The Old Sith Trials

There was a malignant silence. It enveloped the Empress, dragging her and her thoughts toward it. An event horizon, a threshold that suddenly edged closer just as quickly as the silence had fallen upon her shoulders.

Though she had attempted to follow in Særli’s path, she could not. Her muscles halted her. She staggered, a hand inching out to steady her - though she had willed it to shoot out and grab hold of the nearest piece of sterile furniture. Her unwilling steps backward brought her to a unyielding chair, the body of Hjör relenting to it as they collided, flopping un-regally into it.   

As she attempted to regain control of her mind, another darkness fell upon her - a shooting pain through her knees as she was forced to the stone ground with great force...and Force. She instantly recognised the signature, though could not will her body bid him welcome in the tomb - her mind yet enraptured by whatever wrought such a terrible silence. It felt almost as a sickness, but to her assessment, neither her ethereal form, nor Hjör, nor her true form was under such influence. With whatever it was escaping her search and inspection, she only hoped it a something transient.   

She exhaled - automatic body functions seemingly still free from the paralysing grasp - letting her eyes fall shut into a momentary trance. She could hear most everything with pinpoint accuracy of a Force user, but the sources melded together.   

Guard Viscretus, she heard, though what she recognised as the hiss of Dreadwar seemed as close - and as far - as the murmuring of Lak and the nurses at the station mere paces away. A flare of frustration ignited in her chest, chasing away her attempt at concentration. Her fist attempted to curl, a symbolic action more than anything as she tried to break through the mental sludge.

The recent events flashed before her eyes in a dizzying blur; she saw the fountain of energy erupting from the sarcophagus like the volcanoes of Mustafar, ash and decay wreathing a dark form like a cloud. The Dread-king. She understood now. His tomb. She remembered the vision she had beheld in his sanctum, of a man with cold eyes and an angular face; that had been Ku'ar Danar, then, the man who had become the wraith. 

Her attempt at bridging the gap over such a vast space, to envelop the presence of Hjörþrimul on the Triumphant, was becoming more and more difficult. The rushing, churning of recent events had the feel of her senses catching up to her, perhaps some effect of the time dilation increasingly affecting the Triumphant. It was amplified by the presence of the Dread Lord, her perception ebbing toward darkness as she felt herself being pulled into the void of his presence, the strain of distance making the singularity's pull all the more inescapable.

She realised she was being consumed.  

With a gasp, she attempted to regain control, the setting of the Triumphant's medbay fading behind her as she poured her effort into escaping the singularity's claws. With some effort, she was able to pull free, and her vision refocused, physical sight taking the place of mental, as she stared at the retreating black cloak. Even his presence was perilous.  

Fear not, little dove, the whisper flooded her mind. I would have not let you fall far. 

Wind whipped at her raiment, and with some degree of surprise Viscretus realised she had followed the cloak unthinkingly, as if on autopilot, out of the labyrinth of the crypt the Emperor claimed his own. She stood once again in the cool bliss of Korriban's atmosphere, air as cold as the grave reinvigorating her with a sense of power and purpose, as she gazed out onto the eerie beauty of the Valley of the Dark Lords. 

The pull she had felt on her soul was symptomatic of the wound in the Force. That wound had reached out, and where the Force once existed in Jania Kio, there was only nothingness; an absence, a pit in Viscretus' stomach that gnawed at frayed nerves like the teeth of a sarlacc. She had seen this before, somehow, somewhere, and knew that Jania Kio had died with the Force within her; no one could withstand being severed from the energy of life with such abrupt cruelty. 

To one strong in the Force as Viscretus, the thought made her shudder - and question. She was not courting a man. She was courting a cosmic horror. What that boded for her was uncertain, but she thrived on uncertainty, fed on possibility. It was said that men feared the unknown. For Viscretus, the unknown titillated, fear the ambrosia that made her heady with power, the secret thrill that sharpened her hyperaware mind to the point of a knife.

