This short is about the level of PG-13 for descriptions of violence and gore. It describes Brant’s Sith training, and if you know anything about the Sith, well, now you understand why it has a content warning!
The identity of the Presence and the man in the ice-world is a bit unclear. Though this works since it’s also unclear from Brant’s point of view, I wanted to clarify it for the record: the Presence is not the Force (though the Sith Masters surely would want Brant to think that), but instead the Emperor’s soul. The man, though I originally considered making him Kellaro, Brant’s twin brother (hence “the Other”), is in fact Keel’ath, locked in battle with the Emperor as described by the Chapters storyline in SWTOR. In this version, Brant and Keel’ath meeting is what helps Keel’ath throw off the Emperor’s influence, but also what gives Brant the willpower to survive his Sith training mostly (somewhat) uncorrupted.
Author’s Note
Also, the scent of carbonite is totally my own invention. If anyone knows how it really should smell in canon, let me know.
“Hatred… is… power. Power is… freedom… to do as you so desire.”
It was coercive, how they forced him to focus on that voice. The room was kept completely dark, and Brant could smell the musk of other frightened apprentices crammed into the space with him, even though he could not see them. The voice was like a balm to that terrified huddle, the one clear sensation in the room even though it, too, was imbued with the same power as the darkness: the crawling sense of some ancient evil. The only thing Brant could see was the face that vomited it, that voice, and it was a handsome face, even under the ritualistic scarring and red paint like the blood of a tortured slave. You could look into that face and believe it could free you, that only it had the key, and that it would give it to you, if only you acquiesced to its commands. It filled Brant with fear, loathing, but also longing, to look upon it.
As the deadly voice spoke on, other Sith stalked the rows. Brant shivered as they passed, because sometimes they possessed electro-prods, coming out of the darkness from nowhere to shock him; other times they had a gentle touch and a word of approval. He hated and longed for them as he hated and longed for the voice.
It was a pregnant restlessness they were cultivating, a rising anticipation: a growing madness that must somehow make its way out from the depths of his core to the surface. It hurt to hold onto it, and it hurt to hold it back.
So when they brought the mind-altering drug to him, Brant took it eagerly. It burned his throat on the way down. The terrible anticipation knotted his stomach, but the fear gave way to pure fire, and the tightness eased to a heady rush. The room seemed to expand as the apprentices were allowed to spread out and a dim light came on: a red-orange light, like fire on sallow stone.
Then they put a vibroblade — a precursor to the lightsaber he would eventually wield — into his hands, and he killed.
The drug shuddered through his veins, begging movement, release. The dim light was suddenly more than enough to see by, then suddenly too much for his eyes. He hated it as he hated the crescendo of sensations on his skin: his own sweat like the legs of crawling insects; the breathing of the other apprentices was too loud on his ears. He forgot their humanity; he hated their sounds, their smell, their voices. He hated them, and he murdered them.
It ended with one more sweep through the air, one more impact on the end of his blade, one more too-loud gasp and dying shuffle on the floor. His euphoria began to dampen, and the room darkened. Somewhere in his core, something felt desperately wrong, like an emptiness or an alarm, and then he was the one who was slumping onto the sands of the arena, spent: the last left alive.
“Promising,” said the Overseer, overlooking the arena.
“He has much raw power,” agreed the other robed and hooded figure at his side.
“And he is young enough for you to mold to your will.”
The hood turned slightly, back and forth, as the figure inside shook his head. “No. That is your task, and I will not be delayed by the sniveling of a youth. You have blooded him; now let us see what it takes for his spirit to break. A dog of war must have a stout chain.”
The Overseer bowed. “He will be ready, Master.”
And so Brant’s training continued. The boy cut down all the slaves they put before him, sneering and catcalling before he slashed their throats open. Their faces he could not remember; they were a nameless blur, and he always avoided looking directly into their eyes. The euphoria and rage from the drug began to blend with his thoughts, and he rode through it all like a heady dream. Fear was a mere impulse, anger was simply energy, and pain? It did not exist. Not in him, and not in anyone he faced.
