The Guardians - Insight to the dark side II

Posted on Tue Oct 13th, 2026 @ 9:57am by Captain Marie Batel & Patin

2,834 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: Character Development
Location: Bajor

Approximately 6 months ago - Despair

The falling rain had followed Faro for most of the day. By the time she finally stopped, she could barely feel the cold anymore. Her clothes were soaked through, her boots were heavy with mud, and every step was taking more effort than the last. She found a shallow space beneath the trees and lowered herself onto the wet ground, too exhausted to search for anything better.

The rain fell through the branches in a steady rhythm, striking leaves, stone, and the earth around her. Faro closed her eyes and tried to let the sound empty her mind. There had been a time when silence brought relief. Now silence only gave the voice room to speak.

You are tired. She opened her eyes. The Wraith did not sound angry anymore. It did not need to. You have been running for months.

Faro pulled her knees toward her chest and rested her head against the tree behind her. “I know.”

From them. From your enemies. From yourself. From your past.

She swallowed. The words no longer felt like an intrusion. That frightened her more than the voice itself. She thought of Brin. His face. His hands. The sound of his voice. Every memory had once carried direction. Now each one seemed to arrive with a wound attached to it. She had tried to hold onto him, tried to keep the memory of what they had believed in alive, but the Wraith had slowly poisoned even that.

He is gone. Faro shut her eyes. They took him from you. Her breathing became uneven. They would take everything from you if you let them.

The rain continued falling. Somewhere ahead lay B'hala. Beyond it, the Fire Caves. She had been walking toward them for weeks without fully understanding why. Each day the distance became smaller, while something inside her became smaller with it. Her anger had once been a fire. Now it was an ember buried beneath ash and covered with wet soot.

The Wraith kept blowing on it.

Faro stared into the darkness beneath the trees. She wanted to sleep. She wanted the voice to stop. She wanted Brin back. She wanted someone to tell her that she had not spent the last year destroying herself for nothing. Instead, there was only rain, and the voice.

You know what must come next.

Sometimes there was resistance, but in this worn-down state there was only acceptance; a light, however misguided, amongst the darkness was still a light. Her stomach had forgotten food; it had been so long since she had eaten, and the remaining body fat left on her body was running low. She needed food, sleep, and a hearty swig of Brin's moonshine right about now.

Tonight, even a small bit of defiance felt beyond her. She was too tired to fight every thought that entered her mind, too cold to care whether the voice had earned her trust, and too hungry to find much comfort in the distinction between a command and a suggestion. If there was still a light ahead of her, however misguided, she needed something to follow.

There was a village about 2 days walk from here, a small one where, if she were humble, the local Vedek would provide food and shelter for a night or two. Her stomach growled at the thought of food, and her body ached for a bed without insects or the fear of a predator.

She remembered passing through once, years ago, before everything had become so complicated. The local Vedek had a reputation for offering shelter to travelers who arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs. Faro could ask for a meal and a place to sleep for a night or two. If she kept her head down, spoke humbly, and made no trouble, perhaps she could leave before anyone thought to ask her name.

You should go there.

The suggestion came so gently that Faro almost mistook it for her own thought. She rested her head against the tree and watched rain gather on the leaves overhead, each drop swelling until it finally fell. “I was thinking that.”

We need strength. You cannot continue like this.

There was a sort of comfort in hearing it said aloud, even if the voice existed only inside her mind. For months, every road had led to another hiding place, every night to another uneasy sleep, and every morning to the same relentless need to keep moving. The village offered something different.

The Wraith had an answer for everything lately. It knew when to remind her of Brin, when to stir her anger, and when to let the silence stretch until she became desperate enough to fill it herself. Faro had once taken that constant presence as proof of its devotion to her cause. Now she was too exhausted to examine what it wanted in return.

Rest, Faro. Eat. Let your strength return. There is still work to be done.

Her eyes closed at the last words. There it was again, that promise of purpose, the suggestion that all this suffering had a destination and that if she endured a little longer, she might finally understand why she had been left to carry it. She did not ask what work remained, or who had decided that it was hers to do. The questions felt distant and unimportant beside the thought of warm food and a bed.

