warning: this chapter has sexual violence, and no, its not ezra being tentacled. well, maybe he is getting tentacled, but the warning is for other things.
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The tail swept at my ribs.
I jumped onto a broken chain link, used the shift under my boot to pivot, and grabbed a hanging length of rust-fused chain near one of the anchor pillars. Momentum carried me around the pillar in a wet, miserable arc. The creature's claws gouged the stone behind me, close enough that chips stung my cheek.
I kicked off the pillar and landed on the platform's outer edge.
My boots slid.
A tendril shot toward my ankle.
I cut it before it wrapped.
Another came for my face.
I burned through that one too.
The Shrii-ka-rai circled, head low, front limbs spread. Its dead blue eyes still did not focus properly, which meant it was sensing me through something else. Warmth, breath, motion, Force leakage, maybe the delicious seasoning of long-term psychological damage.
I shifted my stance.
Shoulders. Watch the shoulders. Every predator tells on itself somewhere.
The left forelimb tensed.
I ducked under the swipe and carved through two hooked digits. The creature jerked back, but the severed fingers kept twitching after they landed, scraping at the stone with pathetic little movements.
That got filed under "deal with later" because the main body came again.
I retreated across the chain pattern, using the old rings and broken links to force its feet into bad angles. It was stronger. Faster. Larger. It also had four legs, a tail, face tentacles, and the body awareness of something that had spent a few thousand years chained in a room rather than training parkour with Obi-Wan.
I could work with that.
It snapped low.
I vaulted over its head using one of the anchor chains, drove a boot into a bone spur, and slashed down its back as I passed. The blade scored a smoking line across its spine.
The creature bucked.
I landed badly, rolled, and barely avoided the tail as it smashed through a chunk of platform behind me.
"Okay," I grunted, pushing myself up. "Little less elegant than the brochure promised."
Arachnae's headlamp locked onto the monster from the outer ring.
"Keep the light on it!"
BEEP beep beep!
"I don't care if it ruins the ambiance!"
The creature's whole body began to tremble.
At first I thought another charge was coming. Then the bone spurs along its back flexed outward, the tendrils spread wide, and the air thickened with that awful pressure behind my eyes.
"₲ēꞥēɍⱥⱦīꝋꞥ ꞩēꝟēꞥ ꝟīⱥƀłē ᵾꞥđēɍ ӻꝋɍȼēđ ɍēꝑɍꝋđᵾȼⱦīꝟē ꞩȼħēđᵾłē."
"Ⱦħē ħᵾᵯⱥꞥ ӻēᵯⱥłē ꞩᵾɍꝟīꝟēđ īꞥīⱦīⱥł īᵯꝑłⱥꞥⱦⱥⱦīꝋꞥ."
"Ꞩħꝋȼҟ ⱦħē ꞩꝑīꞥē ⱳħēꞥ īⱦ ɍēӻᵾꞩēꞩ."
"Ī đꝋꞥ'ⱦ ⱳⱥꞥⱦ ⱦꝋ ꞡꝋ ƀⱥȼҟ īꞥ ⱦħē ӻɍⱥᵯē, ꝑłēⱥꞩē, Ī ⱥłɍēⱥđɏ ȼⱥɍɍīēđ ꝋꞥē."
"Ⱦħē Ꞩħɍīī-ҟⱥ-ɍⱥī īꞩ łēⱥɍꞥīꞥꞡ...." "ᛗꝋⱦħēɍ īꞩ ȼꝋłđ." "Ꝑłēⱥꞩē ꞩⱦꝋꝑ ᵯⱥҟīꞥꞡ īⱦ ƀɍēēđ."
The voices piled up until I could barely see.
"That is cheating," I growled, saber raised. "You know that's cheating, right?"
The creature slammed both forelimbs into the platform.
Chains rattled around us and the rain blurred.
I blinked once and the chamber disappeared.
Darkness surrounded me in every direction, wide and empty enough to make my stomach drop.
"Of course," I muttered, raising the saber. "We had a physical fight going, so naturally now we're doing mental DLC."
Crimson blades ignited in the dark.
