Private RELIQUIIS

[Reliquiis]

SOME TIME JUST AFTER THE IMPERIAL CONQUEST OF CORUSCANT AND THE DEEP CORE...

PART I​

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Aboard the Soothsayer Heresiarch-Class Battlecruiser
Outer Pelutt Orbit, Beshqek System, Imperial Space​

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[SITH CHANTING]

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Kintik Kaari stood silently as he listened to the congregation of Sith Cultists chant in churning tidal choruses of sorcerous Sith Verses. They were all garbed in black hooded cloaks and long flowing robes of force imbued zeyd weave. Force coverings wrapped their faces in sheer bands of black with woven crimson the very Sith Verses they chanted. Their voices melded together in pitch, tamber, and rhythm, reverberating each word in a boundless echo that thrummed like a beating heart; droning each word, and on and on.

The horde of Sith Cultists, many rows deep in their crescent seated formation, was adorned with instruments, tools, and objects that stood stark against their blending black mass. Some held Sith Oracle Stones, marbled crimson and gold stone orbs that glittered in the dim lights of the ruined Sith Battlecruiser’s Meditation Chamber. Others held ritual bells with Sith Amulet crystals held in the claws of the handle; while many more simply used their voices as instruments and gnarled their fingers together in complicated pious hand signs. Together they sonorously conjured the Dark Side of the Force.

The eddies of perfusion power ebbed and flowed from the Sith Cultists and burst from each word they chanted. Kintik Kaari looked up and followed where the Sith Verses rose to. The entire ceiling of the high domed Sith Meditation Chamber was a crowded canopy of Sith Chalices, hung by thick chains as large censers. The collective fog of burning incense filled the chamber with its own atmosphere of bleak grey clouds drifting along the dome circumference.

But in its natural wafting streaks Kintik Kaari could see the unnatural dance of smoke being bent and whipped by an invisible master. The Dark Side pulsed off the words of the Sith Cultists. It spread about the chamber, stretching its tendrils in an invisible grip that could only be noticed by its warping of the paths of thick incense smoke. But Kintik Kaari could sense it more deeply than shadows and smoke could illuminate. His attuning to the Dark Side followed the melody of the bolts of darkness as they spun a destructive song of corrupting permeation throughout the chamber and deeper into the ruined Sith Battlecruiser. His ears picked up the realspace sounds of its influence as cracked and broken plating creaked and groaned in shrilled and rattling cracks.

A brimming, arrogant pride filled Kintik Kaari and bent a ugly taut and crooked smile behind his Force covering bands. The High Nepherides of Byss had spent decades hunting down the meager trickle of rumors and clues, strewn between an obfuscating sea of falsehoods, ignorant boasts, and half-truths, in order to find the lost flagship of the Failed Dark Saint. Ever since her death at the hands of her own companion Darth Kascallion, and the end of her Schismatic Insurgency, much of her presence and ruin was lost.

As custom among Sith, who covet knowledge and artifacts to bring legitimacy to their own insurgent ascendency, the remains of the Failed Dark Saint’s followers, fleet, weaponry, and even her own body was pillaged and dissected. While his master, the Dark Lord of the Sith forged an Empire in the Core and Deep Core, Kintik Kaari had waded through the Outer Rim, across the filth of Smuggler’s Dens, webs of Information Brokers, and begrudgingly cavorted with haughty Sith claimants of other Dark Orders.

But at last, his wandering had led him to a contact blessed by the foresight of the Dark Side - Darth Bellum . He had given Kintik Kaari a Sith Wayfinder that had led him to the Failed Dark Saint’s flagship, the Soothsayer. The flagship had been hidden away in an ion storm nebula at Malachor’s edge of the Chorlian Sector, converted into a floating tomb. It wast there he had found the Failed Dark Saint's head encased in a glass reliquary of ancient design and kept in a Sith ritual of stasis.

