― ✧ ―

𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞.

❝Answers leap up like a frightened flock, blackening the sky of my inescapable memories. Not one answer, not one suffices.❞

― FRANK HERBERT, The God Emperor of Dune

✧･ﾟ: * ═══════════════ *:･ﾟ✧

𝐈𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐈𝐒 𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆 Eryn has ever allowed herself to be truly afraid of, it's fire. Motherless, reckless, clueless, alone in the galaxy save for a platoon of starry-eyed enigmas, and still she can only admit to the simple fatality of flames. Ribboning tongues of vermillion and lapping indigo-edged scarlet, ravenous heat, putrid char; infernos consume everything she's ever loved without remorse. War-torn girl has become fire-born sinner, one who swallows dread only for it to settle damningly in her crescent breast and raze each part of her to ash with every cinder-choked breath.

Even now she burns away.

Eryn has watched many-limbed monsters of flame corrode Mandalore to blackened bones and cauterized graveyards, watched the cruelty of unfaltering yellow eyes glow with simmering satisfaction, watched bleeding shadows of white-hot embers bring her own ruin. And there's a secret lying in her memory-gaze, seismic in its hidden simplicity, devilish in its terrifying glee.

Fire is beautiful.

(Perhaps it's not a secret at all.)

The light of stars dancing seductively, carmine waves fluttering like passion-spent lashes, blood-red teeth and lips of ash, supernova in your hand. Incandescent with apathy as beating hearts smolder into naught. And as Eryn watched carnelian streams frolick above her like indestructible armies of blazing children, ricochets of a flayed twin sunset, her eyes were just like her father's. Mirrored sapphire pools, pulsing with the echoing cannonade of an arsonist's despair. Empty of divinity.

Standing in a hollowed mine beside a girl whose name was poison, the interlaced planks which wove across the sky abruptly became the freedom fighters' doom. The crude, latticed beams once could have been admirable in their innocent purpose, a juvenile art project protecting demons young and old from a place where time hadn't stopped but retreated, terrified by the clumsy effectiveness of youth. So much like the Sundari safehouse she knew better than her own scarred palms, where Bo Katan had brought the girl after her mother turned to ice in a Jedi's arms. It had been a blurry haven for a misery-washed, glassy-eyed child of just eight years, grief-stained sparks awakening within her in the endless mist, months of lying as still and silent as a corpse lest she become one. When Eryn finally emerged from that stale-boxed asylum it was only for moments, a gasp of air that danced with hopeful daring before the Republic dissolved and pulled her back under with relentless currents and smothering moon-dead tides.

But now, on Corellia, the structure splayed above her caught alight with ease, with eager pleasure as it spread its own demise - perhaps this time she wouldn't get an escape, dragged to the midnight-murk bottom forever.

The Mandalorian caught a solitary hint of flashing metal through the flame, an elusive beacon shining like a hero's blind-bright medallion. The world shimmered, cruelty twisting into view from beneath the paraffin-sewn gauze which had once shielded sunlit lungs from brutal crime. Cinders rained down from heavens of blood-red.

Through shadows and smoke she caught sight of fleeing figures, racing away through the tunnels like filaments in the wind, magnetized by the sugar-throated siren of survival. But Eryn remained, mesmerized by a reality that wept embers like incendiary tears. Scarlet-bladed cataclysm. Grisly luminescence. Half-thawed devastation.

How fragile it all was.

Nix was already gone, ever the midnight-rendered, salt-blessed, anti-heroic independent that even after having met her for mere minutes Eryn already knew her to be. Like sailboats tossed through a charcoal sea, others washed out of sight in her wake, each white-capped second sending more into the deep. The Mandalorian didn't blame them.

These flames were unnatural, pulsing with acrid, metallic exhales that turned to needles within human lungs. Claws tipped silver with chemical mirage, the blazing, burgeoning monster hissed with the scorched rage of a menace fueled by a firehose's mephitic throat.

