Private The Sacred Sith Texts

[Darth Virelia]

"Dark Becomings."

Tags - Stedvar Eldrakadia


Kessel breathed poison and profit in equal measure.

Wind hissed through crushed conduits and snapped old pennants against a sky the color of ash. The processing towers burned night into day and day into glare, vomiting saffron plumes that tasted of alkaloids and rot. Below them, the mines yawned like cauterized wounds—black mouths ringed in rust, swallowing men, machines, and memory. The whole world was a ledger of extraction: of ore, of spirit, of time.

Into this ledger walked a sovereign in obsidian.

Tyrant's Embrace took the light and broke it, violet pulse thudding beneath the breast like a reactor's sleeping heartbeat. The helm's six slanted eyes watched from every angle at once, a predatory geometry that made the nearby guards glance aside as if they'd been grazed by an unseen blade. Segment-plates whispered. Taloned boots found purchase where the dust refused to settle. The cape trailed a deep crimson afterimage as if the air bled wherever she passed.

A foreman with a Pyke's mask of cortosis lattice—someone's idea of prestige and plausible deniability—stepped in with two vibrobatons and a smile that wasn't. "Restricted quadrant, my lady. Private syndicate property. Tours are—"

The talon at the end of her gauntlet rose, delicate as a librarian's finger requesting silence.

"Show me Nightshaft Twelve," she said. The voice from the mask had no human grain to it, only clean intention, a tone that made obedience feel like common sense. "And the old registry vaults beneath."

"There are no—"

Virelia let the Force exhale.

The sound of the yard died—motors shushed, chain clatter smothered, even the fumes seemed to hesitate. For a breath, only his pulse remained—harsh, too fast—drumming against his own mask where she had drawn the world away. She watched him listen to the mathematical fact of his fragility.

"Nightshaft Twelve," he said hoarsely. "This way."

He led; she followed. Droids turned their heads and then remembered not to. Prisoners pretended to work and then remembered to mean it. They wound down past junctions where the rock glittered with black dust like frost, past old lights that flickered in a rhythm that was all but ritual. Virelia reached out along the seam of the world and tasted thought. Here—once—someone had carved letters into the load-bearing stone, then smoothed them away with a gloved hand. The scars were still there, shallow in the Force, like words sung and swallowed.

The exile had been real.

He was rumor the way sickness is rumor—carried on breath, traded in dark corners, denied by anyone who had bought the original manuscript. He had written many things and signed none of them. Treatises that sounded like oaths. Histories that read like threats. A field manual for people who no longer trusted the field. A philosophy that was either brilliant or mad, perhaps both. Names for fractures in the Force that no Academy had admitted to cataloging. Virelia had been collecting ghosts for months now; this one smelled like utility.

At the maintenance lock for Nightshaft Twelve, the foreman keyed them through with the practiced panic of someone who knew a bad night when it wore a crown. The door sighed; cold rose up like a verdict. The air here was clean only in the sense that it had never belonged to lungs.

"Beyond this, sensors cut out," he said. "Signal shadow, old seepage, maybe. The warden sealed the lower vaults after a collapse four managers back. No one uses them."

"I will," she said, and stepped through.

The shaft descended in ribs. Chain ladders. Old winches. Luminous fungus in a color that had no name, pulsing like a heartbeat out of time with her own. Her armor drank the light and returned it as a faint, liturgical sheen. The cape's inner red warmed the black stone when she moved; the tendrils beneath stayed loose and docile, listening for the betrayal of steel on stone.

She did not hurry. The Force did not like to be hunted like game—it liked to be acknowledged, and then it liked to be used.

Halfway down, the scarred presence strengthened. A pattern etched in the rock—nothing but miner's tally marks to the untrained eye—resolved as a cipher once you looked with the wrong kind of attention. She traced it with an articulated claw, and the crystalline node at her sternum answered with a soft, resonant hum. Circuits in the breastplate brightened, glyphs surfacing from their dormancy like eyes opening underwater.

