Humble Beginnings

Maren Da'ar ran as fast as his young legs could carry him, which was quite faster than most other species or his own for his age could accomplish. On Dathomir physical strenght is everything, especially for a member of the Nightbrothers. It was a harsh life with constant beatings, called "hardening of the body", but it seems more a sick pleasure for the elders, simple as it was. Maren hated them for that and for the numerous of other draconian pratices, that only seemed to dwindle the young members of the tribe instead of making them actually stronger.

But he could minimally understand them. The hunt for the very strongest and fittest made for harsher and harsher trials and it had the neat sideeffect of disposing of the more rebellious people by giving them impossible tasks, securing the stability of the tribe as well as their positions. The beatings were just an outlet of their anger and helplesness and specifically with him it was his abnormal physicalities. Because as much power as they had inside their tribe, everyone must kneel before the true masters of this world and these proud, antiquities despised that.

Many of Maren battlebrothers died because of these challenges born from incompetence and impotence. So he bided his time and waited for the day he would rise the ranks and could overthrow the elders and then the masters to achieve true freedom. But that day never came. The Nightsisters arrived one day, put them chains and led them into their domain. There they were locked in chages to wait for their fate. He could hear the screams of his people as these witches conducted their experiments on them. Not that he really cared. He liked, even appreciated some of them, but right now he can not let himself overcome with emotions. He must concentrate on an escape plan and just has to hope the people he cared a little about were not the ones screaming.

He looked around and saw in his cell a few of his older battlebrothers. All of their bindings were taken off and multiple prisoners were caged together, what easily could help with a possible escape. Problem was they would never help him on a plan suggested by him, so he just has to force them to. On a better note, apparently the Nightsisters thought of them no threat. 'This hybris shall be adventageous', Maren thought to himself. The cell was very dark and had four walls, three made out of some kind of combination of flesh and plant. Small creatures the size of his head scurried along the mushy floor leaving their droppings and their dead. Maren tried to scratch the walls with his fingernails but these walls were harder than they should be. "Witch magic", he mumbled to himself. The bars on the entrance had the properties of bone with a door with the same ones. How the cells were opened was as macabre as it was surreal.

When the masters wanted to step inside they used a weird orb-shaped construct emmiting a green light and the bones of the door seperated in the middle or better broke apart by the sound they made and refused together when they left. He looked outside his cage and saw that the prison complex was built like a spiral. Before him was a gigantic casm, maybe going a hundred meters down and all kinds of ways leading to different directions. At the bottom he saw a eerie green light. From there the screams echoed from the cricked and crocked walls upstairs to him. There they must conduct their experiments. Maren could see even with his sharp eyes only silhouttes. Some were thrown into the green ooze. Some were strapped on strange machinations and probed with all kinds of sharp objects. Other horrid dissections and probings could be observed, fates Maren really did not want to share.

A Nightsister came with an entourage of brainwashed or maybe even undead minions, you could not tell with them. They brought our food for today. Some kind of undefinable sludge, also green in colour. Maren thought to himself that he will probably start developing a distain for green as soon as he escaped. "What are you looking at, defective mutant?", the witch asked with a mix disgust and pity the shining green light of the key making him squint his eyes. The freak part came from the fact that he was pale as freshly palided bone with pitch black, and not normally brown horns coming from his head and blazing green eyes. Nonetheless, Maren planned his esxape for a good while now. Firstly he wanted to look as pathetic as possible, eating the rodents in the cells as well as their droppings. Then he took their bones and and fashioned small knives by using his teeth as sharpeners. He was glad about the strenght of his teeth and that they did not split or break doing his task as he was proud of his physical appearance.

One the knives he hid in his hand and the other ones in the darkest corner of the cell. "I don't want to die, please, PLEASE I do anything. I will serve you for the rest of my life. Just please spare me", Maren howled. His prison companions looked at him now with the same digust as the Nightsister. 'Shall they', he thought. "Haha, wow, and I thought the Nightbrothers had any kind of self respect, the only reason that we actually leave some of you scurring around on this planet is, that we need you to make more of us. You are at least somewhat bearable instead of all the other possible species... What a cruel joke of the force". She looked with utmost hatred at the young child. Then she leaned herself down to him, whispering in his ear. "I will make sure, you will be the one who suffers the most. I will pluck out your eyes from your socket, cut every fibre of muscle off you smash your bones into powder and let you see your own heart shutting down, desperate keeping you alive, before I EAT it". She almost frothed out of her mouth making her statement, which was just the distraction he needed.