Charred wood, festering with the malignance of a soldier's nightmares and crowned in radiant heat, pelted downwards towards the girl, ready to tear through her skin and encase her in a molten grave. She tumbled back as the cerulean slaver (still half-conscious, lolling, and eerily, disgustingly empty) was buried by hundreds of ragged pieces. Death tainted the air softly, like saltwater kisses and the shadowed nostalgia of lemon drops, the essence of vacant romanticism. Nothing was left but the vividly azure blood at the edges of her biting fingers - soon, even that would be brushed away. But his memories still blossomed inside, countless foreign tesserae of the morbid and mundane, choosing her as their vessel of salvation. (Perhaps in this sense he was not dead after all - she was simply more alive).

The realities inside of her fought to belong, hundreds of lifetimes begging to be hers with a wave of iridescent vertigo - all of the screams had begun to sound the same, like millions of eyes snapping open with the same soft breath. Her knives reached up to deflect the fiery rain, sending them flying away with flicks of her wrists and cortosis as ancient as an asteroid's scarring craters.

She glanced around the mine as it continued its inevitable metamorphosis into a dragon-bellied tomb, reaching past the little infinity of recollections which grasped endlessly at her attention to find Enfys as the last living creature beside her. It was nearly noble, to be a final barrier save for the dead and insane, to let others escape and embrace the edge of mortality. The leader of the freedom fighters danced through the rapidly accumulating debris, a private performance so bizarre it seemed to hold the fire at bay out of sheer confusion.

"Nice knives." A voice rose from within the other's bone-plated mask, a cresting wave from an unknown source.

"Thanks." Eryn wanted to scream at the triviality of it all.

Without niceties, we find ourselves less than human, Satine Kryze would have said. Her daughter would have shouted that etiquette was for the dead.

Eryn slipped on her helmet, trying to find relief in filtered air, but her throat was already painted with the acerbic taste of smoke. Her head began to pulse within the ancient encasement, weighted with sanguinary woes of centuries and writhing fates of the beskar's former masters. Through the sharpened visor's lens, the fire looked darker, smoother, slower - sickeningly cruel and unclean.

All at once Enfys raised her leather-clad arms with statuesque grace, shooting a single, lonely blaster bolt straight into the air. The taunting echo of a shot hitting it's mark bounded back as armor-clad limbs clattered down, shining silver in the corrosive light of destruction. A firehose trailed in the falling exoskeleton of a person's hands like a tethered serpent, crushed jet pack crackling with electricity as the hole of Enfys's shot razed through its structure, a molten eclipse stealing their only escape. A domed helmet shrouded their features just as fog masks the sea on a melancholy morning, their body twisting upon the ground. Another Mandalorian.

They say that family is forever, that the bonds of home cannot be broken, that the passion-strung heart of a people never stops beating in its wayward descendants. But Eryn had never felt like more of a stranger. It was as if her memories had severed all connection to the ones she was supposed to stand beside, to the planet she was supposed to fight for. The only past she had ever truly endured lay behind a sheet of glass. Irreversible. Unreachable. Unwilling.

The fire settled into a persistent blaze, blinding orange light beginning to dim, for flame cannot eat stone. But it did not stop the final frames of futile wood above from splintering at their burning seams, preparing to bury the dead.

Eryn shut her eyes tightly. She didn't want to see, suddenly feeling incurably weak, heart giving up on her as it yearned for a time in which she still had a people to go back to.

Slowly, exquisite in its slowness, it collapsed as one.

But even encased in heat, knives glowing molten gold as they barely withheld the ruins, nothing could seem to touch her save for the ash which settled in her lungs, spinning, suffocating, mourning. Breathe. Eager eyes which wanted desperately to close once again blearily defined the Mandalorian and Enfys trapped under simmering beams. They were twin silhouettes, as mesmerizing as revolving stars, a skull that stood like an impenetrable fortress and a curved helmet far too much like her own.

And they were burning, victims of the force which had been ignited by one in the other's name.

