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Through the dark, first gnawing and then shredding: a splintered scream, made resonant by the cavern’s gaping throat. Each lip and every tooth, vein, cavity of rock flayed a new texture from the sound as it twisted round the bends. It was a thousand voices, and all of them like something being pulled apart – ribs wrenched open. Guts slashed out and curdling into clumps of flesh on the ground.
It tore Savage awake; a dazed, half-dream awareness pierced by the terror lit under him, blossoming inside the chest now and making his whole body burn cold. He jerked upright with the sporadic chaos of a reflex and froze. Froze head-turned, arm mid-air, hung between a lunge to the door and the safety of his bed.
Grotesque tableaus of animal savagery assaulted his mind. A starved beast left behind by slaughtered Nightsisters, made bloodthirsty by neglect. Or a voritor lizard – though they never usually strayed this near the mountains. A rancor, on the other hand…
No, neither a rancor nor a voritor, nor any named animal. Just thoughts struck senseless by their drowsy stagger. Savage stumbled from his bedchamber to the main hall, logic clicking into place at last.
He knew only one creature capable of a sound like this.
“Brother?” He called out. Nothing returned but his own voice down those arched cave walls, distorted by the underlying shriek. He charged forwards, shifted back and lurched sideways, heel turned, a step in any direction feeling like the wrong one when the voice seemed to come from all around.
This wasn’t the first time, never the last, and he would always be sent shredding through the place the same as before. Feeling along its rough walls, slinging round pillars, a glance into each stone substructure; vaulting over these low and sacred waters that cradled isles of land. Blue-green once, incandescent, since made still and replaced by a dull, deathly grey.
It felt like a place from the afterlife. An afterlife emptied even of its spirits, with the Nightsisters slain and Mother Talzin nowhere to be found. Savage felt no presence there but a draft and the dark, and the howling entangled within them.
The howl that was no longer a howl, having collapsed into sobs, he only now realised. Piercing, shuddering. Almost mechanistic – and, indeed, accompanied by whining metal. Grinding, grinding, a click then a graze. A harsh stuttered breath and a deep cry of pain.
Savage tore back into the heart of the fortress, braced atop the ritual table:
“Brother, where are you?!” A thick, bellowing yell.
Quiet. Savage wondered if he had stirred his brother from his nightmares. But soon came smattered growls carving words he couldn’t make out, rising again till the shriek resumed its violent hysteria.
A shard in the side of his skull crying stop, stop, stop, and it was unbearable, this pain of another. It crawled inside his own head. One thread left sewn into skin from an old life, feeding backwards into a tapestry of… family, love, days of play wrestling. It was a sickness of compassion. A near-forgotten dream of something softer, belonging to someone else.
Savage closed his eyes, let the noise scatter around him with that precious thread in mind. He drew upon what was lost; traced the Force towards the root of this agony.
A dark, writhing something coiling upon itself. A spirit like wire and burnt flesh.
Beside the entrance: an area where the mouth swings open, purposed now as a storage area. He felt it there, amongst that labyrinthian clutter of scrap, spare parts, weapons and retrofit technology, miscellaneous paraphernalia sorted into crates stacked high and dense. Savage prowled past the spires they formed. They were unsettled. One had toppled over, while others were packed more tightly than he remembered or had dragged themselves towards a new position. Not a rearrangement, so much as an ebb and flow around a vicious centrepoint.
Savage sensed it spilling out. He peered around a column and finally met his brother’s body: writhing in place, back arching and repeatedly collapsing upon itself while his head struck the floor again. Mother Talzin’s legs kept kicking out frantically, scraping themselves and everything around. They habitually sent him sleepwalking like this, soon failed, and left him stranded.
He seemed possessed from the waist down and crazed by pain anywhere above.
“Brother, you need to wake up now,” Savage said, gentle, dropping to a knee. He leaned over and held his shoulders down: “Brother?”
“What have you done to me?!” A ghastly wail and shot-open eyes – flitting wild and alight like a beast reined for the first time, head thrashing side to side. Savage wrestled with his weight, tried to force him calm.
“Take it, then, take it, take it… take it all!” Before a string of syllables too frantic and pierced by short-breathed sobs to make anything of.
“Maul!”
Dead silence. His eyes burnt away any residual mist from whatever he had seen in a sleep gored by nightmares. Maul noticed himself still pushing up against Savage’s palms, and stopped; let himself fall back like a cut-string puppet. A post-panic lethargy settled deep under skin, subsiding from prickle to consistent ache.
“You’re awake,” Savage’s relief was well-woven into his words. He shifted his arms to hold his brother up slightly. At the nape of his neck, his hand found a small, gathered wetness. He caught a line shimmering in the pale light, drawn from the edge of his brother’s eye and down the side, under the horn, past the ear, where it must’ve kept running to the back of the neck. He was, or had been, crying; it was difficult to say which, and perhaps it was both.
