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I think what's interesting about Maul, given his upbringing, is that when confronted with a lover (and it is a confrontation), he doesn't know how to treat them tenderly or with affection.
If all he knows is the direct result of his upbringing, he understands the way of pain, the need to subjugate, to dominate, to control a situation that will rapidly degenerate if he cannot maintain the tightest grip, then our expectation is more of the same:
Suffering. Abstaining from pleasure in favour of control because everything is a test, and nothing is offered without wanting something in return.
It's just what he knows.
But what if his partner turned the tables?
What if the greatest threat Maul faces when confronted with tenderness is the paradigm shift experienced by feeling warmth from another? I think that just might ruin him.
More, I don't think he knows what to do with it, or you, Reader.
You might just need to teach him.
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Work is overrated, but do remember to hydrate.
The Ritual - Darth Maul x Reader
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Pairing: Darth Maul x Reader (AFAB Cis), Fanged God as Maul/Reader Rating: Explicit Word Count: 10,914 words Warnings: Edgeplay, Knife/Talon Play, Blood Play/Kink, Choking/Asphyxiation, Bondage, Degradation, D/s overtones, Sacred Sex/Heiros Gamos, P in V, Nightsister Magic, Revival of Ancient Dathomiri Culture/Customs, Alien Biology, Cybernetics in full effect (Robo Cock), Early Crimson Dawn Era, Deity Possession, no use of y/n Notes: For @grinningnexu 🖤❤️🖤
Summary:
The new Lord of Dathomir is set on reviving and bastardizing ancient traditions, and you, a Priestess, are intent on doing your job — no matter how off-putting he is.
There is only one rule you need to remember: the Gods must be appeased.
Excerpt below or Read the full fic at Ao3 >
Foreword —
Etched into the walls of the Red Grotto, stoic beneath the dripping walls and calcified creeper that drape the ancient parts of the cave system beneath the mountain, markings made by nimble Nightbrother fingers tell a story in pictures:
A zabrak descended from the cliffside, a crown of horns on his head, to be bathed in the springs by careful hands of his consorts, reborn and renewed after the hunt.  
The drawings, etched in hydraatis acid, have withstood three millennia of change above, from witches to the Nightsisters to their Brothers’ reclaiming, and yet remain:
This is Dathomir, at its deepest heart.
And like the darkness that gathers here, where the whispers of ancient voices can still be heard when the waters are stirred, some things endure:
The ritual has never changed.
But the King will reign once more.
The Red Grotto, Dathomir —
There’s no one here. 
That’s your first thought after tripping down the last set of spiralling stone stairs and nearly upending the tray of salts and oils and soaps you were tasked to bring into the bathing chambers, expecting his return from the westernmost swamps from a rancor hunt. As if anyone did that anymore. More ritual and pomp, you thought. Something to appease the halls full of guests from the syndicates because some traditions kept the kitchens staffed and everyone else fed, but —
No one expected he’d actually go through with that ancient Dathomiri custom: a rancor hunt to feed a full hall of people but also to demonstrate a Nightbrother’s prowess; his virility.
The thing is… you’ve heard rumours about him:
How he was split in half from the waist down years ago by an adversary in a battle that ended with his supposed death. He came back, didn’t he? Just like he came back to Dathomir after so many years. 
You let out a breath, taking in the dripping walls overtaken by vines and leaves that appear to breathe and shiver in the dim brazier light; the enormous bathing pools of various temperatures fed by the springs, some steaming and murky, others cool and wafting mist. Only the patter of the waterfall on stone on the grottos edges settle your nerves. The sound is unending; a constant rainfall under the phosphor of glowworms clinging to the foliage draping from the ceilings.
It’s beautiful. Too quiet, almost, because you know the ichor has been restless since he got here. Too serene for its new owner.
Now here you are and here he isn’t.
The ‘him’ in question isn’t so much a man as he is a monster, or so his renown would suggest: the new leader and face of the Dawn who’d set up operations on his homeworld, along with a retinue who’d attend him, and all his little syndicate minions.
You took your occupation and the handsome pay that came with it with the understanding that your service required a combination of discretion, secrecy, and decorum. You’ve never met him. You’ve only heard the stories:
The Son of Dathomir is indifferent to the pleasures of the consorts the Black Sun brought with them, and he has no mind for leisurely decadence like dining or drinking or even bathing in the ceremonial waters below the mountain. 
A King is still a king if only in name, you remind yourself. Even if he is a bloodthirsty monster.
You set down your tray. The bottles tink together, and you scrunch your nose at the luxury. You’re familiar with all of them: mixtures with various potencies to ease aching muscles and render someone euphoric, to cool the skin and to warm it, and a special salve made especially for legs built from durasteel: a mixture to ensure fluidity in the joints and protect it from the humidity. 
You blended it yourself on the twelfth moon, with ingredients fresh from the apothecary in the Night Market. It’s perfect. It’s precious. Picking it up, the ointment coats the inside of the transparisteel, as thick and potent as the night you prepared it. 
A little gift meant for someone half-cybernetic. 
A token. A thank you. Not to curry favour, but…
Dathomir hasn’t been the same since he returned, you think.
In many ways, with so many new faces — laughter in the hallways and revels waking the daylight on so many evenings — it’s better. Different, but alive again.
Sighing, you replace the jar, thinking about wasted ingredients and wasted time. 
Silly tokens.
Silly girl, you think. 
This is stupid — this fear, this nervousness. 
You were assigned a task for which you were prepared to do whatever necessary to appease the man, and were given leave for it, and he’s not here. You’ve hours at your disposal, and glaring up into the cavernous space of the grotto with your hands on your hips, you arrive at a decision as the damp seeps beneath your dress:
The grotto is ancient, and sacred, and private.
No one will disturb you here.
You might as well enjoy it...
