Igni Irae
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
Intent: Expand on Tephrike.
Image Credit: Here.
Role: Assassins.
Permissions: N/A.
Links: Dominion of Light, Tephrike, Jedi Inquisition, Mace Windu Thought, Windian Jedi Order, Disciples of the Vader, Atton Rand, Banite Sith, Prosperity Quarter, Vitiate.
GENERAL INFORMATION
Unit Name: Covenant of the Piercing Flame.
Affiliation: Tephrike, Inheritors of the Light Father, Illuminated Path of the Light Father.
Classification: Black Ops, Assassins.
Description:
"The Light should not be afraid of the Darkness. The Darkness should be afraid of the Light."
-An Inheritor saying.
There are some who believe the path of the Light is that of meekness and constant second chances. Lightsiders may not use the Force to go out and fight evil, they must wait for evil to come to them, even when Sith Lords are committing crimes against sentience across the border. This is just the Sith practicing their religion. A Sith, no matter their crimes, must always be forgiven if they claim to have turned a new leaf, no matter how implausible this is. A Jedi healer is obliged to heal a Sith who has committed atrocities, but do nothing to help the prisoners in a death camp controlled by him. The Inheritors of the Light Father disagree. A schismatic offshoot of the human supremacist Sith cult called the Disciples of the Vader, they have decisively turned away from the dark side.
The Inheritors revere Vader, but not as the Sith Lord. After decades as the Emperor's enforcer, he turned on his master and sacrificed his own life to save his son. In the eyes of the Inheritors, his penance continued in death, for he was charged with guarding the gates of Chaos for all eternity. The Light is not the quick, easy path that promises instant reward. Redemption is a life-long process. The cycle of light and dark continued after his death. Just as his first incarnation Vitiate had done, Palpatine exploited a Force Wound caused by cataclysmic mass deaths orchestrated by his followers to enable his spirit to cheat death and return from Chaos, seeking to drown the galaxy in darkness. He corrupted Vader's grandson Jacen, who was opposed by his twin Rey.
The sect strongly believes in the duality of the Force. Light and Dark are real metaphysical forces, not metaphors. And it is the dark side that is ascendant, for the balance of the Force has been tipped towards it. The galaxy's pain reverberates through it. The natural flow of the Force has been disrupted. Every wave of tyranny and oppression pushes it further towards destruction. Similar to the Windian Jedi, the Inheritors view the Gulag Virus as a machination of the dark side. Where they differ is that from the point of view of the Inheritors, the Windian Jedi are evil, too. The taint is so strong that these false Jedi do not recognise their evil, for the dark side clouds everything. The Inheritors view themselves as preserving the candle of the Light, whilst surrounded by darkness.
Some outsiders call them the 'Light Sith', but the Inheritors categorically reject the term. Sith cannot be lightsided and the sect doesn't follow the Sith doctrine. They follow the Illuminated Path of the Light Father. While they follow the Light, circumstance has forced the Inheritors to adopt a strategy that ironically mirrors that of the Banite Sith. Tephrike is a war-torn planet dominated by rival power blocs that view the Inheritors as a threat. Thus they must use secrecy, subterfuge and intrigue rather than force of arms. They have become a secret society utilising a cell-based structure, with both Force-Users and Non-Force-Users as members. The Inheritors live in the shadows, using cover identities and disguise to conceal themselves. They run secret safehouses and try to, where possible, infiltrate the Windian Jedi Order, the Disciples of the Vader or their puppets to undermine them from within, acquire information and recruits. Yet their scarce resources force them to operate on the fringes of society, always at risk of exposure and extermination.
The Covenant of the Piercing Flame is one of their tools. It is within the purvey of the Light to take peremptory strikes. If one can kill an individual rather than a thousand than this is righteous. The path of righteousness does not include giving free passes to truly vile and horrible beings. In short, the Covenant is a group of assassins charged with eliminating select targets to further the cause of the Light. However, such actions must be carefully considered, as they could easily expose the group or put innocents at risk. The Covenant is organised in small, semiautonomous cells, whose members operate on a need-to-know basis. The cell members know the identities of their comrades in the same cell, but not those outside of it. This minimises the risk that they will divulge the identities of more senior members if they are captured and interrogated or turn out to be moles inserted into the organisation. Information is highly compartmentalised. In select cases, operatives may have also resorted to alchemy to alter their appearance to facilitate infiltration or make pursuit more difficult. The leadership provides guidance and builds consensus.
