A Handful of Dust

[Vegaudan]

Outer Rim Territories – Begeren

Prospin hung by a thread.

It was how they worked, dangling dozens of feet over the lip of an apparently infinite hole in the ground. Somewhere high above, a breeze disturbed the desert sand and grains came tumbling down onto his head, joining the hundreds of others already clinging to his sweat-damp scalp. His feet braced against the surface of the caves wall, spread shoulder-width apart.

“Doesn't it,” said a woman's voice down below.

Prospin looked down between his legs and the torch attached to his forehead sent a beam of light lancing down through the damp shadows, illuminating another length of rope dangling in the dark. He squinted. “What're you going on about?”

The figure below lifted their head, their own head-mounted torch turning it's blazing white eye up to glare at Prospin. “I said, it looks a bit like the sky, doesn't it?”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “Watch where you're pointing that thing, eh?” Prospin blinked away the spots in front of his eyes and looked back at the cave wall. His torchlight reflected and refracted inside each crystal, shining a brilliant cerulean back at him. He glanced down, looking over the contents of his tool belt: two dozen tiny hammers, chisels and other tools were fixed firmly into the belt.

He wiped his palms down on the hard fabric of his overalls then plucked out a familiar pair from the tool belt, hammer and chisel. He rolled them between his fingertips, tempting fate to tease them from his grasp and send them spinning down into the cave below. Like two little credits tossed into a wishing well.

Underneath him, Prospin could hear a soft tink tink tink. It could have been the sand hitting outcroppings in the cave surface below. It could have been water trickling through some deep, dank part of the cave system. It could also have been the sound of a tiny chisel chipping away at a deposit of dazzling blue crystal. There was a whole team of them, all dangling by threads in the darkness. Prospin only knew they were there when someone's cough inevitably started a family of sleeping hawk-bats.

“All I'm saying is -” said the voice underneath him “- we could be staring at worse things all day. It's.. nice.”

“Spasst, your banter is the worst, Calib,” Prospin shook his head as he braced one palm against the crystal's surface, fingers spread apart, feeling the contours and cracks. “What'd be nice is if they rolled a giant, fucking planet smashing drill in there and shook the whole lot of this shite out of here in one go. Get this all over. At least then we might get a gig doing something that doesn't involve having a harness up my arse – my arse,” he added louder, but muffled as he bit down on the handle of his hammer while setting his chisel into place. “Which is permanently lined with half the fucking Begeren desert.”

There was a squawk and frantic flutter of wings in protest at the sudden noise.

“You love a sandy crack,” Calib laughed up at him. “Prospin Roe, the sand shagger of Begeren.”

Prospin focused on a hairline crack in the blue crystal's surface, wedging the tip of his chisel in and poising the head over his hammer to strike. “Here, stop messing and get chipping. I'm not missing quota because you decided to spend the night down here practising your routine as the Outer Rims shittiest comedian.”

The laughter went quite and there was only the tink tink tink. Prospin joined that quiet chorus, as he chipped carefully at the crystalline deposit. It went on like that for – how long, Prospin didn't know. He measured out time in the tiny chips of blue crystal that went into the pouch strapped to his chest, the weight gradually getting heavier. Occasionally, he could hear muffled chatter. Once, a thin column of aromatic smoke rose up out of the cave, at least until someone above – someone who got paid enough that they didn't have to work at the crystal-face – called down for the smoke to be put out.

The crystal deposits varied in size and soon Prospin had scraped away everything that he could from the cave wall. There was enough in his pouch to make a fistful of gemstones for some Core worlder, but it wasn't nearly a full pouch. That meant moving on to another deposit. There was always another deposit. Taking the time to tuck his tools back into place and zip the crystal pouch shut, Prospin prepare to make the drop down.

“Chipper coming down,” he announced. There was no reply. Not that he'd expected one. It was a courtesy to let the others know that he was lowering himself further down his rope into the cave. It wasn't like there was much to fear, anyway. It was a slow process and they'd probably hear him grunting before he had a chance to end up standing on their heads.

As he slid further down into the cave, Prospin inspected the walls around him. His torch beam panned over each surface, looking for the tell-tale twinkle of a crystal deposit. Tink tink tink echoed from above and below. Hand over hand, he lowered himself further and caught a glimpse of Calib in the bobbing beam of his torch. She was focused intently on a particularly chewy looking deposit, one that would probably keep her going all night.

