The energy gates charged as she engaged the power cells in either hilt, white hot beams of finely tuned lethality chimed briefly before extending to prescribed lengths in either hand. A thrumming permeated the room in a rhythmic staccato that pounded the air in correspondence with her own heartbeat, a calm that Ahsoka willed herself to embrace coursing through bone and flesh alike with every beat. The brilliant white either blade created causing wisps of the stale air to manifest tiny motes of vapor depleting ambiance that leached the surrounding putrid green from existence. Both sabers waited for executive order, ready with an unnatural weightlessness about them she could utilize in an increasing amount of options and choices. ‘But which one was right?’ Ahsoka thought to herself, unwilling to fully embrace any of the paths she saw.
“A conundrum it will always be…” Ahsoka wasn’t surprised to hear the cryptic whisper as time itself slowed beyond her. The pulsing thrums of her extended sabers slowed to a crawl, the sound reverberating through her montral as the tiny voice echoed its sentiment free of any confining limitations. Her breath sounded out through exaggerated inhales and exhales, her eyelids opening and closing through an extended blink as she sought the wisdom only the diminutive exiled Jedi Master could impart. “Worry about defying a suggestion...hmmmm? Or that the choice is beyond one Ahsoka should make perhaps?”
‘I don’t even know how to answer that.’ She thought in return, her surroundings bathed in a still image, free of the ravages of time.
“Oh, but you do! Was it not for previous action that this moment came to pass?” Was his voice simply imagined? A figment of her own making in some effort to justify what was to come, “the first you will never be to harbor dark desire Ahsoka, to channel fear a means it becomes, and with it your will.”
‘He cannot live Master...do you not know where I am?’ She continued the internal debate, ushering her own resolve toward the enmity she could not avoid.
“Know where you are I do not need to young one, only imperative to you and your choices that information is.”
Sidious felt enraptured as he stood just inside the doorway to the chamber, accepting the stasis time itself had delivered to answer his own beckoning within. ‘Perhaps it is time to allow the Togruta to see…’ Although determined to express his own desired path with an external sneer and cackle, he resigned himself to a simple blink of his hate filled sickly yellow eyes and began flooding his own senses with the power necessary to alter the woman’s thoughts entirely.
“What is it you hope to achieve through deception, Sidious?” Plagueis intervened, Sidious himself only giving the question credence through a decisive will to end the old Muun once and for all. ‘Only to direct the misgivings of fear toward the only one who truly deserves it, Master…’
“Your lack of faith is quite disturbing, apprentice…”
‘It is not I that lacks faith, Master. The fear you sense has only ever been your own, lest the trials of Mygeeto, Acrux or even your lavish suites within [ ] evade you. A fear you projected without thought given toward the only thing you couldn’t lose, even now. And why you refuse to accept the death you had earned.’ Sidious thought, surging his thoughts forward through the multiple avenues they would need to assail the minds of those that stood in his path, silent tendrils of invisibility that snaked through channels between space and time. ‘It is not I that had betrayed the Dark Side Lord Plagueis, that unruly honor belongs to your obsessive adherence to a corporeal form. The narrow sightedness of belonging to the crude nature of your own flesh and blood. While you whittled away in lame effort to prevent the ravages of time to your own sallow skin, I had worked to push beyond the boundaries of flesh and bone itself.’ Sidious continued the narrative thought, pushing his anger through every channel at his command, and willing the Muun’s memory to accept the true depths of a fear that had been projected ages ago.
“So be it Sidious, let your haste cloud your own misgivings and embrace the depravity only you could summon.” Plagueis whispered in a reverberating echo, “what comes for you is beyond your comprehension...know that above all else.”
‘Another false claim then?’ Sidious thought to reply, finding nothing to reply to through the facets of the Force that had delivered the long dead Muun the few moments between the crevice in time Sidious himself had forged. ‘Am I then to be finally free of you Master? Free to carry about my initiatives without the fear you bring to the conversation?’ The absence of form bespoke the absence of the thought itself, the only sound in reply at all being that of the elongated thrums of the dual bleating white sabers in his vision. ‘All the better…’ he thought with a sense of closure to the matter, an absolution that firmed his resolve with a refreshing confidence that could be projected itself with matters relevant to the here and now. He cracked a smile that took eons to manifest and a lifetime to employ, lips parching against one another with a papery grating that only worked to cement the powers he was accumulating.
