Private The Dark Elder

[Darth Voyance]

Darth Voyance’s crimson personal starfighter ripped from hyperspace, tearing itself from the dagger streaks of light that blurred back to singular dots. In a slow inertial drift, her starfighter lingered in a rare respite. The Sith Lady had pressed her craft to conduct multiple jumps from all over the Tingel Arm. And now she had been brought to the doorstep of the Unknown Regions. System to system, empty interstellar space after space, she had jumped and searched – chasing whatever the cryptic Sith Wayfinder told her to.

Inside the cockpit, surrounded by the dim glow of sensory readouts, red HUD lighting, and the distant faint glow of far off stars, Voyance glared down at the Sith Wayfinder. Her black gloved hands tightened around the controls as she burned holes into the artefact with her beaming golden sith corrupted eyes. She fumed with a quiet rage. She knew nothing, understood nothing, and as the Eye of the Emperor – she hated not knowing. Darth Voyance knew and saw all, and yet she could not pierce the darkness that surrounded this wayfinder. Not even her powerful skills of psychometry and Force Empathy could read the Force impressions on the object. Something or someone had cast a great shadow over it. Sealed it in the darkside with some veil she could not pierce.

She drew in a breathe and heaved a long sigh. She blinked slowly, using the extended sigh to re-center her mind and level her consciousness upon the artefact. She watched it blink and shimmer inside as its ancient technology communicated with the starfighter’s astrogation protocols and navigation routines. The map blinked new coordinates, deep and far into the Unknown Regions. Beyond the Chiss and the sparse spacefarer’s depots that sat on isolated worlds. Deep into the middle of a void. Voyance’s tattooed brow rose and she twisted her lips. She wanted to say something but did not.

It was the will of the Dark Side, the will of the ancient Sith Lords. They had come to her in a sudden vision during the corruption of the Tower of Prophecy of Voss’Ka. Tulak Horde, who’s ghost once haunted her as an apprentice deep in his tomb and Vilia Calimondra the Sith Lord who tutored her within her tomb as the Emperor watched. They both and others came to her and demanded her to seek out an Elder. A hierophant of the darkside they called him. Voyance did not understand and for the first time felt lost, just as she did when she was a spice slave on Ventoooine. Voyance hated it.

Snarling at the wayfinder, she tapped in the coordinates into the starfighter’s hyperspace computer and jumped. When she arrived she was met with nothing. A void, no planets, nothing. Just the cosmic constellations and the vapors colors of the galaxy. Voyance’s rage grew and she grabbed the wayfinder, nearly crushing it with her anger. But, suddenly her violent protestations were halted by the sensors chirping a read out of a nebula. Voyance froze and looked up in confusion.

“What?” she whispered to herself.

She released the wayfinder and returned her hand to the controls. Pushing them slowly, she shot the starfighter’s rockets into a brief high blast and let momentum drift her closer. She strained her eyes but, it soon became clear why she saw nothing – a Dark Nebula. A nebula that deformed the waves of light to appear nearly invisible, a black undulating cloud of nothing. As her starfighter drew closer, the warning claxons grew. Warnings that the nebula was an electromagnetic storm of chaos and disruption. Voyance flicked her eyes about and glanced by each warning reading. But, what drew her attention back was the wayfinder.

It began to glow bright red, like a burning ruby, and the astrogation computer bleeped a new route. It was a route right threw the dark nebula. Voyance could feel something too. Something was drawing her consciousness in. Something was calling her. The Sith Lord activated the starfighter’s rockets again but this time into a full afterburn and she plunged her starfighter into the dark nebula.

Inside it was a whirling maelstrom of lightening, cosmic radiation, and a sensor killing particle storm. Her starfighter rattled and echoed with metallic scrapping. All her readouts were dead. Sensor arrays, visual identification finders, everything. Only the wayfinder guided the starfighter. Voyance traveled deep into the nebula until she excited the cosmic storm to an eye of calm and a single grim world. Dark, cold, and yet radiating with a power in the Darkside she had never felt before. Her eyes widened and she felt the shiver of its power slither up her spine.

