Private Chains of Silk and Shadow

[Qyssiyana]

Location: Grand Foyer, Crimson Spire - Zisia
Tag: Darth Virelia

Zoradda the Magnificent was a Hutt of lavish, excessive taste. Everything within the Kajidii’s estate, from his hospitality to his prized possessions—both living and inanimate—were set for his guests to enjoy, no matter their stature. However, the arrival of Darth Virelia, a Dark Lady recently exiled from the Sith Order, demanded something entirely unprecedented.

Discretion.

Thus, Qyssiyana stood alone in the wide, expansive foyer, her form clothed in a richly hued cyan gown with gold accents along the waist and neckline. The garment clung to her curves like a second skin, before cascading into graceful folds that pooled around her feet, elevated by towering heels that added precious inches to her petite frame.

All the while, the gentle murmur of water trickling from the shallow pool running along the base of the farside wall was a constant, soothing presence. However, it was offset by the soaring ceiling that loomed overhead, reflective veins of malachite and aurodium catching the light from floating repulsor-lamps at strategic intervals to produce an awe-inspiring display. Natural crystal formations, preserved and enhanced for exhibition, created gleaming formations that refracted the amber lighting into dancing rainbows that shone across the polished floor. Between the crystal clusters, various pieces from Zoradda's collection were presented in narrow alcoves: ancient sculptures, exotic weapons, and artifacts whose histories were written only in whispered rumors.

Qyssiyana drew a measured breath, her prehensile tail shifting as she registered the hum of a starship’s engines from the landing pad beyond. Having spent the bulk of the last hour making herself to receive the guest, the Elryssiane waited in graceful patience for the Dark Lady to step into the foyer. Zoradda, advised against his usual theatrical displays, had chosen instead to present his most treasured living possession as a solitary welcome, so that she would be the first thing that Darth Virelia saw upon entering the Crimson Spire.

Qyssiyana knew that duty bound her to the Crimson Spire. However, this close to the entrance, a restrained part of her wondered how easy it would be to simply walk out, thereafter to never return.

 

[Darth Virelia]

"One Chain to Another."

Tags - Qyssiyana

The starship's whine dwindled to a velvet hush as the hatch irised open and Darth Virelia crossed the threshold like a blade leaving its sheath. Shadow clung to her cloak; alchemized plates caught the amber lamps and fractured them into cold, violet ghosts across the stone. She disliked Hutts for many reasons—mostly aesthetic. Meat that forgot the luxury of bone. Grease pretending to be power. Zoradda the Magnificent would be no exception.

She took one step into the foyer and forgot him.

The cyan at the center of the room was not a garment but a thesis on control, poured over a body that wore obedience like a rumor and defiance like perfume. Tail. Balance. Precision. Unknown species and unmissable intent: to be seen first. Virelia's mouth curved, a private annexation. Zoradda had taste in exactly one thing, and even that he did not understand.

Virelia's senses sifted the room without moving her head. Security seemed tight. She catalogued it and dismissed it easily like a yawn.

What she did not dismiss was the woman.

She approached as tide, unhurried, inevitable, each heel-fall a soft verdict. Rainbow light broke across the flanges of her greaves and climbed, prisming upward until it reached the oval of her visor. Within, an amethyst sigil drifted where eyes should be. Virelia stopped an arm's length away—close enough to be read, far enough to refuse being read fully.

"Zoradda," she said, almost as if tasting the word for impurities, "can wait."

Her voice was low enough to belong to the stones. It carried the unforced certainty of a storm moving in a straight line.

Up close, the lines of the cyan gown resolved into sharper arguments. Gold emphasized the thesis. The woman smelled faintly of clean water and warmed metal, like a starship kept immaculate. Virelia let silence do the sculpting. Want is noisier than power; she preferred to make both quiet.

Gloved fingers lifted—not touching—then traced heat along the air near a cheekbone, jaw, throat. Not a threat. A measurement. An opening bid without numbers. Beneath that invisible line the Force stirred, respectful as a gloved hand turning a rare book's page.

