Dark stories surrounded the seas of Listehol. Forget the dangerous storms and summer heat—rumor had it there were monsters lurking in the depths, with claws that could snap a ship in half, or mouths large enough to swallow islands, or bodies as long as the ocean was deep. Sea demons, the locals called them, said to have laid waste to coastal settlements and trade ships. It frightened them. No matter what they threw at the sea, bounty hunters or monster slayers or pirates, nothing worked.
Hatice was there to change that. She and Amira Din, a Sith she’d only met days ago and whose name she rarely remembered, had been dispatched as Sith envoys in order to ‘help’ the locals with their little monster problem. It was up to the two of them to find whatever was haunting their shores and end it, and so earn the planet’s allegiance. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of job they’d be doing on their own. The locals had been insistent on leading the hunt themselves, and by traditional means. They’d supplied her and Amira not only with sailor’s uniforms, but a sickly crew and a ramshackle ship dragged from the last millenium.
Oh, and a captain, to boot.
Captain Sabetha Grim was an older woman with cracked skin and a withering smile. She wore a tricorn hat tipped with colored feathers and a bandana, and her black braids spilled out from underneath like a tangle of dark eels. She must have been beautiful, once. Some men might still think she was. As for Hatice, she just felt mildly intimidated. The older woman exuded a kind of authority, a presence, similar to that of a Sith Master, only she lacked both the Force, and the strange, gothic fashion sense customary to most Sith.
Sabetha set down the sheaf of papers and stared between the two young women. Inside the captain’s cabin, there were only the three of them while the rest of the crew labored on deck, steering the ship farther out to sea. “So,” she began. “You must be Hatice.” Sabetha gestured to her, then to the tiefling. “And you are… Amira, am I correct?” Whatever her answer, the older woman clicked her tongue impatiently. “Pretty names, although I expected something a little more… menacing. I thought you Sith liked to go by dreary-sounding adjectives. Like ’Ruin,’ or ‘Misery,’ you know?”
Hatice resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Sure, there were Sith who liked to take on new names in order to sound more threatening—Bane, Maul, Sidious, Raze—but that was the whole point. To sound threatening.
She didn’t bother explaining the complexities of being a Sith Lord to the old pirate, however. Instead she stayed quiet, leaving the talking to Amira, who according to reports, had already made quite a reputation for herself as a diplomat and charming emissary. Things Hatice was, most certainly, not.
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