In terms of demographics, the Covenant is multispecies. Indeed, it has a high proportion of non-humans. This is no surprise, since the Inheritors arose out of a rebellion against the human supremacist Vaderites. Quite a few are former Knights of Ren. The Ren are a sub-division of the Disciples of the Vader, and treated as a dumping ground for anyone who falls short of the Vaderites' criteria for blood purity, but is considered useful enough to serve. The Covenant also has fugitives and deserters from the Windian Jedi.
Prospective acolytes are vetted very thoroughly and must perform trials that test their skill, commitment and dedication. Some of the tests can be a bit manipulative. For Force-Users the final trial may eventually involve being exposed to a nexus similar to the dark side cave Luke had to enter on Dagobah. The sect is not a place for the lazy, argumentative or insubordinate. They must adhere to the laws of the Inheritors and preserve their secrets - even if it means taking them to the grave by biting down on a suicide capsule after being captured by the enemy. Issuing suicide pills to agents is a routine procedure. The Inheritors do not expect the members of their sect to be chaste as they associate this with the Windian Jedi. What they do expect is discipline and absolute commitment. The mission must take precedence over selfish concerns. There is no tolerance for padawans with chosen one delusions, drama queens or 'maverick' cowboys who can't follow orders.
The Covenant does not have an official uniform because that would inevitably lead to exposure, and so the agents will wear whatever is necessary for the mission, including civilian attire and enemy uniforms. Coded phrases are used to identify themselves. These are changed on a regular basis. The assassins make rather liberal use of memory alteration to preserve the secrecy of their order. But they are tactical about this. A failed recruit who hasn't succeeded in their training but can be of use to the sect in a different positions will forget details that could otherwise compromise the group. This is manipulative, but the Covenant cannot be too careful.
The operatives are trained in surveillance, evasion and escape techniques, driving, climbing, diving, infiltration, use of explosives, marksmanship, melee combat and other essential techniques that go beyond Force training. Indeed, several operatives are Non-Force-Users. Learning the basics of masking their Force presence and hiding their thoughts is an early lesson every Force-Sensitive Covenanter learns. Non-Force-Sensitive assassins learn techniques to make them more resistant to Force-based mental manipulation such as mind tricks or reading their thoughts. This can be compared to the techniques employed by Atton Rand several millennia ago.
Training also includes a feigned capture and interrogation...where everything is done to make agent believe that they have actually been captured by the enemy. The sect will not do anything to maim or permanently ruin a recruit, but they will make the experience realistic. This is a bit manpulative, but the life of an operative is dangerous and the risk of being captured and subsequently tortured, killed or brainwashed is very real. To make sure that a recruit does not actually kill themselves during the exercise, the suicide capsule issued to them is a fake. In broad terms, the training operates on the assumption that the only way to prepare an operative for capture and torture - and it is guaranteed that they will not be treated in accordance with humanitarian conventions if they are captured by the Dominion or the Vaderites - is to torture them for real.
Naturally methods that will cause permanent mental or physical damage are not used, but an agent will still emerge from the process changed. The Covenant knows that everyone has a breaking point, even the strongest. Thus operatives must be prepared for that moment so that they can recover when they have reached it. Recruits are rare, and the Covenant does not want to waste them. Lightsabres are incredibly rare on Tephrike, and most Jedi or Sith use Force-imbued or otherwise alchemised melee weapons. A Covenant operative will be just as comfortable using a pistol, rifle or a garrote as a Force-imbued blade, if not more so.
The Covenant does not subscribe the idea that combat must be 'honourable'. War is about survival, not subscribing to a 'gentlemanly' code of conduct. If the most efficient and expedient way to dispose a target is to shoot them with a sniper rifle, poison their drink, gas their bedroom or blow them up with a car bomb, they will do that. But they do have a code against the wanton murder of innocents. Tephrike is a grim, war-torn planet, where those obsessed with 'honour' do not last long.
Dassashk is one of the more unusual Covenant agents, for he is a Trandoshan mercenary and big game hunter. He is a Non-Force-User, but his species has formidable combat and hunting skills. Dassashk worships the Scorekeeper and treats his kills as prizes dedicated to her. Many think this is a weird religion, but the Inheritors are ironically open-minded about it. His comrades have apparently decided that he is just worshipping Ashla in his own, idiosyncratic way and that it would be wrong to forbid that. After all, his faith seems to motivate him to rid the world of evil people. Dassashk looks down on Trandoshans who act like thugs and only fight easy targets. He seeks out dangerous prey, and the Covenant can provide that in spades. The more dangerous the prey, the more points the hunter receives from Lady Scorekeeper. He has taught his fellow cell members a lot about trapping and tracking.
