First Reply Home, Sweet Home

[Darth Virelia]

"Blast from the past."

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The wine shimmered violet in her glass, catching the chandeliers' fractured glow as if liquid starlight had been poured just for her. Chandrila had always known how to mask itself in softness: rolling meadows, cultured vineyards, the subtle architecture that gave the illusion of freedom even as the capital thrummed with bureaucratic chains. To be home again was… dangerous. Dangerous for them, exhilarating for her.

Darth Virelia reclined at the heart of her gathering, half-lounged in an obsidian-backed chair that had been imported just for the occasion. The ballroom was not hers—it never would be, in name—but its bones bent toward her gravity all the same. Chandrilan senators, merchants, off-world delegates, even a handful of Galactic Alliance officers had drifted through her doors, each drawn by the simple lure of decadence. Wine flowed, silken music swept across the vaulted space, and laughter sparkled like chandeliers. Yet beneath it all, an unease breathed. People could sense when a predator smiled too kindly.

Her armor was gone tonight, replaced with a gown of black silk traced with threads of violet fire. The fabric clung like smoke, cut low and daring, revealing just enough to keep every gaze from straying too long elsewhere. Her six-eyed mask rested on the table beside her glass, more ornament than threat here, though its presence was reminder enough. Chandrila had tried to bury her once. Now she drank in its heart without fear.

She let her neon eyes wander over the room. A senator's aide lingered by the balcony, trying and failing to avoid her attention. A Corellian trader whispered in the corner, already loose-lipped from spiced brandy. An officer in crisp Alliance blues raised his glass toward her with awkward bravado, unaware of how much she already knew about his mistress, his debts, his weakness. Every soul here had brought her a gift, whether they realized it or not. Secrets spilled as easily as wine when the music was gentle and the hostess patient.

Her lips curved as she sipped. Patience was her true vintage. She tasted oak, spice, a hint of something floral, but the flavor that mattered was the tension in the room. These people did not yet understand that they had already been catalogued, mapped, weighed. Chandrila had raised her. The Jedi thought it had cast her out. Both were wrong. She was the inevitable return, the violet ember rekindled among their fields of green.

A string of laughter broke too loudly at her left, and she turned her gaze upon the group of courtiers who had dared forget themselves. Their mirth faltered mid-breath beneath her quiet smile, replaced with the polite terror of prey who remembers what shadow they share a den with. She raised her glass in mock-benediction, releasing them. The music swelled again.

Tonight was not conquest. Tonight was courtship. Yet even as she played the gracious hostess, Virelia knew Chandrila itself was already yielding—one secret, one glance, one sip of wine at a time.

 

[Darth Vinaze]

Darth Virelia

The dark, smoke-filled lounge was a tangled web of bodies, secrets, and lies. In the darkness, one could lose themselves, physically and mentally, and that was Virelia's intent, as she watched them keenly, knowing all about them while they remained ignorant. It was the kind of crowd that a single hooded figure could move through unabated, like a shadow dancing with the red and purple light, from corner to corner of the room. Like the hostess, the shadow observed.

Eventually she would catch his gaze from across the room as he stared at her, his head lifting to reveal a devious grin beneath his black hood. His smile would fade, and his silhouette be lost once more in the crowd, then he would approach her.

"Lord Virelia," a voice croaked from beneath the hood, "you are in good health and spirits since the struggle on Desevro." The Prophet made light of their lavish surroundings and the general mood of the evening.

"I suspect you may have only an inkling of who I am, but I have been watching you, The Empire has been watching you. Welcome to our domain."

Vinaze in truth did not know Virelia beyond what his spies could bring forth about her, and she had built for herself quite the facade of anonymity. But he'd seen her demonstration of power at the Sith Conclave, and wondered what the rogue Sith could be doing on a newly occupied Imperial world. She was not one of the ruling Sith Lords of the Empire. Not yet. Chandrila was a staunchly pro-democracy world, diametrically opposed to their new masters, and a rogue Sith Lord with a reputation such as hers, of subterfuge and corruption, being in the mix did not bode well for the Empires plans to dominate Chandrila...

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Blast from the past."

Tags - Darth Vinaze

Her glass lingered halfway to her lips, violet eyes cutting through the smoke to meet the shadow's grin. She let the silence breathe, a predator's pause, before the wine touched her tongue. Slow. Patient. The Prophet's words were as thick with intent as the incense in the air, and she savored them both.

"Desevro," she said at last, her voice smooth and low, a ribbon through the din. "A difficult stage. But illuminating."

Nothing more. She left the struggle unnamed, forcing him to wonder which part of the chaos she found most instructive.

Her gaze drifted across the room as though dismissing him, yet her attention never wavered. Chandrila's revelers were all masks and laughter, blind to the game unfolding in their midst. But she saw him, cloaked and crooked, carrying with him the weight of whispers not meant for common ears. Empire. Prophet. Watcher. His words carried the threat of scrutiny and the promise of recognition, both knives she might turn in her hand.

She leaned back in her seat, one leg crossing the other with deliberate grace. Her smile was faint, dangerous in its quiet. "The Empire watches." She spoke the words not as acknowledgment, but as a test—an opening for him to fill with more than he intended.

Another sip. Her silence lengthened, and the tension grew teeth. She let it. To her, words were a currency best spent rarely, and she preferred others overspend. What mattered was not what she declared but what he revealed in trying to draw her out.

When her gaze settled fully on him again, it was with the weight of inevitability. "Then let us see," she murmured, "what it is you think you see."

And she left the rest to silence, an invitation sharpened like a blade.

