Private A Fly in the Web

[Adonis Angelis IV]

Spoiler: You drift off to sleep...

The air chokes you-​

not with smoke, but with decay.​

There is no light here.​

Your hands are heavy.
In your palm rests your own heart, pulsing fast enough to shake your bones.
You still feel it in your chest,
each thud rattling through your ribs until fear drowns the marrow.

You try to walk.​

But your legs betray you.
Step after step, the ground beneath you blackens, collapsing into soot.

This place is nowhere you know...
and yet it feels like the grave already carved for you.

The cliff face looms ahead, half-seen, blurred,
as though even stone resists your gaze.

Your other hand burns with light.
It shreds the shadows that gnaw at your skin,
glowing fiercer the more you fight to keep it alive.

The darkness presses back.
It wants you swallowed.

At the edge of despair, the light devours everything.​

Your flesh bubbles and sears,
stripped away and rebuilt in endless repetition.
Agony and rebirth-
the same breath.

When your eyes snap open,
your skin is raw,
your hands slick with sweat.​

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Within hours of his vision, Adonis was in the sky. There were quite a few things he had learned from his time with the Mandalorians: pressing your advantage was one of them. It worked like any other dream, if you got up and wrote it down, you remembered it; if you didn't, you forgot. Instead of writing, however, Adonis was traveling. There seemed to be an internal compass, its points guided by the Manda, pulling him through the stars toward this dark world. Something, or someone, there was tied directly to his destiny.

The Mandalorian Knight spent his journey meditating, training, and watching old holofilms from his childhood. The visions weighed on him. Each time he awoke, it felt like he had stood beneath a burning sun for hours, his skin fever-hot to the touch. He had sweated through more blankets and pillows than he could count, until finally he abandoned them altogether, sleeping on the cold steel floor just to cool his body.

Midway through the voyage, clarity struck. The doom pressing against his chest, the pull at his soul, he was headed to Malachor V. A place spoken of only in whispers. He knew the stories: how the Jedi Exile had shattered his people there, how the wound in the Force bled still. Every Mandalorian carried that history. And now he alone would walk its surface.

In the final hours of travel, deep in meditation, Adonis wandered the Manda, searching for the link that called him. Something on Malachor was his to face, though the Dark Side cloaked it in shadow. He felt it whispering in his ear, promising him power, promising him fear, if only he submitted his soul. His willpower held fast, but even then, he couldn't deny the draw of such temptation.

When his ship finally touched down, his body felt heavier than the vessel itself. Every instinct screamed at him to turn back. Even without the Force, this world reeked of evil. But he knew that if he fled now, he would betray his destiny. He swallowed his fear, gathered his gear, and sealed his helmet. Whatever waited outside, he would face it as a Mandalorian.

His boots crunched across Malachor's broken surface. Shadows twisted at the edge of sight. The air pressed against his back like a breath not his own. Sweat gathered on his brow, but he would never let it show. That was not what he was built for. He was built to be a beacon in shadow, to burn away the dark, and regrow light from its ash.

Adonis walked on, steady and unflinching, into the graveyard planet's cracked heart.

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TAG: Darth Virelia ​

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Barren Potential."

Tags - Adonis Angelis IV

The wind off the caldera came thin and razored, carrying the taste of old glass. Worklights burned in a slow constellation behind her—scaffolds, pylons, half-raised monoliths—steel ribs lifted over a wound that never closed. The construction crews had stilled at her approach; droids stood at mechanical attention, sensor arrays dark. This was not their moment. It was hers.

She descended the basalt shelf without hurry. Tyrant's Embrace whispered at each step, plates breathing in violet undertone, a living cathedral of lacquered black. Six soft lenses glowed in her mask like patient stars. The world pressed close, as if the planet wished to listen.

He was heat before he was man. Fever clung to him like an aura, a mirage around steel. Mandalorian. The ash knew that stride. Malachor remembered every boot that had ever tried to master it.

She stopped a spear's length away and let silence do the shaping. Let the dead air and the living wound speak for her. When she finally broke the hush, it was with a voice cut fine, low, and deliberate—respect laid over iron.

"Who comes before me?"

No challenge in it, no blare of threat—simply the hinge upon which all else would turn. Names were geometry; the right shape opened doors, the wrong one triggered traps. She let the words hang and sink, like a weight lowered hand over hand into a deep well.

Her head tilted a fraction, a hunter's acknowledgment of another creature with teeth. "You stand on a scar your ancestors helped carve. This place remembers what it was promised. So do I." The wind curled her cape; ash skittered and settled in obedient arcs around her boots. "I came alone to meet you. I will grant you the same courtesy of truth."

She stepped aside half a pace, revealing the black skeleton of her rising sanctum. Pylons framed the caldera's mouth like an altar under construction. "If you seek penance, Malachor offers none. If you seek absolution, it will charge interest. If you seek purpose, it will require skin."

She studied the sweat he refused to acknowledge, the discipline that kept it from becoming tremor. "You have walked far, for what purpose? The world has put its hand on your back and pushed. It recognises your efforts." She let the notion warm between them like banked coals.