Read the rest at Ao3 >
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O Wishmonger! Grace us with your thoughts -
What made you fall in love with our favourite red zabrak?
Hey, Nocty here.
Just a note to let you know that the Night Market’s closed while the Wishmonger visits the wellspring at the bottom of the Peak on their bi-centennial restorative pilgrimage. (There’s a note in the masterlist pinned to the top of this page that’ll let you know if the Night Market’s open or closed at any given point.)
You’re welcome to talk to me, of course, but I’m ill-equipped to grant wishes. (Womp womp.)
But since they’re not here and I am, I’ll tell you the short version:
Back when I was just a baby monsterfucker and TPM came out, the silent Sith dude peeled back his hood over a head of horns. That’s all it took.
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Title: Drown Me in You Author: nxctuary / @aftergloom (The Wishmonger) Pairing: Darth Maul x Reader / Darth Maul x You (AFAB Cis)  Rating: Explicit  Word Count: 5,745 words
Summary: “They could not bring me back the same.” It wasn’t an explanation you understood, finding him that first time, submerged to the ears so that only the glow of his eyes and the reach of his horns protruded above the brackish water of the swamp. Little webs of sodden lichen and moss clung to him, and with nothing visible save for his expression, all you felt was cold hunger — A million miles between your kind and his, and not knowing his words were warning, you crouched on the shore, your bare toes sinking into the silt, and you held your human hand to him as if you could beckon the creature closer. “I can help you,” you told him. Beneath the surface, his smile was a reflection in razors. “No, my dear.”
Nothing is wasted on Dathomir, and those that return to the planet often emerge from the waters… different.
For Mermay 2023: Mermaid!Maul x (AFAB) Reader
Warnings: Teratophilia, Exophilia, Mildly Dubious Consent, Sexual Coercion, Breeding, Oviposition, Size Difference, Alien Biology, Blood (mention), Mating Bond, Alien Physiology (Cloaca)
🖤❤️🖤 A preview of the fic is included beneath the cut, or you may jump directly to Ao3 to read it in its entirety. 🖤❤️🖤
Keep reading
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The Ritual - Darth Maul x Reader
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Pairing: Darth Maul x Reader (AFAB Cis), Fanged God as Maul/Reader Rating: Explicit Word Count: 10,914 words Warnings: Edgeplay, Knife/Talon Play, Blood Play/Kink, Choking/Asphyxiation, Bondage, Degradation, D/s overtones, Sacred Sex/Heiros Gamos, P in V, Nightsister Magic, Revival of Ancient Dathomiri Culture/Customs, Alien Biology, Cybernetics in full effect (Robo Cock), Early Crimson Dawn Era, Deity Possession, no use of y/n Notes: For @grinningnexu 🖤❤️🖤
Summary:
The new Lord of Dathomir is set on reviving and bastardizing ancient traditions, and you, a Priestess, are intent on doing your job — no matter how off-putting he is.
There is only one rule you need to remember: the Gods must be appeased.
Excerpt below or Read the full fic at Ao3 >
Foreword —
Etched into the walls of the Red Grotto, stoic beneath the dripping walls and calcified creeper that drape the ancient parts of the cave system beneath the mountain, markings made by nimble Nightbrother fingers tell a story in pictures:
A zabrak descended from the cliffside, a crown of horns on his head, to be bathed in the springs by careful hands of his consorts, reborn and renewed after the hunt.  
The drawings, etched in hydraatis acid, have withstood three millennia of change above, from witches to the Nightsisters to their Brothers’ reclaiming, and yet remain:
This is Dathomir, at its deepest heart.
And like the darkness that gathers here, where the whispers of ancient voices can still be heard when the waters are stirred, some things endure:
The ritual has never changed.
But the King will reign once more.
The Red Grotto, Dathomir —
There’s no one here. 
That’s your first thought after tripping down the last set of spiralling stone stairs and nearly upending the tray of salts and oils and soaps you were tasked to bring into the bathing chambers, expecting his return from the westernmost swamps from a rancor hunt. As if anyone did that anymore. More ritual and pomp, you thought. Something to appease the halls full of guests from the syndicates because some traditions kept the kitchens staffed and everyone else fed, but —
No one expected he’d actually go through with that ancient Dathomiri custom: a rancor hunt to feed a full hall of people but also to demonstrate a Nightbrother’s prowess; his virility.
The thing is… you’ve heard rumours about him:
How he was split in half from the waist down years ago by an adversary in a battle that ended with his supposed death. He came back, didn’t he? Just like he came back to Dathomir after so many years. 
You let out a breath, taking in the dripping walls overtaken by vines and leaves that appear to breathe and shiver in the dim brazier light; the enormous bathing pools of various temperatures fed by the springs, some steaming and murky, others cool and wafting mist. Only the patter of the waterfall on stone on the grottos edges settle your nerves. The sound is unending; a constant rainfall under the phosphor of glowworms clinging to the foliage draping from the ceilings.
It’s beautiful. Too quiet, almost, because you know the ichor has been restless since he got here. Too serene for its new owner.
Now here you are and here he isn’t.
The ‘him’ in question isn’t so much a man as he is a monster, or so his renown would suggest: the new leader and face of the Dawn who’d set up operations on his homeworld, along with a retinue who’d attend him, and all his little syndicate minions.
You took your occupation and the handsome pay that came with it with the understanding that your service required a combination of discretion, secrecy, and decorum. You’ve never met him. You’ve only heard the stories:
The Son of Dathomir is indifferent to the pleasures of the consorts the Black Sun brought with them, and he has no mind for leisurely decadence like dining or drinking or even bathing in the ceremonial waters below the mountain. 
A King is still a king if only in name, you remind yourself. Even if he is a bloodthirsty monster.