When she opened her eyes again, the rain had softened to a fine mist. Faro drew her knees beneath her, braced one hand against the tree, and slowly pushed herself upright. Her legs trembled under her weight. For a moment she stood with her head bowed, breathing through the dizziness until the forest settled around her.

Two days, she told herself. Two days to a meal, a roof, and a little rest. She gathered her few possessions and turned toward the village. Somewhere beneath the exhaustion, a small part of her wondered why the Wraith seemed so certain that she should go there. The thought barely formed before hunger swallowed it. She could question the voice when she had slept. She could decide what she believed when she had eaten.

For now, the village was a light in the darkness, and Faro had very little strength left to question where it came from.


Approximately 3 months ago - The verge of madness

" We are close; soon you can rest. We must reach the hidden temple," the voice insisted, guiding her almost by instinct to the caves at the outskirts of the ancient city.

There was a network of caverns, tunnels, and connected stone rooms that thousands of years ago, those who followed the Wraith had used to attack B'Hala. Tunnels that led to storerooms, outbuildings, and other places where covert attacks could take place.

Faro barely registered the change in the terrain as she reached the outskirts of B'hala. The Kendra Mountains rose ahead through the haze, their ancient slopes looming over the scattered openings in the rock. She should have felt something at the sight of them, perhaps wonder or apprehension, but exhaustion had dulled even her fear.

The voice had guided her for so long that she no longer needed to understand the directions it gave. She followed the pull in her mind from one narrow path to the next, stumbling occasionally over loose stone, her attention fixed on the promise that somewhere ahead lay the place where she could finally rest. She had spent months searching for answers, and now the prospect of finding them seemed almost less important than the prospect of no longer having to search.

Faro swallowed against the dryness in her throat and continued toward the caves. The words should have troubled her. There had been a time when she would have demanded to know what waited inside, why the Wraith needed her there, and what it intended to do once they arrived. Those questions belonged to a woman with enough strength left to argue.

She could barely remember what that felt like. Brin's face surfaced in her thoughts, and for a moment she tried to hold tight to the memory, afraid that if she let it slip away there would be nothing left of him at all. The voice filled the silence before the grief could settle. It offered direction, certainty, and the faint promise that his death had meant something. Faro followed, carrying what remained of her hope deeper into the shadows beneath the mountain.

Heat emerged from the rift in the planet's crust as she walked through the fire caves, drawn onward like a moth towards a flame. Flames erupted periodically from below, lava and ash flowed freely through a river of molten planetary core. Here, the Wraith within her seemed to draw strength. She could feel it's connection to it's brethren, she could feel the pull of it's kin. She understood now what she had to do. Persuade others to come here, so that they could be taken as hosts - and for this effort she would take down the young Emissary and be hailed the new leader of Bajor.

Heat shimmered above the molten river, and Faro staggered as a sudden pressure filled her skull. She reached for the rough stone wall, her fingers scraping against its ancient surface, while the fire below seemed to brighten in answer to something stirring deep within her.

The voice fell silent. For the first time in months, it offered no instruction, no accusation, no reminder of Brin or the enemies who had taken him from her. Instead, the darkness before her eyes began to change. The caverns dissolved, and Faro found herself standing beneath a vast vaulted ceiling surrounded by people she did not know, their faces turned toward a gathering of figures whose eyes burned with the same red light she had seen reflected in her own.

They had come willingly, she understood, drawn by promises of liberation and a future beyond the reach of those who had imprisoned their gods. The Wraiths were gathering their followers, and Faro could feel their presence spreading through the room like warmth after a long winter.

The vision swept forward. She saw fighting in the streets of B'hala, the clash of desperate defenders against forces that seemed to emerge from the very stones beneath their feet. She saw a young Emissary standing amid the chaos, small against the violence gathering around her, carrying a light that seemed to hold the entire city together.

Then the struggle reached a turning point. The child fell, the light faltered, and the ancient prison beneath the Fire Caves began to break. One by one, the Wraiths emerged from their confinement, their power spreading through the land as the fires that had held them for millennia became a gateway to freedom.

The vision shifted again, and the devastation gave way to fields heavy with grain, villages rebuilt in peace, and people walking without fear beneath a bright and generous sky. The Wraiths stood as guardians of a new age, their followers honored as the ones who had helped bring it into being. There was no occupation, no persecution, no hunger, no endless cycle of resistance and retribution. There was only prosperity, stability, and the promise that Bajor would never again bow to an outside power.

