CHANGE OF THE GUARD
Next Entry: 01/15
If you live in this world…
They moved like machines. It was, after all, what they had been reduced to. The tactical agents had sunken eyes and sallow skin, with black veins visible along the face and neck. There was not so much as a twitch of the mouth between them. They had been hollowed out - a sharp contrast to the four other men they herded, like cattle, through the halls of the Imperial Palace.
They were still demanding answers, still shouting outrages, claiming rank and privilege, looking around feverishly. These were the colonels of the 551st Legion, after all. Though only a few years reconstituted, it still entitled them to better treatment than this. Or so they thought.
With the Emperor now distant and unavailable, they had taken to leveraging their posts to enrich themselves. All the usual criminal indiscretions. The bribery had been rote, predictable, and that above all else was insulting. There was no vice more universal than simple, crude avarice.
Well. Here was where the tracks of that pathetic gravy train terminated: the Imperial Palace, the heart of deep and rudderless evil.
The sovereign protectors and royal guards were still holding vigil over an empty throne room. That was perhaps who the colonels were looking for and calling out to. But like shamed and abused creatures, the emperor's palace guard shrank away when the procession passed them.
By now they knew better than to interfere in Meliant's intrigues.
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The vergence that remained within the palace, once the beating heart of the Jedi Order, had been poisoned with the Dark Side during the slaughter on Coruscant. One of the last meaningful acts of the Dark Side Elite. The old serenity of this place was now a fleeting memory. Those who beheld the new vergence were left with the feeling of being lashed by the pitiless waves of a violent sea.
Those unaccustomed to the naked truth of the Dark Side were ill-advised to go before it. It did not surprise Meliant that his requisitioned colonels were now seizing on the ground, frothing at the mouth, tearing at their eyes, alternating between screams and gurgling. Nonsensical. Pathetic.
Meliant's proxies had just thrown them in and shut the doors.
Quasten was standing there with him, flipping the pages of a well-worn tome. Another Dark Side Elite, and a greasy, weedy little co-conspirator. "They're lucky. Normally they would have to march through your entrails for some hours."
"The fools hardly know what they're missing," Meliant rasped.
He drew a cruel-looking dagger out from a moldering sheath. The blade was etched with Sith runes. Like the tome, it had been taken from the forbidden archives of the palace. Meliant had killed three sovereign protectors for it. More had died after, and more would die again.
Now Meliant pressed the blade deep into his palm. "Start now before they pass out. Draw from the vergence, like I showed you."
Quasten cleared his throat, found the right page, and began his recitation. For his wretched appearance, he could at least enunciate the ancient Sith language well enough. Meliant began to draw the blade across his palm, leaving a clean slit in the armorweave.
Jet-black smoke curled out from the wound. It coalesced in the air for what felt like an eternity, splitting into four tendrils. Quasten's chanting intensified, the words melding into unintelligible hissing to the ears of the uninitiated. The tendrils coiled and twisted, then angled towards - descended upon - the pitiful colonels.
Meliant watched, enraptured, burning with stolen power.
The change would be painful for them. That was fine. Their anguish would feed the vergence, just as the vergence fed the ritual. It was a feedback loop of cruelty that would only be stopped up once the Jedi mustered the strength to reclaim this place.
By God, there was work to be done, and Meliant had long tired of this farce.
…You're feeling the change of the guard.
