Abregado-rae become just another blurred streak of matter as the Inebriation rattled off into space, whisking its battered and weathered cargo away from their responsibilities, their plights – and their shame. From all walks of life, old and young, rich and poor, sick and healthy folk alike huddled together in a quiet mass of change. Marka was no different.

A runaway soldier, silent and troubled.

Half a glance at the viewport showed the stars begin to stretch - electric blue strands reaching through the void. The engines below Marka’s feet gave one final pained lurch before turning over, shaking every loosely-fit component of the ship. As appropriately as possible, the whole cargo hold seemed the perfect reflection of its contents; mismatched, unusual, unrefined. Eclectic. There was an almost vagrant charm to the rough-living crowd. Toes were stepped on, foreheads were bumped. The air was hot and thick with breath as each person clung to the minute personal space they were afforded. One poor mother held her infant children tight to her chest as they grew restless and hungry, trapped between a rusted steel wall and the turned backs of several others. Shoulder-to-shoulder they stood, having little else to do save examine the person directly in front of them. Stood before Marka was a shorter man, his greasy, stringy hair combed across in a desperate attempt to hide the ever-expanding emergence of scalp. A trademark of humanity. The squat man’s head was shiny and slick with sweat, and rosy. The products in his meagre covering of hair smelled ripe with chemicals, tart enough to taste in the air. His shirt was thin and stained with oil, and it clung to him like everything else as he continued to perspire. Marka’s forearms were unavoidably pressed to the man’s lower back; they grew damp and tingly in the heat of it. But Marka endured, fingers tightly wound around a hide-wrapped sword hilt, held preciously to his stomach.

One of the children began to cry. The tension grew tenfold, with one particularly smarmy looking suit visibly grinding his teeth. It was a pressure cooker for tolerance and compassion. Something was going to break eventually – and no doubt sooner rather than later. The dishevelled mother shushed and cooed and whispered in singsong to her child, anything and everything she could think of to restore the peace and quiet. The boundaries of patience were fraying at the edges.

“Bloody hell, woman. Shut that thing up!” spouted the suit. His perfect white teeth were bared in increasing frustration. The woman just glanced at him, her expression caught between apologetic and venomous.

She murmured, though loud enough to be heard by those around her, “You try bringing children in here…”

That was all it took.

Another woman, whose snooty, pointed features matched the elitist hiss of her voice, shot back.

“My children haven’t made a sound!” she quipped. It was followed by a convulsion of half-hushed accusations and defences as each grew increasingly confident. Before long there was no end to the voices, progressively rising in volume. Shoulders tensed and muscles contracted and throats were finally stripped raw as screaming of all different sorts smothered everyone’s senses. Marka remained quiet, as did the young man beside him. All around them shouts and cries of annoyance swelled and pulsated until each voice grew old and tired and finally, after too long, all grew quiet once more; all that remained was time.

Time enough for Marka to succumb to contemplation of his deeds. Haunting flashes of the skeletal remains of starships, of fetid reanimated bodies skulked through Marka’s consciousness. Shadows had been born and multiplied in his mind. Too much had been compressed. What peace he had convinced himself existed was slowly decaying.

Many months before, at the very tail end of what would be Marka’s last mission for Wraith Squad, the past finally caught up. He and the rest of Wraith had just stolen a child. It wasn’t personal, it was business. Nothing had gone more awry than it ever did. But something ate away at Marka’s confidence, like there was a spectre of something he believed long gone following in his footsteps. It stuck to him like bad smell, all the way back to Tadath. Suspicion grew into paranoia, and paranoia brought out in him a long-supressed desperation for survival. So he ran – took the first shuttle off-surface and left everything and everyone behind. But the niggling fear, the phantom, had followed him; along with a Vast Empire retrieval squad, trained specifically to bring in deserters, alive or maimed. So began months of planet-hopping and evasion.

The retrieval squad eventually stopped for whatever reason. But still Marka ran.

It was on Abregado-rae that the fear became reality. Marka stopped running long enough to see what was behind him.

It was late in the day, and the sun set over the labyrinthine canals winding around the Triple Nova Casino. Flocks of starry-eyed tourists and frequent gamblers shed their work clothes for fancy attire and filled the streets as the neon lights grew bright in fading light. Everywhere, smiles leapt out as street vendors peddled their wares and greeters beckoned passers-by into the bellies of their entertainment superstructures. It was easy to get lost in it all. But the sense of danger was keen in Marka’s mind. Several people had followed him from the front door of his temporary residence. Their faces were so bland, so forgettable, as if they were nothing but shells without souls. Impeccably dressed as they were, they nonetheless stood out amongst the masses. And they took the bait.

A short trip around the block was all it took. Marka practically led them by the belt through the evening marketplace, and back to the small apartment complex he was staying in. He ducked inside, and closed the door behind him. His followers would remain outside for barely a few minutes, he figured.

