Faction Blood for Blood | SO

[Varin Mortifer]

The rain of gel splashed on Varin, eating away his robes revealing the Wonosan armor beneath, with a few personal modifications.

Lirka’s massive arms wrenched around Varin as his forehead began to bleed, coating half of his face like a mask donned for war. The acrid smell reached his nostrils causing them to flair. Though it wasn’t blood that it smelled like Varin knew that Lirka had sustained a decent wound from the impact of his mace.

He could tell without the evidence of possible blood by how her actions severely changed from before. Her arms began to squeeze around Varin as he yelled in her face and with little notice he was thrown into the air, sent a really decent distance away. All the while the cries and whining of the technical mass of Lirka’s suit screamed.

Varin made impact with the blonde woman and she was a lot more solid than he thought. Knocking them both to the floor, Varin’s momentum rolled him off of her as his flesh sizzled and bubbled from the chemical burns. His body soon began to patch him up bit by bit. The cut on his face and forehead burned away, lost to history.

He growled in frustration as he slammed his fist into the flooring punching a hole straight through. He glared past Arris and straight to Lirka as he flipped open a side compartment of his bracer revealing a small datapad. He tapped the screen revealing measurements and dosages. Tapping his finger on the dosage bar he drug his finger all the way up causing the screen to blare a red indicator. He tore the rest of his shirt off revealing the most prevalent of the modifications in his armor. His spine was aligned with various small round vials filled with liquid. In an instant several needles embedded straight into his spine causing him to yell in pain as his body convulsed and twitched. The liquid in his suit draining completely into his body turning his yell of pain into a roar of bloodlust. The symptom was quick, shutting off all pain inhibitors releasing his bodily limits.

Varin’s head shot back to Lirka as his eyes bled down his face. With another yell he slung his mace over Arris and straight to Lirka with much more velocity than before. Fire raged out of his back, he only had minutes before the drug was burned out of his system.

Lightning arced from his teeth as he let out another yell. His throat became hot and the runes that were branded into his body burned like a furnace. The arcs began to meld into heavier bolts before a massive concentrated burst of dark purple lightning shot forth from his jaws towards Lirka.

Lirka Ka | Arris Windrun​

 

[Ivalyn Yvarro]

As Quinn Varanin had been aware, the Commonwealth answered the call to rescue those fleeing the descent of warlords unto Lord Marr's domain.


DCV Margrave – Secondary Command Deck
Above Riflor, Morningwatch Cycle

The holotable pulsed faint blue as data crawled across its surface, population displacements, fleet readiness reports, a blinking priority dispatch from the Office of Interstellar Diplomacy.

Ivalyn stood with her hands folded behind her back, flanked by Janissary guards, as Vice Admiral Julian Colley finished his assessment. "...and the main hyperlanes in and out of the Alvarian region are under fire. We'll have to divert through Faldos routes or punch a corridor ourselves."

"Punch it," Ivalyn said calmly. "Every minute wasted is another thousand souls dragged toward the pyres of warlords."

The Vice Admiral gave a crisp nod.

Across the deck, the comms officer gestured. "We have Fleet Captain Galeway on holo, Grand Vizier. Standing by."

"Bring her through."

The holopresence flared, and there she stood, iron-jawed and unsentimental as always, her navy uniform worn like a blade at rest: Rowyna Galeway , Hero of Brosi, the reason Task Force Valiant existed.

"Captain Galeway," Ivalyn began, her tone precise, "you will take the DCV Valiant and its relief flotilla to Alvaria immediately. Freighter convoys will begin lifting from designated refugee zones within thirty-six hours. You will ensure safe extraction and transit to processing centers in Cerea, Halm, and Riflor. The Sith Order is aware. Their forces will not impede you, for now."

"Yes, Grand Vizier," Galeway said without hesitation. "I'll keep the lanes clear."

"You'll do more than that," Ivalyn said quietly. "You'll make sure they remember who answered the call."

A brief pause.

"And Captain," Ivalyn added, her gaze narrowing, "if any so-called Sith Warlord, or even Marr's remnants turn their weapons on civilians, on your ships, you are authorized to respond. Fully."

Rowyna nodded once, solemnly. "Understood, ma'am."

The feed dimmed.