'So dramatic', Maren mused to himself. The hand with the knife he purposefully hid behind his shadow snapped in front ramming the bone knife into her temple. It had to be fast or the Nightsister would use her witchcraft on him. The knife the leght of a big six year olds hand and thick as his index finger only went half way into the temple. She made a short surprised gasp and wanted to back away. Before she could do that, Maren hammered the bone with all his might into her brain. She looked at him with a look combining surprise combined with the terror of knowing that in the next seconds something will happen and she did not knowing what and that TERRIFIED her. Were the teachings true and there was an afterlife in the force, but more imporantly was she strong enough to reach it. Because if not she would disappear, every colour, every light would go out. She would be alone without anyone. These were all her thoughts as the scarred girl grasped in short and quick succesion for air.

Her bodyguards started to draw their crude weapons to kill the attacker. But Maren for the final part, lunged at her, closed his jaw around her throat and bit through it. Blood gushed from the wound and the boy spit the chunk of flesh out of his mouth. The guards having noone to comand them anymore got a confused look in their empty eyes and then seemed to shut down and not move anymore. This happened in less than 5 seconds which was fast enough that the zombies could not react and the Nightsister not perform a spell on him. He took the green orb from her, coated in the blood from his freshly felled enemy, still spraying blood from her wound. While she looked like as if she has to decide to either die sitting on her knees or to fall face first to the ground, Maren took the green device from her and tried opening the door. He felt somekind of might flow out of it and through him. He thought to himself: 'Open door'. The door did not budge. 'Open I command'. With the familiar breaking sound of bone the door answered.

"Take the other knives they are in that corner", the young boy said to his prison mates. The thought of freedom overriding their repugnance of him, each taking a makeshift knives. He himself plucked his one out of the dead Nightsister's head. 'Gonna keep that' he thought to himself. After that was the next stage of his plan. He started running upstairs, the boy retraced the way when the Sisters first took him to their cells. On the way he opened other cell doors containing his brothers. "You can open the cells with these keys and then run" Maren showed them the orbs. "Do you not want to kill them for what they did to our kin, even if it is someone like you?", a Nightbrother yellow in colour and his skin marked with the same typical tatoos of his people, Maren also showed. "We can not win a fight with the Masters, get as many out as possible and then we have to hide."

"No, they killed our brothers, you disgusting coward. The Nightsisters will pay with their blood."

"Your funeral" was all Maren could recouperate and with this he dashed to the entrance to the casm with a group of Nightbrothers behind him.

When they arrived at the gigantic entrance to the spiral, they saw a group of Nightsisters with enchanted beasts and bodyguards running from different pathways that were built in the tunnel, at them. "Kill them all, leave none of them alive" Maren heard one Nightsister scream. 'So dramatic' he thought to himself again as he let his bloodthirsty brothers take the first wave. Naturally they were slaughtered, but in the chaos Maren ran along the shadowy edges of the enormous tunnel to his freedom. He did not know why but somehow with the orb he knew which way he had to take to get as efficiently out of there as possible. The light it shined seemed also to variate depending on his needs. A few times he closed a pathway behind him so no persuers could follow him.

After a wild Zick Zack of left and right turns he saw the light to his freedom. "Come on, Maren. One last sprint." And with that he escaped. With the orb in one hand and his trusty knife in the other he found himself on a rocky plane with mountains with different heights all around him. "Well at least no more flesh tunnels" he murmured. Now he had to improvise. He knew the way back to his village but there us nothing to gain, maybe supplies. The Masters could not have taken everything, but what after that. Searching for a new tribe. The people of Dathomit are not the most hospital bunch, especially to outsiders and ESPECIALLY to outsiders of their own race. As he looked around to find inspiration from his surroundings.

Maren saw in distance something strange, something he did not see when he was first brought here, something that does not belong on Dathomir. "If this what a think it is, I will now have to make the biggest decision of my life" he said to himself with an uneasy smile. He knew nothing will be the same if he goes through with this a challenge above all else...and he could not wait for it, he was always relentless in his pursuits. So with a big smile on his red face he ran as fast as his young legs could carry him, which was quite faster than most other species or his own for his age could accomplish to his selfchosen destiny.