Unreviewed The Umbral Guard

[Darth Prazutis]

• Intent: To codify the Umbral Guard as Darth Prazutis' personal royal guard and sovereign executioner cadre of the Kainate, an elite, Force Sensitive unit used for bodyguard duty, doctrinal enforcement, ritual support, and precision extermination of high-value threats within Kainate space.
• Image Credit:
  
  • Click - ChatGPT by Me
  • Headers - Teresa Zambrano | Darth Pellax
• Role: The Umbral Guard serve as the inner circle of protection and annihilation around Darth Prazutis. They are his royal guard, executioners, ritual wardens, and doctrinal enforcers, deployed sparingly but decisively as the living embodiment of his authority.
• Permissions: N/A
• Links:
  
  • Ilam Bsaak
  • Imperial Crownguard
  • Dromund Kaas

• Unit Name: The Umbral Guard
• Affiliation:
  
  • The Kainate
• Classification: Elite Force Sensitive Executioner Guard / Black Ops Bodyguard Unit
• Description:
  
  • The Umbral Guard are the sovereign executioners of Darth Prazutis, an all-Epicanthix, all Force Sensitive unit drawn from the stock of the Ilam Bsaak and refined through the crucibles of the Crownguard and the Qazûr Rite. They are not soldiers in the conventional sense, nor knights with their own ambitions, nor acolytes seeking enlightenment. They are the blade behind the throne, the circle of black iron that closes around a target when the Shadow Hand has already passed sentence.
    
    Visually, they are unmistakable: Tall, armored in Umbral Aegis warplate, with obsidian black surfaces, crimson runes, and a single glowing visor slit that replaces any suggestion of a human face. In their hands they carry the Qazûr Execution Pike, a reconfigurable alchemized polearm designed for both battlefield control and ritual killings. Their armor bears a single sigil: A downward-facing crimson spear enclosed within three concentric broken circles, representing Authority, Silence, and Obedience to the Shadow.
    
    They do not speak in public. They seldom move without purpose. To most within the Kainate, the sight of an Umbral Guard entering a chamber means one of two things: Someone is about to be protected, or someone is about to be erased.

• Unit Size: Small
• Unit Availability: Rare
• Unit Experience: Elite
• Equipment:
  
  • Umbral Aegis Mk. I
    • Ebon Psicom Array Mk. I
    • Shadowlink Omni Resolution Array Mk. I
  • Qazûr Execution Pike Mk. I
  • Secondary Weapons:
    • Compact Kainate issue sidearms or hold-out blasters as needed for specific missions. The Umbral Guard have access to the full arsenal of the Kainate, to equip themselves for each mission.
    • Ritual restraint devices, shock manacles, and execution restraints for doctrinal enforcement roles.
  • Support Gear:
    • Comms keyed to Kainate command frequencies and infrastructure.
    • Encrypted data-tags indicating rank (First Shade, High Umbral, etc.).
    • Access to specialized Kainate dropships and escorts when deployed off-world.
    • All Umbral Guard are outfitted with a system similar to the Bloodlock within their equipment, that triggers in the event of death or capture, activated by the individual. This ensures their gear can never be seized upon their demise.
• Combat Function: The Umbral Guard are a precision scalpel of terror and protection. They are not line infantry and do not take the field as a conventional army. Instead, they operate in small squads or as a full phalanx in the following roles:
  
  • Personal Guard: Forming the immediate perimeter around Darth Prazutis during rituals, war councils, diplomatic meetings, and battlefield appearances, often supported by the Crownguard. In this role they act as an unbreakable wall, locking into Obsidian Guard Stance with pikes forward, turning tight spaces and throne rooms into killing grounds.
  • Execution & Silencing: Deployed to eliminate traitors, dissidents, rogue darksiders, jedi and high-value targets whose removal must be absolute and unmistakable. They favor overwhelming, close-quarters dominance, Shadowstepping through blind angles, crushing resistance with Dread Pressure and coordinated spearwork, and making certain that witnesses carry the memory of what defiance costs.
  • Doctrinal Enforcement & Internal Security: Operating within the Kainate's core territories, they punish heresy, doctrinal deviation, and disobedience to the Eternal Rule. They may accompany Inquisitors, Shadow Mind agents, or the Shadow Hand himself to ensure that any conclusion reached is ultimately enforceable.
  • Ritual Wardens & Sorcerous Conduits: Acting as anchors around Sith rituals, their armor and Qazûr-laden bodies are used by Prazutis as stable pylons to channel or contain dark-side energies. In mass operations or on key worlds like Dromund Kaas, they provide psychic perimeter security, detecting hostile presences with Black Mirror Sight and acting as relays for the Sovereign's Will Conduit.
• They typically operate with other Kainate forces rather than instead of them. Legionaries, Blackblade infantry, Crownguard or Epicanthix formations secure the broader battlespace; the Umbral Guard are brought in where a single corridor, bridge, sanctum, or command deck must be held, or taken, at any cost.
• Force Abilities: All Umbral Guards are Force Sensitive Epicanthix, already battle-hardened from Ilam Bsaak and Crownguard service before their Umbral ascension. Their powers are standardized into a carefully curated suite, tuned to their role as executioners and phalanx guardians.
  
