History of House Arcona

By: GRD Mairin Ollaheer d’Hamha (Krath)/Arcona, DC

4000 years before the fall of the Old Republic

Arcona lay quite still, held at wrists and ankles by chains that chafed and worried his already blistered flesh. His thoughts were clear, not at all hazed by the pain he felt; he was already strong, despite his young age. A single tear shimmered on his white skin as he remembered what was to become his own personal tragedy.

He had awakened to sounds – the terrified screams of his mother and sister, his father’s strong voice defying their captors – and had felt only apathy and reluctance to remove. He had been dragged from his warm bed, bound hand and foot with thin rope that bit into his skin, and forced to witness the torture and brutal murders of his family. He had not been able to move to help them, and the guilt and self-disgust he now felt were crushing. His tormentors had thought his overwhelming, all encompassing grief unnatural, had been glad to dispose of their unholy cargo, handing him over to those who had ordered his capture, exchanging his life for a few credits.

Arcona felt cheap. He had been sold into bondage, knew not why, despised himself for his lack of action, and lay still. Plotting his revenge on all those who had committed this outrage against himself and his family.

A door opened. He felt the chill wind from outside against his skin, and heard voices.

"You have the boy?" said a quiet voice. It was a voice that commanded great power, and made Arcona’s flesh creep. A shiver ran up his spine.

"Yes, Master," came the reply.

There came a sound, the sound of a man clearing his throat noisily. Arcona felt eyes on him, opened his own, and stared up into the eyes of the man who had spoken first. He was dressed all in black, and at his side there was a lightsaber. In his eyes was torched the light of anticipation.

"He is strong. I will enjoy teaching him," said the man in black.

The other man coughed quietly. "There is the small matter of the price we agreed," he said, gently reminding the other, as though insistence were not advisable with this particular client, but would be used if necessary.

"Yes, there is indeed," said the man. "Your reward for this task will come at a later date. But for now, here is your recompense."

He clicked his fingers for one of his attendants, who came forwards and carefully paid the trader a prearranged sum of money.

"Very well," said the trader. "Take him. I wish you luck with him."
The man in black snapped his fingers again, and his two attendants came forwards, lifted Arcona between them and carted him unceremoniously out of the building. He blinked his eyes against the brightness of the sun after the relative darkness of his prison. The man in black looked at him strangely and spoke.

"Your prison is yourself now, boy," he said, and a curious, bitter smile crossed his lips.

Arcona stared at him, seemingly unafraid. His eyes were flat and motionless, devoid of sparkle, devoid, it seemed, even of life.

The man in black gripped Arcona’s chin in his left hand, encased in a leather glove. Arcona was forced to stare into the man’s eyes, and could not look away. What he saw there nearly shivered his soul in two.

"You will live," said the man, a grim determination in his voice. "You will live. You will call me Master. You will fight against every principle your father stood for. I will cause the hatred inside of you to grow until there is no room within your soul or your heart for any type of love. Forget all that you dreamed of. That is over now."

The man released Arcona, allowing him to be dragged away by the man’s attendants, to a transport ship. Arcona continued to stare at the man in black with defiance in his eyes. He would never become the creature that the man in black had depicted for him.

10 years later

The young woman watched him quietly as he slept. She compared his sleeping features to his waking ones and found them changed – more peaceful, more restful, happier somehow, a burden of knowledge and anger lifted from the brow, smoothed from his mouth, his face relaxed as he passed the time in oblivion. Her draught had done its work well.

He slept deeply for the first time in a long time. His eyes were underscored by harsh lines and dark shadows, marks that her potion could not lift from his face.

She had known him for more than half her life. She could not remember the times when he was not around, when he had not been a pupil of her father’s, learning his dark arts and sometimes even surpassing him.

He was very handsome; his skin was white and smooth, his hair black, and his eyes, when open, were the deepest swirling pools of chocolate brown. He was strong and muscular, yet agile as a cat and cunning as a fox. His hands were strong, yet delicate; her heart always did back flips over the sight of his wrists – so beautiful yet so hideously scarred.

Alyssa sighed to herself, and settled down to watch over him. She was not afraid of him, as she knew her father was beginning to be. He was the friend of her childhood, although their friendship had long since passed into nothingness, but still her fear of him was evaporated by the memory of happier times spent together.

Alyssa herself was powerful. She too had a knowledge of the Force, and had been trained by her father as had Arcona. Yet the weight of her knowledge had moved into different spheres and compasses than had Arcona’s. Alyssa was not a great fighter. She chose books before weapons, and knew of pharmacology and science before she knew of how to pilot a fighter. She was a writer and historian, a master of the art of poisoning and of healing, and fought only when she was forced to do so.