By instinct she raced towards Enfys, barely feeling the agony on her palms as she heaved a massive, blackened beam off of the freedom fighters legs. The smell of woodsmoke united with acid and the iron-laden lash of boiling flesh, not a sound gracing the devastation save for the grating, demonic roar of flames. Yet pain was still dull, ridden with the numbing frost of a cracking heart as her lungs at last began to give up on her too. The pair made their way to tangled feet shakily, limping towards the last unblocked exit as fire consumed the floor which Enfys had been trapped upon moments before. Bodies wept in the smothering heat, barely winning in a desolate battle against endless sleep. The other leaned on Eryn's shoulder, so willing to expose all vulnerability that the girl might have stopped in her tracks, breathing in the strangeness of it, but the thought of freezing for even a moment echoed like a death sentence. It felt like she was carrying a martyr on her shoulders - the skull-faced paradox of a fighter was surprisingly light, delicate for one who could shatter the world.

The pair reached the mine shaft's doorway, inferno creeping closer behind them as it reached the limits of it's wood-fueled empire, snarling, shameless, headless, unfazed by the open sky it had so daringly revealed. Her eyes stung, choked by particulates, swollen and distorted even beneath the visor. Armor couldn't protect from everything.

Eryn made the mistake of looking back, peering through heavy, wavering mirage to see the gleaming Mandalorian she was leaving behind, beskar still unblemished by smoke even as flames crept across the debris which anchored them in place. Their second skin trapped heat around them like a deceptively graceful cocoon cradling an incendiary child. This was someone who she was never supposed to betray, despite which side of the war they had fallen upon - they were both descendants of the same pain and purpose, the same passionate history which rose above all like a blooming crescent moon tainted with blissful scars. And one of them was dying.

When she first heard what would soon become just another of Mandalore's dead speak, she thought it was another cruel trick of the flames, whispering with savagery. But the voice was human, melting, throbbing, trailing into oblivion.

"Gedet'ye," they gasped, broken.

Please.

Enfys stumbled, coughing heavily. The fire taunted with its crackling laugh. Mercy went unanswered, a fading relic of a dying era, a ruin of the long-past times when birth and loneliness weren't one.

Please.

Eryn didn't look back again.

✧･ﾟ: * ═══════════════ *:･ﾟ✧

𝐋𝐈𝐊𝐄 𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐘 𝐍𝐄𝐁𝐔𝐋𝐀-𝐒𝐎𝐔𝐋𝐄𝐃 𝐂𝐇𝐈𝐋𝐃𝐑𝐄𝐍, whose spirits bleed at the edges of their eyes, the Kryze girl could still remember watching war through a screen. Pain, death, suffering: all countless miles away, caught in the crevices of senseless, pitiable places which would never seem familiar from the outside looking in. It wasn't difficult to recall the many sapphire-lit mornings of the HoloNet, the small movement of Eryn's spindly fingers as she carefully shifted the frequency from child's programming to The Republic's newscast when her mother wasn't looking. Silent wondering would always come: why did these heroes never get up? But it was simpler then; even through horrors of wavering projection, she wasn't the one to decide who lived and who died.

Nix, the girl who took reality as her prisoner, composed yet another coarse melody of words, interrupting the other's thoughts as shamelessly as whistling winds toss the waves of a slate-grey sea. "Enfys says you saved her life. She won't ever forget it." Bottomless, splinter-sharp eyes watched as Eryn stared at her throbbing hands, angry red, streaked with char, and simmering with shame. She clenched them into fists, stretching burnt skin, pugilistic. Wishing they were just anesthetized holograms she could stab straight through without consequence.

