Bleak One
Darth Dreer hummed cheerily as he stepped, carefully picking his way over the occasional gnarled tree root or jagged stone.
Kohlma was oppressively ancient, the sort of place he'd normally quite like. Unfortunately, it was in Galactic Alliance territory, deeper than he'd normally dare go. Right on the border with the Mandalorians. He was here for something specific, else this lengthy trip would have never happened. There were no friends to be found here, he suspected. Not in Alliance space, and certainly not on Kohlma.
The fog was thick tonight, enough so to make a simple walk a hazard. The tattered, vaporous sheets obstructed the way forward, as if attempting to discourage him from going further. There was a certain darkness on Kohlma, even after all these centuries. He doubted anyone remembered. It was ancient history, lost history even, for one who didn't know where to look.
Long ago, something had been stamped out here by the Sith, something they feared as a rival. A sneer formed on Dreer's cracked lips. As with the old, so with the new. Sith were insecure creatures. Always plotting and planning and terrified that their power might be derailed. Power that teetered on so moveable a base was not power.
He supposed he wasn't much better than the rest. They just feared different things. To Dreer's mind, the only thing he was afraid of had already happened, and couldn't happen twice. Kohlma held no terror dark enough to even raise his heart rate. Not anymore.
A more superstitious mind might have been dissuaded. Might have conjured delusions about the ghosts of the unquiet dead defending their resting places. Might have started hearing the shuffling of rotting feet in the normal wind-whisper ambience of the overgrown, unnaturally-twisted trees. Kohlma was the perfect environment to create such fantasies, with its tomb-lined canyons. One couldn't design a more fertile ground for the dead to walk if one tried.
Pattern recognition was one of the key delineators between sapient and non-sapient life, but he knew well that such a gift could be turned painfully against the one who bore it. The mind might start detecting patterns where none existed, and invent fictional devils and ghouls to torment itself with. Dreer knew better. He'd become something of an artisan self-tormentor. The dead didn't hold a candle to the living when it came to that.
This section of the planet's endless cemetery procession was old. Old enough and remote enough to seemingly be forgotten. Dreer stopped to brush a tangle of dead vines from a partially-collapsed headstone. The ravaging claws of time and weather had long since rendered its owner anonymous. This marker was many, many times older than he was.
Good. This was the place. Obscure, old, and out of the way. Just as the texts had said.
It shouldn't take long to find what he was after. Dreer had seen a lot of cemeteries on a lot of different worlds. Some species had more bizarre or unconventional rites, but as a rule, burial seemed the most common.
The wealthy, of course, eventually died too, and those without private family burial grounds wound up right here next to the gormless masses. Naturally, their monuments were correspondingly larger and more ostentatious, striving for importance and exclusivity even as the clammy hands of the reaper hauled them away to irrelevance.
Dreer allowed himself a shake of his head. Such ridiculous priorities. To expend so much wealth on having a prettier, shinier marker than the next plot of worm food.
Dreer's knowledge of the local fauna was admittedly shaky, but he was led to believe that Kohlma's worms wouldn't care anymore about a corpse's bank account statements than those found elsewhere.
It didn't take him long to find a likely target. A mausoleum proper. No pauper's grave, this. It was a gaudy thing of elaborate carvings and faded gold filigree, likely larger inside than most living people's houses. A pair of massive metal double-doors barred entry, built right into the cliffside.
He strode to the door and placed a hand on it, concentrating. He searched for a lock with touch as much as anything else, feeling around for any subtle button or switch.
He'd spent almost his entire adult life doing just this, enough to know that every door had a weakness somewhere. Simply blasting it down with the Force was viable, but much less fun.
No, half of the allure was in the process. Darth Dreer found the musty tomb and the forgotten ruin more exhilarating than anything else that life had to offer.
It was a brief escape, if he tried hard enough. A momentary window back into the past, where everything made sense. In time, he'd defeat this lock the same as the rest, but he enjoyed the panacea while it lasted.
His musical humming increased in volume as his excitement grew, drifting through the cemetery. If the dead (or anything else) were walking tonight, they surely heard him...
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