Editing Star Wars : Kyrie (section)

== <big>Background</big>==

I remember the day the Imperials came.  I was two days shy of turning thirteen, and the days of childhood were about to be put behind me.  I would have to give up my place in the nursery quarters and go to a room that used to belong to Aunt Hyldae.  Two years before, she had gone to join her long dead husband, but the room had never been given to another.  I remember it smelled strongly of medicine, especially the lotion she used to keep her joints from aching.  I was not looking forward to sleeping in that smell, but I was looking forward to being a "big girl" and not being shuffled off with the babies after dinner was finished. <br><br>
Admiral Zetarh arrived with an entourage of storm troopers.  The flitter they rode in on was an ugly thing with thick armor plating.  Deacon was very annoyed that it was shielded against scanners, but his opinion was not asked for by my father or any of his wives.  I was not allowed to be part of the heated conversation that passed between my father and the Admiral, but I knew it was something bad.  I could feel it from the first moment I saw the Admiral.  Something about him made me want to cry. <br> <br>
The next day, everyone was tense.  No one seemed to be making plans for my party any longer, and the atmosphere was too intense for me to pester anyone with my concerns.  Deacon stayed close by my side, and I was shuffled off to the nursery with the babies, which I found very annoying.  When dinner time came and we were not summed to the main hall, I encouraged two of my little brothers into a scuffle, and while NUR-63 was busy separating them, I slipped out.  <br> <br>
I felt an overwhelming urge to get outside.  Deacon was unable to dissuade me, which was unusual but I was too preoccupied to notice.  I escaped the family wing, and scurried through nearly empty hallways until I found my way to the rooftop.  From the battlements outside, I saw the sky begin to fall.  <br> <br>
The Imperials descended in gouts of fire.  The battle suits of the Stormtroopers protected them from a near free-fall descent on retro-jets.  They blazed away with their blasters while heavier weapons battered against the castle shielding, creating a prismatic nightmare of lethal energies.  When a heavy round from an ion cannon blasted away the corner of the building I stood upon, I tumbled down to the ground, and into unconsciousness. <br><br>
When I awoke, I was thirteen, and my family was dead.  All of them.  I can only guess that no one in the Imperial forces had an accurate counting or description of all of my father's wives and children.  They had shot my father, and my five oldest brothers.  The ones who had not died in battle had been hung, were still hanging in the cold light of dawn.  Down to the eight month old baby brother, my family was dead.  All of them.<br><br>
After three days of hiding in the rubble, I was found by the daughter of one of our maids.  She took me home, and her father managed to nurse me back to health.  He had lost an arm and his wife to the attack, and when he pulled in a favor from a tramp freighter captain, we all escaped from what had become hell for me.  I have never forgotten and I will never forgive the Empire for what happened to me.<br><br>
For seven years I lived with and became a crewmen of Darcy's Mystique.  It was a smallish tramp freighter with a crew of a score and a half.  I am certain Captain Jericho was a smuggler and a con artist.  At first, he wanted to sell Deacon off for the credit, but I pitched such a fit that he decided to let me keep my last connection to the world I had known.  After the many times Deacon proved his worth, I don't think he regretted the decision. <br><br>
I learned a lot in those days, and perhaps they were the happiest ones of my life.  Certainly there were bad times, when money was tight and as the daughter of no one I was first to go without a fair share.  But there were times when money was good, and every member of the crew felt that I needed a special treat to make up for all the hardship I had undergone.  I had a quick mind and agile hands, and wanted to learn everything I could about the ship.  <br><br>
We visited many worlds, and I cultivated a spacer's disdain for groundsiders.  I had a dozen mothers and fathers and nearly twice as many brothers and sisters.  My real family had been very large, but with the castle and servants and duties of state, I had never really been able to know what it was like to be close to someone.  The ship crew took care of it's own.  Even the lowest and meanest deckhand was considered an honored brother when someone from a rival crew started trouble.  And Shy'thria help the dirtsider that tried messing with any spacer.  <br><br>
But my life was not destined to be something forever bound in profit and loss margins.  I knew that I would never be happy for long, and the ghosts in my nightmares reminded me of the score I had to settle with the Empire.  I chafed with anger each time we were visited by Imperial representatives or tax collectors.  I got into fights with Impies when we were groundside.  My surrogate family tried to dissuade me, but I was too caught up in my own youthful invulnerability.  <br><br>
I met my first lover in a jail cell on Tatooine.  I was seventeen and Geoff was twenty.  He had started a fight with a tax collector and I had broken a bottle over the Impie's head when things got rough.  Luck was with us, and the local gaoler was open to bribes.  Geoff's shipmates bailed us both out, and we dusted off planet.  I had to leave a message with the port authority, and it took me two months to catch up with my ship again.  Two months of truly being on my own.<br><br>