So it was that Marka found himself ensnared in the unrelenting grasp of the cargo hold, packed to bursting point with all the others. More than a few of them were there only because their homes were just destroyed; others fleeing what they believed to be the beginning of the end of peace on Abregado-rae. And that was only the first shuttle to leave. Half a dozen more were back on the surface opening their landing bays to the scared and the homeless, the superstitious and the opportunistic. There was more than a hint of uncertainty on every breath they breathed. The air became heavy with it: the anxiety in the face of the unknown. The parents especially, but they were the most courageous. They had more precious things to be brave for. The businessmen and the homeless and the slaves to self-preservation worried for themselves, their immediate future. But the mothers and fathers knew they could not put themselves first. It seemed the most common virtue across all species.

There was no announcement as the Inebriation jerked its way out of lightspeed, causing another unhealthy groan from the engines below. Once more the bits and pieces rattled and clunked and strained and every body braced itself to compensate. The steel frame of the hold moaned and whined, threatening to give way to whatever pressure it wrestled with. It was nearly enough to drown out the already crackling voice straining through the comm-system.

“Landing soon. Hang on to somethin’,” warned the disembodied voice of the ship’s pilot. His voice was not warm.

Not long to go now. Backs and shoulders straightened with a renewed anticipation as each and every person felt the end of the journey approaching. For some it meant starting their lives all over again, or seeking new opportunities. For Marka it meant reclamation – and a final confrontation. With who, or what, he was uncertain. But there could be no more running.

. . .

It was only a short time later that the landing gears crashed with a great lack of finesse into the shadowed platform below. There was a synchronised swaying amongst the passengers as the world took its time becoming stable under their feet, and only moments later the bay door fell outward with a great crack. The sight that greeted them was far from inviting.

The dingy, old circular landing pad was littered with assorted crates of varying shapes and sizes, and each had long been swallowed up by black lichen and artificial weeds. The mouldy spores of the dead flora floated visibly through the air, which smelled old and decayed. Several floor-lights fought bravely to illuminate the walkway leading north, but all that could be managed anymore was the occasional blinking and hissing of unmaintained wiring. Past the walkway, tall walls rose high above, beyond sight, into the inky sky. There was no life outside the shuttle.

But every soul marched their way down the ramp and out into the world, and with heads held aloft they went about their business. A portly man wrapped in a whirlwind of multi-coloured, mismatched silks stood rigidly at the cusp of the deep shadows, his oily moustache crowning a deceitfully welcoming grin. He waved his hands at the more helpless of the folk and churned out his undoubtedly practised pitch, luring the naïve to him with the promise of safe transport to palaces of gold and beautiful people. Too many went with him, and before long disappeared without a sound into the black.

Coruscant, as ever it was in the forgotten regions, far from the splendour shown in all the tourism brochures. This was a place of poverty now. The structures, the architecture all around whispered that it was not always this way. But much can change in a decade.

It was  this very landing pad, in fact, that Marka had used to escape when he was younger. It was this landing pad that he would wait on, for hours, for his father to come home. It was there he stood the one day his father didn’t come home at all. It was there he decided to find the Vast Empire. And several miles away was home; once a shining tower of glass and steel that glinted in the light and glowed with warmth in the dark, surrounded at the bottom by terracotta planters housing tidy little bushes rich with flowers of every colour. It had stood suspended over a great chasm, reaching out with unrivaled confidence.

It had been years since Marka’s last visit, and by then everything his home once was had perished. The tower remained, though the uppermost level had been crushed, and the windows were gone, or broken. The steel had blackened in the smog of industry and the plants shrivelled and disintegrated. Winds of traffic and nearby ventilation systems wore the natural substances to dust, and that dust was carried in through the missing walls and windows. Inside, the few items of furniture that survived theft were utterly spent, crumbling under years of nature’s abuse. The door was still clinging to its hinges in splintered pieces, a result of a breaching charge Marka remembered vividly. That was where the men in brown suits had forced their way into the house when he was only a boy. Through that doorway his mother was dragged and carried, kicking and screaming, while her arms and legs struggled to grasp the doorframe.

As all the life Marka had left behind came rushing back, the Inebriation spewed vile green smoke as it wrenched itself away and back into the sky. Everyone had left, leaving only the faintest echo of footsteps in the dark.

So Marka forced his feet forward, little-by-little submerging himself in the oppressive embrace of the narrow streets wedged between the towering, lifeless skeletons of a city-suburb long forgotten. Scum caked his boots within a few metres, and the murky filth in the air seeped into his lungs, and seemed alive – awoken and kicked up by the sudden influx of shuffling refugees.  But he soldiered on, as ever, through winding streets and sloping pathways, to and fro with a half-forgotten familiarity. The shape of it all was the same as it always had been, but that was all. The soul of it - the lights, the music, the smell of food… the people – was dead and buried beneath the ghosts.

