Submersion

[Ras'kala'han]

| S | u | b | m | e | r | s | i | o | n |​

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Quiet streets - the sign of a dead city. Quiet lives, the mark of a dying people - slowly and humiliatingly dying, rotting to nothing from within. Darth Il did not hope for such a fate for his world, he did not wish to allow it, yet he saw the marks of it everywhere he passed by, like a disease. In absence of the hymns, of the prayers of imploration, of the bells or the clamor of squabbling gladiators or the ringing of slave-miners' picks against stone, in the reprieves between the constant business that he mandated, there was still that awful quiet, like the increasingly long pauses between the last gasps of a dying man.

In spite of this, on occasion, the Givin would seek the profound silence. At the reverse pinnacle of one of the inverted pyramids thrusting downwards from the central city, his one refuge from the maddening circular ceremonies of the ambitionless nobles, long ago resigned to the damnation of their planet to an alien Galaxy absent all life save them and the nameless hordes that barred all possibility of escape, growth, or conquest, was the Dark Lord's chamber: the private residence of whomever ruled Nagath, the Last City.

The upper tier of the chamber was filled to the brim with screens, books, with accumulated papers organized and laid out on the floor in meticulous seeming-chaos, the fruits of the designs of all those before him, and what he would leave to whomever came after, but that, now, was not of interest. If Il put his thoughts on paper now, it would look less like words and more like bubbling, black stab wounds of ink, it would look like ugly scares of hopelessness and hate. Now, his frustration at his people's imprisonment in their perfect microcosm of darkness had reached its fever pitch, and it was time reap the harvest of his sewn resentment.

The lower chamber - his own secret design, commissioned in utter confidence. This was his retreat: a coffin, oversized and ornate, in the likeness of some austere, ancient pureblood. Each touch of artistry covered circuitry and wiring, screws and levers and buttons, but it mattered little to him, as all he needed was to touch each with the invisible hand of the Force as he reclined within it. As the lid shut, darkness washed over him. The device let out an airy hiss as the atmosphere pushed out of it, replaced by liquid of neutral temperature, filling the hollows of his sunken sockets. The Lord let out a slow exhalation, bubbles racing away, leaving him as in an empty void.

Waiting a few moments in this utter deprivation, again Darth Il used the touch of the Force to push yet another lever, and the floor opened up beneath him. Drifting down on the slow push of a repulsor, the coffin slowly swept through the air away from the city, down into the embrace of the acid lake beneath them, the remains of what chemicals were used to carve the underground hollow in which the city, the hissing hostile sea that was the last destination of all unwanted things in Nagath, and the secret meditation pool of its leader.

As it reached the surface of the acid, the coffin's force-field pushed the liquid downwards, creating a small bubble of empty space to avoid being dissolved like common garbage, finding rest gently on the bottom. Here, there would be no disturbances, there would be no danger. There was no time, no day or night to be determined by the pulsations of artificial suns and the ringing of the bells.

This was the place where he could reckon with the stillness of death. Hate shining against a tapestry of nothingness, Il drifted on the currents of his hatred through the void, his presence winding in an outwards spiral: the lake, the city, the planet - casting a wide net, combing the absent stars of the doomed void to seek his center, expanding his perception through and beyond time and space to plumb the Dark Side, the one thing that he could trust.

[member="Darth Voracitos"]​

 

[Darth Voracitos]

Peace is a lie, there is only Hunger​

Through Hunger, I gain Desire​

Through Desire, I gain Want​

Through Want, I gain Gluttony​

Through Gluttony my girth shall Devour​

The Force shall be my feast​

This was the mantra, the Dark Lord had chosen, after living what felt as decades within the Netherworld of the Force, a place of writhing agony full of such hunger, of desire and want. It was full of innumerable souls within the interim of life and oblivion, a state separate from even the difference between realspace... and all other states of reality. Where death occurred, whether they be on the surface of a planet, or in hyperspace, or elsewhere, all paths lead to the Netherworld.

The gateway to Oblivion itself. The great Void.

Though much for the Dark Lord had changed, since his death, his imprisonment, since his tenure in hell, Darth Voracitos remained the same power-hungering tyrant, ever searching, ever finding that which he desired. There was no end to the sight, the reach, of Darth Voracitos, just as there was no end to the starving masses, an end to the lost and misguided. Wherever famine exist, Voracitos was there to tighten it. Wherever there was the lost and misguided, Voracitos was there to find for them their guidance in his desires.