Astrae is a Force-Sensitive human female and one of the 'old guard' members of the group, which makes her one of its leaders. Prone to cynicism and with a stubborn, independent streak, she was originally trained as a Sith acolyte of the Disciples of the Vader, but rejected the terrible crimes she was ordered to perform. Having been put through an indoctrination programme, she fled when she started noticing missing time. Astrae used to be part of Lord Salus' insurrection, which aimed to change the Imperium from the inside.
However, she has come to the realisation that the only way to change the Humanist system is to tear it down and build something better upon its ashes. Having grown tired of the rampant misogyny of many male Vaderites and their belief that women are somehow lesser, she has shaved her head and often wears a mask. She has a cybernetic arm from her time with the Disciples. Astrae has potent Sense abilities and a knack for discerning the true alignment of another person. As she is human, she is able to pass among Humanist society with greater ease than the alien members of the sect.
Ruqaiya is a Mon Calamari female and an independent who was a renegade. As a Mon Cal Force user, she would be distrusted by all major groups on Tephrike. She was trained by the Dominion, but suffered from discrimination due to its anti-Mon Calamari policies. Under the pretext of creating 'ethnic harmony', the Dominion carried out a campaign of cultural genocide to 'assimilate' the Mon Calamari. She was taken away by the state to be raised under oppressive conditions. As a neophyte Jedi, she always had to be the most zealous to prove her devotion, but suffered from discrimination. As a neophyte, she was given tasks such as going diving for mines and wreckage because she could breathe underwater.
She was injured in a skirmish with partisans, but then herself accused of being a rebel collaborator. To many of her own people, she was a traitor. Ruqaiya was observed and eventually approached by one of the Inheritors. Instead of assassinating the 'heretic', she joined them. She has been taken in and trained by the Covenant to serve as one of their agents. As is typical for her species, she can stay underwater for an indefinite period of time and is an excellent swimmer. On one mission, she used her skills as a swimmer and diver to smuggle explosives onto a Dominion surface ships to blow it up.
Onaconda is a Rodian male and a cell leader in the sect. He is from Prosperity Quarter. The name is darkly ironic because it is a ghetto for 'lesser beings'. His mother worked in a sweatshop owned by Imperial war profiteers, his father was sent to a forced labour camp. The conditions were so appalling that he grew sick and perished, for he was denied medical attention on the grounds that a sick xenos was a 'useless eater'. His sister was murdered for being a teacher in an underground school. It tried to counter the Sith's efforts to eradicate the culture of the inabitants and provide the children of the quarter with an education. The police shot her in the middle of a lecture in front of the terrified schoolclass, then hung her body from a lamp post.
Onaconda was adopted by a Vaderite officer as a 'pet'. The Rodian survived, not the least due to his talent as an actor. Rodians are renowned for their vibrant theatrical tradition. The Vaderites enjoyed minstrel shows and liked to make aliens stage theatrical plays that pandered to stereotypes by 'proving' the aliens' inherent inferiority to mankind. They enjoyed forcing the actors to humiliate themselves and their people. Onaconda was good at playing his part. Many bigwigs attended the plays. Eventually he started to use his position to gather intelligence for the resistance. He joined the rebels during the rising and became known as an assassin. In the aftermath of the ghetto's destruction, Onaconda got involved with the Inheritors. He is a skilled dramatist, assassin and spy. Out of respect for his dead sister, he has tried to carry on her work by preserving lost Rodian cultural heirlooms as well as using confiscated currency to support an underground press.
COMBAT INFORMATION:
Unit Size: Small
Unit Availability: Rare
Unit Experience: Veteran
Equipment: This is a list of what's available overall, rather than something every agent would carry on an assignment.