You set down your tray. The bottles tink together, and you scrunch your nose at the luxury. You’re familiar with all of them: mixtures with various potencies to ease aching muscles and render someone euphoric, to cool the skin and to warm it, and a special salve made especially for legs built from durasteel: a mixture to ensure fluidity in the joints and protect it from the humidity. 
You blended it yourself on the twelfth moon, with ingredients fresh from the apothecary in the Night Market. It’s perfect. It’s precious. Picking it up, the ointment coats the inside of the transparisteel, as thick and potent as the night you prepared it. 
A little gift meant for someone half-cybernetic. 
A token. A thank you. Not to curry favour, but…
Dathomir hasn’t been the same since he returned, you think.
In many ways, with so many new faces — laughter in the hallways and revels waking the daylight on so many evenings — it’s better. Different, but alive again.
Sighing, you replace the jar, thinking about wasted ingredients and wasted time. 
Silly tokens.
Silly girl, you think. 
This is stupid — this fear, this nervousness. 
You were assigned a task for which you were prepared to do whatever necessary to appease the man, and were given leave for it, and he’s not here. You’ve hours at your disposal, and glaring up into the cavernous space of the grotto with your hands on your hips, you arrive at a decision as the damp seeps beneath your dress:
The grotto is ancient, and sacred, and private.
No one will disturb you here.
You might as well enjoy it...
Read the rest at Ao3 >
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Trick.. or perhaps a treat?
Far above, far below. We don’t know where we’ll fall. Far above, far below. What once was great is rendered small. Far ABoVe, FaR BelOW. WE DoN'T kNow WhERE We'lL FALL. FAR ABOvE, FAR BELOW. WhaT ONCE WAS GreAT iS REnDEREd smALL. FAR ABoV3 FaR B3L0W. WE D0n7 KNOw WH3Re We'77 FALL. FA4 ABOVE, F4R B370W. WHAT W45 ONC3 GREAT!? IS RENd3rD Sm477!!2
Pairing: Darth Maul x Reader (ish) Rating: Mature Warnings: Spiderbutt, spiderbutt, does whatever a spiderbutt does. Shibari bondage. Gore. Intention to eat the Reader (but not in the fun way.) Implied character death. (No sexy times.)
Your face feels hot, your fingers cold. Where there was pain, you are numb to the effect, fear a distant cousin whose name you’ve forgotten. You shouldn’t have come here — 
This is a place where things go to be forgotten.
The refuse and the trash, the spare parts, a collection of lost effects that have no match, no partner like a missing sock. But still, suspended in a myriad of cables, your body twisted and pulled open as if you were too broken to be repaired so now you’re inspected, you hang there with the blood rushing to your head, watching the shadows shift and dance as murmurs carry from the distance.
This is the end. 
Some hungers can’t be fed. 
So you sway in a web of cables, wasted dreads spent on the futility of the struggle. You remember too thin hands and bony, merciless fingers, movements and gestures like an orchestration, weaving the air and your body through it into the tangle of a spider’s web for later consideration. The construction isn’t artful, but you understand the significance: once caught, you’re dead. 
The creature’s appetites are not a man’s. He’s saving you for later.
You can’t seduce a monster. You can’t persuade him with promises.
Here there is no comfort.
This is not how you thought you’d end.
Stupid girl. 
He’s coming.
A scuttling from the corners, the jibbers of the bereft and the broken, a used-up toy thrown onto the scrap heap of some worse evil who’d forgone further use for him. 
He’s coming. 
The shadow looms larger as your heart trips over its rhythm. Maybe you’ll die from fear before it happens, but his laughter makes it seem like it’ll be a prolonged thing, your skin stripped from your skin in slivers, your bones snapped and marrow sucked through blackened teeth to savour.
He’s crying.
Wails of pain and shuttered, stuttering repetitions of a name you don’t recognize. Over and over. Over and over. Until it’s the one thing you remember from his diatribes. You hear it in your dreams, in your half-sleep.
Kenobi. Kenobi. Kenobi. Kenobi. 
The serpent slithers with hardly a glance at the spider’s captive. 
There’s no sense screaming.
He’s coming.
A click of durasteel appendages tacking up the walls, slowing to stillness so that in the dark, when he turns those blood-laced, glaring eyes to yours you think you see something rational in the depths, but you can’t draw breath when he looks at you and no longer sees a victim, just like him.
“Kenobi?” he asks again.
He bears his teeth. He growls. 
He’s too thin.
He hasn’t fed.
That’s why he’s here.
“Please,” you try again, but it’s hard to beg when you can’t breathe.
The debris between you shuttles and flies as he charges.
He’s here.
He’s here.
He’s here.
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Excited to see what wares the Nightmarket has today! Trick or treat!
House of Night Headcanons: On Death and the Afterlife among the Nightsisters of Dathomir
Warnings: Death, resurrection, zombification and death preparations, death rituals
There are twin sculptures that guard the gates to the Nightsister's mortuary. Women, of course. Deities, in fact. Not gods in the literal sense because Dathomir has always had two of them (one has Fangs and one has Wings, if you remember) but these two Nightsisters were once great warriors elevated to god-status. The Nightbrothers don't remember the story. It's not theirs to own, and any territories leftover from the war are left to ruin and decay. Good riddance a lot of them say.
The structure itself is carved directly from one of the mountains, and when you pass through the doors, all is silence. Everything is dark. In the aftermath of the Battle of Dathomir, no one goes there. The Nightbrothers believe it to be haunted. Not surprising considering how superstitious they are -- some places are off limits. The Lair where the Nightsisters lived, for example, but especially the mortuary where they prepared their dead for the afterlife.
