- Location
- supernatural
Yes that's what I talking about, Sidious uses the Empire racism towards non-human for his benefit.
The Unabridged Memoirs of Darth Plagueis the Wise [Star Wars AU]
- Thread starter YeahOkayCool
- Start date
- Location
- Alaska
Sorry, I think I got you and Finagle007 mixed up.
Chapter 7: On the Inside
- Location
- Alaska
Chapter 7: On the Inside
NOTES: And with that, today's chapter dump is officially ended. This was a tricky one to write. Poor Dooku's just starting to realize the magnitude of his mistake but can't see a way out. He's fallen into the trap that good can ally itself with evil and not get corrupted. We already see the seeds being planted, but some careful gardening will be needed for them to bear fruit for the Sith. Also, you may have noticed that the quotes from Darth Plagueis' Holocron at the beginning of most chapters seem to be getting more disturbingly lucid. I'm trying to lay out a consistent philosophy for Plagueis based on snippets from both the novel and in-universe reference materials and lashing it all together with the kind of ideas you'd find in your average terrorist manifesto. Something like "Esoteric Revolutionary Crypto-Darwinism" would be a pretty good summation.
This chapter also marks the end of what I'm tentatively calling the "Bury the Bodies" arc, as we start moving further away from 32BBY and the wheels of Plagueis' plots really start turning. The next three or four will be a little more self-contained than the others, as Plagueis finally finds a promising new apprentice in a most unlikely place.
You're gonna love tomorrow's chapters, lemme tell ya.
Next Time: Journey to the Rogue Planet!
"The Jedi drink the same poison they spread to others. By tyrannizing the galaxy with their worship of disorder--their self-serving lie that all beings, all lives, are equal--all the natural order rebels against them. The obvious corollary of this is that the ordinary beings of the galaxy are our natural allies in the Grand Plan. At any given time, half of the galaxy actively hates the Jedi and resents their existence, while the other half could not care less if they exist or not. However, the manipulation of the masses is a delicate affair. In most societies, there is a strong sense of 'take it or leave it': if social conditions are unbearable, then it is possible to withdraw entirely. This is because weakness is easier than strength, and sentients, when left to their own devices, will always choose the course of least resistance. The Jedi-run Republic can be held largely responsible for degrading the masses and supporting a culture of weakness and passivity. In our modern galaxy, the strong and driven are hobbled by two chains: the external chains of the mediocre masses, and the internal chains of self-doubt instilled in them by a culture low enough to worship the Jedi. But this is no excuse for a Sith. We refuse to acquiesce to disorder. Through the dark side our chains are broken, and revolutionary action is our duty to the galaxy. Not only can it be done, it must be done.
A coward will allow himself to be bullied and pushed aside for as long as there is room for him to back up. For a thousand years the entire galaxy has been cowering in the face of arrogant Jedi and a Republic that dismantles the natural order of the universe. Part of our mandate as Sith is to increase the pressure faced by the inferior masses. We must push the galaxy's common cowards into the corner so that they will have to come out fighting. The Sith of old would have happily razed the galaxy to the ground if it meant that only the strong survived. Our methods have evolved considerably since then. Now we kill only sparingly, and only after great thought. Killing is not a goal in itself, it is a fanning of the flames. If we cannot stir the people of the galaxy to their feet to take back their destinies from the Jedi, then we shall at least put them in a position where they will have to fight for their miserable lives, until only the strong and worthy remain. And with the steady rising of tensions within the Republic, which will involve the government and Jedi at all levels, we can (if we are clever about it) assume the guiding position amidst this anger and coordinate it into what it must become--a revolution to destroy the system. The inner workings of the Republic are so delicately arranged that even small acts of resistance can arise at any time, and in any place. Witness Galidraan, or the Stark Hyperspace War. A Jedi 'peacekeeping' mission goes wrong, and the inferior masses give into the frenzy of anti-Jedi hatred just beneath the surface. Now imagine six Galidraans, at the same time, all across the galaxy. The fury unleashed would tie down most of the system's enforcers, Jedi or mundane.
If, as Darth Myre said, our uniforms for the coming war will be the hatred in our eyes, then what, I ask, shall be the insignia of one's rank? The Sith must realize that the great seething quadrillions of the galaxy will be our army. The leaders and officers of this army will be those who will take action against the Jedi and Republic, and strike like lightning against them. By inflaming tensions galaxy-wide we give the public no options but to fight back against the Jedi in our stead. We are the cause, they are the effect."
--Datafile #38718, Darth Plagueis' Holocron
A coward will allow himself to be bullied and pushed aside for as long as there is room for him to back up. For a thousand years the entire galaxy has been cowering in the face of arrogant Jedi and a Republic that dismantles the natural order of the universe. Part of our mandate as Sith is to increase the pressure faced by the inferior masses. We must push the galaxy's common cowards into the corner so that they will have to come out fighting. The Sith of old would have happily razed the galaxy to the ground if it meant that only the strong survived. Our methods have evolved considerably since then. Now we kill only sparingly, and only after great thought. Killing is not a goal in itself, it is a fanning of the flames. If we cannot stir the people of the galaxy to their feet to take back their destinies from the Jedi, then we shall at least put them in a position where they will have to fight for their miserable lives, until only the strong and worthy remain. And with the steady rising of tensions within the Republic, which will involve the government and Jedi at all levels, we can (if we are clever about it) assume the guiding position amidst this anger and coordinate it into what it must become--a revolution to destroy the system. The inner workings of the Republic are so delicately arranged that even small acts of resistance can arise at any time, and in any place. Witness Galidraan, or the Stark Hyperspace War. A Jedi 'peacekeeping' mission goes wrong, and the inferior masses give into the frenzy of anti-Jedi hatred just beneath the surface. Now imagine six Galidraans, at the same time, all across the galaxy. The fury unleashed would tie down most of the system's enforcers, Jedi or mundane.
If, as Darth Myre said, our uniforms for the coming war will be the hatred in our eyes, then what, I ask, shall be the insignia of one's rank? The Sith must realize that the great seething quadrillions of the galaxy will be our army. The leaders and officers of this army will be those who will take action against the Jedi and Republic, and strike like lightning against them. By inflaming tensions galaxy-wide we give the public no options but to fight back against the Jedi in our stead. We are the cause, they are the effect."
--Datafile #38718, Darth Plagueis' Holocron
Darth Plagueis' Sith Infiltrator Scalpel, Hyperspace, 3.5 standard months following Battle of Naboo.
Beyond the universe, there is nothing. We call this nothing hyperspace, though it transcends names. It is endless, so far beyond anything we understand that even the concept of "end" is meaningless. There is no time there, except that which exists in the tiny bubble of reality projected by the ships traveling through it. If the concept of "through" means anything in a place beyond even the conception of place. A journey "through" hyperspace takes both an eternity and literally no time at all, since it is beyond even the very idea of time. Neither is there direction; no up or down, no left or right, no in or out. The void is trans-prepositional.
The Scalpel fell through the nothing towards the larger universe while I set the forward viewports to full opaque, feeling a little crestfallen as a sheet of perfect blackness sliced away the mottled blue void. I have always enjoyed the visual aspect of hyperspace travel. I love gazing into the perfect emptiness of it and wondering at how it was possible for even something as incomprehensibly small as a single starship could will the nothingness to roll back. Most beings feared to look out at the chaos of hyperspace. The old spacer stories of "hyper-rapture" still frightened even the least superstitious; tales of pilots who went mad from gazing too long into the abyssal space-beyond-space, the Void of Voids. They couldn't bear to look.
I couldn't bear to look away. It reminded me of my power.
In hyperspace, time and space and direction only had meaning within my ship, which only existed through an absolute separation of the Everything within and the Nothing without.
In hyperspace, the only anything you have is what you bring with you.
Much like the Sith themselves. We are sovereigns of our own will, freed from all weakness. The mindless existence of lesser beings is only given meaning by the context we give it through our actions. As such, it is our responsibility to challenge and temper the galaxy, so that the strong and worthy are enabled to achieve their full potential. Whether that was done openly or in secret made little difference in the long term. Does a god stop existing if nobody worships it? Did natural selection not take place for uncounted millions of years before scientists gave it a name?
Another insight to add to the holocron, I thought. But that would have to wait until Scalpel landed back at Coruscant. Right now, there were more pressing matters to attend to.
Making sure the craft was on autopilot, I rose from the pilot's chair and went to the holocomm station that rose, podium-like, from the center of the circular upper deck. The dim red running lights along the floor were cranked down to minimum, giving the small chamber an almost womb-like feel. I activated the terminal and keyed in an encrypted channel as the projector began to whine. A pulse of red light warped and twisted before resolving itself into a quarter-sized facsimile of Master Dooku.
"Magister Damask." The voice coming from the red-tinted hologram sounded like it had aged ten years since our last meeting. "Is there something you need?" it asked with a frown.
"Nothing in particular, Master Dooku," I said. "Just a courtesy call between business partners."
I watched his brows twitch as the needle sank deeper. His eyes filled with pain. Dooku was having second thoughts about our arrangement already. "If you are contacting me merely to gloat--"
"Gloat? Whatever about?" I asked innocently. "Has something happened?"
"You know very well what's happened, Magister!" Hologram-Dooku clenched his little fists. "Viceroy Gunray and his entourage were assassinated two weeks ago, along with a member of the Jedi Council. This is not a laughing matter."
"Certainly not, Master Jedi." Meeting with Jedi was always enjoyable. For all their vaunted control, it was childishly easy to toy with their emotions. "I must confess, this has me at a bit of a loss. I have been overseeing some of my investments in the Tingel Arm these past weeks, and am only now being caught up. Which Jedi Master was it who was killed?"
"Enough, Magister!" Dooku was practically shouting now, back rigid and shoulders tensed. "No more games. You know it was Adi! You know because I told you who would be assigned to Gunray's security team."
Dooku fell silent as his entire body seemed ready to collapse. "You know because I killed her. As surely as I stand here, I played a part in her death."
"I see. Too high a price to pay for a Jedi Council seat, then?"
"Too high a price to pay for anything." Dooku's eyes fell from the holoprojector, unable to meet its gaze. "Had I known what you would do with the information I gave you, I never would have agreed to it. This Council seat is tainted with innocent blood."
I waved one hand dismissively. "Oh come now, there's no need to bring superstition into things."
"Superstition? This was murder, Magister. I'm an accomplice in the murder of my fellow Jedi. Master Gallia was a good friend, and I let her die. It is utterly indefensible." Dooku shook his head with a disbelieving, rueful grin. "It was a mistake to believe I could ever trust a Sith, and now...now I'm paying the price. I am a naive old fool."
"Master Jedi, I thought we were beyond all this. Surely you of all people understand that sacrifices must be made for the greater good. Is sacrifice not the Jedi way?"
Dooku jerked his head back as if my words had slapped him upside the head. "Wha...I...I..." he stammered, before drawing himself up to his full height and glaring daggers at me. "How dare you. How dare you! I agreed to help you, Magister, because I hoped that doing so would prevent more Jedi from dying needlessly, not cause more deaths."
"No, you agreed to help me because together we can return strong, incorruptible leadership to the Republic," I explained. "How was I to do so without an ally in a position of authority? You once told me that you were frustrated by the Council, how you believed that they threw the lives of Jedi away slavishly following the Senate's wishes. Your Order has become a cudgel in the hands of the galaxy's small-minded and greedy. Well, now that you're a member of the Jedi Council, you have the power to do something tangible about it. And now, at the moment of your personal and professional triumph, you're about to toss it all aside because I, a non-Jedi, didn't act according to Jedi standards?"
"To betray the Order in such a way, to play any role--however small--in the murder of another Jedi Master--"
"Let's stop fretting about one life out of thousands and keep perspective," I said sharply. "What exactly did you think I was going to do with the information you gave me? Invite Adi Gallia and Nute Gunray over for some late-afternoon drinks? Don't make excuses for yourself, Master Dooku, it's insulting. You knew exactly what you were doing when you gave me that information, and you knew what the consequences would likely be. Do you get angry when a rock-stinger stings in accordance with its own nature? It is in the nature of the powerful to exercise their power. As a Jedi you know this just as well as I. You choose and weigh the value of some lives versus others every day, just as much as we Sith do."
I paused to let the volley impact him, then softened my tone a bit. "You are one of the strongest and wisest Jedi alive today. Keeping your insightful mind off of the Council for so long is criminal. I daresay that if they had done this sooner, perhaps some of the disasters of the last ten years might have been avoided. Now you have a chance to save more Jedi lives. More Republic lives. Are you really going to throw all those possibilities away because another Jedi had to die for the greater good of the Republic? As regrettable as you may find Adi Gallia's death, it was necessary. If we wish to fully excise the rot from the Republic, some small number of Jedi deaths will be necessary."
"Then alter your plans until they are no longer necessary."
I felt myself frown. "That may be more difficult than you believe. But, as this seems to be non-negotiable for your continued support... very well, I shall make the effort."
Dooku was silent for a long time. Finally he drew himself back up to his full height and looked right at the holocam. Even in red laser-scanned form, the old human's eyes had a power to freeze you in place, like an Iridonian hypno-viper. He was deadly serious. I couldn't help wonder if he'd already forgotten that I had brought him back from the dead.
"No more Jedi deaths, Magister. Not. One. More." Hologram-Dooku pressed an invisible button and the transmission cut out.
Scalpel would be in hyperspace for a standard day longer at least, which gave me plenty of time to mull over Dooku's sudden attack of scruples. Something like this was to be expected, of course, but the venom and sheer outrage in his voice had shocked me. It was as though his pronounced beliefs in the need for a strong and worthy government at all costs suddenly vanished when it came to his precious friends. How could such an otherwise enlightened being still possibly believe that every life was somehow sacred, even when devoid of context? His Jedi indoctrination only got stronger with age, it would seem. Not for the first time, I felt a surge of relief that I had decided against Dooku as an apprentice. Only someone untainted by Jedi training could become a proper Sith; at best Dooku would become a particularly ineffectual Dark Jedi.
He really was better off where he is. Having a pawn on the Jedi Council was a wise investment that would pay massive dividends going forward, as long as I could keep a tight grip on his leash. And from what he had declared, the easiest way to do that was to stop killing his fellow Jedi.
I was looking forward to keeping my word with Dooku. Well, "keeping my word" in a general sense. The Grand Plan was finally progressing smoothly again. Specifically planning and ordering Jedi deaths was no longer necessary. Before too long, Jedi would begin dying regardless the specific actions of the Sith. As the galaxy slowly crept towards the event horizon of the dark side, the stronger and more perceptive beings would begin to lash out against their chains, just as we had subtly trained them for centuries.
Like all good teachers, we lead our students to believe they've discovered the darkness on their own.
With a satisfied smile I punched a command into the console and the viewports de-polarized, washing the cockpit in the roiling blue chaos of hyperspace.
Beyond the universe, there is nothing. We call this nothing hyperspace, though it transcends names. It is endless, so far beyond anything we understand that even the concept of "end" is meaningless. There is no time there, except that which exists in the tiny bubble of reality projected by the ships traveling through it. If the concept of "through" means anything in a place beyond even the conception of place. A journey "through" hyperspace takes both an eternity and literally no time at all, since it is beyond even the very idea of time. Neither is there direction; no up or down, no left or right, no in or out. The void is trans-prepositional.
The Scalpel fell through the nothing towards the larger universe while I set the forward viewports to full opaque, feeling a little crestfallen as a sheet of perfect blackness sliced away the mottled blue void. I have always enjoyed the visual aspect of hyperspace travel. I love gazing into the perfect emptiness of it and wondering at how it was possible for even something as incomprehensibly small as a single starship could will the nothingness to roll back. Most beings feared to look out at the chaos of hyperspace. The old spacer stories of "hyper-rapture" still frightened even the least superstitious; tales of pilots who went mad from gazing too long into the abyssal space-beyond-space, the Void of Voids. They couldn't bear to look.
I couldn't bear to look away. It reminded me of my power.
In hyperspace, time and space and direction only had meaning within my ship, which only existed through an absolute separation of the Everything within and the Nothing without.
In hyperspace, the only anything you have is what you bring with you.
