It had been the first real reprieve he’d had since the droid crisis began. Brant returned to his Dromund Kaas apartment late in the evening, still limping slightly on one leg. The medics told him to take it easy, but Brant paced the full length of the apartment anyway, the stabbing pain reminding him of how far he’d come — and how far yet he still had to go.
How much punishment could a body take before it failed? Though the leg had been nearly shattered, the battle had not been won, so Brant held the limb together with the Force and sheer willpower and adrenaline. The rush of combat — like the many duties he had taken on in the past few months — had overtaken the pain and left him with nothing else to focus on. He grabbed the Force, twisting and shoving it, as he grabbed the people he commanded through the Covenant and Navy, twisting and shoving them. It sustained him, if only for a little while.
His leg had finally folded under him at the end of the battle, as the War Cabinet had at the end of the war. The pain had come flooding back in, and with the pain, all the other things he had been avoiding since the start of the crisis.
Groaning, Brant limped finally into his bedroom. One of the anoobas jumped down off his bed to greet him, and he offered her a scritch behind the ears, before he went to the tall rain-streaked windows and leaned on them. The view looked out over the city, and then past that, on into the hills. When Brant gazed out there, the world seemed even bigger than it was, and he could feel the stirrings of the Force.
He could hear the thing that liked to talk to him while he slept at night.
He had first noticed the thing a couple nights after that terrible day, when his master had taken him into the tombs under Korriban and there made him slay his own parents to earn his Ascension. Shock had kept his mind blank for the first few days of lordship, until Brant could stand to look back into the face of what he’d done. Even thinking about it now made him feel weak in the knees, like he was looking at the surface of a black lake, one that swallowed the stars instead of reflected them, the surface just barely rippling as nameless creatures swam far below.
And something in there was calling to him.
Brant had pushed the faint tugs on his mind away, at first in fear, but then because he had so much else to attend to. Now, with the lull in the war and the long roads he had walked and the accolades he had earned, it was time.
Brant sat on his bed, folding his legs up from under him and giving the anooba a gentle push away when she came to curl around him companionably. He listened to her panting, then her quiet footfalls as she perceived her master to have turned boring, and she went to find her packmate to bother in another room. Brant was left to listen to his own breathing and heartbeat, and finally… to it.
The Other.