#Ludari jai Namtarra

[inonibird]

Sahuldeem Spin-off Snippet #4

Hey, remember how I posted three previous snippets because writing has been hard this year and I felt like sharing excerpts from the various unfinished Sahuldeem spin-off stories I've poked at over the past few years? (I am STILL working on the newest chapter of Sahuldeem; it has just been ludicrously hard to get into it) This next spin-off fic can best be described as: "A story centered around Qymaen’s Force-sensitive granddaughter, set after the Original Trilogy." Treated as a sequel to Sahuldeem, but Force-related shenanigans mean it is less grounded in canon/reality. A bit of a self-indulgent, adventurous romp with some family drama mixed in. (Ludari herself is a re-imagined version of an old ttrpg character)

This short snippet is set near the beginning, as Ludari learns more about the elder-father no one seems to want to talk about. Enjoy~

A few days later, Ludari’s father came into her room, and, instead of wishing her good night and departing as usual, he settled on the edge of her bed, heaving a weighty sigh.

“There’s little I can tell you about your elder-father that I know outside of stories, myself. I never met him. He left Kalee before I was birthed.”

“But elder-mother told you stories,” Ludari said, sitting up straight in bed, every fiber of her body hungry for whatever scraps her father might spare. “She knew him.”

Ludari’s father was quiet for a moment. “Why do you want to hear about him, Ludari?”

“The other children told me he wasn’t always like that.”

“Wasn’t always like…”

“A monster.”

Her father’s face stilled, his slitted eyes falling out of focus, as if picturing something he barely remembered. “You don’t know what he looked like, do you?”

Ludari shook her head. “They just told me he was barely even Kaleesh anymore. More like a droid.”

“Hold on.” Her father rose from her bed and slipped out of the room for a minute. When he returned, he held a portable holoscreen in hand, a cracked, outdated piece of technology that was the norm for backwater Kalee. Settling back into position, he passed the screen to his daughter. “These are old recordings from the HoloNet. They would have aired during the time of the Clone Wars. I was far too young to know anything about it, then. Mother showed these to me years later.”

Ludari squinted at the flickering screen, watching the decades-old HoloNet News broadcasts. Reporters spoke in urgent staccato of the “Knight Slayer” that had come to the attention of the Galactic Republic in recent weeks, and who had, at the time of the newsreel, finally been recorded in action. The footage was grainy and blurred, but amid the white armored figures of clone troopers, a skeletal shape rampaged, a storm of blue-and-green lights that snapped and sliced and severed. The footage paused, highlighting a frame of frozen fury: more metal than flesh, poised mid-assault, what passed for a face pointing up to glare at some unseen aerial intrusion.

The quality of the recording was too low to see much detail, but Ludari merely had to close her eyes to know what every fuzzy pixel had failed to display. She could see her elder-father like he stood right before her, hunched yet looming, taller than any Kaleesh she’d ever met; she could hear the strain of metallic joints and wheezing, labored breaths; she could smell the residue of blaster fire on scorched armorplast, the stink of old blood of felled enemies, and something sour and rancid buried beneath it all. Livid eyes glared back, glinting gold from deep, orbital sockets

“Ludari?” Her father placed a concerned hand on her arm. “Are you all right?”

Ludari peeled her eyes open. “He has a kakmusme,” she observed, and even as she blurted this, she wasn’t sure why that had caught her notice and demanded mention, of all things.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have shown this to you before bed.”

“I’m not scared.” But she was shaking. She couldn’t seem to stop, even when her father moved both hands to her shoulders for a comforting squeeze.

“I’m sorry. I should have known better. Everyone calls him a monster for a reason. The galaxy feared him for a reason.” Her father peered into her eyes, worried. “Do you know what he looked like when he was still Kaleesh? When he was still whole?”

Ludari shook her head again, but her brow creased as something occurred to her. “Like you?”

Her father blinked, then offered a small smile. “Yes, in fact. Your elder-mother has always said so. The village used to have a statue of him in the square, but it was torn down after the stories of the Clone Wars reached Kalee. I barely remember seeing it. He probably even looked a little like you, too, at your age. Wouldn’t have gotten his chin tusks, yet.”

“What was he like at my age?” Ludari asked, desperate for something to distract her from the possibility that, when she closed her eyes for the night, she would dream of a hulking, metallic skeleton cutting off limbs and crushing skulls with powerful claws—or, worse, that the almost palpable vision that had creaked and wheezed and glared at her from behind her eyelids would stand by her bed and watch her sleep.

“Hm. Well, my mother didn’t know him when he was your age, so what she told me was based on stories. But she said he knew how to use an Outland rifle when he was eight years old. Just two years younger than you.”

Ludari gaped. “Eight? You won’t even let me look at your rifle!”

He received a wry, arched eyebrow at that. “And you will learn when you are twelve. No weapons until then. That is tradition. Your elder-father lived in a time of planetary war; the children then needed to learn early, to grow up too quickly. But it’s said that because of him our family teaches all of our children how to shoot and hunt, no matter how many tusks they have.”

Ludari tried to picture herself, at her size, holding a slugthrower rifle. It was difficult. “He fought in a war when he was only eight years old?”

“The Huk War,” his father clarified. “Around 70 years ago. The Huk invaded and tore families apart—slaughtering our warriors, taking our women and children away to sell as slaves. When your elder-father was your age, it was said he protected Irikuum with his rifle. He would destroy entire raiding parties of more than a dozen Huk by himself, he was such a skilled shot.”

Ludari hung onto his every word. The tangle in her chest, which had wound painfully tight at the sight of the old newsreel and the frightening vision of what her elder-father had become, started to unravel and relax. “He sounds brave.”

“I’m sure he was, back then.” Ludari’s father put a hand in his daughter’s hair, giving her curls a gentle tousle. “Feeling better?”

“Will you tell me another story about him tomorrow night? About when he was still honorable?”

His father’s breath caught in his throat a moment, sucked in and held during a brief, silently painful contemplation. “Yes, little Ludari. I’ll tell you more.”

When her father left the room, taking the holoscreen and turning out the light, Ludari sat up in bed, closed herself off from the outer world, and meditated. The Feeling returned to her and seemed to revel in her success, feeding into her a warm, lulling peace that pervaded her body from her core to her fingertips and toes. All she had to do was think about a boy with his slugthrower, lying in the grass under a hot sun, holding his breath as he aimed at a wooden target a hundred meters away.

[inonibird]

“You see a figure in the mist...”

~

So I’ve joined a Star Wars tabletop group! :D In our current small campaign, it is the year 20 ABY and we are a group of Padawans investigating a Jedi temple and searching for a missing Luke Skywalker. I’m being incredibly self-indulgent by playing Ludari jai Namtarra, a Force-sensitive Kaleesh who happens to be one of the few surviving grandchildren of a certain...fallen...war hero...... 9_9 ...and who is hoping to make a good name for Kalee, which doesn’t have...the greatest reputation....for reasons.

But yes, one trial involved all of us trapped in this mystical, mysterious mist, and subsequently separated. Ludari got mad at the mist for plaguing him with distressing visions, and demanded it help him and show him the right path to complete the trial. ...Then this happened.