Shadow Hand
- Intent: To create a new Sithspawn leviathan species for the Kainate, serving as massive hunting ocean dreadnoughts, amphibious siege predators, and living interdiction assets within the conquered Tof Exclusionary Zone, as well as a recurring horror element and RP hook for naval, coastal, and underwater stories.
- Image Credit:
- Click - ChatGPT by Me
- Headers - Teresa Zambrano | Darth Pellax
- Canon: N/A
- Permissions: N/A
- Links:
- Name: Blackwake Leviathan
- Designation:
- Semi-Sentient
- Origins:
- Tof Exclusionary Zone - Abyssal Kainate Lab Facilities overseen by Darth Prazutis
- Secondary breeding and holding sites on Dromund Kaas and select Kainate-controlled worlds
- Average Lifespan:
- 150-200 Galactic Standard Years
- Estimated Population: Scattered - Restricted to the Tof Exclusionary Zone, Dromund Kaas, and select Kainate worlds.
- Description: Blackwake Leviathans are titanic oceanic Sithspawn engineered by Darth Prazutis from the colossal native predators of Tof's seas, spliced with ancient Leviathan lore and modern Kainate bio-alchemy. Each is a starship-length mass of abyssal muscle and black osteo-plating, its flanks veined with dull crimson sigils and its maw lined in jagged bled kyber-shard teeth. In the deep, their passing turns the water dark and strangely still. Sailors speak of "the sea going black" as the only warning before a ship vanishes. Where Lightbane Leviathans stride across land as siege titans, Blackwake Leviathans rule the abyss: living oceanic dreadnoughts bred to ram, drag, and tear apart capital-grade hulls, shatter rig-cities from below, and enforce the Kainate's claim over Tof's poisoned seas with methodical, predatory malice.
- Breathes: Type I Atmosphere and Water (Adapted gill-lung system; Optimized for aquatic environments)
- Average Height of Adults: 25 - 35 meters (Dorsal ridge to belly)
- Average Length of Adults: 120-150 meters (Some alphas exceed 180m)
- Skin Color: Abyssal black, oil-slick blue, deep green-black; alchemical plates often appear as matte, light-swallowing obsidian with faint crimson runic veining.
- Hair Color: N/A
- Distinctions:
- Massive elongated bodies, somewhere between deep-sea whale, shark, and an ancient saurian siege-beast.
- Thick, overlapping layers of alchemized osteo-plates growing from their hides like black iron scales, each etched with Sith runes that throb faintly when enraged or channeling sonic bursts.
- Enormous maws that can unhinge unnaturally wide, lined with serried kyber-shard teeth that emit a sickly glimmer and resonate on impact, generating localized energy shocks to help shear armor and bulkheads.
- Powerful tails and reinforced spinal ridges for explosive bursts of speed and devastating ramming attacks underwater.
- Paired fore-limb fins in the front and back that can articulate into massive, pillar-like webbed, clawed limbs when in shallow water or on land, each ending in broad, taloned paddles used to grip hulls, pier supports, cliff faces, or fortification walls, allowing slow quadrupedal movement along beaches, breakwaters, and low-lying coastal terrain.
- Heavy ventral "stabilizer" fins and cartilage-reinforced belly plates that allow them to drag, belly-crawl, and surge forward across beaches, breakwaters, and shallow coastal terrain without immediately tearing themselves apart.
- Gills along the neck and flanks seamlessly integrated with cavernous lung cavities, backed by bio-pumps that shunt breathable medium (air or water) as needed; these structures are partially armored but remain less protected than the dorsal carapace.
- Rows of pressure-sensitive pits and specialized sonic organs along the jaw, ribs, and underbelly, allowing them to read vibration, locate prey, and unleash focused hydrosonic or atmospheric shockwaves depending on the medium.
- Embedded blister-pods and life-drain nodules under the plates, giving them the classic Leviathan capacity to scour life essence from those they kill.
- Elder Blackwakes accrue labyrinthine scar-runes and barnacle-like patches of black alchemical coral, making the oldest individuals look like moving graveyards of past campaigns.
- Races: None (No recognized sub-races; minor variation in color, plate density, and length between individual bloodlines).
- Force Sensitivity: All
- Oceanic Dreadnoughts: Blackwake Leviathans are purpose-bred to prey on warships and fortifications in their element. In deep water or coastal shallows, they function as living siege engines, capable of ramming, latching onto, and tearing through capital-grade hulls, rig-cities, oil platforms, and sea-facing bastions that have been brought into atmosphere or anchored within Tof's oceans. Anything that shares the water with them is at a severe disadvantage.
- Amphibious Horror: Unlike many Leviathan strains, Blackwakes are fully amphibious. Their dual gill-lung system and articulated fore-limb fins allow them to haul themselves onto beaches, breakwaters, docks, and even low-lying coastal districts, where they can continue fighting in air, even moving on its four limbs. While slower on land, a Blackwake moving into a harbor city is still a mobile catastrophe smashing towers with its bulk, biting through defensive gates, and using its weight to pancake fortifications before retreating to the sea.