If he passed some test, he did not know it, but his victims steadily changed. Instead of whimpering slips of girls or young men before they took on the muscle of adulthood, now came the harder warriors, their eyes bright and stern. These apprentices were older than he, but not Chosen, not so strong in the Force. Like a fevered hallucination, he evaded the smart thrusts of their vibroswords, threw their parries back, as useless as storms breaking on a mountain. It was like a dance to Brant, all their moves choreographed, but only he knew it all, how it ended. When he took their heads and their blood splattered warm on his face, the singing in his belly seemed so fierce and hot that it might burn right through him, light him up like a pyre, streaming through his eyes and leaping from his palms like baying tuk’ata. The more he killed, the brighter it got, still not a pain, but a terrible urge he was desperate to fulfill.
Then the heat truly did begin to leap one day, arcing from him as bitter-blue lightning, and he learned his first Sith incantation.
All fell before him, faster and faster under the deadly lightning. Suddenly the dances seemed anti-climatic, as his spells gripped the other apprentices’ limbs and made them dance out of rhythm, jerking like puppets in the hands of an unskilled puppet master. He scolded them for it, taunted and yelled at them to resist, because deep inside he felt it was wrong, wrong, this wasn’t how a dance was supposed to be, it was not right. It was their own weakness that kept them from fighting him, and he hated that weakness, hated them so.
Their convulsions would continue, but the life would go out from their eyes. He’d then fling them, broken toys, against the hard stone wall, feel some sense of normalcy return as their bones snapped with the force of it, giving the beat back to that languid dance of life and of death.
Then exhaustion would come. The fire fueling him would turn to a deep pit of blackness. He would try to lift the broken marionettes again, put them back into the dance, but his own emptiness echoed, and his incantations became meaningless swipes with his hands through the air.
His master would come then, steal his sword, and lock him away. Brant would sleep, but he was not at peace. Into his dreams leaked the screams those puppets could not voice, and on the edge of his senses was a greater Presence, something full of light and fire and doom and hope that he couldn’t decipher. He knew the apprentices and masters in the compound were both subject to It, slaving at Its whims, feeding at Its feet like parasites, but he couldn’t identify It. It and they were molding him into something, molding something inside of him, some darkness or weapon they wished him to birth. The edges of his soul felt tattered and wispy as they cut into him, carving away, the pieces burning and scattering before the gaze of that great terrible Presence that watched all he did…
The next day he would wake to be clearer-headed; a cold, clammy morning-blue would be shining on the wall of his cell. He would still feel wispy about the edges, and he would go through his morning ablutions and then his chores like a ghost. The other apprentices would stare at him and whisper as they walked the halls. He kept expecting to see the faces of the puppets of the night prior come, screaming, out of the walls, but there was only darkness in their corners, quiet and weary. The apprentices would gossip, but he ignored them: they all knew one day they’d be set against him in the killing ring, and only he would walk out of it alive.
The days seemed almost normal, as he read from books and listened to lectures like any schoolboy his age, only the books were written in blood and the lectures described only death. Night would fall, not through the green trees of a quiet and peaceful world, but casting red light on the red cliffs that were Korriban. He’d be taken to the arena, and the macabre dance repeated from the night before.
Brant became so full of the darkness he was sick often, and despite the Masters’ best efforts to stoke his rage, he felt his spirit go further and further away each day, on a lonely rock of an island in the middle of the dark pit of his mind. His dreams became as real as his living, full of darkness and fear. The Presence watching him seemed to morph and twist, and he now only saw Its fire and fury, and he’d want to fall flat on his face to appease It, only he could not move in his dream-state. His instructors spoke of freedom, but he instead felt increasingly calcified. Only the fire of his rage freed him, but only for so long as he could ignore everything but its heat. When it abated, the mind-numbing fear would return, and he’d crouch in the cold, waiting for the day, when he could finally wake up.
Despite it all, he still believed there was another part to It, that Presence – his life. When he shivered in the dark, he knew he was only waiting, holding on to something greater than the terrible Sith in their fortress home. It would sometimes brush over the top of his dreams, like the hand of a caring father, soothing his son to sleep. When he couldn’t take it anymore and screamed out for it, it always seemed to answer him: quiet, distant, but calm and strong. Just hold out a little longer. Soon.
He did. He learned, reading the books, listening to the lectures, moving through the dance. And he soon learned a name for that Presence, taught to him by the Masters; they called it the Force.
Then one night, something slipped.
