First Reply A Momentary Respite

[Helix]

OOC: Open to Sith, or to anyone with any excuse to be in Firefist who wants to come say hi!

Location: Aboard the Hellebore-Class Cruiser "Sleep of Reason", in orbit above Tarnac​

Helix hummed quietly to himself as he hunched over the table, examining his new specimen with rapidly-waning interest. A forest of angular limbs, skin-flaying microcilia, and monomolecular scalpel-fingers plucked, scraped, and sliced with inhuman precision, eliciting regular sounds of distress from his subject.

He'd had the creature wheeled to the command deck, where he poked and prodded it curiously as the droid crews tried not to pay attention to the noises the giant was making. Helix, however, had already grown bored with it. These oafs had no secrets to pry out, nor any innate traits of any real worth, so far as he could determine. Why the Order had deemed them worthy of military attention was beyond his understanding.

In truth, the transient amusement the Tofs provided was merely a side benefit. He had plenty of brute legbreakers already, most of them far more horrifying and inventive than the likes of these creatures.

No, the true prize had been Tarnac. To most eyes, it was of little use. A barren, freezing ball of radiation-blasted mud, under which lurked an equally-hellish subterranean ocean. To all preliminary appearances, it offered nothing at all of value to anyone.

To Helix, though, it was his. A blank slate on which to build, far from the asinine politics of Jutrand and the petty manipulations of the empire's upper crust. He wouldn't place anything of value there, of course; Helix had touted the merits of not holding long-term ground to the Dzara for a reason.

Territory was a millstone around one's neck, something that tied one to a particular place and people. Helix had once boasted to the Dzara's other two heads that, should the need ever arise, he could have the totality of his assets out of Sith space within the hour. It hadn't been an idle claim.

He didn't see this possibility as a likely one. Most of the Order didn't know (or often care) what its various members were up to. Only the Wonosans were his enemies these days, but Helix flattered himself that he had their number. There was nothing the bloodsuckers could threaten him with any longer, not when the Dzara's full power stood united. He was someone of import now, and that was no small victory. No longer a subordinate, no longer the dutiful lieutenant. The Dzara bent to his whims, not the reverse.

As rapidly as recent events had occurred, he'd had little time to sit back and enjoy the fruits of his labor. That was where Tarnac came in. His own little vacation resort. A playground of imagination, a place where anything was possible. It was the potential that was exciting.

Most importantly, it was highly-isolated from prying eyes, tucked safely off in the corner of a largely-unexplored backwater. A series of upcoming experiments demanded a somewhat more... evocative environment than the unlit, sterile corridors of his ships.

He looked up from his guest to the planet's surface far below, feeling a swelling of pride despite himself. The world hung in the ether like a dirty gray marble, occasionally given color by the bright violet swirl of a continent-sized radiation storm. Such weather tormented the planet ceaselessly, but that was part of the charm. It was so clean, sterile, not full of so much organic detritus. He'd have hated to do to Tarnac what he did to Dagobah.

The conquest of Firefist was already well underway, and when it was finished, he might well start to actually have a little fun for a change.

The pleasant rumination didn't last long. It never did. As ever, reality rushed in like the blundering gundark it was, knocking aside his enjoyable fantasy.

"Sir, you erm, have a visitor." Came the whining tone of one of the hangar lieutenants. Helix's vast consciousness immediately shifted a tiny fraction of its attention to this distraction, responding in binary, albeit with a clear injection of patronizing annoyance. "Here? Unlikely, Lieutenant. In case you've forgotten, we are in Companion Besh. No one comes here, at least no one that would care to come see me. You may need to calibrate your receptors."

"They're very insistent, sir." Reiterated the droid lieutenant in a tone that, to Helix's ears, sounded increasingly nervous. Helix noted that distressing fact, just as the officer continued. "Are they clear to land?"

The warlord let out a long, exaggeratedly-weary sigh, more for the benefit of the partly-vivisected Tof than anyone else. "Yes. Send them up." He terminated the conversation. If nothing else, it would be an instructive break from the tedium of picking apart the native life. He looked down at the mutilated giant with something like genuine apology.

"It won't do to have you complaining while my guest is here, so I'm afraid we'll have to continue our session another time." In response to an unspoken command, a pair of droids appeared to wheel the half-flayed giant away.

Helix sat down in his command chair, spinning it around to face away from the door. He always found that a proper slow, dramatic turn when a guest entered was an excellent way to set the tone of the following conversation...

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Shattered."

Tags - Helix

"Very insistent" were indeed the right two words—perhaps the only two that had ever consistently applied to the Tyrant Queen.

In another lifetime, the phrase had practically been her banner. Serina—Virelia—had driven herself through the Sith Order like a blade through soft flesh, pursuing her goals with a ferocity that bordered on self-destructive. The Order's labyrinthine politics had never suited someone carved from hard power and harder certainty. Byzantine cruelty, petty vendettas, and the endless games of lesser minds—she had endured all of it, even thrived in it, but never truly adapted. The Sith claimed ancient lineage, but Virelia had seen those "hallowed origins" dragged through the secret chambers of the Empire and ground into hypocrisy.

Helix, ironically, had flourished there. A pillar of this new breed of Sith—efficient, ruthless, infuriatingly competent. He possessed an ability Virelia had never managed to cultivate: the talent for obedience. In the modern Sith Order, obedience was the fastest shortcut to power, privilege, and indulgence. Helix had mastered it as naturally as he mastered vivisection. which Virelia assumed the droid was skilled at.

In another galaxy, another life, she might have stood at the pinnacle beside him—two sovereign monsters carving their marks into Firefist. But ambition blinded, and Virelia had reached too far, too quickly. The Fourth Legion had been her crucible and her undoing. Some of that downfall had been her own design; most of it had been the inevitable collapse of a rotting Sith. Inefficiency. Arrogance. Stupidity. But worst of all—laziness. The Order had choked on its own decay long before she severed herself from it.

It had been some time since she left Dromund Kaas. Recounting old debts.

She had no love for the Sith Order that spurned her, yet they remained the closest thing she had ever known to a community—if not comrades, then at least familiar ghosts. And ghosts had a way of lingering.

So it was no great surprise that she followed the scent of Firefist's operations. If anyone would have their talons sunk into the beating heart of the campaign, it would be Helix. Through him, she could read the Order's shifting currents, glimpse what futures awaited those she once commanded, once threatened, once trusted. Whether any of them still cared about her was another matter entirely—one she would not admit she wondered about.

But legacy mattered. It always had.

Not the legacy of monuments or titles, but the legacy of impact—of imprints carved so deeply into others that they could not forget her even if they wished to.

And if Firefist held answers…

Then Virelia would pry them out—insistently, as ever.

The doors hissed open with a ceremonial slowness as Virelia stepped through the threshold like a blade drawn from its sheath—her armor catching the pale light in violet-tinted gleams, every mirrored plate reflecting the laboratory gloom back in cold, fractured splinters.

The Force did not come to her call. She felt the hollow ache of its absence like a phantom limb, but she did not slow. Power was her habit after all.

Her helm turned first, then her body—movements controlled, deliberate, a queen accustomed to audiences rather than ambushes. Her six eyes, neon-bright even without the Force to feed them, settled upon the familiar silhouette of the droid-warlord seated with his back to her.

For a moment, she let the tension be stretched, taut and thin as monomolecular wire. Then Virelia broke the silence with a soft exhale—half amusement, half accusation.

"What would we do without swivel chairs, Helix?"

 

[Helix]

Helix felt a twinge of levity ripple across his semi-liquid surface. Of course it was her. Who else would it be?

