Gonnmakh

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Gonnmakh was born into Raffik's holdings on Rattatak. Not a village, not a clan. A facility with cells under it and fighting pits attached, run by an Arkanian Offshoot who bought and grew people for a living and refused to be called a slaver. Raffik called himself the Curator. He called his slaves pieces and his pits a trial of perfection. The distinction mattered a great deal to Raffik. It never once mattered to Gonnmakh. Thousands came through that intake. Most were broken, sold off, or discarded inside a season for being unremarkable. Gonnmakh's file stayed open: high physical potential, unstable emotional profile.

The Chair

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He was eight the first time they strapped him into it. A conditioning chair wired to read his brain while it punished it. Every spike the sensors caught, fear, anger, hesitation, pain, earned a current fired straight into whatever part of him had produced it. Hours at a stretch, then weeks of hours. He learned what the chair wanted faster than most did. Feel nothing where the sensors can see it, and bury the rest under flat, literal thought. He was the second subject to come out the other side of that particular process, and Raffik shelved the project afterward to study him rather than build another one. It did not stop at eight, or at ten, or at twenty. The sessions ran for seventeen years, until the day he was sold off the planet, and his body kept the record of every one of them. Under the armor he is covered in electrical scarring, pale branching lines across his back, his chest, and the insides of his arms, where the current went into the same places often enough to leave roots. There was no stretch of his life that was not this.

An Unforeseen Variable

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The chair was meant to produce obedience. What it produced, between the sessions and the pits, was a body that had stopped filing pain as information worth reacting to. He took hits in the sand that should have folded him and did not change his stance. Opponents wore themselves out on his guard, and then he hit them once. Raffik had not designed for that, which delighted him more than any result he had planned for. He grew attached the way a collector does. Gonnmakh was written up, shown to buyers, called the great success of his mid-career work.

Manners

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The pits were the loud part of Raffik's business. Above them sat the gamblers and the buyers, and Gonnmakh could hear them through the floor of his cell. He worked out early that the people holding the whip spoke softly and the people dying in the sand did not. Raffik never raised his voice at all. So he taught himself to stand straight in the dark, to speak in short clean sentences, and to bow properly. There was nothing proud in it. A piece that looked refined was worth keeping. A piece that looked like a pit beast got logged as a failed prototype and cleared out.

What Raffik Never Found

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Behind the posture was a fast, funny, genuinely clever mind, and both of those qualities would have gotten him killed. Raffik's optics read pupils, breathing, and the small movements of a face. So Gonnmakh put the wit somewhere the lenses could not reach and left it there for seventeen years. He watched overseers make idiotic decisions and said nothing. He watched buyers get cheated and said nothing. He got very good at deciding what would have been worth saying.

Bought Out

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He was twenty five when a Sith Lord came through Rattatak looking for brutes and found something else instead: Gonnmakh standing over Selkoth, a Rattataki he had been fighting since they were both boys, with the crowd screaming for a finish and Gonnmakh declining to give it to them. Asked why, he said there was no glory in killing the broken. The Lord paid Raffik's price. Raffik lost the best piece in his collection and had no standing to refuse a Sith. Gonnmakh left the planet with the conditioning fully intact and no intention of ever seeing it again.

Learning to Think

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For most of his life he did exactly what he was told and nothing past it. Under Raffik, a piece that improvised was a piece that got corrected, so he executed the order in front of him and left the rest alone. That habit is gone. It went slowly over his first years off Rattatak, as it sank in that nobody was going to wire him to anything for having a second thought. What grew in its place is not subtlety. He is still perfectly willing to answer a problem by walking straight through it, and he knows that is what people expect of him, which is occasionally useful. But he plans now, further ahead than he lets on, and it turns out he has a real talent for it. Obedience became judgment, and the wit he spent seventeen years hiding stopped being a pressure valve and started being something he aims. The ones who still see a pit brute holding a title tend to learn otherwise at an inconvenient moment.

What the Chair Took

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The conditioning did not only teach him to hide what he felt. It cut most of the capacity out. For the better part of two decades he did not experience fear or grief or fondness so much as note that the conditions for them were present, and then carry on with the task. That much has come back to him since Rattatak, slowly and with no grace whatsoever, and he is still getting used to the volume. What has not come back is any ability to look inward. He can read a room, an opponent, or a chain of command faster than anyone standing in it. Ask him what he feels about any of it and he will hand you a fact about the situation instead, and he will not notice that he has done it.

Nothing Wasted

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He is not squeamish and he is not gentle. If a problem is best answered by putting someone through a wall, he will do it and give it no further thought. What he will not do is waste. Raffik discarded thousands of people for the crime of being unremarkable, and Gonnmakh watched that from inside the cells for seventeen years, so the instinct set the other way in him. A captive knows something. A beast can be worked. A relic can be studied, and he studies, because knowledge left on a shelf is the same as a corpse left in the sand. An enemy allowed to walk away owes him, and a debt is worth more than a body. Mercy, when he grants it, is usually the long calculation rather than the soft one, and he is entirely honest about that when asked.

A Word Is Iron

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The exception is his word. Once given it is not open to revision, and he has taken real losses over that which a more flexible man would have stepped around. He does not present it as virtue. He presents it as the one piece of himself that nobody installed. Raffik built the discipline, the pain tolerance, the posture, the silence, and can take credit for all of it. The decision to be a man whose word holds was the first thing Gonnmakh ever chose with no sensor watching to see what he would do, and he has no intention of trading it for anything, least of all an advantage.

Present Day: The Lord Trial

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His trial for the rank of Lord wanted a kill that cost him something, so he went back to Rattatak. He came in through the front of the facility, past guards who had held him down as a child, and killed Raffik in his own laboratory. Gonnmakh took the base, the staff, the cells, and the title along with them.

Present Day: The New Curator

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He walked the cells himself. Anyone still recognisable as a person he cut loose and paid off the planet. The subjects too far gone, and the guards who had done the holding down, he kept, and he broke them properly first. Raffik's methods work. That is the part he cannot get around, and he knows precisely what using them makes him. The lab still runs. He pays scientists well to work it and to send him their reports, and he goes down there as rarely as he can manage. The chair is still in the building. He has never given a reason for that and nobody has asked twice. He commissioned a station instead and put it in orbit over Rattatak, and from up there he can see the whole planet and touch none of it. It is the first thing he has ever owned that was built for him rather than around him.

Key Figures

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Selkoth: childhood rival, fought since they were both boys in Raffik's pits, alive because Gonnmakh would not finish him. Raffik, the Curator: former owner, Arkanian Offshoot geneticist and flesh merchant, dead by Gonnmakh's hand during his Lord trial. Gonnmakh holds the title and the facility now, and wants neither.