“Trouble weighs on you,” said the Elder. A few days more had passed, and she had come to see Kellaro and induct him into the Clan. Kellaro had passed his Trials while under the eye of Jiava of Clan Telich, after all, not Clan Lok. The induction was more ceremonial than anything, and they had a chance to speak after the official words had been said.
“Finding you is nice, I guess,” said Kellaro. “It’s very much like home here. But home is… partly the people in it, and the people I care most about… they aren’t here.” He looked up at the Elder. “My brother walks among the Sith, and they corrupt him more every day. Is there anything at all that can be done for him? I don’t want to lose him.”
“A heavy burden you bear,” said the Elder softly. “Life doesn’t let us choose our calling as much as we might wish. For your question, however, I will tell you a story. I think it’s one you remember, if you think back far enough.”
The Elder turned away, and using the same paint as she had to mark Kellaro’s face with clan symbols, began to draw upon the wall. Kellaro sighed to himself and sat down to watch.
The Elder first drew a triangle, then added spurs and other details to it, until Kellaro could recognize it as an Imperial capital ship. “The Sith Empire,” she said. “Sometimes friend and sometimes foe. In those days, we were only loose allies. They would allow us to hunt in their space and we would offer them a premium on mercenary work.
“For Clan Lok, anyway, that changed, when the Hunter arrived.”
She inked a humanoid figure next to the ship, using blue and red. The colors of loyalty, honor, and aggression, Kellaro knew.
“He came to us as a stranger,” said the Elder. “He had made a name for himself by then, and so he was no drag upon the clan’s resources — at least, not physically. You would see it in his eyes sometimes still, or hear it in his absent footsteps around the bonfires: an emptiness. Great pain he bore, never sharing it with anyone else.”
Eyes, too, were drawn, only empty circles where the irises should be. Kellaro stirred, but said nothing. He had seen that emptiness in another’s eyes before. Brant’s.
“Then there was your mother,” said the Elder, turning to another section of the wall and drawing the figure of a young woman, helm under one arm, shining filigree in the cornrows on her dark head. Magenta, gold, and green went into the armor. “At first I think Dinui was like a little sister to the Hunter, only. She was his wingman, his right-hand upon the ground. When they hunted, she covered his tail, and he soon became protective of her, in turn.” She drew a light blue arc around the woman, like an energy shield.
“She fell for him long before he fell for her, I think,” the Elder went on. “He was cold and distant to the rest of us, but she saw through that facade, and had a way of always drawing the laughter from him. He might have spent more time with his brothers-in-arms, but she was closer to him than any other.” A new color was chosen, and using her pinky, the elder carefully slashed it through both the centers of the woman and the cold Hunter. As she spoke on, she used a white-blue to shade in the background behind the Hunter: vague shapes like Mandalorian helmets, but the line-work also reminded Kellaro of the swirls of icy winds.
“It took some time for the reason he kept himself apart to come out, and then, only to us elders did he speak,” said the Elder, picking up a new pot of paint. This one was a bright red, and she drew a cross of it over the hunter’s head, like two lightsabers clashing together. Another little red line joined the other color over his chest, like a wound to the heart. “He was a Sith, or had been: his powers torn from him in some terrible manner he did not wish to recall nor tell. He kept his old name, Karkemir, a secret, though it would later manifest in the clan name he chose for himself: Lok’kar, rather than Lok.”
Another section of wall, and this time, the Elder picked up black. The figures she drew reminded Kellaro of bonegnawers, dead rhondtas with their head curved back almost all the way to their spines, and curling clawed legs much like the ones on the Shaadlar ships. Kellaro shuddered.
“He came to us one night, asking what future he could have, other than a long, slow grinding into obscurity and then death. He was very old and very worn. That is all he saw for himself. It was very sad.
“Yet, I told him honestly about Dinui, that life is only over the moment the exoboar stops kicking, not before. He looked at me, and there was something else in his eyes, then.” All four fingers dipped into the red, and the Elder slashed through the black etchings of death, like a narglatch’s paw tearing through a net. The elder turned her back on them, returning to the Hunter, and the empty eyes. Painstakingly, she drew new figures in the eyes: adding Mandalorians one by one.
“And when he realized his dark past did not trouble Dinui, he blossomed. There was never a more patient hand with the foundlings from that time on, and each one that sat on his knee or gave his beard a twist added a spark back to his eyes. He was not raised among us, and our ways were alien to him, but the Mando’ade were in his heart just the same.”
The last figure she drew in the filling eyes used the same color as the mark over the lovers’ hearts. The figure was a woman, with the smallest inkling of a baby in her arms — or perhaps two — and then the Elder blocked it from Kellaro’s vision as she turned to him.
“So it is, I think, with your brother, little Ro.” She gave him a pot of that same color paint, and laid a hand on the blank shoulderpad on his armor. It had been waiting for a clan or family sigil, and Kellaro straightened, recognizing that wait was over now. “More than that, I am afraid you will have to let your own heart guide you,” said the Elder. “Your story may end differently, but the same blood runs in your veins. What connected them, can connect you.” She dipped her hands into the paint, and began to draw in the symbol of Clan Lok on his pauldron. “Take this with you to remember that.”