That was the reason why the Coven of Gluttony was created, deep within the Den of Decadence, Voracitos had promised the powers of the Netherworld, and his Tapestry of Souls to a dozen Sith Lords and Knights. Foolish, The Dark Lord thought with a withered smile. Every one became part of the Tapestry, marked into a Coven with his hungering desires, suffering into his devouring touch.

Meditating upon the force, deep within an Alcove to his own within the Den of Decadence, the Sith Lord fell into the force, swirling with the debauchery and carnal pleasures of his own paradise. The Dark Side permeated every corner with his presence, the girth of his power stretched for the length of every web he had created in the Tapestry he wore and sewn into himself. Some strands, stretched as far as across the galaxy, but the bulk of his power was here, in this place of unrelenting sin and famine, absorbed in the suffering masses.

"Leave me... least, you join them." Voracitos rumbled seated upon a Throne with four legs and a thousand faces billowing in the dead-still air. A hundred withered forms huddle around the Dark Lord, chained to his Throne in long lines. A pair of servile Knights to the Coven, Hungered Vassals to his will, bowed silently, before quietly making haste out of the tall double doors, closing each behind them as they left. In moments, the huddle masses of withering flesh and bone threw their hands to the air, as a devouring darkness seem to pervade the air, allowing the screams of famine and death fill Voracitos as his eyes upturned and closed in a blissful trance of hellish cacophony.

Then, in this maddening meditation...

... a vision came.

 

[Ras'kala'han]

"Show me the truth."

The vision was clear, insistent - it came quick to the mind, resonating with it, filling the mouth of the Sith Lord with the taste of dust, and pulling him along, the currents of thought and prophecy carrying him wherever they wished, showing him whatever they wished - and what he saw, the Lord of Gluttony could see, though as peering through mist and shadow, their two spirits pulled towards on a collision course.

Uribin: the planet he ruled, the planet on which he was born, the planet on which he was certain he would meet with death. Its surface flayed by the force of the Charon's anti-life Jihad, seen through the lens of time in each moment: thick, leafy forests crumbling and withering beneath lances of crimson light, the planet as a molten newborn, and the planet as it was now, a bleached-white, cracked sphere of rock and dust, fraught with a quality of frailty as though setting foot on the broken stone would disperse the planet in a puff of smoke.

The rites, the sound of the droning prayers - the Ur, that high priest with a predator's smile who he would glimpse across the long promenades, surrounded by clamoring cultists, offering severed extremities and bleeding wounds for his blessing. "Kraujas Tsisottoi!" the celebrants screamed, ecstatic in the passage of the holy tongue through their lips. "Blood for the Sith!"

Darth Il grimaced, the body of shaped dreamstuff he wore while being whisked along the pathways of dark animus reaching out with a clawed hand as though for something to seize, though it passed through as but rippling water. "I need him, but what for?"

"He will serve you, you must dominate him. He shall light the path, you must listen to him. He will betray you, lay down your life to him."

Again, he grasped at shadows. This time, it was the sky of Otherspace, tearing open, the rift of gray and black, rending like paper before the talons of a K'lor Slug, suddenly giving way to that image that so tantalized him in his dreams, tempted him, that confused him - histories of the place before showed such things as this, but were they not refugees from the end of life itself?

"Why must you show me this?"

"It shall all belong to you. It is your future and your past. It is the maw that will devour you."

More nonsense. More conflicting answers - the future was always moving, and he was at the eye of the storm. He needed only stillness, and he brought his will to bear against the discord of confusion, demanding with his will - asserting himself - hoping to stay a moment longer, glean a moment's insight, and he reached out one last time - and found a thread to follow, a pathway to move along. Pulling on the cords of the spider's web, he grasped harshly, straining for a vision, and he came into the presence of a shadow, a silhouette of a million mouths, slowly peeling away to reveal an alien spiritual presence.

It was dark. It was danger - yet it was like nothing he had seen. In a liminal space, halfway between the real and the Other, where the black nothing and its bright stars collided with the stormy hellscape of the otherworld, he faced the alien in his body of spirit, his favored guise - a death's head, robed in liquid darkness.

"Do you have the answers I seek?" He spoke sternly, absent pride and humility. Both he had discarded, they would weigh him down on his journeys through space and time - he could take them up later, but for now all that he needed was his steel.

