HE: (Suddenly.) I don't want to fall in love with you . . .
SHE: (Raising her eyebrows.) Nobody asked you to.
HE: (Continuing calmly.) . . . But I probably will.
STAR WARS PREQUELS ╱ Anakin Skywalker,
x ORIGINAL FEMALE CHARA...
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CHORUS : Brave girl.
KASSANDRA : People never say that to a lucky person, do they?
✶ Agamemnon, Aeschylus.
52,025 BBY / BIRTH OF LYSITHEA.
Over the irium beams that bind together the regions of Lysithea, runes like constellations spell the word "bloodshed." A chant of destiny. A mark woven into the planet's core as either promise or prophecy, a reminder of the true destructive nature of its people and how they came to be.
What is an Arduena if not a warrior?
Their flag brandished the crimson that stained their hands after every battle won, with their golden sigil inlaid as a bright reminder of the House's persistent glory. Peace, for an Arduena, existed only as a concept, as an unreachable ideal, as the promise they sold a planet's natives before taking their lands for themselves / a hoax. An Arduena, much like Lysithea itself, had to have a steel-shielded heart / act as if they were born wearing the soldier's armor they'd be thrusted into as soon as they learn how to walk / to live by the words always written beneath the family name: Death comes before dishonor.
What is lineage if not a golden thread of pride and guilt?
Nictarél Atlacoya is a daughter of Arduena, the only child of her generation who cared to become a proud warrior of Alom, but despite her relentless efforts and insurmountable desire to become something more than a shadow⏤more than an ancient ritual's offering to satiate the higher power's bloodlust⏤Arél Arduena would be lying if she said she's stepped foot into a marble pillar of glory: a victory many would have regarded as worthy of a title, of a seat amongst her family's elders, instead gains her a ticket to her new life as the banished regent of Anankla (one of her homeland's frivolous colonies) as punishment for her disobedience.
(If death came before dishonor, had they only spared her so she could rot in shame?)
Anakin Skywalker held inside his heart the ire of a warrior clothed in beskar, slithering through his bones like a scaled monster feeding into his bloodlust: a gift left behind by his first step-father (a man of the Death's Watch / an exile in Concordia) and in a way, it's almost as if he never left to fight the war dusking on Mandalore's war torn lands. As if his ashes had never flown away in the wind along with his mother's sobs the cold winter night he became the propriety of someone else / a meaningless sacrifice so Mandalore could form its new era of peace atop the fallen soldier's bodies.
