Dynasty

iv. THE ANATOMY OF WAR

iv.
THE ANATOMY OF WAR

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"You live in me. Malignant."
— Louise Glück, Firstborn

Violence begets violence. Hate brings hate.

It wasn't a difficult concept to grasp. In a galaxy that had been ravaged by one war after another, for aeons and aeons laid end-to-end, the trajectory of violence was encoded to memory—for some more than others.

It was a cycle, a circle perfectly-drawn and sharply cut: it began with anger, like a snake slithering through the grass, stomach swollen with a rodent feast, fangs bared and dripping with venom. And like venom, anger attacked the systems of the body, triggering all sorts of unsavoury reactions, affecting aggression, a primitive urge, in every muscle, tissue and cell, in every fibre of one's being.

A corrupting and compulsive force, it led to action.

And action leads to consequences.

And if you were the right type of person—or perhaps, the wrong type—those consequences would have you find yourself right back at the beginning of it all, at square one. At anger.

At the serpent, just before it strikes.

Ancient and reptilian, that cosmic ouroboros was what Mandalore had come to know. As constant as a planet's orbit around its sun, it did not come without its casualties—casualties that could be seen, immortalised, on Mandalore's surface, in the way that the planet's terrain had been rendered so barren by battle after battle that any city, any attempt at civilisation (or recuperation) had to be constructed within the safety of glass domes. In the way that Mandalore's neutral alignment was considered laughable by most, who didn't consider peace to be a word that even existed in Mandalore's vocabulary, let alone a word comprehensible by its people.

In the way that, even now, when no blood is shed on Mandalorian soil, the sight of a Beskar-steel helmet could still strike fear into the hearts all across the galaxy.

Fallon often wondered if the generations before her had been warriors from the very start. She had been lucky, she supposed—although Mandalore's militant days were long gone by her time, her connection to the Force, present since birth, had guaranteed her a life of indoctrinated purpose in the Jedi Order. Fulfilling the Mandalorian legacy—or creating her own—had never been a burden she was expected to shoulder.

But some fraction of Fallon—some sliver of a shadow self, some stray shard of mirror broken from an otherwise perfect reflection—wanted to know if that desire for destruction was hereditary. If her forebearers had left the womb with their hands, their hearts, aching for bloodshed. If they were natural-born killers, their fates already carved into the cosmos as dictated by the savagery of those who had come before.

Some fraction of Fallon wanted to know if that savagery ran through her veins, too; if it lay dormant, just waiting to be awakened, readied for the strike of a match.

On second thought, maybe savagery wasn't the right word. It suggested disorder—something carnal, uncontrollable. And if Mandalorians (or what Fallon knew of them) were anything, they were methodical. Meticulous. To them, combat was an art form: it deserved to be exhibited in all its glory, in all shades of red, violence, viscera.

Yet there was no way anyone could look at the Temple archives on Coruscant and admit, without lying, that there wasn't something barbaric about the ways of Mandalorians past. Something beastlike.

Semantics aside, there comes the next sequence in the natural train of thought: if Mandalorians were expected to be violent, was that the reason they grew to be?