Private Heartless

[Vesta]

AVIDICH

Monument Mori​

874 A.B.Y​

Endless pain, limitless torture.

Each and every attosecond that ticks by is the entirety of Rhand's orbital bombardment relived, the sensation of blood boiled beneath flesh and flesh burned away - of muscle and soft tissue torn from her skeleton before being reassembled countless times. Regeneration had been no respite from death, it only caused her to ponder the time she had left; the span of which was only a measurement of the willpower left in her to sustain herself in this manner. From the moment she had reformed her entire life's goal was not to prolong that suffering but to end it, to take the reigns of relativistic control in the galaxy and reshape her past so this present, and its inevitable future, could never have happened in the first place. It was a secret motive, one which she shared only with one other - the reason she'd had to endure this suffering in the first place - but it was the one which drove her with far greater fury than anyone had any ability to control.

"They thought building me this fortress would keep me content." She said, answering a question asked of her just moments before, now seven years after the day she'd underwent that painful change. She seemed hardly affected, outwardly, by the pain that still coursed through her body. "I assume you've been welcomed with, more or less, open arms?" The Sith asked, turning her gaze towards Onrai - the two standing in the middle of the foyer of the grandiose castle. Aside from whichever servants were there to keep the place more or less clean she was its only occupant - an allusion to her general presentation as death. Idle words and fancies were something she usually was not one to engage in, circumstances were different, however, in that the woman with her now had something she wanted.

Something she was willing to give.

"Typhojem's heart, hm?" She asked aloud, the question rather rhetorical - she was talking to herself - in order to ponder her own thoughts on the matter.

"One step towards control, then."

 

[Onrai]

The migration - it was not an evacuation, certainly - of Onrai's legions from Nathema to the void of the Maw territory had been a deliberate action. Here, she would finish her magnum opus, the conclusion of all of which she had sought to achieve in a climactic finish after decades upon decades of work. As the two stood within the great castle whose emptiness seemed tremendous, warships still bearing the faded colorations of the Sith Empire traveled through hyperspace, transports, Star Destroyers, and other vessels alike all seeking to transport the ruins of the former Vanessa Vantai's domain to their new powerbase on the world of Kiross. The gutted and burnt-out facilities of the world would be rebuilt, the shattered space stations salvaged and replaced with new orbital installations to allow for the establishment of the system as a new powerbase for her final ambitions.

"And it didn't." She said. "A Sith by their very nature can never be kept content. Always something greater. Always something more. More power, more servants, more resources. I've been around long enough to know what the Sith want and why it fails them, often as it does." She eyed the inquiry of the once Vesta with surprise, curious as to whether there was a hint of legitimate care behind her words. "There has been little interference. I still command the shattered remains of the Empire's military forces, as well as those that came before it. If any of these tribals seek to undermine my dominion or harm my servants, their worlds will burn and those who remain loyal to their causes will suffer and die."

Onrai reached within the inky blackness of her ethereal avatar and once more produced the black crystal Liselle Torrez had assisted her in recovering from a dead world buried deep within the charnel void of Otherpace. The laboratory of the primordial beings, it and it alone contained the power, the great infernal energies that were within the firstborn spawn of the Soulworm, the vile and abominable Typhojem himself. The purity of the evil, of the pernicious darkness the crystallized heart emanated was something that sent a chill down even Onrai's own nonexistent spine. She smiled at the comments of the wayward Zambrano, thoughts raised from her mind once more put into words.

"It's yours. All you need to do is ask."

Darth Mori

 

[Vesta]

Putting on an act was as second nature to the Shi'ido as breathing or changing her form, a necessary trait to survive as a Sith and one that was most certainly the only reason she had been able to make it this far. She understood what drove the people around her, be it power or wealth and anything in between, but the single driving force behind her was far removed from those norms - ironic, given just how much further that motivation would take her than the rest. Onrai was less interested in the rather miniscule sort of details that Vesta obsessed over, it was why she emphasized the grandness of her fictitious desires. Much like her feigned concern, there was very little truth to anything that she'd said during their conversation into the fortress. Control, or at least control in the sense that she continued to imply, was the furthest from her desires.

Ruling just wasn't for her.

"Deeper into the building, then. The room I spend doing much of my studies will do for this." She replied, gesturing towards one of the branching halls that swept out from under and behind the staircase at the center of the foyer. She led the woman deeper into the castle, down and away from the dim light that had illuminated the grand hall they had came from. A collage of smooth and rough blocks of what appeared to be stone made up the walls and ceilings of the corridors they walked through, the only light the occasional piece of luminescent crystal that was spaced far enough from the rest to keep illumination at a low. Eventually they came upon a room without a door, one which was rendered useless by the sheer lack of residents in such a remote location. Tables, examination chairs, charts, screens, tools, and so much more filled the Sith's study.