- Abyssal Armor: Their bodies are encased in layered alchemized osteo-plates over dense, pressure-adapted flesh, providing exceptional resilience against torpedoes, depth charges, conventional naval batteries, and low-flying starfighter strafes. Glancing orbital fire or long-range bombardments struggle to inflict decisive damage before the Leviathan can dive, reposition, or counter-attack.
- Kyber-Shard Maw: Each Leviathan's jaws are seeded with jagged kyber splinters and alchemically hardened fangs. When they bite, those shards resonate, producing a localized energy shock that helps shear through reinforced plating and bulkheads, puncture hulls, and snap load-bearing structures. A single successful clamp can peel open the side of a heavy war-barge or rupture a coastal fortress wall facing the sea.
- Hydrosonic Shock Bursts: Specialized organs along the jaw and underbelly can unleash focused, dark side tainted sonic pulses. Underwater, these generate cavitation shockwaves capable of buckling hulls, shattering pylons, and liquefying crew in flooded chambers. In atmosphere they manifest as concussive roars that can pulverize fortification facades, snap gantries, turn organics into pink mist and throw personnel from walls.
- Life Scourge: True to the Leviathan legacy, Blackwakes possess blister pods that absorb the life force of living beings they kill. Kainate refinement pushes this trait toward a crude, instinctual Force Drain analogue, allowing them to leech vitality in a radius around their bodies, weakening nearby swimmers, divers, or exposed ground troops and accelerating their healing and stamina in the midst of battle.
- Semi-Sentient Pack Predators: Blackwake Leviathans accumulate predatory cunning and fragmented echoes of the minds they have devoured. Older specimens demonstrate coordinated behavior. Driving convoys into shoals or trenches, faking retreat to split escorts, timing multi-angle ramming attacks, or deliberately collapsing structures to isolate targets. Sith handlers can direct them, but even "unsupervised" packs behave with unnervingly tactical malice.
- Sea-Dominant, Land-Limited: Amphibious does not mean equal. In the water, Blackwakes are terror incarnate; on land, they are monstrously dangerous but slower and more metabolically strained. Prolonged operations away from water cause overheating, organ stress, and micro-fracturing in their support cartilage. Clever defenders who can deny them access back to the sea, or trap them in dry zones, can turn time itself into a weapon.
- Exposed Respiratory: While heavily armored above, their gill-lung interfaces along the neck and flanks are only partially protected. Skilled divers, submersible crews, or siege specialists who manage to get close, beneath or beside the main carapace, can target these points to impair breathing, or stun the beast long enough for heavier guns to finish the job.
- Force Light & Consecrated Waters: As dark side creations, Blackwake Leviathans are acutely vulnerable to sustained applications of Force Light. Such effects burn their flesh, scramble their senses, and can drive them into panicked flight or blind berserker frenzies dangerous to friend and foe alike.
- Psychic Backlash on Handlers: The same alchemical circuitry that lets Kainate overseers guide Blackwakes creates a feedback channel. When a Leviathan dies in intense fear or agony, the resulting psychic recoil can disorient, injure, or briefly incapacitate its controller, and may ripple into nearby Leviathans as confusion, hesitation, or uncontrolled rage that savvy defenders can exploit.
- Diet:
- Obligate carnivores.
- Primary prey includes: Native Tof ocean predators, large marine fauna, shipwreck carrion, and starships / sea-going vessels (Crew, droids, and hull alike).
- They readily consume metal, fuel, and industrial run-off mixed with organic matter; their alchemized organs are designed to process and compartmentalize non-organic intake without immediate harm.
- Communication:
- Low-frequency rumbles, bell-like booming calls, and subsonic pulses transmitted through water.
- Body language via fin flares, jaw position, and changes in dorsal ridge luminescence.
- Sith handlers and Augurs may read and guide them via limited telepathic impressions and feedback from the implanted control spurs, but they do not possess complex spoken language.
- Technology Level: None.
- Religion/Beliefs: None.
- General Behavior:
- Hunting & Packs: Blackwake Leviathans hunt primarily in deep water, trailing targets for hours or days along trench lines and thermal currents. Younger beasts often work alone or in pairs, while elder specimens coordinate small packs. They favor ambush from below: First signs include deadened seas, flattened wave patterns, and dull booming sounds reverberating through hulls before the killing strike.
- Attack Patterns (Sea): Typical engagement sequence:
- Shadow and stalk from depth, mapping convoy routes and escort patterns.
- Use hydrosonic bursts to rattle hulls, disrupt sensors, and panic crew.
- Ram from below or the side to break keels, screws, or support pylons.
- Latch onto crippled targets with fore-fins, then apply kyber-shard bite to tear open compartments.
- Feed on survivors and wreckage, often dragging major sections into deeper waters.
