The Edge of Eternity ◂ Bad Batch

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐄𝐃𝐆𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐄𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐓𝐘

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❝The thought was this: 

that all my life had been murk and depths, 

but I was not a part of that dark water. 

I was a creature within it.❞

― MADELINE MILLER, Circe

◂ 𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐈𝐓 𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐁𝐄𝐆𝐈𝐍𝐒 ▸

𝐈𝐟 𝐬𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐢𝐞, Rowan Buteö had always thought she would come back as a bird of prey.

The ambiguous parallels between woman and creature were of grim delight, for she loved to live as feathers love to brush through air, as falcons love to tunnel through clouds, as irony loves to strike when least expected. But the promise rebirth is not a gift easily granted to the living; like any paradoxical renaissance, it glints with divine danger in the sunlight, a knife which can only be held at the blade.

Reincarnation of copper talons and splintered gaze, shifting defender of an iridescently crystallized, infinitely azure sky - it seemed all too tangible to the Jedi Knight, for people already seemed to see her as a winged ghost sprawling over the moon. Intimidation permeated the graceful honor that elevated Rowan's mystical role in the blossoming Order, that of a hawk swooping through the sky above all foes, daring nature to desire its distant vulnerability.

A strange sort of raw normality swirled within this daunting nonchalance, for she had little difficulty spotting her prey with the force flowing freely at her side. Strategy. Attack. Victory. Reservations about striking down enemies to the Republic with devastating blows were few, for was it not a waste to have power and never use it? Familiarity became a beacon of blinding hope within the isolated ways of the Jedi, justifying her apathetic faith without revealing the rot in its core. Even as the woman herself obliviously balanced upon a fraying patchwork of glory and despair, confidence's beauty prospered in the heights of ignorance.

But all that soars must eventually tumble back to the ground.

Rowan has fallen further than most and she plummets downward still, ribs crushing into a cage of dust, vertebrae snapping against choking, tar-like soil, on and on through incandescent magma and molten core until at last she has nowhere left to turn save for hellfire's obliteration. Yet she lives despite it all, not as a bird but as a murderer, trying to bring back the dead.