Tyrant Queen of Darkness
"Credits, oh credits..."
Tag -
Diarch Rellik
The stars above Bastion did not twinkle. They watched—silent, cold, unblinking—like sentinels waiting for the next name to carve itself into history.
And from the void between them, she came.
The shuttle that descended through Bastion's upper atmosphere bore no markings. No escort. No heraldry save the shape of inevitability itself. A sleek wedge of obsidian and silver, matte-plated and mute, it did not announce itself to planetary control so much as it presented itself—its codes clearing every layer of security with pre-authorized precision. No fanfare. No threat. Simply presence. The kind that bypassed ceremony because it had already been decided it would be received.
Inside, Darth Virelia stood at the center of her private cabin, spine straight, hands folded neatly behind her back as the vessel shuddered slightly with final descent.
She was clad not for war, but for gravity.
Tyrant's Embrace shimmered beneath her high-collared travel cloak, hood drawn over her helm. Her silhouette was blade-perfect—symmetrical, severe, beautiful in the way of a glacier moments before the crack. Even here, among dark metal walls and ambient red lighting, she felt like the only real thing aboard the ship. A pressure point around which matter folded.
Her gaze—sixfold and glowing through the helm's forward lenses—fixed on the growing skyline of Rellik and Reign's capital from the viewport. It had changed since she'd last seen it, and yet the bones remained familiar: loyalist bastions carved from old Imperial ideals, recontextualized through a more pragmatic lens. Bastion had not bowed to nostalgia. Nor had Rellik.
That was why she'd come.
She didn't need another fanatic. She needed a sovereign. A peer.
Two years had passed since the Rakatan AI on Dantooine. Since the last time she and Rellik had stood back-to-back beneath a fractured sky, with data constructs screaming like spirits and lightning boiling the air around them. He had seen her then—before the title, before the armor, before the galaxy began to shift beneath her shadow. He had seen Serina.
Now he would meet Darth Virelia.
Not as a stranger, but as something worse: a memory evolved beyond recognition.
The landing struts deployed with a resonant hiss. A final tremor ran through the ship's spine. And then, silence.
Virelia stepped toward the ramp.
The air outside was cool, dry, and heavy with the scent of ionization. She descended with stately poise, the synthetic cape flowing behind her like a shadow given will. She had sent no entourage. No apprentices. No bodyguards. Only a single message days ago—encrypted, brief, unmistakably hers:
"Two years, Rellik. I believe that's long enough."
Now she came to collect on the bond forged in that crucible.
But this wasn't a reunion. It was a calculation.
The Velgrath had begun. The Fourth Legion loomed. And if Bastion aligned—quietly, cleanly, precisely—it would never be known as a supporter.
Only as to accept the inevitable.
Virelia paused at the foot of the shuttle's ramp. Let them see her. Let them feel it in their lungs—that subtle ache behind the eyes, the one that whispered:
You are in the presence of the future. Adapt. Or be rewritten.
She waited, helm tilting slightly, like a queen greeting the battlefield.
Let Rellik come. Let the conversation begin.
The war was already halfway over.