Until We Have Faces

[ninefox]

Krell had to pin him with the Force to get him on the altar, and not gently. The back of his head might be bleeding, but it's hard to tell: the antechamber already smells of iron. The whole station is a bristling-black hulk of ancient ore, nickel and iron and ice and stone. The lack of anything resembling alloys or right angles makes it feel horribly unreliable, not a machine guaranteed to keep the air in, but an ancient brooding piece of debris untouched by the steadiness of engineers. It did have an airlock, that Krell and a few shame-faced clone guards shuffled him through, and iced-over doors somewhere in the dimness of their crisscrossed headlamps that must lead back into the warren of Ninefox Point.

The benighted promontory did not orbit so much as a brown dwarf or black hole: it was a rogue planetoid, drifting through the ragged stretches of starless, lifeless space. Here, old Strife, the Dark Side of War, had been confined ever since the ascendancy of the Jedi, noble Combat, and the rest of the Light pantheon. But even reviled and relegated Gods were due certain honors, and retained certain powers - and certain appetites. And Krell - who had his own suspicions about the future of that ascendancy - had come to give Strife his due and be rid of his most vexing problem in one blow.

It's pitch-black with him and the others gone. The heavy magnetic manacles embedded in the alter are utterly immovable; the stone beneath him is pitted and rough and cold, almost untouched since the creation of the universe - except, of course, for all the sacrifices that have come before.

Comments

[callmefives]

They'd taken his armor away before they'd even locked him in the brig on Krell's ship, he has nothing but his blacks and boots (and surprised he was allowed even that) against the frigid cold of this dark and desolate place. He doubts that will matter much, though, he doesn't expect to live long enough to have to worry about freezing.

He'd fought, of course, fought being shoved into the brig, fought being dragged out and escorted to be chained up here; it's just more proof that he's defective, that he hadn't accepted his fate with the calm and perfect obedience expected of his kind. Defective. Broken. Heretical. Damned. He'd cursed Krell and tried to sway his brothers with every breath, watched with dwindling hope as his brothers blanched in horror and fear at his temerity. And then the doors had clanged shut behind him, leaving him in the dark and cold, the only sound the eerie groaning of this strange not-ship.

He goes silent, then. He won't beg, and there's no point threatening what awaits him here. He takes slow, deep breaths that are more labored than he'd like, but he can't stop the fear from rising as he's finally left to face his fate. Not the clean death in battle that's all they've ever been allowed to hope for, serving the God of Noble Combat, but the traitor's death they've all heard tell of, though it's supposedly been centuries since anyone had even set foot in this cursed place, let alone brought a sacrifice.

He knows what's coming, though; even if he hadn't remembered it from the nightmare fuel of what had passed for his childhood, Krell made sure to tell him in gruesome detail exactly what to expect. He knows he'll be lucky if the demon god kills him before he starts to eat him, and that will only come after he's been violated in every conceivable way, and some beyond the grasp of mortal minds. He's not just going to die, he's going to suffer. But he was made to suffer, was trained to withstand torture at an age when citizens were just learning their letters, if that.

He's hoped for a clean death, but he's never expected one, and so he breathes. And waits. And makes no sound, at least for now. He knows he'll cry out, there's no particular honor in refusing to, but the one thing he promises himself is that he will not beg.