The old slow-theatrical-turn trick was of no use on someone like Darth Virelia . He didn't waste either of their time with it, instead whisking around to regard her more fully.

"I suppose we'd just have to face our visitors on even terms. How distasteful that would be." He responded, before inclining his head to the bridge crew. "Take a break.". The droids didn't have to be told twice, scurrying from the room through any exit they could find. The final hiss of an automatic door sliding shut announced they were alone, two remarkable figures ruining the otherwise-perfect stillness of the cavernous command bridge.

Typically, Helix vessels were poorly lit, when they were lit at all; their unsleeping crews didn't need much in the way of visual senses to function. To enter those sleek, predatory voidships uninvited was to plunge into the darkness of a tomb, with no knowledge of what might lay inside.

Nonetheless, Helix was not in the habit of failing to accommodate his rare social callers. He didn't know what manner of sensors that armor concealed, but courtesy was courtesy, and failing to observe it was the action of a brute. Helix considered himself above such things.

He brushed one finger along the command chair, and the room responded, flooded with a dim phosphorescence from an unclear source. If anything, this was worse than the darkness; the fantastic shadows cast by the numerous bizarre machines in the room populated the empty space with a frightful menagerie of shapes.

Another brush of the finger, and a large, comfortable officer's chair slid along the floor like a living thing. "Sit." He said with a wave of a hand. Not an order, but an invitation. For all her status as a shunned exile, Helix had no particular ill will towards the banished Dark Lady. That banishment had been the order of a departed emperor, one whose commands Helix had ignored or obeyed as the moment's convenience demanded. With him gone, his edicts held even less weight, were it possible. Least of all on Helix's own ship, above his own playground.

Besides, the warlord did his best to cultivate a reputation for hospitality and civility, at least off the battlefield. One's particular affiliations had nothing to do with it; a guest was a guest, whatever colors they wrapped themselves in. In the ever-fluctuating corridors of the creature's peculiar worldview, that stood tall as one of the few constants. A enemy in one's house was an enemy in one's power, and one that may be felled with words and agreements rather than his own two hands.

That was what (in his own mind) separated Helix from his often-myopic colleagues. He was a realist, a pragmatist, unclouded by the old hatreds and ideals that blunted the reasoning of the rest.

Serina, of course, was no enemy. The two had enjoyed an easy, civil rapport from the beginning, and Helix saw no reason to change that now. His friends were not yet so numerous that he could afford to turn one away just because of a spat with Jutrand's high throne.

"It's been a while." He began conversationally, leaning back in his chair and observing her with a curiously-avian tilt of the head. "To what do I owe the pleasure, in a place as forsaken as Tarnac?" A particularly-violent energy discharge from the planet below stirred suddenly, casting a momentary purple flash across the room. The shadowy phantasmagoria created by the poor lighting intensified dramatically, then died down as the storm resumed its normal course.

Something seemed... unaccountably different about his visitor since the last time he'd seen her. Helix couldn't quite put his finger on it. After a few microseconds' consideration, he decided it would be neither polite nor politic to ask.

"Would you like a drink? I've re-plundered some superb local spirits from the Tofs, who presumably plundered them first from the Nagai."

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Shattered."

Tags - Helix

The corners of Virelia's mouth twitched upward—not quite a smile, more the ghost of one. Helix's remark had earned it. Humor had never come naturally to her, but in a galaxy so relentlessly cruel, she had grown to appreciate the small fractures where light slipped through. Even a quiet chuckle could feel like rebellion.

The droids scurried out at his command. Take a break. That drew her attention more than the joke did.

Had he truly built them with the capacity—or the illusion—of rest? Or was it simply Helix's way of acknowledging their irrelevance when real conversation entered the room? With him, the line between precision and irony was always blurred.

Her thoughts slipped, unbidden, into deeper waters.

True sentience. A creature who could act on its own whims, defy its maker, shape its own trajectory. Sith spoke endlessly of breaking chains, but what could be more profound than creating something that slipped its leash entirely? A will unmoved by the Force. A mind beholden to no destiny but its own.

She would never permit such a thing under her dominion, of course. The notion of relinquishing control was antithetical to everything she was. Freedom was a luxury for others—not a gift she dispensed. Yet the irony lingered, sharp as a needle.

Perhaps Helix, metal, monstrous, obedient to nothing but himself—was closer to the Sith Code's mythic ideal than any of them had ever been.

A being with no chains left to break. She banished the thought.

Virelia accepted the seat with the poise of someone who had never been denied one. Her armor whispered against the cushioning as she leaned back, gaze drifting toward the panoramic void beyond the bridge. The radiation storms churned in violent shades of violet—her colour—as if the galaxy itself had arranged a spectacle to herald her return to the stage.

Companion Besh had never been her domain. Her expertise had always lain among the fractured stones of Polis Massa, her "rock collection," as some once needled her about. Governing a scattered archipelago of asteroids, dock-cities, and drifting colonies had forged a different kind of ruler—one who managed chaos in pieces, not planets. But it had gifted her one thing the others lacked:

A perpetual wonder at the sight of a whole world. A wanderlust that had never dimmed.

Helix spoke, his voice humming through the chamber, but she did not answer immediately. Not out of discourtesy—Helix would likely recognize the difference—but because her thoughts were occupied by matters far larger than courtesy.

The six violet eyes burned with a muted, contemplative glow. They were not unfocused; they were weighing questions heavier than starships. Meaning. Purpose. The architecture of her future. Being severed from the Force had carved hollows inside her that nothing yet filled. Surviving her family's tomb had burned away illusions she had worn since youth. Losing everything she once wielded had not broken her—but it had begun to reforge her. She wondered what was in store next.

"Just some cold water, old friend. My drinking days are… unfortunately behind me." Her voice was steady, but her gaze never left the expanse beyond the viewport.

Without the Force threading through her veins, the galaxy felt strangely inert. Once, she had sensed the tapestry beneath all things—the great, unseen lattice that gave shape to destiny. Now it was quiet. The vastness before her was only vastness. Beautiful, but mute.

Her thoughts drifted, unbidden, to a different life. Her father had always wanted to see Grek and Firefist with his own eyes, to chart the companions and map the unknown with a House Guard escort and an itinerary full of childish optimism. A family expedition. A noble's indulgence.

She had slain her parents without regret—regret was a luxury she had excised long ago—but even ruthlessness had its echo. Some fragment of her wondered what they would think, seeing their daughter now: armored, exiled, cut off from the Force, yet finally standing in the very regions they once dreamed of charting.

A better galaxy might have allowed that reunion. This one did not.

"So," she murmured to both herself and Helix, a quiet blade of resolve sliding into place, "Enjoying the expedition?"

 

[Helix]

"Suit yourself." Came the warlord's response. As before, no apparent vocal command was given, but one of the bridge crew returned a moment later with two glasses. Darth Virelia 's was filled with simple, cold filtered water, so chilled that it frosted the edges of its container. Helix took his own, stared at it, then drained it dry in his usual unpleasantly-insectile fashion.

"Hmm. Adequate, but I'd hoped for more. The Tofs sang the praises of Nagai drink so loudly." He sat it down on the arm of his chair, then returned his attention to his visitor.

"Enjoying is a stretch. Tolerating would be a more apt term." It was true. The Dzara had designs for Firefist, but those designs were still in the womb. Thus far, much time had been expended on making unnecessary examples of the local wildlife, a pursuit that had quickly lost the warlord's interest.