You might be asking at this point, how do they know about it if it was forbidden in the first place? Nightbrothers were servants, so it's inevitable that Nightbrother hands carried the Nightsister dead for preparation. They never touched them. Those rituals were reserved for anyone with magick, and being bereft of the ichor and the power to control it, a Nightbrother wouldn't be involved in the process. That doesn't mean that those carrying the bodies never spied the goings on of those rituals -- someone had to be curious. Someone would return to tell the tale to the other brothers around the campfire in the flickering light, when the darkness crept in.
The Nightsisters were familiar with making their own graves, the structures used to lift the funerary pods and the egg-shaped coffins themselves. Rancor leather and sinew stitching, wrapped with red linens -- red, the colour of blood which was sacred to their Fanged God, who granted them the power of resurrection. built exactly to resemble their sacred gravethorns, it's no surprise that the pods resemble wombs, because these women went to the slumber of death knowing they were awaiting their rebirth.
Sure, the bodies were prepared with sacred oils infused with the Water of Life to anoint them, holding skin and bone together to prevent decomposition, and tucked into a slumbering position into their coffins so lovingly built to protect them in their afterlife.
But what the Nightbrothers didn't realize is that preparations for their death and return came long before a Nightsister departed this life. The ritual began while they were living: a commitment ceremony of sorts, and preparations. Lessons. Spells and rituals to better prepare them to be called back so that when they died, their spirit would be ready to rise to their true purpose and vocation. The House of Night was a school first: it taught the Nightsisters how to die with honour so they could return to fulfill their oaths to their sisters: they would rise to protect Dathomir when summoned.
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Happy Halloween! I hope your day is full of fun and frights for the spooky season! 👻🎃💀
Trick or treat! 🦇
-Strawberrycrunch
Last of the night. Enjoy your treats in all their weird flavours.
Pairing: Reader x Zombie!Savage Rating: PG Warnings: Dead dude suffering dead dude things
Past the last grove of grave thorns where the last village was lost, the swamp stretches in all directions. Mist-draped and dark, juts of gnarled overgrowth reach upwards, ready to snare unsuspecting travellers.
Those old trees are bare now, the funerary pods that decorated them long emptied. If the passage of time is marked by tragedy, Dathomir has seen its share and then some.
There’s nothing left here. Everything slumbers, save for the Spirits. 
They light a path through the grave thorns — at first just a flicker of white-green, and then, brighter. Tiny flames hovering just over the water, sending lights into the darkness to make grim shapes from the shadows.
Swamp gasses, you tell yourself, because you know there’s no one left here to light the braziers — not the Nightsisters, definitely, though maybe a Nightbrother clan that’s taken to the higher peaks of the mountains. The fire is the same green as the ichor. Little drips of it. Persistent against so much darkness.
You shiver.
Dathomir’s overgrowth is too busy consuming the ruins to notice one lonesome archaeologist investigating the rest of it, but for a moment you can’t help but feel like a trespasser: an outsider encroaching on territories that don’t belong to her. 
Some private mourning rituals for the departed, you wonder? Like the lights are beacons for the fallen, but why are you compelled to investigate further?
The data log says the entire village was flattened, the arenas too. Nothing to preserve but their history, so what you hoped to find were relics: mementos of the way they lived when the Nightbrothers remained subservient to the Nightsisters, before the Crimson Dawn set up its headquarters in the mountain and Maul took over. 
There are rumours, of course: the nexus is powerful. Like a magnet. And everything born of Dathomir eventually returns to it.
It’s just a theory — a hypothesis you can’t really test, given how many lives were lost in the war and after it. 
But you’ve a curious nature, and you don’t fear superstition.
That doesn’t explain the lights in the forest.
Brave or stupid, you’re a scientist. You decide to follow them.
Darkness on Dathomir has a weight that rests like a hand between your shoulders. It nestles in around you, the mist and murk as the trees blot out the red sky, the black trees bent over creating a corridor that gives you pause for just a moment.
There are superstitions in other cultures, where dark passages like these are sometimes haunted, but the swamp is still save for a few errant black flowers that bloom between the creeper in the crevasses, the groans of distant nydak not near enough to be a threat. 
The little lights usher you forward, wisping away as you approach them, and lighting the path further as if to lure you into deeper places where the silence shelters you from the outside world and all you can hear is your breathing.
It’s unsettling, and heart beating, you wonder how you’ll return because the way back is shuttered, veiled over with black. 
You’re not sure any longer what you’re searching for, but you’re certain there’s something out here that you’re meant to find. 
You feel it like the Force’s stirrings. You feel it in your blood, rushing in your temples with a persistent hush.
And when everything falls to that eerie silence where not even the burble of water penetrates the dark, the lights wink out at last, letting the green seep out. It bathes the trees in bright viridian, emerging from a single source at the centre of a clearing: 
A barrow of sorts, wooded over with desiccated branches as if the creature at the centre has been hiding. A monster, you think, because surely nothing living can sustain itself on so little —
“Is that you, brother?” 
The rumble of his voice is in the baritone of broken things: a legacy of damaged pieces cobbled back together, muscular tissues holding on by threads. His eyes are green and smoking, the horns on his head draped with lichen, but when he turns his enormous head in your direction, you realize that he can’t see you as clearly as you see him. 
“Who’s there?” he asks you, but you feel his hesitation, a trickle of fear prompting him to grasp his spear.
He fumbles it, the weapon slipping. His claws too long to hold it.
“How long have you been down here?” you ask him.
He stiffens, the drops of moss across his shoulders threadbare. Pieces of him are missing and patched together with magick. He’s barely holding together, but there’s one thing you can be certain of: Nightbrothers are resilient. 
His frown speaks of deeper preoccupations, like you’ve interrupted his thinking.
“I’ve been waiting,” he says. 
He doesn’t elaborate. Maybe the memory has failed him.
You can see his ribs. The draping of his skin illuminated by ichor. It peeks through the markings on his chest where the flesh has thinned.
