Part two of Brant(Darth Merce)’s training. Thanks to Alelsa for helping me brainstorm some of Vette’s insults!
Part one is told in “The Crucible of Korriban”, found here.
Author’s Note
As his master had promised, Merce was granted new freedoms for passing his first trial. He now kept his own apartment on Dromund Kaas, came and went from it as he pleased. He ate when he wanted, though the food all seemed to taste the same. He could wander at will around the cool stone interiors of the Sith temples and around the dark forests outside Kaas City — though there wasn’t much reason to. He could play at sabacc in the cantinas, race speeders through the city streets, and get intoxicated on exotic spice in the alleyways. In short, he could go almost anywhere he desired, except off-planet, and do anything he wished, so long as he didn’t disobey his Master’s will.
For he had a new master now: no longer did he report to the Overseer of the killing rings on Korriban. Merce became his new Master’s eyes and ears, his tool, and his sword, and Darth Plothar made use of Merce’s skills frequently. When apprentices whispered their plots in dark corridors, it was Merce’s duty to listen and report on what he heard. When a droid malfunctioned and misplaced his Master’s dinner, it was Merce’s task to track down the errant mechanic who had made it and make him pay for his trouble. When an infestation of jurgorans boiled out of the ancient temples, it was Merce’s job to clear them out.
The latter happened rather frequently, as many of the old temples on Dromund Kaas were abandoned, left for the jungle and the dark spirits within to grow over and control. The jurgorans’ claws were long and their hides thick, but Merce found it wasn’t the same as the killing rings. The thrill just wasn’t there. It was more chore than anything else to the blooded apprentice.
He was not without human rivals, of course. Unlike the old arena on Korriban, Merce couldn’t be nearly as overt about the killings however, and without the headrush of combat, the maneuverings of the others bored him. They might enjoy making faces and taunting each other when their master’s back was turned, but Merce saw no purpose to it. It was all posturing to his eyes, their giving away of clues as to where their strengths and weaknesses lied.
Merce said nothing, didn’t so much as lock eyes. The others saw it as a weakness, but his Master did not, and Merce knew he was favored.
Years passed. Though existence on Dromund Kaas wasn’t exactly painful, not like it had been on Korriban, the days still stretched like a sash close to fraying and tearing apart. Merce sensed they were winding him tighter and tighter like a spring, wasting his efforts on paltry tasks, building his strength and pent-up rage in preparation to unleash him on… something. He did not know what.
Occasionally, on expeditions far out on the planet’s surface, the other apprentices would attack him. Mindful of the way his lightning had failed him on Korriban, Merce evaded these rivals more often than he confronted them, though whenever he was cornered, he made sure to dispatch the men as messily as he could, to serve as a warning to the others. He received swift punishment from his master for the deaths, once laid out on a new piece of torture equipment shipped fresh from Athiss, but he didn’t care. He would bite his lip, sometimes until it bled, so as not to reveal weakness, and eventually, frustrated, the Darth would let him go.
Any signs of rebellion were quashed in other ways, and Merce was beaten bloody for flaunting his Master’s orders. When he spilled Plothar’s water instead of bringing it to him properly, that was five lashes. When he glowered at the history instructor, refusing to answer her questions, that was ten. As soon as he was released from his lessons, Merce would return to his room feeling tired and worn. Yet, through each of the beatings, he sensed his Master was pleased. The darkness was growing in him, like a spirit of its own, blooming from him and threatening to block out the light.
He sought solitude most of the time between his duties, seeing how quietly he could move around the temples without being seen. He relished those hours, spent in abandoned offices and passageways, unbothered by any human presence. Other times, when he couldn’t escape the noise and bustle of the city, he’d put a tablet of narcotic spice under his tongue, and dreams would splice into his waking hours. He could hear the Force more clearly then, or so he thought, though he was less able to decipher what it said.