Hauled back to Imperial space and hidden among the debris fields of the outer Beshqek System, Kintik Kaari had spent another couple of years preparing the ruined Soothsayer. The flagship had to be resurrected before the Failed Dark Saint could even hope to be. Imperial Naval Engineers were pressed into rebooting and rebuilding only the most necessary of onboard systems. His own Sith Cultists reinforced the rest of the flagship with Sith Amulets and Sith Alchemical Metallurgy that fashioned new bulkheads and braces to keep the Soothsayer from simply falling apart.

Kintik Kaari glanced back down towards the center of the Sith Meditation Chamber where a large, gilded Sith Sarcophagus was placed. It stood taller than an adult human’s height, each side was covered in Sith Bas Reliefs and at its hefty rim base was a vigil of Sith Chalices. Laid inside and embalmed in a pool of Sith Alchemical elixirs and concoctions was the Failed Dark Saint herself. Soon his work would be done, his grand work.

The large blast doors screamed a metallic sneer as they heaved to separate. Kintik Kaari turned around and met his master, the other Lords, and Darth Bellum. He strode up to Dark Lord of the Sith, but stopped several steps ahead in subservient observation of deference. He knelt and lowered his head.

“My Lord, the ritual proceeds as planned,” said Kintik Kaari. ​

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TAGS: Darth Solipsis​

 

[Darth Solipsis]

DARK LORD OF THE SITH | GALACTIC EMPEROR

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The chamber darkened as if the stars themselves had bent away in dread. The sound of heavy boots struck the deck plating, once, twice, each reverberation snuffing out a light source in their wake. The Sith’ari emerged from the black reaches of the chamber like a torn wound, his body indistinct from black mass of shadow that was the other Lords in his wake.

"Kintik Kaari," he hissed, his words rolling like ash across stone.

His hand rose in gesture, fingers dangling through the nearby incense as it swirled violently, folding in upon itself before gilding forth toward the figure of the kneeling acolyte. With sight beyond sight, he could see the embalmed husk within.

“Rise.”

The Dark Lord of the Sith moved closer, each step heavier than the last, as if gravity itself thickened around him. His burning gaze never left the coffin, even as he turned to address Kaari and his cultists still chanting, though few of their voices cracked under the oppressive weight of his and @Darth Bellum’s aura.

His voice fell to a whisper, cruel and absolute.

"Ah yes, I remember.”

The chamber thrummed as the Sith’ari’s posture tightened, he relished the thought, the memory of when the head of the deceased was thrown at his feet during the Great Gathering. Shortly after, those Sith would unite with his own New Sith Order, bringing about a new age and total victory during the closing days of the Sith Schism.

“I have need of you, my dead-prophet. It is time you brought FEAR to the galaxy once more.”

​

 

[Darth Vinaze]

Darth Solipsis / Darth Bellum / Reliquiis

Amidst the Third Imperial Civil War, the Battle of Malachor V had changed the course of Darth Vinaze's life. It had been the end of it, and yet merely a beginning. He had not so much learned to live after death as he had been granted it, when Kascalion's axe had cleaved him in two. He returned from the Netherworld of the Force, with no body and half a mind, but something else was missing, the void left by the death of the Dark Saint. He vividly recalled the Sith Lords of the galaxy around that long table on Mustafar, the power of the Sith in an absolute vacuum as the Old Empire entered free fall and the first planet killer in a millennium was fired by a Sith so powerful yet unknown by so many. How times had changed, as everyone knew the galactic tyrant Darth Solipsis. The Dark Saint's legend had rolled to end ignominiously on that table, far too much so for the world she created with her schism.

As the Emperor's shuttle boarded the Soothsayer, Vinaze felt a pang from the past. Never again did he think he would set foot upon the ship, the marvel of Sith engineering. He recalled seeing it for the first time from the viewport of the Dark Praxeum, where he had finished his education, learning that would ultimately lead him to the project at hand.