He looks down at himself as if realizing the condition he’s in, touching with hesitant fingers. It occurs to you that Dathomir is not the only thing that’s haunted. 
“I woke up here,” he explains. “But this isn’t where I started.”
Three fingers touch his chest, the black and yellow markings a mottle of stanched decay. You can still see his tattoos — the blade that ornaments the stretch of his spine. Corded muscle. Handsome features beneath the weathering. 
“Can I come closer?”
He blinks, staring.
“Are you not afraid?”
You take a hesitant step, setting down your toes into soft mulching earth, and wait for his permission. 
“I think you need help,” you tell him. 
“I think I’m a monster,” he murmurs, but beneath the self-deprecation, there is some humour left. 
“I think whoever did this to you is the real villain.” You mean it to be soothing, but he only bows his head. A moment further, and his consideration fritters into a brush of his overly large hand, pulling with it some vines that have grown over him. 
“They can’t hurt me again. They are dead.”
Nightsisters, then. That explains the ichor that animates him. Persistent even after death.
You tread closer, the dark hulk of his frame shimmering green along the edges.
“Who are you waiting for?” you ask him. “Maybe I can find them.”
“That’s impossible. Maul is the one who is easily lost.” He blinks, and frowning, he shakes his head. “No, that is incorrect. My brother. I lost him when I —” he trails off, stark realization creeping in at a distance to settle on him. It pushes down his shoulders as he remembers the particulars. “When I evanesced,” he finishes.
His death.
You tilt your head. “Your brother is alive yet, somewhere,” you conclude for him. “He’s not ready to meet you.”
Those green, smoking eyes turn appraising, some clarity returning before his expression sinks into shadow once again. 
“But I am lonely,” he says.
You hesitate just a moment. The space beside him is big enough for a friend, you think, and he is so heavy that his shoulders curl over onto himself — the weight of his burdens bowing him to earth. Like they might bury him, if you don’t help at least a little.
What good are such fascinating discoveries if you can’t solve their riddles?
Carefully, you place your fingers on his massive fist: 
A gentle touch. Like you might break him.
He stares at it — your delicate fingers tender with him, this patient creature whose loyalty leaves him covered in bits of buddiea and lichen while he waits for his brother to return to join him.
Some part of you hopes that when he does, they’ll move on from here.
“I’ll be your company,” you tell him. “If you’d like.”
Appearing as if no one has ever offered any gesture of the sort before, his lips part in surprise: an expression so human and vulnerable, you can see how  every line and furrow visibly softens. It changes his expression. He appears younger, as if lurking under the fearsome exterior, there once was a Nightbrother who could feel surprise.
“And my brother?”
You sit down beside him, taking his large hand in your tiny one, nudging for him to scoot over so you can get comfortable beside him.
“Tell me about him,” you say. “I want to know who’s to blame for making you wait.”
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There is one more in the inbox but I’m pausing to hand out candy.
Happy Halloween!
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Trick.. or perhaps a treat?
Far above, far below. We don’t know where we’ll fall. Far above, far below. What once was great is rendered small. Far ABoVe, FaR BelOW. WE DoN'T kNow WhERE We'lL FALL. FAR ABOvE, FAR BELOW. WhaT ONCE WAS GreAT iS REnDEREd smALL. FAR ABoV3 FaR B3L0W. WE D0n7 KNOw WH3Re We'77 FALL. FA4 ABOVE, F4R B370W. WHAT W45 ONC3 GREAT!? IS RENd3rD Sm477!!2
Pairing: Darth Maul x Reader (ish) Rating: Mature Warnings: Spiderbutt, spiderbutt, does whatever a spiderbutt does. Shibari bondage. Gore. Intention to eat the Reader (but not in the fun way.) Implied character death. (No sexy times.)
Your face feels hot, your fingers cold. Where there was pain, you are numb to the effect, fear a distant cousin whose name you’ve forgotten. You shouldn’t have come here — 
This is a place where things go to be forgotten.
The refuse and the trash, the spare parts, a collection of lost effects that have no match, no partner like a missing sock. But still, suspended in a myriad of cables, your body twisted and pulled open as if you were too broken to be repaired so now you’re inspected, you hang there with the blood rushing to your head, watching the shadows shift and dance as murmurs carry from the distance.
This is the end. 
Some hungers can’t be fed. 
So you sway in a web of cables, wasted dreads spent on the futility of the struggle. You remember too thin hands and bony, merciless fingers, movements and gestures like an orchestration, weaving the air and your body through it into the tangle of a spider’s web for later consideration. The construction isn’t artful, but you understand the significance: once caught, you’re dead. 
The creature’s appetites are not a man’s. He’s saving you for later.
You can’t seduce a monster. You can’t persuade him with promises.
Here there is no comfort.
This is not how you thought you’d end.
Stupid girl. 
He’s coming.
A scuttling from the corners, the jibbers of the bereft and the broken, a used-up toy thrown onto the scrap heap of some worse evil who’d forgone further use for him. 
He’s coming. 
The shadow looms larger as your heart trips over its rhythm. Maybe you’ll die from fear before it happens, but his laughter makes it seem like it’ll be a prolonged thing, your skin stripped from your skin in slivers, your bones snapped and marrow sucked through blackened teeth to savour.
He’s crying.
Wails of pain and shuttered, stuttering repetitions of a name you don’t recognize. Over and over. Over and over. Until it’s the one thing you remember from his diatribes. You hear it in your dreams, in your half-sleep.
Kenobi. Kenobi. Kenobi. Kenobi. 
The serpent slithers with hardly a glance at the spider’s captive. 
There’s no sense screaming.
He’s coming.
A click of durasteel appendages tacking up the walls, slowing to stillness so that in the dark, when he turns those blood-laced, glaring eyes to yours you think you see something rational in the depths, but you can’t draw breath when he looks at you and no longer sees a victim, just like him.