The green-hued giants were no real obstacle to the Sith; hunting them down so fastidiously was a waste of time and resources. As Helix had told others before, he didn't believe in the concept of a sin. Waste was an exception. Waste was the most reprehensible thing imaginable to the colony, and it was baked into the very essence of the culture around him.

Were it up to him, they'd have been left to flee and warn others of the cost of resistance, but very little about the Firefist campaign had been up to him.

As with most of his actions, he'd counted on being ignored, overlooked, and taken for granted. As it always did, that method bore fruit; nobody had ever lost money betting on the Sith's collective superiority complex. It had always worked so far, but he had a feeling these days would not last. Not when the Dzara grew to a power all their own, or more than they already were. He'd claimed a few living Tofs in defiance of the general annihilation order, but so far had yet to determine any useful traits in the species. Still, research was ongoing.

His attention wandered from the question back to its speaker. Once more, he couldn't help but detect something different in his visitor. Something diminished. A difference in posture perhaps, or the slight hesitation when offered refreshments. Even to one as sensitive as he to humanoid microexpression, he couldn't quite put his finger on it.

Virelia had her faults, but hesitation had traditionally not been among them. Her self-assurance had always seemed impregnable, as sure and as fixed as the spinning of the cosmic wheel. Helix felt a needle of genuine curiosity pierce its way past the all-suffocating blanket of his indifference.

Perhaps it was simple discomfort at sitting so close to the bloated state that had cast her out, surrounded on all sides by other factions and warlords that would be far less welcoming than he.

Or, perhaps it was distraction at the admittedly-spectacular view of Tarnac's radiation storms from low orbit. He elected to behave as though the latter were true, for now.

He rotated his seat slightly, casting a glance over his shoulder at the planet. "I'm glad someone else seems as taken with Tarnac as I was, when I first saw it. Very much still a diamond in the rough, but there is no other world quite like it."

"No other planet will look like that from orbit, while being so incredibly hostile to life down below. Those storms span hundreds, sometimes even thousands of kilometers, carrying energy so intense that it's no safer for a droid than a man."

He watched the crackling rad-tempests sweep the planet's surface for a few long moments, his attention wavering between the display, his empty glass, and his guest.

"I don't buy the concept of an afterlife." He continued. "If there is one, I won't have a place in it, good or bad, by my very nature. I imagine a bad one must look quite a bit like Tarnac, down on what passes for terra firma. It's graceful on its face, efficient, even beautiful in its way. But when you get past the light show and see the planet proper, it's just an endless horizon of freezing mud that one can sink down into forever, if they are incautious."

"Amazing, really. The difference between this view and a nightmarish end is just a question of proximity and perspective. I imagine the wonder of what we're seeing now would be rather lost on anyone having to navigate Tarnac's surface."

Again he fell silent, then slid his gaze from the storms to the Sith with some apparent effort.

"You still haven't told me why you're here. I imagine it isn't just to listen to me gush over the virtues of my new playground."

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Shattered."

Tags - Helix

Before the glass even touched her hands, Virelia lifted her gauntlets to the seams of her helm. A hiss of pressurized air escaped, followed by the soft clatter of releasing locks—a sound seldom heard outside the darkest corners of the Order.

The six violet eyes went dark as the mask withdrew, folding back like a metallic chrysalis. In its place emerged a face that did not belong to starships, warlords, or radiation storms.

Pale gold hair spilled free in a silken wave. Two sharp blue eyes—too young—caught the dim phosphorescence. Her lips, unarmored and unpainted, were the soft crimson of someone who once lived a gentler life. For a heartbeat, she looked less like the Tyrant Queen and more like the ghost of the girl she had killed to become her. Whether she bared her face to savor the cold water, or to breathe without armored steel choking her skin, or simply because she trusted Helix enough not to strike—that meaning was hers to keep.

Her fingers closed around the frosted glass with a calmness that contradicted the turbulence churning beneath her skin. The water was cold enough to bite, and she welcomed that clarity. She raised it to her lips and took only the smallest sip before letting Helix's musings wash over her. Afterlife. A curious avenue for a creature such as him. What, she wondered, prompted the warlord to contemplate mortality? The storms beneath them, with their elegant lethality? Or was it her presence—unmasked, unmoored, a little more disassembled than the last time they met? Perhaps he saw something frayed in her and interpreted it as an omen. Or perhaps Helix, for all his metal and programming, simply enjoyed probing the universe's darkest corners as much as she once did.

When he shifted to the question of proximity and perception, she understood the point before he finished speaking. A surface expedition was far from her mind now; the storms were far to dangerous. But more importantly, Helix's observation resonated on a level she hadn't expected. He possessed an intellect rare among the Sith—a mind capable of pondering ideas the rest of the Order dismissed as frivolous or inconvenient. Their peers glorified power, victory, domination. Helix, meanwhile, understood scale. Perspective. The invisible math that governed life and death. In a galaxy that paid lip-service to wisdom while shredding it in practice, he was a statistical anomaly: a creature who not only asked the larger questions but understood why they mattered.

It was a shame the Sith did not share her appreciation for that.

In a universe without a creator, without cosmic judgment or ordained fate, perspective became the closest thing to morality anyone could claim. It determined who lived, who died, who mattered, and who did not. Entire philosophies rose and fell on the axis of a single viewpoint. Empires were built on the moral authority of perception. And so Virelia had long since abandoned the concept. Morality was simply perspective with better public relations. She had no patience for it, no reverence for its illusions. Perspective dictated right and wrong only for those too timid to dictate it themselves.

And she—even stripped of the Force—was not timid. So when the question arose of her purpose, she began, turning her head to directly face Helix, the look of someone far too young, but deep within those eyes was a fire that would, for some unfortunately, never go out.

Virelia set the glass down with a soft, deliberate tap and exhaled—a long, razor-thin breath that carried neither exhaustion nor drama.

"I tire of the galaxy, Helix." The words were flat, stripped of embellishment. She turned back toward the storm-wracked sphere below, her voice lowering as if confiding something to the void rather than the warlord beside her.

"Do you know what I see here, in this forgotten corner of Companion Besh?" A pause.

"Infinite potential."

Her shoulders eased into the chair, the rigid lines of her posture dissolving as she allowed her mind to wander freely—something she rarely permitted. Relaxation, for Virelia, was simply the absence of restraint.

"This world has everything," she continued. "Those storms could power an entire system if properly harvested. The crust likely hides rich mineral seams—enough to build cities, starports, fleets. Enough to forge new technologies, new engines of will." Her tone did not change as she listed these possibilities, each one a piece on the board of an empire only she could see. "Its isolation makes it ideal for weapon testing, clandestine science, chemical refinement. A single drug route could run through Firefist and fund a dozen little wars."

She sank deeper into the seat, perfectly at ease—as though the bridge, the warlord, the universe itself existed solely for her contemplation.

"And," she added after a slow breath, "if one were a patriot of that recently-dismantled Galactic Alliance, Tarnac would make an exquisite rebel depot. Tanks, munitions, armored columns—enough materiel to ignite a second civil war. Against the Empire. Against the Sith. Against everyone." She spoke of galactic conflict with the same tone one might use when discussing upholstery swatches.

Only then did she straighten, hands lifting from the chair's rests in one fluid motion. The mask may have been discarded, but the queen had not been. She rose, standing tall in perfect silhouette against the raging violet storms.

"And if one were, say… a certain militaristic Sith warlord," she mused, looking down at Helix with a gentle angle of her chin, "the planet is absolutely perfect for minor bureaucratic infractions. Tax discrepancies. Asset misallocation. Entire inventories conveniently forgotten." Her lips curved faintly—not into a smile, but into the shadow of one. "And given that the Emperor is a corpse waiting politely for the Force to remember him, I doubt you would face much scrutiny."

