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dathomirdumpsterfire · 2 months ago

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Read the prequel on Ao3 HERE. Start at chapter one HERE. Updates Tuesdays.

~~~Chapter 5: Please Be Functional~~~

Maul steps off the boarding ramp into a world of inky black. Not darkness, but absence. Dry pebbles crunch under his boots, but when he looks down he sees only himself.

At a distance something small disturbs the unseen ground, skittering and sliding through the grit. Some little animal or another, many-limbed from the sound of it, chittering as it flees from him.

From…

While he’d been distracted by the creature, the dark horizon had lightened a shade and resolved into shapes. Odd, angular formations of rock far in the distance. Behind their sharp planes, a color appears- dim yellow. Maul blinks and suddenly there is a sky above his head, as though it had been there the whole time and he could only now see it.

Dirty atmosphere and yellow light, a field of lifeless rock. But no, there had been an animal just now, it-

Something slams into the back of Maul’s shoulder. He whirls, snarling, and sees a stone hit the ground. It rolls to a slow stop by his foot. There’s no ship behind him. He’s alone in the dusty wasteland.

“Welcome to Tosste.”

Maul whirls again. Nothing moves. There’s not even a breeze to whistle between the sparse boulders. Only the voice of his Master.

He reaches out with the force- seeing, feeling, knowing. It is present everywhere, even in barren places, even in dead winds and dry rocks.

“What do you see?”

He isn’t stupid, he isn’t a child anymore. He’s learned his lessons, he understands.

Maul does not voice the answer Sidious seeks aloud, but he knows his Master hears him nonetheless.

Weapons. I see weapons.

Warm laughter echoes across the landscape, everywhere at once. Crouched in the grit, senses expanded far beyond himself, Maul can feel every pebble around him. Ready.

Unseen, another rock smashes into his arm.

“To live without leaving a mark is a terrible thing,” his Master drawls. “To die forgotten is even worse."

“Rrrgh!” Maul redoubles his efforts, gathering the force to himself, feeling the pebbles, the dust, the lines of fossils trapped within the rock beneath his feet. The ghosts of a world long dead. But underneath it all, he feels emptiness, an icy void, its chill creeping up into everything.

His Master continues as if Maul hadn’t interrupted. “It is… irresponsible.”

His fingers are going numb. A stone flies toward his head and he fails to bat it away, his arm moving too slowly to stop it from cracking into his horns. He should have felt it sooner, why couldn’t he feel-?

“The creatures that once roamed this now dead ocean, they lacked imagination. Ultimately, that is why they all perished. They failed to see… potential."

“No!” he screams. “It is you who failed to see! With your teachings I survived! I survived! You-!”

The next rock slams squarely into his lower back, then another hits the side of his knee, his left arm. He can’t feel them coming. No matter how deeply Maul attunes himself to the landscape, the force is silent in the face of his Master’s will. He’ll never feel them coming.

“You have been… replaced.”

Cold climbs into Maul’s bones and roots him in place, and it’s all he can do to lift his arms—bare and skinny. His hands are small, with a child’s stubby fingers and soft claws, filed flat. He shields his head and roars, his voice cracking apart into nothing but a thin hiss.

“Not fast enough.”

The next rock flies straight for his face.

Maul gasps awake, jolting upright from a slouch over a reading desk.

His eyes itch, and his neck aches. His left leg is awash with the cold-fire burn of nerve pain, and he wants to run off through the gravethorn forest and kill something to make the energy vibrating in his bones go away.

He has been over this fucking library enough times to have it memorized.

Manic energy crests and Maul snarls at it, at the books, at everything. At the irony that once upon a time the entire room and all its knowledge would have been forbidden to him, simply because he was born with the audacity to have a dick. Not that he got to keep said appendage. Oh no, even that he will have to recreate if he ever wants more than the strange human prosthetic the mandalorians inflicted on him along with his fourth set of legs.

A stone candleholder, the candle propped inside long burned down to a puddle, rattles across the desk, spilling wax. He snarls again and hurls it across the room with the force, listens to it bounce off the wall and roll to a stop on the floor.

‘Turn around.’

He does. From sitting hunched at the table to standing with his back to it, faster than his conscious mind can process. For an achingly clear instant his discomfort -tetchy nerves and exhaustion and frustration- is burned away in a bitter chill. A cold-snap reset of reality.

Then his thoughts catch up to the moment. It is the force damned voices again, come to bother him in his distraction.

‘I suspect that every creature that ever lived on Tosste did not think much about rocks either.’

He wants to light everything in sight on fire.

