Public Shadows of Yoggoy

[Vesta]

Dark Matter​

Crunch, grind, crunch.

Heavy boots ground carelessly into the soil and grass. The planet's star was beginning to set, nearly half of its luminous height submerged beneath the horizon, but despite the growing shadow that took the place of fleeting light it seemed that the world was only just beginning to come to life. Insects that had been silent began to hum, not unlike the native Killik that stirred in the great mounds that made up their homes, and the natural weariness that had been apparent on her face began to fade. Red eyes, like hot embers in a dying fire, glanced around as the piles of churned up and shaped earth that the Killik hives' were made of slowly increased in number. She could feel them, down there and above, just as well as she could hear them - their voices, the whispers. The complacency, the quiet murmurs of conservative thought and memories of yesteryear, spoke to her of their belief that life as it was would simply.. go on.

They were hardly suspect that it was quickly coming to a close.

"You are not us."

Her head turned at the voice, turning fully as she caught sight of the arrival, and she grinned at the beastly visage of a towering Killik. Its chitinous frame gave it an intimidating height yet it wasn't she who seemed cautious out of the two. "We are not you." It reiterated, lowering a large polearm that seemed straight out of the war these creatures had had millennia ago with the Rakata. "No, but you will be." She whispered as the weapon fell to the floor with a dull thud. She could feel the panic spread immediately through the surroundings, the fear as the Killik collapsed in a lifeless heap, and knew then that the hive understood what had appeared on its doorstep - and that the fear would call for others to help them do what they knew they could not.

"All of you will be."

 

[Onrai]

And so you again stand to bring the blight of Gorog upon the favored insects of the Celestials. The familiar ethereal tone was something Darth Mori had not heard in some time - not since the one from whose lips it uttered transitioned her to a form of existence so unnatural, so anathema to the ways of reality and the Force itself. Onrai was familiar with the Killik, who had once been guided by those known as the Ones to create weapons of terrible power, most of which no longer existed in any form that could be divined through the sifting of their ruins. Of the taint that ran within the Killik hive mind, there were few who knew of how it came to be and fewer still who understood how to commune with it.

Such was why she was here, though not necessarily in the way she believed Mori would expect. The shade manifested before her, a being whose very existence desecrated the fabric of realspace as did her namesake and forebears.

"You wish to bring the darkness of Tharagorrogaraht out of them yet again, I presume. Or has the heart not told the body of its fallen sister's secrets?"

 

[Vesta]

She could feel them as they approached, see the murderous rage that burned in their hearts as they steeled themselves to kill the woman that had unceremoniously siphoned the life from one of their one, long before the blasters were raised, before the spears were lifted and at the ready. They were like little insects pouring out of the tunnels that led into their mounds, the dozens of them moving about in a frenzy, as they swarmed the position where one Killik had been forcibly cut from the hive. What they found was not what they had seen, however - there was no trespasser, not even the scent of her perfume lingering in the air. There were only a handful of signs that she had ever existed, dead Killik aside, like the careless footprints that had led to where she had been standing minutes before. The colony's warriors and defenders spread out to search the area beyond the cluster of mounds for the humanoid murderer.

They hadn't known to suspect a shapeshifter in their midst, however.

'You wouldn't find yourself asking so many questions if you stopped making these assumptions.' She thought, her words shared through telepathic means as she cautiously stepped into one of the many tunnels that led into a rather large mound at the heart of the colony. Onrai was a schemer, someone who made careful arrangements to her own benefit and always tried to see the meaning in whatever it was others were doing. All of her life she had been surrounded by such people, individuals not quite unlike the spectre that seemed to haunt her now as she masqueraded herself as a Killik in order to travel unnoticed. The longer she went without being found out the more likely she was to be noticed as one that did not belong to the collective mind of the hive, and the more likely it was that the usual suspects - namely Jedi and Imperials - were to arrive to help the colony.

'I have bigger plans.'

 

[Onrai]

You wouldn't find so many questions if you offered more answers, but answers are not always the best answers. Onrai replied in an erratically straightforward manner. The wraith's presence generated only feelings of confusion within the collective mind - she felt it, billions of collective cognitions coalesced into a gestalt overmind. How much knowledge swam within the mind, even corrupted as it was with the fantasies and illusions of innumerable Joiners over the millennia. Perhaps the confusion of an intruding presence similar to its own would aid the Dark Voice, or perhaps it would lead to greater consequences.

If the return of Gorog to the Killik is not the aspirations of the left-handed goddess, what would you do? And what would you have me do? Onrai inquired. There was indeed much to be done here - the Killik were a force beyond reckoning with a singular mind to guide them, though for such a mind to guide them as opposed to be buried within their greater union was something yet to be seen.

Perhaps one would be powerful enough to exert such a force.

Darth Mori