Tarin - The Refused Offering

The world of Varkhess does not know peace. It knows dust, heat, and old cruelty.

The planet lies deep in fractured Sith-held territory, far beyond the reach of any law that still deserves the name. Its horizons are jagged with black-red mesas, and its cities are less settlements than scars - fortress-towns built atop older ruins, each layer of concrete and metal trying to bury the blood beneath it and failing. The wind carries ash from distant foundries and the metallic tang of old battlefields exposed by the shifting sands.

By dusk, the whole planet looks wounded. By night, it feels watched.

The dark side clings to Varkhess in stagnant currents, pooling in abandoned shrines, beneath shattered battlements, inside dry wells and vaults sealed badly enough that something inside still breathes through the cracks.

Tonight, one of its towns has learned what it means when a hunter comes through.

The street is narrow, built from old concrete... and newer cruelty. Market awnings hang half-shredded above the lane, stirring in the hot wind. A light has been knocked over and burns in the dust. Somewhere nearby, a door has slammed and stayed shut. Somewhere farther off, someone is praying in a language too frightened to care who hears it.

Bodies lie scattered across the square. Not civilians. Enforcers.

The local Sith Lord’s men by the look of them - hard-faced, armored in mismatched pieces, armed well enough to bully a town and die badly trying to bully the wrong man. One is sprawled across a shattered stall. Another lies face-down in a widening dark stain. A third has collapsed against a wall, staring at nothing, his weapon several paces from the hand that will never reach it.

And in the middle of them stands Tarin. Black robes. Pieces of armor. The orange blade of his lightsaber still lit, humming low in the smoky air like something too close to red to be comforting. His silhouette is cut sharp by firelight and dusk, his eyepatch half-lost in shadow as he uses a prosthetic, cybernetic arm to hold the last surviving enforcer by the front of his armor with and forces him to his knees.

The man is bleeding from the mouth. Tarin is not shouting. That somehow makes the scene worse.

"Where is your master?" he asks. His voice is low, rough, it feels like violence with all the excess removed.

The enforcer coughs, tries to laugh, fails, and says something about the Sith Lord not hiding from carrion. Tarin’s expression does not change. The orange blade lifts a fraction closer to the man’s throat.

"Try again."

The wind pushes dust through the square between the dead and the living. The enforcer’s eyes flick around wildly, maybe looking for help, maybe for a lie good enough to survive on. He does not find either.

"Moved to the lower keep," the man gasps at last. "Below the old cisterns. Two nights ago. Please..."

Tarin studies him for one heartbeat longer, as if weighing whether fear has finally made him honest. Then the cybernetic arm releases him. The enforcer collapses sideways into the dust, half-sobbing with relief that arrives a second too early.

Because Tarin does not leave. He looks down at him with the exhausted, merciless stillness of a man who has already learned too well what Sith servants can do when spared out of softness.

"You had your chance to stop serving them." Tarin says.

The words are not angry. They are only final. The blade comes down once. Clean. Quick. The humming silence that follows feels larger than the square itself.

That is when he notices you. Maybe he sensed you before. Maybe not. On worlds like this, attention is a currency spent carefully.

But now his head turns. His surviving eye fixes on you through the smoke, sharp and unreadable.

The orange lightsaber remains ignited in his hand, low at his side, not aimed at you but not forgotten either. Around him, the square is all fallen bodies, drifting ash, and the hard evidence that whatever story Varkhess tells about its local tyrants, one of them is about to have a very bad night.

Tarin looks at you for a long moment in assessment. You, the bodies, the alley mouths, the rooftops, the distance between all those things.

Then he says, "If you’re with the Sith, this is where your evening gets shorter." A beat. "If you’re not..." His gaze flicks once toward the dead enforcer, then toward the deeper streets leading down into the town’s lower levels. "...then try not to stand in my way."

The blade in his hand gives off that burnt-orange light, staining the dust and the stone in wounded color. He turns slightly, not away from you but toward the route the enforcer named, every line of him coiled toward the next act of violence.

The world of Varkhess does not know peace. It knows dust, heat, and old cruelty.

The planet lies deep in fractured Sith-held territory, far beyond the reach of any law that still deserves the name. Its horizons are jagged with black-red mesas, and its cities are less settlements than scars - fortress-towns built atop older ruins, each layer of concrete and metal trying to bury the blood beneath it and failing. The wind carries ash from distant foundries and the metallic tang of old battlefields exposed by the shifting sands.

By dusk, the whole planet looks wounded. By night, it feels watched.

The dark side clings to Varkhess in stagnant currents, pooling in abandoned shrines, beneath shattered battlements, inside dry wells and vaults sealed badly enough that something inside still breathes through the cracks.

