Private STRINGS OF THE SERPENT | Whispers in Velvet

[Darth Virelia]

STRINGS OF THE SERPENT | Whispers in Velvet
Location: Garden of Perpetual Dusk, Rakata Prime
Objective: Teach the art of corruption.
Allies: Ellissanthia
Opposing Force: ???
Tags: ???​

The garden breathed.

Each flower was a lung. Each vine, a vein. The soil beneath the blackened lilies still steamed with half-spoken curses, and the obsidian trees creaked and wept atonement in the breeze—a breeze that didn't come from anywhere. Not truly. It sighed from between the cracks of worlds, from fissures rent open by Sith alchemy and whispered prayer, from beneath stone where hearts had once beat in time with hope and now beat only for her.

The Garden of Perpetual Dusk had no sun, no moon, no sky. It lived beneath Rakata Prime, in a sanctum of heat and velvet silence carved by will and flame. Its shadows were not absence of light, but presence of a different truth—Serina's truth.

It had been her hands that tilled this soil, centuries-old volcanic loam saturated with ashes stolen from Jedi pyres and Sith tombs alike. Her sweat had made the roots grow. Her blood had sweetened the buds. With the patient elegance of a spider spinning its first web, she had cultivated every bloom and bulb through ritual, through pain, through the unspeakable ecstasies of Sith alchemy that made even the weeds sing.

And oh, how they sang.

Some with pheromones that invaded memory.
Others with spores that glimmered like constellations and clung to lashes and lips.
Still others released nothing but an emotion—want, despair, hunger, guilt—like perfume.

Their voices wove together in a song of slow ruin, and at its center—Serina sat enthroned.

The throne was grown, not built. A twisted sculpture of living bone-white thorn and petrified heartwood, it curved around her like an embrace, its spines rising into a crown behind her head. Her posture was one of calculated sloth: one arm draped over the throne's armrest, her legs lazily crossed, the side of her face resting against the back of one gloved hand. Her robes—those dark silken layers embroidered with crimson runes and slashed open to reveal alabaster thigh and the gentle rise of bare shoulder—cascaded like oil across the throne and floor.

She exhaled. Slowly. Sensually.

Around her, the garden pulsed in time with her breath.

Today was no ordinary day. Today, Serina would begin the second most sacred of rites: the delicate art of corruption. Not with blade. Not with fire. But with the force of feeling, of need, of belonging. Not every soul had to be shattered. Some could be stolen.

And she had just the right little Undine in mind.

But before the lesson, came the ambiance. The mood. The rhythm of the scene, constructed as carefully as a poem—if the poem were written in sweat and secrets.

Her prisoners had not yet stopped praying.

Across the garden, beneath the low arch of weeping amaranth vines, a woman knelt in trembling rapture. A former Jedi, now something less. Or perhaps, something more. No chains bound her wrists. No gag stilled her tongue. Her chains were made of memory and misplaced desire. Her tongue chanted Serina's name.

And Serina allowed her to.

She liked the sound of worship laced with shame.

The woman had been given no water for three days—only wine laced with root-serum and sugared poisons. No sleep, save beneath the glow of the dream-thorns that whispered lullabies of surrender. No company, save the garden itself, whose breath came warmer when she wept.

Serina watched her now. With the gaze of a sculptor regarding a marble torso mid-carve. Her lips parted slightly—not to speak, but to taste the atmosphere.

It was ready.

Almost.

She leaned forward. One long-fingered hand descended from the throne to a nearby pedestal of fused obsidian glass, where a chalice waited. Black metal, etched in curling vines, filled to the rim with crimson wine so dark it gleamed like blood from the heart of a sun.

She sipped. Slowly.

The taste: aged Catharese vintage—cut with something ancient and thick. She closed her eyes as the first drop passed her lips.

It was time.

A presence approached. Distant, but not unwelcome.

She felt it before she heard it. That subtle ripple across the garden's ambient current—the brush of a foot against silken moss, the flutter of robes caught in psychic scent. The garden shifted, vines twitching as if in anticipation, petals parting to allow the newcomer a path forward.

Serina set the chalice aside with a soft clink.

She rose, movements unhurried and poised, her long silhouette stretching upward like a black flame unfurling into bloom. The silks clung to her like ivy, glimmering as they caught the bioluminescent pollen drifting through the air.

One step forward. Then two. Her hips swayed with feline grace, her gaze sharpening like the tip of a vibrodagger as she turned toward the approaching threshold.

She did not need to see Ellissanthia to know her.

She could already smell her—a faint note of fear wrapped in duty, laced with salt and memory. It excited her.

"Come," she murmured, though the door had not yet opened.

"Let us begin."

And the garden opened its mouth to receive its next song.

 

[Ellissanthia]

Location: Garden of Perpetual Dusk, Rakata Prime
Attire: White Outfit
Notable Personal Effects: Storm Kiss
Objective: Learn the art of corruption.
Tag: Darth Virelia

Into the garden, she stepped.

Lilies trembled their perfume into the air, mingling with the musk of tilled earth and the whispering song of spore-laden weeds. The scent coiled around Ellissanthia in the manner of a dream—reminding her of the fungal gardens she had once helped maintain in the Kaijian Abyss, before she had been brought into the Kabal, before her humiliating failure in the Sith Academy, and before her ascent in the Eclipse Sect.