Ivalyn turned toward Vice Admiral Colley. "Dispatch the orders. I want Valiant in position as soon as possible."

"As you will, Grand Vizier."

She stood still a moment longer, eyes scanning the map now shifting to show outbound fleet paths, each thread of light a promise to the displaced. Then, almost to herself: "No matter who lit the match, it will be the Commonwealth that carries out the rescue."

 

[Lina Ovmar]

Objective: Kill Helix
Allies: Darth Strosius Revna Marr Varin Mortifer
Enemies: Darth Nefaron Lirka Ka
Yet TBD: Mercy Arris Windrun

That she was here in the first place wasn't as simple as an alliance. She wasn't a member of the wonosan's that bowed to Strosius, she was here because despite all her misgivings, despite his terrible track record of being a rancor in a ceramic store, Lina cared. She engaged Helix because he posed a threat to people she cared about. Because he was a vulture picking at carrion left by someone she had cared about.

Lina's saber slid through the limb all too easily. Nothing was that easy, nothing was that simple, she heard it clatter, shifted her stance to defensive, and then she heard the skittering. Like the sound of a hundred tiny metal spiders running from a disturbed nest. Her eyes flicked towards it, widening.

What the feth is that?

She didn't have time to contemplate it as it lunged in sync with the body she'd severed it from. Instinct took over as both sabers moved in a blur of crimson, one high, one low their hums overlapping in a single violent chord. The leaping limb met the upper blade midair, a flare of red light scattering a cloud of molten fragments as she dashed it aside. The lower saber caught the pincer as it swept in for her legs, metal shrieking against plasma.

The impact jolted through her arm, but she turned the motion to her advantage, twisting with it. Shadows bled from her movements stretching and doubling until her outline fractured before him. For a breath, it was impossible to tell which shape was truly her. She slid sideways through the haze of her own illusions, obsidian eyes fixed on Helix's form.

She stepped back in with measured precision. She needed to understand what she was dealing with, where the weaknesses lay.Her first blade came in low, angling toward the pincer arm; the second followed half a breath later, cutting high toward his shoulder in a mirrored arc. Neither strike carried her full weight, each was a question, a pulse of pressure meant to see how fast he could answer.

The shadows mirrored her again, faint and flickering, their edges bleeding into the light. Every motion left an echo behind her, so it was never clear which was real until the moment a blade met metal.

 

[Kasir Dorran]

Darth Prazutis Darth Carnifex Darth Avida Seela Leini Darth Caedes Jorryn Fordyce Eira Dyn Ansisa Quinn Varanin Srina Talon

Kasir heard it first in his teeth, a grinding resonance that set his jaw on edge. The chant wasn’t outside anymore. It had wormed its way in, threading through marrow, rattling the cage of his ribs. Each syllable drove like a nail into his spine, each verse a pulse trying to overwrite his own. His body shuddered beneath it, but he would not yield. His head tilted, not in surrender to the whisper pressed against his ear, but in defiance.. but listening, daring it to speak louder, daring it to try and break him.

And then the hook landed .

The Sangnir’s tether skimmed the edge of the Dark Lord’s consciousness but found no fire, no storm, no fury to gorge upon. Only a vast horizon.. a flat sea without wind, without current, without end. His tendril numbed at the edges, iced over, nerves cauterized as if violently removed. Hunger recoiled, starved, confused. But Kasir’s breath hitched, nostrils flaring. His chin dipped, not in submission but in curiosity. No doubt, he wanted to delve deeper, to plunge into that abyss and see if silence itself could be devoured. Such denial only sharpened the appetite.

The first stroke crashed down and drove his weapon toward the courtyard stones, the weight of it akin to chaining his wrists as though iron had been clamped around them. Muscles bunched and quivered, cords standing out along his forearms as he fought to keep it from buckling.

With a flick of his wrist, a whisper of death grazed the line of his leg, a follow through from the Dark Lord's blade that was evaded. His frame contorted and twisted, barely avoiding the edge, still close enough to leave the skin on his ankle prickling with invisible tendrils of pain. A swift clawed hand shot down, slicing through the air, raking across the courtyard and carving deep trenches into the stone as he fought to maintain his balance. The shriek of the stone echoed in the courtyard, followed by the sound of flesh being torn. Crimson liquid where his claws found purchase. Along his right arm, the old scars that marked his body lit up with the same sickly glow, Godflame's static crept across pallid skin as if the flesh itself remembered each and every wound ever carried.