A dozen Sith stepped out of nothing, each masked, each silent, each holding a red lightsaber angled toward me.
I adjusted my grip.
"Mirage or memory?"'
The first Sith rushed me.
I parried, and my blade passed through empty air.
His saber slid through my ribs without burning anything, but my body still flinched because evolution was never designed to handle fake lightsaber murder.
"Mirage," I said through my teeth. "Love wasting calories."
The second apparition came from the left.
I let it pass through me.
The third swung for my neck.
I forced myself to stand still, which took more willpower than I wanted to admit.
The fourth wore Vasha's face for half a second.
My grip tightened enough that the saber hilt creaked.
"Don't."
Her face peeled open into tendrils.
I swung anyway, because maturity had limits.
The blade cut shadow.
The ground vanished beneath me.
My stomach lurched upward as I fell through darkness.
"Shit—"
I crashed onto stone hard enough that pain ran through my ribs and shoulder. Real pain. Useful pain. The kind my body could not fake without committing to the bit.
I groaned and tried to push up.
Chains held my wrists.
Small wrists.
Small arms.
Too small.
I looked down and saw thin, pale limbs locked in iron restraints.
They were not mine.
The cage around me smelled of old blood, sour milk, and alchemical cleaner. Green lamps burned beyond the bars, throwing light over tables, hooks, glass tanks, and Sith in dark robes moving with the calm efficiency of people who had murdered their consciences years ago and stored the corpses neatly.
A woman lay curled against the opposite side of the cage.
Human. Young. Feverish.
Her belly had been cut and stitched more than once. Old scars crossed new ones. Tubes ran into her arms, her thigh, the swollen line of her abdomen. Her lips moved around words I could not understand.
Mother.
The thought came from the creature, small and hungry and confused.
She reached for the cage bars.
Gloved hands dragged her away before her fingers touched mine.
She screamed until a Sith pressed an injector to her neck.
The memory folded.
Another chamber opened.
Rows of breeding pens stretched under green lamps.
The Sith did not hide what they were doing. They had built the room for it. Steel frames held humanoid women in place with their wrists above them, their ankles locked apart, their spines braced by curved metal so they could not curl away from what the alchemists brought in. Humans filled most of the frames, though I saw Twi'leks, Zabraks, Mirialans, and species I didn't recognize.
Some were pregnant enough that their skin strained around shapes that moved wrong. Some had bellies opened by surgical windows of transparent alchemical film so the Sith could watch the embryos twitch inside them.
Some had already given birth to things that were kept in heated glass boxes beside their heads, forcing them to listen while the offspring cried with voices that did not sound humanoid.
Sithspawn were dragged in under shock collars.
Drugged.
Starved.
Stimulated with alchemical fumes until instinct drowned terror.
When the beasts hesitated, the Sith shocked their spines. When the women fought too hard, the frames tightened. When a subject died during forced mating or implantation, the alchemists complained about wasted tissue and ordered the corpse tagged for dissection.
One beast panicked halfway through the process and tore the woman beneath it open from hip to throat.
Blood sprayed across the frame, across the floor, across the alchemist's boots. The Sith behind the shielded glass did not even raise his voice.
"Ⱦēɍᵯīꞥⱥⱦē ⱦħē ᵯⱥłē ⱥӻⱦēɍ ȼꝋłłēȼⱦīꝋꞥ. Ꝑɍēꞩēɍꝟē ⱦħē ᵾⱦēɍᵾꞩ. Ⱦħē ӻēⱦᵾꞩ ᵯⱥɏ ꞩⱦīłł ƀē ꝟīⱥƀłē."
The memory tried to move on.
It failed.
I saw another frame.
Another woman.
Another monster dragged forward with its eyes rolling and shock burns smoking along its spine.
I understood with the creature's mind that none of them had chosen anything. The beasts had been tortured into rut and hunger. The women had been abducted, restrained, cut open, bred, implanted, and disposed of when their bodies broke. The offspring inherited pain before they inherited breath.
I wanted out.
The memory dragged me deeper.
The Shrii-ka-rai was older now.