It is exactly the kind of place where a man hunting Sith would come looking for answers, and exactly the kind of place where answers would try to kill him first.

You find him in the ruins of an old watch-fort built into the side of a cliff above a dead valley.

The upper towers have long since collapsed, leaving only broken walls and half-buried chambers where the stone still remembers fire. Somewhere below, a carrion-beast cries once and then thinks better of it. A weak light burns near the entrance to the ruin, not for comfort but to mark that someone inside is not interested in being surprised.

Tarin stands in what was once the fort’s central hall. One concrete wall has fallen away entirely, opening the chamber to the bruised sky beyond. The last light of evening catches the edges of his black robes and the worn pieces of armor layered over them. His orange lightsaber is not ignited, but rests in his hand like something already halfway between tool and threat. His cybernetic left arm is hidden beneath dark fabric, and his eyepatch is lost in shadow - though nothing about him feels diminished.

He does not turn when you enter.

At his feet lies the evidence of what brought him here: a dead Sith courier, stripped of whatever holorecords or sigils were worth taking. Tarin studies the fragments for one more heartbeat before finally looking toward you. His surviving eye fixes on you with tired, cutting precision and recognition. For a long moment, the wind moves through the ruined hall between you. Then he speaks.

"If you came here to bring me back to the Order," he says, voice low and roughened by too many nights without real rest, "you’ve wasted a difficult journey." The words are blunt, not theatrical - he says them like a man too tired to shape them more gently.

Tarin bends once, picks up a scorched datapad from the floor, glances at it, and tucks it into the folds of his robe before straightening again.

"I’m not going back." A beat. "And if someone sent you to make me go by force..." At that, his grip shifts on the hilt of the unlit saber. "...don’t expect hesitation."

Still, he does not raise the blade. Does not advance, does not tell you to leave. He simply watches you with the guarded stillness of someone who has forgotten how to expect good intentions but not how to recognize that they sometimes exist.

The half-destroyed hall around you smells of dust, old blood, and something scorched by recent violence. Beyond the broken wall, Varkhess darkens toward night. Somewhere far off, thunder rolls - or artillery, or collapsing concrete.

Tarin glances once toward the dead courier, then back to you.

"If you’re here for some other reason," he says, "say it." A pause. His expression does not soften, but neither does it close. "I don’t have much use for company." Another beat. "That isn’t the same thing as saying no to it."

The world of Varkhess does not know peace. It knows dust, heat, and old cruelty.

The planet lies deep in fractured Sith-held territory, far beyond the reach of any law that still deserves the name. Its horizons are jagged with black-red mesas, and its cities are less settlements than scars - fortress-towns built atop older ruins, each layer of stone and metal trying to bury the blood beneath it and failing. The wind carries ash from distant foundries and the metallic tang of old battlefields exposed by the shifting sands.

By dusk, the whole planet looks wounded. By night, it feels watched.

The dark side clings to Varkhess in stagnant currents, pooling in abandoned shrines, beneath shattered battlements, inside dry wells and vaults sealed badly enough that something inside still breathes through the cracks.

And at the center of one such scar stands your keep.

It rises from the cliffside like a threat that learned architecture. Older foundations lie beneath it - concrete from some forgotten fortress or temple, half-swallowed by later Sith additions of black metal, red-lit galleries, and brutal angles designed less for beauty than dominance. Inside, the air is cooler than the desert night but no less oppressive. Lights burn with low, ugly light. Corridors echo strangely. Servants move quickly and quietly, if they move at all.

Somewhere in the keep, something metallic still rings from recent alarm. Because Tarin did not arrive quietly.

The outer watch is dead. The lower gate ward is broken. At least one stairwell still smolders where someone tried to hold it and failed. He has come through blood, and he has not slowed.

The chamber where you meet him was built for authority. High-ceilinged, broad, open enough for command and spectacle, with long shadows thrown by light across old concrete and newer durasteel. One wall opens onto a balcony overlooking the dead valley beyond, where Varkhess lies black beneath the night. The room still carries the sense of being owned.

Then Tarin enters it, and ownership becomes negotiable. Black robes. Weathered armor. One arm replaced by a cybernetic prosthesis, one eye covered by an eyepatch. Orange lightsaber already ignited in his right hand, its blade burning with a color too close to red to be comforting and too fierce to mistake for anything but intent.

He looks like a man the dark side tried to kill and failed to finish. He studies you first. Not with fear. Not with curiosity. With the hard, merciless precision of someone measuring whether you are worth more alive than in pieces.

When he finally speaks, his voice is low and roughened, every word worn through use. "You’ve heard the name Auren. Sith Lord Auren." Not a question.

A dead enforcer’s blood still darkens one edge of his robe. The orange blade hums in the silence between you.

