatening waves of SA’s that had delivered them, missing the lead vessels entirely.
It took Kowani but a second to register Rory’s intention as the bolt seemed to miss the approaching vessels with intent before she understood its true purpose, followed quickly by an airborne fireball toward the rear of the advancement. ‘The pilot is lucky.’ Kowani thought as the consuming fires the ship had become rippled a cold blue within the red orange flames a few seconds before its payload defied gravity upon reaction sending scores of its proton bombs in all manner of direction. Even through the explosive chaos, the wall of hellfire, Kowani could identify the raining debris of a dozen or more of the SA’s, black silhouettes of mangled, twisted metal fell toward impending doom against the fiery backdrop of their own mission.
“What would you do Ani, what would you do if you held the power to bring them all down?” A dusky whisper pierced her mind, purposefully louder than the diverting Interceptors but not enough to drown them out completely. Kowani didn’t even shudder through surprise at the intercession, concentrating within her resolve on the task at hand.
“Such power does not exist.” Kowani replied, carried through her mind on the wings of instinct as she zeroed in on her next target.
The whisper only responded with a chortled laughter as it resonated through her bones, displacing the concussive shock each explosive thud conveyed, the impending doom of the firewall advancing too quickly for contemplation. Kowani gritted her teeth in absolution as she pulled her trigger, sending another of the bombers to its own fiery destruction.
“A demonstration perhaps?” The whisper returned, deep and resounding, without the flavors of either mockery or contempt that had laced the initial question.
A flash moment before Kowani ignored the query outright a brilliant stab of deep crimson lightning split from the sky as it shredded twelve of the forbearing vessels unconditionally, splitting off through multiple arcs to consume another twenty. Kowani lifted her head from her scope as she lowered the barrel of her rifle, a tinge of exultation mixed with a nameless fear that leached the feeling from her finger tips. The collective gasps of thirty Mandalorians her only cue that she had not been the only one to witness.
“The power to consume your foe is but a commitment removed from your very grasp, Kowani Y’mmat.” The whisper returned, again without the sardonic mysticism or condescension that had fringed its initial attempts to win her attention. “The power to save your people.”
“What commitment?” Kowani quickly asked as she began searching through the skies to locate the known incoming Interceptors, the visual displays within her helmet confusing itself through the myriad threats headed her way.
“A simple matter of devotion Ani. Become the anchor for your own anger, your fueled rage and vile instinct. Let go of the precepts that govern your own resolve and look to that place within that you refuse to acknowledge.” The whisper continued, bringing with it a form through her own imagination, the beady crimson eyes that bore through her soul on Conum Arnia. “I am not what you would have me be. I am you Ani, but only the basis of what you fear to become.”
“Embrace the Dark Side.” Kowani mouthed as she felt the form taking shape directly behind her, the inscrutable eyes focusing on the same hellscape she was.
“There is no Dark Side Kowani Y’mmat, remember?”
“There is only the Force.” Kowani said lightly, feeling, as she saw, the core ribbons of Force energy around her diverting themselves from intended paths and converging into a torrential river of itself, heading directly toward her. Flows that pressed themselves to avoid the conflict where ripped from that intention and siphoned against their own will into the conflagrating path of torrid and repurposed salvation.
“If it is your will, it will become that of the Force Ani. Your fear of corruption becomes your only hinderance, so I ask you Ani, do you possess the ability, the fortitude or conviction to stand firm enough through your own conviction?” The whispers asked bluntly as the voice absorbed the shockwaves of concussive force around her. Kowani flared her eyes open as the thought had never occurred to her, startled by the pressure of a hand upon her shoulder.
“Ani, we need to retreat. Take my hand.” Rory’s commanding shout was enough to penetrate the foggy veil of her own subconscious.
“Decision time it seems Kowani Y’mmat.” The whisper reminded her unnecessarily, causing the exceedingly fibrous tension to override the controlled adrenaline bursts.
“What must I do?” Kowani shouted the question as the drone of converging Ion engines began to maul their way through the walls of her psyche, precisely as intended. But there was no reply. No chortling laughter that would resound as it should, to mock her innocence into complete submission.
In the compartment of rationality, where decisions are weighed against feasible consequence, Kowani found only silence, one that she knew was the precursor to the only choice she knew she could make. She rose to her feet slowly as she cast the steady hand at her shoulder aside with a simple brush of her own and closed herself off from any form of external salvation, breathing in the torrential flows of the Force as she fused the inrush with the fires of her own rage. Kowani let the internal questions lose themselves within the cauldron of her own anger, each connection or kink in her resolve cleansed toward the unification of the fueled tempest she had become. A perfect weapon in the eyes of certain doom as the gasps of those same comrades that had fought with her sounded their shock and surprise with fear laced retreat behind her.
There was no commanding word, no incantation committed to memory, nor somatic gesture to articulately display. There was also no warning as the annihilation that burned within her eyes spoke to the obliteration that coursed through her very bones. ‘Die.’ Kowani thought with more conviction than she had assigned to anything in her life prior as she raised her hands in unison and conjured the vision of the destructive lightning throughout her mind. A split through the sky cracked with deafening thunder as it tore through every other sound on hand, a concussive wave of pressure following close behind that altered flight patterns, snuffed consuming fires and shook the dome of Sundari itself. And then she projected her thought, lethal blasts of crimson lightning, some as wide as the TIE/sa’s themselves, tore through the advancing armada with unquestioning determination. The skies over Sundari cleared of airborne menace with each drop of metallic rain that struck the planet’s surface, the arcing lightning fanning in webs from horizon to horizon as it incinerated vessel and ordinance alike without either taking supremacy.