  • All members possess a baseline of:
    • Telekinesis: Standard pushes, pulls, crushes, and tactical object manipulation.
    • Force Strike: Augments the users physical attack power in hand to hand combat.
    • Force Sense & Danger Sense: Heightened perception, threat detection, and battlefield awareness.
    • Force Speed & Reflexes: Short, brutal bursts of speed for closing gaps, repositioning, and counter-attacks.
    • Art of Movement: Agility enhancing to greatly boost athletic ability even within heavy armor.
    • Force Jump: Increased maneuverability, explosively hurl themselves across gaps or into the air, turning their armored bulk into a sudden, descending spear of impact.
    • Reduce Injury: Allows increased endurance even against mortal blows that would seriously injure or kill others.
    • Control Pain: A power that allows acute control and mitigation over ones pain.
    • Dark Force Resistance: A dark driven resilience that hardens the user, allowing them to defend against others abilities.
    • Magnify Senses: Enhances base senses ensuring greater alertness, attentiveness, and attention to detail.
    • Telepathy & Mind Trick: Projects fear, commands, and shocks more easily than reading minds, thanks to Epicanthix mental resilience.
  • On top of this they are trained in the following structured disciplines:
    • Core Abilities (All Members)
      • Shadowstep: A short-range, micro-scale variation on Fold Space and advanced movement techniques. The Guard can flick a few meters through space to appear from blind angles, behind cover, or inside a gap in enemy lines. Range is limited and repeated use is fatiguing, but in confined spaces it makes them terrifyingly hard to track.
      • Dread Pressure: A refined Force Fear/Horror technique that manifests as a localized psychic weight. It causes enemies to feel the certainty of impending death, hands trembling, breath constricting, decisions slowing, without necessarily inciting wild panic, making it ideal for controlled suppression and executions.
      • Obsidian Guard Stance: A combat anchor derived from Tutaminis, Force Body, and advanced grounding. When the Guard lock into stance and brace their Qazûr Weave into the floor or structure, they are extremely difficult to move, stagger, or blast away, even under powerful concussions or telekinetic waves. Designed to hold doors, corridors, and throne rooms against overwhelming force.
      • Silent Howl: An inverted, focused variant of Force Scream and telepathic shock. Instead of a simple shouted wave, the Guard inject a burst of psychic noise directly into the target's mind, disrupting concentration, breaking focus on powers or marksmanship, and causing momentary sensory distortion.
    • Advanced Abilities (High Umbral / First Shade):Only senior ranks (High Umbral and the First Shade) wield these consistently; others may show partial or emerging aptitude.
      • Umbra Consumption: A controlled, ambient form of Force Drain that absorbs surrounding energy especially darkness, fear, despair, dying echoes, rather than simply ripping life directly from living beings, although capable of this. This can stabilize stamina, dull physical pain, and keep them fighting longer in battlefields soaked with death.
      • Sovereign's Will Conduit: A ritualized conduit-state similar to Children of the Emperor in which the Guard open themselves as living pylons for Darth Prazutis' sorcery. Through their Qazûr Weave and armor runes, he can project his will through them to extend dread, reinforce allied will, or sharpen coordination within a localized area. Alone, they can offer a minor, localized boost in cohesion and morale to nearby Kainate forces.
      • Black Mirror Sight: By entering a trance, senior Umbral can use shadows, reflective surfaces, and obsidian-like materials as anchor points for limited Force Sight and Scrying. Useful for internal security, stalking corridors, and scanning chambers beyond direct line of sight.
      • Umbral Phase: An extremely demanding, brief intangibility technique related to Force Phase. For a heartbeat they can partially slip through matter, letting an attack pass through or stepping through a thin barrier. It is short-lived, and exhausting.
      • Umbral Castigation: A disciplined, weapon-channelled derivative of Force Lightning and Force Blast. When invoked, red-black arcs crawl along their pikes or gauntlets, delivering nerve-searing pain and localized EMP-like disruption rather than pure disintegration, or projecting concussive blasts to smash enemies off balance.