- Coastal / Land Assaults: When directed, Blackwakes will breach into harbors, wade through surf, and haul themselves onto coastal fortifications or low-lying city sectors. They belly-crawl using tail thrusts and fore-limb heaves, smashing through buildings and walls via sheer mass. These assaults are brutal but brief: once objectives are destroyed or defenders' mass overwhelming fire, the Leviathan typically retreats downslope into the sea, using debris and chaos as cover.
- Interaction with Handlers: Conditioned from "birth" to respond to specific alchemical frequencies and Kainate control rites. They recognize certain Sith or Augurs as "apex presences" and will defer or avoid striking at those signatures in the water. However, very old Blackwakes have been known to test boundaries, react unpredictably to new handlers, or require culling when their accumulated sentience makes them less pliable.
- Daily Rhythm: Predominantly crepuscular/nocturnal hunters, though they will attack at any time if provoked or commanded. Between hunts they rest in deep-ocean trenches or wreck-choked canyons known as Blackwake Runs, often circling slowly among the bones and rust of previous kills.
The conquest of Tof did not end at the fall of its fortresses or the breaking of its kings. For the Kainate, the war extended into the bones of the world itself, its seas, its sky, and the stories its people would be allowed to tell.
Tof's oceans had always harbored colossal predators: Titanic, near-mythic beasts that stalked the depths and occasionally surfaced in legends as omens or gods. After the Kainate razed the Tof Kingdom and transformed the world into an Exclusionary Zone, those same predators became raw material. Darth Prazutis, Shadow Hand and Mortarch of the Kainate, saw in them the perfect foundation for a new breed of Leviathan: one crafted explicitly to erase the last remnants of Tof's naval pride and render its seas a permanent weapon.
Within the newly established Leviathan Forges, vast abyssal biolabs and ritual chambers sunk into trench walls and repurposed Tof citadels, the work began. Eggs and genetic samples were harvested from Tof's titanic ocean fauna, then spliced with alchemical templates derived from ancient Sea Leviathan lore and modern Leviathan practice refined by the Dark Lords. Flesh vats thrummed to the rhythm of sacrificial rites. Kyber shards, scavenged from shattered battlefields and broken Tof trophies, were cultivated into jagged tooth-cores and implanted into the developing maws of the proto-Leviathans.
Early trials were disastrous. Some beasts grew too unstable and tore themselves apart in frenzies of uncontrolled sonic discharge. Others proved too docile, failing to distinguish between Kainate hulls and designated prey. Entire trenches had to be purged with orbital fire when experimental broods turned feral and began attacking anything that moved, even one another.
Refinement came slowly and brutally, culling failed lines and reinforcing successful traits. The final, stable design, the Blackwake Leviathan, was achieved only after Prazutis personally oversaw the binding of several promising specimens, saturating their embryonic minds with carefully curated visions of war and victory in the dark. Their control spurs were tuned to Kainate command frequencies, their instinctual aggression honed toward anything bearing Tof signatures or unauthorized IFF profiles.
The first field tests took place in the immediate aftermath of Tof's fall. Remnant Tof war-fleets, having fled to hidden anchorages and secret harbors, found their "safe" harbors turned into slaughterhouses. Convoys vanished with no distress calls, later discovered as scattered wreckage caught along trench walls, hulls bitten open, keels snapped, crew quarters emptied. Tof survivors spoke in hushed terror of the sea itself turning black and still, of dull bell-like booms echoing through metal, and of glimpsing vast shadows gliding beneath their ships before everything broke.
Satisfied, the Kainate formalized the Blackwake program. The Tof Exclusionary Zone was ringed in Blackwake Runs, deep-ocean patrol belts seeded with maturing packs and monitored from surface and undersea platforms. Rig-cities, oil harvesters, mining stacks, and interdiction nets were all given dedicated Leviathan complements. Approaching Tof by sea, or even attempting low-atmosphere insertion over its major oceans, became an invitation to disappear.
As decades pass, individual Blackwake Leviathans grow larger, more scarred, and more cunning. Like their Lightbane kin and the ancient Sea Leviathans, they slowly accrete echoes of the minds they've devoured: fragments of language, memories, tactics, and fear. Some of the oldest specimens recognize specific Sith voices or ships; others drift in uneasy semi-independence at the edges of Kainate control, their continued existence tolerated as both deterrent and experiment.
Within Kainate culture, Blackwake Leviathans are regarded with a mixture of reverence and pragmatic caution. Cults along the rig-cities whisper prayers to "The Black Wake" as both warning and ward. Nav officers mark their patrol zones with more dread than minefields. Darth Prazutis himself views them as one more correction etched into Tof's fate: Where once the Tof sailed as kings upon turquoise seas, now those seas belong to star-eating shadows that answer only to the will of the Sith.
In the end, the Blackwake Leviathans embody the Kainate's verdict on Tof. The world's proud ocean predators have been reforged into instruments of Sith dominion, its waters turned into a living graveyard where the wake itself is black, and the only direction left to flee is down.