"Crimson Dawn sends bounty hunters after us every few rotations," Nix continued, as blunt as ever. "You're lucky we found you in the slave market, otherwise we would have shot you thinking you were one. Or worse, working with the Empire like the rest of your planet." If Eryn didn't know better she'd have thought that the dead Mandalorian had been simply a masquerading thief in stolen armor, posing behind the threat of a culture they could never have known nor understood. But the firehose, brutally crafted links of a metal-throated beast which coughed acid-eternal flame, told a different story. (It was a weapon designed to stand against the might of the Jedi, intended to ensure that none were left alive to battle, to hurt, or - galaxy-forbid - to love.) Used only by those trained on Mandalore itself, the weapon whispered of a fleeing soldier, one who couldn't quite give up the thrill of a fight.

"I guess I'm an odd one out," Eryn muttered dryly. Nix laughed. The pale ignus fatuus of an arafel-eyed girl, a fragment of lost hope clad in beskar that could barely keep her soul aloft, didn't know why the other could be so joyful when she was wrong.

Despite the Empire's crowned position of power, not all of Mandalore's divisive clans had succumbed as they battled to uphold their code of honor - some had still been fighting, at least they had been before Eryn was abandoned on Corellia. But even then, it had been a half-lost battle for a people who recognized the cost of war yet couldn't bear to stand together.

Though the gap of unknown between the young Kryze and the fate of her people grew wider by the day, the connection burning in her bloodlines couldn't be severed through distance alone. It was impossible to know who she had betrayed within the crumbled mine, any existing symbols of loyalty having been disguised by tendrils of smoke and jaws of shadow - there was no justifying the choice Eryn had made with age-old conflict or the vows of civil enemies sworn long before she was born. And so the guilt remained, coagulating, pressing in from all sides. Suffocating.

But Nix couldn't have known that her people were scattered beyond imagination, both in the depths of toiling space and the complexities of scarlet-edged fidelity. (Most didn't want to be found.) 

The raven-haired woman shifted where she stood, not attempting to explain why she had ran from the flames immediately, leaving all else behind. There was no explanation needed for one with the guiltless conscience and affections for survival which Eryn so deeply desired. Laughter died Nix's throat, raspy and coarse, as if she had been the one to inhale ash. Her gloved hand rubbed her left eye gently in a smooth, nearly feline motion.

Even in comfortable silence, the tunnels felt dangerous, echoing with remnants of heat each fighter seemed to have carried into safety alongside them. They were all together again, the labyrinth of mine shafts having intersected at another empty indentation, this one entirely stone with no ceiling of sky. A tomb of temporary rest, just breaths below the surface of a planet that was dying.

With sudden fortitude the Mandalorian girl wished she was old enough to believe there weren't monsters in the cavern's darkest corners, wondering if it was even possible to reach an age where one didn't imagine something waiting there, be it horror-beasts or tender ghosts.

Disoriented by the phantasmic layer of stone between herself and Corellia's surface, she found herself caught in the mystery of which streets extended above, just out of reach. To an outsider the titles which demarcated the planet's grid-like surface were grossly naive, but those who came close soon found they were of midnight-pitch irony. Corellians have to laugh somehow, Qi'ra had explained once. Their half-desperate humor came in the form of a row of flattened shanties called 'Skyscraper Lane', a district flooded with industrial waste lovingly referred to as 'Paradise Valley'.

But now, not even cruel jests could save her from being utterly lost, a floating creature with no attachments, a fragment cast off into deep space with no salvation.

In the momentary catharsis of another day's survival (full of an unshattered, ink-bled silence which spoke only of familiarity), Enfys had taken off her helmet, beating the ash from her fur cape and brushing cinders off her bone-fused faceplate. Her muscles moved with the exhaustion of one who was vulnerable but would never truly show it, wearily leaning the gleaming gunmetal spear of her electrostaff by her side. Eryn didn't have the heart to feel surprised at the live-wired, slender presence of youth hiding beneath. Deep olive skin, wide set yet serious mahogany-clear eyes, freckles scattered over her features like charted constellations. Cascading red curls blazed out behind her, an aureate-scarlet crown, the imprints of her mask casting bruised, geometric indentations across on her forehead. A tiny, beatific smile quirked at rusted lips. The youngest of them all held the fatal divinity of a leader - the same divinity that could send the rest to their graves without question, without cause.

