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thenightmarketofdathomir · 6 months

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Trick or Treat!!

Do you remember that time in Wrath of Darth Maul when Talzin took a little nick of Maul's blood, then later used it in the Talisman of Finding given to Savage to retrieve his lost, unhinged brother from Lotho Minor after some jerk Jedi cut him in half?

What if that's not all Talzin used Maul's blood for?

Pairing: Nightsister Reader x Shadowperson Maul Rating: Explicit Word Count: 2,534 words Warnings: Grief mention, dub con, power dynamics, dps, necromancy, horror imagery Notes: A current knowledge of Star Wars: Ahsoka is required to best understand the insinuations here. The "Reader" character plays with perspective to put you in the driver's seat, but she exists in canon.

Summary: Alone on your ancestral homeworld, Dathomir, you call to the spirits of your long-dead sisters, but something else answers instead.

Black spheres are an omen, you remember, staring up at Dathomir’s twin moons for the first time, your feet firmly planted on ancestral soil:

A cryptic portent writ into the book of Gethzerion by another of your kin before the tome was lost, but what was lost can be reclaimed. The thought harries you, tugging at your skirts like the spirited winds that trundle through Dathomir’s peaks. The air tastes of ash and dirt, humid with the bog reek of the endless grave thorn forests whose silent, empty pods sway above your passage towards the mountain.

Your ship is mired in the swamp behind you.

There is no way out. No way back. Only forward into an uncertain future.

The cold breath of opened graves breathes new life into everything that slumbers when your footsteps lead you into the temples of your fallen sisters.

You’ve never been here before, but the spirits that plague your dreams mapped the way across the stars from core worlds to the Quelli sector, beckoning you back to red shores and silent peaks on a pilgrimage to find nothing at all —

Nothing save the dead.

The carved effigies to the ancient mothers await, staring down at you with dark eyes and distended mouths, and everywhere, everything is at unrest. The Force churns. Nothing lives here but the memory of the old ways persists.

You hear it in the echoes and whispers, disembodied and powerless.

The mountain is a mausoleum.

Bones everywhere.

Trampled.

Piled and burned otherwise by soldier’s hands. Men. Handling the bodies of sacred warriors who should have been dressed and placed with care into their hanging coffins to rise again when beckoned to their fulfill their duty:

Death is not the end.

Death is a threshold.

You know this.

But you’ve never understood dishonour until you see the bones of your sacrificed sisters scattered and piled and broken and charred. They died defending Dathomir. They died with honour. Disgraced in death.

You feel their loneliness.

Their rage.

Their hunger to be avenged.

Empty eye sockets stare from all corners of the old lair, bones bleached and flesh desiccated. No power here. Nothing left. Not a drop of the ichor for your dry hands, dusted with their ashes and their dead flesh so lovingly caressed.

Arise.

Awake, you beckon them —

No one listens.

They were never properly prepared.

You sink to your knees.

You lie down.

The Force drifts in eddies, but the dead offer no wisdom and no answers. Alone and abandoned without answers or even solutions.

You find stillness among your dead kindred, curled there on the dusty red floor of your ancestral home, awaiting a sign that your journey has meaning and that not everything is lost —

Not the books, nor the legends, nor the voices of the fallen, hours passing as gloomy day drifts to dreary night while the ghasts creep from their cave dwellings and the feeble light finally wanes.

It takes everything in you to rise from the hard stone cavern where you’d slumped, curled into yourself, fingernails raking through red dust with your cheek to the dirt as if your tears alone might offer relief where there is none. The ache runs deep. Grief is a bottomless well. The Dark Side offers only anger to fill the empty places.

On Dathomir, nights are long and the darkness remembers an older world, where the sounds of distant predators creep from their hiding places to hunt the weak beyond the mountain.

You build a fire so you can better see what lurks in the little crannies. Beyond it, the shadows splay up the cavern walls, pulling long streaks of graduated black from the shrines and braziers, the windows where the Nightsisters dwelled little better than a columbarium.

All is silent, the flames flickering red and orange and yellow. The mists shift across the water but there is no ichor. You wish you could feel it — that archaic power spoke of in the sacred texts.

You’ve never understood loneliness. The Force has always provided, its unerring presence a constant in your life, but maybe there is a lesson here: in order to understand what you’re missing, you must first face death in all its many acts of decomposition: what you’ve found in your dismay is a civilization buried.

Wasted.

You’ve never felt anything like it. It creeps into the hollows of your being with little black tendrils, the shadows surrounding you breathing closer as the flames flicker, emboldened by your inaction.

You can’t feel them, and distracted by the way your power strains around you at the discomfort of so much nothing, you don’t feel the interloper’s presence until it’s too late.