And so Viscretus followed, silently, gaze lingering as Darth Dreadwar led them to the Valley's head, comforted only marginally by the presence of her friend and ally Apollyon. The Emperor's Hand regarded Jania's murder with the haughty disdain of religious confidence and moral superiority, black glass reflecting only sand as she raked the site of death with her empty eyes, an ancient proverb on the tip of her tongue; "From dust we came, and unto dust we must return." To Apollyon, anything the Lord Dreadwar did was just; how could it be wrong, when morality was defined by the dictates of the gods? She knew her worshipful adoration of her master was frowned upon by the Sith of the New Order; she could still hear the whispers of derision around the dining table, feel the stares of judgement from the Temple's alcoves. The other Sith knew no master but themselves, or perhaps the dark side, and they made it their task to remind her. But Apollyon knew better.

Darth Dreadwar had created the very Sith Order. There was no accounting his age, no ending his existence. He was the comforting monolith of eternal power, as unyielding as the bedrock of Korriban, and the woman once known as Zelashiel had reached the only conclusion she thought sane, a conclusion she knew from her studies the ancient Sith people had reached, when they had yet been ruled by Kings rather than Dark Lords, of which Dreadwar was the first; the now-Emperor was a deity. Her life, the life of all life in the galaxy, was putty in his hands. He sought the betterment of all things, but Apollyon grasped that one needed to break a few eggs to make an omelette. Jania had been a bad egg, that much was visible from the beginning; a chowderheaded cur too motivated by lubricious loins, seemingly missing the point that the Sith Code's appeal to passion was not so crudely simple as slaking one's salacious thirst for sex and self-indulgence.

She would be missed, for Apollyon found herself in possession of a love for life uncommon among Sith, but she would be missed later, in the privacy of conflicted meditation. For now, there was only time for satisfaction at beholding the punishing power of her god, and her slender, caramel-skinned face pinched into a brief scowl like stapled bundles of oiled suede. For her blasphemous disrespect, Jania had deserved the anathema only the Emperor could bestow. And they call me "the Blasphemer," Apollyon thought, ruminating on the other Sith's choice labels for her devotion. The injustice!

She nodded approvingly at Neoplix's handiwork, at the scripture he wrought through sand and stone, and moved on. Darth Dreadwar had rounded the bend of the Valley's head, past the abandoned pyramid of the ancient Academy, and Apollyon followed, the landscape broadening out to a forsaken desert littered with the forlorn ruins of Dreshdae. Apollyon could not resist the charm of Catalyst's banter, and joined in his jibing with Xirr - but this time, with rhetorical collateral: Catalyst's new apprentice. "Careful, Gen'Dai," she chuckled at Neoplix, who had used his pilfered talisman to transform into a Tuk'ata, "or Lord Xirr here might gut you for his ritual. It was Tuk'ata entrails you needed, right, Xirr?" She smiled coyly at the armoured Sith Lord, blinking in faux innocence worthy of Robyn Shaire.

The Gen'Dai-cum-Tuk'ata had demonstrated a cloying if clever degree of subservience in kissing the sand at Catalyst's boots, but Apollyon still remembered the brute's folly in the treasure chamber. Nonetheless, she did not poke at him in lingering punition; instead, she hoped engendering an amiable dynamic between the two Lords of Wit and the one's apprentice might reward the more compliant Neoplix with a sense of belonging. And what of my own apprentice?

A shadow of melancholy touched Apollyon's countenance, as a cloud dims the waving of golden grain. She had been without a pupil for many years, the memory of betrayal still too bitter a sting. Apollyon felt for her abdomen, tracing the scar beneath the leatheris, each step forwards bringing her one second further away from the most painful memory of her life. But pain provided purpose, and one could not be frightened by the past's ghosts forever. She had lost a child that had been thrust upon her, but the memory couldn't help but make her think of the plight of the twins, how the assassin sisters, as much as they tried to mask it with leather and indifference, were simply young girls, thrust into the merciless realm of Korriban from the mercantile world of criminality.

The one called Scionica had caught Apollyon's eye. Kevala had shielded her eyes - and her mind - from the distressing sight of Jania's annihilation, and Apollyon could understand why; they'd shared a kiss in the tomb, less than an hour ago. Scionica had the makings of a true Sith, and the gentler hand of Apollyon could prove to be the caress needed to mend her fractured mind, and coax out the darkness from between the cracks. "Oh, Sci," Apollyon said, using the nickname to provoke familiarity, cocking a caramel finger in a summoning gesture. "Keep up, my master walks fast," she chuckled, eyeing the Emperor ahead striding across the sands. "What do you plan to do when we get back to the Temple?" They were in the shadows of the mountain, now, the Temple already visible up the narrow mountain pass, the remains of the Tuk'ata pack that had assaulted them strewn around boulders at its base - the site of the twins' botched assassination.