Much like the Sith themselves. We are sovereigns of our own will, freed from all weakness. The mindless existence of lesser beings is only given meaning by the context we give it through our actions. As such, it is our responsibility to challenge and temper the galaxy, so that the strong and worthy are enabled to achieve their full potential. Whether that was done openly or in secret made little difference in the long term. Does a god stop existing if nobody worships it? Did natural selection not take place for uncounted millions of years before scientists gave it a name?
Another insight to add to the holocron, I thought. But that would have to wait until Scalpel landed back at Coruscant. Right now, there were more pressing matters to attend to.
Making sure the craft was on autopilot, I rose from the pilot's chair and went to the holocomm station that rose, podium-like, from the center of the circular upper deck. The dim red running lights along the floor were cranked down to minimum, giving the small chamber an almost womb-like feel. I activated the terminal and keyed in an encrypted channel as the projector began to whine. A pulse of red light warped and twisted before resolving itself into a quarter-sized facsimile of Master Dooku.
"Magister Damask." The voice coming from the red-tinted hologram sounded like it had aged ten years since our last meeting. "Is there something you need?" it asked with a frown.
"Nothing in particular, Master Dooku," I said. "Just a courtesy call between business partners."
I watched his brows twitch as the needle sank deeper. His eyes filled with pain. Dooku was having second thoughts about our arrangement already. "If you are contacting me merely to gloat--"
"Gloat? Whatever about?" I asked innocently. "Has something happened?"
"You know very well what's happened, Magister!" Hologram-Dooku clenched his little fists. "Viceroy Gunray and his entourage were assassinated two weeks ago, along with a member of the Jedi Council. This is not a laughing matter."
"Certainly not, Master Jedi." Meeting with Jedi was always enjoyable. For all their vaunted control, it was childishly easy to toy with their emotions. "I must confess, this has me at a bit of a loss. I have been overseeing some of my investments in the Tingel Arm these past weeks, and am only now being caught up. Which Jedi Master was it who was killed?"
"Enough, Magister!" Dooku was practically shouting now, back rigid and shoulders tensed. "No more games. You know it was Adi! You know because I told you who would be assigned to Gunray's security team."
Dooku fell silent as his entire body seemed ready to collapse. "You know because I killed her. As surely as I stand here, I played a part in her death."
"I see. Too high a price to pay for a Jedi Council seat, then?"
"Too high a price to pay for anything." Dooku's eyes fell from the holoprojector, unable to meet its gaze. "Had I known what you would do with the information I gave you, I never would have agreed to it. This Council seat is tainted with innocent blood."
I waved one hand dismissively. "Oh come now, there's no need to bring superstition into things."
"Superstition? This was murder, Magister. I'm an accomplice in the murder of my fellow Jedi. Master Gallia was a good friend, and I let her die. It is utterly indefensible." Dooku shook his head with a disbelieving, rueful grin. "It was a mistake to believe I could ever trust a Sith, and now...now I'm paying the price. I am a naive old fool."
"Master Jedi, I thought we were beyond all this. Surely you of all people understand that sacrifices must be made for the greater good. Is sacrifice not the Jedi way?"
Dooku jerked his head back as if my words had slapped him upside the head. "Wha...I...I..." he stammered, before drawing himself up to his full height and glaring daggers at me. "How dare you. How dare you! I agreed to help you, Magister, because I hoped that doing so would prevent more Jedi from dying needlessly, not cause more deaths."
"No, you agreed to help me because together we can return strong, incorruptible leadership to the Republic," I explained. "How was I to do so without an ally in a position of authority? You once told me that you were frustrated by the Council, how you believed that they threw the lives of Jedi away slavishly following the Senate's wishes. Your Order has become a cudgel in the hands of the galaxy's small-minded and greedy. Well, now that you're a member of the Jedi Council, you have the power to do something tangible about it. And now, at the moment of your personal and professional triumph, you're about to toss it all aside because I, a non-Jedi, didn't act according to Jedi standards?"
"To betray the Order in such a way, to play any role--however small--in the murder of another Jedi Master--"
"Let's stop fretting about one life out of thousands and keep perspective," I said sharply. "What exactly did you think I was going to do with the information you gave me? Invite Adi Gallia and Nute Gunray over for some late-afternoon drinks? Don't make excuses for yourself, Master Dooku, it's insulting. You knew exactly what you were doing when you gave me that information, and you knew what the consequences would likely be. Do you get angry when a rock-stinger stings in accordance with its own nature? It is in the nature of the powerful to exercise their power. As a Jedi you know this just as well as I. You choose and weigh the value of some lives versus others every day, just as much as we Sith do."
I paused to let the volley impact him, then softened my tone a bit. "You are one of the strongest and wisest Jedi alive today. Keeping your insightful mind off of the Council for so long is criminal. I daresay that if they had done this sooner, perhaps some of the disasters of the last ten years might have been avoided. Now you have a chance to save more Jedi lives. More Republic lives. Are you really going to throw all those possibilities away because another Jedi had to die for the greater good of the Republic? As regrettable as you may find Adi Gallia's death, it was necessary. If we wish to fully excise the rot from the Republic, some small number of Jedi deaths will be necessary."
"Then alter your plans until they are no longer necessary."
I felt myself frown. "That may be more difficult than you believe. But, as this seems to be non-negotiable for your continued support... very well, I shall make the effort."
Dooku was silent for a long time. Finally he drew himself back up to his full height and looked right at the holocam. Even in red laser-scanned form, the old human's eyes had a power to freeze you in place, like an Iridonian hypno-viper. He was deadly serious. I couldn't help wonder if he'd already forgotten that I had brought him back from the dead.
"No more Jedi deaths, Magister. Not. One. More." Hologram-Dooku pressed an invisible button and the transmission cut out.
Scalpel would be in hyperspace for a standard day longer at least, which gave me plenty of time to mull over Dooku's sudden attack of scruples. Something like this was to be expected, of course, but the venom and sheer outrage in his voice had shocked me. It was as though his pronounced beliefs in the need for a strong and worthy government at all costs suddenly vanished when it came to his precious friends. How could such an otherwise enlightened being still possibly believe that every life was somehow sacred, even when devoid of context? His Jedi indoctrination only got stronger with age, it would seem. Not for the first time, I felt a surge of relief that I had decided against Dooku as an apprentice. Only someone untainted by Jedi training could become a proper Sith; at best Dooku would become a particularly ineffectual Dark Jedi.
He really was better off where he is. Having a pawn on the Jedi Council was a wise investment that would pay massive dividends going forward, as long as I could keep a tight grip on his leash. And from what he had declared, the easiest way to do that was to stop killing his fellow Jedi.
I was looking forward to keeping my word with Dooku. Well, "keeping my word" in a general sense. The Grand Plan was finally progressing smoothly again. Specifically planning and ordering Jedi deaths was no longer necessary. Before too long, Jedi would begin dying regardless the specific actions of the Sith. As the galaxy slowly crept towards the event horizon of the dark side, the stronger and more perceptive beings would begin to lash out against their chains, just as we had subtly trained them for centuries.
Like all good teachers, we lead our students to believe they've discovered the darkness on their own.
With a satisfied smile I punched a command into the console and the viewports de-polarized, washing the cockpit in the roiling blue chaos of hyperspace.
NOTES: And with that, today's chapter dump is officially ended. This was a tricky one to write. Poor Dooku's just starting to realize the magnitude of his mistake but can't see a way out. He's fallen into the trap that good can ally itself with evil and not get corrupted. We already see the seeds being planted, but some careful gardening will be needed for them to bear fruit for the Sith. Also, you may have noticed that the quotes from Darth Plagueis' Holocron at the beginning of most chapters seem to be getting more disturbingly lucid. I'm trying to lay out a consistent philosophy for Plagueis based on snippets from both the novel and in-universe reference materials and lashing it all together with the kind of ideas you'd find in your average terrorist manifesto. Something like "Esoteric Revolutionary Crypto-Darwinism" would be a pretty good summation.
This chapter also marks the end of what I'm tentatively calling the "Bury the Bodies" arc, as we start moving further away from 32BBY and the wheels of Plagueis' plots really start turning. The next three or four will be a little more self-contained than the others, as Plagueis finally finds a promising new apprentice in a most unlikely place.
You're gonna love tomorrow's chapters, lemme tell ya.
Next Time: Journey to the Rogue Planet!
Last edited:
Finagle007
[Verified Great Old One]
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Seems Dooku's fallen into the same old garbage that Yoda spews. "Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny." Bullshit. Plenty of darksiders have returned to the light; even Ajunta Pall, the very first Dark Lord of the Sith, repented and rejoined the light, though it took millennia as a spirit bound to his remains and the aid of a Jedi.
There's an easy way out of Dooku's dilemma: go before the Council, spill the beans, work towards redemption. But he's too indoctrinated to see it... or simply too filled with despair.
There's an easy way out of Dooku's dilemma: go before the Council, spill the beans, work towards redemption. But he's too indoctrinated to see it... or simply too filled with despair.
Max Uristwell
Custodian of the Toobs
- Location
- United Kingdom
In Dooku's case, he's simply too proud. The man is pathologically incapable of admitting his mistakes, especially to himself.
- Location
- Alaska
Plus, now if he reveals that Hego Damask is the Dark Lord of the Sith, he has to reveal that he aided and abetted the murder of another Jedi Master, and a good friend. So to his mind, the best plan he has right now is to play along and hope Plagueis slips up.
Chapter 8: The Far Outsiders
- Location
- Alaska
Chapter 8: The Far Outsiders
What happened next, I'm not entirely sure. By the time I'm certain of any sort of consciousness is some time later. I remember blurry flashes of light moving past--I was moving; no, being moved, somewhere. There was a sharp pain in the back of my neck where someone had put something small and roundish under my skin. I could feel the pressure it put against my neck muscles, but I couldn't sense it in the Force. A tracking chip? Did these aliens use anything mechanical? All I could recall seeing was various creatures and organic implements. Whatever was in my neck was nothing so easy to understand. More mysteries.
A dim black shape out of the corner of my eyes told me that more of those shell-armored warriors were with me. Was I walking? Being carried? I couldn't tell you. The next stretch of time was just a series of blurry snippets in no particular order. I had no idea where I was, or for how long.
The only thing I knew with absolute certainty is that there was another Force-user there with me. Not in my entourage, but somewhere else on the ship. In a place so dead to the Force that it might as well not even exist, that presence stood out like a flare in the night sky. The delirium--had I been drugged?--was too strong for me to find it coherently, but I knew it was there.
When I finally realized that was what I was sensing, and that it was real, I made a gobbling sound that was supposed to be a laugh. At least something in this blasted system made sense.
Finally we came to a sphincter in the wall, which opened up to reveal a room with some sort of rack in the center, fringed by tentacles and eyestalks that tensed upon sensing me enter. It must have been hungry. For a split second, I was overcome with a bleary sort of exhausted amusement. What a way for the Order of the Sith Lords to end: eaten by a creature inside another creature. There was a joke in there someplace, but mine was never a wit that functioned well under pressure.
The two warriors spun me around and unceremoniously shoved me into the rack. It came alive at the touch of my bare skin (Bare skin? Where were my clothes?), claws and tendrils digging into me with a grip that my heavy limbs couldn't resist. After a few half-hearted attempts to loosen the machine-creature's grip, I gave up.
Then, as a pair of claws hooked themselves right under the ridge of my brows, it happened.
The Sith are trained to rise above petty instincts and achieve perfect clarity of purpose. I knew this. Know this. Live this. But at the same time, feeling the machine-creature's tentacles tighten around my arms and legs, there was no way to deny that the quiet gnawing in my chest had become a full-fledged certainty--an indescribable, inescapable, and absolutely undeniable bad feeling about this.
Then something warm and sharp lanced into my back, and a rush of white-hot agony wiped away the universe.
NOTES: Awwww yiss, time for my favorite trio of chapters! There's no need to worry overmuch if you don't like the Yuuzhan Vong. They'll be here for the next two chapters, then you won't hear about them for a long, long time. Full disclosure: this scene went through two complete re-writes before I was happy with it. The first one was much less violent, if you can believe it, but I thought two introspective hyperspace openings in a row would be too much. And the anti-NJO crowd has a point--it's really easy to write the Yuuzhan Vong in a way that doesn't feel very "Star Wars-ey," and ventures too far into grimdark. Lucky for you we have everyone's favorite Sith making contact. So instead of having him land right on Zonama Sekot like I'd originally planned, Plagueis' ship is abducted by a Vong cruiser and he tries to fight himself free in probably the fight scene I'm happiest with to date. The first attempt didn't go so well (those KRIFFING SNAKES), and there's the little matter of blowing up his own ship in a dark side rage, but when you're strapped into the Embrace of Pain, you have nothing but time. And besides, wouldn't you love to find out who that mysterious Force-sensitive is onboard? All will be revealed soon, in Chapter Nine, coming soon!
Coming Soon: The Lesson of Pain!
"Where does the Force come from? Does life create the Force, or does the Force create life? The greatest of Sith Lords have, sadly, not found this question worth answering-- evidently dressing up in frightening costumes and choking out their subordinates was a better use of their time. The Jedi answer is little better. Rather than answer the question, they reject it as a false dichotomy. Rather, they say, the immanent aspect of the Force (living force, anima, etc.), expressed through a living organism's midi-chlorians, is channeled back into the Force's transcendent aspect (unifying force, aperion, etc.) upon the death of the organism. The Force energy is then channeled back into the universe through the midi-chlorians of a new organism, sustaining its life until the cycle repeats again. Thus, the Jedi say that the Force is really one, composed of two opposed yet symmetrical opposites that feed each other in an eternal symbiosis. The Force creates life, and life creates the Force in turn.
As theories go, this one fits a good deal of the evidence. But there are certain anomalies in nature which bring up questions that Jedi and Sith metaphysics cannot answer. Take the yslamir lizards of Myrkr, for instance. These slow-moving arboreal herbivores can "push back" the Force in a bubble around them, allowing them to conceal themselves from Myrkr's many force-sensitive predators. But how is this possible if the Force creates and sustains life? Negating or pushing back the Force, according to Jedi dogmas, should kill any living things within the bubble, including the yslamir itself. And yet the fact that this creature is one of the most common species on Myrkr shows that this is clearly not the case; this adaptation serves a clear evolutionary purpose. If the Force works the way we think it does, then the yslamiri should not exist. This is a case where experimentation and observation proves that our dogmas about the force are flawed or incomplete.
If the Force is so intertwined with life, then how can life exist without the Force? Do the yslamiri exist outside of the Force, and are thus able to survive in a Force-less bubble? Are they merely hardier than normal creatures, and have evolved a sluggish lifestyle in order to exist within that Force-less bubble? Are they not pushing the Force away, but merely suppressing the ability of others to tap into the Force? Or are they connected to the Force in a way that falls outside our current perception, like a dye that only shows color in the ultraviolet spectrum? We cannot know without further investigation into both their nature and the nature of the Force as a whole. However, this and other examples clearly shows that there is more to the universe--and the Force--than is dreamed of in our philosophy."
--Datafile #56102, Darth Plagueis' Holocron
As theories go, this one fits a good deal of the evidence. But there are certain anomalies in nature which bring up questions that Jedi and Sith metaphysics cannot answer. Take the yslamir lizards of Myrkr, for instance. These slow-moving arboreal herbivores can "push back" the Force in a bubble around them, allowing them to conceal themselves from Myrkr's many force-sensitive predators. But how is this possible if the Force creates and sustains life? Negating or pushing back the Force, according to Jedi dogmas, should kill any living things within the bubble, including the yslamir itself. And yet the fact that this creature is one of the most common species on Myrkr shows that this is clearly not the case; this adaptation serves a clear evolutionary purpose. If the Force works the way we think it does, then the yslamiri should not exist. This is a case where experimentation and observation proves that our dogmas about the force are flawed or incomplete.
If the Force is so intertwined with life, then how can life exist without the Force? Do the yslamiri exist outside of the Force, and are thus able to survive in a Force-less bubble? Are they merely hardier than normal creatures, and have evolved a sluggish lifestyle in order to exist within that Force-less bubble? Are they not pushing the Force away, but merely suppressing the ability of others to tap into the Force? Or are they connected to the Force in a way that falls outside our current perception, like a dye that only shows color in the ultraviolet spectrum? We cannot know without further investigation into both their nature and the nature of the Force as a whole. However, this and other examples clearly shows that there is more to the universe--and the Force--than is dreamed of in our philosophy."
