First Reply To Steal from the Past

[Darth Dreer]

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...

 

[Darth Virelia]

"To be, or not to be."

Tags - Darth Dreer

The fog parted before her like a veil tugged by unseen fingers. Kohlma's air clung wet to the obsidian plates of her armor, sliding down the ridged lines as though even the planet's breath bent deferentially around her frame. Violet glimmers swam across her mirrored faceplate, six luminous eyes shifting with an insectile precision. Each subtle tilt of her helm refracted the dim starlight into fractured constellations, as though she herself were a galaxy staring back.

She had been walking for some time, though not without purpose. Kohlma had drawn her here—old world, old whispers, old ruins half-remembered by the kind of historians who preferred to write in riddles. It was not a place one stumbled into by accident. And yet, here, before a garish mausoleum whose filigree still clung to its stone like a parasite pretending to grandeur, she found another.

Her approach was not silent. She wished him to hear the deliberate rhythm of her boots striking broken stone. Predatory, yes, but never skulking. Kohlma was already alive with phantoms; she had no need to mimic them.

"Curious," she said at last, her voice a sonorous velvet that seemed to purr out from behind the blank helm. "A tomb in the fog, and someone humming as if he owned the dead."

She stopped a few paces from the mausoleum doors, head canting just slightly, as though she were dissecting the sight of him—his hand on the stone, the way the fog clung to his shoulders.

"You make yourself very at home here," Virelia continued, the words not accusation so much as observation. "Few walk Kohlma with such… cheer. Most who come are swallowed whole by the weight of its history. Yet you hum, as if the dead should dance to your tune."

A low ripple of laughter, licentious and amused, issued from her helm, quickly muffled by the rasp of the modulator. She let it linger, the kind of laugh that warmed and unsettled in equal measure.

 

[Darth Dreer]

Dreer didn't jump, look back, or seem entirely surprised to see her. His attention remained focused on the door, kneeling or standing to examine every inch of it.

Interlopers to his expeditions weren't unknown. In truth, he was surprised someone came to a place like Kohlma. A do-gooder, come to disrupt his work? Maybe. Dreer's brand of archaeology had little respect for the resting places of the deceased. Or maybe a rival? One who intended to steal what he was rightfully stealing?

He decided the best way forward was caution. Find out what manner of person had hunted him down amidst the tombstones.

"I'm not sure I'd call it cheer." He said finally. The voice that slithered out from behind his white mask was soft, cultured, almost unctuous, but tinged with an undeniable malice. "Unless cheer be relative. Nostalgia, maybe. For a time and place I never existed in."

"I've always been more at home among the dead than the living." He continued, finally unsheathing a short, chopping blade and sliding it into a small gap in the door's surface. "The dead are lucky. They exist in a perpetual past, where nothing changes and their names are enshrined in glory. As such, they won't miss a few mementos here and there, for those of us still living in the moment."

Despite his efforts, the door remained smugly closed. He sighed wearily, then turned around to study Darth Virelia . Armored, faceless, yet carrying herself with an utterly perfect confidence. His bilious yellow eyes narrowed within his own face-tomb. Careful. Best get her measure first.

"Or perhaps they will. Maybe your presence frightens them." Dreer opened his etheric senses, studying the stranger with more than his eyes and ears. They were a thing of darkness, without question. Darkness of a potent and terrifying magnitude. Such a lovely voice for one whose soul stained the very air around them, and from whom the very fog of Kohlma seemed to shrink away in terror.

"To what do I owe the pleasure? Coincidence, or do you intend to get in my way?"

 

[Darth Virelia]

"To be, or not to be."

Tags - Darth Dreer

The tomb's silence seemed to bend beneath her presence, the violet glimmer of her many-eyed helm reflecting the flicker of Dreer's blade against the unyielding seam of the door. She did not move at once—she lingered, letting the fog coil around her like incense, letting him hear her breath through the faint modulation of her mask, a reminder that she was alive in ways more deliberate than most mortals ever achieved.

When she did step closer, it was soundless, a predator's glide. Her taloned gauntlet brushed the filigreed surface of the mausoleum as though caressing a lover's spine, reverent yet possessive. The runes engraved across her armor pulsed with faint violet light, answering the tomb's old stillness with a heartbeat of their own.

"You mistake me for a warden," she said softly, the words carrying no edge of threat—only a cadence of inevitability. "But no—these bones hold no fear of me. If they stir at all, it is in recognition."

