A Revelation of the Blade….

I found Tulak Hord in fragments.
 
Not in holocrons that preached, nor in tombs that threatened—those are for aspirants who need theater to believe. I found him in the residue of decisions: margins of vellum, the dry arithmetic of duel logs, the obsessive notes of archivists who tried to describe an outcome without understanding the cause.
The first scroll was a ledger of names. The second was a sequence of diagrams—arcs, angles, foot placements drawn with the indifference of a surgeon. The third was the only one that mattered: a commentary written by a student who had watched Hord fight and failed to imitate him.
 
He does not strike.
He edits.
 
I read that line until it stopped being metaphor.
 
Makashi was never “elegant.” That was the lie told by those who only saw its surface. Makashi is economy weaponized—pressure reduced to a line so thin it becomes fate. It is not flourish. It is refusal: refusal to waste motion, refusal to admit uncertainty, refusal to grant an opponent even one unnecessary breath. Tulak Hord understood this. He brought dueling to the edge of inevitability. But he still dueled within the assumption that form - Form II - was whole.
 
And I do not.
 
I do not seek mastery of a system. I seek transcendence of the system that claims it can contain me. The Force loops. The Jedi and Sith circle each other like moths around a lamp. Makashi, at its peak, becomes a loop too—predictable to those who know the grammar.
 
So I took his grammar. And I broke the sentence.
 
The First Discovery: The Line is Not the Weapon
 
The scrolls described his footwork with reverence: narrow stance, centered weight, minimal shifts. Hord cut the duel down to a corridor and forced his opponent to suffocate inside it.
I tried it at first as written.
The training chamber on Vel’korr Station is silent by design—no banners, no audience, no hymns. Only space, light, and consequence. I stepped into classical Makashi and let the first drill begin: measured thrusts, parries that ride the opponent’s blade rather than colliding, footwork that steals half-steps until the other fighter cannot tell when the distance changed.
 
It worked. Too well….that…. was the problem.
 
There is a satisfaction in Makashi that is too clean. It ends questions quickly. It corrects the body and then the body collapses and the mind follows. It is judgment, executed with grace.
But my doctrine is not judgment. My doctrine is Fear.
 
I need the opponent to feel the moment their certainty fails—not after, but during. I need fear to bloom as an instrument, not a byproduct. I need the duel to become a threshold where reality stutters.
 
So I began listening for what Makashi did not say.
 
It speaks of lines. It does not speak of angles that cannot be read.
It speaks of timing. It does not speak of timing that cannot be located.
It speaks of control. It does not speak of control that denies the opponent a stable reference for control at all.
 
I returned to Hord’s diagrams and noticed something the copyists did not: the places where he didn’t draw the blade. The blade, to him, was assumed. Always visible. Always declared.
 
That assumption would be my fracture point.
 
The Second Discovery: Obscura
 
I began with the hands.
 
A reverse grip is crude when used as a declaration—an assassin’s posture, a statement of unorthodoxy. It abandons the thrust, it collapses reach, it violates the very thing Makashi venerates.
So I did not reverse the blade.I inverted the assumption of front.
 
I rotated the hilts inward and turned my wrists so the blades emerged beneath the knuckles, canted behind the forearms at a shallow upward angle—fifteen degrees, then twenty, then back to fifteen. Not aligned with the arm like a dagger; not pointing at the floor like a guard. The blades existed in a place the eye did not want to track, partially occluded by bone and tendon and the simple fact that a forearm can hide what a mind expects to see.
 
The first time I held both sabers like this, the chamber felt colder. Not because the stance was dramatic, but because it was wrong in the way a broken law is wrong—quietly, inexorably, without asking permission.
 
I stood in the mirror and watched my silhouette fail to resolve. A duelist’s blade announces itself. Mine refused.
 
Good. Now I had to prove it could kill.
 
I began slowly, because biomechanics are not philosophy—they are physics.
 
The Obscura grip demanded a new relationship between wrist and elbow. In classical Makashi, the blade points where the knuckles point. The wrist aligns the edge with the thrust. In Obscura, the wrist is a hinge that hides intent until the last possible moment, then snaps the blade into relevance with a rotation so small it feels like a thought.
 
A strike from Obscura is not thrown…It is revealed.
 
At first, my forearms burned. The muscles that stabilize the wrist—flexors and extensors—had to work harder to hold the angle without tremor. I adjusted. Elbows closer to the ribs. Shoulders neutral. The spine upright. The weight shifted slightly forward onto my lead foot, not for speed, but for inevitability: every movement collapsing distance rather than testing it.
I refined the opening stance until it became a predatory stillness.
 
Left foot forward. Right foot back. Stance wider than orthodox Makashi, but not wide enough to be brute. Weight slightly biased to the front foot, the rear foot angled to drive diagonals. Torso upright. Shoulders neutral. Head slightly lowered. The blades trailed behind my forearms, partially hidden, humming where the opponent’s eye could not easily measure them.
 
I was no longer “waiting.” I was compressing.
 