Ahsoka studied the man’s features, observed any deliberate or unintentional creases within the majesty of his crooked brow, illuminated by the piercing glare of the implements at her disposal. Deep furrows that had been unmoving, even through the saber’s ignition, began to crest, as if thought alone would cause them to reveal the degeneracy that gripped him so fiercely. The hands that would deliver a lethality of their own locked away within the folds of opposing sleeves yet causing slight shudders beneath the fabric just the same. Time itself delivering the hints of opposing crescendo, manifest in the slowest form it could take, the impossibly long blink of the man’s eyes a testament to its passage as if he were sleeping in the time it took to open them again. Then the lips began to part. The slightest of movements in the fourth crease of the man’s left cheek began to pull at the sallow folds of loose skin with muscles unaccustomed to the task. ‘A smile…’ She thought as the seconds ticked away through the span of days, and she knew the multitude of avenues she had thought through limitless option had all converged upon the same path entirely.
With a ferocity that brought the stagnation of time itself crashing into the universal laws governing it, Ahsoka consumed the volition of the Force. Imbibing everything it offered and through any channel available to her, without regard given to its very nature or source. A welling profusion of unified will infused her soul, engorged the fibers within every muscle and presented the clarity of mind to execute the converging paths that lay before her, every minute of her past conjoining with every minute of her future, to present everything she was and all that she had yet to become in a physical proxy of the Force itself. Before the opening eyes of Darth Sidious, Ahsoka sought to free herself of the emotions that had been roiling within the depths of her core, gritting her teeth as she narrowed her eyes to become the hand of death itself between the ribbons of time. She launched forward with a simple push from her right foot, closing the distance between them before the man could open his eyes through the blink completely, a brush stroke of artistry as both blades met each other instantly before crossing inward upon themselves.
With a satisfying grunt, Ahsoka reversed the course of both blades, the man’s face only now registering his own predicament, an absolution that had yet to reveal itself through the soul’s mirror in his eyes the moment the blades began to swath a lethal course across one another. The projection of fear closely followed the tautness of the skin at his chin before the first scents of burning fabric had even manifest, bright flares of orange and red, tinges of purple and slight bursts of pink conflicted with the bright white of the sabers reflected light, only catching in the hate filled reflection of the Togruta’s open eyes. The searing pain closely followed as the sabers burned into the jaundiced, loose, and badly discolored flesh beneath the finery of his majestic robes, stabbing ribbons that his mind could not fathom, assuring a clean death if nothing else. Ahsoka sensed a finality as her sabers met, both parallel to one another as they were perpendicular to her enemy’s chest, one that allowed the flood gates of absolution to invade her own mind, influence her own actions, which also prompted her to finish what she had started. The trace of her own sneer, not unlike Sidious’ own prior, thrust her arms to conclusion as the sabers parted ways on their final journey, ensuring a clean path through organ, flesh, and bone.
Sidious’ mind was frantic as he tried to force a swallow, finding the process possible, yet seemingly fruitless as he quickly followed with a dramatic inhale of breath, his nose assaulted by the rancid stench of his own burning flesh and the profusion of a self-imposed mutation upon the air itself. A mingling odor of sulfuric tang and the baking of superheated oxygen affirming the conclusiveness of his own demise. Before what was left of his mind to the frantic pace of encroaching madness could process the truth, he was weightless. A sensation he had not expected just before the cold reality of gravity’s pull yanked his torso beyond the support of his waist and legs in a downward heap that brought the separated appendages within sight. Before the scene could register any finality through the remnants of his sanity he saw his own knees buckle as they spasmed slightly without connection to the mind that would have commanded them. The shock finalized itself only in the span of the silent seconds it took between the Togruta deactivating her sabers and the blinding fury of his own collapsing body, falling as it would upon his separated torso.
The absolution felt as a craving satiated the moment the sabers returned to Ahsoka’s side. The warnings of premature elation finding their way through crack and crevice as she stood with ferocious intent over her kill, calling upon the Force once again to service the heeding with a meritorious conclusion. It responded with an unimagined intensity as she drew upon the flows that concentrated themselves on the thousands below her, each one ripped from its intended recipient and routing toward her monstrous cravings with indifference. Ahsoka silenced the internal cries of mercy, the self-established morals that had guided her every move and the subjective admonishments of consequence, basking instead on the destructive power of the congealing currents as she shouted through her execution with a guttural intonation that shook the facility to its core. The body of the deceased Sith Lord responded with instantaneous atomization, all traces vaporized as the atoms themselves were wiped from existence, the metal flooring it had fallen upon splintering and with crashing finality, falling through to the massive cylindrical chambers below.