Her helm tilted slightly, insectile eyes gleaming, studying him in turn. His presence was unusual—too calm, too self-contained for the usual carrion feeders that haunted forgotten places. He had come prepared to trespass, not blunder. And though she could not see through him, the rhythm of his movements and his voice betrayed discipline, purpose. That intrigued her.

"You ask what pleasure you owe," she continued, her tone dipping into something almost indulgent. "Not coincidence. Never that. Kohlma yields nothing by accident. I came because this world remembers me, though it will not say how. Memory pulls us both here."

At last, she straightened to her full height, the cape at her back rippling with phantom movement as though alive. A faint hum from the crystalline node in her chest pulsed in tandem with her words.

"I am called Darth Virelia," she said, with no boast, no pomp—only the weight of certainty, like naming a law of nature. "I am a student of what the Sith buried and what they feared. Not to guard their secrets, but to remind them that nothing they entombed ever remains silent forever."

A pause—deliberate, respectful, the smallest bow of her head acknowledging his presence as one might a peer across an unspoken boundary.

"And you, wanderer among the dead? You move like one who belongs to them already. Tell me whose company I share at this door."

 

[Darth Dreer]

"An easy mistake to make." He responded, finally removing the blade from the door. With a flourish, it was returned to its place at his side.

"Places like this have many kinds of wardens. Not all are flesh and blood. Most also don't bother to use words, which is a point in your favor. I suppose that means I believe you."

He analyzed her in return. Calm, assured, most certainly dangerous. Contrary to the sleek, high-tech appearance of his visitor, Dreer's own trappings were decidedly weather-beaten. Simple brown leather clothing concealed most of his form, while a ragged, fog-moistened cloak topped off the whole bizarre figure. His appearance didn't speak of much in the way of wealth or an appreciation for comfort.

He decided it was best to be nice, for the moment. Dreer didn't typically appreciate interruptions to his work, no matter how mannerly or unusual they were. This Darth Virelia was both. Somehow he doubted that two Sith were here, in this same place on the same night, and something greater wasn't afoot. Better to play it cautious until it became apparent what his guest really wanted.

"Well then, Darth Virelia." He said, his tongue curling around the words like a constrictor snake. "I suppose that puts us here on similar purpose." He returned his attention to the barricade, sighed, and waved a hand. There was a clanking sound inside, and the doors swiveled open towards the two of them.

"It's no fun, but occasionally I find a door too stubborn for my mundane skills." He stepped inside, withdrew a frayed leatherbound notebook from a pouch at his side, and began studying the door's mechanisms. Here and there a note was taken, and he was silent for quite a few minutes.

Finally, he looked back up towards her, snapped the book shut, and tucked it back into his belt. "The Sith..." he began. "Have a history of burying what they fear, as you say. The powerful are too often insecure, and insecurity suffers no rivals. It is a... constant frustration for those of us with a historian's mind and heart. What alternate viewpoints might have thrived into the modern day, had they not been stamped out in their infancy. What might the galaxy look like now?"

"The Sith side of me sees it as nature taking its course. Weakness gets what weakness invites. My inner scholar, though, can barely contain his irritation."

Dreer stepped away from the threshold and back into the foggy air outside, letting out a mildly amused "hmph" at her last comment. Observant, if nothing else. "Not far off. I'd rather be here than wasting my time on a battlefield or in a boardroom. Darth Dreer, at your humble service." He spoke more like a scholar than a warrior, with something of the cadence of a lecturer without seeming to be aware of it. A near-constant tinge of nostalgia and longing hung on every word.

"Like I said, the dead are lucky, in their way. I'm in no hurry to join them just yet, but I can't deny that being a living piece of history as fascinating as all this..." a jerk of the head towards the door "Well. I can think of worse ends, is all I mean. A shame they do not always recognize their own as easily as you seem to."

 

[Darth Virelia]

"To be, or not to be."

Tags - Darth Dreer

The doors sighed open, iron groaning against iron, and the stale breath of centuries spilled out to greet them. Dust rolled over her armor in faint waves, clinging before sliding off the obsidian plates as though reluctant to let go. Darth Virelia did not step forward immediately; she lingered at the threshold, savoring the first exhale of the tomb. For her, every forgotten vault was a confession waiting to be coaxed, and she preferred to let it speak before pressing her will upon it.

