Private Resurrection

[Darth Virelia]

"I will find you."

Tags - Miasmær



The stars stretched thin through the cockpit viewport, smeared into long, silent lines of white as the shuttle hurtled through hyperspace. The engines hummed with a low, steady drone—like a predator's purr before the strike. Within the craft, bathed in pulses of deep violet light from the navigation systems, Serina Calis sat alone.

Not a word had been spoken since departure.

She had not allowed it.

The pilot was silent behind his mask, a clone whose tongue she had once threatened to remove for an idle cough. He knew better now. The atmosphere within the shuttle was suffocating—not from pressurization or temperature, but from presence.

Hers.

Serina sat on a raised platform near the shuttle's rear, encased once more in the sovereign exosculpture of Tyrant's Embrace. She had not removed it since the girl knelt in devotion. The armor was more than a second skin—it was her will made manifest. The synthetic threads of her hood fell low over her brow, veiling her face in shadow as six violet lenses glowed like facets of an ancient insect. Watching. Calculating. Consuming.

The datapad in her hand flickered with streams of old Sith coordinates, code-fragments, and electromagnetic signatures scavenged from Holonet blackframes and Imperial junkcode. They painted a picture she had already known—something had reawakened on Exegol. Not just ancient machinery or orbiting wreckage. No, this wasn't accidental. Someone had breathed life into the corpse of a world better left buried.

And she knew who.

The girl had asked for safety. But Exegol did not offer safety.

Only inheritance.

She had gone there alone. Serina hadn't stopped her. She had wanted to see what the girl would choose, when faced again with the charred roots of her fear. Serina's power was not in forbidding.

It was in letting them crawl willingly into the flame.

Now she was returning to that graveyard—to the ruined heart of Sith mythos, where so many masters had fallen, and where so many pretenders now whispered like ghosts in static-choked echoes. The shuttle's sensors had picked up volatile anomalies near the debris belt. Automated defenses still flickered to life in unpredictable intervals. Interference from the planet's maelstrom core continued to distort Force presence around the site.

But that didn't matter.

The girl had gone.

And where her apprentice walked, Serina would follow—not to save her…

…but to claim her if she survived.

The lights within the shuttle dimmed slightly as the hyperdrive began deceleration procedures. The coiled talons of Serina's gauntlet tapped the edge of her armrest, one by one, slow as a ticking metronome.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

She did not feel anxiety.

She did feel something… deeper.

Something like memory.

She had walked that world once, long ago, in another name, another shape. Not yet the sovereign. Not yet this inevitability. She had stood on the altar of the dead and dared the dark to answer her call. It had. In ways she was still unraveling.

And now the girl had returned to that same place.

Not to resurrect it.

To understand it.

To make it hers.

Serina closed the datapad with a flick of her fingers. The screen died with a final, whining chime. The chamber fell into near-darkness, lit only by the intermittent flashes of the emergency systems.

A countdown appeared on the central viewport, glowing red:

Reversion in T-minus 00:00:11.

Ten.

She rose from her throne-like seat with the grace of a storm made flesh. The segmented skirts of her armor whispered against the durasteel floor, the durafiber tendrils in her cape slithering gently as she moved toward the viewport.

Nine.

Exegol waited.

Eight.

The planet that birthed monsters and buried gods.

Seven.

She did not fear it.

Six.

She had survived it.

Five.

She had become because of it.

Four.

The stars narrowed.

Three.

The Force twisted.

Two.

Something… reached.

One.

Realspace collapsed inward in a single, stuttering blink.

And there it was.

Exegol.

A broken spheroid half-wrapped in crackling ion storms and the drifting bones of orbital stations. Shattered obelisks hung in stasis between fields of metallic dust. The ancient catacombs—flooded, collapsed, but still alive—glowed faintly beneath thunderclouds so thick they could drown a sun.

 

[Miasmær]

Miasmær had come for a very simple reason, to retrieve her shuttle. From here she'd travel to Loovria, deal with personal business. The shuttle had been where she expected it to be, its cloaking device having kept it safe from any would-be scavengers brave enough to travel between the rocks of a shattered world. Inside had been her belongings: clothes, books both of knowledge and of fancy, and enough gold silverware and decorative pieces to afford most of what she needed, all salvaged from the monastery she had fled. There had been more, but it had already been used to get her to this point.

Her reason for coming to Exegol had been simple, her reason for staying was not.

She had felt something.

Her force senses were still underdeveloped, a fact she knew too well. So when something had begun pulling on her subconscious it stirred within her a sense of curiosity that needed to be satiated. It was such an odd feeling, the force or something using the force to pull on her subconscious, on her emotions.

Now she stood at the entrance to something that shouldn't have survived. The tomb had an oppressive presence in the force, a feeling of something so old and so powerful that perhaps even this remnant of it was what had kept it safe from the planet's destruction. Furthermore, the rock Miasmær now stood on held her firmly in place with a gravity of its own. Something wanted her here. It pulled on her mind to get her to step further inside the same way it pulled on her body to ensure she could take that step.

Around her was ancient stone illuminated by still burning braziers kept alive by a bubble of invisible atmosphere. Obelisks inscribed with runes she could only barely recognize surrounded her, each word glowing a dull red. Her foot rested on long-dead plants as her eyes stared inward at the sarcophagus raised on its dias.

Yet as she stood, enraptured, the presence would falter, its pull seeming more hesitent.

She had arrived.

Darth Virelia

 

[Darth Virelia]

"I will find you."

Tags - Miasmær



The storm above Exegol was not weather.