• Elite Executioner Cadre: Drawn from Ilam Bsaak and Crownguard veterans, then re-forged by Sith alchemy, the Umbral Guard represent some of the most disciplined, resilient, and combat-hardened Force users in the Kainate. Their experience and conditioning make them exceptionally difficult to break physically or mentally.
• Fear and Control Specialists: Their combination of Dread Pressure, Silent Howl, Shadowstep, and dread-imbued equipment (Umbral Aegis, Qazûr Execution Pike) makes them masters of territorial control and psychological dominance, especially in close quarters. They can dismantle enemy morale as surely as they dismantle bodies.
• Heavy Protection and Environmental Resilience: With Umbral Aegis warplate and Qazûr Weave undersuits, they boast high resistance to conventional blasters, kinetic impacts, extreme environments, and many battlefield hazards, allowing them to operate in void, toxic zones, burning cities, or corrupt nexuses without losing effectiveness.
• Synergy with Darth Prazutis and Kainate Rituals: Their entire design, genetic, alchemical, and doctrinal, is tuned to act as extensions of the Shadow Hand. They can safely serve as conduits for his greater workings, anchor ritual perimeters, and act as a mobile enforcement node for the Eternal Rule's doctrine.

• Small, Hard-to-Replace Unit: The intense selection, Crownguard lineage, and Qazûr Rite alchemy mean each Umbral Guard represents years of investment. Their unit is small, their availability rare, and casualties are slow to replace. They cannot be squandered in attritional warfare without long-term strategic cost.
• Reliance on the Force and Dark Side Saturation: Many of their greatest advantages, Shadowstep, Umbra Consumption, Sovereign's Will Conduit, Umbral Phase, dread projection, require an active connection to the Force. While under Force Nullification they are reduced to "only" elite warriors in heavy armor.
• Heavy Warplate and Conspicuous Presence: The Umbral Aegis is intentionally imposing and heavy. While they can move with frightening speed thanks to the Force and their strength, they are not suited for long-duration stealth infiltration, extended acrobatic combat, or rapid aerial maneuvering. Their look alone draws attention; they are instruments of terror, not covert operatives.

If the Ilam Bsaak were born in the ashes of Panatha, then the Umbral Guard were born in the shadow of its avenger. When the Epicanthix homeworld was doomed, it was the ruthlessly efficient intervention of House Zambrano and the Kainate that saved a majority of their people, transforming them into a hardened remnant. Those who survived the Exodus of Panatha were reshaped into the Ilam Bsaak, the Ironblood, a people who shed the last softness of their old civilization and rebuilt their culture around the Will of Iron (Wess ah Ilam). From their strongholds on Dromund Kaas and Malsheem, they embraced war as life, strength as law, and survival as creed.

Among these Ironblood, the most devoted and capable were drawn into the Crownguard, an order of mute, mutilated bodyguards who swore absolute loyalty to the Dyarchy. Their trials mirrored the worst of Sith temple tribulations: tongues removed, bodies remade into living tapestries, identities sanded down into pure function. It was this stock, Epicanthix of iron will and proven devotion, that Darth Prazutis began to harvest when he envisioned something more than just personal guards.

He did not want colorfully robed sentries or simple screens of warriors between himself and assassins. He wanted verdicts that could walk.

In the deep crucibles of the Sith Citadel on Dromund Kaas and aboard Malsheem, Prazutis began designing what would become the Qazûr Weave, the Umbral Aegis, and the Qazûr Execution Pike, a closed ecosystem of armor, flesh, and weaponry that would allow a select few to function as his personal instruments of execution and doctrinal enforcement. Crownguard who distinguished themselves in battle, survived impossible assignments, or showed a particular affinity for the Force were quietly "elevated" to a second set of trials: Immersion in Shadow Fonts, surgical and alchemical grafting to Qazûr Weave, and the stripping and rewriting of identity in the Qazûr Rite.

Those who lived became the first Umbral Guard. They were organized under a singular commander, the First Shade, with ranks of High Umbral, Shadowsworn, and Reborn beneath. Operational detachments formed the Spearline (Phalanx Defenders), Shade Choir (Ritual and Battlefield Dread Specialists), Night Collars (Interrogators and Internal Enforcers), and the Quiet Knife (Assassination Cells). Every name, every title, was chosen to reinforce the same truth: They were no longer individuals. They were functions in a system whose center was the Shadow Hand.