Perhaps his Master soon learned of this, as they began tracking his purchases, confiscating any spice he bought. They instead fed him new drugs, different drugs, that produced euphoria instead of dreams, as a reward, but he’d have to complete his tasks just so, carry out his duties to the exact letter, to obtain them. Despite a growing unease he was abandoning some deeper part of himself, Merce eagerly worked for the new treat. The drugs’ ecstasy was a needed release, an opening for the pain of his existence to leak through and be cauterized; he’d dance through hallucinatory binges until he was sated, and he felt, if not full, then fulfilled. He stopped feeling like the dark was a separate thing inside him, instead perhaps a friend, a calming time to counter the drug-rush: a part of him like armor to a knight. He now reveled in the Dark as much as he hid in it, drawing it down and around the scared little boy at his core, and he wasn’t sure if he intended to conceal him or to smother him.
He had seen the marks of the Dark Side on the Masters, of course, their faces wrinkled and old long before their time, as if each time they drew on their darkness, it left another scar that would never fully heal. He felt the same withering and chafing on his own soul when he fed his darker emotions, but even as the other apprentices’ eyes deepened into red or burned bright with yellow flame, his own eyes remained a stubborn dark blue that he couldn’t explain. If he had been any more lucid, the difference might have bothered him.
The others might have slept the heedless repose of the wicked, but Merce slept the sleep of exhaustion. When he used spice during the day, his rest was long and uninterrupted; when he didn’t, it was fitful. At those times, he felt like he was endlessly searching for something or for someone, like a dog who had given up on waiting for its master and began sniffing out all the old places he had once walked. Unlike the dog, he couldn’t remember the scent, only that he had lost something. The next morning, he’d drowned the feeling in his duties and in the drugs, so making each day a little more bearable.
Not all of the inhabitants of Kaas City were Sith, of course. Slaves were plentiful, but so were free men and women of the greater Empire. Rarely, a talented slave might rise out of bondage, or be gifted some semblance of freedom for serving their Master particularly well. So it was with the Twi’lek he had met in the detention block.
Perhaps she had finally broken and passed on information the Masters had found valuable, or maybe she had only been imprisoned to spite her old owner instead of as punishment for her actions (Merce doubted this, personally). Either way, he now started spotting her walking among the apprentices, usually bearing messages or loads for them. The same endless stream of jokes and teasing heralded her presence wherever she went, and Merce wondered how she escaped being murdered by apprentices irate at being compared to the hind end of a gullipud.
Merce never let her see it, never practiced it around her in case it encouraged her, but he slowly adopted her method of taunting. He didn’t threaten his rivals explicitly but instead made them the butt of clever jokes.
“Oh, I’m sure there’s a good reason you haven’t been given a mission off-world yet, Silaas. They wouldn’t be able to evacuate your stench from the starship ventilation if they took a thousand years.”
“Is that a slow speeder, Peri, or have you been taking seconds in the messhall?”
“Are shaved wookie pelts all the rage on Alderaan, or is that really your hair, Harod?”
He didn’t even let up in the sparring ring.
“You call that fighting? Any worse and you’d have hit a planet three sectors over!”
“Yes, well, a missed parry is hardly the least of your failings. It’s hard to imagine one person could fail so much without being cloned…!”
Merce’s target would spit and sputter, but the other apprentices would be laughing too hard to take any notice, and soon his victim, pride bruised, would slink away, muttering, “Just you wait, Merce…” And Merce would dance on, feeling a lightness even the drugs couldn’t bring.
If their resentment ever came to anything, Merce never knew, because he didn’t keep track of what he said to whom. He was too busy enjoying the sport. Whenever he was in the midst of it, he would suddenly feel a loosening in his middle, and he would go from struggling through his evenings to rolling through the fight, like a gambol around town in a well-oiled speeder. There was a strange power to it: a lightness that lifted him up from the depression haunting the corners of his mind. When he got going on a rant like that, it didn’t matter how much the others threatened him; they could never reach him while his spirits were so high. He almost didn’t need spice after a good round of verbal sparring.
Almost.
“You’ve started early. That’s assuming you actually stopped last night.”
Merce groaned, swimming to the surface of consciousness slowly. His head pounded, and everything seemed to have a rainbow sheen to it. Even the Twi’lek standing before him was a brighter blue than usual. Merce groaned and pulled the pillow back over his head. The Masters’ spice came with hallucinations, but usually not ones that were so vivid.
“The Hutts called. They wanted to thank you for doubling their business this year.”