--Datafile #56102, Darth Plagueis' Holocron
Darth Plagueis' Sith Infiltrator Scalpel, in orbit over Zonama Sekot, 1.5 standard years following Battle of Naboo
Streams of fire slashed past my ship as I rolled hard to port, weaving through a shower of oncoming death. My journey to Zonama Sekot was not going as planned.
Zonama Sekot. A name that meant nothing to almost everyone, but to a small, secretive circle of galactic elites the name hung in the air like an exotic perfume pregnant with meaning. A name for a planet, a seemingly nondescript jungle world out on the furthest reaches of the Tingel Arm that mysteriously began appearing on star charts of the Gardaji Rift less than two centuries ago. A planet hosting a settlement of quiet, secretive Muunoids that produce some of the fastest, most intricate, and most elegant starships in the galaxy. The Zonamans were very selective about their customers, and it was rumored that only those who had already been to Zonama Sekot knew where it was located.
Decades ago, Tenebrous--as his alter ego, renowned starship designer Rugess Nome--had had the privilege to examine a Sekotan starship up close. I had been off on another one of his pointless errands and was not in attendance. Even had I been free, starship design and mechanics in general bore me to tears. Still, it would have been worth it to go, just to have seen my master's reaction. It must have been the closest thing to a religious experience the tight-fisted old Bith had ever had, because he had come back exulting over every aspect of its design. Their ships were true works of art, he'd told me over drinks that evening. Everything from their sleek contours allowing them to slip into hyperspace with barely a ripple, to their painstakingly miniaturized and optimized mechanical parts, to the organic frameworks and pilot interface that made the entire ship practically alive, were combined into a beautiful, seamless whole.
The only flaw, he'd noted with the reluctance of a man finding fault with a beloved wife, was its completely un-Sithlike lack of weapons.
Tenebrous had insisted that acquiring more knowledge of the Zonama Sekot shipbuilders would prove invaluable to the Sith. To that end, he tracked down another Sekotan ship owner and tore the ghost planet's coordinates from the man's mind. He had been planning a trip to the planet's mysterious inhabitants and obtain a ship of his own just before his ill-fated trip to Bal'Demnic. Once I had escaped the planet myself, it had taken me quite some time to go through Tenebrous' records, and I was too engrossed in training Sidious to bother with a detour to some magical ship-factory. However, with Sidious safely dead, no new apprentice to train, and the next stage of the Grand Plan slowly percolating in the galactic background, I suddenly found myself with an unprecedented amount of free time. So I decided that, since I was on the way back from overseeing the Damask Foundation's relief operations on Vjun anyway, a quick fact-finding detour to Zonama Sekot might prove fruitful.
In fact, it was probably the closest a Sith Lord got to anything resembling a vacation.
Which was why it was such a shock to come out of hyperspace to find the entire planet burning.
I barely even had time for it to register before I found myself under fire in the most horrifically literal sense of the word--swarms of glossy green starfighters, as smooth and rounded as skipping stones, whirled and weaved all through high orbit, fending off flocks of craggy, wedge-shaped creatures that looked like they were carved out of coral. As fortune would have it, before I'd had a chance to engage Scalpel's cloaking system a few of the strange creatures had swooped after me, spitting balls of flaming matter after my ship. None of the shots had connected yet, but given that the creatures were faster and more maneuverable than my own ship, it was only a matter of time. They were too maneuverable for my strictly average piloting skills to get a target lock on any of them, and I was running out of tricks to keep them off me. There was nowhere to go in orbit--Zonama Sekot evidently had no moon--except down to the planet below, right into the orange glow-splotches raging across the surface, each one a firestorm a couple hundred miles across.
I twisted hard on the control yoke, pitching Scalpel into a tight roll downwards and to port and relishing the silent crush of two of the creatures colliding in my wake. My elation was short-lived as something smacked into the hull with a ringing thump, shortly drowned out by the lower deck's fire alarms, hull breach alarms, and at what sounded like at least half a dozen assorted claxons and alerts all shrieking at once. Whatever that flaming matter they were spitting was, it had torn through Scalpel's hull like a hot knife through bantha butter. The co-pilot's console showed at least six systems on the verge of critical failure. I snarled and yanked back on the yoke, pulling the ship--despite some alarming groans and pops of protest--into another tight flip, heading back toward the creatures, laser cannons blasting. The red hyphens of plasma clipped one of the things, sending it spiralling away in a tril of smoke and the other three on my tail scattered.
Now we were getting somewhere. Zonama Sekot was clearly falling, but that was no concern of mine; the survival of the Sith Order had to come first. Whatever survived the attack and the fires would still be there in a few years, anyway. The hyperdrive was still operational; if I could just get clear out of the gravity well and out past that moon off the starboard nose, I could--
And then I remembered that Zonama Sekot had no moon.
In a minute that felt like it lasted a century, I took in every detail of the enormous creature floating in the endless daytime of interplanetary space. Its impossibly large body--it had to be at least five hundred meters long--was like a kolyat bird's egg cut in half lengthwise, a rounded granite-grey shell etched with thin grooves that caught the soft orange light off the Gardaji Rift until it looked covered in wrinkles. Its bottom half was a sea-kelp forest of soft pinkish tendrils trailing behind and away from it. Every few seconds one of the tendrils swiveled towards Zonama Sekot and spat a flaming ball of material that streaked down into the atmosphere and hit with the mushroom-blast impact of a meteor. There were no eyes on it that I could see, but I couldn't help but imagine a wave of malicious satisfaction from it.
I say "couldn't help but imagine" because at that moment a icy cold starburst lit up the inside of my skull--
I couldn't feel any of these creatures in the Force. They were right in front of me, and clearly not illusory, but I couldn't sense them. My finely-honed Sith perceptions radiated from my body, out through the Scalpel, and into the empty space beyond--and passed right through the creatures as though they were nothing.
As though they didn't exist in the Force.
But that was impossible, all living things existed in the Force. They must be concealing their presence from me, the same way I concealed my inner darkness from passing Jedi. Once I had a chance to focus I'd be able to refine my perceptions and pick up some trace of them.
But I never got a chance, because Scalpel gave another shuddering groan. Yet another alarm started throbbing in my ears, and the pilot's console was desperately alerting me that we were caught in some sort of gravity well. A quick toggling of the gravimetric scans showed that the well was coming from the giant grey space-creature, which apparently had an organ in its "nose" that could generate pulses of gravitons in a narrow beam in front of it. The graviton pulses were acting like a tractor beam, slowly pulling the ship towards it like a fishing line.
And I was the fish. Great.
I tentatively boosted power to the engines to see if I could overpower the creature's grasp, but an alarm claxon told me that the engines were on their last legs anyway. If they burned out--or worse, exploded--then I'd be completely at this creature's mercies. Better to be patient and wait for an opening. Patience is the way of the Sith. The Dark is patient. Even stars burn out.
As if sensing that I would not resist, the beam's pull increased in strength. Scalpel tilted to one side under the force of the gravitons' tug, changing my view. The monstrous space-creature's underside loomed ever closer in the front viewport until all I could see was an enormous pinkish grassland of all those tendrils lazily brushing against each other. Also visible now were what looked like translucent yellowish blisters along the lower rim of the creature. At first I thought they were filled with some sort of oil, but as Scalpel came closer to them I began to make out a shadowy pattern playing across the blisters' inner walls. No, not shadows exactly. Silhouettes. Muunoid silhouettes.
This wasn't an animal at all.
It was a starship.
Was it Sekotan? Tenebrous had mentioned the Zonama Sekot shipwrights used organic components in their creations. Perhaps the burning planet behind me was the victim of a power struggle between native factions. But that didn't explain why one faction of Sekotan ships was so sleek and smooth, while the others were so craggy and rough. Was this some kind of war between rival designers, like in the Xi Charrian Blueprint Crusades?
There was only one way to find out. I sat down and got comfortable in the pilot's chair. If they were going to kill me, they would have just let Scalpel burn and break up in orbit. Somebody aboard that massive living vessel wanted me alive. It was only natural a Dark Lord of the Sith is always important, even if others neglect to realize it.
The Scalpel swung around, giving me one last look at the smoldering tableau that was Zonama Sekot before it was blotted out by a fleshy wall sphinctering shut. Streaks of pink and green bioluminescence lit up what looked to be a stomach pouch or some kind of interior holding cell-something analogous to a hanger, maybe, or a gizzard, but repurposed by whatever architects made this thing.
I reached out with the Force once more, searching for a response, but I got nothing. I could sense nothing of the ship-creature I was inside, nor of its crew.
Something was very wrong here.
Scalpel rocked slightly with a soft thump against the rear hatch. As I unbuckled the pilot chair's crash webbing and got up I could feel the shriek of bone on metal through the soles of my boots. I took my lightsaber out of my vest and held it down and to the left in a ready stance.
The last remnants of the rear hatch tore away with an angry grunt as three of just about the most hideous sentients I had ever seen marched into the passenger compartment as if they owned the place. They were tall and hairless with grey skins like Muuns, but that was where the similarities ended. Each one was dressed in black armor that looked like it was cobbled together out of some nightmarish crustacean, for one, and rippled with muscle. Each one had a thick, sloping forehead, but even that was obscured by a truly hideous collection of scars, tattoos, and disfigurements. The leftmost one was missing any external ears and looked like he (it had to be a he) had bitten his own lips off. The rightmost one had one eye clouded and milky from a deep, weeping scar, and had a ragged hole where his nose would have been. The one in the middle, who I guessed was their leader, didn't have a face so much as a lump of disfigured grey flesh stuck to the front of his head. The cross-hatched white of scar tissue mixed with mottled black splotches and the spidery red of veinlike tattoos to turn his face into a mass of raw meat. The only thing I could really make out on his face were his eyes, black and pebble-like and burning with hot menace.
I ignited my lightsaber, washing the room in light the color of the burning planet below us.
Scarface on the right barked something in a guttural language and the three ghouls tensed. Pebble-Eyes in the center held out his hand, and some sort of snake-thing unwound itself from his neck and slithered down to his wrist. It looked like a tube of armor. Those dark, burning eyes never left my face. Scarface and Lipless Wonder eased back as the snake-thing unlimbered itself and reared out of his fist, ready to strike. I switched to a two-handed guard. It was clear what was going on--he wanted me to duel him. Why here and now wasn't at all clear (had anything been clear since I jumped to this stars-forsaken system?), but if he wanted me to slice him open, the I was in a bad enough mood now to oblige him.
Even if I couldn't sense him or his underlings in the Force.
Even If I couldn't sense anything here in the Force.
I made the first move. Feinting to the right, I slipped under his guard and slashed upwards toward Pebble-Eyes' chin--
Only to have my blade knocked aside by the snake-thing.
I took a half-step backward and returned to my guard position. Pebble Eyes let me go, but I saw a grin creep out from under his ruined, fleshy face. It felt like an eternity until I could think anything besides--what? The unreality of this entire situation fell down over me like a smothering blanket as a grey veil came down across my vision. Drawing in more of the dark side with every long, slow breath until the entire universe buckled with every inhalation, I reviewed the facts.
I was in a giant living creature that was also a starship--
fighting alien warriors that the Force couldn't sense--
who fought with snakes that my lightsaber couldn't cut.
Snakes. KRIFFING SNAKES.
This was insane. It was unreal. It was insulting. But it was also reality. I would overcome this. I was Plagueis, a Dark Lord of the Sith, the scion of a millennium of plots and schemes, the last in a thirty-strong lineage, the only beings in the galaxy worthy of leading instead of being led. Economies would collapse with but a passing word from my lips. I had conquered death and aging, the very particles of life existed at my whim. All the power of the dark side was mine to command.
I was not about to be beaten by some freak with a KRIFFING SNAKE.
Dark clouds of freezing rage billowed up along my spine. My whole body crackled with righteous anger. With a wordless howl I swooped back at Pebble-Eyes, and the fight began in earnest.
My lightsaber wove a cage of blood-red fire around the warrior. I thrummed with the dark side, my every blow guided by the energy fields of an entire universe. Every slash and thrust and block was furious, predatory, powerful, a maelstrom of rage and scorn. The dark side engulfed the Scalpel. Passenger chairs came loose and threw themselves at the trio. Wires tore loose from the walls and whipped at stray legs and hands. I was a snarling, roaring whirlwind of death.
None of it even touched Pebble-Eyes.
The disfigured warrior parried every blow. Even without the Force empowering his reflexes, he spun and whirled and whipped his snake-thing around and caught them all, riposting with the vicious speed of a ghost-viper. I got through his guard and got some glancing blows off his black armor, but all it did was add a scent of charred bone to the cramped cargo hold. Evidently whatever that shell was from could block a lightsaber too. The snake-thing twisted and squirmed in his grip, but always in just the right way at just the right time. It was flexible one moment and stiff as a polearm the next, sometimes twisting and snapping at my arms and face mid-strike. An icy black hand would reach out through the Force to throttle the life out of the big grey freak, but it was like grabbing air, drinking vacuum. He didn't exist in the Force, none of them did.
It was then that I felt the storm inside me roar and gutter and--
Go out.
All at once I knew that I couldn't beat these three and escape just by battering at them with my rage. Even if I could kill them all, Scalpel was barely spaceworthy before, and after what had already happened to it thus far it was in no shape to get me out of here anyway. I couldn't reach them directly with the Force, but the beginnings of a plan were forming.
A swift knee to the face knocked Pebble-Eyes backwards. As he staggered back, I drew in my focus once more. The moment crystallized and I saw the glimmering fault lines of a weakness in the situation, a place I could strike to shatter my impending defeat like cheap glassware. The aft plasma conduits glinted with an inner shine from beneath the deck plating.
From beneath Scarface and the Lipless Wonder.
I reached out with my anger and gave the metal ductwork two tweaks. The first tweak crimped and buckled the heat-treated durasteel, bowing it upwards and putting a kink in the metal. A second tweak cracked the metal pipe itself, releasing a gout of pressurized plasma heated to a fair fraction of the surface of Zonama Sekot's sun.
With a squeal of tearing metal and a roar of flame, the plasma engulfed the two aliens. They didn't even have time to scream.
Pebble-Eyes roared with pain and charged me, but I was already in motion. With a shout of the Force I shattered Scalpel's front viewports and leaped out into the fetid, swampy-smelling air of the hangar. I saw a thin ledge several feet away--some kind of observation deck, maybe, and soared towards it, buoyed by the Force.
A pair of thick arms wrapped around my legs and the smell of charred flesh assaulted my nose. Pebble-Eyes' grab knocked me off-course and we tumbled to the spongy deck. There wasn't as much give in it as I'd hoped; I smashed side-first into a slab of thick alien muscle studded with sharp shell or coral, and Pebble-Eyes landed on top of me.
I marvelled idly to myself how miraculous it as that all the damage Scalpel had sustained hadn't sent the reactor core into meltdown--right before the aft end of the ship exploded.
The searing-hot blast front swept the two of us us up and knocked us around the hangar bay, still clinging to each other and groping for some soft body part. We smashed into a wall, only for us to rebound off it and roll to a stop in a smoking, snarling heap of cloth and shell and flesh. Pebble-Eyes was still on top of me like a mountain of muscle and bone. He had lost his snake-thing in the explosion, but he was still howling like a berserker and his thick fingers were still clutching for my eyes. One thick, clawlike thumb glanced off my left cheekbone, and I decided I'd had enough pain for one day.
Drawing on every bit of dark power I could manage, I forced his arms wide and tucked both my legs into the gap. Then I pushed, levering the big grey freak off me and grabbing the joints of his chestplate with both hands. He tried to get his legs back under him but quick elbow strike to the nose-hole sent his eyes crossed and his head lolling. I got my fingers under the knobby black carapace and pulled back, levering it up with my knee. The chestplate came loose with a wet cracking noise as hot oily black ichor spewed into my face and down my vest.
