Darth Imperius knelt in the heart of his sanctum aboard the Imperator Rex, his crimson eyes closed, his breathing slow and deliberate. Yet this was no ordinary meditation. The currents of the Force around him were wrong - twisted, screaming. Visions clawed at the edges of his mind: a yawning abyss, a chorus of whispers that were not whispers at all, but the shrieks of things that should not be. The ship's hull groaned, not from the strain of hyperspace, but from something far worse. Something pressing in.
Then the lights died.
The darkness that followed was not mere absence of light - it was alive, hungry. The air thickened, the scent of ozone giving way to something older, fouler, like rust and rotting parchment. The first scream echoed through the corridors, a sound that was less voice and more the tearing of sanity itself.
Imperius rose, his hand finding the hilt of Anathema, the greatsword forged in Sith alchemy's cruelest fires. Its blade hummed with a dark hunger of its own, resonating with the encroaching nightmare. But even its power felt fragile now. The shadows moved without light to cast them, slithering along the walls, forming shapes - elongated limbs, too many eyes, mouths that opened where mouths should not be.
The first of them came.
It was not flesh, not machine, but something in between - a thing of jagged angles and shifting form, its body a mockery of life, its voice a chorus of the damned. His warriors fired, but their bolts passed through it as though it were smoke and spite. Then it moved, and where it passed, men fell, not dead, but unmade, their bodies contorting, their screams becoming something else entirely.
Imperius met it with Anathema's edge, and the blade bit deep, howling as it drank of the creature's essence. It screeched, its form unraveling - but more came. Always more. The ship was no longer his. It was theirs. The corridors stretched into impossible gulfs, the walls weeping black ichor. The air itself had grown teeth.
Then It came.
The final horror. The architect of this incursion.
It wore the shape of something that might have once been human, but no longer. Its flesh was armor, its armor was flesh, and its eyes were voids that pulled at the soul. It spoke, not in words, but in the echoes of every doubt, every fear Imperius had ever crushed and buried.
They clashed, blade against claw, will against will. Anathema struck true - once, twice, carving into the beast's unnatural hide. But then, with a sound like a dying star, the greatsword shattered, its fragments dissolving into black mist.
The creature laughed, a sound that cracked the bones of the world.
Imperius stood, unarmed but unbroken. He was Sith. More than Sith - he was Wrath, a being wrought to conquer gods. The Force answered his fury, not as a tool, but as a storm. He did not wield it. He was it.
The ship trembled. Reality itself buckled.
And then -
Silence.
The lights returned. The air was still. The invaders were gone, banished, though the scars of their passing remained. The Imperator Rex drifted, wounded but alive.
And Darth Imperius stood amidst the ruin, his hands stained with things that had no blood, his mind touched by truths that would break lesser beings.
He would not forget this.
And he would be ready.