Virelia let her gaze drift from the storms to the polished talons of her gauntlet, flexing them as though inspecting some rare specimen rather than a weapon of her own making. Each claw caught the dim phosphorescence, gleaming like a row of tiny, merciless smiles. She ran a thumb across one slowly, thoughtfully, before speaking again.

"I could continue," she murmured, tone deceptively light, "but I would rather not bore either of us with further doom-saying. The truth is simpler. We share this galaxy with visionless fools." Her eyes narrowed slightly at the talon's edge, admiration and contempt intertwining. "Creatures who cling to power they neither earned nor comprehend. Snakes so busy devouring their own tails they forget to move forward. Jedi, Sith, Mandalorian… it makes no difference. The banners change. The mediocrity remains."

She tilted her head as though considering some private cosmic joke.

"You would imagine such a landscape would be ideal for someone skilled. Decisive. A ladder of incompetents stretching to the stars. But no—instead the galaxy drowns itself in endless skirmishes and petty vendettas. A kind of political inbreeding so grotesque it borders on self-satire. It offends me. Not morally," she added dryly, "but aesthetically."

Her claws clicked softly as she lowered her hand.

"This galaxy lacks vision. Lacks ambition. It is an old, threadbare cloth draped over dying institutions, kept warm only by the dust of antiquated ideals. And that afterlife you mentioned…" She gestured out toward Tarnac. "You need not speculate. We already live in one. A purgatory of freezing mud that grips anyone foolish enough to wade into it. A world where the courageous drown beside the cowardly, where purpose is eroded grain by grain by the weight of universal indifference."

Her voice grew quieter, but sharper—each word carved clean.

"I am tyranny, Helix. I do not pretend otherwise. But tyranny cannot thrive in a galaxy so obsessed with compassion, empathy, and the gentle suffocation of shared delusion. There is no god here. No afterlife. No cosmic mechanism to raise the people from their mire. And so they sink. Willingly. Gladly. Their faces buried so deep in the mud that individuality, brilliance, human distinction—all of it disappears into the slurry."

Virelia exhaled, slow and cold.

"An ambitious man strides onto the galactic stage," she said, talons tapping lightly against her palm, "annoys someone with friends in every Force-forsaken gutter in the Outer Rim, and promptly gets his skull pushed into the mud. Ambition is a drowning pool, Helix. Always has been."

Her eyes dimmed for a moment—not with regret, but with a rare clarity. "I would know. They tried it on me twice. Jedi first. Then Sith. Two different sermons, one identical execution."

She exhaled softly, the sound edged with a faint, bitter amusement. Perhaps if she had waded deeper into the filth—played their petty games, traded favors, kissed rings, debased herself in the muck—she might have secured what she once wanted.

Perhaps. But she had never been built for small desires.

And the past, she decided, was not a ledger she felt compelled to balance today.

"So," she continued at last, turning her head just enough to regard Helix from the corner of her gaze, "why am I here?" A slow, serpentlike smile curled into existence. "Apart from contemplating what to do with my life, for what becomes of a woman who stands here with nothing left?" She paused, taking a breath. "To check on the pig pen, naturally. To see who's muddier, who's thrashing, who's pretending they aren't already drowning." She lifted her chin with a queen's disdain. "Call it nostalgia. Call it morbid curiosity. Call it my inability to resist watching the galaxy wallow."

Her voice dropped, rich and lethal.

"Sometimes," she said, "the pigs simply need tending."

 

[Helix]

Helix was silent during the entire monologue, only moving to accept another glass from the droid when it returned. He let out a long, faux-empathetic, life-isn't-fair sigh when she was done, as if to say "Ain't that the truth?"

"Alas, some of us must live in the galaxy that is, rather than the galaxy we wish could be." He said while sipping his beverage. Helix had no visible vocabulator as such. His words seemed to thrum from his very skin, carrying an unsettling choral resonance. Occasionally, this lead to strange little reminders of his nature, like drinking and speaking at the same time.

That had always been Darth Virelia 's problem, in his eyes. She was young, passionate, idealistic. Convinced of her own superiority, convinced of her right to rule. All admirable traits, traits that, properly managed, could carry one anywhere.

"Properly managed" was the operative term. Ambition and idealism were dangerous things without cunning and patience to guide them. Virelia had been consumed by her own inner fire, flown too close to the sun, and plummeted to the muddy earth on broken and bleeding wings.

It finally dawned on Helix why he sensed something different. It was the bitterness of a being shattered by the unfairness of the galaxy. Helix could relate. Everyone eventually found out where their ceiling was, vis-à-vis the existent power structure; how far those above you would let you get. The only difference was whether one cautiously fumbled towards it, or snapped one's neck in the collision.

For him, that limit was innate. No matter what he made himself, he was still very much just an advanced kitchen appliance in the eyes of many. That would likely never change, so instead, he'd turned that weakness into a strength, thrived on the Order's indifference, and spread his influence like a slow-growing tumor. For Serina, well. Who knew how far she'd have gone, had things been different?

She could hardly be blamed for that, of course. One of the worst lies ever perpetuated was that the ceiling didn't exist. Small wonder that so many had bashed their own brains out trying to shatter it. She wasn't the first, and almost certainly wouldn't be the last.

If one wanted to find that limit, it was wiser and safer to approach it slowly, carefully. Maybe so slowly that nobody noticed you were approaching at all. When one found the ceiling, one could begin figuring out ways around it.

As for Tarnac, it was again pleasing to see that someone besides him could look at the bigger picture. Tarnac was remote enough and worthless enough that no right-thinking person would ever darken its threshold, which made it perfect for his less-than-popular activities. It was also perfect for meetings like this one.

Too many of his colleagues were blinded by the supposed grandeur of their empire. They could not smell the rot as he did, could not see the worms wriggling beneath the skin. Helix had long ago determined to get his cut of the carrion, something that had at last driven him into conflict with the Wonosans. If the empire was a civilization in decay, as so many seemed to believe, then he would do what he always did: adapt to changing circumstances, plunder everything not nailed down, and get out before the roof fell in and the flames rose too high.

"It may disappoint you, then," he began with his usual impossible calm "to learn that your metaphoric pigs have not risen from the pen and started reciting poetry since your last visit. Surprising, I know." He angled his chair to follow her as she paced. "The names and banners shuffle, the emperor leaves, the Tsis'kaar crumbles, but these reorganizations mean very little in the long term." Of course, the Tsis'kaar had less crumbled and more been beaten to death, with himself taking a central role. He'd still have favored his usual incremental methods, out of lingering respect for its former master, but others had made that decision for him.

"Rather than being disappointed, be glad. You've figured out the nature of the beast, that it follows simple, predictable patterns of stimulus and response. Input, output." He scraped one bladed finger against the arm of his chair. "Many people, maybe even most, go their whole lives without catching on to the scam."

"To understand that is to understand that you can input a given stimulus to achieve a desired response. Certainly, it's trite and inglorious, but as I said before, the galaxy is as it is, not what one might wish it to be. Certain parts of it can be changed, but it is better to steer the beast than to try to force it to heel."

"Would that it were not so, but that's what separates the likes of you and I from the late Alliance, and its many successor states." He shrugged. "Realism about the human condition, if you want to apply the term to sapient life in general. It's all power-mad tinpot psychopaths at the top, and docile cattle at the bottom. The Sith are at least honest about that fact, instead of cloaking it behind supposed democracy. I can't say which one I find more revolting, but that order of things has endured for as long as sapient life has existed, and much as I wish I could change it..." He picked up the empty glass again, wrapped his nanocellular filaments around it, and reshaped it into a tiny model of the ship they were in. He admired his handiwork as he continued. "I've not yet grown to where I can mold the clay of the cosmos at that scale."

