Tyrant Queen of Darkness
"Like mistress, like apprentice."
Tags -
Valaine Valentine
(I guess
Kito
)
The chamber was dark but not silent.
Candles guttered in their sconces, their flames drawn high and thin by the unnatural pull of the Dark Side that suffused the air. The walls breathed with violet shadows, rippling as if alive, as if straining to reach the woman seated at the center of it all. Darth Virelia.
She sat upon the obsidian dais with one leg crossed over the other, still as a statue save for the soft rise of her chest. The six luminous eyes of her mask cut through the gloom, fixed unwaveringly on the arched doors before her. She had not summoned anyone else. This was a matter meant for only two.
In the stillness, she replayed the fragments. The grainy flicker of the camera feeds. The sound recordings, too alive to be dismissed. The flash of a young Jedi's face, flushed and trembling, and her apprentice—her Sangnir...
Virelia did not sneer at the discovery. She approved. It was corruption at its most exquisite: not imposed, but chosen. A Jedi girl lured into the trembling touch of one already bound to darkness. Yet still, the test remained. Would Valaine admit to it? Or try to bury it behind that tired arrogance, those walls of defiance and shame she clung to so stubbornly?
The Dark Lady intended to find out.
Her claws traced the crystalline node at her chest, the place where her heart no longer was. Each tap was deliberate, slow, echoing through the chamber like a metronome of judgment. Tap. Tap. Tap.
The air grew thicker, every breath laced with something cloying and decadent, something that coiled around the will like smoke in the lungs. Whoever stepped into this chamber would feel the weight of her attention before they even reached the center.
Virelia did not intend to ask much. She would not lecture. Not yet. She would only look. Listen. And force her little Sangnir to fill the silence with whatever truth—or lies—she dared.
When at last the heavy doors groaned open, the sound stretched into the chamber like a scream pulled through honey. Virelia did not move, did not twitch, save for the faintest incline of her head as her apprentice crossed the threshold.
The voice that finally broke the silence was soft, low, drawn out like silk over sharpened steel.
"Come forward."