Age and Irony like to remember the time they were once lovers.

Bacta tablets were carefully distributed to the bruised and burned by the tognath Nix had identified earlier, moving in slow motion to count out each circular pill as if having been assigned and entrusted with a sacred supply. The world seemed to watch as Enfys gulped down hers, swallowing them whole without a second thought as if the quicker she consumed them the quicker her miseries would fade away. Eryn let the mint-frost taste melt upon her tongue, sharp, searing, tastebuds razed away with just a hint of bonded sweetness if she held it there long enough. Relief could wait - as in the familiar course of a tragedy, it had waited before. She found it rather nice not to be completely numb.

But where some pain slips through, creeping through the weaknesses of dissolving masks, its faithful, bloody-lipped brothers follow.

It was in this guilt-strung, transient peace she could still remember Gar Saxon's slithering whispers in her ear, his snake-like eyes upon her small, shaking hands as he aimed and fired each word into the center of her conscience. The deaths are all your fault, Eryn. Her death. You could've saved her, saved all of them. It's a pity. I'll protect you, but if you set a single foot beyond my palace the others will kill. Our code ensures it. He was the puppet master, the sharpshooter, the savior of a marionette-girl with strings for a heart, an empty-shelled child whose mind was just beginning to burst with memories. An almost-corpse with nothing but damaged library pages and a rare solitary hour to try and understand the lethal mystery awaking inside of her. It took months to discover the crisp syllables of psychometry as they dawned in her throat, a year to control the overwhelmingly accidental brushes against unsuspecting objects which exploded with reminiscence, sending shrapnel straight through bone though no one else felt a thing, even longer to understand that Saxon's false armor was a doorway into his lies. (By then she has grown and thinned, from rosy child to skeleton - learning is slow, patience is granted to the pitied). She is twelve when she learns that the Imperial Viceroy cannot tell false sympathy from raw emotion, twelve when at last his serpentine manipulation is revealed as illusions to keep her in a subservient state, twelve when she begins to pretend. But pretending has its own consequences, for it's difficult to be someone else and still come back the same. (Marionette-girl has not cut all her strings, for now even misconceptions seem to have their own mesmerizing security, full of half-perceived truths that growing up with an enemy's hand on her shoulder couldn't help but to cultivate, like thorned roses fed with their favorite poison). Your fault. Killed by your own die-before-forgiving people. Nothing can save you, Clan Kryze, House Kryze, Little Mandalorian. Traitor. She held the false-real whispers close, hands cupping over her once innocent heart. She spilled her blood to defend their tarnished sanctity. Places in her mind she had never been to and would never go flashed by.

But which is the oppressor, the truth or the lie? Perhaps each devours the other.

Eryn swallowed the tablet whole, savored it's fleeing remnants with apocalyptic glee, realized that only seconds had passed as the present re-centered itself on trembling shoulders.

"What's next?" She asked, turning back to Nix's calculated gaze, glinting with dangerous appeal and open judgement, a horizon just before dawn. Others weren't accepting, they couldn't simply keep her. Even those liberated from the slave market were already gone, risking transport to a safer part of the planet. Always seeking, always prepared, always unready. The only stranger left was Eryn, a girl who would never have freedom from her own memories and had long since stopped trying to fight for it. Like a sun-bleached statue, lonely, alone, insecure in her own marble skin. Picking ash from her pale hair and wincing as the burnt tenderness of her fingertips brushed solidity. Staring at those gaunt, blemished, slender-twinned hands (far too much like the stick figure bones Qi'ra used to ink over empty walls) - they were the only human part of her she could see. Wanting no witness to her afflicted grace nor her incandescent demise. What's next?