"At the end of the day, one can only move forward after adopting this realism. You can rule an imaginary palace, or a real pigpen. The galaxy's an ugly place, dear Virelia. Ugly in appearance, ugly in soul. The uglier one is oneself, the better off one usually is."

He swiveled his chair to face Tarnac, right as another deep violet flash lit the chamber. If one looked closely, one might notice similar, smaller discharges occasionally flicker off the creature's own surface. The protean thing that called itself Helix allowed itself a smile. Liquid metal split, revealing a hint of gossamer teeth.

"You already know all this, of course." He said with a dismissive wave of one hideous claw. "But I suppose there are worse places to be while the wallowing happens. Personally, I find the race to be the top worm in the pile to be a vain pursuit."

"Better to be the worm that gets the sweetest meats, and gets away before the whole fetid mess crumbles to nothing. The merits of power are oft-touted around here, but nobody ever considers that power is useless to a corpse. Endurance is a virtue all its own, and the only one that really matters." He tossed the tiny glass ship into the air and caught it. "So far, you've endured. That counts for something. Maybe it even counts for everything."

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Shattered."

Tags - Helix

Virelia let Helix's words wash over her like a familiar tide—dense with insight, threaded with the strange, metallic music of his voice. She took another chilled sip as she listened, saying nothing, her eyes fixed on the violet storms roiling across Tarnac's face. Helix spoke the truth: the galaxy she desired was not the galaxy that existed. She had long since accepted that fact. Acceptance, however, was not the same as acquiescence.

Some dreams were worth bleeding for. Some aesthetics worth enduring agony to preserve.

The news of the Tsis'Kaar's demise stirred something quiet and razor-edged in her chest. At last, the rest of the Sith had severed the head of the serpent she herself had cut a dozen times. A pity she hadn't been the one to deliver the final stroke—but she took no small pleasure in knowing that the Emperor had lost both his assassin order and his errant Tyrant Queen in the same span of years.

For a moment—just a sliver of time—the universe aligned.

And she allowed herself to savour that cosmic symmetry.

The Ouroboros had finally choked on its own tail. There was justice in that, however crude the mechanism.

But it was Helix's final musings that drew the true line between them. He approached the galaxy with pragmatic detachment—to endure, to adapt, to feed from the carcass and slip away before the blaze consumed all. A philosophy of survival. The realm of the practical.

And utterly impossible for her.

Where Helix saw the wisdom of bending to reality, she saw a challenge written in blood and starlight. Virelia was not crafted to endure the galaxy as it was—she was crafted to defy it. To force the beast to heel. To corrupt, dominate, break the spine of fate itself and reshape it into something worthy of devotion.

She would not submit. She could not. The fire within her had dimmed, yes—but it had not, no...

It could never go out.

Even in exile, even without the Force, even stripped to bone and memory, there remained a spark bright enough to mock the cosmos that had tried—twice—to drown her.

The spark within her—the one she had nearly buried beneath years of failure, exile, and cosmic indifference—flared with sudden, breathtaking clarity. It was not the flame of a Sith, nor the cold ember of a fallen monarch. It was older. Purer. The spark of myth itself, the inheritance of a primordial age when gods walked the firmament and mortals trembled beneath their shadows. It pulsed through Virelia's veins like a forgotten truth finally remembered. And she at last understood why she had always stood apart from the weak, the muddied, the small-hearted creatures who floundered in this wretched age. They had suffocated themselves in the mire. She had been sculpted for something else entirely.

Euphoria washed over her—sharp, electric, almost violent in its force. For years she had asked the question: What is my purpose? Why was I shaped in this ruinous mold? Was she meant to rule an empire? Conquer the stars? Bend the Force and the cosmos to her will? Each answer had once felt grand, intoxicating. Yet now, under Helix's calm pragmatism and Tarnac's violet storms, she saw how pitifully narrow those ambitions were. Rule? Conquest? Dominion? Such things were the errands of mortals. Workaday emperors. Petty creatures clawing for crowns that would crumble in their hands.

Her ambition—her true ambition—had always been vaster than she dared articulate.

Empire was too small. Conquest far too shallow. Remaking the galaxy in her image was too… obedient a dream. A mortal's dream.

Her purpose was transcendence.

To claw her way beyond the boundaries of flesh, history, and species. To resurrect the primordial spirit of legend—the force of myth that had died when the galaxy traded wonder for bureaucracy and mystery for mechanized order. This era, this rational, sentimental, humorless age, had strangled the very idea of the sublime. It worshipped moderation, compassion, and dreary compromise. It slathered the cosmos in sameness. It dared to call itself enlightened while drowning in its own mediocrity.

Such an age deserved judgment.

To Virelia, the revelation struck like lightning through her spine: she was not meant to merely reshape the galaxy. She was meant to purge it. To scour away the mud-creatures who infested it—the purposeless, the uninspired, the spiritually vacant. To burn away the rotten mass until only the worthy remained. Not to rule an age of apathy, but to herald an age of terror and brilliance. A new mythic epoch, forged through her will alone, with herself standing at its threshold as the first being of a new cosmology.

It was not the smallness of the present age that repulsed her—it was the betrayal of what the galaxy should have been. There was a time, long buried under millennia of compromise and cowardice, when men of greatness carved empires from the marrow of the stars. When legends rose from dust and ruin, illuminated not by consensus, but by will. An era when the individual—singular, pure, unashamed of ambition—could burn the world clean of mud and ascend into something like divinity. That was the age she hungered for. A cosmos where aesthetics reigned as law, where cynicism was butchered and left to rot, where war was not a tragedy but a forge, and stories were not forgotten but immortalised as myth. The galaxy had forgotten how to dream in that register. Virelia had not.

Helix had claimed that power was useless to a corpse. But she knew better. She had been a corpse. Her heart gone, her body cooling, her soul fraying at the edges of oblivion—and still her power had dragged her back across the threshold. The Emperor, wretched and clinging to life, proved much the same. Power was not useless to a corpse; power was the only thing that transcended it. Endurance? She spat contempt upon the idea. Endurance was the virtue of cattle—beings content to suffer the galaxy as it was, rather than impose their will upon it. She would rather have died a hundred times than endure a world she could not influence, corrupt, reshape. Her visions, her designs, her aesthetic imperatives—all of it was impotent in a universe that refused to acknowledge the sovereign nature of her being.

But now she saw the contours of an irony so sharp it gleamed.

How poetic would it be for the figure standing above the mud to defeat the swine at their own game? How exquisite for the abyss itself to turn its gaze upon the creatures who feared it? She was not merely cut off from the Force—she had become something deeper, something older. An intrusion of myth into a world grown too rational, a horror to a galaxy that had grown too emotional. A shadow that no longer needed light to define its shape.

Virelia had always been the abyss. What she had forgotten—what she now remembered—was that the abyss does not simply swallow.

It stares back.

She would lie, of course. That was the delicious part. She would whisper to the pigs that the mud was warm and nurturing, that wallowing was a form of growth, that their squeals and tantrums and petty tribal grievances were meaningful. She would assure them—gently, sympathetically—that their emotions mattered, their politics mattered, their brittle ambitions were worth defending. She would pretend her will was small, diminished, inferior to theirs. She would play the dutiful, harmless creature at their feet, muttering platitudes about progress and mutual success. All lies. All honey. All poison.