Larger.
Still chained.
They brought human women to its cage because the earlier generations had shown better cognitive yield from humanoid hosts. They drugged the air until its body burned with urges its mind could not understand. They shocked the glands along its spine until muscles moved without permission.
A woman in the frame sobbed so hard she vomited down her chest. She stared at the creature with hatred, fear, and a plea that had nowhere to go.
The Shrii-ka-rai did not want her.
Its body moved anyway.
The memory fractured around the act, less from mercy than damage. I still caught enough: restraints clanking, claws cracking the frame, Sith shouting for lower voltage, the woman's scream turning wet when panic made the creature bite, alchemical monitors chirping like cheerful little psychopaths while blood ran into the drainage channel.
When the creature came back to itself, she was dead.
The Sith harvested what they could.
Then they fed it pieces of the corpse because caloric recovery mattered after reproductive trials.
I gagged inside the memory.
The creature gagged too.
That part nearly broke me.
Because it hated the taste and wanted more.
The memory lurched.
Tables. Hooks. Bone saws.
They cut the Shrii-ka-rai open while it lived. Removed glands. Grafted tissue from things with too many eyes. Sewed armor plates under its skin. Forced dark side energy into organs that spasmed around the intrusion. Fed it animals first, then failed offspring, then prisoners, then Jedi.
There seemed to be some man, a prisoner perhaps...
The man had a beard and kind eyes. He reached through the bars like an idiot hero from a story.
"I'm going to get you out," he whispered.
The creature touched his hand with one tendril.
The man screamed.
His skin greyed around the contact. His cheeks caved in. The warmth inside him poured through that one touch, and the Shrii-ka-rai drank because hunger had been carved deeper than thought.
When the Man collapsed, the creature understood too late that rescue and food could be the same person.
His voice stayed.
That was the worst part.
Every meal stayed.
A Sith apprentice laughing with a shock prod.
A Twi'lek woman singing to herself in a pen.
A child born in glass who lived twelve minutes.
A guard begging for his mother.
A Jedi cursing the Council.
A beast choking on its own malformed tongue.
All of them became part of the chorus. The Shrii-ka-rai grew smarter with every death and less able to know which thoughts had belonged to it first.
The facility broke eventually.
Of course it did.
You could only stack suffering so high before the universe kicked the table over.
The Shrii-ka-rai tore free during a containment failure. Pens opened. Frames collapsed. Half-grown things spilled out of tanks. Women crawled through blood and broken glass. Sith ran for doors they had designed to lock from the outside.
The creature fed on anything bright enough to quiet the hunger.
Men. Women. Children. Sith. Jedi. Animals. Offspring.
It ate until the halls went silent.
Then came the binding chamber.
This chamber.
Chains thicker than my thigh.
Jedi and Sith forced into cooperation by mutual pants-shitting terror.
Runes burned into the platform.
Bodies used as anchors.
The Shrii-ka-rai screamed with the voices it had stolen.
"Bind it beneath the temple!"
"Kill it before the Lord learns—"
...
The chains closed.
Centuries followed in fragments.
Hunger.
Darkness.
Voices.
Stone.
Rain somewhere far above.
The word mother repeated until it lost meaning.
Then shockwave rolled through the Force.
It was far away, yet the shockwave was so large that it felt it anyway.
The disturbance felt familiar....very very familiar.
The old prison stirred.
The creature woke.
It smelled me through the planet.
A bright hollow thing walking above its cage.
A door with a heartbeat.
I ripped myself out of the memory with a strangled curse.
Rain returned. The platform returned. The Shrii-ka-rai was already on me.
I barely brought the saber up before a claw raked across my side and threw me into a coil of broken chain. My shoulder crashed against rusted metal, my fingers went numb, and the saber spun from my grip across the wet stone.
It stopped near one of the anchoring rings.
Too far by normal standards.
Ridiculously far by "my Force connection has been chewed by ancient murder spaghetti" standards.
The creature stalked toward me, dragging its wounded leg. Severed tendrils crawled after it across the platform, still alive enough to seek warmth.