Pebble-Eyes was a little more lucid than he'd been a minute ago. Two glassy black eyes followed my fist. He must have sensed what I was about to do--and in the red-grey haze of combat I thought for a second I saw him smile again.
I struck him square in the chest with one last roar of Force-infused fury.
My fist snapped through his sternum like it was a featherwood board and smashed his heart to pulp. Thick, hot black blood spurted out, coating my hand and chest and face in black grease that smelled of rot. Pebble-eyes jerked once and went still.
I slumped over onto my back, sinking into the soft-yet-hard hangar deck and lay there, panting. Just enjoying being alive.
My reserves were gone; killing those three warriors had bottomed me out. I closed my eyes to keep the room from spinning around me. The transpirator over my mouth and neck buzzed and whirred from the added stress.
I was so exhausted that even by the time I heard the footsteps and the guttural orders, my arms were too leaden to even lift.
I opened my eyes just in time to see a huge black foot stomp me unconscious.
Streams of fire slashed past my ship as I rolled hard to port, weaving through a shower of oncoming death. My journey to Zonama Sekot was not going as planned.
Zonama Sekot. A name that meant nothing to almost everyone, but to a small, secretive circle of galactic elites the name hung in the air like an exotic perfume pregnant with meaning. A name for a planet, a seemingly nondescript jungle world out on the furthest reaches of the Tingel Arm that mysteriously began appearing on star charts of the Gardaji Rift less than two centuries ago. A planet hosting a settlement of quiet, secretive Muunoids that produce some of the fastest, most intricate, and most elegant starships in the galaxy. The Zonamans were very selective about their customers, and it was rumored that only those who had already been to Zonama Sekot knew where it was located.
Decades ago, Tenebrous--as his alter ego, renowned starship designer Rugess Nome--had had the privilege to examine a Sekotan starship up close. I had been off on another one of his pointless errands and was not in attendance. Even had I been free, starship design and mechanics in general bore me to tears. Still, it would have been worth it to go, just to have seen my master's reaction. It must have been the closest thing to a religious experience the tight-fisted old Bith had ever had, because he had come back exulting over every aspect of its design. Their ships were true works of art, he'd told me over drinks that evening. Everything from their sleek contours allowing them to slip into hyperspace with barely a ripple, to their painstakingly miniaturized and optimized mechanical parts, to the organic frameworks and pilot interface that made the entire ship practically alive, were combined into a beautiful, seamless whole.
The only flaw, he'd noted with the reluctance of a man finding fault with a beloved wife, was its completely un-Sithlike lack of weapons.
Tenebrous had insisted that acquiring more knowledge of the Zonama Sekot shipbuilders would prove invaluable to the Sith. To that end, he tracked down another Sekotan ship owner and tore the ghost planet's coordinates from the man's mind. He had been planning a trip to the planet's mysterious inhabitants and obtain a ship of his own just before his ill-fated trip to Bal'Demnic. Once I had escaped the planet myself, it had taken me quite some time to go through Tenebrous' records, and I was too engrossed in training Sidious to bother with a detour to some magical ship-factory. However, with Sidious safely dead, no new apprentice to train, and the next stage of the Grand Plan slowly percolating in the galactic background, I suddenly found myself with an unprecedented amount of free time. So I decided that, since I was on the way back from overseeing the Damask Foundation's relief operations on Vjun anyway, a quick fact-finding detour to Zonama Sekot might prove fruitful.
In fact, it was probably the closest a Sith Lord got to anything resembling a vacation.
Which was why it was such a shock to come out of hyperspace to find the entire planet burning.
I barely even had time for it to register before I found myself under fire in the most horrifically literal sense of the word--swarms of glossy green starfighters, as smooth and rounded as skipping stones, whirled and weaved all through high orbit, fending off flocks of craggy, wedge-shaped creatures that looked like they were carved out of coral. As fortune would have it, before I'd had a chance to engage Scalpel's cloaking system a few of the strange creatures had swooped after me, spitting balls of flaming matter after my ship. None of the shots had connected yet, but given that the creatures were faster and more maneuverable than my own ship, it was only a matter of time. They were too maneuverable for my strictly average piloting skills to get a target lock on any of them, and I was running out of tricks to keep them off me. There was nowhere to go in orbit--Zonama Sekot evidently had no moon--except down to the planet below, right into the orange glow-splotches raging across the surface, each one a firestorm a couple hundred miles across.
I twisted hard on the control yoke, pitching Scalpel into a tight roll downwards and to port and relishing the silent crush of two of the creatures colliding in my wake. My elation was short-lived as something smacked into the hull with a ringing thump, shortly drowned out by the lower deck's fire alarms, hull breach alarms, and at what sounded like at least half a dozen assorted claxons and alerts all shrieking at once. Whatever that flaming matter they were spitting was, it had torn through Scalpel's hull like a hot knife through bantha butter. The co-pilot's console showed at least six systems on the verge of critical failure. I snarled and yanked back on the yoke, pulling the ship--despite some alarming groans and pops of protest--into another tight flip, heading back toward the creatures, laser cannons blasting. The red hyphens of plasma clipped one of the things, sending it spiralling away in a tril of smoke and the other three on my tail scattered.
Now we were getting somewhere. Zonama Sekot was clearly falling, but that was no concern of mine; the survival of the Sith Order had to come first. Whatever survived the attack and the fires would still be there in a few years, anyway. The hyperdrive was still operational; if I could just get clear out of the gravity well and out past that moon off the starboard nose, I could--
And then I remembered that Zonama Sekot had no moon.
In a minute that felt like it lasted a century, I took in every detail of the enormous creature floating in the endless daytime of interplanetary space. Its impossibly large body--it had to be at least five hundred meters long--was like a kolyat bird's egg cut in half lengthwise, a rounded granite-grey shell etched with thin grooves that caught the soft orange light off the Gardaji Rift until it looked covered in wrinkles. Its bottom half was a sea-kelp forest of soft pinkish tendrils trailing behind and away from it. Every few seconds one of the tendrils swiveled towards Zonama Sekot and spat a flaming ball of material that streaked down into the atmosphere and hit with the mushroom-blast impact of a meteor. There were no eyes on it that I could see, but I couldn't help but imagine a wave of malicious satisfaction from it.
I say "couldn't help but imagine" because at that moment a icy cold starburst lit up the inside of my skull--
I couldn't feel any of these creatures in the Force. They were right in front of me, and clearly not illusory, but I couldn't sense them. My finely-honed Sith perceptions radiated from my body, out through the Scalpel, and into the empty space beyond--and passed right through the creatures as though they were nothing.
As though they didn't exist in the Force.
But that was impossible, all living things existed in the Force. They must be concealing their presence from me, the same way I concealed my inner darkness from passing Jedi. Once I had a chance to focus I'd be able to refine my perceptions and pick up some trace of them.
But I never got a chance, because Scalpel gave another shuddering groan. Yet another alarm started throbbing in my ears, and the pilot's console was desperately alerting me that we were caught in some sort of gravity well. A quick toggling of the gravimetric scans showed that the well was coming from the giant grey space-creature, which apparently had an organ in its "nose" that could generate pulses of gravitons in a narrow beam in front of it. The graviton pulses were acting like a tractor beam, slowly pulling the ship towards it like a fishing line.
And I was the fish. Great.
I tentatively boosted power to the engines to see if I could overpower the creature's grasp, but an alarm claxon told me that the engines were on their last legs anyway. If they burned out--or worse, exploded--then I'd be completely at this creature's mercies. Better to be patient and wait for an opening. Patience is the way of the Sith. The Dark is patient. Even stars burn out.
As if sensing that I would not resist, the beam's pull increased in strength. Scalpel tilted to one side under the force of the gravitons' tug, changing my view. The monstrous space-creature's underside loomed ever closer in the front viewport until all I could see was an enormous pinkish grassland of all those tendrils lazily brushing against each other. Also visible now were what looked like translucent yellowish blisters along the lower rim of the creature. At first I thought they were filled with some sort of oil, but as Scalpel came closer to them I began to make out a shadowy pattern playing across the blisters' inner walls. No, not shadows exactly. Silhouettes. Muunoid silhouettes.
This wasn't an animal at all.
It was a starship.
Was it Sekotan? Tenebrous had mentioned the Zonama Sekot shipwrights used organic components in their creations. Perhaps the burning planet behind me was the victim of a power struggle between native factions. But that didn't explain why one faction of Sekotan ships was so sleek and smooth, while the others were so craggy and rough. Was this some kind of war between rival designers, like in the Xi Charrian Blueprint Crusades?
There was only one way to find out. I sat down and got comfortable in the pilot's chair. If they were going to kill me, they would have just let Scalpel burn and break up in orbit. Somebody aboard that massive living vessel wanted me alive. It was only natural a Dark Lord of the Sith is always important, even if others neglect to realize it.
The Scalpel swung around, giving me one last look at the smoldering tableau that was Zonama Sekot before it was blotted out by a fleshy wall sphinctering shut. Streaks of pink and green bioluminescence lit up what looked to be a stomach pouch or some kind of interior holding cell-something analogous to a hanger, maybe, or a gizzard, but repurposed by whatever architects made this thing.
I reached out with the Force once more, searching for a response, but I got nothing. I could sense nothing of the ship-creature I was inside, nor of its crew.
Something was very wrong here.
Scalpel rocked slightly with a soft thump against the rear hatch. As I unbuckled the pilot chair's crash webbing and got up I could feel the shriek of bone on metal through the soles of my boots. I took my lightsaber out of my vest and held it down and to the left in a ready stance.
The last remnants of the rear hatch tore away with an angry grunt as three of just about the most hideous sentients I had ever seen marched into the passenger compartment as if they owned the place. They were tall and hairless with grey skins like Muuns, but that was where the similarities ended. Each one was dressed in black armor that looked like it was cobbled together out of some nightmarish crustacean, for one, and rippled with muscle. Each one had a thick, sloping forehead, but even that was obscured by a truly hideous collection of scars, tattoos, and disfigurements. The leftmost one was missing any external ears and looked like he (it had to be a he) had bitten his own lips off. The rightmost one had one eye clouded and milky from a deep, weeping scar, and had a ragged hole where his nose would have been. The one in the middle, who I guessed was their leader, didn't have a face so much as a lump of disfigured grey flesh stuck to the front of his head. The cross-hatched white of scar tissue mixed with mottled black splotches and the spidery red of veinlike tattoos to turn his face into a mass of raw meat. The only thing I could really make out on his face were his eyes, black and pebble-like and burning with hot menace.
I ignited my lightsaber, washing the room in light the color of the burning planet below us.
Scarface on the right barked something in a guttural language and the three ghouls tensed. Pebble-Eyes in the center held out his hand, and some sort of snake-thing unwound itself from his neck and slithered down to his wrist. It looked like a tube of armor. Those dark, burning eyes never left my face. Scarface and Lipless Wonder eased back as the snake-thing unlimbered itself and reared out of his fist, ready to strike. I switched to a two-handed guard. It was clear what was going on--he wanted me to duel him. Why here and now wasn't at all clear (had anything been clear since I jumped to this stars-forsaken system?), but if he wanted me to slice him open, the I was in a bad enough mood now to oblige him.
Even if I couldn't sense him or his underlings in the Force.
Even If I couldn't sense anything here in the Force.
I made the first move. Feinting to the right, I slipped under his guard and slashed upwards toward Pebble-Eyes' chin--
Only to have my blade knocked aside by the snake-thing.
I took a half-step backward and returned to my guard position. Pebble Eyes let me go, but I saw a grin creep out from under his ruined, fleshy face. It felt like an eternity until I could think anything besides--what? The unreality of this entire situation fell down over me like a smothering blanket as a grey veil came down across my vision. Drawing in more of the dark side with every long, slow breath until the entire universe buckled with every inhalation, I reviewed the facts.
I was in a giant living creature that was also a starship--
fighting alien warriors that the Force couldn't sense--
who fought with snakes that my lightsaber couldn't cut.
Snakes. KRIFFING SNAKES.
This was insane. It was unreal. It was insulting. But it was also reality. I would overcome this. I was Plagueis, a Dark Lord of the Sith, the scion of a millennium of plots and schemes, the last in a thirty-strong lineage, the only beings in the galaxy worthy of leading instead of being led. Economies would collapse with but a passing word from my lips. I had conquered death and aging, the very particles of life existed at my whim. All the power of the dark side was mine to command.
I was not about to be beaten by some freak with a KRIFFING SNAKE.
Dark clouds of freezing rage billowed up along my spine. My whole body crackled with righteous anger. With a wordless howl I swooped back at Pebble-Eyes, and the fight began in earnest.
My lightsaber wove a cage of blood-red fire around the warrior. I thrummed with the dark side, my every blow guided by the energy fields of an entire universe. Every slash and thrust and block was furious, predatory, powerful, a maelstrom of rage and scorn. The dark side engulfed the Scalpel. Passenger chairs came loose and threw themselves at the trio. Wires tore loose from the walls and whipped at stray legs and hands. I was a snarling, roaring whirlwind of death.
None of it even touched Pebble-Eyes.
The disfigured warrior parried every blow. Even without the Force empowering his reflexes, he spun and whirled and whipped his snake-thing around and caught them all, riposting with the vicious speed of a ghost-viper. I got through his guard and got some glancing blows off his black armor, but all it did was add a scent of charred bone to the cramped cargo hold. Evidently whatever that shell was from could block a lightsaber too. The snake-thing twisted and squirmed in his grip, but always in just the right way at just the right time. It was flexible one moment and stiff as a polearm the next, sometimes twisting and snapping at my arms and face mid-strike. An icy black hand would reach out through the Force to throttle the life out of the big grey freak, but it was like grabbing air, drinking vacuum. He didn't exist in the Force, none of them did.
It was then that I felt the storm inside me roar and gutter and--
Go out.
All at once I knew that I couldn't beat these three and escape just by battering at them with my rage. Even if I could kill them all, Scalpel was barely spaceworthy before, and after what had already happened to it thus far it was in no shape to get me out of here anyway. I couldn't reach them directly with the Force, but the beginnings of a plan were forming.
A swift knee to the face knocked Pebble-Eyes backwards. As he staggered back, I drew in my focus once more. The moment crystallized and I saw the glimmering fault lines of a weakness in the situation, a place I could strike to shatter my impending defeat like cheap glassware. The aft plasma conduits glinted with an inner shine from beneath the deck plating.
From beneath Scarface and the Lipless Wonder.
I reached out with my anger and gave the metal ductwork two tweaks. The first tweak crimped and buckled the heat-treated durasteel, bowing it upwards and putting a kink in the metal. A second tweak cracked the metal pipe itself, releasing a gout of pressurized plasma heated to a fair fraction of the surface of Zonama Sekot's sun.
With a squeal of tearing metal and a roar of flame, the plasma engulfed the two aliens. They didn't even have time to scream.
Pebble-Eyes roared with pain and charged me, but I was already in motion. With a shout of the Force I shattered Scalpel's front viewports and leaped out into the fetid, swampy-smelling air of the hangar. I saw a thin ledge several feet away--some kind of observation deck, maybe, and soared towards it, buoyed by the Force.
A pair of thick arms wrapped around my legs and the smell of charred flesh assaulted my nose. Pebble-Eyes' grab knocked me off-course and we tumbled to the spongy deck. There wasn't as much give in it as I'd hoped; I smashed side-first into a slab of thick alien muscle studded with sharp shell or coral, and Pebble-Eyes landed on top of me.
I marvelled idly to myself how miraculous it as that all the damage Scalpel had sustained hadn't sent the reactor core into meltdown--right before the aft end of the ship exploded.
The searing-hot blast front swept the two of us us up and knocked us around the hangar bay, still clinging to each other and groping for some soft body part. We smashed into a wall, only for us to rebound off it and roll to a stop in a smoking, snarling heap of cloth and shell and flesh. Pebble-Eyes was still on top of me like a mountain of muscle and bone. He had lost his snake-thing in the explosion, but he was still howling like a berserker and his thick fingers were still clutching for my eyes. One thick, clawlike thumb glanced off my left cheekbone, and I decided I'd had enough pain for one day.