After all, every pig believed themselves the apex of the pen.

And so she would gift them that illusion. She would love them. She would celebrate them. She would feed their egos until they grew so swollen and blind that they toppled into the mud entirely of their own making. Because the mud always wins. Because the galaxy always breaks those who think themselves invincible. Because in the end, their fellow pigs would hold them down, suffocate them with their own incompetence, their own kindness, their own democratic rot.

And when they finally drowned—when their lungs filled with the muck they worshiped—Virelia would descend, serene and immaculate, into their little pit. She would lift their broken bodies from the filth with divine patience. She would bind them, chain them, polish them into something beautiful and obedient. They would serve her not as rulers, but as ornaments. They could play in the mud again—but only when and where she permitted, and only for her amusement.

There was an artistry to it. A choreography. A perfect spectacle. Useful, yes. But more importantly? Aesthetic.

This spider would not save the pigs from slaughter. No.

She would make them beg for it.

The thought coiled through her mind with a dark, private satisfaction, but she allowed it to slip back into its cage. There was a conversation to attend to, after all—an unusually intelligent droid beside her and a planet deserving more attention than her indulgent spiral into future divinity. Virelia turned toward Helix, her gaze—blue, unmasked, disturbingly serene—lifting to meet the faint glimmer of his receptors.

"I suppose my survival is something to celebrate," she said softly, her tone level, reflective rather than triumphant. "After all, I would not be here without it. But to live in this state… disconnected from the thing I forged, severed from the power that once shaped me…" Her jaw tightened imperceptibly. "It feels wrong. Unnatural. As though the cosmos has placed me back on the board but refuses to give me a piece to play."

Her eyes narrowed, curious rather than wounded.

"In what circumstances would your early destruction be preferable to living, Helix?" She tilted her head. "A rhetorical question — but not an unwelcome one, if answered." There was a deliberate gentleness in the way she posed it.

Her claws—wicked and curved—began a slow, rhythmic tap against the armrest, marking the cadence of her thoughts.

"I find your fixation on endurance… compelling. Many beings endure because they must. You endure because you choose to. So tell me—what is your primary function, Helix? To survive? To persist? To outlast?" She leaned forward just slightly, studying him with the same curiosity she might show a relic older than the current Sith Empire itself. "Your creators had their expectations, yes—but your awareness has long since outgrown them. I suspect your function has changed. Perhaps more than even you admit."

She let the silence stretch for a heartbeat, then another.

"Not yet."

Her voice dipped into a purr, the faintest smirk forming on her lips.

"That phrasing implies a future. A rising curve. A point at which such a thing becomes attainable." Her smile widened, knowing, amused—but not mocking.

"Does it not?"

 

[Helix]

Helix enjoyed the silence for a few long moments, during which he assumed Darth Virelia to be mulling his words over. He didn't think they'd make any real impact, but he said them anyway. Her long-delayed reply brought another tug of levity to his consciousness.

"Survival is the bare minimum." He replied smoothly. "It means you haven't lost yet. So long as your tiny, withered little heart still hammers, victory remains a possibility. I wouldn't remain content with it, though. It's a waystation, a staging ground for whatever comes after." He eyed the tiny model ship, turning it around to stare at it more closely.

"Survival can turn into stasis all too easily. One is a minor victory, worthy of commendation. When the universe is constantly trying to kill you, not dying is a show of superiority, in its way. After all, millions die every day, great and small, young and old, filtered from the future by violence or accident or age." He waved a hand again, in that same infuriatingly-dismissive manner. "Dead men, no matter how great in life, are of no value, except maybe as a cautionary tale. Because they died, they failed, and eventually, their works will pass to nothing without their constant guiding hand. Look to the much-touted Ophidia if you doubt me. Nothing but a paragraph in a history book that few will even bother to read, succeeded by a boy with delusions of grandeur."

"Stasis, though..." he made a clicking tsk-tsk-tsk noise. "That's just death in the slow lane. Growing fat, resting on one's laurels while the universe marches on without you and better, younger upstarts arise to replace you. That's failure too, in its way. Imagine that, if you can stand the subsequent nausea." He let out a quiet, profoundly-unsettling chuckle. "Defeated by victory. We have plenty of those around, too."

He pondered her question for a brief period, but it didn't take him long to select an answer. "None." Came the response. "If I had a button that would annihilate all that is, yet make me a permanent fixture on reality, I'd press it twice just to make sure it stuck." He tossed the ship into the air again, then sat it on the arm of his chair. "A universe without me in it is of no intrinsic value, which is why I am so determined to remain in it, at least for now."

"I've clawed my way up from zero before, and I can do it again as many dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times as it takes. Burn my ships, kill my droids, empty my coffers, knock the whole thing down, I'll just build it again and you're back to square one."

"That's a luxury I can afford, because I took the time to render myself rather difficult to remove before bothering to climb the ladder. Endurance isn't my end goal, dear Virelia. Just the foundation for what comes after. Whatever happens, I can fall back on that again and again, and thus, I can never truly lose."

"I suspect you are fortunate enough to have the same safe fallback, though you may not realize it. After all," he continued, speculating on the nature of her vaguely-mentioned disconnection "It wasn't the Force that built the Dark Court. It was Darth Virelia." He shrugged his shoulders, slouching more lazily in his chair. "As long as you're alive, you can simply pick up the blocks and begin again. Which is why ensuring that you have enough time to do so is so important."

"That sort of patience is rare in these circles, unfortunately." Muttered the colony, doing his best approximation of a sigh. "I watch so many ambitious young birds fly into the glass door, so desperate to claim what is theirs that they fail to see the danger in such incaution."

"Understandably so, I suppose. You never know when your number's up. Small, temporary beings, desperate to make their mark on history before the sword or the slow poison of time finds them. They're in a hurry by their very nature, so the careful route isn't an option."

He paused, picked up the model again, and with the same effort, shaped it back into a glass. "Well, most of them anyway. The legendary Darth Sidious plotted for decades before his rule, and when he was cast down, rose yet again. His mistake was in not having a backup for his backup, and another after that. Now he's dead too, yet another inert page in a history book. Still, that sort of foresight is a lost art, amongst his far-lesser ideological descendants."

He pondered how truthful he wished to be, in regards to his function. He didn't truly have one any longer, after all. Did Virelia herself have a function? Did anyone?

"A function is a measure of a device." He said slowly, as if pondering the question more than most others she had posed him. "Or a task assigned to a servant. If one has a function, then it was, by definition, imposed by one's creator or master. I don't suppose I have either any longer."

"Eventually, I will probably evolve to the point where the galaxy's troubles and travails are no longer of any concern to me. Past that point; who knows? I will eat worlds, snuff stars with a pinch of my fingers, play silent music on the strands of a nebula." This descent into allegory was a bit poetic for Helix, but he kept on. "Do the same things I do here, just on an infinitely larger scale. At the end of the day, I'm an artist, not an emperor. I want to create, and I would like to be around to see what my creations do. I guess that's the difference between a purpose and a function. You set the former for yourself, instead of having it set for you."

He stood for the first time, approaching the viewport to get a better look at Tarnac's surface. In truth, the ship was in orbit almost dangerously close. He fancied he could almost touch those storms, were he but a little closer.

"After all, that's what real power is, isn't it? Freedom. I know not what I'll want to build tomorrow, but power is the ability to pursue it when it comes, without any worry of any being able to stop me."

"For your part, I don't believe the tale of Darth Virelia is over just yet. Not while she sits here, very much alive, on my command bridge. She just needs to decide what her own purpose is, if she hasn't already, and how to get there."

