Helix found little time for leisure these days. It was endless travel from one war to another, endless tedious meetings with Sith dignitaries who wouldn't even spare him a glance. Endless wastes of time in a thousand different forms.
Today was a rare example of time for him to sit down and appreciate the enormity of his plunder.
He sat, legs propped up, at his desk aboard the Fearful Symmetry, surrounded by the plunder of countless worlds. Clone helmets taken from the invasion of Dagobah. Data-slivers holding valuable intel from the Woostri debacle. A single, horribly mangled skull from Brosi. Scraps of dried flesh still clung to it. He'd eaten the rest, as he recalled. Noteworthy only because it was the first Imperial he'd killed in a long while.
Then there were the real treasures. A pristine 1st Edition of "A Darkness Beyond Darkness" signed by its author. A data-backup, should he be destroyed. The Holocron of Heresies. He'd almost forgotten it existed, piled carelessly amongst mountains of detritus.
Helix traced a bladed finger over the holocron's surface carefully, almost lovingly. He'd won the miserable little thing on auction from the late Alicia Drey , for a sum that would beggar a king.
He had been young then, still trapped in his ancient, obsolete body. Still a thing of circuits and wires and limits.
He'd pondered what to do with the thing for some time. Part of him, the part that was currently winning, wished to simply jettison it from the nearest airlock into the nearest star. All that vaunted knowledge, the life's work of countless "great" men, gone.
The poetic irony of this pleased him greatly. Dead men's dead works, all gone at the insane whim of a being who could never comprehend their world. Likely, none of them could have ever comprehended him, either.
If their ideas were of any worth, they wouldn't be dead. Death was an admission of failure. All of one's hopes and ideals, consigned forever to the conqueror worm.
If Dooku could see him now. If any of them could. A disposable tool, grown to be a god.
Helix picked the thing up, studying it. It was so delicate. So ancient. He could crush it to dust in his grasp with so little effort. His grip could peel open armored vehicles, unscrew human heads from their shoulders, send the mightiest of warriors down into the dirt where they belonged. So much power, over so small a thing.
He supposed that was why he kept it around. It was a trophy, a declaration of victory like everything else in his vaults. He liked the power he had over the legacies of these long-dead, long-irrelevant fools.
That was perhaps also why he'd not forked the thing over to Darth Malum of House Marr or Darth Strosius the instant he was able. Only Trayze Tesar knew he possessed it at all. Well, Trayze and everyone else who had been there that night.
They were welcome to come claim it someday, if he hadn't bored of it and used it as target practice by then. He unslung his sidearm, considering the idea. He could toss the thing into the air, take a shot, and poof, no more legacy. He very much doubted that an ancient Sith plaything was equal to a cutting-edge phosphor blaster.
Then there was the book. The Book. Enshrined next to the worthless holocron and all of the rest in a place of honor. Penned by dear, sweet Lirka's own hand. He liked the Sephi, and would almost certainly kill her last of all. Tossing the holocron over his shoulder onto the floor, he plucked the holobook from its pedestal, opened it, and read the entire thing in 1.6 seconds.
He'd read it many times, when his busy schedule allowed, and never ceased to be fascinated. Mad though the knife-eared warlord was, he couldn't help but see some method amongst the madness. It was the scribblings of a vermin, and thus full of verminous ideas. Vermin tended to be survivors, and survival was the only victory worth celebrating. He suspected that Lirka Ka would still be around when everyone else was long dead, thus proving her ideas correct.
Sith all thought themselves to be era-defining visionaries, full of brilliant and enlightened ideas that surely nobody had ever considered before. Most had penned some sort of incoherent manifesto about them, and most such manifestos were utter tripe. He'd gently advised a few such visionaries to stick to murdering and scheming where they belonged, and leave writing for those with something, anything interesting to say.
As such, he only kept the one such manifesto, the rare one where the author actually scratched at the door of truth instead of tormenting him with thousands of pages of navel-gazing, self-congratulatory nonsense. He wished fervently to add others, if he could find them.
He supposed that was perhaps a little unfair. He'd never written anything, because that would require him to want his thoughts exposed to others. Or for others to care what he thought, which was doubtless the larger issue at hand.
Placing the holobook carefully back on its pedestal, he strode out of the office and back to his duties. The few minutes of inactivity had been pleasant, but he had weapons to design, people to murder, and maybe more wine to mooch from Darth Nefaron 's excellent cellar. Now there was someone who could write a good book...