It was another bout in the killing ring. He faced a single apprentice this time, one much like he, favored by another Master as the Chosen. They danced in the arena, trading blows, and this time, just as many strikes got through Brant’s defenses as he deflected. It was a real battle, not simply practice where slaves and washed-up apprentices were thrown to the wolf of Brant for the slaughter.
Yet Brant still had the upper hand, so far. He had a better sense of his rage, how to use it to push past stiffening fear, but also enough control he could reel it back in, listening and waiting, just for a second, until he felt the calmer side of the Force show him how the dance was meant to be. He drew his opponent out into the open in the middle of the ring, and while the other apprentice flailed forward, stuck going in the same direction as he was enthralled by his emotions, Brant would dodge and dart to the side, to come in at him in his blind spot.
Yet the other apprentice was strong, and no matter how many times Brant hit him, spraying the arena with his blood, the Sith fought on.
Brant pulled back for another feint, and the Force sang to him, more clearly this time than ever before. He tripped as it took his senses entirely over, suddenly replacing the sandy arena with the ice of some other world. He saw people moving on its surface: another fight taking place thousands of lightyears away.
The Sith apprentice struck at him as he stood transfixed, and Brant registered the pain, but he couldn’t tear away from the vision. He knew the people fighting, or one of them: knew him as well as he knew that the island of rock in his center was really him and the darkness was just an encroachment. It was the man who touched the top of his head at night, who spoke the soothing words. He was real, and he was reaching out to Brant through the Force.
But what was this other world? Even the frozen planets of Hoth and Ilum did not look so rocky and cold…
The vibroblade of the other apprentice hit him again suddenly, and Brant’s vision broke into shards. He screamed and backpedaled, swinging his vibrosword wildly upfront of him to fend the apprentice off, and though he caught the Sith off guard, he did not pierce through his defenses. Just as he had suddenly known the Other on that icy hellscape, suddenly he became aware of how he was meant to be the fodder of this other apprentice, not the victor himself as so many times before. All the small cuts he had scored were just that: small cuts, and the Sith still had a huge head of steam to bank upon.
That realization cut through the darkness shrouding Brant’s core, the fire of his rage crinkling back like a thin, burnt page from a useless book. He dropped his sword and raised his hands for a last-ditch effort of a spell, but the lightning wouldn’t come to him. Instead, it obeyed the other’s call, and Brant felt the hatred he had so often inflicted on others now reflected back onto him. A bright sliver of sword-shaped pain slipped through his ribs. The pain blinded him, and the world spun over him, edged with icy rock. He barely had enough consciousness to find the face of his opponent and commit it to hateful memory as he fell.
The Masters knew he was still alive when they threw him onto the waste pile. Bodies were stacked under him and more bodies were stacked above. He smelled nothing but death, felt nothing but pressure and pain — a more effective force than even fear to keep him paralyzed.
He called out wildly for the Presence in his mind, but it was gone, off fighting its own battles, and had no more heed left for him. Suddenly Brant remembered how old he really was: not a warrior, only a boy, a boy not even into puberty, and the little boy he had hid for so long came screaming out, beating on the dead limbs around him with his fists, but still no one came. No one came.
He slipped into the sleep of exhaustion, of blood trickling from his wounds and going un-replenished. He dreamed of evil things in the dark, and he howled and screamed like a baby. Usually the screaming brought some heat to his core, but not this time; only ice and rock closed all around.
Ice, rock, and the Presence.
He was fighting, the Other, and Brant realized now the ice-world of his vision was not a planet, but the inside of another mind. Some substance he couldn’t identify coated this other man’s senses, keeping his physical form chained. The bright spirit deep inside still raged against the prison, throwing itself against the ice-rock over and over again. Brant smelled burnt-iron, but he didn’t know its name: that this was the scent of carbon-freezing.
And there was another Presence in there with the man, something more ancient and more evil than even that that the Sith on Korriban were trying to cultivate. It held the man in a grip like a constrictor snake, squeezing tighter each time the man paused to gasp for breath. He would eventually die in its grasp, Brant could tell.
If only there was someone else around to cut the snake and to free the man. As Brant watched, and as the Presence looked up and saw him, did Brant realize that the someone else… could be him.