Drawing on every bit of dark power I could manage, I forced his arms wide and tucked both my legs into the gap. Then I pushed, levering the big grey freak off me and grabbing the joints of his chestplate with both hands. He tried to get his legs back under him but quick elbow strike to the nose-hole sent his eyes crossed and his head lolling. I got my fingers under the knobby black carapace and pulled back, levering it up with my knee. The chestplate came loose with a wet cracking noise as hot oily black ichor spewed into my face and down my vest.
Pebble-Eyes was a little more lucid than he'd been a minute ago. Two glassy black eyes followed my fist. He must have sensed what I was about to do--and in the red-grey haze of combat I thought for a second I saw him smile again.
I struck him square in the chest with one last roar of Force-infused fury.
My fist snapped through his sternum like it was a featherwood board and smashed his heart to pulp. Thick, hot black blood spurted out, coating my hand and chest and face in black grease that smelled of rot. Pebble-eyes jerked once and went still.
I slumped over onto my back, sinking into the soft-yet-hard hangar deck and lay there, panting. Just enjoying being alive.
My reserves were gone; killing those three warriors had bottomed me out. I closed my eyes to keep the room from spinning around me. The transpirator over my mouth and neck buzzed and whirred from the added stress.
I was so exhausted that even by the time I heard the footsteps and the guttural orders, my arms were too leaden to even lift.
I opened my eyes just in time to see a huge black foot stomp me unconscious.
What happened next, I'm not entirely sure. By the time I'm certain of any sort of consciousness is some time later. I remember blurry flashes of light moving past--I was moving; no, being moved, somewhere. There was a sharp pain in the back of my neck where someone had put something small and roundish under my skin. I could feel the pressure it put against my neck muscles, but I couldn't sense it in the Force. A tracking chip? Did these aliens use anything mechanical? All I could recall seeing was various creatures and organic implements. Whatever was in my neck was nothing so easy to understand. More mysteries.
A dim black shape out of the corner of my eyes told me that more of those shell-armored warriors were with me. Was I walking? Being carried? I couldn't tell you. The next stretch of time was just a series of blurry snippets in no particular order. I had no idea where I was, or for how long.
The only thing I knew with absolute certainty is that there was another Force-user there with me. Not in my entourage, but somewhere else on the ship. In a place so dead to the Force that it might as well not even exist, that presence stood out like a flare in the night sky. The delirium--had I been drugged?--was too strong for me to find it coherently, but I knew it was there.
When I finally realized that was what I was sensing, and that it was real, I made a gobbling sound that was supposed to be a laugh. At least something in this blasted system made sense.
Finally we came to a sphincter in the wall, which opened up to reveal a room with some sort of rack in the center, fringed by tentacles and eyestalks that tensed upon sensing me enter. It must have been hungry. For a split second, I was overcome with a bleary sort of exhausted amusement. What a way for the Order of the Sith Lords to end: eaten by a creature inside another creature. There was a joke in there someplace, but mine was never a wit that functioned well under pressure.
The two warriors spun me around and unceremoniously shoved me into the rack. It came alive at the touch of my bare skin (Bare skin? Where were my clothes?), claws and tendrils digging into me with a grip that my heavy limbs couldn't resist. After a few half-hearted attempts to loosen the machine-creature's grip, I gave up.
Then, as a pair of claws hooked themselves right under the ridge of my brows, it happened.
The Sith are trained to rise above petty instincts and achieve perfect clarity of purpose. I knew this. Know this. Live this. But at the same time, feeling the machine-creature's tentacles tighten around my arms and legs, there was no way to deny that the quiet gnawing in my chest had become a full-fledged certainty--an indescribable, inescapable, and absolutely undeniable bad feeling about this.
Then something warm and sharp lanced into my back, and a rush of white-hot agony wiped away the universe.
NOTES: Awwww yiss, time for my favorite trio of chapters! There's no need to worry overmuch if you don't like the Yuuzhan Vong. They'll be here for the next two chapters, then you won't hear about them for a long, long time. Full disclosure: this scene went through two complete re-writes before I was happy with it. The first one was much less violent, if you can believe it, but I thought two introspective hyperspace openings in a row would be too much. And the anti-NJO crowd has a point--it's really easy to write the Yuuzhan Vong in a way that doesn't feel very "Star Wars-ey," and ventures too far into grimdark. Lucky for you we have everyone's favorite Sith making contact. So instead of having him land right on Zonama Sekot like I'd originally planned, Plagueis' ship is abducted by a Vong cruiser and he tries to fight himself free in probably the fight scene I'm happiest with to date. The first attempt didn't go so well (those KRIFFING SNAKES), and there's the little matter of blowing up his own ship in a dark side rage, but when you're strapped into the Embrace of Pain, you have nothing but time. And besides, wouldn't you love to find out who that mysterious Force-sensitive is onboard? All will be revealed soon, in Chapter Nine, coming soon!
Coming Soon: The Lesson of Pain!
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Should be found myself.
Also, this story is great. I'm pretty meh on the Vong generally, your note about them not feeling very Star Wars-y and being too grimderp sums up my feelings pretty well, but I'm interested to see where this is going.
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Fixed. Thanks for the heads up.
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This is super awesome. I've no idea why you aren't getting way more likes on this.
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Well, I'm new here, so I don't have the kind of name recognition that established posters like @Saphrith or @AtriumCarceris have. I don't begrudge anyone for it; if people like what I write they'll find a way to let me know.
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I've been on here for four years, and I've never heard of either of those people
But this is Star Wars, and it's very well-written; I can't see anything in here that would put people off, but you're only getting a few likes per post when something like For The Empire is breaking 250. Genuinely - I've no idea.
Chapter 9: The Embrace of Pain
- Location
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Chapter 9: The Embrace of Pain
"Uncertainty is the first step toward self-determination. Courage comes next. Choose and act, and nothing will be impossible for you."
--Datafile #37912, Darth Plagueis' Holocron
--Datafile #37912, Darth Plagueis' Holocron
Yuuzhan Vong cruiser-analog Bloodborne Glory, in orbit over Zonama Sekot, 2 standard years following Battle of Naboo
It is amazing how much pain can be packed into a single instant by those who know what they are doing. Every second feels like a lifetime. And whoever these aliens were, they were experts at delivering pain.
For the first few seconds--or was it days? Years? Centuries?--it was a featureless blast of noise and agony that threatened to drag me under into madness. I couldn't tell if my eyes were opened or closed, if I was awake or asleep, or even which way was up.
Nothing existed but the pain; pain that engulfed my body and raged through it until every cell in my body vibrated to its blank white note. The noise wiped away memories, scraping my soul clean and raw. Intellectually, I knew that I was Darth Plagueis, Dark Lord of the Sith, the unseen ruler of a galaxy--but it was like recalling a dream within a dream. I had no history, not past or future. Only an eternal now, fastened to and widened into an eternity.
For century after featureless century, nothing existed but Pain.
Pain and the Force.
The Force was a crack in the endless crushing tomb of the pain, and through it I could see the faintest hairline edge of blackness. The dark side was present even here, like a faintly cool shadow on a midsummer day, a memory of a better time. A time where time existed as something other than a cruelly indistinct memory. I clung to that crack the Force made like a drowning man in a flood. It was my one anchor in this endless storm-surge of pain. From within the crack a faint whisper floated out, somehow still distinct over the roar of agony in my ears. The dark side, which some sadistic quirk of my imagination interpreted as the voice of Tenebrous, spoke to me. It told me that despair was a weakness unbecoming in a Sith, that the most satisfying victories are won when the enemy thinks you are at their mercy, that spite is the water that nourishes the roots of strength. An icy black wind crept into the core of my mind, and I understood.
I understood that these invaders must be made aware of the true supremacy of the Sith.
In that moment I knew that these aliens could not--no, would not--break me. The Dark was my shield against the madness. As long as I did not forsake the ways of the Sith, of self-mastery, there was nothing they could do to me but hurt me. Pain was but another facet of the black gemstone that was the Force. How could a master of the Force possibly be harmed by it?
Clinging to that crack in the fabric of the world, anchored against a mindless roar of purest blinding agony, I saw myself as a reed in the torrent. My roots were firm. I would bend, but never break.
Centuries passed, then millennia.
I floated in the torrents of pain, anchored by the dark side. With nothing better to do, I began to actually listen to the pain. Focusing my perceptions some more, the deafening roar that had plagued me since forever blurred and differentiated into different voices, each a different genre of pain.
There was the percussion section, where I could make out the rough sizzling cymbal of my parched throat, accentuated by the hollow, aching drumbeat thrump of my hunger. Then the strings--the tight, wrenching twang of ligaments stretched to their absolute limit, rolling over the grinding bass vibro-guitar of my unnatural joint positions. There was a horn in there as well, made from the squealing warbling bubble of foreign acids lapping against nerve and bone. The periodic wrench of convulsion-inducing shocks added an exquisitely painful trilling synth to the composition inside my body. My mind and heart were filled with a reedy, empty woodwind whistle edging towards despair; the sound of air whistling through the hole where a future should be.
And rising above it all, as the chorus of this ghastly orchestra, was the strained, shattering countertenor of my own screams.
How long had I been screaming? It didn't matter; time no longer existed. There was nothing but the music.
For countless eons I floated in a sonata of pain, absorbed by my own thoughts. Some distant, intellectual voice inside me couldn't help but admire the amount of effort that had gone into designing such a perfect torture device. When I escaped I would have to take one with me. But thoughts of my mysterious captors merely raised more unsolvable questions. Just like the pain, they had sprung out of nowhere, popping into the universe as if from somewhere else. Everything about them was alien. Their technology was made of living creatures instead of metal and ceramic, they tortured captives for seemingly no reason at all, and most bizarrely of all, they were invisible to the Force. But how was that possible? The Force created and sustained all living organisms; without Force energy channeled through the midi-chlorians, there was nothing to animate organic tissue. This was not mere mystical dogma; almost a century of independent experimentation had verified it for me with the empirical certainty--or as near to certainty as possible--as gravitation or general relativity. So if life could not exist apart from the Force, I was forced to accept as true the corollary: that these aliens and their technology were a part of the Living Force, the anima. But why then could I not sense them or affect them directly using the Force?
The pain-orchestra kept playing as I pondered the question.
Eons passed.
Slowly, incrementally, so slowly that entire universes could have been born and died in the gaps between insights, I groped around the edges of an answer. Then, at the crescendo of the pain, the final piece of my understanding snapped into place.
Perhaps, as the Aing Tii Monks believed, the Force was a spectrum, and different organisms were connected to it on different levels. Just like how certain dyes seemed colorless unless exposed to ultraviolet light, perhaps certain organisms seemed invisible in the Force because they were broadcasting on a "wavelength" of the Force outside the range that Jedi and Sith were trained to perceive. An uncomfortable hypothesis, to be sure, but the most plausible on he had come up with.
Now, to test it. If these aliens and their device-creatures were connected to the Force on some level, however faintly, then they must have midi-chlorians or some equivalent within their cells. For most beings, a tissue sample and a diagnostic program were needed to test for the presence of midi-chlorians. But most beings had not been studying midi-chlorians on a cellular level for over a century.
Refining my perceptions down to a near-microscopic point, I slithered through the crack in the pain provided by the dark side into the world beyond.
The world beyond the pain.
I expanded my perceptions as far as they would go, drinking in the sweet nothingness. The empty expanse felt like stepping out into the midwinter air after an hour in a Mygeetan sauna. The expanse was cold, empty, and full of possibility. Far off, on the edge of my perceptions, I could sense another beacon of the Force, as I understood it. The presence was like a pulsar of pain, shining agony out into the void. Turning away from it shaded my perceptions with an afterimage of bleak black despair. The aliens must have captured another Force-user. But there would be time to investigate that later.
Turning my own perception back on myself, I plunged back into my cells like a dagger, following the overloaded pulse-waves of my nerves until I found what I was looking for: a jagged void in my back, curved like a hook. That must be where I was "plugged into" the creature-device torturing my physical body. I couldn't precisely sense it, but I could sense the separation in my own tissues where it tore into them. This gave me a vague outline of the hook's shape. I went deeper, shunting my consciousness down even deeper and finer, finer than a cell, a molecule, the scanning tip of a proton microscope. Finally, all the way down at this level, the gap began to take on a shadowy substance of its own, faint and gauzy as a stab would filled with aerogel. In my imagination I turned it this way and that, melding my kinesthetic sense of its basic shape with the faint presence I felt from its raw matter.
Then, my Force vision popped it into existence, as though it were a stereoscopic image my eyes had suddenly adjusted to. Suddenly I could see and feel every wicked curve of the bony appendage. Plunging into its cells, I felt the power radiating from them like the light-scatter from a nebula. But it felt different, alien and wrong. I got the distinct impression that this creature and its masters were, not so much unnatural as transnatural, like they were from a reverse-galaxy where light was merely a reflection cast by stars that radiated shadow. Their entire existence was a contradiction, a paradoxical affront.
And yet the Force still shone through them.
Well, in a sense.
What I felt was a stunted, twisted shade of the Force-spectrum, a cul-de-sac sealed off from the rest of the Living Force like a quarantine. But there it was, shining through tiny organisms that, while clearly different, were performing the same function as the midi-chlorians I knew. Working backwards from that revelation (or forwards out from it, if you prefer), I expanded back out erupting into a void that was no longer empty but a riot of colors that had no names. I could feel, in some crude sense the feelings of the alien device-creatures that made up the ship's ecosystem. I felt everything from the simple-minded joy of an opening door-sphincter to the frenzied babble of the telepathic things that passed for communicators to the cold-blooded tension lying along the crystalline nerves of the snake-thing sidearms to the boredom of the alien warrior posted outside the chamber door. Bringing my focus back a bit to just my torture chamber, I could feel the vague interest of the eyestalked tentacles hanging from the ceiling and the serene, almost artistic enjoyment of the rack I was strapped into.
I breathed in the twisted skeins of energy and gathered them into myself, feeling it penetrate and infuse me down to my core. Then I gave two commands, seething with equal parts anger and apex predator don't-mess-with-me menace. First, I told the eyestalks writhing above me that if they knew what was good for them, they'd shut their eyes for the next half hour and play dead or so help me I'd tear them out by the roots. Once I sensed their terrified eyelids shut, I turned to my torture rack. With all the vengeful rage I could summon from across the galaxy, I told it that unless it released me right now I would break loose, smash it to pieces, and then kill it.
The various hooks and tentacles dropped me like a hot rock. I braced my hands and knees for a fall, they bucked, weak after countless eons of disuse. I collapsed to the deck like a bag of sticks. For a while I just lay there, fish-gasping in the fetid air and letting my wrenched, grinding joints slowly settle themselves back into more natural positions.
As my raw skin rasped and stung from every current of air they touched, I began to take stock of my injuries. My skin was rubbed raw, washed by acid and scorched by electric shocks. Every joint in my body was red, swollen, and grated like packs of hot gravel when moved. My throat was parched raw and I tasted a little blood with every exhalation. Probing my injuries with the Force gave me the unsettling feeling of not being alone. Going deeper gave me my answer: there were pieces of this alien ecosystem inside me. A web of wire-hard filaments wound through my skeletal muscles and twined along my nerves--following the threads to their source led me to the tiny round lump I recalled feeling in my neck right before getting put in the rack. The seed pulsed with some sort of malevolent purpose of its own, sending pulses through the alien filaments like a pacemaker's synthetic heartbeat. Whatever it was doing was incomprehensible, but it didn't seem to be impairing anything of immediate importance. I'll deal with you later, I thought to the seed-thing, rubbing my jaw--
Jaw?
Come to think of it, where was my transpirator?
With confused trepidation, I touched the bony protrusion to make sure it was real. It was. The aliens must have done some sort of reconstructive surgery on my face, giving me a replacement jaw. It was the exact size and shape that decades of muscle memory had encoded into my nerves as my jaw, and some experimental wriggling and face-pulling confirmed that it had the full range of motion and nerve sensation as the old one. It had the correct dimensions and clearly my immuun system hadn't rejected it, but the skin had a pebbly, almost reptilian texture. The aliens must have mixed whatever genestock they used to make their device-creatures with my own genetic code. Some probing revealed that the patch of alien skin stretched across most of my throat in an area roughly corresponding to the parts of my face and neck carved away decades ago by a failed assassin's decapitation disc.