 

[Adonis Angelis IV]

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A shiver wound its way down the warrior's spine as the air shifted. He had been right, he was being watched. He had been right, his life was in danger. Strength alone could carry a man through many trials, but not this. A trap could crush even the strongest, and in this moment he felt the web quiver to his touch, the hidden predator alerted to her prey.

Her voice struck him like a scream in a cavern, every syllable echoing in his skull until it tangled around his thoughts. It was impossible to deny her influence. The words were stakes, hammered one by one into the soft meat of his mind. He fought to push them out, to hold onto himself. His destiny demanded survival- his survival demanded he master this moment.

Brown eyes flicked beneath his visor as he forced breath past the choke in his throat. Finally, a word broke through the haze: "Adonis." The sound of his own name steadied him. "Adonis Angelis the Fourth. Mandalorian Knight." Legacy gave him the strength to go on, each word driving back the Force-tendrils gnawing at his guard. Still, focus cost him dearly. He could feel himself slipping, dragged to the edge of oblivion.

Her words pressed deeper, speaking of Malachor and its price. He knew the stories well enough, but when she spoke them, he felt them. His mind flared with visions: the battlefield burning, the shudder of the Mass-Shadow Generator tearing heaven and earth alike, the heat of light devouring dark. It was the same heat that had haunted his dreams, the same fire now burning in his veins.

"Something…" His voice wavered, the word catching in his throat. "Something led me here."

His body lurched, heavy and fevered. The world swam as his legs buckled beneath him. A rush of heat blasted through his frame like a geyser, and his vision shattered into black spots. He stumbled forward, shoulder grazing her as he tried to steady himself. Then his eyes rolled back into darkness, and the warrior fell into silence.

Spoiler: You feel a spider bite.

You cannot move.

Straps? Rope?
No,thread.
Silk biting into skin, pinning you in place.

You try to scream. Nothing comes.
Only the taste of ash in your mouth, bitter, choking.

The clicking starts.​

Eight points of sound.
Closer.
Closer.

Then- weight.
It crushes the air from your lungs. Your ribs strain. Your heart hammers- once, twice- then stutters.

The fangs sink in.
Cold fire floods your veins.
Your body locks.
Your body betrays you.

You hang.​

Suspended. Wrapped. Buried alive in silk.
Time breaks. Centuries, seconds, hours
You rot and reform at once.
Skin bubbles, bone grinds,blood congeals.

Reformation.
The cocoon tightens.

Then, movement.

Your arms split.
Your legs bend wrong.
Teeth shear through your jaw, lengthening, multiplying.
The threads snap as you rip free, shrieking-
-but the voice is not yours.

It is a hiss.
A scream.
A sound meant to hunt.

You see yourself.​

A reflection in torn silk.
Not man.
Not woman.
Not Mandalorian, nor Sith.

A monster.

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TAG: Darth Virelia ​

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Barren Potential."

Tags - Adonis Angelis IV

She did not let him hit the ground.

A subtle lift of her fingers and gravity forgot him; the fall became a slow surrender. Virelia drew him into the lee of a basalt fin and lowered him onto one knee first, then the other, then to a seated rest with his back against warm stone. Tyrant's Embrace sighed as she knelt, lacquered plates folding with quiet grace. When she spoke again, the planet seemed to hush to hear it.

"Adonis Angelis the Fourth," she repeated, as if setting a seal. "Mandalorian Knight. Your name stands upright."

Heat ghosted off him in visible waves. She did not reach for his helmet. Respect was the first kindness. Instead, she palmed a slab of obsidian the size of a book, pressed her gauntlet to it, and bled cold into the glass until a skin of hoarfrost spidered across its face. She slid it beneath the crook of his arm where the plates of his gorget allowed air to move. The fever paused, then began to drain by degrees.

"Breathe with me," she said, voice low and even. "Four in. Hold for four. Four out." She counted the beats softly—not command, not spell, a steady rope thrown down a dark well. "You are not prey here. Not while I am near."

The caldera's draft worried her cape; a faint violet washed through the lenses of her mask. She let the Dark bend, not to break him, but to part the pressure around him like a tide around a rock. The world's wound pressed hard on men who came bearing honest purpose. She could honor that with gentleness.

"I asked only who comes before me. You've answered well. Hear me, then—plainly." A beat. "I am Darth Virelia. I am raising order here where catastrophe still speaks. I came alone to meet you, and I will keep that faith."

Her gloved hand hovered a breath above the plates at his sternum—a promise, not a claim. "This fever is the planet's language. It will pass. Sit in it. Mastery begins with listening."

She settled back on her heels, patient as a sentry. "Your people teach that legacy is a weight you choose to lift. You have lifted yours into a hard sky." The timbre of her voice warmed—steel sheathed in velvet. "Be proud."

When the tightness in his breath eased, she angled her head toward the unfinished ribs of her sanctum, then to the black throat of the crater.

"Two paths, Adonis. Up to clean air, under my protection. Or down, to get to the bottom of your condition." A soft, almost fond hush colored her last words. "Either way, you do not walk alone."