PROJECT RELOQUIIS was far from the Empire's most expensive, but it was hidden so deep in the blackest of budgets that anyone who knew of it might have suspected otherwise. But no one knew of it, save for a select few of the upper echelon of the New Sith Order. Like everything the Dark Saint had devised it was an ambitious project. It had been ambitious years and years ago when Kascalion had told him of it, but it was one that Vinaze was uniquely qualified to provide for.

Back when he had first met Kintak Kaari they were much interested in the same work: the manipulation of life, and the negation of death. It was a common field for those who had studied the bibliography of Sidious, Vinaze in the libraries of Bastion and Kaari with the cults of Byss. Derleth Par, as he was called then, had not made any friends among the Keepers of the Sith Code, but he had respected Kintak as a peer. He had been hardly surprised to find the old cultist had been the one Bellum and Solipsis had entrusted to lead the project. What had surprised him was that anyone had found her after all these years.

He knew Kascalion had kept her head as a trophy after Mustafar, but its whereabouts had been a secret never wrested from Kascalion in their final days together. Those had been consumed with disagreement and betrayal. It didn't much matter at the time, for even though Vinaze knew of the Dread Lord's intentions, the Prophet had considered it better that Voyance had died. She was one less challenge to the Sith'ari, and Kascalion had been dealt with accordingly just as well.

But now, here, slumbering in pseudo-death, she could no longer be a threat to the reign of Solipsis. No, she was now a prize that had come with his conquest of the Deep Core. Her ornate sarcophagus, filled with an alchemical solution he had devised long ago on Tash-Taral, loomed before the three Sith lords. How funny, he thought, that it looked so in style for an ancient lord, like one you would find in the Valley of the Dark Lords. He supposed that in its sleepy orbit of Beshqek, the Soothsayer had become a Dark Lord's tomb, the latest ancient ruin of the Sith...

 

[Reliquiis]

The Lords of the Sith shook the Dark Side as they proceeded into the Meditation Chamber. Kintik only followed when all three of them had passed his side. Walking with measured steps that performed the draconian tenants of subservience, Kintik searched for his opportunities of expressing the triumph of his work - and perhaps, finally, his formal induction into the ranks of the New Sith Order proper. Being a Cultist Master was not enough, he wanted to be a Sith Lord and to wield their power instead of studying it or hunting for its remnants. He had made his plans carefully, discovering the work of Dart Vinaze and ingratiating himself to his designs, then finding Darth Bellum and extracting from him the coordinates of the Soothsayer. Now, finally, with the Dark Lord himself here, he would make claim to his ascension.

“As your Darkness commanded, my Lord,” began Kintik Kaari, ringing his hands while approaching just behind the Dark Lord’s shoulder. “I have made it proper, that every detail of the Embalming Elixir specified by Lord Vinaze was adhered to. The Dark Saint’s new body is submerged within a pool of the Elixir that has filled the sarcophagus to the brim. And my lord, I have made sure the apparatus of the Essence Transference from her stasis-kept head melds to her new body.”

Kintik Kaari dared to take a step forward so he was nearly beside the Dark Lord. “I had the Kissai Metallurgists artifice the amulet chalice, for the Kyber Runestune, to your specifications, my Lord," continued Kintik. "The Mortuaries conducted the surgeries to install the amulet inside the new body’s chest, as well as the other biological and cybernetic life-support implants. A similar amulet has been installed as the bridging collar that will connect the Dark Saint’s head to her new body. All as was designed, my Lord, as has been meticulously executed by my guidance.”

Kintik Kaari swallowed a dry patch in his throat and then dared to push his supplication into a petition by stepping beyond the Dark Lord to stand before him. “My Lord, it would be the greatest of honors beyond my service if the completion of this Project came with my admittance to your Order as a true Sith--” Kintik’s grovelling was interrupted by a piercing shriek that screamed out of the sarcophagus. One of the chanting Sith Cultists went limp and collapsed onto the floor in a clattering heap. Kintik whirled his hood towards the sarcophagus and rushed to his congregation. “It has begun my Lord!” snapped Kintik. “The sacrifice has begun!”

