Barriss Offee: The Scarred Healer by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Barriss-Offee-The-Scarred-Healer-1249601170#image-1

Barriss Offee: The Scarred Healer ANIMATION

Tongued Night

Bariss Offee had learned to read absence. In the temple corridors silence had contours and cadence; in the hush of a bivouac the gaps between breaths told you when a sentinel had crept close. She practiced listening as other people practiced swordplay: the muscles internalized it until interpretation came without thinking. That skill had always been more than craft; it was a small magic.

The crater wanted to be understood.

It sat at the city's edge like a removed eye, an indented geometry of stone and shadow. Locals inched their carts wide of it, and shipwrights crossed to the far side of the quay so that the crater’s unease could not lick at their ankles. Merchants told stories of a thing that gulped memories like fish, of a sound like the scraping of coins inside a chest. Bariss went because the Force shaped the notion into a question she could not ignore. She did not like unanswered questions.

The rim was warm when she touched it, as if heat pooled beneath like blood. When she crouched and peered down, the darkness inside did not so much absorb light as negotiate with it. Something in the bowl shifted as she leaned forward — a patient, hollow pulse that translated across skin into meaning. It felt like a slow throat clearing.

"You ask to be heard," she said aloud. Speech was a tool to map a strange place; saying a thing made it more legible. "Tell me what you are."

A pressure at the base of her skull answered, like a hand laid over a sleeping heart. "We remember," the crater said. The word was many voices at once — wind in a stairwell, the rustling of paper, a child's whisper. "We gather what slips. We taste.

"We are hungry."

The seduction arrived not as a lash but as curiosity. The crater did not roar; it offered. It drew images from her mind with such particularity that Bariss felt seen: the exact pitch of a laugh she had once given a friend in the rain, the name of a village whose sign had been erased in the maps, the melody of a lullaby hummed by a woman who was not her mother. Each revelation was presented with the intimacy of a suitor who knows the small shapes of your hands.

"Why?" she asked. Curiosity had a moral edge; it could be a weapon.

"Because forgetting is a hunger," it said. "The world discards. We keep what is dropped."

The crater's voice threaded temptingly around her, shaping images into warm offers. It promised maps to secret archives, the location of a ledger that recorded deliberate oblivion, the truth of which officials had decreed certain names to vanish. Knowledge hummed like nectar in the air. The Force whispered in counterpoint — caution and wanting braided together.

She could have left. Many would have. But Bariss had always felt that there were layers to compassion: one might be generous to others yet careless with oneself. She moved into the shadow and felt the ground pulse against her boots, a heartbeat that felt less alive than intent. The crater asked for a trade: remembrance for direction. It wanted what was easiest to take — small memories, private notes. Bariss could have denied it, but the ledger it promised might repair a community's loss.

"You will not be appeased by mere names," she said to the dark, bargaining in the tongue of her training. "Show me the ledger and I will tell of you in return."

"We prefer truth," the crater intoned, but its voice was interested by nuance. "We take what drops. We accept gifts."

Marek came down the slope at the chosen moment, as if summoned by the rust of occasion. He was a practical man with a face like a cautionary tale; his rope and lamp announced himself as a flavor of help that was half rescue, half salvage. "Bariss," he said, winded, "you look like you've been listening to saints and lost your mind."

"I listen to what speaks," she answered without smiling. "It says it will provide a ledger."

He peered into the blackness and did not joke further. "Ledgers are good. Ledgers have fingers you can hold."

They spoke to each other to keep the geometry of the place from swallowing them. The crater, patient and persuasive, filled the bowl with images that moved like fish in a lantern-glass. It offered the exact coordinates of a sunken chest beneath the old bell tower; a key in a quay-stone; the handwriting of the committee that had decided what and who to erase. The seduction worked by being useful. Marek's mouth went dry at the tho
...(more at https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai).
For more supergirl, chun li, batgirl, tifa, lara croft, wonder woman, rogue and much more, please visit my page at www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai - Thanks for your support :)