"You have to take an oath." Nix whispered, pale-clay features milky in the shadow - the eerie light of strung, dimly florescent lamp-bulbs against skin was still rather strange in a sea of masks. But she had never needed anything to hide, Eryn could sense it, just as she could sense the hurricanes at rest within the other's steady resolve. So blatantly herself, so accepting of her fate.

"That seems dramatic." Eryn's voice was hollow, bouncing around an empty shell.

"Enfys is a little serious sometimes. You'll get used to it." You'll get used to it. Somehow, Eryn believed her.

Nix reached inside her battered jacket pocket, appearing to struggle with something inside, before releasing it with a wince as humming filled the air. Flinching back, Eryn studied a tiny avian creature, wings flashing in a disorienting blur upon emergence, pointed beak needle-sharp. Like a jewel, it glinted silver and misty violet even in the lusterless mine shaft, chirping with a piercing pitch.

"Had to let Juni out at some point," Nix remarked gruffly, as the tiny bird hovered like a levitating droid, twirling at the sound of its name.

"What is that thing?" Eryn eyed the creature, distrustful as it flashed around their heads. To reveal such a tiny oddity stung with the same tradition of sharing a secret weapon's existence, distorted by the insanity these mines so gleefully seemed to cultivate.

"Juni escaped from my planet with me," the dark haired girl raised an affectionate brow at the shimmering bird, holding out a hand and allowing it's twitching, feathered body to settle in her palm. "I thought she wouldn't make it after living in a cage her whole life. Turns out she's good at killing Corellian hounds."

"I guess we might get along then." Nix laughed, leaning against the stone wall comfortably despite Eryn's bitter doubt. Juni was barely the size of the fearsome canine's wilted ears. But the girl's coarse-red hands quickly reminded her that anything can kill if it must.

The clearing of a throat grated through relative peace, like ripples in Bespin's fabled, peach-soft clouds. Nix slipped Juni away, turning as the leader of the freedom fighters approached and solidified. The others stared, a magnetized sea of sweat and strangers as their half-covered eyes trailed from Enfys to the Mandalorian she stood beside.

Come witness the anomaly, judge the broken prisoner in their self-constructed cell, gawk at the hopeless case.

In the dim light, Eryn could have sworn fire was reflected in their eyes.

"Hold out your hand," Enfys murmured, ritualistic wildness in once soft eyes. Pale, spidery fingers flared with barely-settled burns, stretching out into thin air. "Now tell me what you fear."

"How is this an oath?" Eryn hissed, instantly protective, wondering if there was any escape. The crowd of fighters, masked and armored, seemed to crowd closer, filling the hollow with nameless bodies. (It seemed the only reason her weeping heart was still beating was that she had saved Enfys - warriors could respect a selfless act, for they knew death like their own scarred skin, had felt the worth of life slipping through bloodied fingers. Otherwise she'd be another bounty hunter in denial, hiding under the symbols of a half-suffocated culture, no honor or debt to save her.)

"Sharing fears is the most sacred bond of all," Enfys intoned. That, and saving a life. Unspoken truths abounded, flashing through the crowd like sparks through the blazing wire-veins which connected all left standing in the echoing cavern.

"Losing everyone." It came immediately, brief and barely coherent.

Ash settled gently on her tongue. (It hadn't stopped burning.)

Which is the oppressor, the truth or the lie?

"You cannot fear what has already happened." You can when every day is pretending it didn't.

"We could still go after Qi- my friend. We have to." Her response was weak, searching for an answer she couldn't accept, knowing Enfys could see straight through her poorly-hidden lies, hating the truth that she alone wouldn't stand a chance against Crimson Dawn. Qi'ra seemed as unreachable as distant, smoke-veiled stars already, another memory eating Eryn alive. Just like her mother, just like the uncertain remnants of her Clan, just like the Mandalorian that had burned to their doom.

Gedet'ye.

"Fight the ones who took her. But first, share the fear." With the weight of others watching Eryn was madness, an alien with wilted lungs, a tourist attraction degraded with their stares.

Please.