 

[Darth Vinaze]

She was a woman of little words, befitting of her reputation. Vinaze was man of too many words, some would say, as he waxed philosophical. It could rarely be said that the Sith Lord put things plain and simple, but for Virelia he would be concise. He knew with certainty there were other eyes trained on him, waiting for her command. He did not wish to fight her.

"I see great power, unbidden, wielded by rebellious youth. That much was clear from your demonstration at Desevro. I was once myself where you are now, thinking yourself above the old ways. Such is the sign of a strong Sith, who seeks change, always. But I have come to warn you of a changing paradigm which you cannot hope to stand against. I have heard tell of your Dark Court on Malachor, a world you and I both share in importance. But in breaking your chains you do not see that you have only deepened the great schism which has been amongst us Sith Lords for years, and which will soon come to its violent conclusion so prophesied: the Sith'ari has come, the wheel turns on the Sith once again. He is the one destined to destroy us, and to rebuild us. I ask you, when the Imperial war machine that he has built comes to your doorstep, will you be among those heretics fated to die, or will you be among the New Sith, of a new era? You have returned home, but will you return to your rightful place?"

Darth Virelia

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Blast from the past."

Tags - Darth Vinaze

The Prophet's words washed over her like smoke—dense, curling, filling every corner without ever touching the flame. Virelia let him finish, let the air grow heavy with his prophecy and his certainty. Then, only then, did she stir.

Her glass turned slowly in her hand, violet wine tracing a dark spiral along the crystal walls. When she finally spoke, her voice was quiet, intimate, as though every syllable were drawn just for him.

"You speak of the wheel turning," she said, her eyes gleaming in the dim. "Of destruction, of renewal. Of the Sith'ari, and inevitability." A pause, long enough to suggest amusement. "And yet… you stand before me, warning me. As if inevitability requires your shepherding."

Her gaze sharpened, cold and patient. "If the wheel turns, then what difference is there between the heretic who dies and the disciple who kneels? Both are ground beneath its weight. Both are… necessary to the cycle you so faithfully proclaim."

She sipped, slow and deliberate, before continuing. "So tell me, Prophet—if the fate you preach cannot be resisted, why speak of choice at all? Unless…" her smile curved, precise as a blade, "…you doubt your prophecy."

The silence that followed was hers, not his. She wielded it as a weapon, letting him feel the weight of his own logic pressed back upon him.

"Or perhaps," she added at last, voice barely above a whisper, "you come not to offer me a place… but to force me to choose one. To see if I bow to the Blackwall, to the Core, or to myself?"

Her eyes lingered, piercing through the smoke, making the question less inquiry than challenge.

"Which is it?"

 

[Darth Vinaze]

"You are intelligent, but you are uncouth. You know why I am here and yet you mock me. Do you think a haughty attitude is what makes a Lord of the Sith? You bow to the Empire." he stated, like it was fact. "No matter how highly of yourself you think. This world belongs to the Empire, and soon, the galaxy will too. I know you are smart enough never to bow your head to those dog heretics beyond the Blackwall, but there is something greater coming which demands our obeisance! A new order, a new galaxy shaped by new Sith. The Sith'ari is the will of the Dark Side made manifest, the embodiment of the wheel turning anew..."

Darth Virelia

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Blast from the past."

Tags - Darth Vinaze

The violet glow of her eyes did not falter, though the Prophet's words pushed hard, pressing at her silence like a whetstone against steel. She listened, still as carved obsidian, while his voice carried its certainty across the smoke-filled lounge. Bowing. Obeisance. The Sith'ari. A wheel that would turn with or without her consent.

When she finally spoke, her tone was solemn, low, each word chosen like a surgeon's cut.

"There was once," she began, "a Sith who rose from the shadows in a time when his kind had multiplied like carrion birds. They were many, and in their multitude they thought themselves eternal. They warred against each other for scraps of power, until their war consumed itself. And when they were weakest, when they assumed his loyalty, this one Sith struck."

Her glass rotated slowly in her hand, wine dark as blood.

"He did not command an empire. He did not have legions. He had only the clarity to see rot where others still feasted. And so he destroyed them—his own kind. He swept their corpses into the abyss and claimed their ashes as the foundation of a new order. All those lords, all those empires, and history remembers only… him. The rest? A long-forgotten brood."

Her gaze drifted back to Vinaze, cold and patient, voice quiet but edged with something final.

"Do you know what he proved? That when power comes cloaked in secrecy, in patience, it is never those who shout most loudly that endure. It is the one who bows with a dagger behind their back. Who smiles and kneels, and waits. And then, when the moment is ripe…" she tapped a slender finger once against the rim of her glass, the sound a single chime in the hush between them, "…the throat is cut."

She drank then, letting the silence pool, before setting her glass aside.

"You tell me I bow to the Empire." Her lips curved faintly. "Perhaps I do. Perhaps I bow to the Blackwall, too. Does it matter? I bow, and yet I remain."

Her words fell like a whisper of silk, but beneath them coiled iron. "Those you call masters are not eternal. The wheel you revere is not merciful. It does not ask whom it crushes, nor does it distinguish between heretic and believer. It will turn over this 'new order' as surely as it turned over the last. The only question is—who will be waiting in the shadows when it does?"

She leaned back, uncrossing and recrossing her legs with languid poise, her gaze never leaving him. "You mistake disdain for mockery. I do not mock you, Prophet. I measure you. I measure what you fear, and what you hope for. You see a savior in this Sith'ari. I see a reminder of how fragile even saviors are, when patience holds the knife."

The hush stretched, deliberate, oppressive. Then, softly, she added:

"Tell me, then… when you bow, will your hands be empty?"

And she left the question hanging, solemn as judgment, her silence the echo of the dagger she had placed in his hand, whether he wished to see it or not.