“Let go of me,” Maul hissed, breaking loose of his brother’s arms and recoiling away. He groaned as he set himself up against the cold of an oblong crate. Anywhere was a better place to look than Savage at the moment, unable yet to stomach whatever concerned or pitiful expression he was wearing.
Maul ran a hand down his face, hesitating near the eyes to rub the tiredness clear. His fingers first flinched at the dampness, unaware of his own tears. He wiped them dry with a forearm – quick and rough with red-hot loathing.
This is the point where Savage was meant to tear his gaze off him, afford his brother some dignity through collections of shared lies: that he was perfectly fine, and no one thought different, and nobody had seen him cry. Delusions Savage no longer cared for.
He felt his brother’s humiliated irritation at his stare, and kept staring anyway – not to humiliate him further, but because he wanted to see him. To bear witness, even when he would rather him not.
“Why are you awake, Savage?”
“I heard your…” Screaming would be a personal affront; anything else, a lie.
“Oh, yes… yes.” He turned aside. “Never mind that, I…” A whisper-mumble hybrid, full-blooded in shame. “It wasn’t loud, was it?”
“The echo makes it worse than it is.”
Different sorts of words started twisting his tongue. Words Savage couldn’t figure out how to slot together without setting off his brother's fury. Words closer to what and why and does it hurt? Small heresies against unspoken rules.
“You should go back to sleep.” Maul’s fierce delirium had disintegrated into something weary. With his hands planted firm on the crate behind him, he tried to hoist himself to his feet. When he shifted his weight to the legs, however, he was sent back down, crumpled on his knees. He pretended it was intentional, and Savage let him. Those cybernetic claws unsteadied him still, especially when they were streaking his abdomen with pain.
“Go, Savage.” A harsher tone this time, droning low, embittered by misplaced frustration.
Savage rose, but lingered. He turned slow, hesitation stilting his movement, then stopped altogether. Though the noise had been unusually intense, it wasn’t one of the worst bouts he had witnessed; there were times more disoriented, aggressive, emotional. And yet, his usual amount of curiosity, concern, whatever it was, gnawed especially incessant tonight.
“What is it you see, brother,” he dared, “when you dream like this?”
“Well, Savage…” His tone was uncharacteristically mellow, though a coarse growl began rupturing through: “In truth, I dream… of rainbows, you see? Colonies of loth-cats milling and mewing. Comets over Coruscant, a picnic; Gungans doing water aerobics…”
Savage looked down at his brother, examined coldly the way his lips had pulled back into a snarl. They trembled with rage.
“Why answer?” And he turned his back on him, bitter, but not quite making to leave. He discovered himself bound by his lone but building shred of sympathy. It was proving hard to swallow or strangle.
Maul was usually difficult. Savage’s solution was to take up less space, ask few questions, let his brother come to him rather than give chase. Oh, Maul could rave about pain – but it had to be organised. Precise words almost rehearsed in their articulation. He would show you the wounds he wanted you to see, the scars he felt sculpted his grief, trauma, tragedy into shapes he found personally appealing. A kind of masochism that tried to infuse his suffering with some noble quality. Bless it with meaning. Purpose. I was cast aside came smooth; but I felt worthless was a foreign body that had to be pulverised on the cellular level.
Ask him as much, and you were pulverised alongside it.
So it wasn’t why answer, he realised, but why ask? What was he expecting?
“Goodnight, brother.” Savage took a step, but:
“Torment, Savage.” He thrummed, enunciating each rasped syllable. “Is that a better answer? Chains and chains and… Bones – bones, breaking out of your flesh. A swarm of insects suffocating you, their million legs pushing around in your mouth and behind your eyes – inside your skull, scratching. And,” he stood at last, masking an agonised gasp with a continuation of: “cellars. Vile cellars… home to a filth so thick it congeals on your skin and eats its way inside – a kind of… corrosion. Eats away at you like acid, brother, until they start to spill – your putrefying guts, out of your flesh, black with rot.”
Maul hugged his abdomen for effect as he walked past his brother: “You try and cradle them, stop them tumbling out… push them back in. But you just keep falling apart until your whole body is ripped in two. A bloodbath is what I dream, Savage.”
Maul straightened, having reached the end of his soliloquy. He glanced back at his brother. The thinly veiled confusion-turning-disgust that stained his brother’s face kindled a grim, self-satisfied smirk in him.
“These dreams, are they – like it was… then?”