Her helm inclined toward him as he named himself, as though committing the syllables to memory. Darth Dreer. The cadence with which he spoke, the nostalgia soaked into his tone, marked him not as a grave robber, but as something rarer: one who sought to resurrect meaning from bones. That he couched his irritation at Sith insecurity in scholarly terms was… refreshing. Many who bore the title "Darth" could not string such thoughts together without drowning them in ego.

She drifted a single taloned hand along the seam of the open door, tracing where his will had unlocked what his blade could not. Sparks of violet energy arced faintly in the wake of her touch, runes across her chest pulsing in acknowledgment of the opening. When she spoke again, her voice carried an almost indulgent warmth.

"You call yourself scholar, and I see truth in it. The Sith call destruction inevitability, but I wonder if they ever realized how much knowledge their insecurities cost them. Every rival silenced is a shadow across the galaxy's memory. You are right to be irritated."

With that, she stepped inside at last, her cape trailing crimson shadow across the dust. The air was thicker here, heavy with the residue of ancient rites. Her pace was unhurried, a slow promenade deeper into the mausoleum's gloom.

"Let us test a theory, Darth Dreer," she said at length, voice echoing softly against the stone. "If what is buried here was feared, then it is not weakness we are about to exhume, but strength in a form the old Sith could not endure. That is worth a measure of risk, is it not?"

Her violet eyes glimmered faintly through the dark as she glanced back at him. "Walk with me, scholar. History does not reveal itself to those who linger outside."

 

[Darth Dreer]

Dreer was pleasantly surprised to have someone voice agreement with him. Pleasantly surprised, and perhaps a tad suspicious. There was, without question, something more going on here. Life seldom extended him any favors, and certainly not any allies.

"The Sith disregard for the philosophies of our enemies is not a surprising one, but it is a disappointing one. I find they often have much to teach us." What Dreer lacked in raw power, he had long attempted to make up for in breadth of knowledge. There were many strange, obscure arts known only to history's more fringe traditions, and he fancied he knew most of them.

"But, to admit that would be to admit that say, the Nightsisters or the Rhandites or whoever you please hold knowledge that Sith doctrine does not, and thus to admit that they hold power that Sith doctrine does not." He snickered, emitting a sound like a schoolboy who's left a tack on his instructor's chair. "Which of course will not do. Sith doctrine can either be supreme in all respects, or it can be wrong. At least that's how many see it. So, I bear the uneasy crown of the heretic, the dissenter, the apostate."

He considered Darth Virelia 's implicit self-invitation along on his little delve. Her use of "we" was subtle, but the intent was all too clear. Again, he found his eyes narrowing. Fine. He didn't survive up to now by displaying a lack of due caution. He'd see what Virelia's game was, one way or another.

"Quite so." He finally agreed, turning to follow and drawing his hood a little tighter around the edges of his mask. A few strands of gray-laced brown hair escaped out into the biting chill, before being tucked back out of the way. "And what strength it was, if the stories be true. Arts long-forgotten by most in our day. Arts I intend to pry forth, like I have so many others."

As usual, he immediately felt better once inside the tunnel. Quite the opposite of a claustrophobe, he always experienced a sense of increased control and safety in the galaxy's dark and forgotten places. Less avenues for possible attack. Less looking over one's shoulder.

"Of course, others will have been here over the centuries. I doubt that what I seek has been left untouched, but there's always something to be found, for the discerning delver."

 

[Darth Virelia]

"To be, or not to be."

Tags - Darth Dreer

The air within the tomb pressed close, heavy with the musk of stone and centuries. Every sound was amplified—the scrape of Dreer's boots on the dust-laden floor, the soft exhalation of her armor's breath-like systems, the faint hum of the runes that pulsed in time with her steps. For Virelia, this was not confinement but intimacy; the narrowing of space sharpened focus, honed intent. She walked a half-pace ahead, the crimson-lined cape trailing shadow across the walls like a brush of flame.

His words amused her—not because they were foolish, but because they carried weight. Too many Sith cloaked their fear in bombast, hiding from the truth that others had touched mysteries they dared not. That Dreer admitted it freely marked him as rare. Her helm turned fractionally toward him, violet eyes gleaming in the dark.

"Heretic," she repeated, voice a purr shaped into respect. "The word is an honorific, though few understand why. Apostasy is not betrayal, but hunger. The Sith call it blasphemy when one admits another holds a shard of truth. Yet it is only through such shards that the whole can be glimpsed."