It was the same for the entire lengthy trudge. Marka’s long hair and scattered, thick braids became damp with the moisture in the air, and his lips developed a thin covering of some murky grit. His beard had grown long and rough in his exile, streaked with the premature grey of a stretched soul. There had been no balance, no control for far too long. As a person he was unstable. Lost. The one purpose he clung to was only just ahead now, standing in the same decrepit place as the last time.

Home.

And the measly remains of the door were just the same as when last he saw it. But there were visible footprints in the dirtied footpath leading up the miniscule incline to the interior. And, far above, a barely glimmering light; it flickered a faint orange on the highest remaining floor. The family dining room.

Cautiously, Marka put one foot before the other and began the most agonising walk in his memory.

He slipped in through the front door and forced himself not to look at anything as he continued toward the winding stair set deep in the far wall. The wearied stone was recently scuffed by more than one pair of boots. The boot prints continued upward, ceaseless, through four empty floors of uncomfortable memories, to the top. The steel door was rusted and looked like dull copper, but the fancy brass handle was clean. At the bottom, the glitter of firelight fluttered at Marka’s boots as he stood cold and stiff.

A honeyed, engaging voice wafted into the stairwell from beyond.

“Do come in. I have been ever so patient, you know.”

Marka pushed gently down on the handle as if time was slowed; he heard the internal latch slide backward, and the dull scratching as the hinges begged for oiling and cleaning. The door turned in and the debris-scattered floor before him grew more and more bright, and the air warmer, until he was finally inside.

Directly six paces ahead was a grand winged armchair, a meticulously maintained antique piece, embroidered in rich red and gold thread, clearly brought from elsewhere. In it, sitting as relaxed as could be, was a thin, bald man. His hard, gaunt features were bathed in fluid illumination, leaving a hungry spark in his hooded eyes. Halfway between him and the door, by the glassless windows, was a great, deep metal drum and the fire that roared within it. It reeked of kerosene and old oil, and the billowing black smoke it produced collected across the ceiling like a blanket.

“My god, look at you. There you are. Finally, there you are. I almost cannot believe it,” the man spoke with a wide smile. The silence between them was electric.

“My name is Garrett, and I…” he continued, letting loose an amused, fake sigh, “I am your father.”

He let the words hang as his toothy grin grew stupidly. They both knew it was a lie. Marka held his tongue, his expression a mask of passive tolerance.

Garrett pressed his hands into the arms of his chair, and sprung to his feet with great enthusiasm, never once taking his eyes from Marka’s face.

“Well, not your real father, of course. No, no. I would know, I was the one who killed him,” Garrett boasted, the excitement in his voice barely restrained. Tucking his hands behind his back, he continued, “Went down fighting, your old man. He had no chance, sure, but he was tough as nails. Son of a bitch nearly took me with him, actually, your old dad.”

He took the time to focus his gleeful gaze on Marka’s eyes, searching to see if the words had hit home as firmly has he intended. Marka gave him nothing, and a flicker of disappointment etched its way into the prominent laugh lines surrounding Garrett’s antagonistic smile. So he progressed right along to his next best weapon.

“And I can tell you, son, that same spirit was the same with your dear mother – at first. That was, of course, before I broke her. Such a lively thing she was! I’d lay my hands on her and good heavens would she hit me! Nearly broke my jaw on a few occasions.”

Garrett’s features lit up again at his own sadism, thoroughly enjoying the idea of such emotional brutality. With the utmost pleasure, he continued talking while Marka envisioned an infinite number of ways he could unsheathe his sword from his back and tear that man’s heart from his chest. And still the words continued.

“But I’ve had such a long time. So long. One day, I had her taken to my bed, and when I put my hands on her, she just let me. She didn’t fight, she didn’t resist. She did not make a sound,” he said, pacing with a distinct spring in his step. His voice came to a whisper, “That’s right. Your mother, the whore.”

Marka’s blood boiled within, his vision narrowed and blurred at the edges, all the while the voice, thick with delight, drifted on.

“But I suppose you’re wondering what this all means, yes? Why bring you here, hmm? Well, truth be told, I need you. Dead, that is. I need you dead,” Garrett revealed. He injected just the right amount of obviously fake regret into his voice before continuing, “A shame, really. I would dearly love to keep you as a pet. You are quite a remarkable specimen. Very handy with that blade, I bet. And while I did expect you to be brought here by my… faithful servants, the fact that you came alone changes nothing. Actually…”

Garrett paused and raised his sleek eyebrows, seemingly at the whim of some revelation.