“Like when?!” Gone was all trace of anything but cascading rage. Savage had stirred the hornet-hive awake again. Sacrilege, to even allude to his brother’s state when he’d found him forsaken on that junk planet. Maul had not yet learnt to reconcile that vision of himself with his mask of honourable suffering, still treated it as a creature from outside of his being – took the pain, buried the image. Nothing likes to stay buried.
Every morning, sometimes again in the evening, he would shave his horns down with a methodical temper. Washing had become a daily regime of clawing into himself. These actions intertwined into accidental ritual – methods near-holy in his reliance on them to undo the deep-set defilement he sensed still scourging his veins. There were things even Mother Talzin’s magicks hadn’t entirely rid him of.
Dangerously close to the edge now he danced, but Savage wanted it brought into light, unafraid any longer: “When you were on Lotho Minor–”
A shriek of indignation as Maul tore into his brother’s face. “What you saw on Lotho Minor – that… oh, what you saw – what you saw!” Savage kept his eyeline aside, steely and distant. Whatever his brother did, he would take. “What gives you the right?! A decade – more! Over ten years spent surviving on fumes in a scrap pile – you saw NOTHING! You, if you had just – I… You wouldn’t…” Maul was haemorrhaging his earlier fervour by the second as he fumbled for the right words. They appeared to elude this particular experience.
Whenever he got like this, Savage couldn’t help but hear echoes of their first encounter. He recognised them in the noises he made, the same frenzied tone rolling on in ignorance of anything else. Maul had brought back more from that planet than he wanted to believe. And Savage accepted him anyway, was willing to hold that brokenness; but stalk around the subject for eternity, he would not.
A sudden flinch. Maul tilted his head slightly, tending to some phantom sound.
“What is it?” Savage asked.
Maul hushed him. “Nothing… I think. Tell me: is something burning, Savage?”
“What burning?”
“I smell…” His words trailed off inside themselves. He sniffed then turned, his expression softened by doubt. “No, nevermind.”
These illusory sensations played tricks on the both of them – Maul thinking something was there and Savage knowing it wasn’t, but fearing nonetheless that his brother was right and he had just missed it. That they were unsafe. He knew it was paranoia, tried to pay it no mind, but that uncertainty and its neighbouring fear never went away.
He pressed a hand to Maul’s shoulder in wordless farewell and left. He had lost the drive to push further tonight; his appetite had spoiled. All he could hope was that his brother would fall asleep soon, and to a place more peaceful than what came before.
Idle thoughts snatched at his heels as he wandered to the bedchamber. They clattered loud against each other, vying for attention. One was especially unshakeable: what they would’ve been like as children. What Maul would have been like. Had his sleep always looked this troubled? Would they have been friends if they were not brothers? What he would’ve made of Feral – and that snagged on some mental ledge he hadn't known was there.
Feral.
It slid out so easily despite a long exile from his mind. Ghostly, like walking into your childhood home and finding your dead mother alive in the corner as though nothing bad ever happened. Where a well of familiarity and attachment once resided, there was only a gaping hole. The name Feral, and crunch of his throat and neck, were all that remained there.
Savage wasn’t sure what he felt about it.
The bedchamber welcomed him in. Half-moon windows sculpted the glow from the lair’s atrium and cast it soft. Although it was empty, it held the warm ambience of a house left in a rush but soon to be returned to. Clothes, sketchbooks, decorations, even a stuffed animal or two sat beside rows of beds. Belongings of Nightsisters that would never return for them, but the sense that they could breathed a cosiness into the place.
Savage rolled onto his mattress and rested on his side. He found comfort in facing the wall – a false sense of safety, as though nothing could harm him if he couldn’t see it. He’d always slept this way. When he and Feral had to share a bed, they’d sleep back-to-back – Feral anxiously scanning the room until he exhausted himself unconscious, while Savage embraced his dead end and whatever it brought. So many hours he passed watching words and animals and great, fantastical battles play out on the wall, tracing them there with a finger until he was tired enough to sleep.
He was set adrift, lost to moments of childhood solace that lured him off the path of consciousness. For a while, he mistook metal scraping stone and the rustle of cloth as spectres from the threshold of wakefulness, beckoning him deeper. Drowsiness gave them distance. It was only when Maul spoke that he recognised the sounds as happening outside of himself.
“Lotho Minor is… like a splinter to me.”
Without looking, he knew his brother’s likely pose: slumped against the wall, a knee tucked to his chest that he alternately hugged or rested his head on. Savage anticipated words that didn’t materialise, at least not for a long while, and settled into the silence.
He wondered if Maul would stay there, and thought he might even like that – that it maybe completed the image. Feral asleep near the door, Savage drawing lines on the wall, and, looking up at the ceiling from his place on the floor, Maul. Three brothers sharing the room they could’ve, if things were different.