From that day on, I grew more wild and more desperate in my defiance of the Empire and what it stood for.  Deacon blew several fuses trying to cope with my disastrous nature, Eventually the fines grew too high and Captain Jericho had me put off the ship.  I can only remember being angry that they didn't understand my pain.  The anger and hate inside of me was growing like a beast.  Like a black maelstrom of violence and rage.  Like a collapsed star, it wanted to devour everything into darkness.  <br><br>
I signed on to any ship that would have me, and hoped that each one would give me the opportunity to hurt the Empire.  When I could not turn my anger onto the ones I hated, I turned it on anyone around me.  Aching to fill the empty void inside me, I took lovers, and then destroyed their love with my bitter spiral into self destruction.<br><br>
Curiously enough, an Imperial sting operation became my salvation.  I had signed on to a Correlian freighter called Quantum Spark.  Hektor, the scoundrel who captained her was not as competent or street wise as he had thought.  We arrived at what was supposed to be a pick up for one hundred kilos of illegal pharmaceuticals, and were met instead by two dozen Imperial Stormtroopers.  Out numbered and out gunned, we were debating the relative merits of death as opposed to the Spice Mines of Kessel when a maniac interrupted.<br><br>
Quistandalus, or Quiz as he preferred to be called, had an affliction.  Better said, he was a complete mental case, but he must have been great at one time.  He stepped out of the shadows and ignored the Imperials as he made his way over to me.  Everyone was too surprised to shoot.  Quiz told me to follow him, and when I pointed out that the Stormtroopers would hardly allow that, he became puzzled.  When he started to cross back over to them, something broke the spell and someone took a shot at his head.  <br><br>
In a blaze of light, he swept out his saber and deflected the shot back, killing the Trooper.  Then they all opened up at him, and as he scrambled for cover, a stray shot bounced off my transport and ricocheted back into the Imperials.  From what we were able to piece together, it had managed to bounce into the exhaust manifold of their battle flitter, and caused an explosive feedback that took out half of them, and stunned the rest of us.  <br><br>
We hauled ass before the remaining Troopers could stagger to their feet and counted ourselves lucky to only need bandages.  Quiz insisted that I not accompany the Q-Spark, and after the way things had turned out, I needed little convincing.  Good thing too, because a cruiser picked them up on the outbound leg, and according to reports, blew them out of the sky without even hailing them first.  <br><br>
Quiz, it turned out, was only out of his mind half of the time.  The trouble was trying to figure out when that half of the time was.  He thought he was a Jedi knight, and sometimes I think it might have been true.  Other times I am certain he was just a mad man who had learned a few tricks.  <br><br>
He carried a journal with him at all times.  A battered leather book with pages tattered and falling out.  He crammed in more loosely when he needed, or when he found some scraps laying about.  Each page is covered with his spidery scribblings and if there is an order to it, only Quiz knew the key.  Some of the writing contains the paranoid ramblings of a fevered brain, and some of it holds such wisdom and insight that each time I read the passage again, I learn something new.  Quite a few pages seem to be grocery lists.  For a thin, little man, Quiz had a very large appetite.<br><br>
The last time I saw Quiz, he had gone for a walk in the bad-lands.  I didn't notice at first, but he had left his notebook behind.  I had seen it before, and he had often had me read from it, but I had never seen him leave it behind before.  The page it was opened to, like so many others, had been written on and then added to.  It mostly concerned his dream interpretations, something about a green dwarf with very big ears who lived in a tree.  In the margins were cryptic sayings, like "Always seek advice before doing something strange." and "Take risks without hesitation."  The one that caught my eye was still damp, and I smudged the ink with my thumb when I picked up the book.  It said simply, "Look out behind you."<br><br>
I'd like to think my own instinct for danger would've saved me, but the truth is, I was quite surprised to turn around and find two bounty hunters sneaking up on me.  The electro-camo suits had defeated Deacon's passive scanners as well as my own eyes.  The suddenness of my own movement as Quiz's warning caused me to bring my newly built saber to a guard position startled one of them into a spastic blaster shot into the roof of the cavern.<br><br>
The collapsing ceiling nearly killed me.  I managed to collect a broken collar bone and a number of bruises that has never been matched again.  Deacon lost a photo-receptor and damaged his voder unit so that for the two months it took to scrape up cred to repair him, he could only speak in a voice that sounded like a Jawa on speed.  I lost several hours in unconsciousness, and several days in recovering while I hid in the back tunnels.  Quiz never came back, and I can only think that they got him.  <br><br>
In the short time I knew him, Quiz did manage to open my inner eye to the power I hold within.  He put me in touch with The Force, and I hope that I can prove worthy of his trust.  When I look inside myself, I can see the maelstrom that is waiting to devour me.  The pit of darkness that Quiz says has a life of it's own.  That is fed by my own rage and hate, and waits only for the day when I will open myself to be destroyed by it's cold and angry fire.  I use the teachings of his peace, the centering of his maat, to chain the demon inside me.  Someday, I will master the teachings he left behind and in doing so, put the beast to rest.  <br><br><br>