But Scionica was distracted. Apollyon's was not the only question she heard. Into her mind, and her twin's, a whisper slithered, a slow thought that crept like a cold worm all through the brain - a thought not their own. What do you plan to do at all, my pets beloved? Was it Apollyon layering her voiced question with telepathic probing, or something more sinister?

---

Across the desert, Jacen Thilly stared out across the dunes, squinting through the billowing dust. The ruins of the ancient city were sufficiently far away so as to appear tiny; even obelisks that were surely twenty meters tall appeared like needles in a haystack of toppled pillars. For a moment, Jacen thought he made out tiny distant dark spots in the haze, perhaps a pack of native fauna crossing the desert, but then it was gone, barred from view by a stretch of stone wall that, unlike the rest of the twisted, folded structure, was still erect.

He turned from scanning the horizon to Voidwalker beside him, thorny eyebrows raised at the Sith's dreadful omen. What the beveldook was the man talking about? More of that Jedi magic, he supposed. Still, as far as usual tools to have by your side, extrasensory perception was pretty high up on the league tables, and Jacen had no intention of ignoring Voidwalker's dire proclamation. The guy had bust a fleet-killer with nothing but his magic. Jacen had been too busy at the controls, facing forwards, to see Voidwalker's face then, but he imagined it would have sported nothing more than apprehension, or more probably the confidence his godlike powers gifted him; what he saw now was pure terror.

"Now that," Jacen pointed a finger at Karina accusatorily, "is why we're not just gonna go moseying up to the Temple doors and kill them. These Sith, they're like Jedi if Jedi didn't have a stick up their asses. Nah, instead, these Sith, they'll drive that stick up ours, after beating us over the head with it." Jacen shook his head. "We can't kill the guards, we'll be antagonising a whole Temple of 'em. We should come up with an excuse to get in. They don't need to know we're from the freighter," Jacen thumbed behind him, "we can just say we came with the latest batch of wannabe students or something. I bet they get shipments full of those greedy fuckers all the time." Jacen chuckled, before catching Voidwalker's eye, instantly sobering. "Uh, no offense, mighty Dark Lord. I'm a greedy fucker, ha."

Behind him, the three spider bikes were being gingerly lowered from the boarding ramp as Jacen had requested. The Captain once again waved the crew off, repeating his instructions to stay with the ship and attempt repairs, and as crew members either retreated into the ship's engine rooms, or plonked themselves down on the dune to eat their rations, an opportunity presented itself to Nannley. The Cathar had stowed away on the Artificer when it was at port on Onderon, having learned of the brothel-keeper Garn's dual role as a collector of Sith artifacts, and deducing the wares he had entrusted to Jacen's smugglers were not for the pleasure houses of Lyss.

It had been a bumpy ride, but the deduction had paid off. She had felt the Artificer resign itself to gravity, redistributing the vicissitudes of torque through its thousand tiny joists and connectors with a deep and exhausted sigh, followed by a violent bang and a final groan of twisted metal. Nannley could feel the dark side all around her, permeating the durasteel confines of her hiding place like the ghastly hand of a specter, its clammy grasp deathly cold around her heart. There was no mistaking it. She had made it to Korriban.

---

The Temple the Artificer's daring adventurers desired to breach was not devoid of its own intrigue. In the medbay, Zhav'vorsa and Zul'tar squared off, the Warlord of the Howling Blade chastising the hermit who had deserted his clan. The exchange of gruff words were well within Bellorum's earshot, but quite outside her comprehending; she was a cultured Sith, of Chiss heritage blended with human avarice with all the cultivated care of horticulture, and the barbaric tongue of Dathomir was not something she had ever cared to learn. Emphasis on cared; her intellect was more than sharp enough to poke and pry apart the complexities of the language, but it was the language of people beneath her.