You are expected, the pattern implied.

Good.

The vault door at the bottom had once been painted with prison yellow; only the memory of the color stayed. Virelia set her palm to the cold steel. She did not pry. She aligned. A hinge sighs; a seal remembers its first purpose. Locks are only agreements between cowards and time.

The door admitted her.

 

[Stedvar Eldrakadia]

Tags: Darth Virelia
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- The interior of the vault had long since been repurposed, now serving as the primary living quarters for a man slandered as a heretic and traitor by the very same Order he believed he would save.

- A few lanterns lit the vault, with the space having common enough amenities to service for a hidden retreat.
Though, it certainly wasn't the place one would wish to stay for long.
Most of the floor was rock, it was dark despite what little light there was, and it was eerily quiet.

- Still, there Stedvar sat at a metal table, writing a book. Not a holobook, a physical manuscript, painstakingly as he'd done years ago. He heard the sounds of hinges screeching and rocks crunching to his far left. His anticipated guest had arrived.

- "I've foreseen your arrival, if my little clues weren't enough to tell you that."

He stated, not bothering to look over at her.
He remained seated, working surprisingly delicately for a man his of his size and stature, showing his proficiency with the pen.

- "I already know you're aware of who I am.", he began, his tone clear.
His statement wasn't out of some petty pride or smugness, it was purely factual.

- "That's why I take it you're here for more than a stockpile of old tombs. Which means you're either here for me, or here because you wish to learn. Maybe both, or maybe... something far more interesting."

- He continued, smirking to himself as he finished his paragraph. Still, he had yet to look over at his guest.
He sensed her presence well enough for that.

- Surprise guests were rare, some had found him before, though that number was small enough to be counted on one hand.
Most flew past his radar, though, the mere presence of this force user was enough for his interest to be piqued.

- After a few moments longer, he finished writing. He allowed the ink on the tomb to dry, standing.

- His frame was visible. He still wore his old robes, despite his allegiance no longer aligning with the Order.
They were covered in colorful dust, presumably from the natural environment.
His sabers were not present on him.

- He approached a small circle on the floor, an area which he had dedicated to meditation.
Though, he meditated not to clear his thoughts, but rather, to draw from the planet's suffering.
For both power, and inspiration

- He sat, and then spoke with his eyes closed now:

- "By all means, feel free to introduce yourself, unless you're insistent on your anonymity. Masks went out of Sith fashion 764 years ago."

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Dark Becomings."

Tags - Stedvar Eldrakadia


Lantern light skimmed the obsidian planes of her breastplate and broke there, turned into a low violet pulse at the core. The vault's stale chill tasted of iron filings and old breath. She took in the table, the manuscript, the careful line where ink had not yet bled, the small meditation circle fretted into the rock by repetition. A living cell carved from an oubliette.

"Unfashionable things," Virelia said, voice soft as steel laid flat, "are often the only things that last."

The six eyes in her mask angled toward the book. One articulated talon hovered above the page, not touching. The air between claw and parchment tightened; the wet line flashed matte as the ink finished drying at her will. She lifted her hand and the vault remembered it had been quiet a long time before her, and a long time after.

"You foresaw me," she went on. "Good. I prefer being expected. It makes the courtesies honest."

He sat in his circle with his eyes closed like a priest who had misplaced his god and decided to worship the absence. She listened to the way the planet moved through him—thin and insectile, the chittering of chains, the cough inside stone. Kessel's suffering ran like a vein against his palm; he drew from it the way a scholar draws from memory, precise, efficient, unrepentant.

"You're correct," she said. "I did not come for tombs. The Order calls you heretic and traitor. That is a lexicon for men afraid their reflection will answer back. I came for the author."

Her cape settled behind her in a hush of crimson shadow as she moved—one step, then another—until she stood beside his table. The tendrils beneath the synthweave stirred and were still again. She glanced over the vault as if appraising a piece of salvage and already knowing which rivets would refuse to give.

