Private Calling Dibs

[Darth Virelia]

"Underground Greetings."

Tags - William Bradley

The surface of Ession was almost too alive.

A world that bustled with commerce and industry, its sky-lanes thrummed with the rhythm of a million transactions, every hum of a repulsorlift and murmur of a crowd a hymn to order, profit, and progress. Yet beneath that ordered skin — beneath the ferrocrete towers and trade plazas — something old still breathed. The planet's heartbeat was deeper than its people knew, older than the Republic's maps, older even than the Jedi archives that dared to catalogue its history.

Virelia stood at the edge of an unmarked service tunnel, where the city's foundation met the planet's forgotten bones. The air reeked faintly of ozone and metal. Her violet eyes glimmered like a dying star behind her mask, reflecting the light of the glowrod she carried.

Her boots struck stone now as she descended. Step by step, the noise of the city above faded — laughter, engines, the clatter of trade — replaced by the slow drip of condensation and the faint pulse of something electrical, mechanical, alive. The Sith had once ruled here. Long before the Knights of Ession raised their temples, long before the Republic sanctified the surface, the Dark Lords had carved their dominion into the mantle of the world itself.

This was no mere ruin she sought. Beneath the kilometers of strata and forgotten infrastructure lay an archive, a vault of flesh and machine that whispered knowledge through the Force. Virelia could already feel it — like static dancing across her skin, calling her name in a tongue that only the corrupted understood.

She paused at a sealed duracrete bulkhead, tracing her fingertips across the ancient glyphs half-consumed by rust and fungus. They responded faintly, a shimmer of red crawling along the cracks. Not mechanical activation — recognition.

"Good," she whispered. "You remember your masters."

The door groaned, parted like a wound reopening, and the stench of age flooded her senses. The light fell across half-buried statuary — humanoid, but wrong. Carved from black basalt and shot through with veins of crimson glass that pulsed faintly as if blood still flowed within. The floor ahead sloped downward into what could only be described as a catacomb of knowledge — memory crystals, broken holocrons, databanks still flickering weakly with forgotten power.

But she wasn't alone.

The sound reached her first: a breath that wasn't hers, echoing through the chamber. Then the faintest flicker of a glow not her own — a glow too deliberate, too steady. Someone else had found their way into the underworld of Ession.

Virelia straightened slowly, every motion deliberate, her hand ghosting over the hilt at her hip. The darkness around her was alive with potential, a predator's quiet before the strike.

"If you've come to steal from me," her voice rang low, rich, and dangerous, "then you've already failed. The Dark remembers its own."

 

[William Bradley]

D A R K N E S S​

Tag: Darth Virelia

The breath in the chamber grew heavier, coiling against the stone like smoke too stubborn to disperse. From the deeper darkness came the scrape of boots, measured and deliberate, a soldier’s cadence tempered into something slower and colder. Then the glow revealed him: a tall figure armored in blackened plates that bore the scars of war and ritual alike. His single crimson eye burned faintly, the Eye of Wrath, an ember that seemed to pulse with each word he spoke.

“You mistake me,” William’s voice slid through the air, rough and sardonic, carrying that faint lilt of amusement that made it impossible to tell whether he mocked or simply observed. “I do not steal, little flame. I take. There is a difference. Thieves scurry and hide. But I?” His gauntleted hand swept lazily across the catacomb, fingers brushing one of the basalt statues as though stroking the cheek of a corpse. “I carve my claim into the marrow of the world and leave nothing behind but silence.”

He stepped closer, the weight of his presence pressing like an invisible hand against the air, the faintest twitch of the Eye’s glow catching the glyphs etched in his flesh. The mask of control sat over him as snug as his armor, but the currents of rage beneath were palpable, coiled serpents waiting to strike.

“You say the Dark remembers its own. How quaint.” His grin was sharp, humorless. “The Dark does not remember. It consumes. It strips away name, face, even soul, until all that’s left is hunger.” He tilted his head, the eye blazing brighter for a moment as if it relished her defiance. “Tell me then… when the Dark comes for you, will you remember your own name? Or will you scream it until the walls grow tired of hearing?”

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Underground Greetings."

Tags - William Bradley

For a long moment, she said nothing. Only studied him. The armor, the cadence, the way his rage was not vented but shaped. Controlled fury was always more dangerous than the kind that shouted.

When she finally spoke, her voice rippled through the still air—smooth yet steeped in quiet amusement.

"You speak in patterns I recognize," she said, stepping lightly around one of the basalt statues. "That tone—structured, elegant, like someone who learned rhetoric in marble halls before learning to kill. A scholar who outgrew civility."

Her head inclined slightly, the faintest smirk touching her lips beneath the glow of her visor. "Tell me, are you Chandrilan? You sound as though you might be. I lived there once, long ago."

Her boots rang softly as she closed part of the distance, though she left several meters between them—enough to acknowledge threat without granting it dominance. The air between them thrummed faintly, tension woven through the Force like a drawn bowstring.

"I find it interesting that you came here, of all places," she continued, tone lowering to something quieter, more intimate. "Ession's surface is a hive of trade and laughter—so busy pretending to be alive. Yet you descended, same as I did. Into the hollowed bones of a world that remembers what the light above refuses to see."

The violet glow in her eyes brightened, a mirrored echo to his single red one.

"So tell me, Sith—" she drew his title out like a caress and a challenge at once "—what is it you take here? Power? Knowledge? Or something less material… the answer to what the Dark left of you?"

 

[William Bradley]

P O W E R​

Tag: Darth Virelia

William’s laugh came low, a sound like gravel shifting under pressure, but there was no humor in it, only the hollow resonance of someone who’d long since stopped finding the joke funny.

“Chandrilan,” he repeated, the word curling off his tongue as though he were testing its taste. “No. I was born under steel skies and raised where civility dies in the mud. I learned to kill before I learned to speak in full sentences. The marble halls came later… when they needed someone who could bleed and articulate why.”

He moved as he spoke, slow, deliberate, the kind of measured precision that soldiers never truly unlearned. Each step echoed off the stone, reverent in its own way, as though the ruins themselves demanded acknowledgment. His armor caught the dim red glow of his eye, the faint pulse in its core flaring as he drew nearer.

“You mistake the source of my hunger,” he continued, voice soft but with an edge sharp enough to cut. “I don’t descend for power. Power is fleeting; it burns through hands too easily. Knowledge?” He shook his head, the faintest smirk ghosting across his scarred mouth. “Knowledge is just a cage for those who still believe understanding means control.”

He stopped then, just beyond the invisible threshold between their presences, close enough for the hum of his armor to meet the whisper of her breath.

“I came here,” he said at last, his voice dropping to a near whisper, “to remember what the Dark took from me. To remind it that I am not its slave.” His gaze sharpened, the Eye of Wrath flaring in answer to her the glow in her eyes.

“And you…” His head tilted, the faintest curve of a grin forming, not mockery, but recognition. “You sound like someone who’s forgotten which side you stand on.”