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He did not speak at first, rather simply allowed her to appraise him. Let her wonder what he was, what he was capable of. Let her mind wander the lengths and depths of what such a man might be capable of. Tall and narrow, he was no brute liable to speak with his fists – but there was a presence to Salem Ave, an aura that both attracted and repelled in the same breath.
“It can be yours too,” he said at last, his smile never reaching his eyes. “For a price.”
"What price can the dead pay the living?" A'na slowly looked over her shoulder at where Lilaena lay, her body laid out much as it had been in the library earlier. Her black lips curled up in a sly smile.
“The girl.”
His eyes followed hers, two empty gazes settling on Lilaena's pitiful weakened form.
“She is broken. You cannot regain what you have lost by inhabiting such a fractured mind.”
"And what do you want with her?" A'na's eyes narrowed, viewing Lilaena more critically. "If you think her broken. Will you fix her, then?"
She waved her hand dismissively. "Take her. I care not." A'na laughed suddenly, dissolving into mist and then to nothing.
“A bargain too easily made,” he muttered beneath his breath, taking a glance over his shoulder before settling white eyes onto Lilaena.
“Can you stand?”
Lilaena pulled herself to her knees, her movements slightly jerky, as though she were a marionette being directed by strings. After a moment she got to her feet, the same uncanny motion making it appear that something had pulled her up by her head and shoulders.
The woman took one step forward, and then another, slowly lifting her head to gaze upon her 'savior.' Mist swirled fitfully around her bare feet, drifting up to her knees and then her hips where it seemed to cling to her skin as though it were made of a hundred grasping hands. Lilaena took another step toward Salem, and her lips curved up in a smile that was just as quickly erased by some imagined sound behind her.
"She wants power." Lilaena put a faltering hand to her forehead. "She does not like being dead. She -" the mists swirled up again, nearly concealing her nakedness. "She is still -"
Something yanked her backwards, and Lilaena gasped out, "-here!"
Then she disappeared back into the fog, as though she had never been in the cave at all.
Salem heard a whimper at his side and found the child was back, staring around herself with wide, frightened eyes.
Lilaena's last gasp of breath still hung misted in the air but when he reached out into the shadows, the tall man found darkness there and nothing more. He turned to look upon the child, her knees gathered up to her chest as her body shook with muffled sobs. Weakling, he'd called her.
“You're safe now,” he said, a serpents hiss in his voice.
The girl stood up, a lanky teenager who was almost her full adult height but skinny and all elbows and knees. The jumpsuit she wore was baggy, but clean, and she wiped the tears from her eyes. "I am stronger than I look," she promised.
"To be free from her..." Lilaena's voice trailed off. "I feel strangely empty."
Salem peered into the shadows which clung to the caverns walls. They moved, receding then advancing once more, like smoke being inhaled then exhaled. Though he could no longer see or sense A'na, she was not empty. Not by a long shot. She had banished two demons from her mind... but still one remained. He smiled down at her, this vision of Lilaena who was neither the innocent child nor the blood-stained woman he knew.
“Take me to a place where you feel safe.”
She looked at him, and chewed her bottom lip, thinking. The cavern seemed to grow transparent, the dank walls slowly disappearing until they were both standing in a youngling training room in the Jedi Temple. Lilaena looked around, and shook her head. "The safety here was an illusion."
The Mandalorian village from Onderon sprang up around them, and she laughed mirthlessly. Hawkins Grime was striding about, his metal body lithe and shining in the sunlight, a corona of blistering fire about him. He turned and fixed her with a bloodshot blue eyed gaze. The scene melted down and puddled into the ground, leaving Callidus and Lilaena in nothingness.
The teen looked at her hands: empty vessels. "What is safe?" She looked back up at the deaths head mask that loomed above her. "There is no safe place."
She gave him glimpses of worlds he knew all too well. Coruscant, whose illusion of safety had been so convincing that thousands of Jedi had perished because of it and Onderon, with its own people on a knife-edge between ignorant peace and an inevitable galactic conflict that was liable to swallow them whole. Coruscant had been the stage of his downfall but by Onderon he would be uplifted. Whether the Onderonians themselves lived to speak of the great triumph that had begun on their homeworld was another matter entirely.