"You wrote in a way that denies the scavenger," she murmured, head tilting toward the scrubbed stone, toward the tiny incisions that read like breaths held too long. "You wrote so the thought would not survive in pieces. That kind of discipline interests me."

He had not opened his eyes. He did not need to. Neither did she. The helm's violet facets drank his outline, translated posture into probabilities. Unarmed, by choice. Robes kept through exile, also by choice. A man who understood that symbols were tools and that tools, properly honed, were eating implements.

"You may call me Darth Virelia," she said at last, giving him the truth like a gift he would earn in retrospect. "Masks went out of fashion seven centuries ago because lesser men needed to be seen to be believed. I am not wearing a fashion; I am wearing a verdict."

She let the sentence sit with him, then reached down and closed the manuscript with a gentleness that bordered on insult. The talons clicked faintly on the metal table, a metronome for the vault's slow pulse.

 

[Stedvar Eldrakadia]

Tags: Darth Virelia
--------------------

- There was a moment of silence, before the Sith Lord broke into laughter. It wasn't wild, but it was short and loud.
He then resumed his meditation pose, as he spoke:

"You wear cowardice. If a mortal doesn't tremble in their boots just looking upon your visage, you know nothing of fear."

- Another short laugh escaped him.

"Ask any of the slaves about me, and the look in their eye will be all you'll need."

- He spoke not to gloat, no, he spoke as if his words were unassailable fact.

"As for your name, I'll call you what I wish to call you, Zioplys."
there was a brief pause, before he continued:
"Yes, Zioplys will do well."

- He smirked, sensing that someone of her nature would find that name... rather annoying.

- There was another moment of silence, before Stedvar spoke again:

"Before you waste your time, I have no interest in working alongside cowards. If you wish for me to consider so, that ugly mask of yours needs to go."

"And while you're at it, I'd ditch that ugly armor. Those pauldrons may look fancy, but they'll do you no favors."

- His final comment's tone came across the same way a professor's response to a poorly written report, mixed with a bit of his own humor.

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Dark Becomings."

Tags - Stedvar Eldrakadia


His laughter drained into the stone. Virelia let it go where all brittle noises go—into the seam between breath and bravado—then stepped through the echo as if it were only dust. The helm's six violet eyes regarded him the way a storm regards a weathervane: with a patience that is not kindness.

"You mistake noise for terror," she said, almost tender. "And terror for proof."

Lantern light narrowed along the edges of her pauldrons; the vault breathed shallowly. She studied the meditation circle, the careful poverty of it, the manuscript closed beneath her talons. His barbs hung between them like old banners: cowardice, mask, armor, pauldrons. She let each one fall, one after another, until nothing remained but his need for them to land.

"Mortals trembling at a silhouette is cheap currency," she murmured. "Any cudgel can purchase it. Fear worth ruling with is the kind that quiets a room full of killers and teaches them to listen. Love worth ruling with is the kind that makes them choose to stay when the doors are open."

Her attention cut to him at the word he'd chosen, that deliberate, childish thorn he'd pressed into her palm.

"Zioplys," Virelia repeated, tasting the consonants as if sampling a vintage she already owned. "In Sith, it means fool. Who names themselves fool, Stedvar? Only the helpless. Or the crowned."

The six eyes tilted, amused.

She stepped nearer, and the lanterns did not dim; they obeyed, falling into a steady, even measure as if the vault had decided to stop shaking. The synthweave cape sighed, crimson murmuring against stone. She did not touch him. She did not need to. The Force moved through her in disciplined pulses—no theatrics, no raised voice—just the sensation of a room falling into alignment with a gravity it had secretly wanted.

"You want my face?" Her tone warmed by one degree, like light through smoke. "You want the comfort of skin to accuse, the little cruelty of refusing to flinch when a woman blinks? Cowardice wears faces. Verdicts wear mirrors."