The final motion descended upon him like a spear, sudden and unavoidable, as if distance itself had collapsed in a blink. He reacted instinctively, snapping his body across the line with all the grace and fury of a seasoned assassin, saberstaff whipping into place, but the impact still pierced through him with searing agony. A shockwave rattled through his frame, bones humming with the raw power emanating around them, threatening to break him. Another breath left in a sharp hiss, torso folding around the blow like a wounded beast.

A storm of shards orbited the air. He dropped low, body coiled, saberstaff snapping in tight arcs to swat aside the worst of it. But the storm was too thick. A sliver of one kissed his cheek, opening a thick red line that burned cold. A jagged rod clipped his shoulder, tearing flesh, sustenance running down his numb arm in rivulets. Another buried shallow in his thigh, the sting sharp, and so every nerve began screaming.

He refused to give ground. His head angled, twin amber flames narrowing to slits as he followed the murderous orbit with the stillness of a nexu waiting to spring. Breath leaked sharp between his teeth, the tang thick on his tongue where he’d bitten through flesh. The storm cut at him, but his gaze never slipped, calculating the rhythm of the spinning blades. Each cut only sharpened him, each drop of blood another vow, daring the storm to show him the smallest weakness.

Then the cage fell.

Like the ribcage of some infernal beast, the crimson arcs folded down around him, sealing him in a cage of violent light; the air around him convulsed, first a furnace blast that singed his skin, then a sudden void that chilled him to the bone, his breath misting as the heat was ripped away, leaving behind the taste of iron. Static crawled over his skin, every hair standing on end as if warning him of the impending danger, and yet his body remained coiled with a quiet tension. His knees bent, blades braced across his frame, the stance of one who knew there was no clean escape from this deadly, perfect trap.

His eyes cut upward, then side to side, mapping the angles and geometry of his prison, searching for any weakness or opportunity for escape. But every path was a punishment, each option leading to a different form of agony or death. Or both. Should he leap, the orbiting steel would slice him to shreds. Should he drive forward, a blade waited to strike. Hold ground, and the cage would close in on him, nerve by nerve, until nothing remained but smoke.

Despite the hopelessness of his situation, Kasir's muscles drew tighter. The trap was flawless, and yet he still dared the jaws to close around him

Another arc descended like a verdict, the walls folding inward at the same moment so that the world itself seemed to fold into a single point of annihilation. His heel slid back across the broken glass, grinding shards into flesh as he fought for footing, his torso twisting violently as he dragged the saberstaff upward into a cross guard that trembled under the pressure.

At the last possible instant he blurred sideways, the Force ripping through his veins in a desperate surge that carried him just beyond the killing arc, barely, but not beyond that cage. It licked across his flank, searing through old scars and splitting them open until raw flesh glowed and the stink of charred skin filled the air.

Kasir staggered upright from the ground, the crunch of glass under his boots drowned out by his own ragged breaths, each one a wheezing reminder of the life currently leaking from his wounds. His shoulder, a twisted mess of shredded meat and ivory bone, screaming with each strained movement. His thigh, a river of red, displayed the gleam of his femur with each step. And his arm, a tattered banner of ruined flesh, hung half-useless, revealing the skeletal structure of bones.

He had always been a grotesque thing, warped by what coursed through his veins, but now he was something worse, something splintered beyond repair. His body became a ruin of blood and bone, yet it was his mind that bore the cruelest wound of them all.

Something clawed at the edges of his sanity until his own thoughts began to tear.

The fracture had long since spread like a disease through his being, hairline cracks etched deep into the foundation of his being. In that flicker of silence, Kasir stood within himself, a pale ghost among the ruins of a house long since consumed by the ravaging flames of darkness.

Lost and aimless, he witnessed the embers of his former self smolder and die.

And as the ash settled, the final descent of the sinner's arc began its slow, inevitable descent.

Something inside him broke in full, not a crack or a splinter but a complete collapse that left nothing standing. The Sangnir’s psyche shattered completely, not into fragments that could be gathered again, but into dust that scattered and left him hollow. In that emptiness, faces rose like wisps of smoke.