Arcona was a warrior through and through. Those things that came easily to Alyssa he had to struggle to obtain yet obtain them he did. Nothing, however, thrilled his blood, as did the prospect of combat. He was no restful soul as was Alyssa. The sight and smell of blood aroused in him the same emotions as a perfectly written history aroused in Alyssa. The cries of the dying were music to his ears, balm to his soul. Except for certain cries. These were the cries he heard night after night in his sleep.

He relived the fateful night every time he slept, every time he drifted into a dreamlike state somewhere between sleeping and waking, and he was at his most susceptible. When he was awake, he could keep his memories at bay, crush them to the back of his mind, beat them down and beat them down and beat them down until he thought they could rise no more. And still every night they arose again, clamouring and screaming and seeming to stretch out soft little hands to clutch and claw at his flesh, so desperate to be remembered were they, so alive and so real and so haunting.

And every night Alyssa sat beside him and watched and begged him to take something to help him sleep, to let him rest undisturbed. Tonight he had given in. Tonight, his dreams were more disturbing than ever.

The screaming rose to a crescendo. There was nothing he could do. He was immobilised by his bonds. His father cried out in agony as a man gouged his eyes from their sockets with his fingers. Arcona wanted to be sick. His mother was screaming as she was repeatedly raped and beaten, cut with sharp blades, her throat only cut when at last she was so badly injured that her death was a mercy. Her blood spurted out over Arcona. His stomach heaved. His sister was fighting her captors, fighting so hard for life, and her face was not her face anymore, it was bruised and bleeding the way he remembered seeing it the last time, but it was not his sister’s face, it was Alyssa’s, and he wanted to scream. His fathers fingernails were ripped from their beds, his teeth pulled forcibly from between his lips. Arcona was screaming and screaming and screaming, but there was nothing he could do, no way to stop the torture. His sister, in her guise as Alyssa, had been defeated, was raped, beaten. Then men put a length of rope around her forehead and twisted the ends together, tightening the noose around her head. Her head seemed to elongate, and the sound coming from between her lips was so filled with agony that it could not be described as remotely human. It was pure animal and pain and pain and pain. And still they tightened the rope around her head until finally, with a hideous crack of bone, her skull burst open, her cerebral cortex was ruptured. There was blood and bone and brain everywhere, spattered on the faces of her tormentors, but they could not hurt her anymore. Then they cut open his father’s stomach and dragged out his entrails, left him there to die, went away with their prize as Arcona’s father lay writhing in his dying agony on the floor.

The man in black entered the room slowly. He was still a quiet man, yet no one dared to deny him anything he wanted. He had become a dark Jedi Master many years before, longer than he cared to remember, and certainly well before his daughter was born. He had stolen her from her mother, and reared her himself, had come close to rejoicing when she began to take an interest in the Force and its Dark Side. Love was not an emotion experienced by Master Lix. He was cold and almost emotionless. Perhaps all that remained of the vast array he had been born with were his pride and his anger. Nothing more and nothing less. He was proud of Alyssa, but there could never be anymore in his soul for her than that.

Arcona was the same. The love he had once had for his dearest friend was gone. There was no emotion there, just a cold, hard heart that felt nothing. Only Alyssa, who cared nothing for her enemies, who had no thought for people who did not matter, had clung to an emotion so primeval she spent all her time hating herself for it. And so she hid her emotion until he slept, and then she sat with him, and allowed herself to love him, just a little, in secret.

When Master Lix spoke, it was with a degree of pride and triumph in his voice. He had taught Arcona well. "He will never love you, daughter."

She turned her eyes to him, flat green emotionless eyes. She raised a perfectly groomed eyebrow in a quizzical fashion and then shook her head as though dismissing his statement. "Did I say I wanted him to?" she said.

"Any blind fool could see it," spat Master Lix, taking a perverse pleasure in her pain.

Her eyes narrowed slightly, and then she shrugged briefly, turned her attention back to the slumbering Arcona.

"He sleeps in peace for once," said Master Lix.

"I gave him a draught," said Alyssa, and had the rare experience of seeing a shadow of fear cross her father’s face. She rather enjoyed it, wanted to see it again. She raised an eyebrow and said with amusement in her voice and lighting her beautiful face, "You’re afraid of him."

"I am not afraid," snorted her father.

"What is it that he dreams of every night?" demanded Alyssa. "What is it that every night causes him to wake screaming? Why are you so afraid tonight?"

"You are delusional," said her father and laughed at her.

"You are afraid," said Alyssa, sensing the truth. "You are afraid because tonight he will finish his dream. Tonight is the beginning of your end."