Ahsoka heaved a massive breath as time finally began to catch up to itself, the chamber rocking with ear splitting creaks and groans, the light stolen from it entirely as each illuminator exploded in unison, filling the room with cascading shards of lethal reinforced steel and glass. The consoles that had been in the rooms center smashed deeply into one of the many empty sockets lining the walls, the equipment within them sending rockets of fiery sparks in all directions and providing the only light within the chamber, a confusing miasma of red and black with pockets of white and orange. Vibrations began to seethe from the sight of her manufactured annihilation, cascading with consequential ferocity downward. Ahsoka peered through the opening between levels in open eyed disbelief as explosion after explosion filled the chamber with massive amounts of green liquid and mist, mingled profusely with innumerable shards from devastated pods. The bodies began to fall in earnest, each one around the concentric levels, falling through the deluge of Bacta upon one another, instantly impaled with the shards of subsequent pods exploding in response to the shock that vibrated with growing urgency through the facility downward.
Ahsoka fell to her hands before the destruction even registered, her mouth falling agape and completely outside her own control. She could stare through the opening as the mounting crescendo of death wormed its way ever downward, the bodies unconscious to the fate she herself had delivered them unto in an eerie silence devoid of any shouts or terror-stricken blood curdling screams that should have been present. The consequence of her raging anger thumping in the recesses beyond sight as each one piled atop the one before providing a solitude of silence broken only by the constant dripping of the fluid’s remnants. All of the fallen speaking through the Force as it whispered suddenly through her thoughts, some thankful others vengeful as they pledged to find her in their next lives and extol the same fate upon her and those she found dear.
The suddenness of the whispered assault whisked itself into obscurity as she heard a dreadful moan behind her, her insides retching quickly even before she could whirl around. She had forgotten about Rex. She had forgotten about Nara’s clone. She had forgotten about Hedala. The stasis of time presented itself yet again, stealing the quick glance she intended with the tragedy of suppressed realization through an impossibly slow turn of her neck. Each item of devastation, a result of the path she had taken, smoldering, broken, sparking, or tragically deformed beyond recognition before her peripheral finally caught the old man. The sight painted the mural her imagination had formed, his head turned awkwardly with streams of red blood flowing freely from severed arteries, spraying the remnants of the pod Hedala had been in with heart pumping accuracy, his hands failing in any attempts to stem it. Rex’s fingers worked their way up toward the left side of his neck falling just as quickly as the strength to do so evaporated through each attempt. “REX!!!!”
Ahsoka could not proceed any faster than her aguishly perverted sense of time would allow, each second passing beyond her comprehension as her hands began to slowly mime the actions her mind had in store for them, the body of her friend desperately out of reach with each one that ticked by. The closer she did manage to come, the more profusely the scene unfolded, hundreds of tiny shards protruding from the man, head to toe, each one sourcing ribbons of life blood that began to pool around his torso. Her fingers finally reaching their destination, she felt the chill of his body through their tips only what seemed a second before the man’s flailing attempts ceased after a final pacified clutch at his throat. “WHAT HAVE I DONE!” Ahsoka heard herself shout, the acoustic pounding of her own words stealing the breath from her own lungs. Long painful aches stretched through each of her sides, her head still whirling to survey the results of her carnage, finding the motionless body of a teenage Hedala lying in a pool of rancid blue. Nara’s clone lie prone, dead eyes turned upward to the darkness above them, her robes soaking up the accumulation of body fluids, blood and stasis suppression chemicals, leaching the black within the fabric to a sullen shade of rusted brown. “WHAT HAVE I DONE!!!”
“You have done precisely what you meant to.” Obi-wan sounded out, his voice distant but irrationally close through Ahsoka’s mind, a sensation she was certainly not prepared for at all, “do not feign a dazed stupefaction young one, you knew the consequences but acted anyway.”
“Help me Master….we can save them!” Ahsoka shouted, willing her hands to work as fast as her mind needed them too, scooping handfuls of Rex’s blood intent on putting it back where it came from, her hands moving too slowly in the process however as the liquid ran between her fingers before she could. “We can save them all!! HELP ME!”
“Ahsoka, what’s done is done. You know as well as I do that they are all dead, you cannot bring them back any more than I could.” Obi-wan responded politely.
A gentle blue hue began to pierce the darkness of the broken room attracting her attention. She lifted a blurry eyed gaze toward the translucent image of her deceased mentor. “What have I done!” She cried out the statement, her knee slipping in the encroaching blue fluid Hedala had been submerged in, causing her to crash into the metal flooring with a thud.
“What have I done?” Ahsoka whispered the question into the lifeless arm of the Thebasken she had been unwilling to assist in childhood.
