Trauma is a cruel curator of memory. It left 𝐄𝐋𝐄𝐄𝐍𝐀 𝐃𝐀𝐑𝐔 with nothing but the sick, twisted fragments of her parents. A faint, fading resemblance of what it meant to know some delusional form of happiness.
Born into slavery, she was forced to endure cycles of severe labor, with psychological and physical abuse serving as the constant enforcer. Survival was always the objective, or so it was said.
Deep within the subterranean dark of the Stalgasin Hive, the towering capital spire of Geonosis, there was no sky. She was detained in the lower levels of a massive, automated weapons foundry and foundry refinery. A multi-kilometer-deep industrial labyrinth where the clanking of machinery, the hiss of molten metal, and the endless clicking of worker drones echoed through stone corridors without end. Here, the elite of the hive manufactured advanced hardware for shadowy galactic clients. To her master, Eleena was nothing more than disposable labor to grease the gears of their industrial empire and continuosly recalibrate their tracking systems or malfunctions in droids.
And death?
Death was a merciful gift. A gift longed for. A gift denied.
One she did not fear.
For what was there worth living for? Pain? Suffering? To wish for freedom like a wanton fool? Perhaps that was all she would ever be. She expected nothing more than the routine of daily beatings earned by instinctual defiance, and the grind of hardened labor.
Sleep was her only sanctuary. A temporary, silent oblivion where the chains did not bite, the blade did not scar, and the lash did not fall. But even the darkness was not a guarantee.
Lavender eyes snapped open before the amber glare of Ea could fully breach the pen’s edge. Her lekku twitched, a reflexive, serpentine coil against her neck, sensing a guard’s arrival as heavy boots hit the sand-scorched floor. She did not gasp; she did not flinch. She simply sat, the movement fluid and devoid of wasted energy, her body already bracing for the routine.
A series of harsh, metallic clicks and low, vibrating buzzes erupted from the guard's mandibles. To any off-worlder, it was animalistic noise. To Eleena, her mind translated the insectoid dialect instantly, delivering the degradation straight to her soul.
"You, leash-hook! Stand!"
Her body cried out in agony as she obeyed. Dried blood stained the beautiful azure of her scarred skin as the rising light of Geonosis revealed the extent of her injuries; deep, ragged gashes and fresh wounds littered her physique. Her eyes followed the guard as he examined her, his expression a mix of disgust and pity.
"Disgusting mongrel," he seethed.
Before she could control herself, the Rutian Twi'lek leveled the guard with a glare that clearly spoke volumes of defiance. A look he caught and certainly did not appreciate.
𝐒𝐌𝐀𝐂𝐊ⵑ
The violent, sharp crack of a slap echoed throughout the arena, silencing nearby slaves who flinched at the sudden outburst. The sheer force of the blow sent Eleena stumbling to the hard ground, her vision swimming.
"PATHETIC CHATTEL!" the guard clicked, his jaw snapping aggressively as he loomed over her. "I will be having a word with your owner!"
Her owner: a Geonosian Baron, an aristocrat within the hive hierarchy who found pleasure in breaking the working caste and collected twi'lek slaves as a cruel hobby.
Since she was a child, he had enforced one iron rule: any work found insufficient or any act of defiance was met with calculated brutality. He would starve them, cut their rations, or carve his displeasure into their flesh, ensuring the lesson left a permanent mark.
There was no end to this inhumane nightmare.
Yet somewhere beneath the agony, beneath the starvation and carved obedience, something within Eleena continued to resist.
Not loudly. Not foolishly.
It lived in silence.
In every glare she swallowed before it became punishment. In every order obeyed a heartbeat too slowly. In every wound she survived when others did not.
The Geonosians believed suffering reduced a being to instinct.
They were wrong.
She learned quickly that defiance was costly, but weakness invited worse.
So Eleena adapted.
She memorized the cadence of boots against durasteel or rugged terrain. Learned which guards drank too heavily, which slaves informed for scraps, which overseers enjoyed cruelty enough to become careless. Silence became her armor. Observation became survival.
"Stand, filth. I am taking you to the Baron. He can decide what to do with your rebellious insignificance."