Darth Strosius, Revna, Veradun, Soah.

Fewer names than fingers on a single hand. They blurred and slipped away, until he no longer recognized them.

He too saw one final glimpse of the boy from Dromund Kaas, when he was too thin, too quiet, sleeping in the cracks between buildings, in a city that didn’t care if he lived or died.

Gone.

Perhaps it was the Darkseeker training from the Dresuoti that clung to him, some instinct that refused to die even when everything else had been burned away. One last shadow of discipline.

A ghostly pallor softened the mouth.

“I do not know why I fight.”

Digits curled tighter around the slicked grooves of the hilt, tendons standing out beneath ripped flesh. The last ritual of a body that refused to let go.

“I only know I cannot stop.”

When he suddenly moved, it was still violent, a lunge that echoed that of Juuyo. The first crimson blade snapped forward in a wild arc. No mastery, not even memory, but he would drive it forward with the fury of something that’d been cornered. The strike was reckless, overextended, far from the form’s true rhythm.

The final surge of a body refusing surrender.

 

[Darth Prazutis]

The cage's afterglow guttered out in slow breaths of red. Steam curled from the vitrified stones, the courtyard pulsing once, twice, before falling still. What remained of the storm was silence, and the rasp of something half-alive trying to remember how to breathe. The Dark Lord moved through the haze like a verdict returning to be spoken aloud. Every step cracked glass beneath His boots; every footfall made the air bow inward, as if gravity itself were genuflecting before His dark majesty. The Godflame still hung in shards about Him, orbiting in slow, obedient comets of crackling crimson light. Prazutis didn't step back from the Sangnir's defiant strike. He absorbed it. The impact rippled through Qâzjiin'vraal, up through His shoulders, and into the ground beneath His feet, turning the courtyard stones to molten glass. Every scream, every plea, every death echoing through Alvaria fed into Him through the armor's veins, until the warplate blazed like a furnace of red sigils. He let the Sangnir see it, how every heartbeat of the dying Tsis'Kaar was a prayer being answered in His flesh.

The giant stopped just a pace from the Sangnir's ruin. "You stand before me." The Shadow Hand said, His voice quiet enough to force the ear to lean closer. "You think you cannot fall? You have never fallen, Kasir Dorran. You have only postponed the moment when the abyss remembers your name." The world answered with a tremor. Shadows folded toward His palm, color bleeding from them until blackness took weight and form. The air went cold, it was the kind of cold that stripped memory from bone's very marrow, and even the Godflame drew back as if unwilling to stand beside what was about to arrive. Lines of runes ignited one by one down His arm, runes that had never known language, only hunger.

Qâztharûn.

It didn't appear. It didn't emerge from the shadow. It arrived. A wound in reality lengthened until it became a blade, its edge the shape of absence. The world recoiled from it. Light bent away. Even reflection failed. From within its silhouette crawled dim silhouettes of faces, hundreds, thousands, mouths stretched in eternal soundless screams. The souls of the devoured whispered in reversed tones, echoing from nowhere and everywhere at once. Where it moved, the Force buckled, retreating like water from a collapsing shore. Beyond the estate walls, the Shikkari chorus faltered. They felt the change, the way prey feels the shadow of the predator. Then their chant shifted, deepened, became a hymn of extinction.

"Name to ash. Breath to silence. Debt to flesh."

Each verse struck like a hammer upon the anvil of the dead, and in that rhythm the galaxy itself seemed to pause, waiting. The Mortarch lifted the runeblade in both hands, and for an instant, the courtyard held its breath. Even lightning hesitated. "You wished for truth." He said, the whisper cutting deeper than any roar. "Truth is not mercy. Truth is extinction." He moved once, just once, and then sound vanished. Qâztharûn fell. It wasn't a swing. It was a decree. Reality didn't split at its coming, it surrendered before it. The line of its descent was too clean, too absolute, as though the universe had been edited out of existence in a single frame. The Force screamed, then stopped like a dying animal as its life ended. When the world blinked back in the split second the blade struck, the impact around them was immediate, the courtyard was gone in parts. Black glass spiderwebbed through the foundation. Stone melted. The air itself seemed wounded, shimmering in a scar that refused to heal, and standing at its heart, impossibly, was Kasir Dorran.

