Shadow Hand
- Intent: To create a Kainate exclusive breed of colossal, monstrous Sithspawn guardians engineered to replace Imperial Sentinels and serve as elite living wardens of detention decks, vault complexes, sanctums, and critical installations.
- Image Credit:
- Click - ChatGPT by Me
- Headers - Teresa Zambrano | Darth Pellax
- Canon: N/A
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- Name: Dread Sentinel
- Designation:
- Semi-Sentient
- Origins:
- Dromund Kaas - Kainate Lab Facilities by Darth Prazutis.
- Average Lifespan:
- 40-75 Galactic Standard Years
- Estimated Population: Scattered - Found only within Kainate installations, fortresses, capital ships, etc.
- Description: The Dread Sentinels are towering, abhorrent masterpieces of Sith alchemy, giants of blackened flesh and sculpted brutality, standing easily between three and four meters tall. At a distance they resemble statues carved from obsidian or volcanic glass, motionless and cold, until their internal conduits throb with crimson light and they begin to move. Their musculature is impossibly dense and saturated with alchemical ichor that pulses like molten metal beneath the skin. Their dermis is a living armorplate, chitinous, ridged, and naturally segmented like a nightmare parody of blacksteel. Every inch of them looks engineered for violence.
Their faces are mask-like and inhuman, lacking expressive musculature and carved into expressions of blank, predatory calm. Most display burning red eyes, some empty pits, others hollow sockets illuminated from within by bioluminescent tissue. Their limbs are reinforced with bone-over-bone layering resilient even to lightsabers, their joints augmented for explosive power, and many strains manifest retractable bone blades or talons used in close-quarters slaughter. Runes and sigils are carved directly into their flesh during gestation, glowing whenever they are commanded or when aggression heightens.
While at rest they are nothing more than statues. In motion? They are executioners. While in battle? They are extinction in humanoid form.
- Breathes: Type I
- Average Height of Adults: 3.4 - 4.2 meters
- Average Length of Adults: N/A
- Skin Color: Obsidian black, volcanic grey, ash-white; All with faint crimson luminescent veinwork.
- Hair Color: N/A
- Distinctions: Colossal, statuesque humanoids with hyper-dense muscle mass; bone-reinforced limbs capable of breaching armored barriers, chitinous armored hide, crimson bioluminescent vascular patterns. Mask-like facial structure with burning or empty eyes. Retractable bone weaponry, redundant organs, hyper-coagulating blood and alchemical sigils carved into flesh. Near-silent locomotion.
- Races: The Dread Sentinels do not possess natural racial divergence. Instead, their "races" are engineered batch-line morphotypes, specialized strains grown for distinct battlefield or guardian roles. Each variant is a deliberate choice by Darth Prazutis, shaped by different alchemical schemas, ichor compositions, and skeletal reinforcement protocols.
- Vanguard Strain: The standard Dread Sentinel batch and the most stable of all variants. Engineered for durability, obedience fidelity, and raw physical dominance, the Vanguard strain forms the backbone of Kainate elite guarding forces. These are the colossal "statue-soldiers" found standing immobile for days in strategic locations outside detention vaults, ritual chambers, and Sanctum doors. Their musculature is maximized for blunt-force devastation, allowing them to overwhelm virtually any foe in close quarters. Vanguard Sentinels possess the purest obedience imprinting and the longest operational stability, making them the most widely deployed.
- Executioner Strain: A specialized combat strain created for terminal lethality during breaches, purges, and execution events. They are leaner but more predatory than the Vanguard kind, with elongated skeletal structures and hyper-reinforced bone sheaths that can protrude as natural weapons. Their ichor composition is tuned for aggression, granting faster reaction cycles and brutal kill-efficiency. Executioner Sentinels are often stationed in Punishment Complexes, Interrogation Wards, or aboard ships where high-value prisoners require an immediate, unstoppable deterrent. Their obedience patterns are functional but less stable, necessitating tighter control protocols.