Down he went, deeper down foot after foot until – the torch caught something that glittered. Prospin frowned, slowing his descent. The light was sparking but not blue. It was... gold. He lowered himself alongside it and cocked his head to the side, the column of torch light rolling to the right as he stared at... it. Set into the stone, it wasn't... crystalline. It was flat. Metallic even. Prospin adjusted his head-lamp so that the light wasn't pointed directly at the golden – panel? That was the word that came to mind. It looked like a plaque, complete with well-worn symbols etched into it. Words, maybe.

He reached out a gloved hand towards it. Tink tink tink went something – behind it. Behind the panel.

His hand flinched back.

Something behind it was scratching.

[Adrasteia]

It was no ordinary panel, that much was obvious. As Prospin hung there in the darkness staring into it, it shimmered like the surface of a lake of gold suddenly disturbed. The scratching stopped, but the fluid appearance of the slab of gold only grew more active. It appeared to be glowing from somewhere deep inside. He leaned in closer to see what was making the metal sparkle like that. Just as his face was inches from the gold, the shadow of a hand appeared on the other side, pressing toward him.

"The fuck?!"

Startled by a hand where no hand should be, one of his tools slipped his grip. It's descent into blackness was silent, until it was marked by the abrupt round of curses as it collided with other workers on the way down. Curses from below were throw up his direction. About what a careless son of a whore he was being, but he didn't give a shit about that now. The scratching sound was back, and this time there was a voice too.

"Help me.."

A woman's voice, weak, faint..

"Please.. let me out."

"Shit. There's someone here.", he called back. His hands reached for the panel of gold, ready to pry it loose. It looked heavy, but it was worth more than a bucket of chipped gems. The shiny gold sheet was his.

Just before his hands made contact, he paused, feeling a touch of hesitation. A warning. His greed outweighed his caution however, and he set to prying free the golden covering. "Hang on.", he grunted. "Almost there..."

The piece came free, and as expected it was damn heavy. He held it against his lap for a moment, admiring it, running fingertips over the symbols and ancient writing. If he'd been educated enough to read what was carved there, he would never have removed the panel. It warned specifically to never do such a thing. That great evil would follow.

He looked up. Blue eyes, heavily lined in kohl looked back into his. Seriously pissed off blue eyes..

A hand was at his throat. Gold-tipped claws digging into his skin. "Where's Fenris...?", she rasped, her voice dry and brittle. She began dragging herself out of the hole in the cave wall, toward him...

[Vegaudan]

The look in the woman's eyes made Prospin want to run - but there was no way to stagger backwards from the sight of the woman coming towards him. Trying to run would have only left his legs cycling uselessly in the empty air. Dangling as he was, he had two options. Up or down. Fumbling to wedge his tools into his harness, Prospin gripped his safety rope with both hands and barked at the cave wall. "Pull me up!"

A startled shout echoed behind him, a gasp that seconds later hurtled down into the darkness beneath him. Moments later, a second. A third, a fourth. Prospin twisted and strained to see what was happening, as torch-beams whipped every which way across the pit walls. The beams cut across each other, flashing blinding into the eyes of the panicked miners.

With his neck craned painfully back and his eyes wide, panic made quivering jelly of his flesh as he looked up at the mouth of the pit. There was a figure there, striking at the cords that held the miners. Cutting the threads that suspended them and dropping them into the pit below. He could not see who the figure was, only the flash of moonlight on the axe that was severing one life line after another.

A voice boomed down into the cavern.

"Adrasteia!"

[Adrasteia]

Her hand was still at his throat, the dagger points of her claw like golden nails beginning to puncture his flesh. The woman's intense blue gaze swung upward, toward the sound of the voice above, calling. For her? Her dry, pale lips cracked into a smile in that direction. Prospin found he had a a sudden sense of self preservation.

"Here!!!" He choked back up the shaft quickly, struggling to force the words out around the pressure on his throat. The man with the axe would not cut the last line, not when what he was seeking was right here.

"She's.... here!"

Prospin's frantic eyes returned to the woman who had now dragged herself out of the wall. A wall which had previously been covered in thousands of years worth of crystal growth. Her pale limbs dangled before him from the shreds of black around her legs that had once been a robe? A gown? Cautiously, frightfully, he extended one shaking hand to her. A sign that he might help pull her out, carry her up - especially if it meant the difference between living and joining the bodies of his fellow workers, splattered somewhere far below..