"He cannot beat me," said Master Lix, shrugging, nonchalant.

Alyssa smiled the curious bitter smile she had inherited from him. "He will beat you," she said.

"He cannot defeat me," said Master Lix.

She smiled again and shrugged her shoulders, turned her attention back to Arcona.

The day had dawned, bright and fierce with sunshine. The sky was cloudless, and the whole morning reeked of the fresh scent of dew. Alyssa tugged her covers up around herself and mumbled to herself, not wanting to rise and face the morning. Slowly, she forced herself out of her bed, rubbed her eyes, stretched and pulled on her boots. She had slept, as usual, fully clothed.

She gazed out of the window and sighed to herself, hating the sunshine, hating its incandescence and brilliance. Then, looking up to the hill which overshadowed the building in which she and her father and his students lived, she saw Arcona, sitting along, cross legged on the dewy grass; his hands rested on his knees, and his eyes, she fancied, must be closed. He was lost in thought. She wondered if his sleep had brought him dreams or not. She made up her mind swiftly. No one else would have dared to go to him. No one else would have dared to ask, but Alyssa did.

She strode purposefully up the hill, and when she reached its summit, she settled beside Arcona in the same position, hands resting on knees. She could see that his eyes were open and that he had ignored her approach.

"Good morning," she said, her voice level and calm.

"Is it?"

Alyssa shrugged. "You dreamed last night," she said.

"And?"

"I wonder what it was that you dreamed of," she said, and lifted her eyes to his face and glanced swiftly away again when she saw the hostility there.

"You have a nerve asking me that," he said. "As your father’s daughter, I should kill you now, and put an end to it."

"But then who would make you your sleeping draughts?" said Alyssa lightly. She smiled, her curious, bitter smile, inherited from her father, and angered him still further, for her recognised Master Lix in that smile, and hated it, hated HER with a blind, white, burning kind of hatred, the purest kind of hatred, that lasts only a few seconds and is replaced soon afterwards with a lesser kind of emotion, a more vain and presumptuous one, which calls itself hatred, but is merely dislike. "Tell me your dream," she said, and rested her hand on his. He snatched it away as though burnt.

"Why should I tell you my dream?" he said. "I’m sure you know the whole story from your father. I’m sure you both thought it a great joke."

"Humour me then," she said, and tell me your dream."

"I was young. Men came to our house, they killed my family, and they took me prisoner. They sold me to a trader, who in turn sold me to your father. He had ordered my capture, and cared so little for the people who had harboured me until then that he had them destroyed in the most hideous painful fashion."

"Then you must kill him," said Alyssa, and Arcona stared at her surprised. "Why so great a shock, Arcona?" she said, bemused.

He was silent for a moment, and finally he spoke. "I never thought I would hear you say something like that with so little emotion."

"Why did you think that? Am I truly so different to you?"

"I thought there was too much love in you for you to ever truly be like me."

Alyssa glanced up at him and then looked away again. "I have no love for my father. He has done nothing to earn either that or my respect."

"Then I was right. You are nothing like me," he said triumphantly.

"Perhaps not in all respects," said Alyssa, conceding the point and falling silent. "So go. Exact your revenge."

"It’s not revenge," said Arcona stiffly. "It is justice."

"Justice?" said Alyssa, and her smile lit her face again, and again Arcona felt that blinding hatred which again settled down into the insignificance of dislike. "Oh Arcona. Don’t fall into that trap. Justice is not meted out by the individual or by the victim. It could never be justice that you seek. You seek retribution."

"You are wrong," said Arcona.

A trifle smugly, Alyssa shrugged and said, "I am not wrong."

Arcona slapped her hard across the face, rose to his feet and left her sitting there alone, her hand held to her jaw where he had hit her and a red mark was starting to appear.

They faced each other across the courtyard, eyes caught together. Alyssa had just arrived, breathless, having run down from the hill, and watched them cautiously. They were so alike these two, her father and Arcona.

Master Lix sneered elegantly. "So," he said, "you know the truth."

"I have always known it and never allowed myself to believe it," snarled Arcona, holding himself back from striking Master Lix through great effort. The Master would never know how great an effort.

"Then you are a fool," said Master Lix, "which is not what I raised you to be."

"Your lessons for me are over," said Arcona. His breath was ragged in his chest. He wanted to much to plunge his hand into the Master’s chest and rip out his heart and eat it in front of him whilst his yet living eyes looked on. He found his gaze drawn to Alyssa.

"You have to do it," she said, and again her voice was devoid of all emotion.

Arcona was shocked once more. He could not quite work out why he was so surprised. She had spoken this way on the hill, he knew how she felt for her father, and that emotion was not love, could never be love. And yet, and yet… Why was he so astonished at her reaction to the prospect of her father’s death?