“Kenobi?” he asks again.
He bears his teeth. He growls. 
He’s too thin.
He hasn’t fed.
That’s why he’s here.
“Please,” you try again, but it’s hard to beg when you can’t breathe.
The debris between you shuttles and flies as he charges.
He’s here.
He’s here.
He’s here.
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Trick or Treat:D
CoH B-Sides with the usual suspects: Feral, Savage, Kai.
"Don't let anyone give you a tour you don't ask for," he warned her. "And keep an eye on your weapons."
"Especially in the Night Market."
"Definitely in the Night Market."
"And don't go into the temples alone at night," Feral added.
"Or at all without an escort," Savage murmured. 
"Or just at all."
"And don't accept trinkets, especially if someone claims there's magic in it."
"Best keep your hands in your pockets."
"Thieves?" Kai asked.
Feral glanced at his brother. "Someone is more likely to put a talisman on you. A wayfinder. Bone tracker. Spell bauble.” He pulled a face. “You’ll end up down an alley and then I’ll have to explain the bodies to my brother —“
“I think I can manage.”
“It’s not you that I’m worried about, Koth.”
Kai heaved a heavy breath. Held it. Looked between them.
"Is there a Cantina at least?"
Feral tipped his head, questioning.
"I could really use a stiff drink."
He smirked, but it faded quickly.
"Nightbrother tavern," he said, searching her, then Savage. "Catacombs."
"Catacombs," Kai repeated on a breath, wary, suddenly of the implications.
"It's where we bury our dead."
She winced. Of course they did.
He nudged her. “At least the neighbours don’t complain when the patrons get too rowdy.”
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*knock knock* Trick or Treat! I had to stop by the house of one of my favorites.
Guess the costume. (Hint: They’re all a sexy something.)
Feral: Furry, round ears. Brown cowl hood. Bare chest. Brown furry short shorts. Brown furry knee-high boots. Spear. 
Savage: Green pointy ears. Pale brown thong. Big booboo Savage eyes. 
Maul: Gold and burgundy metal bikini top. No bikini bottoms. Burgundy panelled skirt. Burgundy and gold belt. Cinnamon rolls.
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Oh, dearest Wishmonger....
🎃 Trick or Treat 🎃
The one where they could all fit into that Backstreet Boys video.
(Reference)
Pairings: Darth Maul x Reader, Savage Opress x Reader, Feral x Reader Rating: Explicit Warnings: Monsterfucking, omegaverse stuff, blood
Feral: You need a whole body to raise the dead with the Talisman of Resurrection. Feral had half of one. Not in the best condition. You wrapped him with toilet paper. Rolls of it. Hiding the partial decomposition. From between the folds, he looks at you and grins, asking with that garbled rasp that's all consonants now, "Your sarcophagus or mine, love?"
Savage: Whoever found a fur coat big enough must have took down the wampa themselves. He looks good in all that white, chest bared to show off his markings. His claws already primed. The beard, though? That's a new addition that comes from the transformation. Not to mention the softball-sized knot that greets you once the wolf man drags you back to his lair later.
Maul: Nobody warns you just how sacred blood is to the Fanged God. Nobody warns you how eagerly you'll volunteer as tribute when it comes to his appetites either, but there you are with all your smooth skin bared in supplication. He sucks his fangs at you and adjusts his topcoat, his shirt cuffs, his ruff. Red eyes staring the longer you try to entice him. "When I asked for a taste, I meant from another vein, my dear," he purrs. That's how you land with your back on the brocade duvet, his teeth in your femoral artery, his fingers in your pussy.
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trick or treat :3
Pairing: Darth Maul x AFAB Reader Rating: Explicit  Word Count: 1,532 words
Summary: From time immemorial, Sith Lords would return from beyond the grave to corrupt living adepts in the Force and impart their agenda onto them, and up until Darth Bane, that effort usually meant “restoring the Sith empire to glory” in some capacity. Maul is far more selfish than that.
(Or: the one where you pick up Darth Maul's haunted cybernetic legs from the desert.)
Warnings: Possession, dub con, bondage (kinda?), masturbation, mutual masterbation (also kinda?)
“Droid scrap.”
The limbs make two hollow thunks as they hit your durasteel workbench. Sand scatters, spilling across the surface. 
“Worthless,” you mutter, because the arrangement of parts isn’t like anything you’ve seen before. Nothing you can sell in the condition they’re in, anyhow. They’re old, and the toes barely articulate anymore from the Tatooine desert jamming the joints, the knees need replacing, and the connections — strange. Very intricate. Amazing they held together at all because it seems they were assembled with a little magic. 
It’ll take hours before they can be repurposed, but what did you expect? 
They’re desert salvage. 
Also, the legs are short.
You leave the limbs, frustrated and exhausted at the meagre haul, and toss yourself into the refresher before climbing into bed with your data pad for the evening.
Tomorrow, you’ll try the North sector of the map. Maybe you’ll find something better to sell than a couple of janky old limbs you can’t much repair, let alone sell. Your stomach grumbles. Going to bed hungry again isn’t appealing, so you opt for distraction —
Holoporn. The weird stuff. You flip through the list, trying to find a suitable distraction: Shistavanen breeding a Twi’lek or something to take your mind off the day’s poor collection. Iktochi psionic gangbangs that make the nose bleed. Hutts in heat. 
Tomorrow will be better, you think. 
Finding a particularly nubile display of flesh and teeth and tongues, you push down the covers in your dimly lit bunk, setting the data pad against the storage compartment wall. 
“Just something to take the edge off,” you tell yourself. So you can slip into the black of oblivion and not dream about ration packets and your empty pantry.
