Tyrant Queen of Darkness
"Credits, oh credits..."
Tag -
Lodd Grimmin
The air in the factory was thick with a scent older than war—dust, metal, oil, and purpose. Beneath Geonosis's blasted surface, within the skeletal remains of what had once been Confederacy might, the old bones had been reanimated. Not as ghosts, but as tools. Instruments. Soldiers.
They marched in silence.
Down the spine of the reawakened complex, flanked by retooled assembly arms and molten-track forges, rows upon rows of SRV-17 Adaptive Tactical Enforcers stood in waiting. Each gleamed with fresh black plating and seethed with violet underlight—hulking, insectile silhouettes cast in monolithic formation, awaiting a voice to justify their rebirth. They did not need loyalty. They were loyalty. Not programmed to obey—but shaped to belong.
And at the apex of that assembly line, motionless as the throne she'd yet to build, stood Darth Virelia.
A pillar of obsidian wrought into feminine terror. She moved like dusk incarnate: slow, inevitable, beautiful in the way avalanches were beautiful—deliberate, divine, and entirely lethal.
The segmented hem of her cloak dragged across the permacrete like a veil of execution. Her helm caught the flickering light of the forges in its faceted lenses, six violet eyes scanning the floor below with predatory grace. Machines parted for her without signal. Workers looked, once, then away, as if the very act of meeting her gaze might drag their will into orbit around her gravity.
She stopped at the main platform—a spire of command rising above the factory's heat-slicked heart.
Behind her, the SRV-17 units stood at parade rest, like statues awaiting animation. Their glowing photoreceptors dimmed and pulsed in time with the factory's core cycle. Each one was a prototype she had named. Not numbered. Named.
She did not build armies.
She built instruments of symphony. Dissonance given form.
Two years ago, these foundries had been cold. She had found them gutted, desecrated by time and irrelevance, a tomb of unfulfilled ambition. She had not mourned. She had reengineered. With
War Marshal Helix
's nanite sorcery and her own alchemical rituals, she had resurrected the bones of the Confederacy not as servants—but as sovereigns. Her sovereigns.She could feel it. The rhythm. The precision. The inevitability.
The Velgrath had begun in name. But the war was already over. She had ended it in silence, long before her rivals ever chose their colors. They chased battles. She bred outcomes.
Virelia stood with hands clasped behind her back, Tyrant's Embrace humming softly at her shoulders, the glow of its rune-threaded seams tracing her spine like a burning sigil of authorship. Her thoughts were not on glory, nor power, nor war.
They were on design.
The Fourth Legion was not a prize. It was a fuse.
She would take it, not as a general, but as a catalyst. A visible proof of her will, to be grafted into her greater network. By the time the galaxy saw her victory, it would be too late to stop it. Armies would follow her not out of loyalty—but inevitability. A tyrant does not win. She is obeyed.
Her commlink flickered once—an encoded Trade Federation handshake. The delegate was inbound.
Below her, the assembly line trembled as a fresh wave of droids locked into formation, freshly cast from the reactivated furnaces of war. Their violet optics flared to life, one by one, like stars igniting in reverse.
Soon, the delegate would arrive.
And they would understand.
That the game had never started.
That the Velgrath was already over.
That the opportunity to invest in an inevitability was before them.
Last edited:
