Ozymandias
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
- Intent: To build out one of the many important events that came from Empyrean's reign as Emperor.
- Image Credit: ChatGPT
- Canon: N/A
- Permissions: N/A
- Links: N/A
- Event Name:
- Unofficial:
- The Long Week
- Official:
- The Blackout Protocol
- Unofficial:
- Event Specific Links:
- Location:
- Galaxy-wide. No single staging ground; the Protocol was defined by its simultaneity rather than its geography.
Operations ran from the Core to the furthest Wild Space holdouts over the course of a standard week, with confirmed actions on Maena, Bastion, Exegol, Korriban, and more. Coordination ran through Tsis'kaar cells under Darth Ophidia, with command authority routed from Jutrand. Bounty collection — lightsabers, fingers, other proofs of kill — was centralized on Jutrand for verification and payment.
- Galaxy-wide. No single staging ground; the Protocol was defined by its simultaneity rather than its geography.
- Galactic Standard Year: 900 ABY (Over the Course of a Week)
- Participants:
- The Sith Order (initiating)
- Darth Empyrean, Dark Lord of the Sith and Emperor (architect, command authority)
- Gerwald Lechner, the Emperor's Wraith (operational oversight)
- Darth Ophidia and the Tsis'kaar (executing body — intelligence, surveillance, and the bulk of field operations)
- Subordinate Sith Order assassins, hunters, and loyalist forces deployed in support
- Targets (independent and unaligned dark-siders galaxy-wide)
- Former members of the fallen Sith factions (Maw remnants, Warlord adherents, Sith Empire holdouts)
- Independent Sith Lords who had declined Empyrean's offer of peaceful reintegration
- Retired, dormant, and "civilianized" dark-siders previously logged by Tsis'kaar intelligence
- Established sovereigns and planetary rulers of Sith affiliation outside the Order's hierarchy
- Estimated casualties in the thousands; exact figure unrecorded, likely deliberately so
- The Sith Order (initiating)
- Brief Overview:
- In the wake of the Sith Schism — a decade and more of fratricidal collapse that consumed the Maw, the Warlords, and the old Sith Empire — Darth Empyrean's restored Sith Order stood as the sole institutional power of the Dark Side. Its supremacy, however, was not its security. Splinters remained: independent Lords scattered across the Galaxy, retired predators living quiet lives on quiet worlds, deposed rivals waiting out the cycle. Sith history had shown, repeatedly, that such embers reliably became fires.
Empyrean's solution was administrative before it was violent. For years prior, Tsis'kaar intelligence under Darth Ophidia compiled a galaxy-spanning registry of every known dark-sider outside Order authority — their locations, routines, attachments, weaknesses. When the registry was judged complete, the Emperor issued a single standing order: the Blackout Protocol. Reintegration was no longer on offer. Every name on the list was to be killed within the week.
The execution was characterized by its breadth rather than its subtlety. Thousands of operatives — overwhelmingly Tsis'kaar, supplemented by Order assassins and contracted hunters — moved in coordinated simultaneity. Targets ranged from forgotten exiles to seated planetary monarchs. Proof-of-kill (typically lightsabers, occasionally fingers or other identifying tokens) was returned to Jutrand for bounty. The Galaxy registered the event first as a wave of scattered, seemingly unconnected assassinations, and only later — as the pattern became undeniable — as a deliberate purge.
The Protocol's outcomes were several. It eliminated the institutional possibility of a rival Sith claimant for a generation. It left a small, dispersed population of survivors — competent enough to evade Tsis'kaar professionals — who would form, in time, the connective tissue of every dark-side insurgency that followed. It hollowed out Ophidia's network through expenditure, an outcome whose strategic value would not become apparent until Empyrean's later move against her. And it established the operational tone of his reign: that the Emperor's mercy was a one-time offer, that his attention was selective, and that his indifference was as lethal as his wrath.
No victory was declared. The Order issued no announcement. The Protocol simply ended, the Tsis'kaar stood down, and the Galaxy was left to count its absences.
- In the wake of the Sith Schism — a decade and more of fratricidal collapse that consumed the Maw, the Warlords, and the old Sith Empire — Darth Empyrean's restored Sith Order stood as the sole institutional power of the Dark Side. Its supremacy, however, was not its security. Splinters remained: independent Lords scattered across the Galaxy, retired predators living quiet lives on quiet worlds, deposed rivals waiting out the cycle. Sith history had shown, repeatedly, that such embers reliably became fires.
The Blackout Protocol was the culmination of a strategic posture Darth Empyrean had maintained, in some form, since his ascension to the Sith throne — that the Schism which had consumed the Order for more than a decade was not a wound to be healed, but a disease to be cauterized. The Order he inherited was the last institutional Sith power in the Galaxy, but it was not the only Sith presence. Across the stars, in numbers no central authority had ever accurately counted, the residue of the fallen factions persisted: former Mawites, deposed lieutenants of the Warlord era, exiles of the old Sith Empire, and the older, quieter sort of dark-sider who had simply outlived their wars and retired into wealth, anonymity, or sovereignty. To Empyrean, this residue was not background. It was the soil from which every future schism would grow.
