That Not Dead

[Ras'kala'han]

In passing millennia in fitful dreams, in nightmares and visions, Antherion had come to disbelieve in change. There was no change - only decay, a slow rot at the core of the Galaxy that spread viciously and insidiously, plunging it ever closer to darkness, to metaphysical heat-death in the form of total stagnation and disruption.

Antherion was a prideful creature, but he regarded his continued life as a symptom of this fraying. There were yet rifts between the spirit and the material that seemed only to widen. The fabled Font of Power was utterly empty. The rate of sensitivity to the Force grew, as did the power of Force-wielders, yet the only significant change was an ever-rising death toll as the cataclysms and collateral damage grew larger in scale beyond reason. It was only natural that nothing should yet stay in its grave.

The emaciated, withered being was dressed in a mockery of Jedi Robes, white and ascetic in their style, yet his neck was adorned with a cord of songsteel, and heavy rings and Corusca Gems glittered on its fingertips. Its feet were bare.

It sat in an endless-seeming waste of sands, and it waited. Waited for the enemy to come. Waited for his message to be received. It was simple, a pressure on the mind exerted from afar, the issuing of a challenge to be answered. Words to ring in the fiend's meditations, to haunt it eternally, until it was set right.

"[member="Darth Abyss"]. Come to me. Come, and be destroyed. Come, and destroy me. Come, and end this quarrel."

The nexus that was the planet whispered words of hate and fear to Antherion's subconscious. It said things of madness, of the awful and the unspeakable. Yet, in a way, it was all nostalgic. Here, both he and his foe would be at the peak of their power, yet there was no scar they could lay on the planet that did not already exist.

In a way, choosing here was a message: Fear the Sith who has nothing left to lose. Antherion raised a ringed finger, peering through the halls of time and space, waiting for the arrival. He brought it close to his ruined mouth, and murmured a few words in the Old Tongue, close to a prayer. A declaration of conviction.

He had no eyelids to close, so he set them on the barren horizon line, waiting for the end to begin.

 

[Darth Abyss]

The Dead had grown restless in the recent age. Never before had the veil that kept them apart from those still cursed by live been so thin, so brittle and easily cut into pieces. What was left of them, the glimpses of essence caught in the maelstrom of chaos that waited in the beyond, waited for the day of return, the day when the veil would finally fall apart and allow them to rise within the prison of reality once more.

Yet while the dead waited, there were those among them blessed with insight that allowed them to never truly fade from the galaxy. Darth Abyss was one of them, as was his nemesis, his one enemy that had him opposed once to often, @Antherion. Time and time again Abyss had witnessed the cripple rise and fall, and seemingly endless cycle of near death and rebirth forcing them to engage in war and violence until the end of eternity. Every of his attempts to end the life of the cripple once and for all failed, not due to his weakness but due to Antherion's refusal of death as a concept - a rare, yet not unknown ability granted by the darkness.

Abyss was not even slightly surprised when the echo in the force called for him. The all seeing had known that this fight was rising on the horizon, the myriads of paths the future could take all leading to this crescendo to their twisted symphony, no matter which one he took. For one day and one night Abyss had rested hidden below the sand and darkness of Ostarvis IV, waiting for his adversary to issue his challenge.

Mere seconds stood between the ethereal words of Antherion, and a slight wind that began to blow over the desert. Then the sand began to rise, a burst of energy lifting it up in a storm that marked the rise of the Mindeater from below the desert. For a moment there was wind, sand and darkness, then the husk that was Abyss suddenly stood within the desert, the metal armor motionless as the hollow eyes fell upon the thing that his nemesis had become.

"Cursed, not blessed, are those of us powerful enough to stand between life and death, are we not my crippled, rotten friend? You should be thankful that your pitiful existence will not continue much longer."

Antherion was no man anymore, just a rotten, broken creature fighting for survival no matter the price. Like Abyss he had beaten death, free from the chains of flesh, at least in a sense. There the empty husk stood, as the otherworldly words faded into the distance, his form hidden under the same ragged robe he had worn since his first day as a sith.

 

[Ras'kala'han]

"I spent freely the coin of my hatred. It spared me death, but could not purchase life. And yet... I have far too little left for you, Lord of Heresy. Circumstance and desire put us on this path -" The creature exhaled, it joined seamlessly to the howling winds of the corpse-world and smelled of dust. Rising from his meditative posture, he dusted off his robes, careful not to catch a thread of fabric on a jagged, hooked fingernail.

"- like gravity setting twin planets on a collision course." The lifeless powder and sediment that formed the ground beneath the two began to stir faintly, orbiting in the air in unnatural formations. "So just think of this as reaping what you nurtured in me at long last. Suffering."

Then, the withered adept brought his hands together - there was an eruption of noise, rings meeting rings, the striking of a minute bell - yet, like its origin, the sound did not die easily or as it should, it began to grow, to deform outside the audible spectrum.

Yes, for as the atonal screams and shrieks of the Sith are the domain of the Dark Side, so are the movements of the air, and sound through the air the domain of the Shapers - and Antherion had stolen wisdom from both. The vibration shifted ever closer to resonance with the metal body of [member="Darth Abyss"], an attempt to simply use physical force to shatter the shell that the haunting spirit inhabited.

And all throughout the noise, the modulation, the single word continued to ring true in it. Suffering. For all his arch rhetoric, Antherion's leathery heart began to quicken at the possibility of savoring revenge.

