Private Like Clockwork

[Darth Virelia]

"Negotiations."

Tags - War Marshal Helix



The room was a monolith in silence. No light but what was necessary. No sound but the distant thrum of machines too old to remember what they were powering. No scent save the antiseptic sterility that marked all of Polis Massa's lower tiers—levels never meant for life, only function.

Darth Virelia stood alone in the meeting chamber.

The walls were seamless obsidian-plasteel, polished to such a fine sheen that they reflected only suggestions of her shape—never the full truth. The overhead lights, minimal and cold, cast no shadow. That was by design. The shadows on Polis Massa did not belong to the light.

She had chosen this place precisely for its austerity.

Not the throne rooms of industry. Not the fractured temple ruins where secrets bled from stone. Not the Geonosian foundries where her dreams of mechanized sovereignty hissed into being beneath fire and wire.

No.

This place was sterile.

Dead.

Honest.

The air here was weighed down by silence. But not emptiness. That silence had pressure. It wasn't absence—it was anticipation. The kind of stillness that comes before a body exhales, before a scalpel touches skin, before a mind breaks.

Virelia stood at the head of a long, narrow table of matte durasteel, her hands folded neatly behind her back. She wore no armor, only a sleek, high-collared bodysuit of synthsilk layered beneath a tailored mantle of black and violet. Still imposing, still inhuman, but stripped of the myth and menace that cloaked her in the field. Her hair was tied in a golden twist behind her helm, which sat dormant at her side, faceless and waiting.

She had not summoned Helix out of necessity.

No, necessity was a weakness for lesser beings.

She had summoned him because he was the only one she could not predict.

And that intrigued her.

Their last venture into the ancient depths of Geonosis had yielded more than just machinery. It had yielded potential. Something old, yes—but also something useful. And usefulness, to Virelia, was the highest form of worship. A being like Helix, for all his obscenities of form and fragmented contempt for organics, had proven that he understood this.

She respected him for it. Genuinely. In the same way one respected a blade sharp enough to draw blood without effort.

He was a machine without chains.

And she, a sovereign without gods.

But that alliance… it could fracture at any time.

She needed to see him again. Not to command. Not even to sway. But to measure.

Because there was something on the horizon now. A shape forming behind the veil of the Velgrath, behind the pageantry of imperial succession and the petty squabbles of Sith factions clinging to the delusion of cohesion. Something that required more than soldiers and starships.

Something that required intellect. Will. Design.

Helix could be an asset in that future. Or a threat. It remained unclear which path he would choose. And Virelia was far too strategic to leave variables unaccounted for. Especially not ones that could rewrite the script entirely.

A low chime pulsed through the floor—the only sign that the invitation had reached its recipient. Whether Helix would answer it was another matter entirely.

She waited.

Still as death.
Composed as ice.
Burning beneath the skin.

Her gaze never flickered to the sealed door. Her posture remained pristine, spine straight, lips unmoving. But the air around her began to shift—an imperceptible distortion of pressure, of presence. Her command of the Force did not boil or crackle. It did not flare in theatrical shows of hatred.

It compressed. Like gravity on a dying star. Like inevitability given form.

If Helix arrived, he would not be greeted with pageantry or flattery. He would find her precisely as she was.

Waiting.

Unblinking.

A sovereign in mourning for a galaxy not yet dead, but already hers.

 

[War Marshal Helix]

Helix hadn't been to Polis Massa in a very long while. There was seldom any reason to go, after all. A chain of floating asteroids with no atmosphere was of little use to him, on most days. Little worth plundering, and even less worth seeing.

Until he received the call.

Darth Virelia wasn't kept waiting long. A small, sleek vessel snapped out of hyperspace above the asteroid cluster. Helix was pleased to see that it hadn't changed much, at least at first glance. Some things in the galaxy were born worthless, and stayed worthless. In this highly-chaotic and turmoil-filled era, it was nice to know that some things stayed the same.

That pleasant sense of stability didn't last. He very much doubted this was a social call. People didn't tend to invite him to dinners, parties, and wine tastings, and for good reason. Serina had something important to bother him with, or she would not have called.

Helix lost no time in making planetfall. When he did, he observed that the chain wasn't quite so dead as it appeared from orbit. Serina had been busy, building the place up into her own personal little rat's nest. A shame that such talent was wasted in improving a ball of rock.

He had still not decided what to do with Calis. The Tsis'kaar were not admirers, as one might expect. Not after the death of Fury. Helix did not share such concerns. As likely as not, he'd do nothing. He was content to let most of the Order's little schemers and powerbrokers alone, in the end.

His power was not yet so insecure that he deemed everyone outside of his grip a threat. So far, his strategy of carefully balancing cordial relations with most of the Sith, despite their endless internal power struggles, had worked. He'd not allowed any of them to draw him into open conflict with another, despite numerous rigorous attempts by some of them. Logically, it could not last forever.

"The center cannot hold." He murmured to himself, right before he opened the doors to Calis' meeting room. It was sparse, sterile. More like a hospital than a castle. He'd expected animal hide rugs, gold chandeliers, the works.

Maybe Serina still had some surprises in store for him. If the center could not hold, then in the end, he was on his own side. What else was new. What was best for Helix was all that mattered, at the end of the day, and that could change by the hour. When the chips were down and the bullets flying, he cared about three things, in descending order of importance. Himself, a few close allies, and giving this rotten little galaxy the wakeup call it needed to break from stagnation.

He'd see what Calis had for him, and prioritize his response based on that.