Malsheem, Deep Space
902 ABY
Darth Carnifex sat within the Sanctum of Memories, legs crossed and hands clasped over His stomach. His face, once serene, was now darkened by the shadow of concentration. It was not uncommon for the Dark Lord to receive visions and revelations during the height of meditation, but this wasn't that. He felt entirely divorced from His body, His consciousness dragged further and further into the darkness beyond the walls of His perception. Shadows rushed up to swallow Him whole, drowning Him in an inky unending everblack. Sharp panic spiked in His heart, such a Human condition for one who had become so removed from His own mortality.
Then, the darkness receded. He looked to either side of Him, but found no end to the nothingness which yawned in all directions. No end, nor any beginning. There was only the weight of it, a slow, omnidirectional pressure closing in all around Him. Beneath Him is nothing so much resembling a floor, but more an expanse of frozen breath; smoke rolling about His ankles like waves of water. Above Him there was no sky, only a ceiling of suspended thought. Fractals of memory dancing and spiraling towards a vanishing point that pulsed with the rhythm of a heartbeat that was not His own.
He walked towards it, never knowing just how far He traveled in this endless dreamscape. In an instant it began to fold in around Him, not threateningly or in welcome, but in recognition. Disorientation seizes Him, but He lets it wash over Him, sensing that it was only a passing sensation. He is proven correct as space reorients itself, and He finds Himself at the center of what He'd been traveled towards.
A throne, not of stone or steel, but of thousands and thousands of towering panes of reflective black glass. Each one was curved and angled like the petals of a flower, and each surface hummed faintly as though caught on the precipice of shattering. Their edges trembled under the weight of something terrifying real.
Each one reflected His own face back at Him, but though they bore His likeness He sensed that they were not truly His own.
A ruinous Emperor of glassy eyes and eroded voice, a creature long removed from the triumph of His conquests, He alone seated upon a throne of broken swords as the galaxy rotted all around Him; a young man still yet to be scarred by the terrors of war, His eyes wide with fire and ambition, proudly standing at the center of a pool of the dead, reaching out towards the stars with bloodstained hands; a trembling war-priest of a broken temple, whispering liturgies to Himself to keep the darkness at bay, trembling as He realized too late that He was the darkness; the terrible joy of a madman, who has unmade whole star systems and watches their collapse with ecstatic reverence, drunk on the power to undo meaning.
More faces flash in each reflection.
A sihlouette stretched into impossible angles, flesh wrought of iron and eyes like a jeweled scarlet diadem, the Force itself wrapping around Him in orbiting rings, terrified of it's own creation; a cracked breastplate, ribs exposed, bloodied hands clutching a stillborn child of Light, kneeling in a war zone that has no victor, whispering the name of something once precious now entirely forgotten; fang-toothed and war-mad, with a grin carved by pain and cruelty, wielding a blade of the names He's erased from history, eager to strike at Himself if it meant greater stillness; weeping as the tears do not fall from His face, but remain suspended in the air, as though gravity itself recoils from His sorrow, his mouth open in a silent cry in a universe that no longer has any words to give His anguish meaning.
Each one turns to look at Him through their mirrored existence. Their mouths do not move, but the air grows thick with the cacophony of their voices, all speaking as one. Their voices, His voice, thread together not in harmony, but in monolithic unison; each word carrying with it the weight of all His sins magnified.
"We are you before you remembered."
A chill radiates down His spin, but not in fear; recognition. These are no mere reflections or aberrations of the self, these are the precedent. They are the possibilities, discarded paths, and rejected outcomes that once sat beside Him like shadows. They are the root of His becoming, the lives He did not live, and those that have yet to pass. Their unlived momentum shaped Him. Their gaze is not accusatory, but cold and indifferent. They existed so that He could evolve beyond them.
"We are the thoughts that fed you."
He could feel it now, the slow pressure of something not metaphorical, but literal. Every surge of insight, every unspoken certainty, every intuitive grasp of the galaxy's structure was not His alone, but seeded by these silent witnesses. The rage He once felt towards those who endeavored to limit His potential; the certainty that the Dark Side was not a power to be obeyed, but a pattern to be imposed; and the instinct to build the Malsheem not as a throne world, but as an Ark to persist beyond all time. All of it came from them, the undigested thoughts, the pre-formed instincts, and the ancestral dreams of a thousand possibilities whispering across time and space.
"We are the others you must become, but not while contradiction remains."
He looks now to the throne again, not realizing He'd looked away. It glows now, not with light, but with finality. A beacon of what He must do. In it's hum, He finally understands. These selves reflected back at Him are not mistakes, they are not regrets, they are requirements. He must become them, He must accept them into Himself, one by one, not as shadows to banish but as the final pieces of a puzzle He'd unknowingly been building ever since He was born. He can feel them now, He can feel them crawling towards Him.
He remembers hiding, He remembers falling. The fear seeping into His bones, He feels it again. Not to weaken, but to anchor.
His palms are scarred, His voice cracked from prayer. He remembers mercy. He remembers choosing to save instead of choosing to kill. The tenderness lingers, not to soften Him, but to define contrast.
He laughs with a barking choke that reverberates like broken glass. He remembers delighting in cruelty, breaking beauty for the pleasure of destruction. The madness settles into His ribcage, not to unmoor Him, but to teach Him restraint.
They pass through Him like smoke, like blood and dreams. He does not stop them, because now He understands their truth. As each one enters Him, the dream begins to shift and warp. Time loses sequence, sensation becomes polyphonic. He is weeping while commanding, laughing while dying, kneeling while standing victorious, and none of it is in conflict. There is only saturation, coalescence. The weft and weave of all threads becoming one cloth.
The final convergence.
His body is too small for it now, His mind too linear, but the shape of what He must become is settling. He can see it now, so clear in His mind's eye. It is the unknown one, the only reflecting that does not resemble Him. It's face is a blank slate, featureless, it's very presence like static behind the eyes.
He reaches for it, fingers outstretched.
And awakens.
Darth Carnifex snaps forward, nearly doubling over as He violently rips Himself from the dreamstate. Blood drips down from a dozen lacerations all meticulously carved into His arms, spanning all the way from His wrists to His biceps. He'd done it in the throes of His vision, nails tearing into flesh to douse themselves with His black blood. With them, He'd drawn something on the floor below, slightly smudged by the hand that had thrust out to catch Him from falling. His eyes looked over it in stunned silence, uncertainty bleeding away to cold realization.
This was it.
This was what He saw.
And above it, marked in the runic script of ur-Kittât, were two words.
BUILD ME