Impatient, she hurried her starfighter to land. Once planetside she disembarked and was surprised to find that the world supported vegetation. A thick swamp. But, the trees were all barren, and the mud wash ashen grey with the waters viscous and sodden with a red moss. Voyance wandered the swamp, stepping over bloody moss heaps and slurry sludge rivers. The wayfinder in her hands, she felt through the force for the thing that had summoned her.

[This thread is set after the Corruption of Voss Tower of Prophecy]
Gryylarc​

 

[Gryylarc]

"Gryylarc. With me."

The old Wookiee looked up from the disassembled vibrogenerators in his alchemical spearhead. The Elder, all two feet of him, waited impatiently at the workshop's door. Gryylarc weighed the little alien's mood and stood up immediately. He left the spear where it was, snatched his lightstaff off the workbench, and followed.

The Elder set an ear-wigglingly brisk pace through the old temple despite his stature. "A visitor we have," he said over his shoulder. "A servant of the Empire. Clouded her future is. Walk on the edge of a knife she does, whether she knows it or not. Hard it is to be an idealist and a Lord of the Sith."

Gryylarc snarled something about the dichotomy.

The Elder chuckled. "Sith ideals, Lord Gryylarc. Sith ideals." A curtain of vines parted for them, revealing a landed starfighter and a Twi'lek woman.

"Welcome you are, Darth Voyance , to the Temple of Akala. The Elder I am." He gestured at the gray-furred wookiee. "Recognize Lord Gryylarc you might, from your Empire's tournaments."

 

[Darth Voyance]

She had never seen a creature like the one that had emerged from a curtain of mangled vines and red moss infested ruins. Short and wrinkled, grey green skin and dark deep eyes. Yet the darkside permeated from him. It was nothing like her master the Emperor, it was not a raging and oppressive power. It was tranquil, rich, and warm, like an embrace. It swaddled her and everything around it. This creature’s connection to the darkside was immense and it made Voyance fill tiny just by being near it.

Beside him was an ashen wookie (Gryylarc ) who snarled at her and watched with suspicion openly painted in his expression. Voyance said nothing for a moment. Instead she crushed her fingers against the wayfinder and took out her anxious frustration on its obsidian rims. Was this the creature she saw in her vision? The dark shadow that came after the old Sith Lords and from across space and time delivered the Sith Wayfinder to her?

She did not know. She hated not knowing. Nothing punctured the dark vortex that armored the creature. She could not sense him, study him, or peer into his impression in the Force. He was a void, dark and bottomless. Like the darkside itself.

“Who are you?” Voyance growled.

He fingers tightened even further on the Sith Wayfinder. She presented it forward to the small creature.

“You know who I am,” she continued, “And you gave me this. Called me here.”

Voyance took a step closer to loom over the creature. “Why?” she hissed.

 

[Gryylarc]

As Darth Voyance loomed over the Elder in all her imposing power and presence, the little alien cowered in terror, ears aquiver-

And then straightened up and laughed.

"MWEE-HEE-HEE. Told you I have, Darth Voyance. Serve the Great Queen, I do. The Elder, I am called. The truth, I hold." One little three-clawed hand closed in a fist. The other thwacked Voyance on the shins with a walking stick. "Learn it, will you?"

Gryylarc did his level best not to react any which way. The Elder did not want to be interrupted.

 

[Darth Voyance]

It was not the reaction she had hoped to coax. The wack of its walking stick came with the Force behind it. Voyance fell, reaching for her shin and collapsing into a kneel. She knelt for no one. No one but her master the Dark Lord of the Sith, the Emperor. Especially not to a master so powerful in the darkside yet cowers behind some beast. Cradling her struck shin, she looked up and saw that she was now eye level with the creature. She fixed her stare on this Elder, and fumed.