Another Sith Cultist in the front row of the congregation collapsed, an inert lump of flesh, emptied of soul and the Force. The Amulet embedded inside the chest of the Failed Dark Saint, needed to be fuelled. Essence, especially that of the Force, cannot be created from nothing, only transferred, changed, and transformed. Life was needed to bind life. The Sith Cultists in the front row had been chosen to siphon their own souls in the Force to fuel the Amulet to power its spells in binding the Failed Dark Saint’s spirit into her new vessel. Another Cultist fell, and another shuddering cry belched from the sarcophagus. When the final Sith Cultist died, the chanting stopped and so did the cries of the Failed Dark Saint.

Kintik Kaari gestured to the large Dark Side Adepts to open the sarcophagus. Using the Force the two Sith brutes pulled apart the tomb. Panel by Panel they dislodged the walls of the sarcophagus. Torrents of embalming slurry spilled out in a viscous sludge that buried the censers. The fragrant and ensorcelled wisps of Korribanian Incense were smothered by the putrid stench of Dark Side corrupted ingredients. As the tides of embalming sludge streamed down and cascaded off the platform the sarcophagus was placed on, a mound at the center was revealed. Slowly, with every wave of sludge, the mound began to reveal a form; a curled up naked body of a blue-skinned Twi’lek. Her skin was adorned in litanies of Sith Sorcery, tattooed in the ancient script of the Sith known as ur-Kittât. The only thing to cover her body’s exposure was the lacing veil of dribbling sludge that colored her blue skin a sickly green as it drooled off her curves and form.

“My Lady,” said Kintik as he trudged through the sludge to kneel beside the motionless Twi’lek. “Can you hear us?”

An arm shot out and snatched Kintik by the neck. Her head rose up and looked at him with a taut grimace of tightening rage. Kintik was imbued with her Force powered fear, he flailed and clawed at her arms trying to break free. It was like being gripped by a flame, he could feel his spirit being flayed from the Force. Her bright golden Sith eyes, like binary furious suns, beamed from the darkness of her sludge caked face.

“What have...you...done!” she howled, her voice projected out of her throat and then into the Force so it shook through the bodies of the congregation. Like a Force Blast, her voice flung the congregated Sith Cultists outwards in a bombarding shockwave. “My penitence! MY PENITENCE!” she screamed over and over. “You fools...have ruined...my...PENITENCE!”

“Muh-mah…my-Lady,” Kintik choked his words out from his crumbling throat. “You…hav-have…been awakened…for…a..great-er…purposssse.”

“There is no purpose...greater...than my penitence...to the Dark Side!” she screamed. “You...should have...let me...BE!”

The Twi’lek snapped Kintik’s neck with a single crushing clench of her fist. The Sith Cultist’s body relaxed and his desperate limbs fell limp by his side. The Twi’lek threw his corpse aside and gingerly tried to stand, but she fell back down and splashed against the sludge. She crawled forward, like a stalking beast, and though her body was still weak, the Dark Side erupted around her. It began to bend the plating of the Chamber, making the metal whine and groan as their structure was being slowly crumpled.

“The penalty for this sacrilege IS DEATH!” growled the Twi'lek.

One of the surviving Sith Cultists rushed to the Dark Lord. “My Lord, quickly, you must speak the words of the Amulet and activate the Spells of Binding. Or her rage will destroy the entire ship!” said the terrified Cultist.​

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Darth Solipsis Darth Bellum Darth Vinaze​

 

[Darth Solipsis]

DARK LORD OF THE SITH | GALACTIC EMPEROR
Reliquiis | Darth Vinaze

​

The chamber shrieked beneath the Dark Saint's awakening, plating bending like the wail of a dying beast, cultists scattered like ash before the storm that was Reliquiis 's rage made manifest. Even amidst the potent wrath that spread like wildfire, the Dark Lord's silhouette remained immovable in the sickly green haze, a bastion of shadow carved into the wave of rebirth. Ember eyes burning forth from the Sith'ari regarded the blasphemous spectacle with something between fascination and disdain. His voice cut through the chamber like a blade across flesh, measured, resonant, heavy with inevitability.