- Warden Strain: Heavy, hulking variants crafted specifically for long-term confinement zones. Their bodies are double-reinforced, making them slower but nearly unbreakable. Layers of plated dermis and ossified armor create a walking bulwark capable of absorbing explosive charges or incredible impact without catastrophic failure. Warden Sentinels often act as permanent immovable guardians of vaults, tombs, Sith data crypts, forbidden research wings and more. They enter deeper forms of stasis between activation cycles, awakening only when the integrity of their domain is threatened.
- Hunter Strain: The most mobile and behaviorally aggressive variant. Engineered for pursuit, retrieval, and lethal recapture, the Hunter strain features heightened sensory pits, reinforced digitigrade legs, and a more dynamic muscular structure. They excel in corridors, ventilation spaces, industrial decks, and the shadowed bowels of star destroyers where fugitives attempt to hide. When deployed, Hunter Sentinels stalk targets with near-silent precision until a strike threshold is reached, after which they become a blur of claws, bone, and overwhelming force. Mental suppression is lighter to allow advanced pathfinding, but this also makes them prone to slipping into feral states without command stimulus.
- Overlord Strain: Extremely rare, experimental batch-line produced only under Darth Prazutis' direct oversight. These titans stand significantly taller than typical Sentinels, closer to four meters, and are layered with alchemical ritual enhancements fused during the forging process. Their skeletal matrices are carved with high-density sigils, granting superior pain immunity and endurance bordering on unnatural. Overlord Sentinels are used strictly for throne-world fortification, high ritual events, or the Citadel's innermost sanctums. Their obedience is absolute, but their presence alone can destabilize the minds of lesser beings. They possess greater intelligence than their counterparts, something approaching sentience. They are the closest the Kainate has ever come to creating mythological juggernauts, an echo of ancient Sith war beasts reborn.
- Force Sensitivity: Force Dead - They cannot be sensed, manipulated, compelled, or deceived through the Force. Their minds are empty wells that absorb nothing, project nothing, and simply persist.
- Apex Bioweapon Anatomy: Their physicality rivals small walkers in raw destructive force. A Dread Sentinel can tear blast doors apart with its bare hands, uproot reinforced bulkheads as if they were rotten planks, and rip open armored vehicles like paper. Their massive, alchemically-hardened frames render small-arms fire nearly irrelevant, while only sustained heavy weaponry can slow them, and stop them at cost.
- Absolute, Terminal Obedience: Their neural structures are carved, reforged, and sculpted to biologically eliminate any possibility of rebellion or hesitation. Loyalty to the Kainate and the Eternal Dyarchy is absolute, they follow every command with machine-precision and corpse-cold certainty. They feel no fear, no confusion, no self-preserving instinct, only the absolute imperative of their master's will.
- Force Dead Living Juggernauts: Illusions, mind tricks, telepathy, fear projections, domination attempts, all fail instantly and absolutely. There is nothing for such abilities to latch onto, for they are dead to the force and resilient to its touch. Dread Sentinels simply walk through these efforts without pause, often killing the caster before they even realize their powers had no effect.
- Suppressed Cognition: Their higher reasoning is intentionally destroyed. They cannot plan, adapt, or solve complex problems without direct guidance. When left without orders, they fall back to their hardwired reflex loops: Guard the area, stalk intruders, destroy targets. Anything beyond this requires a handler, commands and supervision from Kainate personnel.
- High Metabolic Burn: Their colossal bodies are powered by unstable alchemical engines that demand constant support. They require nutrient-dense biomass, ichor-infused protein slurry, ritual stabilization, and frequent stasis cycles. Without these, their tissues destabilize, aggression spirals amplify, or their overheated metabolism begins to devour their own muscle mass.
- Control Cascade Failure: Deprived of command input for too long, a Dread Sentinel eventually enters one of two catastrophic states: a petrified, statue-like inert phase, or a feral hunt mode that attacks anything alive with blind, unstoppable fury. This is why they are kept in highly constrained, closely monitored environments.
- Light's Touch: While incredibly resilient to nearly all Force manipulation, the Dread Sentinels remain heavily susceptible to Force Light, which burns through their alchemical tissues, disrupts their ichor systems, and can destabilize or destroy them with enough exposure.
- Diet: Carnivorous, requiring nutrient slurry or dense biomass. Standard rations are useless or toxic.