Her taloned gauntlet drifted along the carved walls as they descended. Reliefs had long ago faded into anonymity, but under her touch the glyphs shimmered faintly, as if recognizing that another darkness now sought to read them. She lingered at one, tracing the suggestion of a figure bent low beneath a descending crown. The image fractured, unfinished, a tale silenced before its end.

"Look closely, Dreer," she murmured, her tone softer now, intimate in the echoing corridor. "This is the nature of their fear. Not that rivals would defeat them, but that rivals might endure. Sith power consumes, but endurance resists consumption."

The path opened suddenly into a chamber vast and hollow, its ceiling vanishing into darkness. Stalactites drooled ancient water into a still pool at the center, and the reflections of their violet eyes shimmered across its surface.

Virelia advanced only far enough to let her presence claim the chamber. She turned her helm toward Dreer and inclined her head—an unspoken gesture: This place offers. Take the first step, scholar. Show me what you seek.

 

[Darth Dreer]

"I quite agree." He said smoothly. "My scholarly inclinations cannot be satisfied by but one path, one philosophy. To demand as much is to shackle me with dogma, and such shackles grow very tiresome, very quickly."

"Indeed, I have a theory that all of them share a common origin, somewhere in the primordial past." He stopped, dug that ratty notebook from his bag again, and made a few rough sketches of the symbols when she called attention to them. "Maybe I'll find that too, someday. The font from which all darkness flows."

Dreer stared out into the moldering cave. Here was where it had begun. All those centuries ago. "You seem to know a thing or two, so I'm sure you've divined why I came here. Nearly a full millenium ago now, there existed a... let's call them a society, on Kohlma. One part Dark Side-venerating cult, one part criminal organization. One that enslaved its members' minds with a combination of drugs and sorcery."

"The Sith had them eradicated, via the assassination of their leader, a Dark Jedi." He sidestepped a stalagmite that had grown across the passage as it opened up. The centuries had not been kind to these tunnels, and he wouldn't be surprised if some proved to be blocked or flooded. "Of course, history doesn't tell us what happened to their members, or their assets. All those drug-addled agents, assassins, moles. Thousands, by some counts. Maybe more. All unaccounted for."

"This, if my information is good, is what remains of their citadel. The door still being locked is a good sign. Perhaps this portion went undisturbed, and there might be something to learn from it, even after all this time."

"Which begs the question. Did you know all this already when you came here, or do you just make a habit of stalking boneyards at night, waiting for random homeless men to open doors for you?" His tone was darkly jesting, but in truth, he was still trying to figure his compatriot out. Darth Virelia was an unknown variable, and those historically didn't end well for him.

 

[Darth Virelia]

"To be, or not to be."

Tags - Darth Dreer

Virelia listened as Dreer's words unfurled, their cadence steeped in memory and theory, and she found herself amused by the contrast. His cloak was frayed, his notebook battered, yet his mind was sharper than most Sith lords clad in gold and proclamations. A man willing to imagine that all shadows might spring from a single font—such thoughts were dangerous, intoxicating. She admired the taste of them.

The chamber accepted them with silence, its still pool a mirror for two figures out of time: one ragged, one sovereign. Virelia's gaze lingered on the faint glyphs reflected there, violet eyes multiplying across the water's surface. She stepped closer, her talons clicking faintly on stone, then stilled—head tilting as Dreer spoke of Kohlma's ancient society. Drugs, sorcery, obedience born of chemical chain. Her breath, distorted faintly through the mask, was a slow, deliberate sigh.

"How fitting," she said at last, her voice velvet laid over steel. "That the Sith destroyed them. Not because they were weak, but because they were effective. A rival discipline that dissolved the self, that turned will into instrument—ah, that would wound the ego of any Dark Lord. To see loyalty engineered rather than commanded."

Her gauntlet traced the air just above the water, sending ripples dancing across the mirrored glyphs. She did not touch—yet the pool responded, disturbed by her mere nearness.

"You ask if I knew. No. Kohlma's call is what drew me, not this particular cult. The past speaks to me as it does to you, though perhaps in another tongue." She turned, helm catching what little light the chamber gave. The six violet eyes burned faintly as her head inclined. "It seems fate has led two seekers into the same grave. That is all the explanation I will give."

She took another step, the cape whispering across the dust, and gestured toward the yawning black beyond the pool. Narrow passages beckoned deeper, the stone visibly warped by unnatural growths—roots twisting as if bone, stalactites shaped almost like teeth. The citadel waited.

"Come then, Dreer," she murmured, respectful yet edged with promise. "Show me what you seek."