Then he knew. It was because he had been forced to watch as his father was murdered, and could not imagine how any living creature who must have emotions, could possibly eve consider doing on purpose what he had been forced to do. He looked at her then with terrible sadness in his eyes, realising at long last what had been made of him and of Alyssa, and what they both had lost.

In a split second he remembered the child she had been, so eager to please her father, trying desperately to be all that he wanted, and finding in him at no point the love she expected from him. Attempt after attempt to win his approval had gone unnoticed, and finally she gave up. She had slowly ceased to love him, and had been left with only a deep-rooted dislike of him, and terrible resentment against him for the life he had forced her to live.

Alyssa raised an eyebrow and shook her head. She seemed to have read his thoughts. "Don’t pity me for what I lost or what you think I should have had," she murmured. "It is all in the past."

"There can be no present without the past," said Arcona.

Alyssa nodded slowly then and walked towards her father. She was quiet and her thoughts were masked from both her father and Arcona. She had grown good, over the years, at concealing her thoughts and emotions, and there was no sign of what she was about to do. Only at the last second did Arcona grasp her intention – shades of his dream – and move to stop it happening, and cursed himself forever afterwards for being too late.

Alyssa had stepped close enough to her father to take a dagger from his belt. She moved backwards, half-turned and then drove the blade into her white throat. Her blood flowed in a stream that was redder than red, so dark it was almost black, and she fell to the ground, weakened by the loss of her life force.

Arcona leapt to her side, knelt in her blood and gazed one last time into her green eyes. They shone with some emotion he did not recognise, and she gripped his wrist with one bloodied hand. "Retribution," she said. It was her last word, uttered on her last breath, and the last spark of life in her eyes flickered and died and Arcona felt some inexplicable grief that was stronger than any other he had known overtake him.

He was shaking when he got to his feet. He could feel the wetness of her blood at his knees, felt the sticky mark of her hand around his wrist and then stared in horror at Master Lix. The smile was in place, on his lips, as he gazed down at the corpse that had been his child. He felt no loss t her parting, maybe felt nothing at all, except that his smile suggested some awful parody of joy.

"Retribution," said Arcona, and his voice was strong and filled with rage. He and Master Lix joined battle.

They were well matched as fighters. Parry for parry and thrust for thrust, lunge for lunge and cut for cut they circled each other in that bloodied courtyard, Arcona growing in strength and stature every time he glanced at Alyssa’s body, lying, bleeding still.

After four hours of gruelling fighting in the blazingly hot sun, Lix knew that he would be beaten. Arcona was stronger than he was. Stronger in some capacity that he did not and could not comprehend, for it was surely not by his tutelage that Arcona gained his power, but from something else, as though he had drunk in Alyssa’s spirit through his knees along with her blood. He seemed to know Lix’s next move, to be able to see inside his mind and change strategy like the whirling sands of time to be able to meet the next blow, to be able to make an attack that wounded Lix one more time.

Lix spoke at last and they were the words of a man who knows he is beaten. He cast aside his lightsaber and spoke. "The Grand Master always said you would be the one to kill me," he said.

Arcona smiled bitterly. "Retribution," he snarled and struck. Lix fell dead to the ground.

Arcona dropped his lightsaber and fell to his knees beside Alyssa’s form. He gazed deep into her eyes, brushed away the flies that were beginning to settle there and sighed a deep sigh. For she was gone. He had hoped that it had been some ghastly illusion, some trick of the mind, for she had been skilled at those. But it was not. He knelt there and felt tears welling in his eyes and despised himself for his weakness.

"You have your retribution," he said quietly, and with a swift movement of his hand closed her lustrous eyes for ever.

It took him a whole day to build her pyre, piled high with fragrant herbs and beautiful flowers. He dressed her in white and put a wreath of flowers on her dark hair, and at dusk carried her to her pyre and laid her upon it. He looked away for a moment and then thrust in the burning torch he held, and watched the woods kindle and the flowers beginning to wilt at the heat, and smelt the scent of the herbs as they burnt.

The flames seemed not to touch her body for a long time. She lay there at the top of the pyre, unharmed, it seemed, so alive in appearance she almost seemed to breathe, and Arcona watched her there and felt rage and pain and sorrow. And slowly the flames licked around her body, seemingly soft and gentle, yet raging and burning, and Arcona could watch no more, and when he next looked back, the pyre had died down and her body was no longer there.

Arcona walked slowly towards his ship. When he looked back, he saw the dull red glow on the hillside that signified the buildings he had torched. He turned back resolutely towards his ship. His quest for retribution had only just begun.