Potential Sith Inquisitor Prelude. On Korriban, a slave is singled out for attention.
“Mirial is a desert world, if I recall correctly. Your kind still drink water, though, is that right?”
Asolde blinked slowly. She had grown unaccustomed to being asked non-rhetorical questions. She nodded her head.
“I do like hearing an answer.”
“Yes. My lord.” She tacked on the honorific just in case and watched the Sith as he hummed and poured water from a glass pitcher into her cup and then into his own.
He was a human. A massive man in a neat and orderly set of robes. Cybernetic augmentations studded his hands and face. His head was half-shaved with the black iron colored hair that remained swept back.
“Excellent. Places like this truly limit one’s ability to be a good host.” He said with a smile, the scars that crisscrossed his lips tightened and pulled as he did.
The wind raked through the expeditionary office tent, yanking at the canvas door flaps. Distantly she could hear pickaxes and shovels still scraping across sand and stone of the dig site.
She still wore the rough canvas jumpsuit of a skilled laborer, emblazoned with a red Esk on the back and chest for ease of reference to what slave pen she belonged in.
“Please, drink.” The man insisted and mechanically Asolde lifted the glass to her lips.
She had never really understood before when the poets called water sweet. But she knew now, after months of gritty, sani-bacc treated water, what they meant.
The water was clear and cooler than that air around her and it took everything not to practically inhale it.
The Sith was still smiling at her, taking a drink of his own glass. “Go on,” he encouraged mildly, “Have as much as you like.”
She eyed him for a moment. A friendly Sith was especially dangerous. Certainly to one of the bodies of the slave corps. But then she considered that if this was going to be her last drink she might as well enjoy it.
She gulped, tipping the glass up she breathed through her nose between vast swallows of water until she’d emptied the glass and set it back down panting.
“Good. I see they haven’t beaten the appetite out of you.”
“Thank you, my lord.”
“Or the manners.” He raised the pitcher and refilled her glass, which she drank more slowly this time.
She did not bother to ask after his purpose. He would make it clear soon enough. Probably something to do with what had happened down in the dig site. The Holocron.
“There’s still some polish under all of the chips and cracks, I think. You weren’t born into slavery.”
“No, my lord.”
“What were you before.”
The daughter of a provincial lord. She thought. Top of her class in sight translation of early Republic glyphs. A competitively ranked duelist. In-line for an apprenticeship at one of the most respected and celebrated museum archives on Mirial. Betrothed.
“Nothing, my lord.”
“Nothing? You popped fully formed from the void at the moment of your capture?”
“I was a student.”
“Of?”
“Literary Archaeology.”
“Ah, thankfully you didn’t go to waste in the general labor corps. You were lucky to be slated for Korriban, a chance to prove your true value. This is a sacred place, many discover their power here.”
She did not answer, hand still wrapped around the water cup.
“The foreman said you did something remarkable at Site One. Activated a damaged Holocron.”
“I only picked it up, my lord. It opened of its own accord.”
“A holocron can only respond to a force user. You may not realize what you did, but you were the catalyst.”
From his robe the Sith produced the cracked Holocron from the dig site and placed it on the table between them, beside the water pitcher.
“I’d like you to do it again for me.”
“I… as you say, my lord. But I don’t know how I did it.”
“Try.”
Asolde took a slow breath. When she had removed the device from its buried cradle she had only meant to transfer it safely to a protective case for further study. She hadn’t even known what it was. She’d assumed some kind of ritual aid. It had been cracked and dull, but when she’d picked it up it opened like a flower in her palm. She had been gripped by a strange force, the lines and quadrants of a star map had burned itself into her thoughts along with a susurrus of half intelligible whispers. She could feel all of them lingering as if in waiting in the back of her mind.
She reached out to pick up the Holocron.
It remained closed. Gently she turned it in her hand, thumb running over one of the cracked corners. There weren’t any buttons or levers to manipulate. At least none that she could see.
She looked back up to the Sith, lost.
“I’m sorry, I don’t…”
“You picked it up just like that?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Try again.”
“I-I don’t know how.” She said softly, trying to make herself small. “It may be too damaged—“
The Sith studied her for a moment, gazing at her face. Slowly he reached forward and moved the water pitcher to the side of the table.
She watched him, frozen under his regard.
“My lord. I’m sorry, I—“ it was as if her throat had suddenly closed, a heavy pressure wrapping around her neck.
“I hate to have to do this sort of thing, but occasionally the force must be made to present itself through desperation.” He said, almost apologetically, his hand raised.
Asolde clutched at her throat, panic rising as she failed to draw breath.
“Come, slave. Find a way to stop me.”
Asolde clawed instinctively at her neck, eyes wide as her muscles worked to draw air that wouldn’t come.
“I don’t want to kill you if I don’t have to. Stop me.” His tone was calm, conversational even.
Panic met despair. She didn’t want to die on Korriban. She didn’t want to die a slave. She didn’t want to die at all.
She could feel the pressure on her neck, steady and hot.
Despair met anger. She didn’t deserve this. This cruelty so casually meted out by someone so unbothered, someone who hadn’t even tried to learn her name.
The whispers that had echoed in her mind when she had first touched the Holocron rose up in her muddled thoughts.
Resist. They hissed. Pay him in pain.
“Don’t disappoint me.” The Sith said gently.
Her hearing had gone cottony, her arms heavy and uncoordinated. Anger stoked to something hotter, something dynamic. She reached without reaching. Some part of her touched the power that emanated from the man across from her like a rope.
Asolde set the connection between them ablaze, letting rage and desperation reverberate down the link.
Suddenly she found herself gasping and coughing on the grate floor of the tent. She’d fallen out of her chair, but all at once she was breathing again.
It took her a moment to register laughter from across the table. The Sith was on the floor as well and something smoked and crackled on, or perhaps under, his sleeve. He was laughing as he put it out.
“I was beginning to worry someone had lied to me.” He said, rising from the floor. “Splendid, really. Beautifully done for an untrained slave. Oh, go on and pull yourself together.”
Asolde stared, now more confused than anything. Slowly she stood back up.
“I believe you opened it.” He said thoughtfully, “But it’s possible, as you say, that it was damaged. Disappointing. We’ll have to do some work to repair it. But you…” he tilted his head a little, “I see potential in you.”