Her hand released his throat, not to take his in offered hand gratitude, but to make a sudden horizontal slashing that he did not quite comprehend. Warmth spread across his chest. Prospin looked down. Even in the blue gloom provided by his solitary light, he could see it. Shiny. Wet. Red. So much red. He gurgled in one last breath and spat it out. The golden tablet slipped from his sticky wet fingers, falling for so long that he was dead before it hit the bottom with the ringing of heavy metal against stone. There it would mark the final resting place of Prospin Roe and the others of his team.

Her fingers worked deftly at the restraints keeping the body on it's board of a seat. Releasing the wretch to fall, she grasped the restraints and stepped her bare feet into the now vacant seat, and looked up. One hand above the other she began to haul herself up the lines, her feet curling around the slack below her, using it to climb with the incredible speed and agility of a trained performer. When she near the edge of the pit, she took the hand waiting for her. The first steady thing she had seen since awakening was not the foundation beneath her bare, bloodied feet, but the man waiting for her.

[Vegaudan]

He threw an arm around her shoulders, the axe still in hand, and pulled her against him. Dry lips crushed against the top of her head as he breathed in a deep lungful of her scent. Stale sweat and sweet rot and all of it like the first blessed mouthful of water swallowed from an oasis.

Revived by the moment of intimacy, he pushed her back and met her eyes, his own lined and riddled red. “There are others,” he said. Somewhere behind him, obscured by the cloak of night, there were voices calling out in confusion. Torch-beams lancing through the shadows, flitting here and there like frantic moths.

[Adrasteia]

The bloodied tips of her fingers curved around the stubble of his jaw, lingering to grip his face just hard enough to assure herself that this was not some sick dream of escape teasing her. "Not for long..", she promised.

All of this was wrong.

Memory told her then when they were released it was to have been under very specific circumstances. The proper rituals observed! At the very least she had expected that their Devoted ones be present. Incense, a few candles perhaps? Instead they had been awakened to absence, and intruders. It was not the queenly emergence that had been foretold in her time, but they were free..

The golden talons of her fingertips scraped gently away from his jaw, leaving a warm bloody trail behind. Her attention, and her cold blue eyes, shifted toward those approaching, and the light upon them.

They thought, perhaps, they were the hunters?

[Vegaudan]

Blood still smeared on his cheeks and chin, Fenris followed with his axe in hand. The voices head now called out in chorus with an alarm, amber warning lights spinning on top of some box-like structure in the distance.

A searchlight flared top life on top of the building, a searing circle of white light swooping across the sands towards them. Fenris narrowed his eyes against the glare, as four silhouettes jogged into view. They wore what might be harnesses or body armour.

"This is a restricted area!" one of them shouted, and he might have said more, had Fenris not hurled an axe into his throat. The only warning was a grunt of effort, as the handaxe spun end over end, blade meeting its mark with a wet thunk. He fell backwards with a gurgling scream and as one of the three left standing reached for something, perhaps a weapon, Fenris barrelled into him.

[Adrasteia]

Using the chaos created by her abiding partner through time, Adrasteia increased her loping pace, springing forward toward her own very much distracted target. His preoccupation with his comrade bleeding out would be his own undoing. Pouncing forward, agile as any predator should be, she took down her prey. Burying the metallic shards of her nails into his abdomen over and over, she punctured through any weakness she found in the joints of his armor, digging into his guts until red began to splash about the sands around them.

It had taken seconds.

She rolled off the man beneath her, as the stale scent of sweat and fear preceded a roar of anger and desperation from behind her. The last of them.

The momentum of her roll returned her to her bare feet. Her fingers wiggled, pinkies to pointers, sending droplets of blood flying. Then she crooked one of those digits at the last man standing. Beckoning him forward to her where she waited.

[Vegaudan]

Straddled over a corpse’s chest, Fenris looked up from the bloody mess. His lips stretched back into a grim, red-toothed smile at the sight before him: Adrasteia, the inescapable, calling the last man standing towards her.

The coward swayed on his feet, eyes rolling wildly left then right, trying to find somewhere - anywhere - to look for help, for safety. “P-please,” he stammered. “What do you want?”

