Matalok Warship Voice of Agony
In orbit of the Baanu Amnan, Tingel Arm, Wild Space
Day 128, 30 ABY

Vasi Khess hung in the white, exploring the spectrum of pain.

In the far infrared, he found cinders of thirst that baked his throat. Higher, up in the visible wavelengths, gleamed the crimson wire-stretched ligaments that sizzled within his shoulders; grinding glass-shard screams howled from his hip joints like the death shrieks of golden tishwii starflowers. There was green, too—bubbling tongues of acid hungrily licked his nerves—as well as lightning-blue shocks that spasmed his overloaded body into convulsion.

And higher still, now far beyond the ultraviolent betrayal that brought him here—the betrayal that delivered him into the hands of the Shamed One, the betrayal that gathered him into the Embrace of Pain, the betrayal by Niiriit Phaath, whom he had trusted—he found silent shattering gamma-ray blasts sleeting into his brain.

Those gamma-ray blasts were the colour of the lie he had believed since birth.

For he now understood the truth:

The gods were not true.

The cold moist touch of a hand along his jaw leaked time back into the white.

The tides of agony retreated, and Vasi could open his eyes.

He hung horizontally, suspended facedown two meters above a floor of wet, slick-looking greens and browns—its surface corded, viny, as though with muscle and vein. The walls oozed oily dampness that smelled darkly organic: voxyn sweat and barbfly droppings. From the darkness above swung tentacles like prehensile eyestalks, ends socketed with glowing orbs that stared at him as the tentacles wove and danced and twisted about each other. The two heretics were watching.

Something that felt like claws, sharp and unyielding gripped his skull from behind; he could not turn his head to see what held him. His arms were drawn wide, pulled to full extension and twisted so that his shoulders howled in their sockets. A single strong grip crushed his ankles together, grinding bone on bone—

Yet the greatest pain he now suffered was to look on Niiriit and remember that he had trusted her. It had sounded wise at the time. Her plan was to graft yammosk tissue onto his brain, and to transform the lowly shaper into an avatar of the gods. To do what the Supreme Overlord had tried—and failed, regardless what Varesh Shai claimed—in attempting to imbue a Child of Yun-Yuuzhan with the sacred energy only the Jeedai could wield.

But Niiriit had failed.

His body had not transformed into the khattazz al'Yun as she had promised. It rejected her experiments. The rikyam implants had mutated into a tumour that now bulged out his skull in a nest of cancerous warts. His life was on borrowed time.

And for the Master Shaper’s mistakes it had been he who was condemned; he who had been declared a Shamed One; he who was made a slave who now nobody cared what further mutilations and acts of heresy she performed on him.

‘You’re awake.’ Not Niiriit’s voice. The other. The Shamed One. Eckla.

‘You—’ Speaking tore his throat as though he coughed splinters of coral. The hand stroked his face gently as one might a child. Had he the energy, he would have torn the fingers off between his teeth.

‘There, there,’ the innocent voice whispered. ‘You are doing so well. Think of all the good you are doing. Thanks to you, we will heal the curse our race has borne for millennia.’

He heard footsteps behind him, then the needles of an amphistaff’s mouth slid up into his wrist. This time it was the voice of Niiriit, ‘Each new Jeedai is another chance,’ she muttered distantly, most likely talking to herself. ‘Maybe this one’s blood will be the key.’

His pulse sped up as lava surged into his veins and wrapped around his heart. The fire pumped up his throat, red washing over his eyes. His skull rocketed into the middle of the sun as the white swallowed him once more.

The gamma-rays returned, their whispers carrying the truth:

Your life is a lie.