A Golden Age, the voice whispered, and Faro felt the words settle into the hollow places grief had left inside her. For one terrible, beautiful moment, she wondered if this was what Brin had seen before he died. Perhaps he had been shown these same fields, this same peace, this same future in which their sacrifices finally meant something. Perhaps he had believed because the vision had been so beautiful that doubting it would have meant surrendering the last reason he had to keep fighting. Faro wanted to believe it too.

She was so tired of loss, so tired of running, so tired of carrying the memory of a dead man through a world that seemed determined to make his death meaningless. Brin had faced that promise with the strength of his convictions and the love they had shared. Faro had only the voice, her grief, and the desperate need to believe that there was still a path ahead of her.

When the caverns returned around her, she was trembling, tears cutting clean tracks through the ash on her cheeks. The molten river still roared below, and the Wraith's presence pressed against her thoughts with the intimacy of an old friend.

You have seen what awaits us. You know why we must continue. Faro stared into the red depths, no longer asking what the Wraith wanted from her. She was beginning to understand her role.

3 months later, Faro was still in B'Hala, masquerading as an archeologist assistant. She withdrew to the caves at night, as many on low wages tended to. Live off the land, scrape together what they could for food, and live in the wilderness.

The work offered a convenient excuse to ask questions, examine old ruins, and spend her days among people who had little reason to suspect her true purpose. At night, she withdrew to the caves beneath the Kendra Mountains, where she could sleep rough and live off the land, scraping together what she needed to survive. The arrangement suited her. She had learned to keep her head down, offer little about herself, and only allow others to see what she wanted them to see.

Beneath the ancient city, she could feel the Wraith's presence growing stronger. Something waited in the hidden chambers, a power bound to the Emissary alone.

She was aware of the energy within the underground, of the powerful text for the Emissary alone. Sooner or later the child would be drawn to it, and she would be waiting.

The Wraith had shown her the future, and Faro had accepted the part it had given her. She would be ready when the time came. She would bring the others to the threshold, see the old prison opened, and help usher in the Golden Age she had been promised.

Whatever doubts remained, she kept them buried beneath the certainty of that vision. She had spent too long searching for meaning in Brin's death to turn away now, when she finally believed she could see what it had all been for.


The Guardians - Following the Trail

"There." Patin pointed at the mountains. "We've been here before. You can almost taste the familiar, can't you?" She asked Marie. Just ahead of them, a small cabin in the mountains and a presence Patin was almost drawn to, like a friend she hadn't seen in a thousand years. Like a neon sign in the darkness.

"Who lives here?" Marie asked curiously, taking in the rudimentary structure and the air of strength that permeated the space.

Patin shrugged one shoulder. “I'm not sure, but I've got a hunch.” She studied the cabin, her eyes narrowing as she tried to place the familiar feeling. "Usually lives down in the jungles in the south, but I remember her mentioning a cabin out west, here in Kendra Province.” She tilted her head, taking in the rough structure and the unmistakable sense of someone living on her own terms. “Yeah. This feels like her.”

Almost as if the cabin had heard them, the door opened, and a warm square of light spilled across the ground outside. A shadow moved through it before a woman stepped into the doorway. She stood tall and proud, her bearing carrying a quiet strength that years of hardship had done little to diminish. One of her legs was missing below the knee, replaced by an artificial limb that caught the light as she shifted her weight. Patin's expression softened with recognition. “Zio.”


TBC



Inspiration: Mumford & Sons - 42
https://youtu.be/cSAlKS7oot8?si=ge6p6rktn2iqBkLt

Where do I turn to when there's no choice to make?
And how do I presume when there's so much at stake?
I was so sure of it all

But what if I need you in my darkest hour?
And what if it turns out there is no other?
If this is our last hope
We would see a sign, oh
We would see a sign

Well I've been running from the ashes we left
Forgiveness fends for itself but how can I forget
When there's a stain on it all

But what if I need you in my darkest hour?
And what if it turns out there is no other?
We had it all
If this is our time now
We wanna see a sign, oh
We would see a sign

So give us a sign
I need some guiding light
Children of darkness, oh

 

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