“Why…”
“Seriously, if that was water, the amount you’ve consumed could have irrigated Tatooine.” Something poked him in the side. “So, have I learned the difference well enough, or haven’t I? Or can you shock me as well as the Masters?”
“You… slave. What are you doing in my room?”
“Well, because like a slave I was ordered to. Like a free woman, I am doing it in my way. Wake up, spicey head. Vette’s calling.”
“Who’s Vette?”
“Vette’s me. Wouldn’t hurt you to use my name, you know. Here, I’ll show you the nice way to do it. Hello, and who are you?”
Merce groaned and slapped the pillow back over his face. “Go away.”
“That’s a funny name, but I guess it’s beyond me to judge a Sith. Nice to meet you, Darth ‘Gowai’. I’m Vette.”
“That’s not—” Merce swore and then pulled off the pillow to confront her.
“That spice sure must have dirtied your mouth something fierce, Darth Gowai. Does your momma know you talk like that?”
“I’m not going to get anything useful out of you, am I?”
Vette rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe if you say ‘please’.”
“Seriously?”
“What was that? Sounded like the grunting of a kaadu. Did you hide one under your bed?”
“Vette…”
“And you even taught it to talk!”
Merce sighed, sitting up and rubbing his temples. “It’s too early for this.”
“Actually, it’s pretty late. That’s why I was sent.”
Merce glared at her. “What do you mean?”
“Your master wants you. I don’t know why.”
Merce swore again, loudly enough he didn’t hear Vette’s rejoinder as he rolled out of bed and slapped around for his robes. It took him a minute before he noticed Vette holding them for him by the door, smiling mischievously.
“Wha—give me those!”
“As you wish, Darth Gowai.”
“And stop calling me that!” Merce rushed from his room. The halls dipped and bent oddly, courtesy of his overindulgence the night before. He stumbled his way along them as fast as he could go.
“I never called you ‘Darth That’,” said Vette, suddenly at his shoulder. “I called you Darth Gowai. If you have something else you’d rather I call you by, you can just say that, and I might even use it if you’re being polite enough.”
Merce shot her a glare, and he regretted it as the hallway spun around like a starfighter with a faulty engine. “It’s Merce.”
“That’s so much better. Well, Merce, honestly I’d let you storm around like a falumpaset with a sore toe, but I’m supposed to tell you your Master is waiting for you at the Dark Temple, not his offices.”
“Why didn’t you say that before!” Merce spun on his heel and started running the other way.
“Well. You did forget to say ‘please’.”
Merce stumbled down the steps and threw coins at the conductor droid as he vaulted onto a rented speeder. Vette got on behind him — perhaps that was his Master’s orders, or perhaps she was a bit concerned that he might fall off while he was so loopy. The woosh of the wind against his face helped to clarify his thinking, but not so much as the beating fear in his throat as he raced for the Dark Temple.
He fell more than jumped off his speeder as the road ended and the Temple loomed up ahead, taller than even the mountains on either side. The aura coming off of it, like a darkness that lived and breathed, mixed oddly with the spice still in his gut and made him feel sick. He took a moment to straighten his robes, and even Vette helped by flicking a leaf off his shoulder, then he walked as steadily as he could to the tent where his master was waiting.
Darth Plothar regarded him steadily, or so Merce assumed from under the hood. Merce bowed, moving slowly so that he didn’t overbalance from dizziness.
“Master. I’ve come.”
The Master only answered by pivoting, pointing a long, white finger at the Dark Temple. Merce swallowed dryly, looking at it.
“You want me to go… in there?”
The hood dipped slightly.
Merce grimaced as the Temple dipped in tandem to his spice-clouded eyes. “For what purpose?”
“It is time to see if you are ready for your final trial. Do not return until you have tasted the essence of the Dark Side. Good luck, apprentice.” With that, the Master gestured at Vette to get back onto the speeder, and he followed her up, the silver lining of his leggings flashing as he threw a foot over. Unlike some of the Masters in Kaas city, Darth Plothar had always moved with the grace of a youth.
“Good luck,” called Vette. “You know I’ve always rooted for you… Darth Merce.”
Darth Plothar snarled at her to be quiet, then the speeder was moving away. Merce shivered, feeling completely unprepared. He hadn’t even brought his vibrosword.