"What are you called?" The question acknowledged a name while implying a new one could be provided.

She did not look toward the corridors where the Hutt's retinue waited to be important. In her head, the minor trade—fuel allotments, docking rights, clearance codes—collapsed into a single, bored ledger line. The living calculus before her promised better returns: loyalty extracted, reverence engineered, a beautiful instrument tuned to a higher cruelty. Zoradda's death, once a convenience, became an aesthetic correction.

Virelia tilted her helm, thoughtful, a small mercy disguised as appraisal. "Come with me, you don't deserve to rot here." she suggested, already turning, certain the room would follow the gravity she had just introduced.

 

[Qyssiyana]

Location: Grand Foyer, Crimson Spire - Zisia
Tag: Darth Virelia

Qyssiyana felt herself melt beneath the imposing weight of the Dark Lady’s hexa-eyed gaze. The woman’s features were unreadable beneath the insectoid mask of her helmet and the sleek, dark design of her armor, the latter clinging to her frame like liquid silk. She was immediately compelled to the familiar instincts of submission, which the Elryssiane swiftly followed as she inclined her head in a shallow, respectful bow.

Rising, Qyssiyana opened her mouth to speak, only for Darth Virelia to do so first, swiftly declaring that her master could wait.

“I am called Qyssiyana,” She answered after a momentary pause. “The Great and Magnificent Zorrada of the Tuvinii Kajidic eagerly awaits your presence in the throne room, my lady.” The slave added, her tone rote and flat even as her thick, prehensile tail shifted uneasily in her wake.

As she spoke, a quartet of Gamorrean Guards entered the foyer, each dressed in ornately plated armor and hefting a large vibro-axe. Although they were still some distance away, their porcine grunts and heavy footsteps carried over the murmur of the water trickling from the nearby pool.

All the while, Qyssiyana felt her cheeks flush crimson as the Dark Lady turned away, doing so in such a way that she expected her to follow. She glanced back towards the four Gamorreans then, her expression, once controlled, flickering in equal parts confusion and dismay.

Then, steeling herself, she spoke.

“The Great and Magnificent Zorrada anticipates your presence.” Qysssiyana said, her words opened with a subtle, yet tangible weight—harmonics layered beneath her voice like invisible threads weaving through the air. Gentle beat frequencies tuned to align with theta brainwaves carried in her declaration; not to directly manipulate, but to draw attention. At the same time, a low-frequency undertone sang from her thoracic channels, lending her speech a pull that to most ears, might be comparable to the magnetic attraction of a moon to a planet.

The same vocal architecture that could, if unleashed, bend minds to her will now served merely to ensure that her words did not go unheard.

 

[Darth Virelia]

"One Chain to Another."

Tags - Qyssiyana

The sound reached her before the meaning did—threads under the air, a hush spun into pressure, the kind of beauty that tries to live in your bones. Virelia felt it slip along the seams of her helm and into the thin places of her nerves; theta tug, gamma glitter, the careful interference pattern of a trained throat. Not crude sorcery. Craft. The rarest kind of power: one that makes surrender feel like a decision.

Revulsion and rapture intersected along the same blade. She loathed being moved by anything but her own will. She adored the act of moving others until they forgot they ever possessed one. The first instinct was to crush the stimulus—mute the channels, hard-lock the mask's dampers, drown the harmonics in white ruin. The second was worse: to open everything and let it take her, just to learn its geometry from the inside.

Discipline won, as it always did. She split the difference.

A subvocal command rippled through Tyrant's Embrace. Filters tightened; not a wall, a lens. The song thinned to a silk ribbon she could study without letting it cinch. The pressure lessened. The desire did not.

Qyssiyana. She tasted the name inside the mask and decided it pleased her. The Elryssiane's talent—Aerovocalics, she named it privately—wasn't a parlor trick. It was an instrument, and instruments belonged in capable hands. Hers.

Virelia pivoted just enough that the six lenses in her visor centered on the woman again, allowing a single, lazy pulse of attention to sweep the foyer. The Gamorreans, the axes, the ornamental brutality—noise. Zoradda's staged appetite—noise. The only clear tone here stood in cyan and gold, voice still singing resonance into stone.