You’re dry as a bone. Desert pussy, you think, derisive, as you knock your thumb against the bundle of nerves between your thighs like pushing a button to make things work.
It’s not the same as a warm body picked up at the cantina. Doing the work for yourself is rarely appealing, but what’s the alternative when you’re all alone out here?
From the data pad, there are moans, the sloppy sounds of flesh slapping flesh, the frizzle of synaptic firing and your curling toes background for the sounds and glow of someone else’s pleasure. 
You rub through your folds, finding only a little drop of wet waiting for your fingertips. Not enough to press inwards. Relief remains elusive.
You grunt, rubbing with firmer, sharper circles to get things going — two fingers grasping the nub of your clitoris and working it over until you grit your teeth and start begging for something to distract you. The moaning from the data pad and your growling stomach makes more noise than a dying shaak. 
You’re not coming.
This is bullkriff.
“Kark this,” you manage, when across the small confines of your dwelling comes a clatter as one leg turns over where you left it and crashes to the floor with a bang! 
The sound echoes a moment, and you, sitting bolt upright with your trousers around your knees, can’t make sense of what moved them.
“Who’s there?” you ask, because the part of your brain that isn’t addled by the need to get off decides to be stupid. “I have a weapon!” you threaten.
“You have nothing, not even the presence of mind to realize your own vulnerability in the moment,” comes the aggrieved mutter of the disembodied, followed by a chuckle ripe with self-deprecation. “As it appears, neither do I. How fitting.”
“Where are you? I can’t see you —”
“My dear, that you are ignorant of the obvious is most evident.” His patience is a tremulous, testy thing that shivers on the edge of irritation. “This is a haunting.” 
You hesitate, realizing that the legs you retrieved from the Tatooine desert have an occupant.
Closer to your ear, you realize that the spirit’s intentions are far from innocent when he murmurs directly into the shell before your eyes roll back into your head:
“And this is a possession.”
You hit the bed, your back arching with the intrusion as the invisible presence takes a seat in the driving position. Your vision whites. Your body is a rictus, and every synapse fires in the very same moment making fireworks. You throb into wakeful realization, another sliding against the inside of your skin ripping a moan from your lips. 
You no longer feel your hunger. You can’t even think for the intrusion, because despite the brief discomfort, you’re still aware when your jaw unhinges and you hear your own laughter at the hum of pleasure as your muscles relax and you turn molten.
Oh, that’s different, you think. Like the edge of an orgasm, electric and lit along the edges with a feeling you’ve only imagined. It thrums through everyone. It pulses.
Power. 
Darkness.
Your breath shudders. It shouldn’t feel this good, but it does. 
“Interesting,” the voice purrs, your vocal cords vibrating with the delayed pleasure of feeling your own body acting of its own volition. 
Fingers flexing, your hands are drawn across your breasts to tweak a nipple. 
The shock of pain registers a live-wire firing from your chest to your groin as someone else manipulates your digits across your skin.
“This does have potential,” he murmurs, but you’re not in control of yourself as your eyes flutter open, your attention directed as your fingers flutter across your belly to the meat of your thighs, your calves, and to your feet. Worshipful. You’ve never once thought to caress yourself like this, fingers trailing from the sheer pleasure feeling your nerve endings fire at the contact.
He hums his contentment as he wiggles your toes.
“Delicious,” he says.
And in the back of your mind, a thought struggles to break free:
Are you going to destroy me?
A chuckle spills from your mouth as your body settles back against the pillows.
“A feat that would be physically impossible, though the prospect is fascinating — to consume another’s will and exact it as my own.” He drums your fingers against your thigh, contemplating things too quickly for you to seize the thoughts. “What might one accomplish given the circumstances?”
He’s teasing. Just like his fingers when they brush across the thatch of your pubic hair, making your insides jump at the contact.
He sounds only moderately flustered by your reaction. “Forgive me. It’s been far too long since I’ve had the corporeality to exercise any sort of decorum.”
No legs, you realize. No bottom half entirely. No pleasure receptors. Because the spirit was attached to cybernetics, and whatever was left of him must have decomposed in the desert. Burned, maybe. Stolen.
Your gaze strains left, but he lifts your body, puppet-like and too easily maneuvered.
Get out, you think at him. Right now. 
You don’t mean it. 
You’ve never felt anything like it, really. 
“That is the Dark Side, darling,” he murmurs. “It appears that if the glove fits, one might wear it.”
Your cunt offers a pulse of protest. 
He hums like he knows you like it.
It occurs to you that he shares in the sensation, that his pleasure might redouble onto yours.
Gloves? Your voice in your mind trembles, but not out of fear.
“Leather,” he clarifies, an image floating to the surface: 
Slick and dark against your flesh. Brushing against your lips. Biting into his fingers before he fucks you with them.
Maker, you whisper. Your mouth forms the word, but no sound emerges.
His chuckle rolls across you like a storm threatening a torrent, and, so help you, legs parting, you realize that cadence of the voice has left you sopping —
Arousal slicks your thighs, your knees strained to the edges of their trouser confines, and he uses your eyes to look down at the body in his possession and at everything he’s been missing.
Escape is a shivering promise. You can’t run from him. 
“I hardly think that’s wise,” he murmurs, your fingers (his fingers) exploring your soft places. Squeezing. Scratching. Testing the way you respond to his ministrations. And you realize, distantly beneath your ebbing panic, it’s like someone else’s hands on your body. Twin sensations.
He chuckles. “Perhaps we might help each other, for a time? An arrangement that is… mutually benefitting.” 
Only the after impression lingers when the feel of his fingers stroke past your clit, dipping into the slick heat of your pussy.
“My cunt,” he murmurs, and you shiver, the strength of that word bleeding power and possession at once. “Say it.”
Your jaw works as you struggle around it, your lips parting to form the word. Feels good. Intolerable. But good. 