She angled a talon toward his circle without crossing its rim. "You call me fearful while you clothe yourself in the Order's dead robe and stroke the planet for absolution. Hostility is not rigor. It is the pedagogue's trick: bait, dismiss, pretend the pupil revealed themselves. You're not my teacher. You're a library I intend to read in the correct order."

Her gaze went to the scrubbed wall, to the immaculate refusal to be misquoted. Softly, almost as if confiding:

"I like your refusals. They tell me what you will not sell."

Silence gathered; she let it thicken until it held a shape.

"What do you desire to do with the Sith?" The question came quiet, inexorable. "Not what you resent, not what you fled—what you would cut away, preserve, seed, and weaponize. Do you want a monastery with sharper corners? A choir trained to sing subtraction? A republic of knives? Or do you want a spine that does not ask councils for permission to stand?"

The crystalline node at her sternum pulsed once, a slow, sovereign heartbeat. It made a low hymn in the metal table.

"I rule with fear and with love," she continued, voice a velvet edge. "Fear that steadies hands and focuses cruelty into utility. Love that binds ambition to something larger than appetite. Both are leashes, if you lack imagination. Both are wings, if you have one."

She let the sentence breathe, then indulged him a final mercy of humor, a smile he could not see but could feel: a warmth at the edge of a precipice.

"As for the pauldrons—favors are for courtiers. I trade in leverage."

Her head inclined, the smallest bow a sovereign gives a useful storm. "You may call me what you like. It changes nothing. I will call you Stedvar until you choose a truer name."

A last step—close enough to share the same cold, close enough for the quiet to register as choice rather than absence.

"Now answer," Virelia said, calm and absolute. "What do you desire to make of the Sith—doctrine, order, instrument? Speak it, and I will tell you whether you are asking for a footnote or an empire."

 

[Stedvar Eldrakadia]

Tags: Darth Virelia
----------------------

- He smirked, still maintaining his meditation.

"The fatal flaw of the Sith-the very same as I sense in you: A desire for total control and dominion. That is what I seek to hinder."

- His tone was analytical and explanatory, as he continued:

"Countless Sith have fallen victim to their own pride and ambition, or ultimately dragged the entire Order down with them. This is a disease I which to remedy.

Naturally, it'd be impossible to do so, nor do I wish to hinder one's self interest... as, it stands as a fundamental pillar of the Sith way. No, I wish to systematically prevent the Order from imploding.

There are few Sith who've grasped similar ideas to mine, yet, they prove true when tempered. The Dark Council was always meant to be the cornerstone of the Order, the idea that those motivated by self interest should be forced to devote themselves to one Sith is utterly irrational.
Instead, the Order must foster bonds between itself, preventing the need for internal dominance."

- He paused, before continuing:

"Though, I assume you already have an understanding of my philosophy, given you've sought me out."

- He stated, finally opening his eyes, now standing. He approached her, speaking once more:

"Perhaps I could ask you the very same question?", his reply filled with a newfound curiosity.

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Dark Becomings."

Tags - Stedvar Eldrakadia


Virelia listened, the six violet eyes in her mask dimming to a thoughtful hush as if the helm itself had leaned in to consider his thesis. Lantern-flame steadied in her gravity. The vault's quiet felt curated.

"Devotion to one is irrational," she repeated, tasting the shape of his argument as if it were a shard of ore between her teeth. "And yet devotion to many is merely distributed appetite. A council is a stomach with nine mouths and one gut. You are not wrong about the historical failure modes. You are imprecise about the cause."

She moved a pace, the cape's inner red whispering, and set a talon lightly on the closed manuscript. Not a threat—an index, as if citing his life's work.

"You call it pride and ambition, as if excess alone is the pathogen. But pride in the Sith is heat; it tempers or it splinters depending on the quench. The disease you're after has always been mispriced risk. Power without escrow. Succession without design. War declared inward because no one priced the cost of losing a hand at the same rate as losing a fleet. A council does not solve this—it launders it. It turns coups into minutes, vendettas into agenda items, and calls the stenography 'stability.'"

