Unreviewed The Null Sigil

[Darth Keres]

[The Null Sigil]​

OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION

• Intent: Personal Holocron
• Image Credit: Me: Google Gemini
• Canon: N/A
• Permissions: N/A
• Links: N/A

GENERAL INFORMATION

• Holocron Name: The Null Sigil
• Alignment: Dark Side
• Origin: Darth Keres
• Affiliation: Order of the Silencers
• Gatekeeper:
  • Known only as Varn of the Still Tongue, the solitary Gatekeeper of The Null Sigil Holocron. Cloaked in tattered robes of shadowed silk, the Gatekeeper's presence exuded the hush of an unspoken prayer. The air around the Gatekeeper bent with quiet dread, for the Gatekeeper had surrendered voice, breath, and warmth to the holocron's will. The Gatekeeper did not speak, for the tongue had been sealed by ritual scar and black resin; yet the Gatekeeper's silence commanded obedience more than any cry. To behold Varn was to glimpse a soul suspended between being and unbeing, the living threshold of Darth Keres' forbidden knowledge, forever listening to the whispers that the living dares do not hear.
• Description:
  • Darth Keres' black and purple holocron is a small, obsidian prism that seems to drink the light around it. Its facets are etched with faint, pulsating runes that shift like liquid shadow, glowing deep violet only when stirred by nearby presence. A low, inaudible hum vibrates through the air, more felt than heard—an echo of the Void itself. When held, the holocron feels impossibly heavy for its size, cold as forgotten tombstone metal. Within its geometric depths, threads of dark energy coil and twist like living smoke, forming patterns that briefly resemble eyes or symbols before fading back into formless darkness. It exudes an aura of solemn silence and restrained malevolence, as though something ancient watches patiently from within, waiting for a mind quiet enough to listen.

DEFENSES

• Accessibility: To even activate the holocron, the seeker must pass through three mental thresholds
  • The Test of Composure: The holocron floods the mind with echoes of one’s fears and silences; panic causes instant rejection.
  • The Test of Insight: The holocron presents paradoxes about the nature of absence and the unspoken truths of the Force; failure traps the mind in recursive thought-loops.
  • The Test of Surrender: The final lock demands the user yield their ego, entering a meditative silence that mirrors the Void itself. Only then does the holocron awaken its geometric core and reveal its contents.
• Security: The alchemized security defense of Darth Keres' holocron — that is where the line between artifact and living curse dissolves entirely.
  It is not merely protected by the Force, but forged through Sith alchemy so that its own matter becomes aware, reactive, and predatory. The holocron carries an alchemical reflex: every act of aggression against it or failure to properly open it is inverted and reflected.
  • Attempt to drain its energy, and it drains you.
  • Attempt to corrupt its crystal, and it corrupts your midichlorians.
  • Attempt to shatter it, and the shattering rebounds into your mind, breaking your sense of self into mirrored fragments whispering in reverse.

CONTENT INFORMATION

The holocron of Darth Keres was unlike any other artifact of the Dark Side—its structure an obsidian polyhedron veined with faint luminescence, not of energy, but of absence. When one approached it, sound itself seemed to recede, leaving behind a deep, suffocating stillness that pressed upon the mind like the weight of deep water. Activating it was no mere act of will or command—it required surrender. The initiate had to quiet every impulse, every thought, until only the breath of silence remained. Only then did the holocron awaken, its dark geometry unfolding like a blooming wound in reality.

Subject: The Void and the Silence


—Within, the projection of Darth Keres appeared—not as a flickering phantom, but as a silhouette suspended in a vast void. Her eyes were twin coals in a sea of unbeing, her voice soft, distant, and hollow, as though echoing through eternity—

["To understand the Void," she began, "one must first understand the end of sound, the death of movement, the exhaustion of meaning. The Force, in all its luminous and shadowed aspects, is a storm—a ceaseless whisper of creation and destruction. But beyond that storm, there is stillness. Beyond the war of wills, there is nothing."]

Her voice did not rise, yet it filled the mind of the listener, wrapping around their thoughts like silk drawn across a blade.

She recounted her discovery in words that were both confession and revelation. She had wandered far beyond the known territories of the Sith and the Jedi alike—into the forgotten sectors of dead systems, where stars had long since drowned in their own collapse. There, she found no dark temple, no relic of power, but a silence so complete it consumed the pulse of her presence in the Force.

["I reached into the currents," she said, "and found no current at all. It was as though the galaxy had exhaled and forgotten to breathe again. And in that breathless expanse, I heard a voice—not of sound, but of stillness. It spoke not in words, but in the absence of them. It was not the Dark Side. It was beneath the Dark Side—older, hungrier, immaculate."]

The holocron shimmered, and the projection expanded to show a horizonless expanse—a black ocean without surface or sky. Within it, pale shapes seemed to drift and dissolve, neither alive nor dead.