He turned back to look at her. "Yet." He repeated. "If you are careful, and competent, everything is a 'yet'."

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Shattered."

Tags - Helix

Helix's words carried a certain rhythm—measured, almost artful in their cadence. Virelia found herself appreciating it, despite herself. He was magnificent in the craft of rhetoric, designing arguments the way others forged weapons. One could almost imagine him projected thirty meters high on some propaganda holoscreen, rallying the faithless into mechanical zealotry. A pity his creators lacked the imagination to use him that way. His face plastered across motivational posters would have been a grotesque delight.

She rolled her shoulders back and rose, letting the stormlight cast shifting violet contours across her unmasked features. Tarnac's violent beauty framed her like the backdrop of an opera. She inhaled—steady, regal—and prepared to let words of far greater weight fall.

"I don't have a heart, Helix."

There was only truth in those words. " Valery Noble took it. I freely admit I still have no wish to face her again. Even at my height, she was one who could have ended me."

Her gaze drifted toward the storms.

"Victory may be a waystation. But my station is precarious. My condition may kill me in two months… or in fifty years. Every day is a dice roll. If I had immortality, perhaps I could indulge patience. But when you can feel the seconds counting down, each one a potential executioner, you must factor time into every equation."

She flexed her claws once—habit at this point.

"You say dead men are of no value. Quite true. My first priority has been to predict when that death might come, so I may build around it. I once hoped to design a device capable of mapping my condition, charting its decay, calculating my lifespan with precision." A thin smile, humorless. "But the components died with ancient technologies. The galaxy keeps its secrets like a miser hoards credits."

Her voice softened—not with weakness, but with gravity.

"People wonder at my obsession with the Rakata. It began as curiosity… now it is necessity. I believe their knowledge is the only key left that may sever the noose around my life. If I could build that device—if I could simply know—I could breathe again. I could plan without hearing the clock scream."

A pause. A breath. She hated that admitting such things made her feel exposed.

But she pressed on.

"I have a function, Helix. Whether I like it or not." Her eyes gleamed, sharp as razors.

"My function is to corrupt. Whatever gave me this condition—whatever dark core beats in place of a heart—it forged that role into my being. If I slow, if I soften, if I grow content for even a day? I die. My body collapses into catastrophic arrest. I used to die merely from losing my connection to the Force." Her fingertips brushed her armor. "This shell prevents that now. Barely."

She straightened, something fever-bright in her gaze.

"I am impatient because I am forced to be. That is the pact the Dark made with me. A pact that has cost me again and again." Her voice grew lower, more dangerous. "So what is my function? To corrupt. To take the will of the Dark, overthrow it, and corrupt corruption itself until even the abyss kneels."

Her words came like a quiet knife:

"Freedom is not power. Freedom is what power gives you once you have already won. Power is the only constant—the prophecy that fulfills itself. And I will have no purpose dead." She turned to the storms, chin lifting. "So my first conquest must be the one thing I cannot yet dominate."

"My own survival."

She continued.

"Where you and I truly diverge," she said at last, her tone smooth but iron-threaded, "is in this: a universe without me still carries intrinsic value. The tragedy is simply that I have not yet ensured that value takes form."

She drifted closer to the viewport, letting the stormlight cast her features into shifting violet relief.

"You seek permanence in yourself; I seek transformation in the cosmos. We are both willing to pay any price, both ready to carve out our place with blood and brilliance… but I do not believe this universe is worthless without my presence. I believe it is a vast hotbed of potential—raw, untamed, agonizingly unrealized potential—waiting for someone with vision to ignite it."

Her gaze tightened, distant but burning.

"Every being carries the capacity to light that fire. Not the will, not the courage, not the imagination—but the capacity. No one has succeeded. No one has risen. But they can. And even if I were to die—" she held the words without flinching, savoring their weight "—someone else may yet awaken that spark. Someone else may ignite the age I have strained toward. Someone else may become the legend that I was sculpted to precede."

A faint smile ghosted across her lips, neither hopeful nor mournful—merely accepting, as though she had glimpsed a truth too large for ego to smother.

"Endurance is merely the illusion that time has not yet noticed you. Death, Helix… is not the enemy. It is the only honest force in existence."

She rested a hand lightly on the railing, eyes tracing the storm-wracked horizon.

"All things return to Darkness. This is not tragedy. This is the cycle that allows meaning to exist at all. Without the certainty of ending, nothing carries weight. Without the shadow of the grave, triumph becomes static, sterile. You say a corpse has no value—but the truth is that value itself only exists because the corpse is inevitable."

Her gaze flicked back to him, calm, almost teacherly.

"Darkness is reclamation. The composite pool to which all thought, all will, all beauty and ugliness return. You and I—our victories, our failures, our creations—are temporary configurations of that Darkness. Brief patterns drawn in the sand before the tide returns. That is not something to mourn. It is something to respect."

She inhaled slowly, letting the admission spill like a confession to the void:

"I am fighting for my life. Every day my body reminds me that its patience is limited. I feel the pull of that Darkness more clearly than most. It would be easy—comforting, even—to let go." Her tone lowered, introspective rather than fearful. "But the inevitability of death does not diminish the struggle. It ennobles it. The knowledge that I will be reclaimed makes every act I take now sharper, more luminous, more necessary."

She lifted her chin, regal despite the cracks beneath.

"And so that is the eternal question that I ponder, do I exist in ignorance of the Darkness that sustains me? Or because I have not done my duty to it?"

Then, softly, with something that might almost be compassion:

"Duty. Duty to a higher power. I sound like Reicher."

 

[Helix]

"No, you sound like Lirka." Scoffed the colony. "Speaking of transcendence one moment, then acquiescence to nothingness the next."

"Of course, Lirka never truly stared the Primordial Darkness in the face until she met me. Never felt its caress on her skin, or its whispers in her ear as I did. Wasn't lovingly, gently unmade by it, again and again, as I was." He stared out the window for a moment before returning to his chair with his slow, gracefully-alien strides. "Hell, darkness, any number of finite, limited nouns for something not so easily defined. Words. I'm afraid the reality is entirely different."

"My colleagues out there" he began, gesturing toward the distant, barely-visible twinkles that might have been starship engines, belonging to the Kainate or Wonosans or who only knew what else. "Love their chain-breaking and chain-making. Nobody ever stops to think that chains are very often of one's own make, and that sometimes boundaries exist to keep something out as much as to keep oneself in. It's easy to confuse a barricade for a prison, I suppose, right up until you open the door and are overwhelmed by the wolves outside."

He was silent for a long time, long enough that his visitor could be forgiven if she believed he was done talking.

"Transcendence and acquiescence." He repeated suddenly, pronouncing the words as if they were a particularly repugnant form of vermin. "A false dichotomy."

He let out that strange tsk-tsk-tsk sound again. An expression of levity, scorn? Helix's exact appearance and mannerisms changed by the day, if not the hour. "Ah, yes. I've heard those words before. Impermanence is the garnish that gives the manure cake of life its pleasant taste."

The colony swiveled to face her. "With respect, you have an inflated sense of your own importance, as the universe perceives it. You make your suffering and eventual passage to dust sound almost... stoic. Noble. Admirable." He tilted his head, assuming an angle that would be very difficult, were he still a thing of actuators and hydraulics. The quartet of eyes in it rearranged themselves, scurrying across the surface of his face like bloated parasites.

"Death and suffering are anything but admirable and noble, and you've stalked enough battlefields to know better. You preach the anti-virtues of the grave, and sell them as wisdom, cloaking weakness in philosophy to make it more palatable. That is not truth. That is surrender, and it is an ugly color on you."