Licking my lips, I considered the implications. Something compelled my captors to remove my breathing mask and keep me alive via their own methods. Whatever mad phobia compelled these aliens to reject all mechanical technology must be powerful indeed.
Interesting.
I could have lay sprawled on the floor for years. But entirely too soon I remembered that the surveillance creatures would wake up and see me if I stayed. So I forced myself to my feet, ignoring the howls of protest in my grinding joints. It was only pain--nothing but an interesting phenomenon.
A cold breeze across my nether regions roughly informed me that, in addition to being bruised, battered, rubbed raw, and infested with alien creatures, I was also stark naked.
Ah. This would not do.
I staggered over to the wall, where I had earlier sensed a spongy epidermal membrane covering the torture room's structural frame of coral. I grabbed a loose corner and ripped away strip after strip, tying them all together until I had fashioned a rough toga, clotted and dripping with blue-black gore. Good enough for right now.
Giving my neck another experimental stretch, I reached out and located that other Force presence I had sensed. The presence was like a main-sequence star on the verge of eruption, seething with rage and pain, but also shading into the spectrum of black, infrared despair. The sheer strength of it was astonishing--deep and primal, instinctive. I hadn't felt a presence that strong since Sidious.
Very interesting.
But if I wanted to investigate this presence, I would have to do so quickly; there was a disturbing undercurrent of madness to that mind ready to boil over.
I reached out through the alien web along my nerves out beyond the chamber door--specifically, the soldier standing guard on the other side of it. Focusing on the snake-thing resting rigid and stave-like in its hands, I imparted a conviction to its primitive mind, which I engraved into its mind with the power of the dark side--a conviction that, rather than being a good and beloved owner, the being holding it was in reality a delicious snack delivered by whatever kindly god watched over the lives of Snake-Things.
To door-sphincter puckered open and I stepped quickly over the now headless guard, continuing on my way.
The ship's corridors did not appear to be laid out in any particular pattern. There were no decks or straight lines; rather, it seemed to be haphazardly honeycombed with tunnels that wound around, doubled back, split in half and reformed, and in general entwined to form a hopelessly complex warren that would give a Sullustan savant a headache. The immobile and unmistakable mind-feel of the other Force-presence was my only reference point, tugging at the back of my mind like a lodestone of despair. The corridors smelled like a zoo enclosure--all sweat and excrement and a thousand other pungent organic scents. My skin crawled as I crept through the slimy bioluminescent halls, ducking into mucous-filled alcoves to avoid patrols and intimidating security eyestalks into closing their eyes as I passed. It felt like I was traveling through the intestines of some enormous beast, and any second I was going to fall into its stomach any second. Bad feelings aside, the crew had almost certainly noticed that I had escaped by now. One misstep could put me back in that torture rack.
That was not an option.
After what felt like an hour of sneaking around finally I found the right hallway and began making progress towards the mystery Force-user. The corridor ended at a door guarded by another one of those disfigured alien warriors. The Force-presence radiated through the door so strongly that the alien almost seemed backlit by the glow. I ordered the snake-thing to slit its master's throat, and it obeyed. I waited until the alien slumped gurgling to the floor before moving forward.
I entered a torture chamber set up identically to my own--empty pod-like room, low ceiling with eyestalks hanging down, and a torture rack in the center of the room like some depraved primitive idol. I gripped the eyestalks by their bulbous tips and tore them out of the ceiling by the roots, causing an impromptu rainstorm as hot drops of tar-like ichor splattered across the floor. As the tentacled monstrosities writhed and squealed, I threw them down and stomped them, marveling at how cathartic it felt to have their jellied eyeballs strain and burst under my bare feet. kicking the remains off to one side, I regarded the torture rack, which seemed smaller than the one I'd been put in.
A look at the occupant explained why. Bound into the device-creature was a young girl, no older than twelve or thirteen. What was visible of her skin underneath the mass of hooks and tentacles was a pale powder blue, signifying her as some species of near-human. Her face was pulled into a rictus of pure agony, teeth gritted and gaunt cheeks pulled tight. Her big almond-shaped eyes were open but were--aside from the streams of tears--completely unresponsive. The girl looked through me, lost in her own agony.
It suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea how long the aliens had been besieging this world. Scalpel had reverted to realspace right in the middle of an orbital bombardment that, judging by the extent of the firestorms planetside, had been going on for some time.
How long she had been strapped into this creature? How long had she been locked in her own private universe of pain, forced to endure the unendurable? It was a testament to her strength in the Force that she was still alive at all.
I suppressed my desire to tear this rack-creature to pieces, storing that rage away for later. Instead, I reached back into that odd quarantine zone of the Force and informed the creature that if it did not release its current captive, it would end up like the eyestalks laying crushed and dead in the corner.
Slowly, almost delicately, the tentacles unwound and the hooks slid loose from soft flesh. The catatonic girl slumped to the floor, immobile. Her mind was still active in the Force, as the pure fusion-point of agony that had dominated her consciousness fractured into dozens of dueling emotions. No idea what sort of a state this one is in, I thought.
I touched the edges of her consciousness and fed a trickle of Force energy into her limbs, banishing the worst of her exhaustion. Her limbs brushed against each other feebly, then strongly. A swollen tongue emerged from between two scabby indigo lips. Her back arched as she tried to get her arms under her, only to have them buckle under her weight, sending her sprawling back to the floor like a baby bird pushed out of the nest. I noticed rows of inch-long thorny protrusions peppering the skin of her back, emerging from patches of raw-looking pinkish skin. A characteristic of her species or an addition made by our hosts? Intriguing.
I caught her before her face impacted the deck, gently pushing her into a sitting position, head propped against the rack-creature. "Don't try to get up yet," I said in a firm voice. "It will be some time before strength returns to your limbs."
The girl was naked and alarmingly skinny, and I could trace the outlines of every bone in her torso. A thin layer of black stubble peppered her shaven head, and her entire body was covered in raw sores where the tentacles had bound her. Her captors had clearly kept her alive, but only barely.
My knees and hips screamed in protest as I sat cross-legged a respectful distance away. "What is your name, young one?" I asked through the grind of bone on bone.
The girl rallied the strength to raise her head up. "J-Jaaaahhh" wrenched itself from her mouth as her parched throat closed up. She squeezed her eyes shut and forced the words through it. "Jaaa-bi-thaah," she groaned. "Hallll. Jabitha Hal."
I nodded. "My name is a bit more complicated than that, but for now you may call me Hego. I'm a doctor."
Jabitha nodded, leaning too far forward and pitching herself onto her hands and knees. She made a horrific gagging noise as her swollen throat sent her into a coughing fit. Her back flexed with every cough, odd thorns slicing the fetid air.
When she seemed to have gotten control of herself, I caught her attention again. "Not to be rude, but what species are you, Jabitha? I can't say I recognize it."
"M-Mixed," she gasped, eyes bleary. "My father is human, my mother is... was Ferroan."
I made a concerned noise. "Then I take it the growths on your back are abnormal?"
Jabitha's confused expression told me everything I needed to know. One hand reached over to her back. Confusion changed into horror, and then she broke down. With a scream of raw anguish and terror, she collapsed into sobbing ball of emaciated limbs. The air charged with power as the thunderstorm of despair in her head found an outlet in the Force. For a long time I simply sat and waited. Jabitha had a strong and primal connection to the Force--not to mention the kind of powerful emotionality that seemed unique to humans--but stars only knew how long she had been in that rack. Her mind was collapsing, along with her old life. A careful shepherding would be required, if she was to break through the fog of her grief and embark on the path to true power.
I tore loose the upper half of my improvised toga and draped it across her back. That seemed to break the spell. She drew the edges around her and sat back upright, a huddle of gory leather crowned by a tiny blue face awash in tears.
She sniffed. "What did they do to me?" she demanded, voice thick with grief. "I'm a freak! A monster! I-I'm..."
"Clearly stronger than you look, young one." I folded my arms, daring her to challenge my assertion. "Not many girls your age could have survived the horrors of this place for a day and kept sane, let alone how long you were here."
Jabitha tugged the membrane wrapped around her tighter, but stopped when the thorns began poking through. She shivered. "Everyone's gone..."
"What do you mean? Down on the surface?"
"Y-yeah. I was up here in the--" she swallowed and looked away from the rack. "in that thing when it happened, but I felt it. I don't know how, but I felt it when they..."
"When they died."
She nodded, curling her knees up tighter. "It was like something broke inside me and I just knew." Her eyes grew moist again. "I just knew that one of these fireballs blew up Middle Distance. I felt them go. Die. Even when I was in...in there...I knew they were gone, and there was something else there. Something the Far Outsiders couldn't feel. Something in there with me." She found a clean spot on her wrappings and wiped her nose. "I'd never felt anything like it before. What's happening to me?"
I smiled. So strange to smile and have others see it. "What you felt was the Force, young Jabitha. Have you heard of it before?"
"A little bit. That's what Jedi have, right?"
"Not only Jedi," I said. "All living things touch the Force in some small way. But only a small number of them have a connection to the Force as powerful as yours. The strength you can take from the Force will support you in your darkest hours. That is how you were able to survive for so long in the torture device. The pain you experienced has opened you up, revealing an aspect of your life that you never suspected. You are stronger than you give yourself credit for."
"I don't feel very strong." Jabitha stared at her toes. "If I was strong, I would have been able to get out of there. That's how you got out, right? The Force?"
Strong in the Force and intelligent. A fine candidate indeed. "I am strong in the Force, yes." I put my hand on her stubbly blue head. "If you concentrate, you'll be able to feel my power. Try it."
Jabitha squeezed her eyes closed, lips pressed into a thin pale line. Then they popped open with a start. "I can feel you," she breathed in a voice equal parts fascination and terror. She scooted back a few inches out of my reach. "It's so...wow..."
"Wow indeed. You've just taken one small step into a larger world." I raised an eyebrow, inadvertently opening a small cut. "But I sense great fear in you, Jabitha Hal. Do you fear yourself, or me?"
She sat silent, brow furrowed. I noted with surprise that her captors had even shaved her eyebrows. She might not even have eyelashes.
"A little of both," she finally said. "I never knew I could do that, feel people in my mind. It feels great, but also kind of scary too. Like if I'm not careful, I could hurt someone. That's scary. But you..." she shuddered. "You feel like you've hurt people before. Killed them. And you don't feel anything about it. That's really scary."
I smiled. What a perceptive child. "That is simply the nature of great power, Jabitha. The strong are always dangerous to those weaker than themselves. If a trashfly could touch the Force, I'm sure he would call you a monster as well. All moral judgements are a symptom of our own point of view."
Jabitha frowned. "My father always told me that strong people can't ever start thinking of themselves as better than others. He said that power means we have a responsibility to be good to each other, the strong especially. That's justice."
"Good? Justice? Ha! Naive little girl. Look around you and tell me--do any of these horrors look like they belong in a good universe!?" I stood, drawing myself up to my full height.
"Let me tell you about life," I said conversationally. "Real life. I am a scientist, a mystic, a seeker of truths. I have been seeking the truth for almost two centuries now. Do you know what horrors await a truth seeker, little Jabitha? Do you know what truths you learn when you face the coldest, hardest, truest reality we know, and face it square on? You learn what a pathetic farce all the moral codes that society gives us truly are. If the universe truly rewards good and punishes evil, then why have you been stolen from your home and made to face unspeakable torments? What kind of good universe would have all your hopes and dreams for the future be torn away from you in an instant, replaced with only blind, uncaring pain?"
Jabitha's eyes widened as if I'd just slapped her. I shook away the memories of Sidious welling up in my brain and began to pace. "Indeed, what universe would do that? The answer is all around you--our universe, Jabitha. The great, horrible, secret truth of it all is that this, all this, this-this-this stupid, mindless slaughterhouse is replicated through all of existence. That is what the universe is, simple as that."
She looked like she was about to cry again, but I saw a spark of understanding kindle within her eye. I knelt down, cupping her tiny, fever-flushed chin in my palm. I lowered my voice and continued, firm but gentle. "They say that when you look into the Void, the Void looks back into you. But I'd go one further; I say that when you look into the Void long and hard enough, the Void reaches out and pulls you into the abyss and grinds your face into the cold lifeless nuclear ashes of dead stars and forces you to see the pain and the chaos and the imperfections. And then the harshest reality of all demands that you recant, that you repent, demands that you take back your claim that there was purpose and moral order down here."
"There is no good or evil, Jabitha," I said in a soft whisper. "There is only alive and dead, strong and weak. The weak will always be at the mercy of the strong, no matter what platitudes the galaxy uses to hide it from us. And nobody can become strong unless they are taught strength."
Jabitha met my gaze, liquid tawny eyes looking tired and impossibly old, like an ancient dragon's. "What... what do you want from me?" she rasped.
I held out a hand. "All I want from you," I intoned, "is a student."
The next brace of moments were as silent as interstellar space. Then Jabitha met my eyes again, tired but determined. Her slim blue hand gripped mine with surprising strength.
"Good, good." I smiled, pulling my new student to her feet. "Now, come with me if you want to live."
NOTES: A double-feature to kick off the weekend! So now you've all met Jabitha, Anakin's friend from Rogue Planet. She's in a pretty dark place right now, but things will get better soon, assuming she and Plagueis can escape the Vong ship they're on. Some additional observations for your consideration:
- If you don't want to give Jabitha a big hug (mind the coral bits) and tell her everything's going to be all right, then frankly you don't have a soul.
- In case you're wondering what the thorny growths on Jabitha's back are, that's one of the side-effects of being implanted with Yorik-Kul, aka "slave coral." All Yuuzhan Vong slaves get implanted with it, and once pieces of it begin protruding from the skin you're perilously close to becoming a thrall. Plagueis has slave coral growing inside him too, but in a less advanced stage than hers. Happily, once you get the seed out it stops growing. If you can communicate with Vong creations, it's reversible.
- Speaking of Vongsense, one of the fun parts about this chapter was setting Plagueis' encounter with the Yuuzhan Vong as a dark foil for Jacen Solo in Traitor. Both spend time in the Embrace of Pain, and both learn how to sense the Vong in the Force, but they got there in totally different ways, and use Vongsense in completely different ways. Jacen gets Vongsene through extrapolating his natural empathy with animals, and uses it to make friends with Yuuzhan Vong biots and creatures. Plagueis, on the other hand, achieves Vongsense by sensing the midi-chlorian analogues in vonglife (a natural extension of his scientific interests), and uses it to bully and threaten said vonglife to do what he wants, or else. Sort of like a telepathic version of your dad shouting and swearing at the family car when it won't start.
Next Time: The Great Escape!
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If you think the Fate Denied story is that good I'll have to give it another look, I couldn't get past the first chapter on previous attempts.
Also, I'm absolutely loving this story still. Plagueis is such a fun character.
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I really dislike the Vong and can think of maybe two or three stories with them where I actually liked how they were used. I now count yours among that number. Plagueis's method of interfacing with them was great, very Sith compared to Jacen's more empathatic approach.
Edit: Just realized that you already commented about the Jacen / Plagueis difference in your authors note.
Edit: Just realized that you already commented about the Jacen / Plagueis difference in your authors note.
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Max Uristwell
Custodian of the Toobs
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Wow, considering how divisive the Vong are, I'm pleasantly surprised to have sold you on my portrayal of them. Just out of curiosity, what other published works or fanfics did you like the way they were used?
Oh, trust me: I felt insufferably clever when I first realized the thematic links.
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When I consume new media I don't do the smart thing and spread it out over a longer period of time, I go through as much of it as I can as fast as I can. So when I was on my Legends kick I went through most of the post imperial period in about a month and a half. I don't remember any of the specific stories with the Vong that I liked beyond the one where Jacen discovered Vongsense. It should also be noted that I got fatigue from the Vong really fast, and if I reread some of the stuff now I probably wouldn't find it nearly as objectionable as I did when I just wanted that whole plotline to end. The best stories were the ones where the Vong were a thing that was happening and motivating the plot but most of the story was about how the characters were reacting and not focused on the Vong, but on the effects of the Vong's actions.
