The Ve’lora Family Vault
A little bit of history that I needed to get written out! My everlasting thanks to @humanrevolt for trusting me to write Lyrisal, and for all the stories we’ve built together so far. I’ve been having such a bloody good time, I can’t even put it into words. Kind of wish I had the stamina to stay up late enough to make an illustration to put to this, or the fortitude to wait until I have the time free to draw something before posting it, but... I don’t. Feels kinda weird to be posting text only though!
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Ulfran stared hollowly at Lyrisal for a good ten minutes before speaking. “It was you, you know.” She’d been her eternally patient self, not saying a word, not prompting nor pressing, merely working away at her meal with better table manners than one might expect from your average ex-Commando- unless of course one knew her at all. The sound of her cutlery clinking against the plate stilled, and she lifted her eyes to meet his. They were still a little difficult to look at, despite how long it’d been since they’d… changed. She waited again, letting a single raised eyebrow do the talking for her. “My final trial. My trial of the flesh…” he curled his lip a little at that, like the words were a bad taste in his mouth. “It was you.” Lyrisal tilted her head at that; the slightest of movements, but for her, it conveyed the height of interest in what he had to say. “Doesn’t that one normally involve a certain amount of… bloodshed?”
Ulfran sighed, though there was still a sneer in his otherwise defeated tone as he nodded. “Normally. Usually it’s physical pain that they put to the test. Much easier to… control, and dish out in appropriate measures. But no, no, not for me. She knew about us. Master Antinea.”
Lyrisal remembered young Kane Ulfran’s master well, of course. The Togruta with wits as sharp as her teeth, as kind as she was severe. They certainly hadn’t been the first teenagers at the Temple to liken her to a mother vorn tiger, stripes and all. “That’s not entirely a surprise. I can’t imagine we were nearly as discrete as we thought we were.” Her voice wasn’t cold, exactly, but she was still guarded.
“She knew, and she let us be. Left me be, to… to make my mistakes. See if I’d come around on my own. And when I didn’t, she decided to use it to… test me.”
This wasn’t exactly the conversation Lyrisal had been expecting to have. Here they were in hyperspace, putting as much distance between themselves and Bothawui as possible, with a pair of hostages in tow. Ulfran had come with them, a fact that both excited and concerned her, and she had yet to make any measure of where his loyalties currently lay. The fact that he’d never left Republic service had come as a genuine surprise, but why… why the Republic had seen fit to authorize a mission that involved kidnapping an unremarkable Bothan girl and forcing her into a marriage arrangement amongst Bothan nobility was the mystery she truly wanted some light shed on.
But Ulfran clearly needed to let this out, so she leant back in her seat and let him.
“Just before I was knighted, she confronted me. Told me she knew exactly what was going on, and I… I was ashamed.” He gritted his teeth, letting his eyes flutter shut for a moment. “I was so desperately ashamed, because I’d known… I’d known all along they wouldn’t approve. But I kept going back to you. Because we were different, weren’t we? We understood our obligations. We would never let one another get in the way of our work. Of serving the greater good. We could have… made it work. Been an example. I wasn’t ashamed of us, I was ashamed only because I knew we were going against the rules. Because I’d been found out.”
Perhaps it was because he was, for the first time in his life, speaking aloud thoughts and frustrations he’d kept bottled up since he’d been a Padawan... but he sounded more like the young man he used to be than the silver-eyed sorcerer he’d posed as for so long. If any feelings were stirred inside Lyrisal however, she let nothing show. She merely listened, and gave him the space to work through it at his own speed.
“She asked me if I would walk away. She asked if I could turn my back on you, for the good of the Order. And I didn’t even blink before saying yes. ‘Yes, Master, of course, Master. Whatever you ask. I live to serve.’”
He fell into bitter silence for a few harsh breaths.
“She didn’t ask anything of me there and then. It was… the day after I was knighted that she came. I don’t think I truly expected it to happen, I… I think that’s why I said yes so easily. But then Master pulled me aside, and told me the plan. And that if I agreed to it, I would be playing a very, very long game.
“Antinea and a fellow Master, they’d spent the last few years tracking down rumours of artifacts. Deadly, powerful, game-changing artifacts. You know the sort. But they could only track so far without someone on the inside. They needed… someone smart. Someone resourceful. Someone who could convincingly pretend to abandon the Republic and be welcomed into the Empire’s Sphere of Ancient Knowledge.”
He actually laughed a little there, shaking his head as a wry grin twisted his features.
“An undercover treasure-hunter. That’s what they wanted me to be. I was the perfect candidate, and the very idea of it was thrilling.”
Lyrisal felt a similar, but subdued smile tweak at the corners of her lips, and she gave a single nod of acknowledgement. “The sort of thing we’d always talked about.”
“Except that it couldn’t be a we. I had to convince everyone that I’d truly abandoned the Order. You, most of all. I had to make you believe it with all your heart, because if you were convinced, then, heh, surely everyone else would be. I’ve put on a lot of acts over the years, Lyrisal, but I think that was still the greatest show of my life. So good, I nearly convinced myself.” His tone took a harsh turn.
