Imperator
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
- Intent: To finally properly codify Lirka’s belief system and what the “Primordial Dark” is in an IC document
- Image Credit: N/A
- Canon: N/A
- Permissions: N/A?
- Links: Lords of Nihl Sith Eternalism Sith-Imperialism and the Foundations of Eternal Rule Sorcerers of Rhand Way of the Dark Otherspace Knyga iv Kotsûshatul Itsu | The Book of Broken Chains
- Media Name: A Darkness beyond Darkness
- Format: Holobook
- Distribution: Rare - Lirka Ka is a deeply paranoid monster on the best of days, and with a text like this that borders, if not outright declares, its own heresy she makes sure to keep it to only those whom she can trust. Yet, in a surveillance state like the Sith Empire, is anything truly hidden?
- Length: Long
- Description: A Darkness Beyond Darkness is the religious text penned by Lirka Ka for the purpose of sharing her beliefs in what she calls the “Primordial Darkness” - an entropic force of cosmic destruction that from which all things began and all things will end. The many facets of what entails a life fighting against this cosmic truth on the Dark Path of Power is listed within it, among them the ideas of a new form of Sith belief melding together her own religious beliefs and those found within the more common denominations of Sith, from Kainite, Eternalist, to classical understandings of the Sith Code.
- Author: Lirka Ka
- Publisher: Self
- Reception: Darkness beyond Darkness is little but carefully guarded whispers, and as such at the time of publishing the document has had minimal reception from the Sith Empire and the Galaxy itself at large.
Darkness Beyond Darkness is an incredibly plain holobook, by intent. It is a book of belief and a way for Lirka to preach her cosmic truth - the truth does not need to be flashy, it is merely the truth. It is formed together by a mixture of Lirka’s written musings and some of her droning monologues from audible contemplations during her long absence from the civilized Galaxy trapped within Wild Space.
CONTENT INFORMATION
The Primordial Darkness: The Primordial Darkness, at its core, is an underlying cosmic energy in the Galaxy that compels aspects of the living world to cease existing. For all existence begins at the emptiness of primeval darkness and at the end-of-all-things everything will return to its cold embrace. The living world can be compared to an impossibly vast pool of water, the Primordial Darkness is a drain that slowly but surely draws all things back into itself - people, planets, governments, beliefs, everything that exists within the material plain falls under the purview of this primordial darkness. The Primordial Dark works at a pace unknowable to mortal minds, and as such leaves a metaphorical axe dangling above the neck of all things - which leads directly into the belief of worthiness. By every metric, something can allow itself to lazily drift towards the drain till it is eventually consumed. Or, those enlightened souls can realize they are in the pool - and they can start swimming away from the drain, staving off the inevitable.
The Catalyst of Suffering: While words can be read and considered, to feel the Primordial Darkness’s grasp one needs to experience suffering. Suffering is a catalyst upon which one can reach a state of evolution and become something better than what they were before - or simply collapse and be consumed by the Primordial Darkness if they are deemed to be an unworthy soul. Pain is something to exalt in, both inflicting it upon others to having it inflicted upon oneself. The Galaxy by in large must suffer lest those that could become strong fall to the wayside and remain untested souls, suffering becomes a matter of uplifting yourself which by proxy will uplift those around you as your own suffering becomes a run off for those within your presence. This sadomasochism present takes multiple forms, and does not limit itself simply to physical suffering - in fact Lirka makes explicit mention that is in fact mental suffering that will usually serve as one of the most poignant catalysts to herald someone forward upon the Dark Path.
Transience and Evolution: Suffering begets transience. To truly embrace the Dark Path is to understand that your being is a constantly transitory thing from a lesser form to a greater form, within that great transition there is to be minor evolutions along the way as the natural order is defied and tested to become the strongest version of oneself. Hardship is the ultimate firestarter of change. This devotion to transitional periods and evolution lends a certain praise towards notions of alchemy and flesh crafting, to be able to alter the form given by nature and remake it to an end more suitable shows a devotion to the denial of death. One must never grow overly attached to what they are, and must keep their minds focused on what they could be.
Lirka ruminates on this concept in many different ways, to evolve you must be willing to become untethered from all that you were. It is an open idea, in many ways Lirka believes that such a thing begets an aromantic belief towards the world or if nothing else a willing to disconnect yourself from your fellows - and of course, such a prospect of social based suffering does offer a new catalyst in the endless masochism that assists in the Dark Path.