["The Jedi worship balance. The Sith worship will. But the Void—ah, the Void requires neither. It is the truth that balance and will are illusions born of noise. Silence is what remains when the galaxy ceases to speak. It is the purest state of the Force—when it stops dreaming of form."]

She described her communion with the Silence as a form of death—one she endured and returned from altered. Her emotions did not vanish, but hollowed out, leaving clarity that bordered on horror.

["When I emerged," she said, "I no longer feared the end of all things. I understood it. The Void does not destroy; it reclaims. The Silence does not condemn; it listens."]

Throughout the holocron, the imagery grew stranger—patterns of dissolving galaxies, the silhouettes of beings kneeling before invisible altars, the faint hum of nothingness resonating through the structure itself.

Darth Keres' final words, soft and unwavering, were a benediction to those who would dare follow her path:

["Do not seek to command the Void. Let it unmake you. Let the Silence erase the noise of yourself. Only then will you hear what I heard—only then will you see that the end is not darkness… it is peace without breath."]

When the holocron closed, no sound followed—only the haunting impression that something vast and unseen had just drawn closer, listening.

HISTORICAL INFORMATION

The creation of the black and purple holocron of Darth Keres was a work of dark devotion, born not from mere knowledge but from communion with the ineffable—the Silence itself. Cultists of the Order of the Silencers speak of its forging in whispers, for even recounting its making was said to invite the gaze of the Void.

It began deep beneath the surface of Dromund Kaas' shadowed moon, in catacombs where the air itself seemed to have forgotten the meaning of breath. The chamber was circular, hewn from volcanic stone and lined with sigils that did not glow, but instead absorbed light, devouring it into a pallid gloom. At the center lay a pedestal of fractured obsidian—a wound upon the world. There, Darth Keres labored in solitude for seven nights, guided by nothing but the voice that was not a voice—the still murmur of the Silence that had followed her since her discovery among the dead stars.

• The Gathering of the Core

The foundation of the holocron was a crystal shard of what she called Nullstone. Its surface was so dark it seemed to drink not only light but memory—touching it left the mind hollow for hours. She carved into it symbols that did not belong to any Sith codex, but rather to a private tongue she had birthed in her meditations—curves and cuts that represented absence instead of meaning.

Each etching was made not by blade but by thought; she drew upon the Force until her vision blurred, and the air shuddered with pressure. Her blood—darkened and faintly luminescent from her communion with the Void—was the binding agent, mixed with powdered obsidian and vaporized kyber. It hissed and steamed upon contact with the Nullstone, leaving behind faint veins of violet fire that never flickered, never burned, and never went out.

• The Binding of the Silence

On the fifth night, when the air had grown heavy with power and her voice cracked from chanting, she performed the Binding Rite of the Still Veil. No records of this ritual survive outside one of her own holocrons, but fragments from her disciples claim it required absolute sensory deprivation. She extinguished all sound, sealing her own hearing through the Force until even her heartbeat ceased to reach her ears.

Then she invited the Silence.

The darkness within the chamber deepened to the point of blindness; the torches did not go out—they simply ceased to exist. The temperature fell to a breath above death.

In that silence, she reached inward—and outward—to the same formless consciousness she had touched in the Void. It responded. The holocron began to hum, though no sound was produced. Its surfaces warped and reformed as if alive, its geometry no longer obeying the logic of three dimensions. When it solidified once more, its color had changed: deep black, laced with veins of pulsing amethyst light, like veins of lightning imprisoned within shadow.

• The Imprinting of the Soul

On the seventh and final night, Darth Keres performed the Imprinting, offering a part of herself to the construct. She cut her palm with a blade made from kyber glass, allowing her blood to spill upon the holocron's surface. But instead of absorbing it, the holocron drank her essence. Her body stiffened, and the shadows around her convulsed, drawn toward the object as if her life were being rewritten.

Within its depths, a reflection of her consciousness took shape—neither spirit nor hologram, but something quieter, colder, more knowing. This fragment of Darth Keres did not speak in her voice; it whispered in harmonics, the tone of deep pressure, like the resonance of planets colliding beneath black water. It became not a mere record, but a vessel for the Void's will, a living absence that could awaken when touched by those attuned to its frequency.

When it was done, Darth Keres collapsed beside the altar, her skin pale as bone and her eyes burning with the dull light of distant nebulae. She had aged a century in seven nights, yet her presence in the Force was sharper—a thin line between existence and nothingness.

She named the artifact "The Null Sigil", though her followers came to call it The Silent Holocron. To gaze upon it was to feel one's thoughts slowing, as if the mind itself were being pulled toward stillness. To open it was to hear not teachings, but the absence of sound that thinks.

When she finished her work, she whispered the final invocation—a statement that marked her complete surrender to the truth she had found:

"The Force speaks to those who listen.
But the Silence listens to those who stop speaking."