"I usually make it a point to be clear that I take what I desire, never ask, but I suppose out of courtesy I will make the exception."

"Will you do the honors?" She asked, gesturing towards herself - where the heart would be placed, that is.

 

[Onrai]

Onrai fully expected that at some point, the two’s so far amicable relationship would end up breaking down. It was with such tenuous feelings subtly buried within the greater sphere of relationship the duo had developed and eventually ultimately shared with one another. Onrai had admired the Shi’ido’s ability to continue existing, to defy the pain and suffering pressed upon her on multiple occasions. The goddess’s relationship with the Zambrano family notwithstanding, he hatred she felt in place of the love she had once had for another sans herself.

Of course, Onrai’s own love was lost long ago.

A pair of hands, so soft and delicate, gently clasped the crystalline heart, fingers caressing it as they slowly moved towards the flesh of the shapeshifter, through the void or cavern that was within her flesh. Slowly but surely the crystal was buried within until the hands of Onrai - nay, the hands of Vanessa - nestled it upon the bottom of the pocket of flesh Mori had formed for this moment. Her hands slowly withdraw, waiting for the woman’s mass and essence to accept the heart within her body in question until they had fully escaped her.

Onrai chose to say nothing until she had seen whatever metamorphosis had occurred. This was the critical phase of Mori’s transformation from a mortal to something far more.

Darth Mori

 

[Vesta]

Monster​

Existence was a strange state of affairs.

In one moment there was nothing, a cluster of organic matter at best, and in the next it was a living, experiencing, being with a mind of its own. At any moment that lease on life could expire, could reduce that singular being into a decaying mass and take from it the consciousness it had been presented with, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it in its entirety. Death, in a manner of speaking, was an universal constant; absolute. Nothing could escape it, not even the stars themselves, and even those who cheated it still had to experience being in its clutches for long enough to know that they'd eventually find their way back into that cold embrace.

Deep within the fortress that shared a namesake with a woman whose name was intended to refer to that inevitability, laying herself down on the slab of stone that would serve as her operation table, was a being that was, by all rights, already dead. It didn't matter what kept her going, to wonder on how she still managed to persist would have been irrelevant, because all that remained was borrowed time - time that was ticking its final seconds even now. There wasn't time left for her to ponder the purpose of this, to wonder how much more she could gain in this way, and there wasn't will enough in her to consider changing her mind - something she had been unwilling to do from the first moment she stepped down onto this road so many years ago.

When her chest opened, courtesy of the rather advantageous Shi'ido biology that she possessed, the look on Vesta's face was not fear, it wasn't anxiety, concern, or regret. Determination, instead, was the firm tightening at the edges of her features, the wrinkles etched into the corners of her lips and the sides of her eyes; determination that this decision, this acquiescence, was the missing key she needed to find her way off of the beaten path she had tumbled down on and back onto a route that might lead her back to where she had dreamed of being ever since that fateful night on Eshan so many years ago. Her eyes turned vacant as she forced herself into a stasis that was dependent on time, literally held within a moment of it while the procedure continued.

Blood pooled in the cavity as the veins and arteries leading into and branching out from her heart were cut, the organ that belonged to her giving in as it was freed from her chest and placed on the examination table beside her head, limp, and the young Zambrano was, in at least the medical sense, dead. It wasn't the lack of breathing, the draining of what blood was coursing through her veins then, or the sight of the woman's heart beside her tilted head that gave it away - it was the sudden shifting of her body to the true shape and visage that she'd been hiding from the galaxy. A pale and rather unassuming woman lay there, her hair dark, mottled now by the blood that had found its way into it beneath her back, and she seemed considerably younger than the older appearance she had forced upon herself, albeit an obvious adult all the same.

Whatever beauty she had masked herself with, whatever façade of intimidation she'd been covered by, there was nothing terribly evocative of either in the face and features of the seemingly dead Vesta Zambrano. Onrai 's hand guided the crystalline heart of Typhojem into her chest, the eldritch organ attaching itself to the hanging veins and arteries that had been cut. Where the green hue that veins took under the surface of skin was had been replaced by a darker color while the heart slowly began to beat. For several moments longer she did not stir, her body slowly being revitalized as she and the heart were assimilated with each other, until the stasis she had forcibly placed upon herself wore off and she came to. She tilted her head forwards to watch the woman pull her hands out of her chest and step back to marvel at what she'd done, the cavity that Vesta had opened in her chest closing with a grimace.

She was different, perhaps, but she didn't show it; that wasn't like her, preferring to always be assumed as something less than the truth.