[member="Darth Voracitos"]​

 

[Darth Voracitos]

"Ghaa!" The Dark Lord uttered in echoes, feeling as though the fibers of his heart were being strung like a harp, amateurishly, by a fool who knew only how to sound the horn of the hunt. The room of a thousand hands rippled, each hand falling and rising to screams which were uniformly synchronous in their nonconformity. A fat, corpulent, heavy hand struck out before him, each finger like the maw of some unknowable horror, and immediately a row of hands rose up, as far as they would go, and instantly a cord struck through their hearts. Each began to wither... skin to dust, meat to ash, bone to marrow. All was consumed to calm the assault upon his farthest reaching webs. Once the pain subsided, the Lord redirected his energies to curiosity.

"What it is that tugs upon my wandering soul, now?" The Lord said irksomely, in reference to the folly of his hunt within the Netherworld of the Force, for a fulfillment he never found, which had tugged gently at his heart... not so brutishly as whatever desperate force now beckoned the Lord of Gluttony. A whisper, just out of reach of his minds own thoughts, suddenly - subtly - penetrated the skull of his spirit. An imperceptible offense to the fortress of his mind.

"His desire shall be yours, thus serve him. His path is dark, thus guide him. His life is yours, thus betray his to you."

The Dark Lord gritted his teeth, gnashing them together as rage filled his being, and found himself slipping from the realm of his physical being, hoisted higher by the strings of his spirit. He opened his mouth and a hundred peeled open around him, magnifying into a thousand, and a thousands' thousand, devouring ever higher, ever deeper into this nest of madness. Riding upon the flow of horror, his tongue lashing shadow began to ingest the existence that now held so dearly to his heart, but found no grasp upon the puppeteer.

Voracitos called out only in obscenities into the great void, filling it with his perversions, the deformities of his voice becoming themselves the maws of terrible abominations which screamed and created calamity before being eaten by the teeth which gnashed and created them. Each tongue both a womb and poisoned whip.

"None shall belong to you. It shall neither be your past nor future. All of it you shall consume."

What spoke did not concern the Lord of Gluttony, but the prophetic verbiage which seemed to reverberate upon his chords did. What held the authority to speak of what his own free will shall decide? The Dark Lord was purely rage, nothing but an avatar of devouring anger.

"Do you have the answers I seek?" A death's head chattered into the only void which his abomination did not fill with the girth of his consumption, cloaked in darkness. His path is dark, thus guide him... The thought forced its presence down the throat of his minds mouth. A thousand voices emanated from his hundred throats, each with a bitter "no!". But all were silenced by one maw, which ruled all mouths, quaking their liminal reality with a resounding affirmation, making all voices which screamed and thrashed and chattered, as little more than whispers of flies over a rotting corpse. When the obscenity was finished, the voices incoherent came rarely together:

"I am the answer you seek."​

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[member="Sintel Kay"]​

 

[Ras'kala'han]

Swirling in form of spirit, Darth Il still could feel his hands twitch in his physical body, his arms instinctively starting the motion to cover his ears from the thunderous blast of sound that rang in his mind. This being was unlike any he had seen, no, anything he had so much as dreamt of, not even using the Force on a different scale, but seemingly intertwined with it in a way he could scarcely imagine. Perhaps he was speaking with one of the demons of ancient legend, or a facet of the Dark Side itself, but there was a spark of life behind it - something not separate from mortality, but transcending it. He was filled with fear and fascination in equal measure.

There was a part of Lord Il's mind that was outside his passion, apart from all his sentiment and suffering, his refuge from it - he stepped back into it, and examined the situation. This thing 'was' the answer he sought - what did that mean? Was he to learn from it directly, or was he to learn from its qualities, the ferocious gluttony he sensed bleeding from its vast power. Or perhaps it was this web that the ferocious, spidery being was entangled in... there were too many variables to be certain. It was terrible and otherworldly, literally of another world, but he could not be certain of anything. He needed to press further for inquiry.

"If you are the answer I seek, I would know the answer." ​Absent in his voice was impetuousness, he was far from disagreeable - and even, almost, humble, though he did not actively bow or scrape, or grovel. To do so would be unseemly, and foster only disrespect, perhaps even more than genuine disrespect. He was simply... asking a question. "I have sojourned from the farthest reaches of Darkness, and it was my people who escaped the end of civilization - we survived the apocalypse. I am the Dark Lord of the last of the living Sith - and I would know what mystery you wish to reveal, that I may know how to lead the Order to its destiny."

Then again, perhaps there was no destiny, only the emptiness of the dead stars - no, the Force was still alive, and the great powers still worked through it. He was certain it would yield up its secrets and show him a future - any future, and not the slow, geriatric oblivion of civilization turning to merely the act of living.