Akala? Great Queen? Was she some ultimate Force of the Darkside? Nonsense there was only one power in the galaxy and it was the Emperor and the Sith Empire. This jungle recluse knew nothing of the power that the legions and the lords mustered. Yet, the Darkside powered around him. Voyance was lost. The nebula, this world, this Elder, clouded her vision. Rubbing her shin she exhaled the pain from between her gritted teeth, spitting it out. She was unsure. For once she could not see what was to come.

For once. She was afraid.

“Learn the Truth?” said Voyance.

“From you? From this Great Queen?”

Voyance scoffed and smacked her dark lips together.

“What truth do you have to teach me?” she jeered.

Standing back up she rose up and passed her glance to the wookie, (Gryylarc ), staring him down and then walking past both towards the curtain of vines. She stopped looked down at the wayfinder and turned around. She would not be deluded and lead astray. She would investigate this power – and tame it. Or destroy it.

She fell silent for a moment.

Her eyes slid down and she spoke to the Elder, “Who is this Great Queen?”

 

[Gryylarc]

Darth Voyance

The Elder smiled. Gryylarc shivered.

"Twenty-three years ago, a dream you had, you or someone you know. A dream of a desert, a river, a crowd, a blue-skinned princess looking for her lost love, a hundred thousand years before. Twenty years ago, vanish into the Netherworld you did, you or someone you know - perhaps many people, yes? And claw your way out through tormented dreams and strange roads. And a dozen worlds appeared from another galaxy, and shatter, Corellia did, as another world merged with it. All of that, wrought Akala of the Kwa. The greatest of us all, she was. Older and greater than the Sith or the Jedi. Twenty, thirty millennia - bah. Children we were. No greater being has lived."

The Elder prodded Voyance in the thigh.

"Lived through this you did. Open your eyes, you must."

 

[Darth Voyance]

Darth Voyance stood shocked in the threshold of the vines overrun entrance. She watched the Elder and the wookie walk past her into the temple, lecturing her about a greater power that rended the fabric of the galaxy asunder. Destroying worlds, altering reality and annihilating swathes of peoples. Such a power existed and was not in the control of the Sith? Impossible. Or was it? Voyance was confused. If such a power existed, was it behind her reach? Or was it hidden from her reach. She thought of her master the Emperor, the Empire, and the Sith Lords who served it. Were they all, as like her, leashed to Imperial Doctrine and hidden from true knowledge of the Darkness.

Voyance followed, brushing aside the vine curtain and stepping into the first chamber of the mysterious and ruined temple. She strode behind the Elder and beside the wookie.

"And what must I see?" Voyance asked, replying to the Elder's suggestions of 'opening your eyes'.

"A greater power? Some esoteric Truth?"

Voyance stopped.

"If this should be a ruse. I will end you both."

"I, am a Sith Lord. I serve the greatest Force in this galaxy."

Not sure why she had become so defensive, Voyance lingered on the words she had spat out. The Elder was getting to her, digging beneath her skin. What was it that he had touched? Some sort of doubt? No, her will was resolute and her obedience to the Empire was impenetrable. Then what was it? What was this unease, this anxiety. This Elder had cut through her guises and reached something deep in Voyance. His lecture had already begun to rattle Voyance's reality. Was it so weak? Was she? Voyance chastized heself.


Gryylarc

 

[Gryylarc]

The Elder whirled on Darth Voyance and leveled his little walking stick at her. Gryylarc took an involuntary step back. He'd seen similar gestures...not end well.

"In this galaxy you say, heeheehee." A tiny three-clawed hand closed into a fist again, and an illusion took form, a Force version of a hovering, holographic galactic map. The detail was staggering. A red blotch depicted the Sith Empire's current extent with intense fidelity.

Then it shrank as if time was rewinding itself, tracing out the Empire's growth over the past decade. Once the Empire vanished, a double handful of bright sparks flashed and crackled like lightning.