"Okay," I coughed, pushing myself up with one arm. "So you're the original. Great. That is the kind of lore reveal I prefer in a cutscene, not through nonconsensual trauma VR."
A tendril whipped toward my boot.
I stomped it against the stone.
The hollowness still climbed through my foot before I ground the thing under my heel.
"Detached murder noodles," I muttered. "That is officially bullshit biology."
Arachnae fired a shock dart from the platform's edge.
It sparked against the creature's shoulder.
The Shrii-ka-rai twitched, then kept coming.
"Try the eyes!" I shouted.
BEEP BEEP beep!
"I know they look fake! Stab the fake eyes anyway!"
The creature circled the central pillar.
I circled with it, keeping stone between us, one hand pressed against my ribs. My saber sat seven meters away in the rain, mocking me with the smug silence of an object that had never paid rent.
The voices crawled through my skull again.
"₮ⱧɆ ฿ØɎ ł₴ ₳ ĐØØⱤ."
"₮ⱧɆ ⱧØⱠⱠØ₩ ₩₳₦₮₴ Ʉ₴."
"Ø₱Ɇ₦ ₴₭ł₦, Ø₱Ɇ₦ Ⱡł₲Ⱨ₮, Ø₱Ɇ₦ ⱧɄ₦₲ɆⱤ."
"₥Ø₮ⱧɆⱤ ł₴ ł₦₴łĐɆ ₮ⱧɆ ₩₳Ɽ₥ ₱Ⱡ₳₵Ɇ."
"₣ⱤɆɆ Ʉ₴, ₣ɆɆĐ Ʉ₴, ₣ł₦ł₴Ⱨ Ʉ₴."
"I am not your therapy animal," I panted. "I am barely my own therapy animal."
The creature struck around the pillar.
I ducked under the claw, rolled over its extended forelimb, and jammed my vibroknife into the softer joint behind its elbow. The blade sank deep. The creature reared, and for a few awful seconds I clung to its arm while it thrashed like a speeder with legs.
Then the tail wrapped around my waist.
The moment it touched, strength poured out of my stomach and thighs.
The Shrii-ka-rai flung me across the platform.
I landed near the saber and slid through rainwater. My fingers brushed the hilt.
A severed tendril wrapped around my wrist.
Another curled around my throat.
The chamber vanished again.
This time I stood in the breeding pen as the creature, older and huge, dragged toward another frame. The woman strapped there had torn two fingernails out trying to claw through the restraints. Sith alchemists adjusted the angles of her hips with mechanical arms, discussing pelvic damage and fetal viability like they were calibrating a speeder engine.
The creature fought the chain.
Its mind screamed with stolen voices while the Sith took notes through shielded glass.
The memory blurred, fractured, returned in ugly pieces: the frame bending, the woman choking on a sob, claws digging into metal, blood in the drainage channel, a monitor recording implantation success before the subject's heart gave out.
Then the Sith cut the dead woman open while she was still warm and lifted out something that moved under translucent membrane.
The creature watched.
Hungry.
Unable to tell which feeling belonged to whom.
I clawed at the tendril around my throat in the real world.
"Get out," I rasped. "Get the fuck out of my head."
The memory shifted.
My hand weakened.
The world became the platform and the pen and the cage all at once. Tentacles covered the stone like a living carpet, sliding over my legs, around my waist, across my chest. The Shrii-ka-rai's body pinned me down in the real chamber, but my head kept sinking through memory after memory.
I felt my anger thin.
My fear dulled.
Even Vasha's absence, that constant jagged thing I carried everywhere, began to soften at the edges.
That scared me into motion.
"Fuck you," I choked. "You do not get to eat that."
The creature's face lowered over mine. Tendrils crawled across my cheeks, my mouth, my throat, searching for whatever part of me tasted brightest.
My saber lay just beyond my fingers.
I could see it.
I could not feel it through the Force worth a damn.
Arachnae leapt onto the creature's skull.
Her damaged legs clamped around a bone spur. One manipulator stabbed straight into a milky blue eye, and then she dumped a brutal electrical discharge through its head.
