Private Refiner's Fire (Malum)

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

THE SPIRES OF HELL - ATHELVAI
NOW INSIDE THE BLACKWALL

Ashin requested to meet Darth Malum of House Marr on a series of terraced landing pads that connected two twinned spires a thousand miles long. The air was thin, the wind strong and cold, and the fall unfathomable.

She stood at the edge and let that wind rip at her armourweave cloak and robes. Her feet never moved. She'd brought only a simple lightsaber and wore the Mask of Anger, which had no special powers.

The complex, ancient, terraced projections looked out over impossible layers upon layers of storm clouds. She watched them and thought of better days. This was a place of powerful memory. Lightning had left the spires' weird substance scarred, a good sixty years back now.

 

[Darth Malum of House Marr]

He had raised an eyebrow as he had received the summons, even as his heart bitterly bellowed at the inveitability that his mind would accept them. Yet, most unlike the scion of House Marr, it had not been curiosity that had so compelled him to take a course that may as well have been the height of foolhardiness.

It had been nostalgia.

To think now it had been years since he had taken the Lochris, at the summoning of another powerful Sith, that which one singular meeting on Fiviune had set him on the path he found himself on.

And that to this day, for all that he had, for all that he had accomplished, he could never claim with the surety of confidence that it had been for the best.

The board had been set out the same, invited, alone, to the den of another figure likely far more powerful than him, certainly far more experienced and wise than him. He remembered still, how distinctly he had feared that his future Mistress, had invited a lowly acolyte out into the darkened waste simply to kill him.

He supposed a Dark Councillor to be invited out to be killed by a former Sith Empress, somehow felt both more and less likely.

In the end, as self-focused as it was, if there was anything that was changed upon the board, it had been the relative station of the one who had walked from one board to the next. He was no longer an acolyte.

He was a Lord.

Yet, still, the Lord could not help himself, curiosity, nostalgia, a desire to prove... to one of the giants that he had stood upon the shoulders of, or to himself? The mind did not prove easy answer.

He stared ahead over the windy heights of the spires far below, they seemed architectural marvels, spears that pierced through the earth to rise ever higher and higher, unsupported, if one did not count the terraced landing pads, that in which in all honesty he doubted anyone who cared for safety would consider as much. The Lochris shuttered against the wind currents, as the landing gears deployed, and he struggled against the controls to bring ship and man to safety.

The gaze over the side at his heart in his mouth.

One might have struggled to see that there was ground at all, all the way down there.

This was no Fiviune... certainly not.

​

He stepped outside of his ailing, yet ever still reliable starfighter. Bedecked from feet to neck in black plate and steel, encrusted in rubies that shimmered in the cloudy air. At his side, sheathed, yet still prominently placed, the beskar hilt of blade ready and designed for war, was at this moment kept at equilibirum.

As, gazing forth, a scratch was felt at the back of his head.

She wore a mask too.

It was far more expressive than his own, the replica face of his great ancestor.

He felt the weight of the moment curl across his skin, the wind lapping up against his arms, as the hairs stood at rapt attention. He wondered if the Force itself demanded such theatrics, the wills of Force and Destiny conspiring even now, or...

...Or if it was the weight he himself put upon this moment.

There were few Sith that did not know the name of the Conqueror of Ten Thousand Worlds, that did not know the name of the rare figure who became Sith Empress, that did not know the name...

...Ashin Varanin.

It was a name whispered in echoes, a name known by all, even if a figure that felt entirely still elusive. Her rule had been seventy years ago, yet, she still lived, she pre-dated the ills of Kaine's Tenth Empire, the retreat in disgrace that was the fall of the One Sith in the Core, she was of a time before that.

Of figures that had become legends.

Figures like Darth Sidic, Darth Moridin, Darth Voracitos, Darth Adekos, Darth Arcis, and of course, Darth Vulcanus.

He felt the echo stir in his heart, a strange sensation, a blur, as it seemed his heart was stolen right outside his ribcage, only to return mere seconds later.

Of those legends, he could only remember two who still wielded weight upon the galaxy, who were not dead and gone... Darth Carnifex, of course.

And... Darth Desmius.

The echo stirred once more, a fire in his chest, as a jackal's laughter filled his ears.

She was a true... figure of folklore, of fiction, a figure that existed in a galaxy that looked nothing like it looked now.

An immortal tyrant who had for the most part, given up her tyranny.