 

[Darth Abyss]

When his worldly shell began to oscillate heavily, the metal slightly bending and deforming framed by thin, black some rising from the small cracks left by the attack, through the cacophony of entropy released by his rotten adversary, a truth was revealed to Abyss. [member="Antherion"] had grown more powerful, but more importantly he had spend time developing techniques tailored for this day alone. This was a day of fate, and while Abyss could actually appreciate such an effort, it would lead his opponent nowhere.

To others it would seem like chance, but chance was a lie especially when destiny called. Unknowingly Abyss had come into possession of an object that would bring down the decaying sith, an arcane trinket that easily could've been his answer to Antherion's newfound abilities. Outsider's Reach he had dubbed it, a ring found in the depths of yet another faded tomb of the ancients that couldn't evade the endless hand of the Prophet. Like a single, elegant tentacle the artifact wrapped around the index finger of Abyss left hand, a mirror of what was about to come for the reborn cripple.

"Do not worry Cripple, soon there will be no suffering left, only the emptiness."

The laugh of the Mindeater blasted through the desert, the otherworldly, dissonant noise uniting with the atonal soundscape produced by the lesser sith into an utterly incomprehensible, jarring song. Then the husk began to lift his left, the arm still shaking and resonating under the pressure, while the ring began to emit a dim, crimson glow.

"Now be reminded of the one truth that made you into the broken thing that stands before me: The Prophet's Hand is Endless."

Almost to quick for human eyes to see, the fingers of Abyss left performed a complex series of gestures, a silent incantation to summon the power hidden within the trinket. Pure, raw dark side energy began to gather in front of his hand, forming what only could be described as portal, a pathway into the darkness itself. From it emerged a strom of black tendrils, all of them wildly reaching for Antherion with their touch of decay, designed to not only hurt and destroy, but to erode both living matter and undead flesh while disrupting or even breaking any sort of spell they meet.

 

[Ras'kala'han]

In truth, this was not the first time Antherion had seen this technique - or at least, something similar. It was a favorite of one of his disciples', Haskill of the House of Terrovax. He wondered, with something close to languid idleness, whether [member="Darth Abyss"] had inherited this technique from that lineage, whether he was touched across the millennia by the legacy of the Hive-Lords, or whether that too vanished underneath the crush of dust and time's indifferent cruelty.

Letting slip his concentration on his sonic assault, confident that first blood was his, he turned his attention to the incoming surge of tendrils, pointing one finger.

"Nirwani diâ titiai raria."

They seemed to shudder - hesitate - there was a current of clashing energy - yet they persisted, resisting his spell of disruption. He stepped back slightly, drawing away, yet in an eyeblink was encircled, then constricted. Vapors rose, pain bubbled up inside him. He strained, turning his head to face the empty-eyed lord. The tendrils twisted, trying to swallow him whole against a paper-thin wall of telekinetic Force, his only armor.

"I concede that your hand is indeed endless. That is why you've won our battles." The decrepit's lips cracked as they twisted into a smile. "But so is your arrogance."

Suddenly, the skeletal Sith was silhouetted in a nimbus of light, like staring into a transient sun, and there was a smell of ozone as lightning spilled from every pore and socket. The storm was swift as it was terrible, and soon only the white-robed figure was left, rising as it dusted its robes off nonchalantly. Along its wrinkled skin, several stripes burnt black, seething wounds on its arms and legs. Tokens of the Mindeater's power.

"And that is why you will lose the war."

 

[Darth Abyss]

"Is that what your tell yourself every time I send you back into the dirt?"

Abyss was not really surprised that [member="Antherion"] was not dead yet. The thing that stood before him was far more powerful in unlive then the cripple had been when he still had to breath. What surprised him was that his foe made no further move besides freeing himself from the grip of his spell. It would be foolish to underestimate him, so it was clear that he had card on his hand which he held back, a trick meant to crush him when Abyss would least expect it.

Unfortunately for the cripple that was the same thing Abyss had been doing his whole live, and it was quite foolish to leave the Mindeater time and space to use his powers freely. From his left sleeve a pocked watch jumped into his hand, the clock itself swinging on a small chain wrapped around his claw like fingers. There was something oddly intriguing about the trinket, a seductive pull that lingered over the small arcane watch to call all eyes upon it.

"Time and time your rise from near death, but for what cripple? You will be lost, forgotten the second I put you out of your misery. History will not remember the name Antherion."

Right now Abyss was playing on time, giving his trinket time to work its enthralling spell onto his opponent. If his words would further irritate the cripple mattered little, all they had to do was to hold his attention long enough. Soon he would understand that time was on Abyss side in more then one way. The words were followed by another laugh, a last piece of this act. Then he raised his voice another time, whispering ancient words to reveal what the object in his left truly was capable of.

"Nenx dar amzi buti pras nuyak raka, Isatraga buti zo diable" ("Not even time is beyond my hand, Eternity is a curse")

The spell would be thrown at Antherion, but this one war far less physical and flashy then the tendrils he had summoned. Instead it was like a million small needles, all designed to pierce into the mental defenses wherever he expected a weakness. Pride, a desire to leave a mark on history. Pain, not physical but emotional one, and the desire to be free from the chains of whatever past trauma had made him the way he was. Love, or rather hate, not for other but himself. Self pity, forged by years of being pushed into the dirt by beings far superior then him.

Would the mind of his foe fail to resist for even one moment, then the invisible hand of the Mindeater would reach into his thoughts, his perception and change how he experienced the reality around them. As said time was his ally, and the longer the eyes of the cripple would rest on the clock, the slower the time around him would become, his thoughts sluggish, his reactions painful slow.