[member="Darth Voracitos"]​

 

[Darth Voracitos]

His desire shall be yours, thus serve him... a voice reminded the Dark Lord, as the Lord of Gluttony rippled within his presence at the idea this presence before was a 'Dark Lord of the Sith'. What manner of Dark Lord could there be, if there is not even a single subject in which to rule or teach? In contrast to the incomprehensible girth of his presence, this wist-like being before him was Lord of a darkened void which threatened to swallow his own presence hungrily, if not for the consuming nature of his mass. The Lord of Gluttony would introduce only famine to an already starving subject.

Trusting his feelings, Lord Voracitos heeded the words which were uttered to him, though not without resistance.

"Lord? Dark Lord of the Sith? You are Lord only of emptiness." The Sith rumbled in a thousand echoes, "I would consume you, if such would not introduce the taint of your lonely 'otherness'." The Dark Lord expressed a rippling rage, reverberating against the endless surface of their shared vision. The weight of his existence expanding ever great into this expanse-less abyss, and through his hungering mass, it was starting to collapse. Though summoned beyond his will (perhaps both out of time and space), curiosity struck the corpulent one... what mysterious force brought their respective forms to each other? What manner of bait did his spiritual web provide, that would catch something so - otherly. Darth Voracitos resolved to find out, and to dedicate such time to locate the true source of the voice which commanded him with prophesies. After a moments pause of his cacophonous voice, he resumed.

"Your answer is the spirit of Darth Voracitos, Shadow Emperor, Pillar of Knowledge, Master of Souls, and Lord of Gluttony. You've found purchase in the intangible web of my existence, which bridges our worlds..." Though this knowledge was only speculative on Voracitos' part, it was the only reasonable explanation for his summoning, when dealing with a figure so clearly separate from his reality, or any reality he knew of (of which he knew several).

"I may broker to you, a piece of my soul, in service to your destiny, of which I may anoint you its tentative master." The Dark Lord inwardly sneered, but utilized the faith of the figure to ensure the purchase was accepted. Though he granted the stranger a vulnerability, such allowed Voracitos a means to sense and feel the presence of this new potential ally... or gateway.

"I shall see it returned to me." Voracitos' added quickly, unable to help himself from amending his statement.

I have now served the stranger, and lead his path to me, now I shall expect his life in my hands. If the voice is to be believed. Voracitos thought privately, even under the mess of fleshy mouths shouting their obscenities in the empty void surrounding the Death's Head of Darkness.

[member="Darth Il"]

 

[Ras'kala'han]

Darth - the word brought terrible joy to Lord Il, though it seemed his Lordship was far more... limited than he could ever have known. It may be a strange and frightful thing, to feel small, but that was a passion from which power could be gleaned, and this smallness is something that must come from seeing a vista of possibility open up before him. He could not help but exposit.

"We survived. The plague was the end to life and civilization, and the Sith... we lived through it. In the Golden Age, we had power to breach the veil - and they used it to run away." It was a strange, cruel sort of irony to be mocked by the countless visages of the Gluttonous One. He imagined that if he were faced with one of those ancient lords that fled, this might be what they seemed as, an overwhelming being of pure, expressed power. He was not such - he was different - but he could see the wisdom in this teaching. It was the art of the Sith to create such networks, to spread outwards and become the many, than pull inwards and become the one. Perhaps once, that art had brought great power, but no such things were wrought on Uribin. The power of reaching out, lost for a perpetual and fruitless inwards exploration. "More than four centuries of exile, for nothing, and so much lost."
hav

Such is the reward of cowardice.

"I am Darth Il, leader of the Khurus clan, and of the uncity of Ythlythix. Even if you mean to mock, I accept the mantle of Lord of Emptiness to add to my names, it has more meaning than anything this empty world could grant.

"If we are putting ourselves in subjection to prophecy, very well - we shall dance the dance of fate together. Lord Voracitos, I accept your spirit. You shall be the beacon that lights the way back to the Galaxy. You have given us a future, perhaps the future."

The maw that devours him, and yet that which he devours - mutuality, it suggested, in a strange way. It seems he bore some mark of disease from the otherworld, some twistedness that kept him... unappetizing. It didn't take much calculating to know whether this stay of consumption would be indefinite - the answer to that could be seen in front of him and measured in kilograms. Or perhaps tons.

It was a gambit. The price was his eternal soul. Yet the price of choosing not to gamble would be an eternity separated from the birthright of his ancestors - and an eternity in drudgerous misery, worse than any oblivion. The unknown that was the Galaxy weighed heavily on him, and he desired to see it resolved.