But then, he thought as he looked up at the Dark Temple, maybe he didn’t need it. The Temple was well known for its ability to twist the mind and drown unwary intruders in nightmares. No vibrosword would help him against that. Still, Merce would have felt better with it on his belt.
He trudged up the black steps, nearly 500 of them, and then peered, shivering, into the doorless maw of the Dark Temple’s entrance. The shadows seemed to lean on his eyes, or maybe that was just the pressure of his spice headache, and Merce dully rubbed at them. After a moment’s hesitation, while nothing moved around him — not even the wind — Merce took his first steps into the darkness.
The walls were carved with countless ridges, like ripples on a lake, and they moved like water too, seeming to bend and shift in the corner of his eyes. The effect might have been worse if he hadn’t been so full of the drug; as it was, Merce couldn’t tell what movement was from his hallucinations and what was from the Dark Side of the Force. He felt like he was walking, numb, through a dream, and like in a dream, the corridor seemed to stretch on impossibly forever until, abruptly, it came to a halt.
He was staring at another Merce. Or so it seemed; his heart leapt into his throat as he thought it might be his brother, impossibly come across the stars –- and clothed in a Sith apprentice robe no less -– to take him out of this dark place. He stuck out a hand but only felt a smooth, cold surface like glass, and he knew his mistake. Stupid. Stupid to think of his brother so… that was another life, when he had had another name…
The image flickered and then deepened under Merce’s fingers, inviting him to take another step, then another, forward into it. He knew his face should have smacked into the glass by now, but he felt nothing but heavier air, like a breath of fog, against his cheeks as shuffled forward.
The dream encapsulated him now, as he found himself back in Kaas City, but he was staring at himself from all different angles as he walked down a street instead of the corridor in the Dark Temple. Apprentices he had known, even a few he had slain, greeted him, and he watched, like the playback of a hologram, as he taunted them in the dream. His own words came back to his ears, doubly harsh from his past.
“…could not evacuate your stench if they took a thousand years…!” and he could smell something like rotten flesh.
“…wookie pelts like that are all the rage on Alderaan…” and the heavy fog became stringy and matted, like he were pushing through cobwebs spun by a spider sitting atop his head.
“…the least of your failings? It’s hard to imagine one person could fail so much without being cloned…!”
Merce stumbled. He was a clone, or something like it: an identical twin, and the one that was not supposed to be born. He was the odd one out, the only one in his family who could sense the Force. Even his own parents had told him he had been unexpected, that they had been trying for only one…
All the taunts he had ever let fly had really been about him, he realized: the shame he wished to be rid of, come boiling out of him like vomit when he had imbibed too many drugs.
Like now. He went down on one knee and emptied himself. The dream began to tear away at the corners, and Merce saw the truth. The only way through shame was the same as the only way through fear or a bad spice dream. You had to prove oneself to be better than it, to crush it under your heels. The other apprentices couldn’t laugh at him if he made them afraid, made them hurt – made them die.
He slammed his fist forward into the air and met something hard, like glass. His dream snapped apart, and instead of rot he only smelled damp stone, and the air was clear and free again. In front of him, the mirror-like surface still stood, untouched, but it was wobbling and wavering from the impact he had made on it, its supports in the walls unsteady.
Merce wiped his mouth and stood up, snarling at his blue-eyed reflection. “As fury is my power, the only way through you is a fight!” He formed a fist and smashed his way through the mirror. Its shards ricocheted and fell to the ground in a musical shower, though a music of pride instead of joy. Merce took pleasure in grinding each of the shards into dust under his shoes, imagining them to be shards of the past that had cut him on the inside like the glass cut his hands.
Beyond the broken mirror, the passage led on.
The dark had taken on a kind of hollow, pale green glow to it now: mushrooms sprouted from the cave walls, but something else, too. As he continued forward, he had the sense of stepping onto a long-spanning bridge, the farther end lost in shadow. It spiraled and curled like the back of a k’lor’slug, or like that fraying sash that seemed to tie everyone on Dromund Kaas up in its darkness. Merce kept a firm hold of his dignity, however, and his surroundings remained clear and crisp.
Soon, he was stepping into a room at the far end of the bridge. The walls carried runes he couldn’t read, and in the center of the room stood a dark pool. He knew without thinking that this must have been what his Master had meant as his goal. He knelt at the edge, cupped the liquid in his hands, and drank it.