- Communication: Mute. They respond only to handlers, command signals, alerts, or designated personnel and Shadow Mind impulses. Though mute and incapable of language, Dread Sentinels emit thunderous roars and low-frequency growls when roused to violence, bestial, resonant sounds that shake bulkheads and reverberate through detention decks like the warning of an oncoming storm.
- Technology Level: None (None. They depend entirely on creators and handlers.)
- Religion/Beliefs: None. They lack the cognition for abstract concepts. Their "faith," if it can be called such, is simple: Obedience. Absolute loyalty to the Kainate and the Eternal Dyarchy.
- General Behavior: They do not form societies or families. They are grown in isolation pods, conditioned in alchemical crucibles, imprinted, and assigned. In operation they behave with eerie simplicity. They stand motionless for days like statues, exploding into unstoppable pursuit when a target is marked, responding instantly to their handler's presence, becoming immovably territorial in assigned zones. When not needed they return to their statue-stillness.
The creation of the Dread Sentinels was not a project born from mere scientific ambition, it was a decree of Darth Prazutis, the Elysian Grandeval Mortarch, whose will reshaped the very concept of a guardian into something biblical in its terror.
The earliest spark began deep within the vaults of Dromund Kaas, where the Shadow Hand uncovered fragmented archives detailing the forgotten experiments that once birthed the Imperial Sentinels of Byss. These records were little more than decayed data-ghosts, half-erased formulas, and corrupted holologs, but to Prazutis they represented a foundation, a crude prototype for something far more profound. The Emperor of old had sought obedient giants. Prazutis sought weapons of dread.
Where the old Empire relied on cloning alone, Prazutis had other tools. The Biological laboratories of the Kainate, the forbidden alchemical rites of the Shadow Mind, and his own mastery of Sith sorcery and violence. He personally commanded the excavation of lost Sithspawn ossuaries, reclaiming colossal bone matrices and dormant bioweapon tissue from eras predating even the Old Sith Wars. These ancient samples, monstrous things engineered for forgotten battlefields, became the raw flesh upon which the new breed would rise.
Prazutis did not leave their creation to underlings. He entered the crucibles himself. He carved the first runes into vat-flesh with his own hands. He bled his darkness into the embryonic forms to burn fear from their minds and carve obedience into their neurons. He personally shattered the higher cognitive centers of early prototypes when they resisted, reducing malformed titans to pulp against the crucible walls as a warning to the flesh itself.
In time the flesh finally learned. Through endless iterations, failures drowned in nutrient vats, successful strains molded like iron beneath the hammer, the Dread Sentinel template took shape. A fusion of:
- Vat-grown colossus frames based on recovered Sentinel genomes
- Grafted Sithspawn organ-chains capable of fueling massive musculature
- Alchemically forged dermal plating hardened through ritual ossification
- Force-dead genes sculpted into blank, obedient engines
- Runic binding scrawled into bone, tendon, and ichor
The first true Dread Sentinel opened its eyes in his presence. It knelt. It bowed, and in a demonstration to the entire Kainate staff, Prazutis commanded it to rise and tear through a blast-hardened containment wall with its bare hands. The creature obeyed with a sound like mountains splitting.
From that moment, the blueprint was set.
The Kainate refined the process, producing the first disciplined batches: Vanguard strains to break intruders, Warden strains to stand eternal watch over vaults, and Executioner strains intended for sanctioned purges. Yet even as they grew more efficient, the ritual component remained untouched, every Sentinel still bore the carved sigils that Prazutis himself codified, every one still shaped by the ancient rites he resurrected.
Now, the Dread Sentinels stand as the apex guardians of Kainate domains. They watch the detention decks of vessels like living statues, stalk the sealed sanctums beneath New Kaas City, and tower beside command vaults and ritual chambers where only the highest Sith tread. Their primary dominion was moved to Malsheem where they exist in larger numbers. They are not soldiers.
They are punishments.
Born of tyranny, sculpted through torment, perfected by Sith alchemy, and carrying Darth Prazutis' will in their marrow, the Dread Sentinels are the final evolution of the old Sentinel dream, monstrous, loyal, and utterly without mercy.
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