Mistress of Silence
[Rite of the Still Veil Holocron]
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
- Intent: Create a Holocron With Ritual Content
- Image Credit: Google Geminin - via Myself
- Canon: N/A
- Permissions: N/A
- Links: N/A
- Holocron Name: Rite of the Still Veil Holocron
- Alignment: Dark Side
- Origin: Darth Keres
- Affiliation: Order of the Silencers
- Gatekeeper:
- The Gatekeeper of the Rite of the Still Veil Holocron manifests as a wan specter draped in the illusion of flesh long since surrendered to dust. Its visage flickers between the living and the lifeless—an archivist of dread wisdom whose eyes are pools of dim starfire, eternally reflecting unseen catacombs. Its voice is the slow echo of a tomb sealing; each syllable weighed with aeons of sorrow and forbidden remembrance. Shadows cling to it like mourners, and from its presence emanates the chill of ancient crypts, where forgotten rites once silenced the screams of the faithful. To gaze upon it is to feel the faint pull of the grave—an invitation to knowledge that devours the soul as surely as the dark devours light.
- Description:
- Darth Keres' orange and black holocron thrums with a malign vitality, as though it were not crafted but grown from the marrow of extinguished stars. Its black facets drink in the light around it, while veins of molten orange pulse like sluggish blood through obsidian arteries. The air near it hums with a low, sorrowful resonance—half whisper, half lament—echoing the screams of those who once sought its secrets. When it opens, the glow it releases is not illumination but corruption, a sickly radiance that paints the walls in the hues of decay. To touch it is to feel eternity gaze back, cold and curious, from the abyss between thought and nightmare.
- Accessibility: To even activate the holocron, the seeker must pass through three mental thresholds:
- The Test of Composure: The holocron floods the mind with echoes of one’s fears and silences; panic causes instant rejection.
- The Test of Insight: The holocron presents paradoxes about the nature of absence and the unspoken truths of the Force; failure traps the mind in recursive thought-loops.
- The Test of Surrender: The final lock demands the user yield their ego, entering a meditative silence that mirrors the Void itself. Only then does the holocron awaken its geometric core and reveal its contents.
- Security: The alchemized security defense of Darth Keres' holocron — that is where the line between artifact and living curse dissolves entirely.
It is not merely protected by the Force, but forged through Sith alchemy so that its own matter becomes aware, reactive, and predatory. The holocron carries an alchemical reflex: every act of aggression against it or failure to properly open it is inverted and reflected.- Attempt to drain its energy, and it attempts to drains you.
- Attempt to corrupt its crystal, and it attempts to corrupts your midichlorians.
- Attempt to shatter it, and the shattering attempts to rebound into your mind, attempting to breaking your sense of self into mirrored fragments whispering in reverse.
CONTENT INFORMATION
The Rite of the Still Veil is the most dreaded and sacred ceremony within the legacy of Darth Keres—a ritual whispered of in the darkest corners of Sith archives but never recorded in full. To scholars, it was blasphemy against both the Light and the Dark; to her disciples, it was transcendence through annihilation. To Darth Keres herself, it was the moment she ceased to be a woman and became something the galaxy could no longer properly name.
The rite was not performed to the Silence, but with it—an invitation, a beckoning, a merging of consciousness and absence. It required solitude, not as meditation, but as abandonment. No witnesses could survive it.
- The Chamber of Severance
She chose for her altar a place beneath the world—a hollow carved into the bones of an ancient catacomb where time itself seemed to hang in suspension. The walls were black stone veined with veins of violet ichor that pulsed faintly, as though the rock itself possessed a slow, sick heartbeat. No torch would burn there for long; flames bent inward, strangled by the heavy air.
At the center stood a circular dais engraved with spiraling runes that converged upon an obsidian mirror—the symbolic threshold between existence and its reflection. The mirror had no reflection to give. It drank light, sound, and the tremors of life until the chamber quivered with dread stillness. Darth Keres would enter robed in black, the fabric stitched with thread of silver ash gathered from cremated kyber. In her hand she carried no weapon, for the rite demanded she bring nothing that could cut—only that which could yield.
- The Preparation
Before the rite began, she spent three days in sensory deprivation. Her acolytes sealed her within a coffin of basalt submerged in cold, viscous water drawn from a subterranean lake where no echo returned. She lay awake, motionless, until her mind began to erode at the edges—thoughts stretching thin, memories dissolving into pale fragments. When the coffin was opened, her eyes were devoid of reflection, her voice hoarse from disuse.