Like a drug, the effect was swift. It seemed to replace some part of him with its own power — not his fury, like the killing rings on Korriban, or his motivation, like the spice. This time, it was a sense of despair, like a great weight in his stomach or a blackness behind his eyes. It was like the essence of Kaas embodied, and he lay down next to the pool, gasping, writhing, but also feeling… stronger. A little less sick, and not as aimless.
For the first time in years, the desire to disappear into spice dreams was no longer so strong. For better or for worse, he’d set his feet down on the path of a Sith, and he now had to walk it with purpose. The killing-rage drug and the hallucinatory spice could be his tools, but they weren’t the source of his real power. That source was this: this feeling of night, the unsleeping malice of ancient tombs, the wells of the destructive earth: the Dark Side of the Force.
After his stomach had calmed, Merce got to his feet as smooth as a stalking nexu. When he finally got back to his own quarters, he destroyed what was left of his stash of spice, any misgivings quieted by the memory of that dark room and the power he had felt. His Master nodded in approval when he reported in and gifted him a new blade. It was still a vibrosword, but the edges were enhanced with a kind of proto-lightsaber’s glow. A kyber crystal inside the handle produced it, but it was un-attuned to the Force, so Merce sensed, like a cheap copy of a true lightsaber, just as the drugs had been a cheap copy of his Force-sense.
“You have learned to hone yourself, so that you may now hone your weapon,” said his Master. “Take it. Forge it anew. You know how it must end.”
Merce accepted the blade and bowed low. “Yes, my Master.”
The final rite was almost easy, in comparison to his venture into the Dark Temple. The apprentices that had so long nibbled at each others’ heels were finally allowed to take their fighting public. Like the Korriban killing rings, they sparred, and it was a duel to the death. Each carried proto-lightsabers like Merce’s, but he sensed theirs weren’t as well-tuned as his, and he tore through their defenses with a fury born of connection to the raw Force.
With each apprentice slain, his blade sparked and gleamed, but it was not enough. He slashed open their corpses, wetting the blade, hearing the crystal whine as each stroke brought it more in line with the Dark Side. Yet, after he had coated the entire arena with blood, it was still not enough.
Merce took the failed apprentices’ proto-lightsabers then, cracking them apart to expose their kyber crystals. He grasped them between his fingers, two or three to each hand, and invoked the power of the Dark Side. He screamed as he willed the Force to come up out of the dark Kaas core and into him, screamed as the terrible power burned his soul and threatened to overcome him. Yet the dark water of the Temple was in his belly, and he quenched the ferocious power, sending it streaming into the crystals, channeling it like he might channel the heat of a forge so he might form something new, instead of being consumed by the heat.
The crystals glowed red now, dimming the arena lights with their own glare. He released them, and they streaked through the air, darting like fleeing cardinals. He didn’t let them escape though. He seized them again with the Force, one by one, sending them spiraling towards each other, then into each other, pressing so hard they crumbled to dust and began to reform into something new between his clawed fingers.
Finally he took his own proto-lightsaber’s crystal, and put it into the center of the subjugated kyber dust. He closed it between his palms and squeezed, squeezed with all the might of his anger and pain and the darkness of Kaas, until the kyber crystal stopped glowing, though it had turned a deep blood-red.
His Master brought him a hilt of an ancient Sith warblade, and when he set his new crystal into it, the lightsaber beamed out red. Merce gave it a few test strokes, and it swept through the air with an unearthly howl, echoing the terrified endings of the lives he had taken with it.
Merce hated it, for it reminded him of all the terrors he had experienced: the blood of the Korriban arenas, the pain of his rivals’ lightning and his near death in the waste pit, the darkness of the evil Temple and the taste of the Kaas water on his tongue. He quickly learned how to channel that hatred however, finding his lightning again and sending it to dancing down the lightsaber’s blade, arcing to his targets. It could reach farther now and lasted longer, truly the lightning of a Sith and not just some naive boy from Tatooine.
No, he realized. A man from Korriban. Finally, he could let that old identity slough off like a snake’s skin. There was no Brant, no quaking twin of a lost family. He had become Darth Merce.