Strength: There exists a Zambrano saying. “The strong will do as they do, the weak will suffer what they must.” Truly what is there to more concisely describe the cruel meritocracy that awareness of the pull of Primordial Darkness brings about? To stand against inevitability is to walk a path of the strong, to have the might to take what you want and force those beneath you to accept your will. Yet what is strength truly? It takes many forms, strength of the body, strength of the mind, strength of the spirit. One must master strength in all forms to truly grow beyond the confines of the natural order: Lirka puts a particular amount of attention to the strength of body, for the body and its evolutions into mightier and mightier forms when embracing the path serves as a tether to reality. Yet, what good is strength of body without the strength of mind to know when to use it? And what good is the intelligence gained from the strength of mind without the convictions granted by the strength of spirit? Strength is connected deeply to the individual, hence the power of the individual, and the strengths within an individual are fundamentally conjoined.
The Power of the Individual: To succumb to Primordial Dark is to abandon individuality, as such those who walk the path should cherish the individuality they retain upon defiance of Primordial Dark’s embrace. Yet fitting within theme, individuality quickly devolves to selfishness. The strongest stand alone, ultimately. The internal drive of oneself represents one of the most pertinent ways to avoid the pull of darkness once you are aware of its presence. The desires of the self are a thing to be both encouraged, yet also tempered. To follow base instinct is an avenue to animalistic power but it is not the animal that is truly ascendant upon the Dark Path, one must indulge and deny themselves all the same so that both aspects of the self can be honed and sharpened like a knife. Survival begets at times a savage beast, but at the same time it may demand an assassin’s careful grace to survive the crucible Primordial Darkness inflicts upon reality.
Shackles, Slavery, the Means to an End: There is no institution within the Galaxy more cruel than the slave trade. As such, it serves to be the most effective means to an end of inflicting the suffering that may become the crystalis necessary to herald an evolution into a stronger form. With a Sith leaned bias in most of a Darkness Beyond Darkness because of Lirka’s experience among them, two primary examples are given with Sith of rather great renown.
Darth Strosius - High Priest of the Wonsoa - The supreme nuisance of broken chains himself. While the “high prophet of Bogan” is certainly far from one of Lirka’s favorite Sith there is an undeniable truth to the power he possesses. What is the catalyst of power? Suffering of course. Would the supreme-nuisance-of-Wonosa be where he was today without the misery inflicted by the spice mines of Kessel? A great many bouts of violence and chaos have been born from the Wonosa quest to break the chains - violence is always to be praised, even if it is for ends that Lirka deems most idiotic.
Sith-Emperor Darth Empyrean - What better example of the power that can be gained through the agony of slavery than that of the Sith Emperor himself? Lirka offers the leader of the Sith Order some scorn in her rantings, for he should understand better than most that his early years in chains and his outlawing of slavery is a deeply foolish bout that works against the necessity of Primordial Darkness’s expansion of misery. Far from an uncommon plight upon the Galaxy, but one that hit unfortunately close to home for the Once-Sephi and had made plenty of frustrations in her work as the Slavemaster General of the Kainate.
So long as slavery exists within the Galaxy, the circumstances to allow more powerful Dark-Siders and other warlords, warriors, and killers to rise up will persist. If a million must languish in misery for one to rise above, so be it. No cost is too great to push lifeforms along the Dark Path of Strength.
If chains are to be broken, as the Sith so often cry. Chains must still exist to be broken.
Holy Rhand - Precursor of Darkness, temptations of annihilation, and the Great Lie: The Way of the Dark practiced by the Rhandites of the Perann Nebula is the basis upon which the revelations of Primordial Darkness were discovered. Yet even in the days of Carnifex’s old-empire Lirka scorned the teachings of the Sorcerers in their entirety with her largely irrelevant Lords of Nihl upon Sith-Imperial Concordia. The Way of the Dark is a simple philosophy of power, destruction, and nihlism. Only power is real, and the only real power is the power to destroy. Existence is fleeting. Destruction is eternal. This all-encompassing doctrine of Rhandite belief is known to Lirka as “the temptation of annihilation” - compared to the likes of spice and other addictive substances due to its satisfying simplicity. To devote oneself entirely to destruction is to lose a grip upon reality and devolve into something less than sentient. What the Rhandites deem “Dark” - which Lirka renamed to Primordial Darkness to exemplify its foundational nature to reality - is nothing more than a meager aspect of the chaos that Primordial Darkness inflicts to weed out of the strong from the weak. The Way of the Dark is referred to as the Great Lie for its dumbing down of the multifaceted nature of the Primordial Dark’s pull to nothingness. Despite this scorn, Rhand is still referred to as Holy Rhand for while the Great Lie is a lie, it was Rhand that first brought about the beliefs that would evolve into the grim truth of Primordial Dark and warp into something beyond mere nihilistic destructionist sentiments and instead turns the knowledge of the End-all-of-Things instead into testament on the value of one’s life: there is nothing more holy than surviving till the stars grow cold, till there is but too beings throttling each other at the end of the universe.