It was wrath.

Vast violet spirals tore across the sky in slow, impossible motion, not clouds but scars—rents in reality left by centuries of unholy practice. Forks of blue lightning danced between shattered spires, illuminating nothing. Even the stars had turned their faces away.

Serina did not.

The shuttle pierced the outer magnetic field with a shriek of tortured hull plating. Electromagnetic turbulence clawed at its wings like wraiths denied entry. She let it come. Let the winds scream. Let the world remember her.

The pilot veered toward a ravine just north of the ancient citadel's ruins, guided only by sensor ghosts and the trace signature she had encoded herself into the girl's mask days prior. That trace had burned to life the moment her apprentice crossed the invisible threshold of the tomb.

Serina had felt it—not in the Force—

—in the bones.

She is near.

The shuttle landed in silence on a jagged outcropping of black stone. The ramp hissed open with a guttural gasp of depressurizing seals. Smoke rolled down onto the platform like a shawl of fog, thick and clinging.

Serina stepped into the gale, and Exegol shrank.

She walked as if gravity bent for her, not the other way around—an obsidian sovereign draped in monarchic dread, flanked by the whisper of tendrils and the ever-burning glyphs of her armor. The six-lensed helm regarded the catacombs beyond, and in response, the storm paused.

It recognized her.

The last to kneel here had been zealots, monsters, and would-be emperors.

Serina had no interest in kneeling.

Her path was etched in darkness and blood, but she did not follow it.

She authored it.

And something in the ruins knew.

She descended the path with deliberate ease, the storm falling away behind her like curtains at the end of a show. Around her lay debris: bones turned to dust, crumbled statues of long-dead tyrants, shattered containment canisters, and ritual stones cracked by orbital bombardment.

All defied time.

None defied her.

As she neared the tomb's threshold, the wind ceased entirely. A deathly stillness—not of peace, but of anticipation—fell over the catacomb.

Then she saw her.

There, at the edge of the sanctum, the girl stood motionless. A red silhouette framed in still-burning braziers. The runes of the outer obelisks glowed weakly as if awed—or afraid.

And Serina knew, in that instant, that Exegol had begun to answer her apprentice.

The girl had not conquered the world.

But she had been recognized by it.

Good.

She would punish her for the risk later. But now… now was not the time for wrath.

Now was the time for confirmation.

Serina's voice came low and smooth, vibrating through the very stone beneath them:

"You heard it, didn't you."

Not a question.

A fact.

The echo of it rippled down the tomb walls like a serpent through bones. The sarcophagus beyond the dais pulsed faintly in time with her words—subterranean lights reacting, or perhaps obeying.

She stepped forward again, closing the distance slowly. Her steps were soundless, yet each one struck the senses like a drumbeat. The Force here did not resist her. It opened, reluctantly, as if unsure whether to welcome or fear her.

Serina stopped beside her, but did not look at her directly. Instead, she stared at the dais. At the long-dead husk entombed in black alchemized stone, its runes flickering like dying stars.

"Do you know who lies there?"

 

[Miasmær]

Miasmær glanced sidelong at her master as they stepped up next to her, before her gaze would return to the dias. Her skin prickled, an omen of what would come. Not now, but later. Best not to dwell on it.

"Wasn't my intention-" she pauses mid explanation. Best not to give excuses for her actions, it was done and Miasmær doubted she could dissuade any ire with simple words "No. Not exactly." she redirects her words, best to move forward with something constructive.

"I can read a few of the sigils-" she'd point at each rune as she'd speak her interpretation of its meaning "Sith Lord. Apprentices? Or a lack there of. I think the symbol shows a negative case. I-" she'd stutter a second as it dawned on her that this woman could probably read this text flawlessly, but still she carried on "I believe it to be old, at least pre-Darth Sidious' Empire. Not the tomb of a recent Sith Empire or the Brotherhood of the Maw. What I find most interesting is a lack of statues, typically tombs have depictions of the deceased. But this is... empty, by relative terms."

There it was, the pressure in her mind driving her forward. The sarcophagus called to her, reeling her in with an invisible hook and wire. Miasmær was not weak enough to be subdued by it, but the constant nagging at her senses was starting to add kindling to the simmering rage in her core. It was difficult to concentrate, to remember the histories she had consumed so vigorously under her previous master. Still, she pushed forward as she'd shift her finger to another rune

"I think this set explains their death? Poisoning? But in a metaphysical sense, not a literal poison." she'd take a deep breath before clarifying apologetically "Most of this is written in poetry, I-, well, I never studied the arts. I... wasn't sure there was any."

With a gesture around the room she'd finish her thoughts, an eager tone in her usually collected calm attitude "But someone had to build this for them. And a lack of apprentices makes me believe they were important; a sage, inventor, or someone else deserving of a tomb made by strangers. Though not so important to make it more... public?"

She falls silent, trying to pace her racing thoughts. This is why she had come to Exegol in the first place, to commune with the lords of old. To delve deep to find lost knowledge and artifacts. She had been rejected and now something had its hooks in her. Yet as Miasmær looked towards Serina she felt at ease, the presence recoiling as if knowing Miasmær was not theirs for the taking. It was both comforting, and terrifying.

This had been the most she had spoken to her master in their brief time together. Was this a good thing? Or perhaps a sign of weakness. It was dangerous to let others know what you found interesting, any information could be used against you. So as Miasmær's gaze returned to the sarcophagus directly in front of her she awaited the inevitable, what ever that would be.

Darth Virelia