Pulled back into the featureless darkness, Salem considered young Lilaena.
“There is no place safe,” he agreed. “Not yet.. but in time. Trussst me.”
"Trust." She said the word slowly, as if she were tasting it. "I trusted once."
There was a clanking sound in the distance, the heavy step of a droid. Lilaena's eyes tracked toward it, her face smooth, unscarred, and haunted. "There is no trust."
With an almost bird-like tilt of his head, Salem's focus slid towards the sound of another memory advancing upon them: metal striking metal, like the dull toll of a bell.
“What now, then? If not trust, what?”
"Vengeance."
The word had a slight lilt to it, making it almost a question. The clanking grew louder, but nothing pierced the black around them. "She is not worthy of avenging, though."
The assassin droid IG-88 lurched from the dark, red optics glowing, and she leapt at it, a lightsaber suddenly in her hand. Purple blade met red energy bolts, but she did not seem to be able to gain the upper hand against the droid. After a minute she simply stopped.
The droid halted as well, arm extended and blasters smoking.
Lilaena turned back to Salem, a fiery red welt bisecting her left eye. "I cannot win. I cannot trust. There is only death to look forward to."
“Your vision of the future is disappointingly narrow.”
Slow steps carried Salem towards the assassin droid – and through it, the apparition dispersing around him like smoke.
“You'll come to see the galaxy as I do. Not yet, perhaps,” he echoed his earlier words as the shadows began to consume him too. “But in time.”
She grasped at him as he melted away, yearning for something indescribable. For a moment De'Ville stood alone in the darkness, and then she fell to her knees...
...the stones hard and cold under her, her head aching and body stiff. The night still clung to the moors, oppressive and heavy in its domination of the landscape, but the moon had risen and illuminated the shifting fog. She looked up at her master, his hands still on her head, and felt... lighter. A'na no longer lurked behind him, teasing and testing her. Hopefully the bitch was gone forever.
Salem staggered backwards, his hand snapping away from her as if they had been joined together by some powerful magnetism that had suddenly repelled him. Heat burned in his fingertips, in spite of the night chill. Only the screech of the storm lantern swinging in the breeze disturbed the silence. Lilaena swayed too. She looked on the verge of dropping to the flagstones in exhaustion.
Without a word, he moved with slow yet steady steps by her, towards the manor house.
She struggled to her feet, pain stabbing through her from the wounds on her side, following Salem in silence. What was there left to say? Lilaena stumbled at the threshold, managing to catch herself with sore arms before she fell.
Inside the manor with the door closed behind her, Lilaena leaned against the sink, her eyes closed while her head throbbed. She could hear Salem still walking, walking away from her. She opened her mouth and tried to speak, couldn't, and then wet her lips and tried again.
"Thank you," she managed, huskily, eyes still shut.
The only answer to her words was the sound of a door closing, as Salem entered what was left of his study.
The night wore on, though the howl of the wind became more distant as it moved out over the moors. Around Salem, the study still looked as if it had been hit by a storm. Splinters of wood and glass, data-cards and archaic hide-bound books strewn about the place. In the darkness, his white eyes were almost luminous as he surveyed the damage and began to pick up the pieces.
When Salem was done he slept and dreamt of a pale phantom with hair as white as leprosy running ice-cold hands from his shoulders to his hips, her red-ringed eyes full of hunger -
Abruptly, he was awake and sitting up. It was morning. His awareness leapt outwards and he felt Lilaena stirring somewhere else in the house. He paced barefoot into the hall to find her standing there, already dressed.
“You're leaving,” he said, half-statement half-question.
She turned as he approached, her holdall on the floor by her feet. "Did you wish me to stay, Master?" There was a touch of true meekness in her tone, but she met his baleful gaze for only a moment before she looked down the hall to the front door.
"My own apprentice needs tending to," she offered by way of explaination. "The Alliance will be expecting me back shortly and... there is much to do."