The stone floors were warm to the touch, heated by an ancient and antiquated system of steam pipes installed over a thousand years ago, throughout the main temple complex to drive the frigid cold of the mountain peaks upon which the complex was built even longer before, in Q’no’os’s Antiquity.

In that time, before Kahless and the Age of Honour and Glory, there had been an unknowable Age of Blood and Darkness, where the Klingon Homeworld had been wracked by undignified warlords and shameful invasions from the stars. 

It had been in this time that a group of Klingon women fled into the deep mountains and founded the temple as a sanctuary of learning. Their study of the invader’s technology and sciences made them labeled as witches by the lowland warlords and they leaned into the implied mysticism to keep those warlords at bay through fear, naming themselves the Hellborn and Daughters of Gre’thor…when one of those Warlords rose above the fear to call their bluff and begin trekking up the mountains with an army to face them, the female monks became assassins, slaying the warlord with esoteric techniques and infiltration of his camp in the night, leaving such a scene as a warning to his warriors to find in the morning and become gripped in fear.

Or so some of the legends of the Daughters’ genesis stated. As with most Klingon stories, the truth was somewhere in there, behind many imperfect retelling and biased embellishments…though, the temple monastery was indeed ancient, and up until the Duras Rebellion, had been an unconquered and unbreached fortress.

Now it, the real one and not the holographic facsimile that currently occupied the demanse of Holodeck 2, was all but a smote and blasted ruin, haunted by the ghosts of memory of those few Daughters who were left, scattered to the galactic winds.

Q’orvha, had such memories and had been such a Daughter…and her program, Q’orvha-Calisthenics-2, was a means of engaging and utilizing those memories for pursuits both practical and spiritual. Like a storm, the memories illicted the calm of many days spent in meditation and both the raging fires of rage and the depths of sadness and despair from when she had learned of the Monastery’s and her Order’s, destruction. It was in the middle of such differing emotions, where clarity of purpose and intent could be found for the aging Klingon Nun…where her strength could gathered and then released out into reality.

A reality that currently included her opponents, photonic skeletal-like enemies that had been lifted from another calisthenics program found in the Starfleet Security Training database.

When extended through her arms and released via her hands and elbows, it allowed her to break through her opponents bodies…when released through her legs, it allowed her to close the gap between her targets and move right through the arc of her opponents swinging bladed arsenal. It reinforced her hearts and both sets of lungs, to push her further at this quickened pace for longer.

Though she was getting on in her years, that energy, combined with her furthered mastery of the physical techniques employed in her vicious variation of Mok’bara combat, allowed her to fight like she was still in the physical prime of her youth, which had ended some 30-odd years ago.

She allowed the energy to still well up within her, even after she landed the last flying elbow to the holographic alien, which fell to the ground with a visceral thud. She maintained it even as her fallen foes vanished from the photonic temple-scape, as the program reset itself…she only allowed the energy to disperse with a long exhalation of breath, once she had scanned the simulation several times and made certain her area was clear of hostiles.

Even with that energy gone, the Monastery remained in her memory still…and like much like the hardlight projections around her, it remained now only as imagined ghosts.Like so much and so many that had been part of the Warrior-Nun’s life.

Q’orvha breathed deeply of the simulated cold alpine air and kneeled down in the centre of her haunted temple of ghosts, closing her eyes and whispering an old mantra in Klingon to herself, followed by the names of the fallen Daughters of Gre’thor…now all but ghosts, themselves.