The Shrii-ka-rai screamed with every stolen voice it had.
The tendrils loosened.
The hallucination cracked apart enough for rain, stone, blood-smell, and burning meat to matter again.
Arachnae clung to the monster's face like an angry metal tick, stabbing the same ruined eye while her chassis sparked.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!
I wheezed under the creature's weight.
"Yeah," I rasped. "Fuck his eye up."
The creature tried to swat her away.
That shifted its weight off my right arm by a few centimeters.
A few centimeters counted.
I stared at the saber hilt.
The Force around the creature felt chewed hollow, and trying to grab the weapon through it was like reaching through static with a broken hand. My first tug did nothing. My second made the hilt twitch maybe half a centimeter.
The tendrils crawled back toward my mouth.
I dug deeper.
The hilt was metal. Circuits. Power cell. Emitter assembly. Magnetic containment. It was not alive in the normal way, but broken things had patterns, and I knew broken things better than I knew most people.
I had fixed scrap on Lothal.
I had rebuilt droids from trash.
I had flown a dying Inquisitor ship through hyperspace by treating circuits like nerves.
A lightsaber was just a machine with an angry crystal and religious branding.
The hilt slid across the wet stone.
Slowly.
Too slowly.
Arachnae shocked the creature again, and the monster bucked hard enough to crack the platform beneath my shoulder.
My fingertips brushed the saber.
A tendril shoved between my lips.
The taste was rotten metal and dead memories.
I grabbed the hilt.
The Shrii-ka-rai slammed its body down, trying to crush my arm beneath its chest.
I angled the emitter upward because there was no room to swing, no room to posture, and absolutely no room for Jedi dignity.
At this distance, aiming was a luxury item for people whose enemies respected personal space.
I thumbed the activation stud.
The red blade punched upward through the creature's underside.
Meat, bone, organs, and old Sith grafts parted around the plasma. Steam burst across my face. Black fluid poured over my chest. The Shrii-ka-rai convulsed, and the pressure pinning me down became frantic instead of controlled.
I shoved the hilt sideways with both hands.
The blade carved through its insides.
The creature shrieked.
Arachnae launched herself away as the monster thrashed.
I twisted the hilt until the blade met something dense near the spine. For one second it resisted.
I pushed harder.
The saber burned through.
The Shrii-ka-rai collapsed.
Its full weight dropped onto me, and my lungs tried to exit my body through sheer protest.
For several seconds, I lay trapped under the corpse, rainwater running over my face, black fluid soaking through torn armor, one dead tendril still twitching against my cheek.
Arachnae skittered back into view near my head, one leg sparking, her photoreceptor flickering.
Beep?
I tried to answer and produced a noise that made me sound like a dying accordion.
I deactivated the saber before I cooked myself through the ribs and let the hilt fall against my chest.
The draining stopped.
The hollow pressure inside my body loosened all at once. The Force returned unevenly, like a damaged comm signal finding channels one by one. Rain came first, cold against the platform. Then Arachnae's little knot of machine presence. Then the temple's old dark pressure. Then my ribs, which reported in with several complaints and a request for management.
I dragged in a breath under the creature's weight.
"Okay," I rasped. "We killed the forbidden basement squid. Quiet applause only. My organs are unionizing."
Arachnae gave a weak, offended beep.
"Yeah, obviously you get MVP. Tiny psychopath medal. Maybe a parade if we survive the next ten minutes."
The corpse twitched.
I went rigid under it.
The tendrils did not tighten. The claws did not move for my throat. The body stayed heavy and slack, sagging over me while steam rose from the saber wound.
Then the flesh began to soften.
The bone spurs cracked.
The tendrils curled inward.
Black fluid bubbled around the burned channel through its chest.
For a stupid, hopeful second, I thought the damn thing was finally decomposing after a few thousand years of being too angry to rot.
Then something shifted through my chest.
The draining had stopped, but the movement had not.
The direction changed.
The hollow place inside me opened wider.
The corpse emptied.
And my body, traitorous little bastard that it was, drank.
----
Donate the stones if you have them, gives great motivation!
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