Eleena kept her eyes elsewhere, the words striking her soul like a blade. She could mask her expressions, become distant, but never cease the internal wreckage. This was existence beneath the hive. To be spent until nothing remained worth keeping.
The guard clicked a removable chain to her iron collar, testing its reliability with a sharp tug before hauling her toward the arena's exit. Her lavender gaze flickered toward a group of Twi'leks. No words passed between them, but the subtle, warning twitch of their lekku signaled one thing:
Danger.
Eleena’s own lekku curled inward at the sight before her when they emerged. Hutts encircled a group of slaves... individuals undoubtedly being measured for a far more sickening fate. A fate worse than her own.
Entertainment. Pleasure.
"Unit Daru! Here! Now!"
The command was a jagged, insectoid rasp that cut through the already suffocating air of the arena. Eleena did not hesitate; to do so would be to invite the very discipline she fought so hard to avoid.
She turned, her movements practiced and fluid. A mask she wore like a second skin.
Just a few paces away, the Baron stood, his mandibles twitching with a frantic, pulsing rhythm. But his focus wasn't on her; it was on the periphery, where a sharp retort of a blaster echoed through the hangar. A Twi'lek, younger than herself, collapsed into the red dust, cut down mid-stride in a desperate, foolish sprint for the perimeter.
The silence that followed was broken only by the thin, high-pitched wailing of children huddled in a nearby pen. They were frightened, uncomprehending, and loud. A sound that, in the hive’s hierarchy, was as offensive as it was pathetic.
A guard lunged toward the pen, his clawed hand raised, the metallic buzz of his intent clear.
Eleena felt a cold, jagged ache in her chest. A reflexive spark of empathy she had spent years burying beneath layers of obsidian iron. '𝗟𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗮𝘄𝗮𝘆,' her survival instinct hissed. She stared at the sand, at the shadows of her own feet, and willed her heart to stop hammering against her ribs. To look was to be next. To care was to be broken.
Lavender irises shifted to find her master again. By the look in his eye: cold, impatient, and devoid of anything resembling mercy; there was urgent work to do. And judging by the pleased, erratic twitching of his facial chitin, it was going to be the kind of work that left a mark if something didn't go according to plan.
The transition from the open, suffocating heat of the arena to the subterranean depths of the spire was a harsh shock to her system. As she followed a pace behind her master, the red dust of Geonosis gave way to polished, cold durasteel floors. The ambient temperature plummeted. The dry, hot wind was replaced by the low hum of massive cooling vents circulating sterile, recycled air.
Here, deep within the hive, the primitive cruelty of the slave pens dissolved into the stark reality of an industrial war machine.The Baron stopped before a set of heavy blast doors. With a rapid sequence of clicks from his mandibles, he swiped an encrypted keycard. The doors hissed open, revealing a cavernous workshop illuminated by the eerie, pulsating blue glow of holographic terminals.
In the center of the room loomed the asset.
It was the core processing unit of a prototype Orbital Tracking and Point-Defense Array. A web of thick power cables slithered across the floor like mechanical serpents, feeding energy into a massive, rotating weapon matrix. Suspended in the air above it was a complex three-dimensional hologram of the planetary sector, flashing aggressively with warning errors and fracturing data strings.
The Baron turned his multi-faceted eyes toward her, his wings flaring with an agitation that vibrated through his chitinous armor. A barrage of rapid, snapping clicks and guttural buzzes erupted from his jaw, translating flawlessly into her mind:
"The targeting matrices are fracturing. The predictive logic cannot lock onto hyperspace exit-vectors. Fix it before the Sith shuttle touches down in the hangar, Unit Daru. If the system fails when his dreadnought enters the atmosphere, I will carve the skin from your lekku myself."
The Rutian Twi'lek did not let the threat register on her face. Her lavender eyes immediately locked onto the cascading lines of red error code bleeding across the primary terminal. The raw terror of her existence seemed to quiet down, instantly replaced by the cold, razor-sharp focus of her analytical mind.