"Penitence?"

The word lingered, dripping venom into the air. He raised his hand and extended it, not with haste, or desperation, but with quiet authority. An invisible force extended forth from his the control of his palm. The chamber groaned as the violence of her rage bent inward, caught in his unseen grasp. He spat out to the void as the air grew heavier, the powers of the resurrected let loose upon the chamber with such intensity.

“Nu Sua Tave Tsawak Iv’Tave Tsis, Qu Nuyak Kraujas j'us Sekleti..”

He paused amidst the chaos and whispered,

"Obey."

His lips parted once more, roaring to Dark Saint.

“..Nu bind Tu Su Nuyak Kraujas!"

His head tilted, his aura igniting in a crimson wave, casting his form in the light of judgment.

He tightened his grip, moving his open palm into a closed fist.

The words carried like a prophecy, cryptic yet final, as though the very outcome of her rebellion had already been inscribed in the marrow of the Force.

"Your crusade paved the way for my path, now I shall return the favor in kind. Rise, Saarai-kaar. There is no pentience, only a debt. One which you will pay.. to me."

 

[Reliquiis]

PART II

MONTHS LATER…SOME TIME AFTER THE ARKANIAN CAMPAIGN…​

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Tower of Sedriss, Rakatan Wastes
Byss, Galactic Empire​

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Reliquiis opened her eyes and hissed a long dragging sigh from her flaring nostrils. Once again, her meditations into the Dark Side only yielded visions of her awakening. Still yet, she couldn’t access the memories of the other person that dwelled within her. This other her, who was her, but not her as she was now, was locked behind the Sith sorceries that imbued the amulet buried in her chest.

Reliquiis could not reach her; the one her Dark Master called the Dark Saint. She was a shadow, shapeshifting in the ensorcelled seams of her stitched together soul. Whenever she dove into the Dark Side and employed the powers of channeling and releasing her mind into the abyss, the amulet violenting pulsed with countering magicks that lashed and beat her mind back into her body. There was no escape. She had no reach to gaze upon this lost other self. But she was Reliquiis and that side of her barked at her to desist, to obey and to becalm her trepidatious investigations. She was not this Dark Saint. She was what was left of her. The remains; as her name in ur-Kittât meant, Reliquiis, a relic.

Her black leather gloved hands dug into the cushioned edges of the curule bench. Around her, Korribanian incense swirled in thick, sallow grey mists inside her pyramidal qabbrat. The aroma of singed spices that carried the airs of the dead Sith world lulled her frustrating anger back down into its usual fuming simmer. Her meditative stupor subsided and more and more of the real world returned in fading trails of the senses.

She could feel the Sith Amulet pulsating inside her body and the vibrations of its chains on her soul. She felt the cybernetic implants that riddled her body and connected it to a life-support system mounted on armor plating, covered beneath her black robes. The collar of fastening locks, gears, and plating, gilt in Sith Gold, that fastened her head to her body, gave mechanical stutters as she turned her neck from side to side. Then she heard an alert beep from the comms panel built into the armrest of her bench.

Releasing one hand from its taloned grip, Reliquiis clicked a command button in a keypad beside the panel. A small hologram projection materialized from a compact holoprojector lens at her feet. Kneeling before her was the miniature visage of the Captain General of her Death Guard Troopers, Aleph Taral. His armor was crimson and gold, mangled together in a mosaic of binding seams, just like Reliquiis’ own body. A golden face plate with dark eyes looked up to his mistress and from his vocoder a deep, thrumming but electronically rattled voice spoke.

“Mistress,” said Aleph Taral. “The Lord Vinaze has made a visitation to request your audience once more.”