He lived, or something that looked like living.

The runeblades strike had carved from his collar to his hip, and what bled was not red, but void black, thick and alive, leaking like ink through glass. The wound burned with runes not his own, Sith glyphs written by agony. The Force around him spasmed and withered, his connection to it gnawed half-through, flickering like a candle drowning in wax. His skin blistered with cold light, his bones quaked beneath the pressure of what had tried to erase him. The blade had not merely cut his flesh; it had reached into him, clawed through the Force that made him whole, and started to feed. The trapped souls within Qâztharûn howled with new hunger, tasting him through the wound, dragging pieces of him into their chorus. For one heartbeat, the Sangnir felt every death the blade had ever caused. He saw burning temples, falling masters, dying worlds, entire civilizations dragged into wholesale annihilation. He felt the extinguished, the countless Jedi and Sith whose final breaths were swallowed by this blade, writhing through him like maggots in a wound that would never close. All the while his mind tore at the seams from its assault, and yet, he remained.

Perhaps by miracle. Perhaps by defiance. Or was it because Darth Prazutis allowed him to. Because the abyss itself was curious. "You should not still stand. But you live, because I have ordained it so. Because you will be my living message to all." The Dark Lord murmured. "Perhaps that is the miracle, the abyss has not yet decided it wants you." The blade's runes guttered low. The Dark Lord turned its hilt, and the earth convulsed. From beneath the molten stone, a black-iron standard erupted skyward, its shaft screaming through molten rock, a Kainate war banner flying its standard on a deep canvas, runes glowing red as fresh blood. Prazutis caught it in one gauntleted hand, raised it high, and with great force, drove it through the Sangnir's chest cavity, nailing him upright against the ruined stone. The hammer fall shattered the glassed ruin beneath them, the ground shaking from the impact. "Tell the Wonosa what happens when they send faith against dominion. When they challenge the might of the Kainate. When you stand before me." The Mortarch said, each word a sentence carved in stone. "Tell Darth Strosius who owns the night. Ask him how much I must take from him before he understands."

The banner flared, crimson fire racing through its veins and up into the sky above Alvaria, a burning mark so vast that even those at a distance could see it. The message was carved across heaven: The Reaper had come. Outside the walls, the Reaping changed. The Shikkari halted mid-stride; blades stilled, throats quieted. Where massacre had reigned, silence now ruled. The purge became a prayer. They had proven the supremacy of their god, and now they awaited his stillness. From the horizon, a new omen rose, dark crystals emerging from the blood-soaked ground, formed from congealed vitae and sorrow. They grew and clawed towards the living, pulsing once, twice, with dim, mournful light. The sky dimmed. The planet's heartbeat slowed.

The Sith Empress's will. The command to end. The Shadow Hand looked to the glow that spread across the world like veins of red glass. He knew that signature, the iron gravity of her presence pressed through the Force. "The Empress calls an end." He said, low as thunder. "And it shall be so." He withdrew the blade. Qâztharûn dissolved into shadow, its edge unmade, its memory left in the air like the taste of blood. The banner remained dark iron driven through flesh, the Sangnir impaled, leaving a monument, a message, and a miracle in equal measure. His body was left trembling there, smoking, still alive in defiance of the impossible. The Shikkari dispersed like mist vanishing into the smoke and silence. The hymn they carried faded into the sundered air, and the courtyard cooled. In time the slaughter gradually slowed to a halt, the shrouded wraiths who rained blood down on the world vanishing, leaving behind haunting reminders carved into the marrow of the world, of what happens when any challenge the might of the Kainate.

The Mortarch turned from the ruin then, the glass beneath Him reflected nothing, only the shadow of a titan walking away, and as He vanished into the crimson haze, deeper into the estate the world, scarred, trembling, consecrated, finally remembered how to breathe. Before long, the Shadow Hand emerged from the darkness to stand right beside his nephew the Eternal Father and they moved without any gesture or word, their connection ran deeper than that, volumes were spoke in a single moment.

Kasir Dorran | Darth Carnifex | Srina Talon | Darth Avida | Seela Leini | Darth Caedes | Jorryn Fordyce | Eira Dyn | Ansisa | Quinn Varanin | Veradun Sharr | Darth Strosius | Soah Ty’Jyn​