You don’t belong here, it whispers, rising the down on the back of your neck. Your kind is dead, my dear.

Your voice echoes through the chamber. “Who’s there? Show yourself, stranger.”

Laughter trickles; disembodied and floating to the ceiling, from the crevasses, across the river. It’s everywhere — he is everywhere.

No Nightsister would dare threaten one of their descendants.

The warmth of your body beneath your ceremonial wrappings attracts it, maybe, or the blaze of the flame after so long without light in dark places. The fire gutters — little better than a candle when the wind rises like a breath moaning through the ancient cavern.

The fire shivers, ash and cinder scattering. You feel it finally:

The old. The forgotten. The rage that drives it.

Unfamiliar.

Embers bank the walls, sending up sparks revealing nothing at all as you twist to look over your shoulder. Nothing there. No spirits. No magicks.

But how easy it was to forget the first lesson as the cold slither that passes your toes and ensnares your ankles in dark tendrils:

Some shadow things persist even when you remove the light that casts them.

The fire dies, and you’re plunged into darkness as your body jerks forward through the dirt, a swirl of embers revealing the after-image of a figure that wavers before you feel the smothering heft absent a body. He’s on top of you: an impression of broad shoulders, a smear of limbs that might’ve once been a man flinging you onto your stomach, the elongated spears stretching from the crown of his head, the weight of your face is pressed into the dirt where you left tears like offerings but not your scraped skin.

Horns, you think.

A Nightbrother, or what’s left of him.

This is my world now, the voice growls into your ear.

He jerks you forward, intent on instilling fear where you only feel indignation.

Let this be a lesson from an old Master: no one trespasses.

A tongue of shadow licks across your chin and down your throat into the folds of your robes. It’s cold. And the shadow creature is a pervert. You shiver against the intrusion, flesh pebbling against the sensation.

“Dathomir is not your inheritance, demon,” you tell it, your muscles rigid and straining against the strength in those shadowy tendrils that brace you against the floor.

His voice reverberates, humming through your skull. My claim is stronger. I was born here.

He could beat you until you broke beneath him. He could suffocate you with darkness. But he doesn’t.

Perhaps you already know the answer why.

A flicker of shadow coils up your thigh, licking over your backside and around your waist. Finger of shade raking through your hair. Investigating. Seeking something familiar from the foreign. Perhaps it’s power he craves — dominion over the matriarchs that kept him subservient. Perhaps revenge.

Despite your resilience, your breathing hitches when the sensation tickles over the shell of your ear. You grimace.

“You’re trapped here,” you tell him. “All alone in the darkness. No living soul to offer you entertainment.”

The spindles of shadow wrapping you tighten, rising you up to your knees and binding your movements. Like ropes, they notch closer, squeezing your flesh into contortions that make it difficult to draw breath. It’s uncomfortable, and meant to threaten, but he’s toying with you in a way that makes you think he’s interested… or perhaps it’s been too long since he’s touched anything living.

Maybe he misses it.

“If that’s all you can accomplish, then I suggest you remember your place.”

His laughter reverberates down your spine, curling around your bones as easily as if he could sink into your body through your clothes. The fabric flutters, plucked by so many invisible fingers that you realize the lack of substance doesn’t mean he can’t choose for himself the form he takes.

Witch, your threats are misplaced. I am no servant. I do not obey.

Prideful thing. You remember the old ways. The old teachings. The efforts to power that maintained equilibrium.

“What’s your name?”

A glance at your pinned wrists reveal a slant of shadow across your skin — the strength in his grip unyielding. This was a warrior, once. You are certain. You remember the vitriol, the rage.

I — he falters.

The strain in the silence ripples into waves that break across your body, and then in shivers.

Anger threatens. I do not remember.

“Perhaps you weren’t given one.”

No. I had a mother.

“You’re a spirit, then.”

An echo. A collection of impressions absent memory to bind them.

“A shadow.”

A shadow, he agrees. Whatever is left when the body dies and the soul cannot evanesce.

Interesting. Nightbrothers believe in something different — lands of plenty. A place steeped in bounty.

“Have you no body? No anchor to resurrect under the right conditions?”

The hesitation costs him, because there is much revealed of longing through silence.

You have no such power over the ichor.

“That was not my question.”

A lilting hesitation. In another place, perhaps. A long way from here. Bones are brittle, but the mechanics — he trails away. I do not know why that preoccupies me.

Dust trickles across the floor, like sand flittering over dunes at a distance — pulled in glittering, dark waves that dance in swirls as he stirs them with his near-translucent fingers. He’s the wind. He’s everywhere. He is nothing.