Nonetheless, she saw no need to quell their bickering. Darth Coatlec slumping to the floor was enough to draw eyes from a future of bloodshed, Bellorum's own crimson gaze falling on the hoary Lord's withered form. "I think he needed more rest," a chuckle bubbled from Bellorum's throat as if rising from a brook of sweet blood, her tone murderously sanguine as it was cloyingly saccharine. "Silly Turncoatlec," she tutted, already branding the exhausted Sith Lord with her signature derisive nicknames. She toed the prone form with the tip of her boot, and shrugged as she looked back the two barbarians.

"Well, I guess it's just us, boys," she smirked.

---

Hundreds of feet beneath them, separated by a thousand tons of rock and a hundred hidden clefts, Arcane gripped on to life by the tips of his fingers, as the girth of the Sith wyrm rolled by. "Well, that was ridiculous!" he shouted at Ermir as he rejoined his teacher on the bridge, racing from the mammoth beast's squamous bulk towards the subterranean sept. "Now what?! We don't have a lot to go on. Can we outrun this thing?"

Ermir Marcus held up a hand in warning, desperately hoping his pupil was not fool enough to charge head-long into the shield that had repelled him. "We can't outrun it, you bloody monkey!" Ermir shouted, creativity in the art of insults falling aside to lazily broad brushes of denigration, callously calumniating Arcane's intellect as usual. "If we want to get inside the tomb, we've gotta disable the shield, and, oh, I don't know, if I was a Sith Lord designing a sadistic trap," Ermir's voice rose higher and higher in vitriolic sarcasm, as the Sith wyrm aborted its failed roll, lashing about and beginning to undulate towards them, "I'd totally not make the shield dependent on defeating the giant monster or anything!"

With another roar, the wyrm dove towards them, and Ermir jumped sideways into the moat as the thing's vast maw smashed into the stone bridge, hurling his lightsaber like a larang towards the wyrm's small dim eyes. The blade missed, but it did gouge deep, steam rising from the slick flesh, and the wyrm issued a furious roar, snapping towards Arcane ahead of it as if exacting a debt Ermir had passed to him - and taking loathsome delight in its divine station as both creditor and collector.

---

The Triumphant, en route to the Nihil Retreat


Lord of Destruction

Simmins slumped to the floor with a scabrous sigh of death, gravity pulling his crimson-swathed body from the roiling plasma of his partner's blade. The lightsaber had boiled the blood of Simmins' freshly-gouged chest cavity, steam curling away from the wound alongside the sick scent of cooked flesh. Krar Setura looked at the corpse with dispassion. It had made sense, she decided. Simmins always had looked at her queer, lust building behind those wet bulbous eyes like water about to break a dam. Closing those eyes forever, and thus closing the awkward potential of ever being the recipient of unwanted advances, seemed like the right thing to do.

And Nox Talus, the man placed in her charge, really seemed like an okay sort of fellow, when she thought about it. “Well, that was unseen,” he joked as he stepped out into the hall. He had a good sense of humour. “Now remove these cuffs and get me to that medbay!” A bit demanding, but she understood why; those handcuffs probably chafed something awful. He just seemed like such a friendly guy, and she didn't know why she'd been so suspicious of him before.

She should have reserved all that suspicion for her friend with the wandering eyes! Setura frowned, briefly, glancing back at the corpse and wondering if he'd really deserved to die, given he hadn't actually ever flirted with her. Maybe not, but... It felt right, somehow. It felt like she'd had no choice in the matter. Oh well. Setura shrugged, and said, "Sure," leaning down to unlock Nox's cuffs. With a clink, they separated and dropped to the deck, and Setura nodded at him. "You're an okay guy, Talus," she said, smiling slightly. "Come on, this way to the medbay." And then, with one last look at Simmins, poor dead Simmins, she began jogging off.

Bulkhead after bulkhead blurred by.

Surprisingly, it took only minutes for the two to navigate the Triumphant's labyrinthine passageways, the brig being in relatively close proximity to the hangar whence Nox had came, and thus to the nearest medbay Alisha Tano had been whisked off to. But that proximity did not necessarily do Nox any favours. Krar Setura might have been brought successfully under his control, but there were more than Imperial Knights walking the Triumphant's decks, now, and as Krar Setura rounded a bend, she almost ploughed straight into Sabba, exiting the medbay with Vassago's staff in-hand.