Realizing the difference in appearance that losing consciousness seemed to have caused, Vesta steadily shifted herself back to the face that was more recognizable as Darth Mori while she sat up on the table and glance down at the heart that had previously been in her chest. It seemed smaller than it should have and weaker, too. "I hope you weren't expecting a demonstration." Mori said when she averted her gaze and looked towards her benefactor. "I'm afraid the sorts of things you'd be watching me do won't be happening just yet, not til the Maw reaches the core." She explained. Her eyes moved back towards her heart, considering for a moment what she might do with it - if anything at all. While the strange sensation of her new heartbeat seemed to fill her with a feeling that she was finally right in the bodily sense, the mass of muscle beside her seemed to symbolize something else entirely.

 

[Onrai]

The rarity of getting to see the true shape of Vesta’s flesh was not lost on Onrai. Her considerations flowed chiefly as She observed how remarkably at peace her flesh looked - it spoke wonders of how much of the west and tear upon the Sith Lord’s body were almost effectually self-inflicted given how much more put together she looked in her natural form. As the process of integration began itself, Onrai thought back to the innumerable experiments, wholesome and horrendous, she had performed in the years past that had allowed her to reach this point. Ashin Varanin. Silara Vantai. And of course the use of that spacer’s flesh as a vestibule to create the Vinithi. All of that seemed like such child’s play compared to what she had just done.

“You’ve already demonstrated more to me than you may know.” Onrai’s reply was short and simple, one that masqued her understanding of the woman’s deep-seated agony that had weighed so heavily on the heart whose futile final pulsations exuded the last droplets of blood within its own ventricles. Onrai understood now the sense of personal inferiority - nay, of self-hatred - that Vesta felt for herself. Whether it was from her collapsed love with her former apprentice, a sense of being unworthy to take the place of her father’s daughter, or other tertiary considerations not yet run through her ethereal processes, Onrai was not sure. The knowledge of such self-flagellation was burdensome to the twice-false goddess.

“It will take some time for us to see what the heart has given you.” She said. Personally, she was unsure as to the traits it would gift the Shi’ido now that it was melded into her flesh. Whatever the case, the last vestibule of pure evil now lay firmly entrenched within the systems of Vesta. She was more than she had ever been. “Now our fates are inexorably linked. All we can do is seek to guide the galaxy towards the conclusion. One where once more we are the masters of creation, more than all those others one would call themselves lords.”

Another step had been made, another motion towards the pantheon’s development. Gods and monsters would roam the galaxy again, and reality itself would suffer for the best or worst of it.

Darth Mori

 

[Vesta]

She nodded her head, as if she shared the same understanding as Onrai in regards to the uncertainty of what it was that was now coursing through her. Her face was a mask of neutrality, perhaps a subtle sense of agreement leaking through at the fringes, but inside she felt the same sensation she did when she smiled. The woman, she thought, had believed herself to hold the answers, or at least a firm understanding, of just what it was that she'd placed within her chest, hiding something from someone who was already keenly aware of it was fruitless so she had not even attempted to; however, contrary to what she had believed, Onrai seemed to imply that there was much she didn't know about either this process or its results.

'To think I had offered to show my hand so easily just a few moments ago.'

Swinging her legs over to the side of the table, vibration-like tingling ran up her thighs and into her chest from the reconnecting nerves her stasis had put "to sleep", she considered the ramifications of the new circumstance she had placed herself in. Outwardly there wasn't much of a sign of change in her, something that the Shi'ido would have thought the woman would have understood as a consequence of being masked by her desire to keep up an appearance desired by herself through the ability to shapeshift yet unaccounted for, but the transition was unmistakable from the moment that the stasis fell.

There wasn't a cliché rush of power, nor was she an entirely different entity than what she had been before the procedure had begun, and indeed things changed in the most subtle of ways for her. Individual change, in fact, was rather minute - it was the compounded effect it had on her ability to experience the world around her that made it clear that it was more than just placebo. Without focus she could see both to the biological limitations of her eyes as well as the famed force sight that the Miraluka held as their claim to fame, something that would have required conscious effort before that was now simply the de facto method to observe her surroundings. Where her presence in the force had previously been constrained to her own body, like nerves running beside veins, she was a veritable cloud that filled the room like a gas might its container and felt both herself and everyone within it.

She looked down towards her right hand, which clenched tightly into a fist and then relaxed into an open palm before closing again several times, with a mild degree of interest. "I wouldn't have expected anything sooner." Mori agreed, almost absentmindedly. To be more forthcoming would mean giving up the advantage of holding her cards so closely to her chest, potentially ruin her chance to take advantage of her plans for the world of Tython in the coming months. The less her benefactor understood about what had been bestowed upon her, the better; she almost preferred the erroneous notion that the new organ had granted her something as mundane as raw power when the reality was far more threatening. She hyper-focused on the quip made the moment it implied that they were to serve as little more than a rudder for the fate of the galaxy.

"To the end, indeed."

She aimed to be much more than that.