"I'm afraid of getting lost in the past and never coming back." It was nothing more than a shaky murmur. Suddenly transparent, she feared anyone could see straight through armor to cauterized bone.

Enfys smiled, fossilizing, the birth of a congealed universe lighting up her gaze.

"Nix said your name was Eryn." The Mandalorian was brought to stillness as the red-haired girl reached up to place a firm hand on her shoulder. It was a strange action from someone who had lived so few years, who had to tilt her head up to meet the other's eyes. Despite the hardened, learned look to her angular features, beneath them swirled undeniably iridescent childhood, barely waning. Both mystic and warrior, ancient and innocent. Youth fighting for a last year of reverence.

A knife slid from Enfys's fingers across the other's outstretched palm, blooming garnet petals pooling into glimmering tributaries as skin broke under the blade with the sting of the unexpected.

"You didn't tell me it was a blood oath," Eryn growled in Nix's vague direction, trying to take focus away from the strangely calm expression on the inflictor's face. Another bond: this time written in gore from under one's own skin, cutting fractured pieces and letting them bleed in a simple effort to become whole again. The wound was thespian, shallow and slow, the bacta in her bloodstream already beginning to take effect. In time, perhaps it would heal entirely, unlike the moon-white scar already slanting across her palm like lightning in an evening sky. Enfys eyed it carefully. A foregoing oath, this one broken? Eryn would've given up a lot more than blood before telling an entire hollow full of freedom fighters that the older wound had come from a failed knife trick - she had missed the hilt and caught the blade.

Someone in the crowd hummed, a lonely yet conspicuous rhythm stirring the unconscious ghosts within. Emotions clouded at the edges of her vision, of her armor, of the newly fallen slaver, of the countless estranged lives who heard a heartbeat and lurched forward eagerly to claim it as their own.

Music likes to awaken memories.

The hummer swiftly stopped. The Mandalorian bit the inside of her cheek, quelling an unwelcome urge for bitter laughter. Enfys began.

"You're one of the Cloud-Riders now. You've earned your place." Cloud-Riders. A name for those above everything, silver-misted, angel-feathered, penned by a child and looked up to in worship. Enfys didn't ask if the Mandalorian wanted to join her crusade. She claimed her own, and Eryn was grateful for it, left in awe of what appeared to be the secret working of unconscious desires. She still barely knew how she had come to stand, hand scabbing over as she nodded carefully at the girl she was wordlessly accepting as a leader. The past hours had moved with unbelievable tempo, so stuck Eryn had been in the absolute of nothingness that she was blind to the universe moving beyond her. Certainties had vanished, leaving in their wake a path to unknown fate. But there was unavoidable change ahead, nowhere left to stay the same, no one left to rescue her and offer another chance, to pull a familiar sun back over the horizon. No Qi'ra, no Mandalore. No legacy.

Her armor felt heavy, even as the eyes of the Cloud-Riders fell away, attention dissolving into dust. They wouldn't stare at one of their own, for their lack of words said enough: somewhere in this twisted little rebellion, she would belong.

It was then that Eryn wondered if oppressors feared these bursting wells of insanity they had created, the people like her they had forged in furnaces of loss and inhuman brutality. Each of them were sparks of brutal vengeance and fearful consequence bringing ruin to all they touched.

And each of them would become nothing less than a wildfire, blazing until at last extinguished.

✧･ﾟ: * ═══════════════ *:･ﾟ✧

𝐀/𝐍: I would henceforth like to be known as the person who brought killer hummingbirds into the star wars universe, please and thank you.

I tried to slip some more references to Eryn's childhood on Mandalore in there (definitely not creating it as I go), and am very excited to write more of Enfys, Nix, and the Cloud-Riders!! (this group has very little canon, so I may or may not get to go all out with some creepy rituals) *eye emoji*

All in all, I know my updates are rather infrequent, and I sadly won't be able to get them much more consistent, but I hope you all still enjoyed :)

- Jynni

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