She stepped close—not touching, never touching first—letting the heat boundary between them speak in gradients. The gloved hand hovered once more near cheek, jaw, the hollow where pulse betrays certainty. This time the gesture acknowledged the risk taken and the restraint shown. The smallest tilt of her helm stood in for approval.

"Qyssiyana," she said at last, shaping the syllables like a claim rather than a courtesy. "Good."

The single word held a verdict and a promise. Her gaze slid past, toward the corridor that would disgorge Zoradda and his pretensions. She could kill him between one harmonic and the next. He merely hadn't earned the courtesy of immediacy.

"We will indulge your master," she murmured, the slightest curl of amusement in the dark. "Briefly."

Indulge, not obey.

She turned, cloak sighing, and began toward the throne room without looking to see if the room followed; gravity does not ask the tide for permission. As she moved, she permitted herself a private future: the cyan throat open in song at her command, harmonics tuned to her pulse, the weapon that had dared to touch her mind reengineered into a crown she alone could wear. The memory of the pull—hated, exquisite—gnawed at her like a hunger she would feed properly later.

At the threshold she paused half a breath, enough to let the suggestion hang in the wake of her words like perfume. "Sing for me again," Virelia added, soft as an order disguised as invitation. "After."

Then she crossed into the Hutt's theatre, the mathematics of murder held in one hand, and in the other, something rarer: patience sharpened into appetite.

 

[Qyssiyana]

Location: Grand Foyer, Crimson Spire - Zisia
Tag: Darth Virelia

Qyssiyana felt the shift in the electromagnetic currents as Virelia pivoted back around, her mechano-insectoid gaze once more centering back onto her in a movement as swift as it was casual. The distance between them closed then, and the Dark Lady’s gloved hand hovered near her pale, slender neck, causing the Elryssiane’s heart to surge within her chest as her third eye flickered and twitched.

She realized then that her previous declaration—laced with layered harmonics—had served its purpose.

Qyssiyana inclined her head, before stepping aside. However, it was Virelia's next statement that caught her attention. After. There was an implication in the command which the Elryssiane could neither refute nor ignore.

Escape.

Perhaps to freedom. Or, to a different kind of slavery, under a mistress, rather than a master. Qyssiyana swallowed, but she did not allow her apprehension to show on her features. Discipline and patience won out.

“Yes, my lady.” Qyssiyana replied, before offering Virelia a sweet, yet calculated smile, then turning towards the exit.

It was only then that she spotted the rotund, gargantuan form of Zoradda the Magnificent looming at the fore of the room, opposite from the entrance. Surrounded by his Gamorrean guards, the Hutt Kajidii cut an imposing figure, a cruel smirk borne across his expression as slobber dribbled from the corner of his lipless mouth.

“I trust that you have enjoyed the company of my most prized living ornament, Darth Virelia.” The Hutt boomed as he slowly slithered forward. His retinue of Gamorrean guards accompanied him, along with a small procession of Twi’lek and Togruta slaves, in addition to a group of attendants bearing plates of effrikim worms, fruits, and dumplings. “Look upon her. Do not refuse your eyes the pleasure,” the Kajidii continued. “She is a rare delicacy. You can find slaves of the more common races in any flesh market. Of Twi’leks, Togruta, elves, Zeltrons, and others, there are billions. Perhaps more.” The Hutt came to a halt as a stubby hand reached out to stroke along the Elryssiane’s thick, prehensile tail, which went taut inside his grasp.

“But this one...” Zorrada's grip tightened possessively. “The population of her species numbers only in the hundreds, all locked behind the Blackwall, deep in domains under the control of Sith. You will not find another like her even in the courts of the major Kajidii on Nal Hutta.” Zorradda reached out with his other hand, before grabbing a writhing worm from an offered plate and shoving it into his cavernous maw.

“These creatures belong to the Sith,” the Hutt spoke between bites.

“But the one called Qyssiyana belongs to me.”