"The worlds she brought, these are. That one-" A blazing hemisphere. "-Corellia it is. Wrought this she did, by her own power. Akalaaa. AKALA."

The galaxy zoomed out until it was barely the size of a fist. Other galaxies and globular clusters surrounded it, all at the same scale. Another galaxy entirely took on a crazily warped aura.

"Brought them from there. From the galaxy of the Yuuzhan Vong. Think larger you must, Voyance. A mortal, you serve. Almost human, less than a century in age. A thousand times longer did Akala live. Pfft. Greatness. Ephimerality do you serve, ego, a consenting illusion of permanence. Endure, empires do not. One year, five years, and vanish your Empire will."

 

[Darth Voyance]

Light itself warped to produce the whirling and vaporous illusion of the galaxy. Its presence emanated with the Force and ricocheted about the temple's worn stones, levitating rubble, and then crashing down onto the stone tiles below. Its weight fell upon Voyance and forced her to collapse to her knees. It was some sort of malevolent gravity that pulled her down, festooned her in place. Forcing her to take in the lessons of the Elder. Voyance's eyes were widened and she grinned her teeth, baring them like a cornered animal.

She watched the worlds that were touched by Akala. The Empire's crimson wiped away and only leaving Akala. The greater darkness that worked in the shadows and destroyed worlds.

"Brought them from there. From the galaxy of the Yuuzhan Vong. Think larger you must, Voyance. A mortal, you serve. Almost human, less than a century in age. A thousand times longer did Akala live. Pfft. Greatness. Ephimerality do you serve, ego, a consenting illusion of permanence. Endure, empires do not. One year, five years, and vanish your Empire will."

"I serve, the Darkside!" Voyance forced out of her teeth. "The Darkside serves the Empire!"

"Serve nothing, you do!" The Elder chuckled.

He flexed his claws and the illusion undulated, separated into bubbling black mists before collapsing together into a new visage. A visage of chaos and destruction. The Empire burned, overrun and ripped into tatters. Shadowy figures fought each other and slayed one another.

"Serve an Empire made of vanity, do you," the Elder said.

"Fall it will, Darth Voyance."

"Fail in heeding my lesson, to see greater than the Empire. Fall, you will too."

Voyance's eyes grew wider and tears whipped from the winds of the vision splattered from her lashes. Her mouth opened wider and words escaped them. Choking gasps tumbled from her lips. Her body was failing to fight back and the vision became more vivid. It was real, it burned into her mind and embedded itself into her consciousness. She could feel it all. Like the visions of her time as a prophetic dancer. This was no illusion. It was a prophecy and it would come true.

The Sith Empire is weak and it will be destroyed by the very vainglorious powers that forged it. It was not in service to the Darkside and as the Elder, and the Sith Lords of Old opined, the Darkside did not serve it. In fact, it was repulsed by it. Reviled by it. The Empire was an Empire of avarice, wearing the shroud of the Darkside as its justification.

The Empire would fall.

The illusion vaporized and the Elder rested his clawed hands on the pinnacle of his walking stick, glaring down at a broken Voyance.

Voyance, shivering, her body shaking from the residual shocks of the pressure looked up. Bloody tears, from bloodshot eyes and twitching muscle, streamed from her golden eyes. They fell on her dark robes and dripped black blotches on the stone below. Her lips twitched and she recalled how to speak.

"What..." she coughed.

"What, must I do."


Gryylarc

 

[Gryylarc]

"Follow the Dark Side you must. Lead you it will, to those who can understand." The Elder nodded firmly. "Two futures you saw. When fall the Empire does, what will rise? True Sith or worthless ones? On you and those like you, all of that depends."

Gryylarc did his level best to relax. The worst seemed to be over. If the Elder was going to lash out, he'd have done it by now.

"Know what must come, you do. Others there are. Different dreams they have, but work as one you must. Above your pride and preconceptions you must rise."