“Ulfran-“
“Don’t. The time for sympathy is long gone. I knew what I was getting into, I… stepped into it willingly. I knew I was going to hurt you, and still I went forward. I’ve been bearing that weight since the beginning. Of course, the fact that I’d chosen that path didn’t stop it from tearing me up inside. The hours in the library, researching, cataloguing, seeking out references to great and terrible things I’d be sent out into the world to destroy… oh, they were a joy. They were my solace. The anger you saw in me was real, so real, but it wasn’t at my post, it wasn’t at my Master. It was at what I had to do to you.”
Lyrisal watched him carefully, and measured her response with equal care. “I survived.”
“You left.”
“After I thought you’d abandoned it all! After I’d tried for years to bring you back--“
Ulfran raised his hands; a call for peace? Or a surrender. “It made it near impossible to continue, for a time. I never questioned anything so hard as I questioned myself, when I wondered if it really mattered so much if we were working for the same cause. If one person could make such a difference to how I felt about the Republic. I’ve never stopped wondering if you might have stayed, if only I had been around…”
His voice trailed away, and Lyrisal gave him nothing. She’d always been reserved, but now she was like stone. If she had the answer to his lifelong question, this was not the time she was willing to give it.
“Were you successful?”
So far his thoughts had wandered, that her question took him a little by surprise. “Sorry…?”
“Destroying artifacts. Did you?”
“Ah.” He smiled then, though his mirror-like gaze was distant. There was no pride in his tone, but some level of contentment. “Yes. Five unique and potentially devastating alchemical objects. Located. Tracked down. And their procurement and destruction so artfully arranged that my name was never associated with a single one. One operation was so well executed that the next virtually fell into my lap, as its caretaker strove to see it better protected.”
Lyrisal almost smiled with him. Almost. She closed her eyes, thought for a moment, and when she opened them the look she fixed him with was darker than the void of space. There was a ferocity there, the likes of which Ulfran had never known she could show, but her voice was calm and smooth as ever. “So tell me, then, what this all has to with faking the death of one of my crewmates. Kidnapping her and attempting to force her into a marriage. Where was the Republic’s interest in all this?”
Ulfran didn’t labour the point. “The Ve’lora family vault. Access to what would have been my sixth terrible artifact. Have you ever heard of the Tempus Shard?”
“…I can’t say that I have.”
“It’s been called a few things over the centuries, but that has always been the most common. Rumour says it gives the bearer some ability to manipulate time.”
Lyrisal’s skeptical stare was so old and familiar, Ulfran very nearly laughed out loud.
“Oh, I’m not quite sure I believe it either,” the silver haired man agreed with her silent judgement. “But one way or another, it’s left quite the trail of destruction in its wake. It’s powerful, that much I can confirm. And somewhere down the line, it fell into possession of the family of the young Bothan lad you have in captivity here. I suppose… technically… it would be his now, wouldn’t it?”
“If it was so terrible a thing, why couldn’t the Republic simply negotiate for it?”
“Ahhh, you don’t really know Bothans, do you? If they caught so much of a whiff of the fact that the Republic had an interest in it, you could bet they’d clamp down so hard one could only hope to glimpse it six or seven generations down the track. If they were lucky. No, no. Attributing more value to the Shard would only make the Ve’loras more intent upon keeping it… that is to say, if they admitted to owning it at all. It’s not uncommon for the wealthier families to possess all manner of illegally obtained items, stolen pieces from cultures all across the galaxy, to be showed off on occasion at horribly pretentions get-togethers with one another…” a sneer twisted Ulfran’s features into something rather ugly. “The Republic would virtually have to declare war to seize the Shard openly.”
“Why not just let it be, then? If the Ve’loras had it kept so tightly under wraps…”
“Hadrex Kor’var.”
Lyrisal frowned, eyes narrowing in thought. “You asked me to…”
“Kill him, yes. And I appreciate the efficiency with which you did so. I don’t know how much you knew about him, but he was… quite the eccentric. Obsessed with Sith Philosophy. Considered himself something of an alchemist. And alarmingly well versed in the myths surrounding the Shard. I was tasked with beating him to it.”
Several things clicked into place at once. “You had to work for him. He would have leapt at the chance to have a ‘Sith’ on staff, where the Ve’loras would never have trusted you.”
Ulfran nodded. “Get in good with the Kor’vars. Facilitate the union between the families. Earn a measure of trust from the Ve’loras. And even if I was never invited to view the contents of the vault… well, I’d be in a far better position to act. Arrange a heist, perhaps. Or at the very least, keep putting obstacles in Hadrex’s way.”
“And Ahuska was your way in.”
“She was my way in.”
“You know it wasn’t right. There was nothing good about the way you took her. Or treated her.”
Ulfran fell quiet. The regret was plain on his face, even in his strange eyes, and he took some time finding his next words. But whatever he was trying to put his voice to never had the opportunity, as his head snapped up with a sudden jolt.
“Lyrisal.” His tone was oddly urgent. “I think we need to go to the cargo bay.”