"Sorry, girl," Krar Setura said, gruffly. Sabba would recognise the uniform of the red-armoured Imperial Knights under Shira's command, but she would recognise Nox, as well; she had been at the altercation outside the hangar, where the Empress had instructed the unconscious Jedi refugee be taken away in handcuffs. With a nod of apology, Krar moved to step past Sabba into the medbay.

In the medbay, Doctor Lak turned to regard Xal'den with gentle eyes. He placed a calming hand on the alien's shoulder, and nodded. "Of course you can, my friend," he said, wanly. "Even if she's asleep, she'll be able to feel you."

Shira A'dola, meanwhile, finally caught up with Særli. The Vahlan was bent over, panting, one hand resting on a bulkhead for support. As she neared him, he spun around with a wild look in his eyes. "Stay back!" said he. "I can feel it inside me!"

There was little explanation for his mad words, but the wraith-like whisper in Shira's mind was happy to provide one. He bears the sickness, it said, echoing strangely in the hollows of her brain, suffusing each vinegar-smelling neuron with the aura of decay. But I can cure them. You need only pray to Me. At the intruding voice's words, a grim image flashed in Shira's mind, of A'dola standing above Alisha, dripping water on the Togruta's forehead in unhallowed baptism, chanting in a dreadful, hollow tone. "Tsyok, nuyak Ari Typhojem. Vexok savaka, nuyok nwit Jidai. Vexok savaka, châts hadzuska koshûjontû midwan. Vexok savaka, mwintuska hâskûjontû Alisha Tano. Vexok savaka. Vexok savaka. Vexok savaka."

The voice was showing her how to pray.

The passageways were soaked with bloodlight, the occasional feeble lantern of emergency light providing sinister sanguine scintillation by which to see the shaking corridors of the ship. Down, up, left, right, left, left. Left, like the Left-Handed God. Left again, like the dominant hand of the Sith species.

The tarp did not know of the arcane geometry by which the Ninûshodojinyaut had been designed, nor its loathsome origins as a bloated pyramid barely containing the foul seed of the Darth Venomis, with which he germinated horrible half-life and filled the cruel ship to bursting with lacquered black oil. The tarp knew nothing of such matters, knew nothing of the Sith beyond the feverish half-memories of stolen snippets of Kint's conversations, drudged up from the murky infinity of nonexistence by the magic of the Mirror. Sapience had been unkind to Kint's tarp; where once there was blissful ignorance, now there was knowledge; not knowledge of the dreaded vessel it was aboard, but knowledge nonetheless. Now it had something to lose. Now there was terror.

Kint Dranlor rounded the last turn slightly ahead of Lemmy, the tarp clinging onto the racing Masarian's shoulder for dear life. It let out a pathetic whine as it beheld what lay ahead.

The room which housed the console for the gravity well generator was small, dingy and even darker than the passageway that led to it. The console seemed easy enough to work, a small, primitive datascreen glowing faintly scarlet beside a lever that was clearly pulled down in order to disable the generator. But the console was anything but easy to get to.

Lying in the entryway was a human corpse, smelling of mildew and mold. Its skull was badly crushed, half the face swollen and purple, the other half grotesquely pancaked so that one corner of the mouth peeled upward in a hideous parody of a smile. With a soft smacking of lips, the mewling thing clambered uneasily to its feet, joining six other abominations. Thick ropy spit swung from the half-pulverised jaw, and from the vantage point of Kint's shoulder, the tarp could actually see colonies of maggots squirming in the thing's lacerated scalp.

The monsters behind it were no less deformed. There was something deeply wrong with the tilt of their faces, as if their features had been ripped off and stitched sideways on their heads. Their eyes were black and dead, their oily skin putty-coloured and lifeless, except for their mouths, which were twisted back in grinning scimitars of unmistakable hunger.

But the living dead did not attack. They simply stood there, smiling death into eternity.

A voice sounded from behind Lemmy, and the tarp turned. "Hello there," said the twisted man, hobbling awkwardly up the passageway they had come from. "I am the Lord of Affliction. I am the face of blood and fire."