Apart from the curiosity, the nostalgia, the desires, that may have been the true reason he had accepted such invitation, that may have been the reason that despite all animosity he should have held for the woman before him, the animosity he did hold on behalf of another dear to his heart...

...The respect he felt still had him lower his head.

She was no longer an Empress to be bowed to, but knowing all this woman had accomplished, all that she had done for their people.

She deserved that much.

He tilted his mask back in observation, "...I have looked forward to this moment for quite some time, Darth Desmius." The wind warped words, but the waves pushed on still, perhaps for such a moment it deserved better words.

But there was always the possibility that soon it would be material beyond words that would do the talking for them.

Ashin Cardé Varanin
Mentioned: Darth Ophidia Darth Carnifex Darth Vulcanus Quinn Varanin

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

On the lowest edge of the terraced platform, she watched the starfighter come down. There were many places to land here; her own ship, the yacht Lanvarok Whisper, was half a turn around one of the spires under the responsibility of her Massassi pilot (and language tutor, and tattoo artist) Jaccath. Out of sight, just in case. She knew relatively little about Darth Malum of House Marr . The forces that had connected them today, that had prompted her invitation, had been compelling but vague. He had station and influence, by all accounts, a player in Sith Empire politics at a level where she had few ties and only limited investment. The odd gift, for example, or formal appearance to bolster her daughter's machinations. Being a team player.

All that to say, other than what she'd seen in the great kaggath on Ruusan, she had no firm idea what this man was capable of, or when and why he used those capacities, or what if anything differentiated him from the other lords of high rank. As his was a name connected more and more to her daughter, there was value in finding out.

"These are the Spires of Hell. Here I trained the Lords of the Fringe. Forgive an old woman her home ground advantage."

She took the lightsaber from her belt and fired it up, burnt orange, just half-bled.

 

[Darth Malum of House Marr]

Malum smirked beneath the mask, his memories of days long past were quite often short, but the nostalgia was prescient as ever, though... he struggled to understand why, there had been more than a few words that had been exchanged between him and his Mistress that day on Fiviune ever so many years ago...

...There had been remarkably fewer during their last meeting.

The smirk faded from his lips, as he tilted his head in assent. The Lords of the Fringe were not a group he knew much of, their beginnings certainly, how they related to perhaps two of the most legendary Sith Lords the galaxy had known somewhat more likely... but other than that. All he knew was, how the project had seemed so... unSith.

"An Empire, a people on the defence are destined to fall," Malum answered back, as dark gloves gripped around the icey beskar, a sharp rattle along the sheath echoed the winds, as the black blade shined along the sun's rays, one leg back, the other forth, the Sith Steel pointed in challenge towards his immediate foe, "I seek to always fight my enemies where they hold the advantage." It made victory all the sweeter, the red plasma hissed as it ignited out the tip of the sword, before the entire blade embossed itself in blue flames.

Two paths laid out before him, to see what she would do, or to end this as quickly as possible.

He held no true belief that he could, one did not become monarch of the Sith without the ability and skill to kill, but to give her the initiative?

Well, one did not win being on the defence.

He extended his arm out to his side, the blade following suit as Sith Steel, red plasma, and blue flames hissed in the motion, as the masked heir of the Lord of Duty, considered his foe. A beat passing between them.

As starting from zero, the acceleration pulled his velocity forth, a steady drumming beat across the windspent metal, as he sought to cross the distance, a mighty swing, aimed to carve through flesh and bone.

Ashin Cardé Varanin

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

Ashin stood vulnerable on the railless edge of the lowest terrace. The stance she settled into was plain two-handed Shii-Cho on the order of a Padawan's first day.

Literally half the battle in moments like these was to see a Sith Lord bearing down on you, a young man with a reach advantage, clad in items of substance and moving fast, and master your own instinct to step back. To dodge, to shrink, to let your inbuilt biological instincts recoil from the impending collision. It was the precise survival instinct you faced if you stood in front of a repulsor train and felt the shiver in the trackway through your boots.

It wasn't dissimilar to standing in the radiative rubble of a black hole's accretion disk and facing down the end of all things. If memory served.

The blazing sword met her lightsaber and seemed to bite into the plasma blade but not through, as if the saber was tough wood. The stark heat of their impact surged around and through her armourweave gloves.

She moved in to push against the lock, less a step and more a shift into another settled stance, ideally before Malum could shift from a rush to a stable configuration. Whether or not she broke his balance she aimed to follow with a firm slash to bull him toward the edge himself — get this young man wondering, at a survival-instinct level, about that endless fall.

Darth Malum of House Marr