Ozymandias
They came like a sickness. The thousand Sith fleets, black-bellied and wide-throated, emerged from the dark hearts of hangars across the severed territories. The Blackwall had not cooled. Its edges still burned with the heat of things undone. Entire worlds had only just realized their isolation—had only begun to scream into the void where the galaxy had once answered them—when the first fleets arrived. No flags. No heralds. Only weapons hot and doctrine written in blood. The age of names was over. Now came the taking.
The worlds were not warned. Kal’Shebbol burned in its high orbit before a single order was given. Alzoc III watched the sky crack open and found itself on fire. On Adras the warlords descended like carrion birds, and what ancient ruins still whispered were crushed beneath the tread of Sith war engines. They struck not as liberators nor as tyrants, but as something older. Something that fed. They did not conquer by strategy alone. They did not conquer by truth or lies. They conquered by hunger. And each planet they took became a rung on a ladder made of the dead. This was not the Fourth Legion. Not yet. These were the war-priests and butcher kings who would birth it.
A hundred battles bloomed like tumors. Some Sith took to the stars, pushing farther from Sluis Van as if distance alone would crown them. They struck out across the still-forming hyperlanes—twisting, half-stable corridors through the Blackwall’s gut—and some were quick enough to reach the outer worlds. But they found themselves alone. Surrounded. Trapped. In some cases, killed. In others, mad. Their fleets waited like spiders at the edge of nothing, unable to return. Others learned quicker. Set ambushes along the lanes. Waited. Let their prey come blind and arrogant before tearing them open with precision and flame.
Still others did not move at all. They fortified. Took one world and made it a crucible. Let others come to them and crushed them against the walls. Some made pacts. Sat in the dark and whispered their names to others in return for loyalty. A few honored those pacts. More did not. Acolytes murdered their masters. Captains turned traitor for promised thrones. Sith Lords took the knee not out of fear, but calculation—and many stood again when it suited them. The boundaries of honor melted like wax. Some warlords turned their eyes not outward to the stars but inward, drunk on newfound power, making palaces of terror and cults of self, slaughtering by whim, believing themselves gods of the thousand-world tomb.
And all the while, the Force screamed. It screamed in the bones of those who listened. It screamed in the storms. It screamed through weapons that should not function and gates that opened when no key was turned. For this was no mere war, no political reshaping, no border dispute or game of state. This was the Velgrath. An old name. A name buried by time and curse and now unearthed like a sword through a corpse’s ribs. There would be no return until it was done. No voice but victory would be heard. No legacy but blood.
And somewhere in the dark behind it all, the one who had set it in motion watched in silence, and did not speak. For the rite had begun, and nothing now could be called back.
Objective I: The Gate of Red Glass
“The strong do not wait at the end. They wait at the threshold.”
The first of the hyperlane corridors stabilizes beyond Sluis Van—narrow, flickering, still choked with the debris of severed routes and broken ships. But something waits there. A Darth known only as Amunex the Hollow has claimed five fleets through betrayal, seduction, and precision. He now controls the corridor’s edge and has constructed a great ambush crucible using ritualized mass shadow generators—illegal technology and forbidden sorcery bound in flesh and steel.
He lures fleets in under the guise of safe passage and then crushes them, harvesting their survivors, cannibalizing their craft. The trap feeds on movement, on the desperate, on the ambitious. Some say he’s building a citadel from the wreckage. Some say he's trying to summon something. You may seek passage. You may seek alliance. Or you may dare to make Amunex Hollow the sixth fleet claimed.
Objective II: The Silence at Morrigal
“Not all conquest is won through fire. Some is won when no one comes to stop you.”
Morrigal was once a trade world of little note—scarred, gray, quiet. But it rests now at a crossroads in the hyperlane web. To hold Morrigal is to gain supply, visibility, leverage. It is the perfect staging ground for further conquest. Yet the world lies unclaimed. Rumors whisper of an ancient Sith cult buried beneath its surface—those who believe the Velgrath was foretold, and who serve only the one who will end it. These cultists are said to possess ancient maps—keys to the Velgrath’s oldest roads.
Some Lords may choose to ignore Morrigal, seeing no challenge in a dead world. Others may seek to rule it. But those who land will find that silence is not peace—and that the price of the maps may be steeper than blood.
Objective III: The Pact of Broken Banners
“When you cannot kill your enemy, make them kneel. When they kneel, make them beg.”
At a drifting station called Kyral’s Wound, six Sith fleets orbit in a fragile ceasefire. They are too damaged to continue, too proud to retreat. And so they parley. They drink. They plot. The War Council forming here may decide the fate of half the Velgrath’s western reaches—if it survives long enough.
Some have come to offer alliances. Others seek to shatter them. A few have no interest at all in negotiation, only in taking advantage of proximity and pain. Whether through diplomacy, deceit, or sheer violence, Kyral’s Wound may become the grave of a dozen would-be emperors—or the forge of a new Sith coalition powerful enough to threaten the rest.