Reliquiis narrowed her Sith golden corrupted eyes down at her Captain General. Darth Vinaze had been placed by the Dark Lord as the main artificing keeper of her body and the Sith Amulet. No doubt he was also a spy, reporting on the condition of the Sith Amulet and any incursions Reliquiis had made upon its bindings. But she had also sensed from previous sessions that this Sith Lord had some past with the other self she was trying to reach - the Dark Saint. Reliquiis pondered on his arrival for a moment. She reached a hovering hand away from the control panel and peaked up the t-shaped macrobinocular view face plate that completed her helmet.

“Understood, Captain Taral,” said Reliquiis.

She placed the face plate and locked it into the edges of her helmet. A rebreather hissed from behind the face plate and a slow echoing wheeze of its breathing cycle exhaled in a low repeating beat. She ended the hologram feed of Aleph Taral and rose from her bench. The top half of her pyramidal qabbrat split from the large black obsidian base and rose up. Revealing Reliquiis as she stood and then descended the steps. Aleph Taral lowered his head and bowed it deeply, averting his gaze from his Mistress. Reliquiis passed Aleph Taral, her silent march signalling him to rise and to follow.

“I shall greet with Lord Vinaze myself,” continued Reliquiis, her voice a roiling, synthesized dark snarl. “Have the Armiger Servitors prep my Qabbrat for my return.”

“As you command Mistress,” answered Alpeh Taral with a salute made by beating his fist into his breastplate. He clacked his boots together, bowed, and turned to leave.

Reliquiis pressed on, walking down a corridor and through a side gate with a high arched automatic door. The doors parted and Reliquiis entered the audience chamber. She took a few steps forward and she herself now knelt down onto one knee and bowed her head.

“Lord Artificer,” said Reliquiis to her Arch Sith Artificer. ​

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Darth Vinaze

 

[Darth Vinaze]

As the doors of the audience chamber pulled apart, he saw her... his monster. The spindly, emaciated Sith lord slouched in the throne of the audience chamber, appearing as nothing more than a great mass of burgundy robes.

Lord Artificer... beneath his long, obscuring robes he hid a cringing expression. Such a title... one he had worked for with so little to show. And, yet his greatest achievement stood right in front of him, reminding him of just how much research had been lost when his laboratory on Tash-Taral had been exorcized by the Jedi. Years of work creating Sithspawn, bending both creatures and people to his will... all flushed down the drain. And now here she knelt before him, the one who had given him the very same laboratory, one of the three whom he had once dedicated his work to serving. It was all wrapped up in fate, it seemed. Despite his rage at what he lost, it had paved the path which had led to Reliquiis. The one monster that served him now, built on the backs of a thousand others, was also the one that worried him the most.

His faith in the Emperor was resolute, but when Solipsis and Vinaze had begun this project in earnest, the Prophet could not have foreseen its overwhelming success, and now he was all too aware of the potential they had given her. They had given a new life to a Sith Lord of great power, and though Vinaze liked to fancy himself above such things as fear, he had begun to worry what might happen if their control over Reliquiis was not as strong as they had originally believed. How could he be certain of their success, when they had perverted the very Banite philosophy the New Sith Order claimed to hold sacred? When they had cast her down from one who embodies power, to one who craves it? He had been witness to her awakening, and the wroth with which she had broken from her deathly slumber. If the binding amulet's sorcery did not hold... he shuddered at the thought of the warpath an awakened Darth Voyance might carve.

"Rise... Hound," he rasped, reminding her of her place, "and tell me, how do your arrangements suit you? The Emperor wishes to know that his weapon is... satisfied." he asked, veiling a lie. Though the Emperor was indeed curious as to the progress of Reliquiis, especially given that he wished to use his new weapon, neither the Emperor nor the Lord Artificer could have cared less about the material arrangements they had made for her. The Empire would lavish her if need be... but what he really wanted to know was if their binding spell was holding strong, if there were any traces of the Dark Lady trying to break her chains...