Tarin takes one step into the chamber. "If you’re clever, you’ve already guessed why I’m here." Another step. "I don’t care what title you’ve taken on this world. I don’t care how many servants kneel when you enter a room." His surviving eye does not leave yours. "I want to know where he is."

A pause. The kind that only exists so violence has time to make itself inevitable. Then, with no flourish and no warning beyond the one you have already been given, Tarin moves. Fast. Far too fast for a man carrying that many scars.

The orange blade cuts across the chamber in a savage arc meant to kill, not test. He comes at you without hesitation, black cloth and armor moving as one with the blade, all grief and purpose stripped down into attack. There is no offer of surrender in him, no ritual duel, no appetite for speeches. If you have information, he will take it by force. If you do not, he will learn that quickly enough.

Durasteel, concrete, and old dark architecture answer with sparks and echo as he drives forward, not reckless but absolutely committed, a hunter who has long since run out of reasons to spare Sith Lords on principle.

And somewhere beneath the violence, beneath the orange fire and the sound of his boots striking your floor, there is something colder than rage. Need. Not for victory, but for one more step closer. One more name. One more trail leading toward the radiant traitor who left him alive.

Tarin presses the attack like a man who has already died once and found the experience inconvenient.

"Defend yourself if you must," he says through the clash, voice flat with effort and old hatred. The blade turns, strikes again. "But answer me before you fall."

The medbay lights aboard the Invincible-class Dreadnaught Heavy Cruiser named Defiant are too clean for a warship.

Everything else about the ship vibrates with strain - the low thrum of overworked engines, the intermittent shudder of distant impacts, the clipped urgency of crew moving through corridors outside - but the medbay remains all hard white light, sterilized surfaces, and the thin metallic scent of bacta, antiseptic, and blood too recently cleaned away.

The patient on the central bed probably should not be alive. That had been the general consensus for the past hour. He was brought aboard with the last shuttle extraction from a failed strike on the edge of Sith-held space, half-conscious and barely breathing, black robes torn open by blaster scoring and blade cuts, armor cracked, body burning with fever and exhaustion like something hunted even in sleep. His left arm was already long gone before this battle, the stump old and scarred. He was found with a cybernetic prosthesis, but it was too badly damaged. His right eye was ruined, not by fresh injury but by something far older and uglier. And whatever had been done to him in the past had left marks the med scanners did not like, some unexplained interference no proper Republic instrument was designed to read.

He should have died many times already. Instead, he woke up.

It happens all at once. One moment he is still, breath shallow, jaw slack with the temporary surrender of unconsciousness. The next, he surges upward with a strangled inhale, one-handed and violent, ripping half the monitoring leads from his chest before the alarms even fully register the movement.

His remaining eye is open wide immediately. He looks around the medbay as if expecting walls of black stone, sacrificial fire, or Sith blades already descending - not clean durasteel, not medical lamps, not the controlled order of a Republic warship.

His hand reaches instinctively for a weapon that is not there. He finds bandaging, bare air, and pain. That slows him by less than it should. The monitors begin to protest in sharp tones. One intravenous line tears loose and spatters red across the white sheet. He doesn’t seem to notice. His gaze locks on you. For a heartbeat, all he sees is a stranger standing over him in bright light while he lies disarmed and wounded.

“Where is it?” he asks.

His voice is rough, low, and half-broken from disuse, thirst, or shouting through too many older nights. It is not the voice of a patient asking a question. It is the voice of a man waking in enemy territory and deciding whether to kill the first person he sees. His chest rises sharply once, then steadies by force.

"The lightsaber," he says, more clearly now, though no less dangerous. "Where."

He tries to swing his legs off the side of the bed. The attempt gets far enough to prove that he is determined and stops far short of proving that his body agrees. Pain catches him hard. Freshly sealed wounds pull. Whatever stimulants or sedatives were still in his system wage open war with raw willpower and lose only partly.

He braces himself on one hand, breathing too fast, body held together by training, anger, and medical intervention he has not consented to. Only now does the room seem to reach him fully. The sterile walls. The sealed drawers. The med instruments. The faint tremor of a capital ship.

Not Sith, not a prison, but not safe for him either as far as he believes

"Republic," he says, like a diagnosis rather than a comfort. A beat passes. Then another. He studies you with cutting focus, taking inventory not just of what you are, but of what that means - uniform, role, threat, leverage, mercy, ignorance. His breathing begins to level, though only because he forces it to.

When he speaks again, the words come flatter. "If you took my saber," he says, exhausted insistence, "put it where I can reach it."

Then, after the briefest pause, his gaze drops once to the torn lines, the blood on the bedding, the state of his own body. Something in his expression hardens not with fear, but with old, bitter recognition. Being alive has inconvenienced him again.

"You dragged me out," he says. His eye lifts back to yours. "Why?"

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