Maul turns from his former master's voice, making distance between himself and all the remaining books and scrolls of the nightsisters, knowing that he needs to be further from precious, flammable things. Immediately.

He kicks the candleholder aside on his way out the door.

Seeking a balm for his temper, Maul heads to the temple's hot springs, born up from deep water with old magicks. Perhaps the heat of them would match his energy, and curate it, buffer it so he could think.

‘I had hoped that you would be smarter,’ Sidious whispers from nowhere.

'I will soak myself and rest,’ Maul thinks, forcibly placid, shaky with rage, ‘then on the 'morrow I shall contact Vos and see if-'

h e r A ?

e r r rr Y o u?

r r e o ou

"Rrraaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!"

The sith howls in abundant, caustic fury and turns for the sanctum. He slams claws that have begun to overgrow into the solid rock of the temple wall, and reinforces them with his hate .

The timing! Of these attacks! Is!

Maul's nails leave a trail of gouges all the way there. Who is left to chastise him for defacing the temple? No one. Who is left to forbid him from knowledge because his flesh does not match his talent? No one. Who is left? Only. Him. He is alone but he is free, and he is determined to find whoever or whatever is responsible for these assaults.

‘What do you see?’ his master’s voice asks again with deceptive calm.

The circles of ichor are already lit, their protections triggered even before he could reach them. Latent magicks help push away the tendrils, warding him automatically simply because he is there, and in need of their aid.

Something soft at the bottom of his chest catches and aches. How distinct that feels from everything else, like… like the memory of blue eyes and cinnamon oil and petrichor. Mother.

But a memory is not a feeling.That does not make sense, he is missing something.

Or something is missing from him.

Maul growls and shoves that mystery down into the frustrating bramble of all his other useless emotions, so much fuel for his rage, and takes his place at the center of the wards. The strings are slippery today, plying and sweet, almost deceptively gentle. He refuses them all the same, not fooled by the lie.

‘I’ll ask you again.’

It has been five days, and he has noticed no specific pattern to the threat. Sometimes the break between is measured in minutes. Other times he has hours before it comes again.

Either way, he has been sleeping in this room.

Either way, he has not been able to trace the source.

Maul watches as the walls start up their firework flicker, runes burning bright and fading out. He made both a holo-recording and a physical diagram of the entire wardset on the second day, just in case any of the marks failed from overuse. So far they have held. The Nightmother's wards remain strong, even in her absence.

Runelight fades, and Maul sneers in triumph at the threads’ retreat. Fucking good riddance.

Now, he will go to the pools.

‘What do you see?’

With a veneer of calm he rises to leave, still ignoring the voices of the past, pausing briefly to touch the delicate curl of a long and winding rune. Just the vitality in his fingers is enough to make the ichor infused in it glow softly. Maul stares at it a moment before exiting and heading for his original destination.

He wends his way through the empty halls of the nightsisters’ undercity, led onward by a draft of cool night air blowing in between distant carbon-scored pillars and the remains of titanic statues.

Far to the city’s edge a series of springs lie sprawled against the wall of the cavern. The heartspring sits high at the back and literally boils with heat, too hot to enter. A curling scent of sulfur and magnesium wafts around on air currents thick with steam. The heart and its immediate children sit tucked away in an overhang made of the same stone and gnarled roots as the temple.

There are dozens of options further away, relatively cooler and brackish, but it is to those higher pools he goes, shedding clothing in a trail, leaving himself bare to the elements.

A waft of heated air curls past him, pricking at the synthskin recently grafted around his hips. The flesh is tender and raw in its newness, delivering an uncomfortable amount of sensation compared to the bare metal of his outer thighs or the nerveless mesh around his knees and ankles. He can feel the airflow there now, the tickle of condensation and the heat rising off the water. Maul has reclaimed these for himself.

Any discomfort is ignored as he continues past carved shelves above and below the waterline. Higher to sit and cool off. Lower to recline in the water. Maul bypasses these options and dumps himself in the deep end, letting the weight of his metal half pull him down, down, down…

At the very bottom he purposefully lets go, roaring a gout of muted bubbles, feeding his fury into the world, letting it run rampant. The waters geyser up, splash away, turning a slow trickle from pool to pool into white, frothy rapids.

The remaining water crashes down, leaving his basin at a fraction of its previous depth. Maul breathes deeply, and spends more than a few moments centering his mind. Long curtains of glimmering navy kelp hang limp down the sides of the pool, dripping, alive with waterbugs large and small. A vividly yellow crab goes scuttling across the bottom toward it, kicking up a trail of sandy murk as it races for cover.

‘What do you see?’

The sith lays down right where he is, and lets the water rise around him.

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