Armour:
- Shadowsuit
- Thinsuit and Civilian Clothes
- Masks
Primary Ranged Weapons:
- Verpine Shatter Rifle
- Bolt-Thrower
- KiSteer 1284 Projectile Rifle
- J-301 Pulse-Wave Saboteur
- Model MGL-1
- Outland Rifle (with scope)
- Submachine Gun
- Slugthrower Rifle
- Verpine Shattergun
- SH-9 Slugthrower Pistol
- ATA Pulse-Wave Blaster
- FWG-5 Smart Flechette Pistol
- Sonic Stunner
- Enforcer Pistol
- Adjudicator
- Monofilament Wire
- Weapon Silencers
- Vac Attack Mk-127
- Various poisons such as Synox, Mycotoxin, rock worrt venom, Chuba Poison, Senflax, Skin Buster.
- Jedi Utility Belt
- No-Shows, Taozin Amulet.
- Sentinel's Masque. Used by operatives to pass themselves off as darksiders when they have to infiltrate Sith territory or other regions controlled by Sith. Or conversely for false flag attacks in the Dominion.
Combat Function: The Covenant of the Piercing Flame is a group of assassins that serves the Inheritors of the Light Father. Their purpose is subversion, sabotage and, above all, assassination of select individuals for political and religious purposes. The Covenant operates on Tephrike, with a focus on subverting the Disciples of the Vader and the Dominion of Light. Thus their targets include Jedi and Sith, but they will also target military officers, administrators, government officials, researchers and the like. Due to the nature of their work, the operatives rely on stealth, subterfuge and disguise, both mundane and supernatural.
They may eliminate a target with a sniper rifle's bullet, a bomb, poison, gas, a knife in the back or using Force-based mind tricks to incite self-destructive behaviour or provoke a fight without getting involved themselves. It depends on the situation at hand and the individual specialisation of the agent. Each operation is preceded by reconnaissance and surveillance. Operatives may be embedded in a settlement for an extended period of time, hiding in plain sight by doing day jobs as normal citizens before they strike. The mission of the Covenant is two-fold: one is to eliminate individuals the Inheritors have sentenced to death for their crimes, the other is to destroy symbols of totalitarian power.
A totalitarian government retains power due to its ability to gain its subjects' blind submission to its rule through a combination of propaganda, terror and law. Its power creates fear. It is, from the standpoint of the Covenant, not enough to eliminate a functionary. The people must witness it in order to harness any undercurrents of discontent that exist in it as well as undermine propaganda that depicts the regime as omnipotent. At the same time, the regime will grow to fear them. Another objective of the Covenant is plugging leaks, eliminating defectors, enemy agents and the like. A team of operatives can be as small as two or as large as twelve. However, the operatives receive little support on missions. They are routinely equipped with suicide pills to make sure they cannot give away secrets under interrogation in the case of capture.
Force Abilities (Force User Units Only): Force-Sensitive operatives receive training in concealment techniques to obfuscate their Force aura or conceal themselves from sight. This can also allow them to blend into a crowd by appearing ordinary and mundane. Moreover, they are well-trained in the use of mental abilities, such as lie detection, memory manipulation and Force persuasion. Apart from that, they focus on telekinesis and its various sub-applications, Force Stun, Force Resistance and Force Flash. Their use of telekinesis focuses on precision instead of brute force. For example, a Covenant assassin is more likely to use telekinesis to surgically break an opponent's knee or take them out with a blood-choke. Massive Force waves that could cause needless carnage and alert other enemies are not part of their skill set. Use of telekinesis is also helpful to make an assassination look like an accident.
Strengths:
- Highly skilled assassins. They excel at disguises, subterfuge, and infiltration. Discipline, skill and commitment are their hallmarks.
- Mix of Force-Users and Non-Force-Users allows for versatility.
- Small unit and operate in small teams. This makes them ill-suited for pitched combat. Moreover, they will receive little support on missions, if any.
- They are assassins and clandestine operatives, not assault troops. They are lightly armoured and forego heavy weapons such as missile launchers, rotary cannons and so on and lack heavy integrated support.
The history of the Covenant of the Piercing Flame is closely tied to that of the Inheritors of the Light Father. This is no surprise since the assassins are the sect's main offensive force. They operate on the war-torn world of Tephrike, where the Dark Age never ended. When the Gulag Virus ravaged the Galaxy, Tephrike descended into chaos. Millions died from disease or factional infighting. The nominally democratic federal government proved incapable of resolving the crisis, so the Jedi staged a coup. What started as a temporary, emergency regime soon degenerated into a repressive, totalitarian dictatorship.
