Dark Arts, Black Heart

[Verinoma]

Verinoma didn't want to get up but the alarm intruded upon her reverie long enough to be annoying. The incubator would need to be checked, her samples looked in on and breakfast had before she started her new project. Emix had wanted solitude for bringing up Verinoma, so he had found an abandoned garrison on Jondora. For his needs it was perfect, plenty of room for training, space for a lab, a small hangar, and rooms to be his spaces. He had kept the slave girl, Accabi around to tend the gardens and the animals that they relied upon for sustenance.

Verinoma had confirmed her suspicions shortly after Emix's death, his detailed notes on the entire process had been illuminating. Accabi was definitely her mother, although there was no real familial bond with the aging woman who shared the compound with her. Emix had long since rendered her incapable of speech, and so she spent most of her time tending the food sources and prepping meals for he and Verinoma. She was mostly left alone, and Verinoma believed she probably preferred it that way.

She worked on making her mark on the old base, taking down the things Emix put up in favor of the things she enjoyed. Alchemy was great, but in her mind, Emix was putting the cart first. A deeper understanding of sorcery would only expand her alchemical talents. To do that, she needed a ritual space.

She pushed up from the bed, the room devoid of all light. Her shoulder ached a little from the position she slept in, her tchun curled up behind her back. A roll of the shoulders, a sharp intake of breath and she rose. The click from the lamp shattered the silence followed by the wash of the small yellow tinted light. She had slept in her clothes, collapsing in the wee hours from exhaustion. She had been working on clearing out a small opening in the vegetation not far from the base. The wide open space would be perfect for her needs.

It had called to her as she passed through the woods, the old growth portion of forest carrying a sinister air about it. When she spotted the bare dirt and opening in the canopy, she could not have been more pleased. The pull of the darkside spoke to her of the ley lines beneath her feet. This was a sacred place.

 

[Verinoma]

It took several days to clear the area, to smooth the forest floor to somewhat level, to carve a path to the circle but Verinoma refused to leave the task unfinished. The perimeter was leveled out and marked with an edge of flat stones that she buried to match the level of the dirt of the center. It would not do to have trip hazards in her sacred space.

She had burned the torches late into the night, dragging a long crooked stick through the damp earth, tamping over mistakes with her boot before she scrawled the design over it again. Checking her work required climbing a moss laden tree and venturing out on a branch, studying the marking and comparing them to the ones in her journal. Once she was satisfied with her layout, it was time to make this a more permanent.

She had taken Emix's ashes and combined them with a combustible powder, sprinkling the mixture into the shallow grooves. Just the presence of the preliminary runes was enough to make the air feel close, thrumming with something that an ordinary person would have shied away from. Her task complete, she stood before a wide table at one end, the empty bowl shoved across the scuffed work surface.

It was time.

She took the oil lamp burning to her right in her dirty hands. She smelled of dirt, sweat and the scent of gunpowder, the grime of her deeds rendering her hands black. Her mind was running over and over the incantations. She couldn't screw up a single syllable or the entire ritual would be ruined. Taking her place in the center of the circle, she closed her eyes, cupping the fire in both hands, stretched out before her.

Her voice called out as she began, the sound snatched from her throat by the growing power, as it dampened her, closing around her in the darkness of coming night. The opening incantation was long but she managed to get it out perfectly, though the pressure was enough to make beads of sweat stand out on her brow, and trickle down her lekku. However, she dared not move a muscle.

Once she had reached the appropriate moment, she opened her eyes, the sulfuric pupils seeming to glow in the guttering green light of the oil lamp in her hands. She bent down to the center of the circle in front of her and poured the oil and flames into the spot from where all the markings began. Green fire burst forth and spread out around her feet, racing through the trenches as the powder caught but Verinoma began to chant the new spell. The fire from the runes leapt fire, bolstered onward the by magick she called from the nexus beneath her.

The heat, the rage, the madness, the passion swirled around around her until all at once it died to nothing, the runes burned into the ground, into the space between. The torches around the edges were the only light save for a small, reddish glow near the work table. Verinoma squinted her eyes, her voice nearly hoarse as she parted her lips, the sound coming out as a hiss.

"Emix..."

The red light flickered and began to expand, growing to a tall vertical oval. It took a few minutes of her repeating the summoning chant but by the time, she had chanted it three times, the ethereal form of her master stood before her.

Her blood thumped in her veins, her heart pounding. She had done it. The mere study of this technique had taken her 3 years but here she stood, having called the shade of her former master from beyond the unknown. She stood enthralled with her success a moment before she was moved to words.

"You sought to make me a creature of your design, but now you will answer to my vision. You are enslaved to this circle. You will answer my demands, you impart your knowledge to me so that I may surpass you and wipe your name from the galaxy. You will tell me what I wish to know, or you will spend eternity bound to this place between life and death."

The ghost of Emix opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out as Verinoma began to laugh.

 

[Verinoma]

It was not particularly easy to wrangle the ghost of one's dead father and mentor into being the teacher she would need him to be. There were days where he stubbornly refused to answer her and so she would banish him from her presence for extended periods of time. Caught between the Nether and the living realm seemed to fray him and when she would summon him to return later, she would find him more pliable. Like he had done to her, she had to break him. It was the only way he would accept her dominance.

Her embrace of sorcery had irked him, but in it she had thrall over him. She could command him and there was nothing he could do to stop her. Emix could respect that kind of power even if it was beyond him to understand it. He had figured sorcery to be some hokey foolish misunderstanding of the power of the Darkside, but in watching Verinoma study and refine her abilities, he began to see the precise accuracy needed in calling forth a spell. She studied alchemy still but she did not have the passion for it. Not the way she did for sorcery. That she had decided her own path and had dispatched him in his fit of madness had demonstrated enough to Emix that she was capable enough as a Sith in order to determine her own path.

Verinoma had been reevaluating her training. Emix's notes and his knowledge would only get her so far. Emix was a hermit. Stuck on Jondora for the rest of her life was not the future she craved. In her search of the wider galaxy, she had come to know of the existence of other Sith, other darksiders who studied and trained. There was a universe beyond her imagining out there. She just needed to get there.

However, she would need Emix's knowledge. His binding curse could be attached to something else however, the work to do it would be difficult. She considered leaving him there. Stuck in that circle for eternity, the thought made her delight in his endless torment. She supposed she could come back and retrieve him should he prove useful but as she looked into the galaxy, the more she became convinced she would not.

Accabi seemed to be amenable to the idea that she could leave the place, and Verinoma considered taking her mute mother along as a servant but it seemed better to leave her on Jondora. Verinoma packed her things and then packed the rest of the compound up and locked it away in storage before she rented the base out as a hunting camp.

Emix disagreed with her plans, but when she threatened to unmake him altogether, he quieted himself.

"I don't care if you like it. I'm not you, you pathetic excuse for a Sith. Your detachment from the galaxy has left you shortsighted."

"It was my choice, apprentice. I choose this place to conduct my experiments and I succeeded without distraction."

"After you had already been properly trained. You were a lousy teacher."

Emix huffed, glaring at the young Twi'lek.

"Then why keep me here?"

"As you were fond of telling me, to teach you a lesson."

Verinoma grinned as she turned from the circle. The freighter crew would be arriving to drop off the new load of supplies and to take her on soon. She had decided to head to the outer rim, to see where the darkside would take her. For the first time in her life, she was excited at the prospect of the unknown. This was her time and Emix had no place in it.