 

[Darth Virelia]

"One Chain to Another."

Tags - Qyssiyana

Virelia regarded the Hutt as one studies mildew on marble—an offense, but also an opportunity to cleanse. The porcine guards, the parade of exhausted beauty, the wet sound of the worm splitting in his maw; none of it moved her. Only the white, possessive knuckle of his grip on Qyssiyana's tail drew heat to the edges of her patience.

"Magnificent," she echoed, tasting the word like spoiled fruit. The six-lensed visor turned a fraction. A small movement, and everything changed.

Pressure folded around Zoradda's wrist. Bone creaked. His hand peeled from the Elryssiane's tail as if the air itself had grown teeth. A second pressure—clean, surgical—clipped the nerves at his elbow. The limb sagged, grotesque and suddenly obedient. She did not look at him when she did it. She looked at Qyssiyana.

"You were misnamed," Virelia murmured, words pitched for her alone. "You are not an ornament."

The amphitheatre of the foyer answered her in machinery: cameras blinked to dead glass; mines unarmed with a barely audible sigh; vibro-axes hummed once, then fell inert. Two Gamorreans slumped, narcosed by a whisper across their hindbrains. The others found their arms heavy and their legs suddenly without instructions. Attendants froze, then scattered when she tilted her chin—silent clemency, a door opening in the threat. Slaves saw the line of escape. They took it.

Zoradda tried to speak ownership again. Virelia lifted a single finger and the sentence strangled into a wet, thwarted grunt. She did not choke him; she pinched the breath to a thin, humiliating trickle. Enough to suffer. Enough to listen.

"These creatures belong to the Sith," he had said. She let the words dangle before cutting them free. "I am not the Sith's leash," she said softly. "I am what walks beyond it."

Her attention returned to cyan and gold.

"I told you after," she went on, velvet over steel. "I am merciful when it amuses me."

The amethyst sigil in her visor brightened, a small dawn. She stepped past Qyssiyana—close enough to share heat, close enough for the Elryssiane to feel the restraint coiled beneath the armor—and took position off the Hutt's shoulder, giving the woman a clear, unchallenged approach. She would not take this kill. She would author it.

"Sing," Virelia said, the command so quiet it might have been a secret. "For me."

The Force gathered to her like a tide and then held, a cupped hand around the room. She damped the edges of the Hutt's retinue, flattening their impulses into sopor and stupor. She loosened nothing for Zoradda. Every sensation remained, to be savored or weaponized.

Her helm inclined, approval already written into the world she had arranged. "Show me your art, Qyssiyana," Virelia finished, stepping into the hush like a patron into a private box. "And I will show you mine."

 

[Qyssiyana]

Location: Grand Foyer, Crimson Spire - Zisia
Tag: Darth Virelia

Qyssiyana heard the warping of a sudden spike of pressure in the air, followed by the sharp, reverberating crunch of Zoradda’s wrist as it was smashed by an invisible force. The Elryssiane gasped, stepping back reflexively as the Hutt’s scream tore from his maw. Virelia spoke then, words that came as a murmur yet registered like a prod to her awareness, compelling her to look towards the Dark Lady even as the Hutt gasped and cried.

“Guards!” Zoradda gasped as he turned back to the Gamorreans, his eyes widening with equal parts disbelief and terror upon seeing their paralyzed forms. “Qyssiyana,” the Hutt rasped, addressing his favored slave. “To my side! Defend me, please! Strike down this witch!”

"I am not the Sith's leash," she said softly. "I am what walks beyond it."

Qyssiyana glanced between the two figures, realization manifesting in her expression. Now was her opportunity, in spite of the fact that it had arrived earlier than expected, and certainly not in the way she had anticipated.

And yet, she was ready.

While not occupied with her duties, she studied the specific neurobiologies of Humans, Hutts, Gamorreans, Twi’leks, Nikto, and Weequay, committing wavelengths, light frequencies, neuroelectric resonance patterns, and yet more to memory so that she could better manipulate their minds when the time came for her to escape. She had cultivated strength in her body through dance, while maintaining her aesthetics through skincare, cosmetics, and a carefully tuned diet.