Savage would give everything for that. But most would, for things they can never have. Perhaps they were innately doomed, and no amount of changes to the sequence of events that brought them here could have graced them with salvation.
A sigh, trembling faintly, stirred him from his thoughts.
“You would be… surprised, Savage. How cold one gets – even on a junk planet like Lotho Minor.” Maul seemed too tired for theatrics this time, something like defeat staining his words. “Fire all around you, yet a chill driven in so, so deeply. You can outrun it for a while, but you let it in once, and it becomes inescapable. You could burn yourself alive and still feel that chill.”
Savage was scared even to breathe. He didn’t want to disturb this unusual mood or the oddly candid confessions that accompanied.
“I still… feel it, sometimes. It’s like it’s in... my spine. And I’m there again. A thousand years and a thousand more spent under a dead sun that's just a scrap pile set alight. But it looks enough like a sun when your vision is blurred from eons in the dark.”
Maul retreated into quietude for a moment, tapped out rhythms onto the floor until the words sailed back to him. “It was rancid. But it blinds you to it over time. The filth becomes part of the place, and the place becomes your body, so your body becomes part-filth. It’s this slow decomposition, and it takes… everything. I–” Maul’s voice cut out suddenly, interrupted by a hard, involuntary swallow. Each syllable was its own battle. “I don’t always…” he strained, “remember much of it. When I think about it, I find… long darknesses.”
“Like burnt paper,” a sentiment that seemed more coherent in his mind than said aloud.
Savage didn’t know why he’d said it, except that he remembered a book he would read to Feral, and that it was set on fire one night by the other kids. That sight of writing crept upon by singed black borders, disappearing into chasms where the page had burnt all the way through – it made him think of Maul. Tracing thoughts or memories into smoke, left with small pockets of words devoid of context and stripped of meaning. Senseless fragments made impossible to piece together by tissue damage, made permanently disorganised from its obliterated components.
“You know, brother… In my dreams, Lotho Minor appears much less than you might expect. Yes, sometimes I’m on the old legs, or back in those tunnels. But mostly, I dream as a child. There is punishment, drowning, the end of existence itself. And, often... my old master.”
There was a finality to Maul’s words this time; this is as far he goes, or is willing to go right now. He hadn’t divulged much about his time with Sidious, except that it was excruciating. Savage knew better than to ask about that.
“Thank you, brother.”
“I don’t know what for.”
And Savage didn’t know why he was thanking him, either. He realised it just felt right. “It's like family, talking this way. I didn’t think… I could do that again.”
Maul hummed in acknowledgement, solemn.
“Do you need help?” Savage asked.
A long silence. Then, a confession: “Yes.”
When he turned, he found Maul sitting exactly as he had imagined – even in his chaos, a creature of habit. He offered his brother a hand and helped him to his feet, then wrapped an arm around his back to provide some stability. The two ambled down the path towards one of the other bedchambers.
The space Maul had claimed was smaller, and he had already cleared out whatever possessions the Nightsisters left. It felt both colder and emptier. Tomb-like.
Savage set his brother down on a bed and asked: “Is there anything else?”
“Yes. Your… dreams.”
“What of them?”
“What do you dream, Savage?”
How long had it been since someone asked him a question? A personal question – something about Savage himself. Nobody cared for such things. The answers were of no value to Ventress or Dooku, so the questions were never asked. Feral used to talk to him like this, but that seemed long ago; longer than it really was. It made him forget there was anything inside to answer with.
“I dream… Nightbrothers.” He started with a slight smile. It was exhilarating, this rediscovery of the inside world. “Nice food. Storms, sometimes. Bugs that block out the sun. Or, my horns growing inwards and killing me. I always dream of home.” That word didn’t feel quite right in his mouth; where did ‘home’ fit into his new existence? The child raised there with his Nightbrothers wasn’t recognisable as this changed body. It felt like a pathetic impersonation to call that village ‘his’, a disgusting theft. “I used to dream more. They’ve mostly gone away.”
“You... enjoy your dreams?” Maul made it sound as though it was some unimaginable thing.
“Yes. It takes me somewhere I’m not… this.”
Those weren’t words Savage was expecting – not even something he realised he felt. It was catharsis to speak of it. The release of this built-up pressure – winding frustration, a screaming pain dampened under orders and obligation since it was first inflicted. He wanted to cry for the first time, but the tears wouldn’t come.
Savage looked back at his brother. There was a bittersweetness to knowing that, in the morning, he would be as vicious a face of cruelty as ever. But in the nights, he would always come undone.
This was enough for Savage. A second-chance family, whatever it looked like and whoever they had become.
“Goodnight, Savage.” Maul lilted. “And… sweet dreams.”
“Goodnight, brother.”