On the night of the rite, she drew a circle around herself in powdered bone mixed with her own blood, chanting an ancient litany that had no language—only rhythm, a cadence that mimicked the heartbeat of the galaxy slowing to stillness. Her words were carried not on breath but on will.
- The Descent into Silence
When the final chant ended, she invoked the first command of the Still Veil: "Let all things that speak forget their sound."
The chamber would change; faint drips of condensation ceasing mid-fall. The air thickened. Her pulse slowed until it was little more than a whisper. Then came the absence. It was not quiet—it was a presence of stillness, a suffocating pressure that crushed all motion. The veil fell. The shadows deepened into liquid forms, writhing like smoke forced through glass. Her reflection in the obsidian mirror began to twitch independently, its movements lagging behind hers, then surpassing them—until she no longer knew which image was the original. The reflection opened its mouth, and from within came nothing—a sound that devoured all others, a silence so deep it became a vibration felt in the bones. Keres trembled as her own breath was drawn from her lungs by the unseen force, her heartbeat stilled completely, and the Force itself around her went mute.
- The Revelation
In that eternal stillness, she beheld the Void—not as darkness, but as absence personified, vast and endless, where the Force did not flow but slept. From it, tendrils of faint violet light coiled toward her, whispering in non-sound, shaping thoughts that were not hers:
{"There is no balance. No discord. Only the pause between them."}
Her consciousness was unmade and remade within that pause. Her body hovered between life and non-being, her form flickering between flesh and shadow. Her soul was stripped of all resonance until it matched the tone of the Silence itself. When her eyes opened, they glowed faintly with violet light—an echo of the nothing she had seen.
- The Sealing of the Veil
When the rite reached its end, Darth Keres exhaled for the first time in what might have been hours or centuries. The sound that escaped her lips was not breath but a low hum—like wind moving through the corridors of a dead temple. Her reflection on the mirror did not vanish; it remained, imprisoned within the glass, its mouth still moving silently. She took a shard from the edge of that mirror and pressed it into her flesh, letting her blood seep into the runes. The chamber quaked, the shadows shuddered, and the sigils around her flared with deep amethyst flame. The Silence, now bound to her, sank into her body like smoke into stone. When it was over, she fell to her knees, neither alive nor dead, surrounded by a stillness so complete that even the Force dared not stir.
- The Aftermath
From that night onward, those who encountered Darth Keres swore she carried the Veil within her. In her presence, sound dulled, thoughts slowed, and even the Force itself seemed to hesitate. She no longer spoke above a whisper, for her voice carried the cold pressure of the Void; her words silenced rooms. She later taught her disciples that the Rite was not an act of power, but of surrender—of dissolving the self into the cosmic quiet that lies beneath creation. But few ever attempted it, for those who did were said to never return from their trance.
Her holocron, forged in the aftermath, described it best:
{"The Still Veil is not a barrier—it is a mirror turned inward. Step through it, and you will find not oblivion, but yourself unspoken."}
HISTORICAL INFORMATION
The black and orange holocron of Darth Keres, the vessel that entombed the secrets of the Rite of the Still Veil, was said to be the most dreadful of her creations—a reliquary not merely of knowledge, but of transformation. It did not contain the ritual so much as it remembered it. Those who dared approach it reported a sensation of being watched by something vast and silent that waited patiently for their first mistake.
The holocron, known in the forbidden lexicons of the Silencers as The Ember of the Veil, was unlike any holocron forged before or after it. Where Sith holocrons burned with red or bled with the dark pulse of the Force, this one seemed to breathe—a dim, smoldering object that glowed not with power, but with remembrance. Its creation was neither ritual nor craft, but an act of slow and deliberate unmaking, a blasphemy committed in solitude against the very fabric of sound and time; for it was said to burn without flame, consuming only the spirit of those who listened too long.
Where her black and violet holocron—TheNull Sigil—had been a record of revelation, the black and orange holocron was a record of consequence. It chronicled not discovery, but surrender. Darth Keres designed it not to teach the Rite, but to preserve its resonance—to imprison within crystal the psychic residue of what she had invoked, so that none but the truly unmade could endure its call.