Zoradda, of course, had believed that it was all for his benefit.

"Sing," Virelia said, the command so quiet it might have been a secret. "For me."

Now, he would know the truth.

Qyssiyana turned towards Zoradda then, her features set in a tight, focused expression. Her mnenoosyne core surged to life, an invisible neuroelectric field reaching across the space between her and the Hutt to seek out the rhythm of his thalamo-cortical oscillations—the deep, slow waves that governed his massive brain's timing scaffold.

The phase-lock came easily, almost like instinct. Zoradda's neural rhythms were sluggish, predictable, and unguarded. Like synchronizing to a distant drumbeat, Qyssiyana aligned her emissions to his cortical timing, becoming an invisible conductor to his neural orchestra.

Then she began to corrupt the symphony.

Invisible micro-electric pulses flowed first, carefully modulated to tip the delicate balance between excitation and inhibition within Zoradda’s cortex. Qyssiyana dampened the inhibitory circuits that normally prevented runaway neural firing while simultaneously nudging excitatory networks toward dangerous synchronization. The effect cascaded through neighboring cortical columns like wildfire. Normal information processing collapsed as vast populations of neurons began firing in chaotic unison—the telltale paroxysmal burst of a tonic-clonic storm.

“Dance, Zoradda the Magnificent! Dance!” Qyssiyana hissed, her third eye lighting up as she fell into the surging bioelectric rhythms.

Zoradda's massive frame went rigid, muscles locking in tonic spasm. What followed was a series of violent convulsions as the seizure generalized, propagating along interhemispheric pathways and brainstem relays. The Hutt’s massive, magnificent bulk thrashed against the floor, guttural vocalizations echoing through the foyer in a tortured melody!

 

[Darth Virelia]

"One Chain to Another."

Tags - Qyssiyana

Virelia watched the seizure take him, a slow smile unfurling behind the visor. The slug's grandeur liquefied into animal noise; wealth, power, reputation—reduced to meat and misfiring electricity. Poetry, really. She lifted two fingers and the Gamorreans' blasters sheened with frost, internal mechanisms seizing; another idle flex, and the foyer doors hissed shut, locking the world out. Privacy purchased in a breath.

"Exquisite," she purred, circling—not Zoradda, but the cyan axis around which the room had just begun to spin. "You were never decoration, Qyssiyana. You were a blade disguised as silk." Her voice was soft, reverent the way a collector speaks in a private vault. "And you learn."

The Hutt convulsed again, a wet thunder against polished stone. Virelia extended her palm, not to save him, but to cradle the moment—arresting nothing, merely ensuring no stray variable spoiled the composition. The guards remained pinned in invisible resin; the surveillance lenses on the upper gantry turned to face the wall, a courteous blindfold.

"Listen to him," she coaxed, stepping close enough that the gown's edge lived in the air between them. "The body tells the truth in ways the mouth never will." A hush, intimate as a whisper in a temple. "Finish your thesis."

She angled her head, six violet irises brightening within the helm. "I will not steal your kill. What I will do is make it mean something." A lazy gesture toward the ceiling—toward the veins of malachite and aurodium catching the light. "When he dies, the Spire stays quiet. His accountants will discover he signed today's deal on terms favorable to me. His rivals will be briefly confused. And you"—the syllable lingered like a fingertip—"will not be forfeited as property, but chosen as prize."

The next words were velvet-wrapped iron. "End him."

A beat. The licentious curl in her tone deepened, unhurried and hungry. "And then walk away from this room and never look back without being looked up to. Serve me, Qyssiyana. I will tune your gift until crowds hush at a breath. I will set you where empires must listen." She let a laugh shimmer, low and delighted. "And I will enjoy every step of the corruption."

Virelia pivoted, offering the Hutt a last, almost affectionate glance—like a sommelier acknowledging an empty glass. "Magnificent," she murmured, to the dying title rather than the dying flesh.

Her hand drifted aside in benediction, clearing the stage. "Sing him to silence."