Otherspace, and the Charon - an insight: Otherspace, the void between realities. In many ways that most dreadful of places can be considered a microcosm of what is to happen to reality once the weight of Primordial Darkness grows heavy upon the Galaxy. In a place of cruelty and mere fragments of life, all that is capable of surviving there must be exceptionally strong. In this section a particular mention is made to the Sith-aligned mercenary Commodore Helix who hails from otherspace, the might of the Nanite Mechanoid is used as a prime example of what is capable of a reality where Primordial Dark has been allowed to flourish. Within Otherspace lives the murderous Charon. Charon believe in the Void of Death, interestingly a similar concept to the Lesser Dark preached by the Rhandites: while this can ultimately be considered another deception by the Great Lie, for the Charon unwisely preach the peace brought about by the end. It shows that even outside of what one would consider the Galaxy’s native “reality” the Primordial Dark can still be felt as a clawing force. Peace is stagnation, the Charon’s desire for the peaceful silence of nothingness shows they are another group that has warped the path of darkness into something that it was not meant to be.
Primordial Dark and the Force: The Primordial Dark represents cosmic law that lays beyond the purview of the Force, a separate entity though the two are now locked in union: in many a way, the Primordial Darkness stands in opposition to the Living Force, as it is an energy that compels the ceasing of life rather than the flourishing of it. In the dawn of the days when the universe is once again consumed into nothingness, it is reasoned the Living Force will simply cease to exist as it too is drawn into the endless void. Yet the teachings within the Darkness beyond Darkness is one steeped in lore of the Sith, and formed from Lirka’s own experiences serving among those who channel the Dark Side for power: in stark contrast, the Primordial Darkness does not grant any particular power to its followers like what the Sorcerers of Rhand would lead one to believe, Lirka ruminates within the text that in many a ways the Force has become a weakness for most - an over reliance on the powers granted by cosmic forces rather than an accentuation of the tangible things in the Universe. A blinder that narrows one's perception down to only that which they can sense. To truly reach enlightenment, one must open their minds to a darkness beyond darkness.
The Light and the Dark: So much of the Galaxy can be wrapped in the unending war between light and dark, Sith and Jedi, order and chaos. Some would say the Dark Side is a corruption, and in many ways Lirka offers agreement with that notion. Darkness beyond Darkness. The Dark Side is a tangible thing, an undeniable truth of corruptive power - yet where does it come from? One must consider the relationship between the Primordial Darkness and the Dark Side of the Force as that of parent and child, for the Dark Side is born of Primordial Darkness’s ever-weighty will dragging reality towards its end. The powers of the Dark Side is a corruptive force to stand against the peace and serenity of the Light, the brightness of good blinds the dull mind. The Light Side of the Force brings about nothing but stagnation and weakness, its practitioners a plague that disallows the worthy to rise up from the ranks of the teeming masses across the Galaxy. Despite this fact, the light is the natural state of being of life: the natural state is to be defied. The Dark Side was infested into reality by the Primordial Darkness as a way to encourage the worthy to defy against this natural order, an ever-growing cancer that seeps across existence till all is consumed once by inevitable entropy. To perpetuate the infection is to reap the dark rewards of power.
The Sith’ari: No gods. No messiahs. The Sith’ari is the grand lie that will never come, despite what notions of Eternal Rule might suggest. The Sith’ari is ultimately a rejection of the true power of the individual as one must put a messianic figure as something beyond themselves - all can reach the pinnacle through struggle, none are born greater. It is through joint unified effort that the Dark Path is followed, and while one is not discouraged from embracing the wisdom of their fellows - for while the individual is mighty, the stepping stones of other beings’ heads is a very effective way of moving along the path. The Sith’ari Prophecy instead is recontextualized instead to be an early precursor of the path beckoned by Primordial Darkness. The death of the Sith (suffering) begets a rebirth where they are stronger than before (transience).
Sith and the Great Enablers: The Sith are in a not dissimilar place of nigh universal constant since their inception, while they may eb and flow in their power, they an eternally dark presence in the Galaxy regardless. Unwitting perpetrators of the suffering that awakens ones’ minds to Primordial Darkness - when one considers the previously mentioned relation between Primordial Darkness to the Dark Side of the Force, this is not a surprising factoid to the enlightened mind. The Dark Side is the disease that perpetuates the Primordial Dark’s grasp over the material plane. Many Sith would deny the Primordial Dark for few things are more quintessential to being a Sith than ego. To walk the path is to allow that moment of letting ego wither and accepting that the cosmic inevitability of the end brought about by Primordial Darkness is the ultimate power to struggle against.
The Sith are the enablers of evil, it is by their dominion that the necessary evils of strength rise to prominence. Yet not all Sith are made the same, and with that comes the title of “Great Enabler” for those beings of immense power whose existence allows for other beings of cruelty to rise to great prominence than they ever would have on their own. Lirka’s existence is owed to the Great Enablers of the Galaxy, and the book would not have been penned without living within the great cloud these sort of beings bring out upon the Galaxy.