Her gaze angled past him to the scrubbed wall—those careful incisions erased into intention. "You speak of bonds. Bonds are admirable instruments. But which? Kinship? Ideological oath? Ledger obligations? Blood-debt? The Dark Council you idealize has cycled through all four and each time rediscovered the same principle: bonds unenforced by leverage become memoirs."

She let that settle; the crystalline node at her sternum pulsed once, slow as a gavel.

"Devil's advocate, then," she murmured, indulgent. "Say we adopt your architecture. Polycentric sovereignty, codified self-interest, interdiction against monarchical gravity. Fine. What stops the council from becoming a cartel? Cartels rot by comfort. They purchase peace with ceilings. Ceilings purchase stagnation. Stagnation ensures the first external pressure—Jedi crusade, corporate famine, a clever heretic—shatters the pane from outside instead of letting us fracture along designed seams."

She stepped closer, until they shared the same engineered quiet. "You want to prevent implosion. You are asking the forge to be an oven. Sith who cannot explode are merely aristocrats with better knives."

A slender tilt of her helm toward his meditation circle. "Here is a different assertion—not mine, just a useful cruelty: The Order does not need fewer implosions. It needs vector control. Failures should vent outward. Duels should feed supply chains. Schisms should become colonies. Loss of a Lord should trigger automatic redistribution of assets to adversaries most likely to turn them against our enemies. Try designing that in committee without someone smothering the clauses that would one day strangle them."

The taloned fingers tapped a quiet meter on steel. "You say 'foster bonds to prevent internal dominance.' Practical translation: institutionalize patronage and call it fraternity. What you are actually proposing is a hospice for immortals—enough morphine that they stop biting the nurses." A breath of humor, razor-thin. "Effective, until the ward doors open."

She drifted past him, surveying the lanterns as a general might inspect troops. They held fast in their even glow.

"You also smuggle a premise beneath your diagnosis: that the Sith must be protected from themselves. That is pastoral theology, Stedvar. The shepherd who fears wolves breeds sheep, and then spends the remainder of his life explaining why the flock is safer with fewer teeth. The Order does not require fewer teeth. It requires occlusion—teeth arranged so the bite lands where we choose."

She paused at the threshold of the scrubbed stone. "Your cure preserves the Order and forgets the project. When the Sith forget the project, we turn mastery into performance. Councils adore performance. Empires do not."

A beat; the vault listened.

"You ask me the same question." Her voice softened, not kinder—more intimate in its restraint. "You'll forgive me if I prefer to test a mind before I feed it the thesis it most wants to recite back to me."

 

[Stedvar Eldrakadia]

Tags: Darth Virelia
----------------------

- Stedvar was silent for a few moments, before laughing heartily, daring so much as to pat her shoulder.

"Oh Zioplys, you amuse me!"

- After a few moments, he recovered, speaking again, a large grin on his face as his words cut through not just her statement, but her.

"You remind me of why the Order rejected my teachings. You view yourself as superior, yet suffer from much the same flaws." He began, retracting his arm.

"Your lust for power is self-evident. You view my thesis through the same lens as those who lead the Order: A conqueror's. You offer no solution of your own because, truthfully... it is the very same Order which you despise. Why? Because for you, it is merely a tool.
You would take a throne and lose your Empire." He stated, his tone becoming darker.

"I seek the preservation of the Order for what it was meant to be: An institution designed to breed power, and allow its members to pursue their personal interest.
This has no role in your vision, does it? You understand the flaws of the old Orders, yet are doomed to repeat them.

You give analogies of sheep and wolves, besmirching my doctrine as if it would make the Sith docile, when in truth, you understand that it would foster an army you couldn't control."

- He allowed his words to strike deep, bruising her ego.

"Your intentions are not as hidden as they may seem, child. Though, let's entertain your folly for a moment:

- You speak of dividing assets, as if this would magically prove to be accepted, and wouldn't only breed dissent against the monarch and the Order itself from within.