[Adrasteia]

Stood where she was for the moment, Adrasteia lifted her right hand to her mouth. Her tongue emerged, licking the still warm blood from one long claw. When it was cleaned, she looked to her beloved and smiled, a red toothy grin.

Hands before her, in a gesture of placation for the moment, she approached the dead man walking. "I want you to be smart. I fear I'll be disappointed though.", she rasped in her throaty voice.

"No! Just tell me what you want?!"

She exchanged a glance with the one who accompanied her. It seemed enough for them to have carried on an entire conversation, to which the woman nodded.

Very close to the last man now, she leaned down just a little. "Where else have you been digging....?"

[Vegaudan]

“Only here! Everything we’ve excavated is back at the site office.”

Adrasteia smiled, almost sweet, and thanked the man by tearing out his throat. In that last breath, Fenris could almost hear the cry of betrayal, as he fell to his knees, hands desperately trying to stem the tide of blood oozing from his neck and mouth. Fenris watched him scrabble about in the dirt for a moment, then turned to look across the horizon. To the north, a squat building awaited them.

With sharp eyes and bare feet, they set off towards it.

“Where are we?”

[Adrasteia]

That was a very good question. For the first time since escaping, Adrasteia considered that and many other things. Chiefly among them - where was her sister? Stopping in the sand, she looked around and recognized nothing, all was eroded to time and decay, or buried beneath the sands. But which sands were these? Black-rimmed blue eyes lifted to the night sky, recognizing at least some of what she saw. The same stars still shone on her, they were somewhere in the center of what had once been a mighty empire.

"Fenris.. we're home." As inexplicable as that sounded, it was the truth. She could feel it to her marrow. They were somewhere in the Stygian Caldera.

Closing her eyes, Adrasteia reached for her sister, knowing that no matter where Nemesia dwelled in this life or the next - they could not be separated. It was why they had all been contained as they had, killing them would only have made them stronger. Yet, for all her terrible power her reach seemed...short. Frowning she searched, eyes fluttering rapidly like moths wings beneath blue-veined lids.

Nemesia, sister.. We're coming.

She had no way to know if her thoughts would reach her sister, or where her sister was, but it did not matter. Adrasteia would not be stopped. She was Fate..

"My power.. is diminished." She could feel the Dark Side, she could recall every terror she'd ever committed with it, and her acts had been many, and yet she felt bereft of the strength behind her deeds.

Eyes opened once more, she looked to Fenris, furious at the inconvenience, before her attention returned to the building. She could sense something of their old life, hidden within..

[Vegaudan]

For the first time since awakening, Fenris took in the sky and the stars. It was as Adrasteia said: there were familiar shapes in the constellations above. These were stars that they had gazed at before, whether when mapping out their future conquest of distant star systems, or with arched backs and teeth bared, howling in ectstacy and agony at the darkness.

“Your strength will return in time, master,” he said, with the certainty of a man who walked beside the embodiment of fate.

[Adrasteia]

The flames of cold blue fury banked in her eyes, slightly. Fenris was right, almost. "Our strength.."

They needed to find Nemesia and the others. Teth. Anthymis. Their powers were significant individually, but once they were together again, systems would fall one by one to their will. As it was before, so would it be again. They would need to find a way off this world, get to Krayiss Two, but first..

Something in that building called to her. Something that they should not be touching. Something that was hers..

[Vegaudan]

There was an undeniably urgency to Adrasteia’s movements. Whatever was in the site office compelled her towards out. Stretching out his senses, the Force felt strange and distant to Fenris, like a limb that had gone numb. Only a prickle of awareness remained. In time, he knew that the full feeling would return.

“What do you sense?” he asked, as they reached the short stairway to the office.

[Adrasteia]

Reaching the top of the stairs, Adrasteia stopped before the door. There was something almost gentle about the way the flat pads of her fingers brushed downward across the surface of the door, stopping in the center. Her five fingers splayed out as she stared unseeing at the entrance before her, part of her was already moving within. This was no Dark Side ability that had been cruelly taught to her through pain and punishment. This was simply who she was..