She stepped up to the console, her bruised, azure fingers hovering over the glowing keys before she began to type. The Geonosians could build the hardware, but their insectoid minds lacked the creative cognitive flexibility to program fluid tactical logic. They could not anticipate the chaotic, unpredictable maneuvers of an organic pilot.
But Eleena could.
Her fingers blurred across the terminal, rewriting the tracking algorithms in real-time. She reallocated processing power from the secondary sub-routines, forcing the array to calculate atmospheric drag and defensive shield dispersion frequencies simultaneously. To her, the code wasn't just numbers, it was a battlefield. She was mapping out crossfire vectors, predicting entry angles, and building a flawless net in the sky.
Line by line, the bleeding red errors on the screen began to turn a steady, compliant blue.
Suddenly, a deep, heavy vibration rattled the durasteel floor beneath her boots. It wasn't the machinery. It was the distinct, thunderous hum of an Fury-Class Interceptor's engine passing directly overhead. The Sith had arrived.
The data stream on her terminal gave one final, violent pulse before settling into a pristine, unblemished cobalt blue. The tracking array was perfectly calibrated. The logic was flawless.
She had just woven a web capable of snaring a fleet, yet she stepped back from the console, instantly shrinking her posture to match the invisible, crushing weight of her chains.
A sharp hiss cut through the hum of the cooling vents as the workshop's reinforced blast doors parted.
The heavy silence of the laboratory stretched, taut as a wire about to snap. The Baron continued to click and gesture, his wings a blur of desperate flattery, completely oblivious to the sudden, icy shift in the room's atmosphere.
But Eleena felt it.
The towering warrior in a black cloak took a single step forward, the heavy click of his armored boots vibrating against the floorboards. Flanking him was another menacing silhouette; his master, Darth Vindican. The Sith Pureblood’s crimson visage was partially obscured by an ornate, bone-like mask, his dark-side aura projecting a chilling authority that made the room's temperature drop even further.
And then, slowly, his gaze fell upon her.
Instinct screamed at her to look away. Her survival armor, the obsidian iron she had built around her soul, demanded she drop her head, mask her features, and blend into the shadows.
Instead, her lavender irises rose.
Her breath caught.
Strikingly haunting molten golden orange eyes met hers. They held the fire of a thousand burning suns, a raw, uncompromising power that refused to be broken by anything or anyone.
The chains of Geonosis still bound her flesh, but as their attention remained, Eleena knew the inhumane nightmare of her old life had just come to a sudden, violent end.
"We allowed corrupt doctrines to dictate the paths before us. But this power is yours-- no matter what the Sith or the Jedi proclaim. No matter your age or your lineage, the Force is yours to wield."
Darth Malgus
Star Wars: The Old Republic (Legacy Reborn, 2026)
I hear his heartbeat. Slow, like our mornings, bare of souls and bare of bodies. Such things shouldn’t last, I tell myself. And if he was listening, he must’ve heard. I tilt my head up to see him. Eyes closed, he’s got his fingers on one lekku, touching, stroking.
Do you know how much I love you?
“Yes, I do.” He replied. He doesn’t smile but opens his eyes.
I had been forgetting things. Little things. Minor things. But it alarmed me. It alarmed me because I was not like this before. Before, my mind chewed over each word, each glance and pause, I thought and thought again, over the choice of words said to me, in the context of how it was said, and the tone. This mental work was exhausting, and it would lead nowhere, at least, nowhere I wanted to go. I was not apt, in that way, unlike most other Sith.
For reprieve, I'd spend what I could off the battlefield at the archives. I was often alone there, and if I wasn't, the other presence would have enough sense to leave me to my searches. I read the works of philosophers long gone, I analyzed old battle plans, personal dossiers, receipts of supplies, schematics of war droids. I'd start from one file to the next, one row to the next, one century to the next. My body was restless yet my mind was fatigued, so fatigued, that I did not notice my slipping until…
What meeting it was, I've forgotten. The huffs and exhales of frustration replaced by a strange sensation. It took me some time to realize, that the strange sensation, was sorrow. I had never felt sorrow before then. And after that, I was intimate with it, more than I'd like. But how could I stop sorrow, when on the other side of it, was you?
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