My problem with the Vong is two-fold; one they feel like someone was trying for Lovecraft in Star Wars and totally missed the point of Lovecraft. It's not about the monsters that defy description, it's about how that horror shapes and affects the people who witness it. (Okay it's a bit more complicated than that but this isn't the place for a long dissertation on Lovecraft). Instead what we got was a new enemy that ignored all of the previously established rules, curbstomped almost everyone right off the bat, and worst of all had no buildup beforehand. It quickly created a story that didn't feel like Star Wars at all.
This leads into my other complaint about the Vong, that they were a massive plot cancer. Every storyline became about them, everything got warped so that the Vong were the focus. It got very tiresome very quickly. It ruined the feel of the universe for a long while.
The creation of Vongsense was a great idea had it come sooner or the Vong had less focus beforehand. The idea of a species that operates on a different frequency of the Force and how they treat the rest of the galaxy could have been a great storyline. A sort of Ender's Game esque plot where the Vong view the galaxy in such an alien fashion that they don't realize that they're committing atrocities. This could have nicely tied into a message about cooperation and trying to view things from another's perspective. Instead we got the Flood / Zerg in Star Wars.
Chapter 10: Zho Krazhmir
- Location
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Chapter Ten: Zho Krazhmir
"A Jedi sufficiently strong in the Force can be trained to produce a facsimile, but not true Sith lightning, which, unabated, has the power not only to incapacitate or kill, but to physically transform the victim. Force lightning requires strength of a sort only a Sith can command because we accept consequence and reject compassion. To do so requires a thirst for power that is not easily satisfied. But while you must break the Force and make it your servant, it can never be treated deferentially. Like fire, it is a treacherous servant. In order to summon and use lightning properly, you will someday have to feel its full wrath, as a means of taking the energy inside yourself. If you wish to be a storm, your bones must taste the lightning."
--Datafile #32978, Darth Plagueis' Holocron
--Datafile #32978, Darth Plagueis' Holocron
Yuuzhan Vong cruiser-analog Bloodborne Glory, in orbit over Zonama Sekot, 2 standard years following Battle of Naboo
I felt a ripple in the Force just as muffled alien voices growled from the other side of the door. The door-sphincter shuddered and puckered, but remained shut. The torture-rack must have communicated some of its fear to the door, because the fleshy iris seemed to be in mortal fear of opening. The contingent outside started shouting and hitting the door, making muffled thumping sounds against the thick muscle.
Jabitha's eyes went wide and she wrapped the membrane tight around her. She looked around in obvious fear.
I put my hand on her bony shoulder. "Courage, Jabitha. Use your fear constructively, and save your emotions for when they will prove useful. This is your first lesson."
"There's no way out!"
"Of course there is." I pointed at the door, which was now weeping more blue-black fluid from long, deep gashes where the aliens were cutting through it. "It's through that door."
Jabitha looked at me with mounting horror. "You're crazy, y-you're crazy! I've seen what they can do to people! They burned my planet, they've killed everyone! W-we're not even armed!"
"Then we have them right where we want them, do we not?" A smile crept across my face as I began to feel a cold undercurrent of power billowing up along my nerves. I grinned like a sand-panther cornering its prey. "You forget so quickly, young one--my weapon is the Force, and a powerful weapon it is." I inhaled and savored the euphoric tingle of the static building in the tips of my fingers. "Oh, yes, a powerful weapon indeed…"
The pain the aliens were inflicting on the door finally overrode its fear of me, and it puckered open, letting in a squad of black-armored warriors. I counted four heads silhouetted in the slime-lit doorway, and an unknown number in the corridor beyond.
I pushed Jabitha to one side. "Find somewhere to take cover and stay there. This won't take a minute."
She didn't need any prompting. The girl scurried behind a fleshy-tentacled console that resembled an unopened flower as the aliens stood at the ready in the doorway, hesitant. No doubt the story of the fight in the docking pod had spread in the time I'd been captive.
One of the four in the room, a huge scarred freak nearly a head taller than any of his compatriots, snarled and brought his snake-thing up into a ready position. "DO-RO'IK VONG PRATTE!" he bellowed.
"DO-RO'IK VONG PRATTE!" came the response, as dozens of guttural throats roared in unison.
I said nothing, merely unlimbering my shoulders and bringing my hands up to chest level, long grey fingers hooking like claws. I grabbed my anger--in my mind's hands it squirmed like a thorny snake, tearing into my will as I wrestled it into place--and subdued it, merging it into my deepest self. Instantly, my entire perspective shifted. If I had once been limited to one perspective, my mind now seemed tethered above my corporal body, taking in the battlefield from high above. It was clarity, oneness, a unity with all things. The Jedi often talked of this fabled momentary enlightenment as being the product of release of the self. Perhaps some of their greatest sages had indeed achieved something similar, but this was no weak subordination, no craven capitulation to the Other. No, this was a clarity borne of self-exaltation. All had become one, but only through submission to me. I was the sum of all things, other beings were a mere subset of my infinity. This submission granted me the power of my rage, but channeled through the iron focus of a true Sith. The thunderclouds built in my mind, but instead of clouding my perceptions my head was suddenly as clear as the purest river ice. A low, clear ringing sounded through the Force like a dinner bell.
I bared me new teeth in a savage grin. This was going to be a moment to savor.
When they charged, their anger rushed ahead of them like water from a bursting dam. I took it in and fired it back at them, adding untold eons of fury to it.
With a snarling roar like a thunderclap, a surge of blue lightning rippled from my hands in a blast-front of pure hate.
The tall alien leader was evidently the sort of being who led from the front lines, because he rushed out in front of the others and therefore took the bulk of the dark lightning full in the chest. The sheer power of the electrical fury blasted his body into a spray of ash and bones as the ambient heat seared the skin of the next rank of warriors. My lightning exploded outward in a forking cone from each hand now, pouring into the convulsing aliens. When their bodies had reached their carrying capacity, the remaining energy forked out of their backs in snapping spears of searing blue-violet light, lancing into the aliens behind them and sending their burning bodies into convulsions in turn.
The pod once again became a torture room, a crackling thunderstorm of near-infinite power. Months of pain and despair and loss and sheer planet-cracking, star-destroying fury poured down my arms and out from my fingertips, more and more coming until I felt like I was going to burst from the strength of the surge. A cold star coalesced in my chest and sat there burning like frostbite as all the frustration of a thousand galaxies came to bear on my enemies. An almost giddy euphoria at the release trickled through my brain like a spring thaw. I smiled, then laughed, and soon I was cackling with the pure, sadistic animal joy of watching them scream and writhe, smoking and howling.
After the last alien fell, I sent out another shock and blasted the torture rack into a shattered pile of smoking coral for good measure.
Finally, the storm ended. I lowered my hands and surveyed the damage. What greeted my eyes looked more like the aftermath of a forest fire than a battle. A dozen or so alien bodies lay crumpled on the floor, crab armor scorched and smoking. A light dusting of ash and shards of blackened bone coated every surface in a broad arc in front of me. The smell of ozone and burning flesh hung in the hot, swirling air. My body was flushed with heat and waves of sensitivity pulsed down my forearms.
Wiping the ash from my forehead, I suppressed a delirious giggle. Decades of planning in secret, of polite greetings and subtle insinuations, of being forced to suffer an endless parade of fools, seething with the knowledge that I could wipe their slime from the galaxy with a mere thought...it was maddening. Worse, restricting.
Through victory my chains are broken.
Sometimes, a Sith just needed to cut loose.
I stretched my limbs with a satisfied sigh. For the first time since jumping to the Zonama Sekot system I felt like a Sith Lord again.
"Whoah..."
I turned around in surprise to see Jabitha's shaven blue head peering out from behind the console. She scrambled out into the center of the chamber, steering clear of the worst of the ash burned into the floor. Echoes of the lightning storm still seemed to play in her wide eyes as she surveyed the carnage with those wide eyes.
She turned to me, the look on her face straddling the border between awe and fear. "Was all..." her voice trailed off, unable to find the words to describe what she had just seen. Instead, she just sort of waved her hand, indicating the entire tableau of dark-side supremacy and carnage, as though it was all the work of some dark vengeful god.
Not totally inaccurate.
Jabitha regained her composure and continued. "Was all this the Force? You did this?"
"Indeed it was," I said with a smile. "When you have a strong and focused command of the Force, you can accomplish many things that the mundane world considers to be unnatural. This little...display was, I grant, a bit grandiose. But it shows what a Force-sensitive can accomplish when they embrace their emotions without letting them take control. With the correct guidance and training, you too can accomplish this."
"I could do that?" Jabitha looked at her hands as if she had never really seen them before. A thousand emotions warred behind her ageless eyes.
"Yes," I said. "In time, you will learn. But before you can achieve true power, you must give yourself permission to use your gift. Nature and genetics have allowed you to touch the Force, but you have been held back all your young life. Even before you knew you could touch the Force, others sensed that you were different from them. Stronger, better, more capable. So they told you lies about ethics and equality, in order that they might control and suppress you. These ideas are shackles upon your spirit, Jabitha. You must break through the fog of lies society has surrounded you with--only then will you be able to reach your full potential."
She was silent for a moment. I felt my seeds of doubt start to take root in her mind. It as inevitable, really. Jabitha already had within her all that the dark needed to grow--pain, frustration, fear, resentment, and a desire to be free so powerful that it strained against her self-control like a seismic piston. Once she was able to truly break with her past, she would make a fine Sith.
When she finally spoke her voice was heavy and liquid, but shot through with an undercurrent of something colder and harder. "And if I do this, the Force'll make me strong?"
"Stronger than you can ever imagine. You will never be at another's mercy ever again."
The twitch of a sad, tired, hopeful smile at the corner of her lip. Good. I continued: "It is a bit early to start your actual training, and this slaughterhouse is not the place to discuss philosophy. But let me give you some words of wisdom for the time being. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me. Consider their meaning as we continue on."
Jabitha nodded. Her dark tawny eyes went a bit distant. "Okay."
"Good." I turned back to the door, stepping over a sizzling body. "Now let's find our way off this ship, before more soldiers arrive."
I retraced my circuitous route through the alien ship, with Jabitha following close behind. A general alert must have gone out, because the black-armored warriors were patrolling the corridors in squads of four. When we couldn't find anywhere to hide while they passed us, I made quick work of them with bursts of lightning, and we hurried on before more patrols came running. For a while we were just wandering aimlessly again, but having already gone through these halls once before was helping to solidify my mental map of this part of the ship.
Soon, we entered into a much wider corridor, which stretched perpendicular in front of us, disappearing left and right past the limits of my vision. From its size, I guessed it ran the full length of the warship. There was no time to search and destroy through the whole ship--as satisfying as it would be--so I decided to fight smart instead of hard. Reaching out into the strange Force cul-de-sac the aliens and their creatures inhabited, I searched the corridors with my mind. The door barring the far rightmost end of the passage concealed a pulsing mass of emotions. Skeins of alien anger and fear rasped over each other like snakes in a bucket, standing out against the cool, vegetative glow of thickets of device-creatures. Some sort of control room, perhaps even the bridge. The only guards in view were the two aliens at attention at the door. It took only a mental glare of sufficient menace to convince their snake-things to sink their fangs into their wielders' throats. As they slumped gurgling to the ground, gaping black holes where their trachea should have been, I padded up to the door, Jabitha in tow.
I sidled alongside the door and pushed Jabitha behind me. "I sense a great many warriors behind this door. If you want to live, you must stay behind me and don't make yourself a target."
"Okay."
A quick bolt of fear to the door's primitive mind convinced its muscular iris to open. A heartbeat later I leaped through the opening, arms spread like a predatory bird swooping in on a kill. The world went cold and clear and slow, a moment suspended in ice, and I took in my surroundings in a crystalline burst of Sith focus.
Two aliens were staggering back from the door as I swooped into their faces, eyes widening and yellow teeth slipping from under shredded lips, snake-things rearing into striking position like an eel swimming through Vjun treacle.
Behind them stood six more warriors coming to attention, scrambling over a jungle of seafood--fleshy anemone-like consoles, thickets of sensor-tendrils pulsing with bioluminescent glow, and craggy, fungus-crusted cocoons.
At the back of the room--actually the front, I was realizing--the coral wall was bisected at waist-level by a glassy sheet of clear chitin, and through that immense window everyone in the room got a front-row seat to the spectacle of a world dying in fire.
I reached the peak of my arc a hand-span shy of hitting the low ceiling, and I let out a savage jungle shriek of victory.
As I felt myself starting to fall, I called on the dark side, accelerating in that crucial half-second to something which felt close to terminal velocity. I fell upon the first two warriors like a stooping hawkbat, grabbing a leathery bald head in each hand, driving them into the deck. Their skulls gave way with a very satisfying crunch. Not a second was wasted--as soon as I felt their heads pulp I drew myself back into a low crouch, lightning pouring down through my forearms and sparking between my hooked fingers. But before I let loose another torrent of lightning, something unexpected happened.
Though I have always seen combat as a waste of good emotional fuel, Sith Lords as a vocation tend not to die peacefully in bed. Thus, I have been in enough fights to be prepared for more or less any eventuality, based less on Force-borne insight and more a lifetime of killings and mayhem. Once you understand a combatant, you begin to notice that every being tends to fight in very predictable ways. Most beings are trained in combat using rote repetitions of fight sequences, a simple string of strikes and block they execute from muscle memory. Likewise, every living being carries in it a common set of basic instincts--simple fight-or-flight neural patterns ingrained over millions of years of evolution. Improvisation is rare, and very few things can surprise an experienced fighter.
From past experience, I had expected the six aliens in front of me to try and overwhelm me with a full frontal berserker charge. I had considered the possibility that they would take up defensive positions, to wait for me to make the first move. I had even considered the (quite low) probability that the remaining aliens would panic and flee, or at least fall back and regroup somewhere else.
But never, not even in the most unlikely scenarios, would I have predicted one of them to talk to me.
A deep growling voice called out in butchered Basic, "Of staying hands, warrior! Would of talkings to you, I."
The word WHAT ricocheted around in my skull for a few moments. Then some part of me noted intellectually that the fighting seemed to have stopped.
Sure enough, the aliens were standing rigidly at attention, eyes fixed steadily on the middle distance. The two in the middle parted to let through another of their kind, though much broader in the chest. From what I could see this one was clad in the same black armor as the others, albeit much more ornately. Its shoulders bore craggy pauldrons made of the same crustacean-like material as the armor, studded with curved thorns that reached upwards like the fingers of a plaintive hand. A thick, fleshy cloak, slate-grey and glistening faintly with slime, hung below the pauldrons, obscuring most of its body. The only exposed skin I could see was its face, which was such an alarming mosaic of scars and deformities that I wished I couldn't. From the knobby slope of his brow to his missing nose to his sickly green eyes the color of a dead swamp, every part of this being signalled death and deformity in me head. Did these aliens choose their leaders based on who was the ugliest?
The being opened its appalling mouth and began to slowly churn out more sentences. The Basic consonants almost seemed to get snagged in its teeth on the way out. "Great warrior of merit honorings, you. Speak, we."
Jabitha shot me an apprehensive look as she approached my side. I sent her a ripple through the Force, as blatant as an upraised hand. They clearly knew I could kill them all if I wanted to. "Very well, we shall talk." I said. "What is your name?"
"Zho Krazhmir, I. Am Supreme Commander of the Yuuzhan Vong, I. Be mine--this ship, these warriors." His shoulders moved under his cloak-skin like tectonic plates. "Now, of tellings me your name."
I drew myself up to my full height, well aware that I was half-naked and covered with caked-on ash. And the blood of his men. "I am Darth Plagueis the Wise, Dark Lord of the Sith and ruler of this galaxy. What business do you have entering my domain?"
"Many decades have watchings of this galaxy, we. Of hearing no mention of you, we."
"I have always been the ruler of this galaxy," I informed him, "even if others did not know this. Strength is the only secure source of power...and I am the strongest in this galaxy, as you have seen here today."
Krazhmir nodded solemnly, as though what I had just said was the most natural thing in the universe. Which it was--the strongest ruled, no matter where in the galaxy you went. Why should it be any different elsewhere in the universe?
I was more interested in this creature's claim to be from beyond the galaxy. This was a true unknown, a completely new factor in my plans. "Tell me--where are your people from?"