No Great Enabler is given more praise than the Eternal Father himself, Darth Carnifex lord of the Kainate for it was the studies of Carnifex that first introduced Lirka to Rhand and the teachings of the Way of the Dark. It was Carnifex that gifted her a world to burn, and the power to do so. Without Carnifex, Lirka certainly would have withered into obscurity as a decaying beast, for even the body she inhabits was crafted by Kainate make. Much of Lirka’s ability to acquire the power she has in her possession was via the enabling of Carnifex and by proxy of her own experiences she considers such a trickle down of power and prestige by powerful Sith Lords to be the primary notion of the Enablers. While the Zambrano patriarch is given the majority of focus in this section - to be expected from a woman who is officially of the Kainite personality cult, other Lords are given mention. The secondary lord of the Kainate Dyad Darth Prazitus is an extension of the Kainate powerbase, his success offers much of the same enabling of evil that Lirka has reaped from the Eternal-Father himself.
Of course, it is impossible not to give mention to the current Emperor of the Sith once more. The Eternalist led empire that the Sith Order represents is a miserable place, of poverty, controlled crime, and endless war. As an emperor his ability to enable is difficult to match, truthfully any Dark Lord of the Sith could have taken his place in this section - Empyrean simply represents a recency bias for Lirka to focus on as she has spent the majority of her tenure in the Sith under that Eternalist domain.
While these are merely specific examples, it is the ultimate path of strength to become one of these Great Enablers. To be the strong surrounded by the weak is to be a soul incapable of being properly tested within the crucible of existence. Enable the worse in those around you, and the bounteous reward of strength will flow as more worthy souls rise to the fray.
Primordial Darkness and the Sith are linked beings, yet for an energy beyond the Force to be aligned with force cultists is a curious thing. Transience is the path of Darkness, and so Lirka speaks to a Transcendent Sith - the perhaps insane notion that to truly be Sith one does not need to touch into the force. Merely to believe is enough, to act in ways according to what Lirka believes to be a code mixing what the Sith had already built themselves towards and the enlightenment found within Darkness Beyond Darkness.
Peace is a Lie.
There is but chaos.
In chaos, there is suffering.
In suffering, we become transient
In transience, we become strong
In strength, we grow beyond.
HISTORICAL INFORMATION
Lirka Ka considers herself an enlightened theologian. For many years has the Once-Sephi waxed on about her variety of strange beliefs outside the norms for what one would consider a Sith-Imperial. Yet enlightenment is a lonely thing without someone to share it with, a quest came to her mind that would not allow the beliefs she has built over the many decades. Her knowledge must be shared, the Galaxy must be reforged into the meritocracy of the strong.
Often the beliefs of Lirka Ka have been a thing mentioned offhandedly by the Once-Sephi in her many rantings and ravings during the course of battle or the simple prayers she spouts off to no one in particular. Such a thing could no longer stand to be a matter of privacy in the rise of Sith Eternalism. Empires burn, Sith die, new things rise in the wake of the old. With empires placed in a position where there is a modicum of expectation to inevitability suffer some great change, it was the ever-heretical Lirka Ka who saw an opportunity to begin enacting what she deemed most important for the survival of the strong. To walk blindly upon the Dark Path as Sith so often did would not be productive - for few things make Lirka’s hearts shudder like the notion of unproductivity.
It was perhaps a lucky coincidence, that for many many years Lirka was stranded aboard her slave-ship on another raid for the Kainate. A departure when this current Sith Empire was but fledging till a return that was only recent, within that many year gap? An incredibly long time with little more to do than to kill, and to think. So did Lirka think. She wrote. And she spoke. Forging what would become Darkness Beyond Darkness that was to be the melding of the myriad of beliefs Lirka had encountered during her many long years serving under the purview of the Dark Side and beyond. A combination of the Way of the Dark, the Sith Code, and Lirka’s own philosophical musings forged from decades of murder, war, and suffering.
Some would call it madness, but an enlightened mind is madness to the blind.
So, she penned her madness. Keeping the thing close to her chest, only now beginning to spread the seeds of her preaching across the Sith Order as her new web of relations within the Order grows wider. Nigh heretical ideas sprinkled towards minds that the Once-Sephi believes may be open to the prospect of a Transcendent Sith all locked within the form of remarkably dull gray-plated holobooks.
Lirka Ka covets knowledge, and little knowledge is more powerful than what one believes. With her own beliefs now open to the prying eyes of the Sith, a Darkness Beyond Darkness represents Lirka’s next step on the Dark Path she preaches so heavily about - a priestess rising.