And more:

He is lonely.

You understand it as surely as you sense the feeling that lingers: wasted potential. A wasted life. Pushed around by forces greater than him. But you can sense him. You feel him, as sure as the nexus. Intriguing.

“Perhaps it is purpose you’re missing,” you suggest, a plan formulating.

Destiny.

The sound shudders around you, trilling down your arms and across your belly, notching between your legs to puddle with the vibration. The air around you moves with the word, and you know it’s significant to him, even if he can’t remember the particulars. You shudder with the tremulous air, your bindings loosened just enough that you can feel how his grip has left you tender. And, heartbeat throbbing in the places where he touched you, you find enough slack to turn your head.

“Yes.”

The Force stirs, the nexus restless. Everything churns and you know, somehow, that this moment was fated. He did not bring you here, but perhaps the Mothers wished you to find him — this lost son of Dathomir — to give him new purpose.

You watch him, visible only on the periphery of your sight as his density gathers strength, layers sliding together like sheaves to create form from nothing. So powerful. So eager.

“Shadows shouldn’t have strength,” you tell him. “But you are more than that, aren’t you?”

He hesitates again. Perhaps he is trying to remember.

“Would you like to be, stranger?” you ask him.

Carefully, you tug a hand free. Lifting it, you raise your fingers in a familiar gesture — a curve of your digits and you slide into that in-between where green flickers edge the darkness.

Something lingers.

Something special in this one.

Tread carefully, witch, he murmurs. You’ll find this form isn’t so receptive to your tender ministrations.

Ichor shimmers along the outline of his figure — nebulous and uncertain, but bearing markings of a life half-remembered, obscured by tragedy and distance.

You strain, the effort leaving sweat beading along your brow, but the sensation catches all at once, and tugs him into you, dissolving on a breath that rains ichor around you in delicate, green shimmers.

Magick lives on in him, even without form or substance. You feel the being’s shudder. It warbles on the air around you, landing like an unsteady hand on your shoulder as if to brace himself.

“So many would shatter without a Nightsister’s blessings. You must have curried great favour from the clan Mothers,” you murmur, appreciative of the show.

Quiet punctuates his hesitation.

“I can help you.”

The words hang.

Presumably if I extend the same courtesies, he murmurs.

A smile threatens. You bow your head, acquiescing.

Indeed.

“There is a word in old Dathomiri I think might suit you nicely,” you tell him.

To what purpose?

“Something to call you, if it suits. A courtesy.”

Another hesitation.

“It is tradition that to Name something confers power to it. A grace of not forgetting that it is known, and appreciated.”

A squeeze, and tendrils slither — a myriad of serpentine limbs drawing you closer into the offset where his edges blur and deepen, a form coming together without details or features, only the rough timber of his voice to guide your chin upward as if he’d crooked a finger beneath your chin.

I will not call another ‘Master,’ he murmurs.

The soft viciousness of the assurance leaves you wondering.

“A gesture of our partnership,” you offer again.

He likes that better, you think.

“I cannot subdue a creature that I cannot grasp in my fingers,” you explain. That small smile again. You let him see it.

I am not partial to subjugation, he says. But perhaps, with persuasion, I might be willing to negotiate on the particulars of our arrangement.

Invisible fingers stroke over your shoulder and down your chest, steady and curious as they dip into your bellybutton and between your legs. You part your knees a little as if welcoming his exploration.

The air hums with his interest. Your skirts lift and flutter, everything inside you roiling at the feeling:

Power beyond measure threads through your fingertips when he takes your hands in his, lifting your arms overhead to hold you in place. Who was he, you wonder?

A lick of cold curls against the heat of your sex, resting there as if he knows he belongs there.

Then perhaps the second order of business is a body, my Lady.

“What is the first?”

Against your ear, you feel the shape made by his lips, the trail of a tongue tasting your sweat and the barest trickle of fear as fingers split into tongues to burrow deeper into the warmth of your body. Curious. Or maybe controlling, because you gasp a breath as those fingers grow firmer and thicken.

What will you call me under circumstances where I’d prefer you to scream it?

Fingertips shiver against your lips, begging to seal your bargain with a kiss.

“Marrok,” you whisper, your breath hitching as another tendrils presses against the pucker of your ass, the one in your cunt throbbing larger with every second that passes, stretching you to fit every part of his ichor-infused being.

You sigh at the feeling of fullness as your body succumbs, letting him cradle you as you sink into his darkness.

“Marrok,” you say again before the word is stolen with the press of his tongue to yours.

‘Shadow,’ he murmurs, appreciative of the translation. How fitting.

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