Rank Structure

• The First Shade: The First Shade is the commander of the Umbral Guard and the only member who deals with Darth Prazutis in something approaching direct counsel rather than simple obedience. They relay the Sovereign's will, assign targets, sanction internal purges, and serve as the Guard's strategic mind. In battle or ceremony, the First Shade is the dark figure half a step behind and to the side of Prazutis, the one who silently gestures and entire squads move.
• High Umbral: High Umbral are senior officers and exemplars, veterans who have survived multiple campaigns, ritual exposures, and decades in Qazûr Weave without breaking. Each High Umbral typically commands one or more detachments (Spearline block, Quiet Knife cell, etc.) and is trusted to interpret doctrine without hesitation. They are the ones entrusted with the most dangerous powers: Umbra Consumption, Black Mirror Sight, Umbral Phase, and acting as Sovereign's Will Conduits.
• Shadowsworn: The Shadowsworn are the core body of the Umbral Guard: fully forged executioners who have survived the Qazûr Rite, completed their Shadow Font immersion, and proven their reliability under live deployment. They form the bulk of the Guard in armor and spear, rotating between protection, execution, and doctrinal enforcement as needed. Most battlefield images of the Umbral Guard, tight phalanxes, synchronized pike strikes, silent squads moving through smoke, are lines of Shadowsworn under a High Umbral's command.
• Reborn: The Reborn are the newest members, warriors who have passed the Ilam Bsaak Tempering, served (often) as Crownguard, and survived the initial Qazûr grafting and Shadow Font rites, but have not yet earned full standing. They fight, bleed, and kill beside their seniors, but are closely monitored. A Reborn either proves worthy of being named Shadowsworn or vanishes from the rolls without comment.

Operational Detachments

• The Spearline: The Spearline are the Umbral Guard at their most iconic: Shield-wall and pike-line, locking down corridors, throne rooms, and landing platforms. They specialize in Obsidian Guard Stance, formation Shadowstep, and coordinated pike work designed to break charges, crush breaches, and hold impossible chokepoints.
• The Shade Choir: The Shade Choir operate as ritual wardens and battlefield dread-projectors. They anchor around Prazutis during major workings, serve as conduits in Sovereign's Will Conduit operations, and deploy in engagements where psychological collapse of the enemy is as important as physical defeat. Wherever the air feels too heavy to breathe and panic rises without cause, the Choir is likely nearby.
• The Night Collars: Named for the choking pressure they bring, the Night Collars serve as interrogators, internal enforcers, and handlers for prisoners destined for exemplary punishment. They are expert in Dread Pressure, Silent Howl, and the calibrated use of the Qazûr Execution Pike as a tool of breaking rather than simply killing. When they arrive, someone's loyalty is being measured—and will not be found sufficient.
• The Quiet Knife: The Quiet Knife are the assassination arm of the Umbral Guard. They deploy in very small teams or alone, striking at rogue darksiders, traitors, enemy commanders, and anyone whose death Prazutis wishes to be both final and exemplary. They make extensive use of Shadowstep, close-quarters pike forms, and subtle Force techniques; their work is rarely witnessed by surviving enemies, but the aftermath is always unmistakable.

Over the years, their legend grew quietly but inexorably.

When Prazutis walked the storm-wracked streets of New Kaas City, the Umbral Guard marched as a moving wall of spears and black iron, turning even celebratory parades into processions edged with fear. When Kainate governance required the removal of a especially dangerous, corrupt governor, heretical cult, or treasonous warlord, it was often the Quiet Knife that appeared in their sanctums, pikes shifting configuration as they flickered through Shadowstep and left nothing but bodies and an absence where authority used to sit. During great rituals in the depths of the Sith Citadel, the Shade Choir formed full circles around Prazutis' workings, their armor runes glowing as they served as pylons for the Sovereign's Will Conduit, extending his reach through their Qazûr-wired bodies.

Despite this, they have never been common sights on open battlefields. The Umbral Guard are not line breakers or siege masters; those roles belong to Kainate legions, war machines, and other specialized formations. Instead, their history is written in sharp, focused moments: the single breach in a fortress where they held the line until reinforcements arrived; the sudden, silent cleansing of a compromised command staff; the appearance of black helms and crimson visors in a war council where someone's loyalty has just been judged and found wanting.

Within the Kainate, they have become myth and warning both. Children in New Kaas City whisper that if one lies about loyalty, the men with the single red eye will come. Officers know that if they see an Umbral Guard detach in their corridors and their name has not been called, it is time to stand very still and say very little. For the Ilam Bsaak, to be chosen as Reborn is both the highest honor and the ultimate surrender of self: a chance to become the iron hand that ensures their people will never again be broken.

Outside the Kainate, stories conflict. Some say the Umbral Guard are little more than Sith knights in fancy armor. Others call them death made flesh: Faceless, wordless, unstoppable whenever they are unleashed. The truth is simple, and far colder. The Umbral Guard exist so that when Darth Prazutis passes judgment, he never has to raise his own hand. The sentence walks for him.