The intelligence foundation of the Protocol predated its conception. Darth Ophidia's Tsis'kaar had operated as a galaxy-spanning espionage apparatus for decades before Empyrean's reign — her network's reach into the criminal, political, and arcane undergrounds of the Galaxy was, by the late ninth century ABY, without serious rival. When the Emperor's directive arrived, roughly three standard years before the Protocol's execution, it did not ask Ophidia to build a registry. It asked her to focus one she already possessed. Names were compiled, cross-referenced, and verified. Routines were charted. Attachments — spouses, children, students, financial dependencies, refuges — were catalogued with the cold completeness that had made the Tsis'kaar feared in their own right. The work was not hurried. The Emperor was content to wait until the list was correct.
Before the killing began, Empyrean had given his targets a single public chance. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the New Imperial Order and the Mawite remnants, he had broadcast a speech offering the surviving dark-siders of the Galaxy reintegration into the Sith Order — as his subjects, on his terms, with no negotiation as to either. The offer was not generous in its framing. Empyrean was not a beloved figure in independent Sith circles; many of those still alive had personal histories with him, or with those he had elevated, that made submission a humiliation rather than a refuge. Most declined. Some did so publicly. Others did so by silence, which the Order's recordkeepers treated as equivalent. The list of those who refused became, in time, the list of those who were marked.
When the Protocol commenced, it did so without warning and without sequence. The defining feature of its execution was simultaneity. Tsis'kaar cells across thousands of worlds — supplemented in less critical theatres by Sith Order assassins, Wraith operatives under Gerwald Lechner's oversight, and contracted hunters paid by the head — moved within a window of roughly a standard week. The coordination was deliberate: any longer, and word would have traveled; any shorter, and operational depth would have been compromised. The Galaxy registered the killings, in the first days, as a statistical anomaly. A retired Sith Lord found dead in his estate on one world. A planetary monarch of dark-side affiliation assassinated at a state function on another. A reclusive practitioner in the Outer Rim, gone without trace. By the time the pattern became legible — by the time anyone could draw the line connecting the deaths — most of those who would have drawn it were themselves already dead.
Success rates were high, though not absolute. The targets, after all, were Sith. Many had survived the Schism by being precisely the sort of person who survives such things. The Tsis'kaar accepted casualties as a structural cost; Ophidia's operational philosophy had never prized the lives of her own. Records of the contracts that failed are partial, and largely reconstructed from later events rather than contemporary documentation, but they suggest a small but significant survivor population — individuals competent enough, paranoid enough, or simply fortunate enough to weather the night the Galaxy's dark-side population was halved.
The shape of those failures, when they occurred, was instructive. The contract on Matsu Xiangu — Atrisian Sith Lady, former Dark Councillor of a prior Sith Empire, and by any measure one of the more consequential Sith figures of her generation — illustrates the operational character of the Protocol better than most. Three Tsis'kaar were dispatched, in coordination, to a populated establishment on Maena where her routines had been logged. The fight was close. She lost the use of a cybernetic lung to a knife between her ribs and emerged from the encounter bloodied, broken-breathed, and incandescent with rage — but the three assassins did not emerge at all. The first was killed against the bar with a cybernetic strike that ended in a lobotomy. The second was beheaded by lightsaber. The third was systematically dismantled at the level of her central nervous system by a Sith Lady doing what a Sith Lady of her caliber does best, and left to drown on the floor in her own blood. That this required all of Matsu's considerable skill, and nearly cost her her life, indicates the seriousness of the contracts that were issued. That she survived at all indicates the limits of what even Ophidia's best could accomplish against targets of the first rank. Multiplied across thousands of operations, the implication was clear: the Protocol was not a clean instrument. It was a brutal one. It worked because it was wielded at scale.
By the end of the week, the killing had stopped. The Tsis'kaar stood down. Bounty collection on Jutrand — lightsabers, fingers, and occasional more idiosyncratic tokens, weighed and verified against the registry — continued for some weeks afterward as confirmation trickled in from peripheral theatres. No proclamation was issued. The Order made no public claim to the event. Empyrean himself did not address it, then or later, except when directly asked — at which point he acknowledged it without elaboration, without justification, and without any apparent interest in the conversation. He had never considered the Protocol a controversy. He had ordered the killing of every Sith outside his Order who had refused his peace, and the killing had largely been done, and he saw no further reason to discuss it. Those who survived to bear him a grudge, in his estimation, were either insufficient to threaten him or beneath his notice. Both were, for his purposes, equivalent.
The Protocol's lasting effects were several and overlapping. The institutional possibility of a rival Sith claimant was eliminated for a generation; no Schism-era faction reconstituted itself, and no charismatic survivor was able to gather enough remnant under one banner to matter. The Sith Order's monopoly on dark-side legitimacy, established by Empyrean's victories in the field, was now also established by the absence of any alternative. The Tsis'kaar, having spent years of intelligence work and a meaningful portion of its operational capacity executing the contracts, emerged from the Protocol diminished in ways that would not become strategically relevant until the Emperor's later move against Ophidia — a move whose feasibility the Protocol had, in retrospect, materially advanced. And the surviving population of independent dark-siders, scattered and embittered and competent by selection, became the connective tissue of nearly every dark-side insurgency, cult, and would-be successor movement that arose in the decades that followed. They had been left alive not by mercy but by failure. Empyrean did not seem to mind. The Galaxy he had wanted was the Galaxy he had made: one in which the Sith Order was the only Sith that mattered, and one in which the price of disagreement had been paid, publicly enough to be remembered, quietly enough to deny anyone the dignity of martyrdom.
It was, by the standards of Sith political history, a complete success. By the standards of anything else, the question is harder to answer. The Order, for its part, never asked it.