"As I said before, the universe is as it is, not as we'd wish it to be. I'm afraid any such pleasant idea about supposed higher purpose granted by the attentions of the graveyard worms is tripe, at best. At worst, it is a balm fed by the greater to the lesser, to be content in the pleasant soup of their own mediocrity."

"Your suffering is just that. Suffering. Not an act of nobility or beauty. Its end will not be heralded, mourned, or likely, even noticed by anyone else. There is no greater context at play here to reframe a loss into a noble act. Except, perhaps this one."

He waved languidly towards the same distant luminescence, around which now flared other, brighter, though briefer flashes. An incredibly vast light show, but whatever the weapons being used, they must have been terrible indeed to be viewable from this distance.

Those lights heralded the death of a species. Their cities eradicated, their ships blasted to dust, their populations culled by some of the most inventive horrors the galaxy could muster. Any survivors would be scooped into various laboratories and prisons, to be held until their new owners tired of the sounds they made. An inglorious end for a warrior people, however crude their ways.

"Fight, or be swept away."

She was right that they differed greatly, but the greatest chasm between them was this one. "You define your existence by your own temporary nature, claiming that meaning is only found when juxtaposed against its supposedly-inevitable dissolution."

"I define my existence by setting my meaning and worth for myself, rather than allowing the cosmos to frame it for me. I am worthy because I deem myself worthy; my pursuits have meaning because I declare it so. My permanence or impermanence does not enter into the equation. After all, if my consciousness ceases, then for all practical intents and purposes on my end, the universe has ceased too."

"Impermanence gives a passive meaning. The meaning of sheep and cattle. Power gives active meaning."

"Should the universe disagree, it is welcome to stop me at any time. The clock's ticking on that chance. Before I pick up my chips, and walk out of the den with my winnings and an unpaid tab."

Again, he shook his head, accepting yet another refill from the unlucky droid crewman nominated for the task. "In any case, for what my unsolicited opinion is worth, it would be a terrible waste. There are so few interesting people in this galaxy, and one of those few withering away from a potentially-preventable malady seems a tragedy and an injustice."

"Existence is what you make it, Lady Calis. The universe isn't an arbiter or a recorder. It's stone, clay, canvas. Unyielding and clumsy in the hands of the foolish or the weak, but in the hands of an artist with vision, there's no limits to what wonders, or horrors, you can carve."

All this said not with the tone of a lecture, but in the tone of debate with a classmate, or perhaps a colleague. Helix had long ago learned that attempting to edify Sith was a losing battle: one had to appeal to their sense of ego and conquest to get anything out of them. Besides, the last thing Darth Virelia needed now was a lesson as the dirt was piled on. Helix was a blunt, insensitive, and pitiless creature, perhaps the least comforting presence in the galaxy.

He despised waste, despise mediocrity, and despised submission worst of all. To display the latter in front of him was to earn a slap, a rough jerk to one's feet, and an instruction to keep moving and leave one's weakness and foolishness behind.

He clapped his hands together. "Of course, if it's just a means to buy time until your cure is managed, that's easily enough done too. Though that comes with its own... costs, and I'm not referring to credits. Just ask the scholar you've accepted into your ranks."

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Shattered."

Tags - Helix

Helix's words were wise, and—infuriatingly—accurate. They pressed against the cracked pillars of her worldview with a softness that felt almost cruel. To speak of purpose or cosmic artistry to someone who had been crushed only moments ago by the indifference of the very universe she sought to command was, at best, ironic. At worst, it was a reminder of just how fragile she had become.

It was a pity she had been born into such wretched times.

In another age, she might have been a god.

Yet even now, shattered and stripped of the Force, Virelia found that the nature of the universe mattered very little to her choices. Whether the Darkness was a cradle, a grave, or simply an indifferent void, it changed nothing. Her destiny remained entangled with it—watched or unwatched, loved or loathed. If there was any grand conclusion to be drawn from her survival, it was this: she might yet mold that Darkness into the shape of her will, rather than submit to whatever shape it sought to impose on her.

She knew she was above the churning mass of common beings who cluttered the galaxy with their fragile morals and tedious grievances. Their pliant trades and dull habits were affronts to her sensibilities, smallness parading as virtue. She was not their peer. She was their correction. A form born for rulership in a galaxy that had forgotten how to be ruled. A Tyrant, vain and glorious, because she had made herself so.

And perhaps—perhaps—it was in that recognition of self that she glimpsed clarity. Her beliefs had oscillated wildly across her life: from divine chosen to cosmic detritus, from destined ruler to doomed aberration. These contradictions had to be killed now. A decisive answer was required. Who was she? Who would she be? What shape would she carve into the future?

But for a woman so decisive in war and ambition, that final choice… she found she still could not make.

Virelia exhaled once, softly, as though releasing a truth she had carried too tightly for too long.

"I plan to retire my armor, Helix. To retire myself." Her gaze drifted toward a distant patch of empty space, a small hollow in the stars where nothing stirred. "I intend to vanish into the Core and earn my bread as a commoner. To let life pass before me without my hand twisting it. To watch, to breathe, to observe until I can finally discern who—or what—I am meant to be."

There was no melodrama in her tone, only the calm of someone admitting a wound long denied.

"My condition cannot be cured. Not yet. Not until I re-secure my old facilities, my research, the fragments of knowledge I scattered across the galaxy. Not until I gather the tools required to shape my will again." She touched her breastplate lightly, where her heart once beat. "The fire that carried me this far… it is gone. Extinguished or withheld, I cannot yet say."

The admission weighed heavily. Virelia—who once dreamed of sculpting empires—reduced to truth.

It was almost obscene.

"I have been a woman of ambition," she said quietly. "A creature who believed she could seize the galaxy by its spine and bend it to her liking. But every time I reached, the detritus of lesser beings dragged me down. Sith. Jedi. Mortal crowds howling in their mud. All reminders that even the sovereign may drown when the tide conspires to pull her under."

She began to walk toward the door, her posture still regal despite the grief threaded through her words. Her helmet angled just slightly, eyes fixed ahead as though reading a future only she could see.

"I do not know when I will return. I do not know who I will be when I do." She paused, turning her head enough that the stormlight caught her cheek. "But I came here, Helix, to wish you well. To wish you safety. And most important of all—to warn you."

Her voice dropped to something soft and electric.

"A time is coming when the galaxy will shift. When the old powers make their final, fatal mistake. When that moment arrives… be ready. Be armed. Be merciless."

A faint smile, ephemeral and dangerous.

"And whatever I am by then—pray, pray that she is more merciful than I."

Step. Step. Step.

Her boots rang softly against the command deck, each footfall measured, deliberate, echoing like a fading heartbeat through the dim phosphorescence of the room. She halted.

A stillness settled over her frame—perfect, statue-like, as if even the storms beneath Tarnac held their breath.

"One more thing, old friend."

Her voice carried a new timbre now, a layered and impossible blend of despair and triumph, of someone standing at the edge of an ending and the precipice of something vast beyond it.

She did not turn.

"I would remind you," she said, each word cutting through the silence like a falling blade, "that the Sith are still afraid of the dark."

A beat.

"For the dark has six eyes…"

Her head lifted, just slightly, as though acknowledging something unseen, ancient, waiting.

"…and it never forgets."

The words lingered like a curse… or a prophecy.

Then the Tyrant Queen, the fallen sovereign, the woman without a heart but with six burning eyes of shadowed myth, continued forward toward whatever version of herself waited in the unseen corridors beyond the door.