The Jedi were corrupted by their power and the horrors of war, as they were forced to make increasingly ruthless choices. They became the very thing they sought to destroy, while still believing they served the greater good. The Disciples of the Vader arose to counter them. The Disciples are an extremist, human supremacist Sith cult that worshipped Vader as a Dark God and preached the inferiority of non-humans. The Vaderites built a human supremacist slave state.
The Inheritors and thus the Covenant came into being as a schismatic off-shoot. There had, of course, always been resistance to the Vaderites' tyrannical rule, but the Inheritors posed an internal ideological challenge. A lost tome from the pre-Dark Age had come to light, telling the true story of Vader's redemption. The Inheritors were born out of a faction of 'Light Sith' who took the tome's words as gospel and rose in rebellion, promising freedom to the non-human slaves.
For a brief period, this faction held power. Their leader was Lord Salus. But they soon became embroiled in a war with the Dominion of Light and were overthrown by orthodox Vaderites. An uprising in the Prosperity Quarter ghetto was brutally crushed by the forces of reaction after several days of fighting. But not all renegades were killed. A masked being called the Illuminator, clad in an all-white variant of Vader's armour, challenged the Supreme Leader. The Illuminator was reported to have been killed several times, but seemed to resurface each time.
The Covenant of the Piercing Flame claimed to be acting at this illusive leader's behest. The first broadcast was accompanied by wave of assassinations against prominent leaders in the Humanist State and Party. The Covenant made its debut by blowing up an Imperial monument and gassing several prominent government and Party functionaries during a public performance. The Covenant pursued propaganda of the deed, seeking to undermine the Imperium by publicly assassinating its functionaries. In addition to targeting prominent Sith and government officials, the assassins went after smaller cogs in the machine - soldiers and policemen who had participated in murder of civilians or prisoners of war, doctors and nurses involved in the forced sterilisation or murder of the 'racially inferior' or 'incurably sick', propagandists and actors who supported the regime and mid-level businessmen using forced labourers.
Commonly, an operation was followed by a broadcast that explained why a person had been sentenced to death. This period went down in history as the Year of the Long Knives. However, the Humanist security state cracked down on them. At this time the Covenant's structure had been rather hierarchial. A military council of senior Inheritors provided command and control. This structure was beneficial for overall strategy, but proved vulnerable. The sect was badly weakened by the loss of experienced agents to air strikes and 'anti-terrorist special forces'. The Covenant was forced to alter its strategy, adopting a clandestine, cell-based structure.
Assassination became a tool of ideological subversion, and the Covenant used it as a tool to intensify hostilities between the Dominion of Light and the Vaderites. In one operation, they hijacked an Imperial drone to assassinate a prominent Jedi and pin the blame on the Vaderites. Moreover, they established a safe haven in the Dominion. For a while elements in the Jedi theocracy's government tacitly backed them. However, their practices were too heterodox for the Dominion tolerate, and the Covenant tried to penetrate the Jedi Shadows. In turn, the Jedi Inquisition managed to plant a mole in the group and use it to dismantle the Inheritors' presence. However, when Jedi Inquisitors ambushed what appeared to be the Illuminator, it turned out to be an illusion.
The Covenant's clandestine structure made it incredibly difficult to dismantle the sect for good, though it meant cells had to operate semi-autonomously. Some cells needed to be reined in for crossing the line into 'individualist terror'. Though the motives and aims of the Inheritors were different, the Covenant's methods came to bear a strong resemblance to those of the Banites. Darth Guile had once compared the Sith to a malignant cell, too small to be discovered by scans or other techniques, but capable of spreading silently and lethally through a system. Initially the victim did not feel right, then it fell ill, and ultimately succumbed. Though they would not have phrased it in such terms, the Inheritors sought to apply similar methods. A cell of Covenant operatives tried to assassinate Mahtara, Battlemaster of the Jedi, having correctly divined that she was a 'shatterpoint' who was key to the Dominion's survival. However, the attempt failed.
One assassin was captured, but swallowed cyanide before she could be 'put to the question'. When unknown starships appeared in Tephrike's orbit, the Covenant took notice. The Inheritors - correctly - concluded that this meant there was life outside Tephrike that had survived the Darkness and - wrongly - assumed that the 'star people' had to be a light sided power after they went to war with the Dominion and bombed the Vaderites' headquarter. With the resumption of full-scale warfare between the Republican Guard and the Dominion and internecine strife among the Vaderites, the Covenant has stepped up operations.
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