Even through the shadows I could see him crying as three figures kicked and punched the crumpled form of the Miraluka. I stood some way back, around the corner of an adjoining corridor. The boy cried out, a spray of blood with every exhale and the jeering faces spitting as they cursed their victim repeatedly. The girl stepped back a moment, panting. She was short for her age, petite, a Twi’lek. The Force ran through her veins and it lit her up, her smile vivid as she observed their work. The other boys looked up, expectant of praise. The small form on the floor sobbed quietly, clutching at its broken body. They exchanged a few proud words before the girl gestured something strange. To my disgust, the boys began to urinate all over him. It was weakness that drove them to the violence; insecurity so strong that any to question their ability would be targeted. This was the Shadow Academy at its best.

I watched the consequences of naivety in real time. I finally breathed, watching them congratulate each other and let the illusion dissolve. The girl noticed it first and let out a horrified sound. The boys looked now, gasps escaping their lips. Immediately they helped the broken body to its feet, its pale skin replaced by green, the markings across his nose just visible. He didn’t know him, or his name, but the others did. They spoke it again and again, their voices broken, their rage subsiding. They hated me for my skill, my attitude, my origins. They loved their friend as a kindred, struggling soul.

I pressed a few buttons on the datapad and informed his father, a commanding officer within the brotherhood, that his son had suffered intensive injuries by some classmates and took one last look at the panic before I made my way silently out of sight. I think about that every now and then, a pang of guilt following. But I learnt my place and the place of others. For life is dog eat dog, after all.

File included in case Markdown fails me. 350 words.
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Plans. There is something bittersweet about plans. It comes to her then that all of her plans are prayers, not to her gods or the Force, not to the Lights or the Void, but to time, the great eraser and birther of them all. Every plan she has made has been but a tiny little prayer.

She wonders what the fault in her prayers was. She thinks she did not believe strongly enough or that she was meant to be in pain. She then thinks that is nonsense, because there is no such thing as fate, not with all the cracks in the world of smiles and tears. She thinks, perhaps there is no result to praying; it is not an action that *causes,* it is an idea that *sustains.* Something more like a paean of transcribed joy, like a morass of flesh and blood, like a taste on the tongue, like a wash of water on fingertips. Something both abstract, as a concept of machination, and a finite, feasible product.

She decides that there is no action to prayer, because it yields nothing. Plans are not mothers. There is no birth here.

There is no life, here, either, just the remains of it. Corpses and broken hearts. Silences too deep and wide and smooth to ever fill. Gaps in the universe. In the unfillable and encroaching space that is left, there is just her, and the woman she loves, who is not dead, *yet,* but who is already not alive.

* “Please,* Atty. Please, I’m *begging* you, please, *make it stop.* Make it stop. Do it, *please.” *

It is all her beloved chants, again and again, and she has ceased hearing the words. The shape of them, their sound, echoes in deaf ears. She cannot hear them—she is too full of their meaning, too much enraptured in being redefined to listen.

She is learning that plans are prayers, that her prayers are not enough, and that her love *is.* That love is watching someone die.

So she concedes, places the barrel to her heart’s head and pulls the trigger.

“There is a moment in my life that I will never forget, a memory that still haunts me to this day. Nothing I do will ever make this wretched piece of my past fade, this memory is the memory of the day my loving fiance K'ara was ripped from my life by a swift blade. Though it feels as if she might be here in spirit, it still hurts. A burning pain like no other; sometimes I could have sworn I've seen her as some sort of force apparition, but it could just be my brain and aching heart playing tricks on me, but all in all that memory is one that is forever burned into my mind. I can often feel her weight on my arms, the same weight I felt as I watched the life drain from her eyes, why does the force will such pain towards me? What have I done to deserve such a loss, even revenge didn't prove to dull the pain, but I will continue to truck the the pain, because I have other priorities so I cannot just lie around feeling sorry for myself.” - Obelisk Templar Kanis Da'uul