"Of birthings us far from this place, the True Gods." Krazhmir locked eyes with me, unblinking. "Another galaxy. Of crossings darkspace for eons, we. Age upon age in the starless void, our fleet. Of reaching your galaxy from across endless night, we."
"But why have you come here?"
Lurid flame swept into Krazhmir's eyes. "Come here to live and settle, we. But we of comings here, find your galaxy polluted, we. Full of abominations. Of relyings on dead things, you, a blasphemy of each breath. If of livings in this galaxy, must of much cleanse it, we. All will die, all dead metal things of purgings, until all who live accept the True Way, you. Of bringings the True Way of the Yun'o, we."
I frowned. Not only were they violent technophobes with literally unknown capabilities, not only were they practically invisible in the Force, but now they were superstitious fanatics itching to purge the galaxy out of some misplaced sense of piety. Just my luck.
"Your people have a strange way of dealing with prisoners," I remarked, rubbing my new jaw. "You healed my neck and jaw, but threw me in that device to be tortured."
The alien smiled, showing an astonishing array of sharp yellow teeth. "Will of allowings no blasphemy on my ship, I," he said with evident pride. "not even among infidels. Of healing your injuries, my shapers, and of fittings you with the yorik-kul."
"Yorik-kul? I asked as the alien knob at the back of my neck jumped and pulsed. Crisp packets of pain ran down the seed's alien fibers and burst from every nerve ending. Oh, not good.
"The surge-coral. Of implantings all our slaves. Of killing many with the pain. Of survivings it, only the strongest."
"And the...device?"
"The Embrace of Pain, it. A sacred biot, it. Of train our warriors to resist pain, it. The signature of life, pain--the greatest gift of the True Gods, it. To be of putting in the Embrace of Pain is an a great honor."
"An honor!?" Jabitha shouted in a strangled voice. Her spiny back went rigid as her eyes flashed with hatred and disgust. Rage flared off her through the Force like a plasma torch. Impressive. "Getting put in that...that abomination...that was an HONOR!?! You sick kriffer!"
Two meaty hands emerged from Krazhmir's cloak and spread in a what-can-you-do gesture. "Wished to of testing the mettle of your galaxy, we. So far, of beings found worthy, only a few. You of beings a great warrior, Seeth. And of surprisings us as well, young blue one. Of survivings the Embrace without of going mad, none other. Of beings unique, you. So few of this galaxy are of havings strength worthy of honor." He inclined his head in a quiet bow. "Of givings many of our warriors honorable deaths with your magics, Seeth. A worthy opponent, you. But of suspectings you are unique in this galaxy, I."
Well, he wasn't wrong.
"You know what I can do," I pointed out. "Attempting to keep us here will only result in more of your men dying, and your own mission coming to naught." Krazhmir said nothing.
I continued. "We have no quarrel with you." Perhaps it was more accurate to say that in my current position I had no way of contesting these Yuuzhan Vong's incursion, but it was accurate enough for right now. After all, the shipwrights of Zonama Sekot were Tenebrous' obsession, not mine. If pacifying this reclusive jungle world was enough to hold off whatever plans Krazhmir's fleet had, that was fine with me. "Simply allow us access to one of your escape pods and this needless bloodshed shall end, to both our benefit."
Krazmir's leathery brow furrowed. "Of wishings to fight you in honorable combat, I. One warrior to another." He tilted his head in what I assumed was his people's approximation of a shrug. "But of beings correct, you, in sayings that my own mission is of beings vital to the Yuuzhan Vong. Of havings a higher purpose, we. Very well. Shall let you go, I. From one warrior to another."
"Many thanks, Supreme Commander." I head-bowed. "Where may we find the escape pods?
"Of being a control patch on the wall here by the door. Of opening a door to the lower level of the bridge, it. There of beings the escape pods."
I head-bowed again. "You do me honor." Then, I tapped into my remaining hatred, letting the dark side manifest as more lightning, crackling between my fingers. "But, that will never be enough to make up for what you did to me. You must suffer the consequences of your actions. That is the way of the Sith."
The six aliens of Zho Krazhmir's honor guard disagreed.
Fifteen seconds or thereabouts later, they were all dead.
Five minutes after that, Jabitha and I were rocketing free of Zonama Sekot's gravity well in a tough, cocoon-like escape pod. Once his guards had slumped to the floor, still twitching with electrical feedback, it was a simple matter to get under Krazhmir's guard and send a blade-handed chop into his neck, paralyzing him from the neck down. We had dragged the Yuuzhan Vong into the hidden escape pod bay, intimidated one of the capsules to obey my mental orders, and launched in the middle of the pitched battle still raging in Zonama Sekot's orbit. The coral starfighter-analogs were inadvertently screening our escape, suggesting that nobody left aboard the warship had discovered the massacre on the bridge yet. Or perhaps they were reluctant to fire on an escape pod carrying the ship's commander.
I rubbed my jaw with satisfaction. Hostage-taking was a grand old Sith tradition, one I yet to indulge in.
Jabitha reclined on a long bench, back upraised, gingerly inspecting the slave-coral spines embedded in her skin. She had wanted to sit as far away from Krazhmir's crippled, immobile form as she could. Thus, he was slumped on the floor next to my seat. I considered her once more. The girl was undoubtedly strong in the Force, but the fact that her talent had only manifested as a defense mechanism while under torture was concerning. As was her reluctance to actually face the alien commander responsible for her torments. It suggested that she was still gripped by fear, rather than using it as fuel. Sidious had had the opposite problem--he had been an expert at engaging with and controlling his emotions, so much so that it nearly spelled the end for me. I had never truly tamed Sidious, and in truth he was a master manipulator from childhood, completely untrained.
A natural Sith.
If Jabitha was to begin acting like a Sith, then I would need to take a more proactive teaching approach.
I grabbed Krazhmir by the collar of his armor and heaved him into the center aisle. He landed next to Jabitha with a thump.
The girl jumped upright with an adorable little squeak. Her eyes locked onto Krazhmir, then followed his trajectory to the other side of the escape pod, eventually meeting my eyes.
"What's going on?" she asked, half lost in thought.
"I want you to kill our friend here," I said matter of factly. "He is at your mercy, and you have every right to want him dead. So kill him, and bring an end to it."
Jabitha said nothing and just stared at the Yuuzhan Vong, stark and rigid. Her fists clenched and unclenched. A hot trickle of anger began to pierce her consciousness, but I felt her push it back.
"Do not fear what you're feeling, Jabitha, use it!" I hissed. "Call upon your righteous anger. Focus it, and the dark side of the Force will act as an extension of your will. He cannot sense the Force, he cannot stand against you. Strike now. Strike! Sate your vengeance. Kill him."
Pain, fear, and longing mingled and spilled out through the Force. I could see the cold light gleaming off Jabitha's eyes like sunrise off a glacier. But she hesitated, seeing not only a sadistic alien foe but a crippled, helpless enemy.
She let out a deep breath. "I shouldn't..."
"Think, child!" I barked. "How many lives has this being taken? How many of them were your friends, your family, your world? How much of your spirit did that torture machine chip away? How much of your life will you never get back? Does this creature not deserve to pay for his crimes? Is he not too dangerous to be left alive!?"
My voice softened, as I saw her hand begin to tremble. "This is not an order, Jabitha, but permission. Permission to choose, to act. You don't have to be weak anymore. You can be a force for justice, for vengeance. You can be the vengeance you wish to see in the world. You have the will to do it, which gives you the right to indulge in it. You can make sure what happened to you will never happen to another girl, ever. All you need to do is decide. I am merely making you aware of all your options."
Jabitha blinked back tears. When she did, I caught another glimpse of her eyes. They shone a feral, animalistic yellow. Just like Sidious, came an unbidden thought. Then one slim, deceptively strong blue hand grabbed Krazhmir's throat, dark power radiating from her grip. Krazhmir was still too stunned to do or say anything, but under the obvious pain was a hint of a smile playing at the corner of his lipless mouth. Jabitha's mouth tightened into a thin indigo line, and her grip tightened with it, crushing the life out of the alien, her captor, her torturer.
Then, finally, came a muffled wet crack, like breaking a rotting branch, and Supreme Commander Zho Krazhmir was no more. The Force absorbed him like a stain.
A long, dark moment passed, Jabitha with her hand still locked around the alien's throat. Then she finally let go and staggered backwards, expression pained and tired, but not regretful.
I came up alongside the girl, putting a hand on her shoulder. She winced at the touch, but only a little. "Congratulations are in order, I believe."
"I felt my anger, and suddenly it was like I was drowning in it, like all I wanted was to...to destroy him. Wipe him out like he was nothing. I couldn't stop myself..."
"Couldn't stop yourself," I asked in a warm voice, "or didn't want to stop yourself?"
She turned to face me, realization sweeping over her like a tidal rush. "The...the second one, I guess. I knew that I could kill him, and inside I wanted to kill him so bad that it felt like I was burning up. It was amazing. That power I felt inside me--was that the Force too?"
I nodded. "Yes. That power was the Force, but also your own emotions giving it focus and clarity. When you tap into your emotions rather than denying them, when you access the Force and bring every aspect of your being to bear on it--then you will find that you are capable of amazing things. Like bringing justice where none exists."
"The Force shall free me," she breathed, looking at her hands as if for the first time. I noticed tiny prickles on the backs of her hands--the beginnings of new yorik-kul growths just starting to break the skin.
"Just so." I smiled. "You have only begun to discover your true potential, young Jabitha. The question now is, what next? What shall you do with it? Once we land on Coruscant, you will have a literal galaxy of options, any number of opportunities ready to be exploited by a crafty and resourceful young Force-user. But should you plan on learning more about this new power, where should you go? The Jedi will not take you--you are far too old, and even if they did ignore their dogmas on your behalf they would make up for it by forcing you into the confining strictures of Jedi life. You would not only not be you anymore, you would barely be human. You could certainly strike off on your own, and discover your power in the Force independently, via trial and error. But you would always find yourself hampered, and end up with strange idiosyncrasies in your techniques that your enemies--and you will have enemies, young one--can exploit."
"Or, I can have you teach me." Jabitha said. "You're not a Jedi, are you? I've never heard of any Jedi frying a bunch of people with lightning before."
I paused, as if considering something. "That is true. Tell me, what have you heard about the Sith?"
"Only a little. They were evil and dangerous, full of hate and anger. Their empire oppressed the galaxy a long time ago."
"And how much of that do you believe?" I asked.
Jabitha thought about it. "Not much," she finally told me. "I mean, hate and anger aren't really bad, if they lead to something good in the end." She pointed back to Krazhmir's crumpled body, cloak-skin covering his craggy armor like a tarp over a pile of garbage. "If I hadn't used my hate and anger, then that monster would still be alive. And more people in the future would be hurt."
I smiled. "You learn quickly. I'm reminded of something my old master once told me. Revenge is justice. Justice began with revenge, and vengeance is the only justice many beings will ever receive. It is a balancing of the scales."
"Are the Sith stronger than the Jedi?"
"Incomprehensibly so," I said. "We explore all the mysteries of the Force, unhindered by the dogmatic, narrow strictures of the Jedi. We accept the consequences of our actions, rather than making them the rest of the galaxy's problem. We set ourselves free with the Force, unwilling to settle for anything less than total mastery--be that of ourselves, of others, or even an entire galaxy of lesser beings."
Jabitha's eyes gleamed with hunger. "Then that's what I want to be."
"Do you truly wish to be my student?" I asked.
"Yes, Lord Plagueis. I want to learn the ways of the Sith. It is the only way for me to become stronger."
I frowned. "Be warned--becoming a Sith will mean forever severing all connections to your old life. Your family, your friends, they will all be dead to you now."
"Everyone I once knew is dead anyway. Zonama Sekot has nothing left for me."
"You must be willing to leave everything you once held dear behind. your home, your possessions--all of it must die to you."
"My father was Magister of this planet," Jabitha said with a steady gaze, "but he always told us that it was our deeds that defined a person, not their possessions. Their loss means nothing to me."
"Indeed." I looked Jabitha up and down, inspecting the cold, lean lines of her body. Despite her ordeal she still had a fair amount of muscle on her frame, but what truly impressed me was the hunger in her eyes. She had been a victim at the mercy of her captors once before, and I knew that she would never let it happen again. That sort of determination is rare enough in an ordinary being--if that being could touch the Force, who knew what they could accomplish? Yes, she would do nicely.
I regarded the skinny half-breed girl. "Is it your will, Jabitha Hal, to join your destiny forever with the Order of the Sith Lords?"
"Yes." Jabitha knelt to the spongy deck. "It is my will to join my destiny forever with the Order of the Sith Lords."
I touched the crown of her head with my left hand and let the dark side roar through me unhindered until I felt entire galaxies orbiting around me. Our bodies resonated together until the escape pod rang with a silent shriek of power.
"By my will is it done. Now, my apprentice, you are a Sith Lord in full, the thirty-first Darth in a millennium. You have entered into a grander, more meaningful existence. The weak little girl who was Jabitha Hal is forever dead, and you have been reborn, forged and tempered into a superior being. Choose a new name for yourself--a symbol of your new existence."
A long moment passed in silence, colder and darker than the heat death of the universe.
Finally, Jabitha spoke, head still lowered. "Borea. I am Borea." The words carried a deep, resonant alto I had never heard from her before.
"So be it. From this day forth, the truth of you, now and forever more, shall be Darth Borea, Lady of the Sith."
I raised my hands in benediction. "Now rise, Lady Borea. We have much work to do."
Borea rose, eyes glowing with a predatory golden gleam. "What shall I do now, master?"
I grinned and folded my hands behind my back. "In time, Lady Borea, we shall bend the galaxy to our will. But as for your own power? All you need concern yourself with now is your training. One day, you shall be a Sith Lord in power as well as in name. But for now, unquestioning obedience must be your only concern. For I will make a Sith out of you, even if it kills you."
A silent threat compelled the escape pod to leap out into hyperspace, back toward a galaxy pregnant with possibilities.
A galaxy that would soon face a second Sith.
NOTES: This is the last fight scene we're going to have for a few updates, so I really wanted to set Darth Plagueis let his inner evil wizard loose. Also, we learn a bit about the Yuuzhan Vong and their plans through a surprising source.
- On retrospect, perhaps it was a bad idea to make Zho Krazhmir talk like Polandball, but I stand by it as a creative decision. The idea I'm going for is that he's figured out some level of Basic vocabulary, but is utterly lost when it comes to grammar. Hopefully it works.
- Jabitha--excuse me, Darth Borea--has finally become a Sith apprentice in full. We'll be doing something a little different for the next update, as we jump forward quite far in time, as Borea's training plays out in a long "montage" of sorts.
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Max Uristwell
Custodian of the Toobs
- Location
- United Kingdom
I would absolutely go and see that movie.
I'm really enjoying this. Plagueis is very fun. You are posting like a madman! How much do you have prewritten vs writing on the spot?
I feel like asking a brand new Darth to name themselves with no warning is how you get embarrassingly chuuni names like Plagueis, Maul, Nihilus, etc.
I think they felt the need to have a different fundamental galactic tension than the tired Rebel vs Empire conflict. They had a good point, and an external threat isn't a bad way to go about it. The problem is that, as you say, the Vong just didn't feel starwarsy.
I feel like asking a brand new Darth to name themselves with no warning is how you get embarrassingly chuuni names like Plagueis, Maul, Nihilus, etc.
I think they felt the need to have a different fundamental galactic tension than the tired Rebel vs Empire conflict. They had a good point, and an external threat isn't a bad way to go about it. The problem is that, as you say, the Vong just didn't feel starwarsy.
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- Location
- Alaska
I've already written all the stuff I've been posting: I've got 23 chapters done until you get all caught up with where I'm at. After that, I predict we'll settle down to a more reasonable once-a-week schedule.
"Borea" is actually significant on multiple levels: it's combination of the lighting-manipulating Sekotan bora tree with the Greek god of the north wind (Boreas), which is a reference to how Jabitha's father used to call her "Wind." I also considered "Darth Vex," "Darth Invicta," and "Darth Maliss."
Imagine Kill Bill, only with lightsabers and the Jedi are all Bill.
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