“You have already seen that Ahsoka, I will not allow the question itself to vindicate your actions, as you shouldn’t.” Obi-wan offered a soothing calm, despite the bite Ahsoka felt within the words, “you feel the shame that has been deserved, that was earned in your haste to undo all that we had sacrificed ourselves for, but that is not the question you should be asking, is it?”
Ahsoka knew the answer, had avoided the question outright, ‘how?’
“How indeed Ahsoka Tano, yet..you already know the answer to that as well, don’t you.” Obi-wans whispered demeanor had not shifted, despite the path she knew they were about to take.
“..the Dark Side…” She whispered between them both, a haunting eulogy that consumed her thoughts entirely. Broken was the tie she had always held to the construct of her own beliefs, in its place, the truth that could never be unknown.
“The promise of unlimited power is a powerful Ahsoka.” Obi-wan whispered turning himself through the destruction she had caused, observing the death that lay within arm’s reach before he silently strode for the opening she had created, a window that lay bare the carnage she had wrought, “but its cost is all consuming.”
“This cannot be undone...can it?” Ahsoka asked, the spiritual guide refusing to turn from the devastation of deaths wake below.
“How could anything be undone Ahsoka?” Obi-wan said, turning from the view, “would that there was a way, what lessons would mistakes teach us? No Ahsoka, there is no coming back from this, none that would accept any version you were able to conjure…” He began approaching her at a rapid pace, his face a contortion of rage she had never witnessed as he lept for her throat, “only the path forward that you forged for yourself, apprentice…” He concluded at the same time the translucent fingers would wrap around her throat. Ahsoka winced in response, ready for death to take her, ready for the subjugation of the universals Whills as they condemned her soul beyond reconciliation. But there was nothing. Nothing of Obi-wan’s spirit, her destruction, Rex’s horrific death, Hedala’s body nor the clone’s. The pod that Hedala had rested peacefully within was gone from the catered socket it silently stood.
“There is only one path forward.” The powerful, guttural intonation could belong to no one but the Darth Sidious she knew, each syllable dragged along without mercy, each consonant building momentum with a range of power she couldn’t comprehend. Every vowel and indication that she was lost to something so complex she couldn’t even begin to understand. Her mind wiped itself clean of hope, her body acting without command as she fell to her right knee in deference to the source of her own power, the one who would wield it outright, who would protect it for her until she needed to call upon it. She bowed her head in reverence to the power of the voice itself as it shocked through her core, creating a longing to embrace its cold dark depths. She opened her hands and forced them with palms down onto the metal flooring beneath her, her insides churning with a hunger she feared would never be satiated as she forced herself to contrive meaning behind her quest for dominance and power. “Good...good...I can feel your doubt, the struggle within to justify the rage within.” The words were no condemnation, they felt abnormally comforting in the wake of her actions, almost docile and nurturing as the beast within began clawing away at the protective shields she didn’t remember creating. Despite an overwhelming urge to let loose her roiling insides, she remained fixated in her own willing submissive gesture, not daring to look the man in the eye out of obedient surrender if nothing else.
“You are powerful, Ahsoka Tano….your Master would have been quite envious indeed. But...you answer to a new Master now….don’t you.” Sidious cajoled her fragile psyche even further, goading her into complete submission with his hypnotic echoes, each of which hid the elements of true power she found herself inexplicably craving. What was left of Ahsoka’s sanity began to seek the only refuge she could muster with which to cast infinite blame, ‘Nara...you’ve betrayed us all….’ She thought to herself, casting the last shreds of accusation away from her in a statement that felt oddly familiar, but even that, the last thread of who she had been broke what was left of her barriers, penetrated, and demolished any tether she could find to the light in a sea of ever encroaching darkness. A darkness that promised to deliver her to true sense of power, the craving taking full advantage of the shredded protections that lay mangled in her own soul. The promise to cater through any obedient gesture necessary to deliver upon the hordes of the darkest powers. Ahsoka was ready to pledge an allegiance of the darkest nature in response to the overpowering craving that needed the man. “I am but your servant….Darth Sidious.” She said with trembling lips, both knees crashing to the floor in an unpreventable weakness.
“Not today...or any day!” Nara shouted from the shadows of Ahsoka’s own consciousness, her voice a melody to the churning hums and indecipherable speech that had overtaken her mind. The voice was as powerful as the one Ahsoka herself had just sworn fealty to, a power within it that belied the age of its owner, one deep and ancient. The depravity she found herself coveting, a complete willingness to follow the man, began to tatter immediately into shreds of unreasonable doubt.