Beyond the door was a metal walkway square in design, surrounding an opening to the lower floor. There was a desk, the top of which was strewn with hand drawn maps. More advanced cartography from later explorations, and finally a holographic display of the area that they had already excavated highlighted in red, with an overlay in blue based from an ancient etching of what they might find. On the floor below, crates were stacked with what they had already pulled out. One box jokingly read 'The Queen's chamber', so called because of what they had found inside. A female's chest plate, of what they had naively assumed was gold. Another crate read simply 'Armory'.

And one armed guard, attempting to reach the rest of his team and getting no response..

Her blue eyes opened.

Adrasteia smiled, backing up a step. She wrapped her taloned fingers, around Fenris's hand, not for the moral support so much as to entwine his power with her own, leeching it away just enough to...

There was a loud groaning of metal. The solid blast door folded in on itself as though it were made of no more than tinsel. The guard below shouted a warning, just as the solid weight of impacted metal bowled into him and flattened him on the opposite wall..

"Come beloved.. we will reclaim all that belongs to us. Starting here."

[Vegaudan]

As they stepped inside, Fenris squeezed Adrasteia’s hand tightly one for last moment, then let go as they began their search of the cabin. The interior was unfamiliar, but it’s contents pulled at Fenris, almost buzzing in the Force. He crouched by the already opened crates, digging through their insides and finding nothing of value. With an irritated growl, he tossed one of the boxes aside and moved onto another crate labelled Armory. It was sealed shut, but with a few swings of the hand-axe the locked popped open.

[Adrasteia]

The crate was atop a table, lights had been shining down on it. Now in the aftermath of the force blasting the door inward, they swung back and forth casting the table in and out of shadow. Each step that brought her closer became a little quicker than the last. Looking down at the table, her eyes moved over what they had attempted to document about their findings. Not a word of it was the truth. Scanning over the tablets that accompanied the finds, she could see why. It seemed her name had been obliterated from the surface. Deliberately smashed away in an effort to leave her forgotten to time? Buried in the dust? It was the same each place she looked. They had been erased.

Eyes narrowed in anger, one pale hand moved in a slashing motion. The lock fell away from the crate, bouncing to the floor as Adrasteia's claws moved through it with no resistance. Her hands lifted the lid, pulling back the wrappings and packing. "Fools..", she muttered.

A slow smile crept over her bloodied, cracked lips. Pulling the cuirass from the crate, the same alchemical metal that it was made from had been driven deep into her nail beds, and that was not the least of the tasks that she and her Sister had achieved with it. The pinnacle of their creation remained waiting for them, on Krayiss Two..

Looking down at the tatters of what had once been a black robe, Adrasteia frowned. They were going to need to go strip some of those bodies..

Clutching the chest piece in her claws, Adrasteia returned to Fenris to see what possessions of his they had been intent upon displaying, as mislabeled priceless artifacts..

[Vegaudan]

The Armory crate contained dozens of pieces of armor, in all states of repair. Unlike some of the other stores in the cabin, there had been nothing to preserve this collection. Vambraces were heaped on top of greaves, fractured helmets contained scraps of ringmail, and little of it matched. If someone were to dress themselves in the content of the crate, they would have worn the colours of half a dozen armies and it would have done little to protect them.

All of it was as uninteresting to Fenris as it had been to the people who had packed it away. All of it except one piece. As he dug through the heap of metal and leather and cloth, his fingertips touched something familiar. Something that sent a jolt of familiarity through his forearm.

His teeth bared in a grin. With a grind and groan of metal being displaced, he pulled the piece out from beneath the trash it had been hidden beneath. The metal was tarnished and scuffed in places, but there was no mistaking it: his gauntlet. Formed to fit him, with forearm and fist enclosed but fingertips exposed to the open air, enough that his nails - his claws - could reach unsuspecting flesh.

The cloth glove that had once sat within had decayed to tatters, but as he slid the gauntlet over his right hand and flexed his now armoured fingers, it felt to Fenris as if no time had passed at all.

[Adrasteia]

It seemed even with their history being willfully obliterated, some things could not be forgotten.

So little of them remained. A few scattered possession strewn across the system? Was that all that remained of them? Adrasteia could not, would not, believe it. In addition to their 'sisters and brothers', she and Fenris had had a family. What had become of them? Hers was a strong mind..but this was a test of what even she was capable of handling.

Disgusted with the place, and with the time they found themselves occupying she looked to Fenris with a bit of disappointment. "There is nothing else."

With what she had come for in hand, there was no reason to linger.

"There is nothing left here for us. We should go."