- You dismiss the strength of fraternity, yet provide no clause for its undoing. Furthermore, by advocating for breeding stoicism, you fall into the same trap of betrayal and ultimate self-interest that only serves to create power-hungry deadweights, which serve no purpose to the Order apart from furthering themselves.

- You fearmonger the idea that I would disarm the Order, when I simply seek to redirect the will of its members, turning envy into fellowship, and forcing her patrons to work in tandem, rather than apart.

- You speak of projects without any understanding of the Order's purpose

- And, finally, you claim my vision would fail, yet provide no reason as to why, dismissing the ramifications of my doctrine as if the flaws of the old Order would simply remain."

- After his long spiel, Stedvar finished with:

"Never before have I heard so many words amount to... so little. You are as I know you to be: A visionless coward, consumed by her own delusions. You hide behind authority, clinging to a false sense of superiority, when in reality: You are nothing.
What you seek to build will not be lasting, and like the old Masters, you too will fade into the cosmic force, your ambition unfulfilled."

- Following his assertion, Stedvar simply turned, speaking for a final time:

"I have no interest in associating with such pretenders. I advise you leave, otherwise, I shall find myself bored, and eager to spare the Galaxy of another burden."

- By now, he was finished. He couldn't even bear to look at her, disgusted at how much she reminded him of the Order whom had outcasted him for challenging their delusions.

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Dark Becomings."

Tags - Stedvar Eldrakadia


He patted her shoulder.

He should be dead.

Tyrant's Embrace registered the contact as pressure and heat, catalogued it, and did nothing. Beneath the hood, six violet facets watched him laugh as if he were demonstrating a theorem about noise. The lanterns trembled; then, at a thought, steadied. She did not.

He spoke and tried to wound. He arranged her into a mask he could dismiss, into a child he could scold, into a pretender he could threaten with boredom. The old robe, the circle etched in stone, the manuscript drying under her earlier breath—every prop in place for the lecture he had rehearsed in exile. Pride moved in her like a blade wanting a throat.

She put it on a leash.

A breath in. The crystalline node at her sternum answered once, a single, slow pulse. The anger did not vanish; it obeyed. It went where she pointed—backward, inward, into the spine of the machine that was her.

Virelia turned the manuscript so the spine faced him, a librarian's small correction. The talons left the faintest tap on metal—one, two, three—as if closing a casket with reverence, not defeat.

"Understood," she said—only that, the word laid down like a coin on a counter neither of them would return to.

She stepped away from his circle without ceding him her back until she chose to, then gave it to him like a verdict. The cape's inner crimson whispered over stone; the concealed tendrils slid against synthweave and stilled. At the vault door she did not break posture to glance back. The helm did not tilt. She did not offer the last, easy cruelty. Leaving was the cruelty, and the mastery.

The door remembered her and opened without complaint.

Silence followed her into the corridor, then the mine's noises returned by degrees, as if the world exhaled only when she permitted it. She descended the ribs she had climbed, violet eyes taking the measure of rust, fungus, tally-marks glittering like fossils of thought. Each step was placed where pride would have lunged; each turn was a refusal sharpened into a blade she could keep.

He had wanted her to argue. He had wanted her to prove him right about thrones by needing one here. He wanted a storm to curse and write about, something to polish his doctrine against until the philosophy gleamed with rescued dignity. But he overplayed his hand, made idiotic assumptions on points Virelia hadn't even made and argued against already defunct standards.

But his worse crime was daring to touch her.

His arrogance would net him a very easy spot on the current Dark Council of the Sith Order.

She gave him a different vacancy instead—the kind that humbles more surely than defeat.

Control tasted better than victory.

Halfway up, she allowed herself the small luxury of recognition: she had not always possessed this leash. There were years when she would have filled the vault with power and made him understand until his bones learned the shape of her answer. That woman had been formidable.

This one was inevitable.

Virelia moved on.