“Release your grip and face what you truly fear!” It was Nara again, Ahsoka had to concede. The shreds of doubt only circling with a blinding fury as they whisked themselves into and out of view, positing a revulsion within her that forced her to the floor, coughing up some unknown blockage that had lodged itself somewhere in her throat.
“Your power wanes old man, look into the eyes of your killer Darth Sidious...Plagueis will have his revenge!” Nara continued, casting Ahsoka into further confusion as the constriction grew tighter around her throat, preventing air from traveling in either direction as the darkness began to part into a hazy green swirl. ‘Do not take him betrayer...I need him!’ Ahsoka tried to shout, forgetting the invisible noose around her as she sputtered her own saliva across her cheek.
“Release her now!” Nara shouted once more, filling the air around Ahsoka with an electric charge, a humming static that threw chaos in all directions. “You’ll have to do better Sidious…” The Mirialan shouted, Ahsoka quite certain she could hear the odd humming of the woman’s ancient saber slicing through the air not far away. As quickly as she had felt drawn into the inevitability of complete subjugation, she could see tightly packed flashes of what was happening around her. The Mirialan stood not six meters away, the blinding fury of the twirling orange saber reflecting off the very much alive eyes of her oldest friend, Rex’s expression a confusion of circumstance as he tried to cover the prone body of the cloaked clone and look into her own eyes while keeping himself directly behind the confrontation between them. Ahsoka’s confusion only magnified as she shut her eyes to blinding flashes of white-hot light above her, colors bursting even through her eyelids that caused her to wince unwittingly. The more the confusion grew however, the less constricting the noose became, allowing her to resurrect the core of her internal barriers. She tried to recenter herself despite the extreme dizziness that assailed her, between grunts and groans of extreme concentration just above her head, it was a whisper that began in the foggy recesses of her scrambled mind, a name that kept repeating itself, and one inferred by Nara herself.
“Plagueis!!” Ahsoka attempted to shout, overjoyed that it resulted in nothing more than a whimper but audible enough for herself to hear it. She tried to shout the name over and over again, failing every time to carry her own decibels over that of common rodents but strengthened by it just the same. With each attempt the noose slackened more and more, allowing her to further the internal barriers with layer upon layer. As the dizziness began to right itself, she meekly fumbled for her shoto hilt, firing her eyes open at the exact moment she heard Rex shout her own name. In the span of seconds, she felt a foot pin her wrist to the floor and saw Rex extend himself beyond Nara’s barrier leveling his blaster in a quick shot before tucking in behind the whirling blade once more. The instant he fired, Ahsoka felt the weight remove itself from her wrist followed by a muffled thud behind her. She wrestled with her inner strength as she snaked her fingers downward, fumbling with the device for only a moment… “Now!” She heard the wailing dirge from Sidious himself.
A pain Ahsoka had never thought possible shot from the base of her neck, a burning incision she was helpless to prevent that caused every ounce of her returning strength to fall back into the barriers she had begun to erect. The fire in her neck began to spread as the probing, throbbing pain buried itself deeper into her spine and quickly approached the base of her skull. She was immobilized and helpless despite hearing Nara groan with guttural determination in whatever efforts she had employed to divert the Dark Lords attention. Ahsoka remembered the saber hilt, so close to her palm and blinked through the aggressive pain as she turned her shoulder downward, causing the pain to magnify substantially but allowing her to place the hilt in her palm. With a slight twist of her wrist, she had the deadly implement ignited and burning into whatever she could find in a path over her back and skull.
“Aaaghhhhh.” A shout came from behind her followed closely by the scrambling of feet.
“We have enough My Lord…” The voice was unrecognizable, nondescript as more footsteps shuffled forward, the pain withdrawing completely with a forceful yank on her flesh. Willing herself to her side, she rolled to her right to the sight of two fleeing forms in light gray uniforms disappear into the corridor beyond.
“Jade is waiting…” Ahsoka heard Sidious grunt just before he unleashed another storm of lightning from his finger tips, “GO!” He shouted without turning, the arcing bolts slamming unseen into the barrier Nara kept thrumming with vibrant effectiveness.
Her mind returning to some sane version of itself, Ahsoka looked quickly to the saber in her left hand before thrusting it over her prone body into the right foot of the Dark Lord.
“AHHHHH!!!” The man shouted in some horrific display of surprise giving Nara the opening she needed to return the kinetic bolts right back into their source, taking the man off his feet entirely, straight through the door and crashing into the far wall of the corridor. Ahsoka could feel herself losing the battle again to the encroaching dizziness but lifted her head in defiance and called upon whatever remnants of the Force she could to shutter the door with a thunder that rocked its very frame.