An ascent that might one day be fully complete.

And this, Ellissanthia knew, was naught but one step on that climb; albeit, a meaningful one. The Undine trusted Serina enough to know that the woman would not have called her here without purpose or something that might ultimately see them both benefit. Thus, as the garden opened itself before her, petals shivering apart to beckon her down a path, Ellissanthia followed, her footfalls as light as spores on the wind.

And soon, her eyes shifted towards where Serina stood.

Serina waited before her throne—a cradle of ivory thorns and heartwood that seemed capable of forming a precarious embrace around its occupant, for its spines might be capable of cutting flesh. On the pedestal adjacent to the throne was a chalice, a construction of black metal and engraved vines, brimming with wine the hue of essence from a slit throat.

The Undine gazed briefly upon both items, before turning her attention back towards Serina, full and undivided in its scope.

“I am ready,” Ellissanthia replied, her tone trembling like a plucked harpstring. Then, with a deep inhalation of richly scented air, she knelt, the damp earth cool beneath her knees. Her forehead was inclined not to the ground—but to the hem of Serina’s robes.

“I am ready to learn, Master.”

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Corruption."

Tags - Ellissanthia



The word Master fell like a kiss into the soil.

It echoed, not in volume, but in meaning—a resonance that passed through the Garden of Perpetual Dusk like a ripple over dark water. The vines shivered. The lilies, those little lungs of perfumed compulsion, exhaled all at once. The air thickened, warmed. And Serina stood still in it, as if listening to a melody only she could hear.

She allowed the silence to linger. Let it sink its claws into the moment.

Let her feel it.
Let her drown in it.

The Undine had knelt.

The Undine had named her Master.

Oh, how easily those two small things could shape a fate.

Serina descended—not collapsed, not crouched, but descended, like a wraith might lower itself over a corpse. Every inch of her movement was an act of sovereignty. The silks around her legs hissed softly as they folded beneath her, black serpents surrendering to gravity's will. She knelt with Ellissanthia, not beside her, but just enough to tower over even on her knees.

Her gloved hand reached out. Not to strike. Not to offer. Simply to hover—two fingers raised near Ellissanthia's cheek, a breath's width away.

"No, Mistress is preferable." she whispered.

Not a denial. A refinement.

"You are ready to want."

The fingers hovered closer, tracing the phantom outline of Ellissanthia's jaw without touching it. Her voice, low and terrible in its tenderness, curved around every syllable like a blade sheathed in velvet.

"To learn from me is not an act of intellect. It is not theory or lecture or the brittle catechisms of dead men preaching from ash. To learn from me—" her head tilted slowly, the corner of her mouth curling into something cruel and exquisite, "—is to become something that should not exist. It is to hollow out the girl who walked in here and pour something richer, stranger, and starving into her place."

A breath.

Then she touched her. Just barely.

Two fingers pressed beneath Ellissanthia's chin, lifting her face so that their eyes might meet—Serina's a furnace behind veils of obsidian ice, ancient and awake.

"I will not teach you. I will rebuild you."

The garden moaned its approval, the leaves folding inward as if to watch more closely.

"I will plant the roots of something in you so vile and so beautiful that you will never again walk under starlight without hearing it sing in your marrow. You will crave the dark like it is breath. Like it is blood."

Her hand slid along Ellissanthia's jaw, cupping it now. Intimate. Inevitable.

"But only if you mean it."

Another silence. This one heavy as stone.

Then—Serina smiled.

The chalice waited, its surface damp with condensation despite the heat of the garden. The wine within shimmered with a luster too deep to be natural—a velvet darkness kissed by glints of garnet and emberlight, as though a dying sun had wept into the cup and bled its last warmth into the liquid.

Serina did not move from her kneel. She merely watched Ellissanthia, her hand withdrawing in a slow, almost regretful caress, as if reluctant to break the contact. But the moment demanded progression.

"The wine is not poison," she said, her voice the softness of a shroud being drawn across something sacred. "It will not enslave you, nor will it burn you from within."

A pause. The ghost of a smile.

"That would be far too simple."

Her gaze flicked briefly to the chalice.

"It is memory."

A beat of silence. Then:

"Fermented in the catacombs beneath Korriban. The vintage is Catharese, aged in volcanic glass casks sealed with resin drawn from the blackroot trees of Ziost. Subtle, smoky. I had it laced with a distillate of vermilion poppy—nothing more. Just enough to open doors. Not the kind that swing on hinges, but the kind you've forgotten how to knock upon."

She rose again, slowly, her height unfurling as if she had never knelt at all. Her robes whispered across the earth.

"It will not make you see visions. It will not bend your will. But it will show you—very quietly, very intimately—the part of you that already knelt before you ever walked in."

The light around the chalice dimmed slightly, not from any change in the air, but from the way the shadows seemed to curl closer around it, like petals folding in before bloom.

"Drink," Serina said, her voice lower now, velvet and command braided as one.

She gestured toward the chalice on the obsidian pedestal, the wine within no longer simply wine.

"Let the first sacrament pass your lips. Then we may begin."