Third-Person: What the Chamber Saw
From the far end of the room, the cameras recorded an image that did not match any form in the archives.
Vokun’zar stood angled, left foot forward, the line of his body calm as a statue. Both violet blades extended behind him, canted upward, their lengths broken by the silhouette of his own forearms. His hands hung at his sides, elbows close, as if the sabers were incidental—yet the air around him vibrated with contained violence.
When the training droid advanced, its sensors hesitated—unable to resolve the primary threat vector. It chose the centerline.
It died for that choice.
He did not swing.
His front foot pressed into the deck and he stepped forward as though closing a door. His right wrist rotated a few degrees inward and upward, and the blade—previously hidden—rose along a diagonal line that cut through the droid’s weapon arm at the elbow joint. The sever was clean, driven by wrist rotation and forearm stability rather than shoulder torque.
Before the arm hit the floor, his rear foot pivoted. The second saber—also in Obscura grip—snapped forward in a short thrust that traveled barely the length of his forearm, the point landing precisely at the center of the droid’s chassis. The thrust was not a lunge; it was a step-and-insert, powered by hip alignment and a forward-weighted stance.
The droid split and fell.
Vokun’zar’s shoulders never rose. His posture never “fought.”
Only the outcome moved.
 
The Third Discovery: Makashi Without Telegraph
 
The scrolls spoke of Makashi’s conversation: attack, response, counter-response. A language between duelists. I disliked that. Conversation implies equivalence.

I do not grant equivalence.
 
So I began altering Makashi’s most sacred element: its readability.
 
Classic Makashi announces its intent through perfect form. A trained opponent can “read” the line of attack as it forms—knowing not only where the blade will go, but when.
Obscura had already denied them clear orientation. Now I needed to deny them preview.
 
That required discipline. No shoulder roll before a cut. No elbow flare before a thrust. No weight shift that signals “now.” I drilled in front of a timing sensor array—light points that tracked micro-movements. Every tell was punished with a shriek of feedback. I learned to generate force from the feet and hips while keeping the upper body still, letting the wrists and forearms do the final articulation.
 
The stance became a lie: calm on the surface, predatory beneath. Then I layered Trakata—not as spectacle, but as punctuation.
 
The first time I extinguished a blade during a bind, I understood why lesser minds call it dishonorable. Their pride needs continuity. Their defense needs predictable resistance.
A bind is comfort. Trakata turns comfort into void.
 
I practiced the “vanishing” at contact: deactivate at the instant of pressure, allow the opponent’s blade to pass through empty space where resistance should be, then reactivate inside their guard before their nervous system can revise its prediction.
 
It required precision so severe it bordered on spiritual discipline. Too early and the opponent notices the absence. Too late and you are cut. Perfect timing feels like the universe blinking.
That became the doctrine.
 
Third-Person: The Refinement Becomes Visible
 
Weeks later, the sparring partner was no longer a droid. It was a living duelist in training armor—fast, competent, trained in orthodox Makashi. They circled at a respectful distance, searching for the line.
Vokun’zar did not circle.
He held the Predetermined Stance: angled body, left foot forward, weight biased front. Both sabers in Obscura grip, trailing behind his forearms like violet shadows that could not be measured.
The duelist stepped in with a precise thrust—classic Makashi, centerline claim.
Vokun’zar’s response was almost invisible: a fractional diagonal step forward, not away. His lead foot crossed the opponent’s line rather than yielding to it. The opponent’s thrust slid past his shoulder, missing by a margin so small it looked like luck.
It was not luck.
As the thrust passed, Vokun’zar’s left wrist rotated upward. The hidden blade rose beneath the opponent’s guard and severed the tendons of the weapon wrist with a surgical cut—upward, controlled, powered by the feet and stabilized by the elbow close to the ribs.
The opponent tried to recover—instinctively seeking a bind, seeking contact, seeking something real.
Vokun’zar offered it for half a heartbeat.
Blades met.
Pressure.
Then the violet blade vanished.
The opponent’s saber passed through nothing. Their balance lurched forward—brain expecting resistance, body committing to it.
A second later the blade returned—not outside the guard, not in an arc, but inside. The violet line appeared at the opponent’s throat level with no visible wind-up, driven by a small forward step and a short wrist extension.
The duel ended as quickly as a thought completes.
Vokun’zar did not hold a finishing pose.
He simply lowered his hands again, blades trailing behind the forearms, and the opponent fell into the Truth of what had happened: they had been fighting a form that refused to exist in the place they were looking.
 
My Final Refinement: Expedience as Doctrine
 
There is a temptation, once you learn to make opponents hesitate, to luxuriate in it—to extend the fear, to savor the unraveling. That temptation is for tyrants who need applause from their victims.
 
I do not need applause. Fear is not entertainment.
 
Fear is revelation.
 
So I refined Makashi Obscura toward expedience: the art of ending the fight at the first point the opponent becomes vulnerable—psychologically, structurally, temporally.
I kept the stance. I tightened the first movement. I made the openings fewer, cleaner, more lethal. The Predetermined Stance now serves a single purpose: compress the duel until the opponent commits, then terminate the commit.
 
Every strike is biomechanically honest:
Cuts driven by foot pressure and hip alignment, not shoulder flailing
Thrusts inserted by step timing, not lunges that gamble balance
Wrist rotations small enough to evade telegraph, strong enough to control the blade plane
Elbows kept close to protect the shoulder line and preserve speed of recovery
Diagonal advances that steal angles rather than chase distance
 
Makashi Obscura is not acrobatics. It is not intimidation by posture. It is the surgical denial of options.
 
Tulak Hord turned dueling into a ritual of judgment.
I took his ritual and made it a threshold.
 
Now, when I assume the stance—angled, weight forward, gaze lowered—the duel has already begun. Not because I invited it. Because I have already chosen the only ending I will allow.
 
And when the blades rise from beneath the forearms—hidden vectors made manifest—the opponent learns the central truth of Makashi Obscura:
Form was never the weapon.
The weapon is the moment they realize they cannot find the rules.
And by the time they realize it,
The Truth has already judged them.