“Ah-ha!” he chuckled, “If anything, you’ve done me a favour! Now I don’t have to pay anyone! I can keep your family’s money all to myself. But I am getting away from the real issue.”

On and on, Marka held himself still as bloodlust suffocated every fibre of his being. He took no time to think, to plan an escape, to observe his surroundings. All the training he had received and absorbed disappeared beneath the veil of hatred inside him. There did not need to be a way out of this. When this creature before him ran out of words, Marka would do everything in his power to take Garrett’s head off, whether it meant death or not.

“So, here’s where you come in,” Garrett began nonchalantly. “See, your bitch of a mother left everything to you – and let me tell you, it’s enough for a small empire! Of course I didn’t know this when I murdered your father and had your mother married to me. Imagine my frustration when I took your family name – oh yes, I am quite officially Garrett Su’Riven – only to learn that the fortune I wanted would only fall to me should the remaining legitimate family be eradicated. So, that left you, and your delightfully supple mother.”

Garrett braved a step closer, and cocked his head faintly to the side.

“Your mother, of course,” he hummed, “was killed the moment I knew my men had found you. Mmm. It was a sad way for such an obedient piece of meat to end, but a necessity nonetheless.”

The night’s wind picked up beyond the broken windows, scattering the fire’s shadows in a frantic dance across the crumbling walls. Outside, the sky seemed darker, the wind colder, the stars dimmer. It was if the world was coming to a close. And still Garrett’s voice intruded.

“You don’t say much, do you? At any rate, I have talked long enough,” he said, and gave a brief wave toward the window. “And now the man I have positioned on the rooftop over yonder will have you in his sights, though I imagine he has done the entire time. You have no hope to kill me. You are going to die here, like a dog, in this old ruin.”

Then, with a flourish, Garrett gestured once more to the window, and the resounding snap of a single shot rung out in the air.

Garrett’s chest exploded outward, blood splattered every which way, and as he fell he left behind a fine crimson mist in the air. Little clouds of dust puffed up as his knees smacked against the floor while he bled. He twitched, gave a short and pained gurgle, and slumped back on his heels. There he knelt, extremely dead, the trademark look of morbid satisfaction completely gone from his face. Marka drew his sword with great caution and approached the body, making a point to step in the swiftly expanding ocean of blood pooling before it. Then, with a precise and vicious swing, he took the head clean off and cast it from the window into the gaping chasm below. Beside him, the body slumped left and toppled from the excess force.

Marka had no idea how long he stood there, struggling to find any suitable reaction for what had just happened. He was all but a statue, the drum’s fire burning fiercely alongside him. There were no words to describe any of it. There were no feelings complex enough. But, as always, time kept pace and passed in silence.

Eventually, Marka was shaken from his subconscious existence, and drawn back to the door behind him. A diminutive, pale man clad in dark leather armour breathily inched his way into the room. A long, complicated-looking rifle was slung over his back.

“Bastard,” he breathed, his bloodshot blue eyes sweeping over the messy remains of Garrett.

Still unable to conjure a suitable word for the situation, Marka settled his gaze on the grizzled man before him. Sewn into his dense jacket was the name ‘Knight’. He was thickset and broad across the shoulders and chest, but short, with only little legs.

“I’ve worked for this scumbag for a long time. This was the last straw, you know?” Knight grumbled, taking an aloof sniff.

Suddenly, words burst from Marka’s mouth.

“You worked for him?” he asked, the words rolling from his tongue with an unusual accent.

Knight gave a curt nod, “Sure did. Fifteen years. Always pretty dirty work, but the pay was good. Stopped being worth it a little while ago.”

“Did you know what was happening to my mother? Were you involved with what happened to my father?”

“I knew about your old lady, sure. He always had a plaything, I figured she was just the new flavour.”

Knight very nearly flinched as Marka turned partway toward him. A questioning look struck his face as his brow crinkled in confusion. He only had a handful of moments to mull over the ramifications of what he had just admitted to before he found his chest halfway along the intensely sharp sword in Marka’s hands. It had happened so fast, the pain was yet to take hold.

Marka’s voice trembled ever-so-slightly as he spoke, “You knew. All that time, you knew. And you did nothing. Remember this pain in hell.”

The last word was a hiss, and with his life draining away onto the floor, Knight’s legs gradually crumpled beneath him. He fell with a resounding thud and shared Garrett’s fate, leaving Marka to wrestle the internal typhoon of chaotic emotion: responsibility, guilt, vengeance, fury. And everything else.

After another stretch of time spent standing in tortured silence, Marka eased himself into the armchair and looked out over the sprawling towers of Coruscant. He watched the lights and the speeders, he surveyed the buildings before him, and he remembered the sweet old lady’s face in the moment his actions took their toll on her heart, and stopped it. There, sat in the throne atop his crumbling castle, Marka waited for a purpose.