"Show me the path."

Peering out across the angles of the fifth dimension into the future through the cracks of the liminal space they dwelt in, that dissolving twilight that would only last so much longer - to where the ends of the serpent of corruption became a circle and the Prophecy of Hunger was at last fulfilled, yet the motion of the ring was beyond his sight, perhaps any sight. There was escape, the possibility to turn back.

I have never needed a destination. Only a path on which I can see forwards. I will stake my planet and my people on the honor of a demon, but I will not live imprisoned any longer.

​

[member="Darth Voracitos"]​

 

[Darth Voracitos]

The death's head accepted the soul, and Voracitos spat it out as a puppet-master might discard a marionette, all the strings attached. It was as if Lord Voracitos was casting out a fishing line into a deeper unknowable ocean, and the miles between Voracitos and the Lord of Emptiness seemed to stretch on to infinity, as if the very being of Voracitos could not willing give even the smallest most pathetic soul in his possession. Their liminal reality was collapsing faster for each moment this state of stretching continued, until finally...

... The Lord of Emptiness possessed within it a single, writhing, wretched, and unwilling tenant, still bound to another across the vastness of another reality. Separated from not only space and location, but time and future. The being now living in this otherrealm, a former being of darkness damned to the hellscape of the Netherworld, found itself a new hell to endure, one of exceptional loneliness and deprivation.

The mouths which had created the presence dispersed rapidly, each eating one another, dissipating, and withering way, absorbed into the flesh of the beast which was becoming every second farther away. The being which was massive and all encompassing was becoming as the stars - distant and a picture of the past, hidden in the cracks of a temporarily reality ripping itself apart, sending the two otherworldly spirits away, leaving only a small channel, where a single thread of reality would remain shared between them.

In a whisper without origin, the Lord of Emptiness would hear the echo of a message long expired.

"Take this is, keep it in the heart, let it pull upon you, suffer its pain, wear it as a cloak upon your world. Let its famished hunger consume you, and dominate its passion. Only then shall your presence match with my own, and we shall be returned, but before me, in this realm." The world shuddered, as the final vestiges of Voracitos fell away, the vision they shared diminished so that only a string connected their minds together.

***​

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Lord Voracitos fell and fell farther and deeper into what felt like oblivion, something that made his mind uneasy and fearful such might be possible for a being such as him. A cloak of souls spewed out from beneath him, as the heaving mass of his soul moving faster than time descended further from its spiritual girth, compacting and folding tighter until not even the force could leak from him by even his own will. Then in a sudden implosion, Voracitos found his mind experiencing through his body again, and his eyes were awakened into consciousness.

Around him, the Dark Lord of the Coven peered at the chains which were all stilled, covered in dust, ash, and marrow. Not a soul disturbing the perfectly stale air, devoid of any presence of life, nor even the smallest mite in the wind. All around the Lord of Gluttony was consumed, and reduced to waste. Slightly disorientated, the Lord of Souls raised a hand to his sweating head, feeling a great strain upon his heart, a lightness of breath and a heavy soul. The force seemed weak in this place now, no longer drenched in his power, all of it summoned into himself, to be fed upon no longer. The ritual was over, as was its unexpected consequences.

Now the Lord famished, and there was only one remedy for such desire, such hunger...

"Vassals..." The Lord of Gluttony beckoned his feast from their hiding places with a whisper of a word, and with hesitance they would all come, to pay their tithe.

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Months later...​

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The pain which wracked the Dark Lord had not ceased since that day, the presence of [member="Darth Il"] forever in the mind of his heart, the single strand which crossed the threshold of time and space, tore at his very being, demanding his every waking moment of will power to suppress his being's natural intention to tear itself apart. His resolve though, was stronger than the forces which beckoned his many souls into the dread of oblivion. His Hungered Vassals were famished with the pain of serving their master, and their Starved Subjects numbered in the hundreds out of necessity (or to face inevitable death by the maw of their Gluttonous Master).

Enthroned within a starship, Lord Voracitos was meditating once again, following the traces of the pain, searching for a presence... his own presence, but one disjointed from himself, separated and pulling at him. With the command of his voice, the star ship was directed through a path across interstellar space, to stop a star which did not exist.

Not entirely...

"My Lord, there is... something we have found." A Hungered Vassal reported upon a knee, prompting the Dark Lord's eyes to open, seeing for himself out the view port of the bridge, witnessing before him something truly bizarre.