Like the fight in the arena, he retreated quickly into the calmer part of the Force, listening hard for the sway and weave of the future’s dance. The man he was sharing a mind with went off into another round of useless struggling, and Brant could feel the cold of the carbonite forcing its way into the man’s body, sapping his precious reserves. Yet it seemed to sap the snake, too, and Brant saw his opening.
He dashed in, weaving around the snake like the snake wove around the man, forcing that icy sense of fear and pain and panic into it instead. He took the screams of the trapped and dying boy on Korriban and fed it to it, and even though the snake grew bigger, it also grew lighter, like a cloud, and the man could punch through it now, shredding it up like fog. Brant had a thrill of satisfaction as the ancient, terrible creature was now afraid of him, of them, working together, and they tore it apart.
The man’s spirit broke loose, suddenly beaming bright as a sun breaking from behind cloud, and Brant had to retreat from the sudden pain in his eyes until it slipped back into the fog again. The snake seemed to be a part of the man’s skin now, and it came towards him, like a great bending in the murky darkness, a kind of fear and awe that presses one’s throat closed, makes one wish they had no eyes to see it, but also the need to stare at it so it could not ambush them in the dark. He felt like he was drowning–
“Brant,” said the man suddenly, and the familiar voice ruptured through the darkness.
It knew him!
“Of course I know you, though it was you who found me, trapped here in this carbonite…”
What… is carbonite?
“A prison. Quiet now. I will come for you. Your path is hard, but you must not submit, no matter what, do you understand? Go back to your own body.”
No, no… Brant recoiled. That way lay too much pain. He almost couldn’t feel the little boy, so far away now, and he was glad for it. He didn’t want to go back. He didn’t want to face that darkness, or the killing ring…
“You must. You will.”
Please, please, please…
“Brant, listen to me.”
No, no…
“It will be alright.”
Please…
“It will be alright. You are loved. Hang onto this. It will be… alright…”
Brant was pressed through a great darkness in the air, squeezing, like he was being expelled from something – that other mind. He had a flash of sensation of cold ice-rock, before he became aware of the sense of heavy bones and dead fleshy weight laid on top of him again, the pain and struggle just to take in another breath from the close, rancid air of the waste pit.
Yet there was a spark of the bright man’s soul that had come along with him. It sat now in the center of his island in the center of his soul. It was burning a scar into him, not a raging red scar, but something clean, and purer than even the morning-blue that he associated with the calmer part of the Force. Connection, conviction… a father’s love?
“Da-a-a-ad!”
Something heard him, though he couldn’t tell if it was a janitor, or his father’s spirit, or even the ever-awake Presence as it lived on Korriban. Brant lapsed into that sense of that he was waiting again, waiting for the night to end and the day to begin…
When the bodies were shaken down from the waste pit to the incinerator, Brant stuck out a hand and pulled himself back up onto the killing room floor. The arena janitor ran screaming, for he was a sight, covered in blood and offal, but he was also, impossibly, alive.
Pain clouded his senses, like the drug-rage but not quite, and when his eyes cleared, he saw he was standing before his master. The cloaked man had been waiting patiently this entire time for Brant to return to him, and though Brant sensed the Master’s hope he would be mistaken for it, Brant knew this man was not the Father or the Snake he had sensed in his vision. This was something else entirely, and Brant eyed him, pondering how he must overcome the new threat.
“You have passed your first trial to become Sith,” the Master finally said. “I will now take you as my apprentice. You shall be known as Merce, for mercy is what saved you, and that is what you will strip from others as you carve a path of destruction across this galaxy…”
The Master spoke on, and the light in Brant’s heart dimmed a bit. A darker mass in his belly — the cultivated darkness, the Dark Side Presence that he now knew it to be — shifted awake, smoldering like a coal. He hated it, hated everything indiscriminately, but he was holding onto one thing stronger than even the darkness. He was one step closer to fighting for his freedom — not the freedom of the rage, but the freedom of something he dared not name in the darkness of the Korriban halls. It was a freedom the Sith could never give him, and he now glimpsed the other way, wavering in and out of his vision, like water on the hot desert’s horizon.
When they gave him his first lightsaber, he stalked the other apprentice to his room and slew him in cold blood. It was illegal, though not discouraged, and for it, the newly-named Merce was shipped away to Dromund Kass. The rest of his trials were still to come.
One thought on “The Crucible of Korriban”