Her brethren behind her, silent for lack of reason or explanation, remained unmoving as she prepared herself for another assault. She churned yet again at the seething rage within, ladling the fuel with precision as she focused her intention toward the carrier vessels in low and high orbital positions above them. Kowani forced her own mind into the thoughts of command crews nestled kilometers distant aboard the Quasar class cruisers that had thought themselves too far removed from the onslaught they had delivered to know fear. She touched each mind with that foreign to them as she engorged the internal fires of resolution toward the only goal for which they had been summoned.
*Again, the skies thundered with a deafening roar just before the crimson death fired toward the heavens, a delta of webbing lightning that converged into a massive bolt of destruction, consuming each and every mind she had touched aboard the vessels too distant to view. An effort that screamed of finality ensued as packets of green energy began slamming into the planet’s surface, the Star Destroyers in extreme orbit free of the obstacle their own bombers had been, to tune in distance and modulation as they carpeted their way closer to the city. Kowani reached out her right hand, holding it high as she stretched her fingers abnormally wide and tensed each digit into monuments of forged aggression. Gasps of awe escaped a few of her brethren behind her as the green energy bolts found the edge of the protective sphere she had erected, pinging meekly against her energy field as they dissipated through circular ripples converged together like an angry ocean.*
“Civil defense!...This is Aurora Wren...we are staged on the upper parapet. Imminent threat...well, no longer imminent. Target orbital SD’s, maximum payload.” Rory shouted directly behind Kowani, the fluidity of the statement and tone confiding a shocked surprise as she barked the command.
The sound of warning Klaxons whirred to life around Kowani, ‘or were they blaring the whole time?’ She couldn’t be certain, only that the hand that been offered as a means of escape not moments before was clamped tightly about her shoulder again, providing a saturation of both support and strength as she focused intently on the energy shield that had negated every single volley from above any success.
Tiny specs of flaring lights shocked to life at random intervals across the Sundari plains, well outside the range of the protective shield, and streaked their own firestorms skyward. Each tendril of superheated smoke capped by a warhead capable of absolute obliteration as they converged in multiples toward the three monstrosities hell bent on delivering their deadly message.
Every Mandalorian head upon the battlement was cast skyward, observing with self-assured conviction that the hope that had felt dwindling at best when viewing the initial oncoming threat had transformed into a cohesive, tangible, collective victory. Moments after the heavens blazed anew under the incendiary demise of the lethal behemoths, Kowani felt every visor canting her way as the helmets came to rest upon her alone. With a final extinguishing breath, she released her hold upon the cocoon of Force energy and stumbled backward uncontrollably, her body drained of energy and fell into an exhaustive heap at Rory’s feet. Within seconds she felt the supportive gestures of dozens of hands as those closest to her offered whatever assistance they could, Rory’s own knees and chest directly behind her back as someone else entirely removed the helmet slowly from her head.
Not a word was uttered, none that Kowani could hear, only various tempos of rapid breathing and indecipherable murmurs as soft chords of light pings alerted her that most of them were removing their helmets as well. Through the distant crashes of falling debris came the finality of scorched hulls and careening bulkheads, like the skeletal remains of fleshless dragons that imploded the war-torn plains of Sundari with cratering decisiveness. Rock and crushed gravel rocketed skyward in giant arcs as each massive section of the fallen ships dug and filled their own graves, a resounding shock wave punctuating the act as it extoled the remainder of the tale for the souls it took with it.
The silence of death stilled the early morning air as Kowani fought to keep her eyes open, tears streaming from them as they cleared the dust from her cheeks in ribbons of glistening absolution. Squinting through the watery haze, she found she was not alone, those around her shedding an equal amount of tears to the joy no one needed to voice. She felt the sentiment as it traveled through the air about their perch atop the city’s dome and knew that those same tears were being shed through the kilometers under and around her, “what was it you said Rory? A thousand more tears would be shed this night? I think….I think” Kowani stammered through her own exhaustion, “I think that number to be in the hundreds of thousands…” She concluded, her head lolling into Rory’s lap as complete fatigue took her.
Kowani shocked herself from her meditation to the sounds and scents of her lofty perch on the cliff side reaches, not far from the deadly confrontation with her former colleagues. The salty air refreshing as it bathed the imagined scents of battle from her mind, the rhythmic crashing of the waves below a sullen and very welcome diversion to the chaos that still reverberated through her skull, shouts of comradery and anti-defeatist rhetoric, the pinging and scraping of metallic grinding and the echoes of percussive blaster bolts. She let the trivial remnants of the imagined battle die into obfuscation as the questions began to overtake her without compromise, all of them leading toward the only one that needed an answer. “How was that possible?”
Kowani knew the answer could be found within but waited patiently, her legs folded in front of her with arms relaxed upon her knees, for the whispered source of such imagined power to enlighten her in this mortal form, because power of that magnitude would not remain silent once its own seal was breached. One word filled the air as it mingled with the squawks of shore birds and cresting waves below. A singular location manifest in both thought and emotion as she breathed it in with the salt and grain finery carried on the winds of the plains far to the East. “Ciutric…..”