“Your —” you begin, but your fingers push past your lips as his grip on your wrist guides your actions. 
You choke on it, the taste of yourself immolating as you struggle against the grip of his control. He holds you to the mattress, wet fingers leaving a streak down your body as you feel his anticipatory shudder.
“Your cunt,” you sigh as his hand slips into you, curling sharp and determined as you feel his growl reverberate up your spine.
“Mine,” he murmurs on a shuddery breath. “Mine.”
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Have put a pause on the doorbell (because you kids keep dinging) and I need to catch up.
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Hello Wishmonger,
I sincerely apologize ahead of time if I do this wrong, but I’d love a Trick or Treat with Feral, if you find my request worth granting, and humbly offer you a beautifully shaped pumpkin with a rather poorly drawn ‘scary’ scarecrow face on it as an added apology. His name is Dave, he’s been my silent yet comforting companion since the beginning of October and I hope that he will be so for you as well.
Thank you so much for your time, I hope you have a wonderful night.
Hello! I'm certain "Dave" is much more charming than the two rotting uglies we have waiting for us to carve in the garage. My partner has volunteered to leave them on the porch "in sacrifice to the squirrels" in the effort to zombify them prior to the little humans coming out for candy this evening.
The same happened last year: the squirrels ate them. Left pumpkin guts all over the porch. Filthy beasts. Made for two very interesting, ghoulish carvings, however. We smeared them with fake blood and let them loll a bit, misshapen and disgusting.
But on the topic of this trick or treat business (to meander ever so casually into a response to your ask), I will honour this request especially because Feral is my beloved and you clearly know how to play to my vulnerabilities. (Any other specific request might get tricked instead of treated. Beware.)
Paring: None (Genfic) Rating: PG Characters: Savage Opress and Feral Word Count: 758 words Warnings: They're just "napping"
Summary: Savage might have forgotten where he came from, but Feral has not.
Dathomir, again. Savage nurtures several regrets upon rising to a seated position, not understanding the scenery. He blinks upwards into Domir’s brilliant red glare, feeling the familiar oppressive weight of his homeworld welcoming him.
How did he get here? Has he been sleeping, again? 
That he’d forgotten something important from that precarious grey stretch when he could no longer be certain whom he served or what his purpose was beyond the task of revenge, when he was Asajj’s weapon. Maul gave him purpose and Maul hardened him to the task of earning his respect as his Apprentice, and Maul, for some reason, hasn’t come with him.
“Brother?” Savage calls into the distance. 
The stretch of time between his transformation and Maul’s retrieval is thin and watery, a mist clinging to the edges of his dreams that leave the edges indistinct when they twist and become haunting. They call him home like unfinished business. Something buried wanting to surface, but shuttered to tightly into the darkness of his near history.
What a mess.
Dathomir is a desolate ruin, and whatever appears in the deep hours between moonrise and dawn might be visions or they might be nightmares, but they keep him from sleeping, so he keeps trying as he walks the old roads into the village and the caverns beyond it where he sees markings left by Nightbrother hands, but no one lingers. Everyone’s moved on, it appears.
That’s when the figure appears: in the distance, on the crenellated edge of the mountain, one foot firmly planted. Hands on his hips. 
“Took you long enough to get here,” he calls. “It’s only a little way further.”
He doesn’t know the Nightbrother, at first, though he feels familiar — the markings on his features, chest, and back distinctive. Brothers tattoo each other, he remembers from his infancy. He remembers marking Maul with black ash and mushling ink while his youngest stared on with stoic determination not to flinch, but the boy’s markings are wilder and more organic, flowing with an intricate sort of artistry that make Savage’s fingers itch. 
It’s only when the young man holds up a hand to wave that Savage sees the mistakes: those loops and curls winding over the mound of Venus to wind through his fingers, like they’d been applied in haste to avoid further pain.
In dreams, the young man smiles at him, hesitating. His hand lowers when Savage only stares, frowning at the sensation of having missed something important: dust through his fingers. Blood on them when he bows his head. A ring of impressions left in bruises matching his fingertips. 
There’s nowhere for him to wash them.
“Brother,” he laughs, because where the boy is, no pain lingers: 
Some distant part of him tugged into taking a step forward finding green grasses beneath his bare toes, not Dathomir’s red rubble and stone. It doesn’t make sense, but Savage feels the humid breeze and wonders at the feeling — like a string wrapped around his hearts and pulling him onward in the uncertainty of the moment.
Where is he? 
Laughter carries, gravelly but familiar.
“The fearsome warrior hesitates,” he chortles, mocking but good natured. 
That hand extends to him in invitation, smaller than his own by not by much, because Savage nearly trips climbing up to meet him. He grabs at him before he can fall, the past and the future and the present made taut by the connection, and Savage remembers as his brother pulls him to standing.
“Don’t you know, Savage? You’re on your way home,” Feral says, and beyond him, green stretches — 
Birdsong and glittering rivers await him beyond the mountain. Nodding flowers and trees burdened by the weight of their fruit. Herds grazing, perfect for the hunt, the chase —
Feral claps his shoulder, grinning. “You look a little worse for wear, old man,” he tells him. “A little thinner around the midsection.”
He catches Feral’s hand, overturning the palm to look at the only marks that deserve permanence: the ones he’s left on him from love and care.
Savage remembers the swirled pattern — the difficulty of applying them when a boy’s hands are moving, batting at him in self-defence to avoid the tattooing process. Fear and self-preservation making a mess of a careful process. 
Savage clasps the outstretched hand.
“Brother?” But this time, it’s laden with recognition.
Relief spreads, warmer than that the look Feral gives him: limned by sunlight and glittering with promise that while he might’ve forgotten who he was, his youngest brother has never.
Feral smiles. “Let’s get going.”
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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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