Unreviewed Tsis'tzîkal ûl Xortâs - Visage of Darth Sortis

[Darth Carnifex]

• Intent: Update Carnifex's battle helmet
• Image Source:
  • ChatGPT - Generated by Me
  • Headers - Teresa Zambrano | Darth Pellax
• Canon Link: N/A
• Permissions: N/A
• Primary Source:
  • Visage of Darth Sortis - Previous Submission

• Manufacturer: Darth Carnifex
• Affiliation: Darth Carnifex
• Market Status: Closed-Market
• Model: Tsis'tzîkal ûl Xortâs - Visage of Darth Sortis
• Modularity: Yes; Limited
• Production: Unique
• Material:
  • Alchemized Zîrkaris Armor Shell
  • Blood-Forged Aurodium Inlay
  • Obsidian Voidshards
  • Blackstone Filaments

• Classification: Dark Side Augmented Battle Helmet
• Weight: Extremely Heavy
• Resistances:
  
  • Energy: Extreme
  • Kinetic: Extreme
  • Lightsabers: Extreme
  • Force Based Attacks: Extreme
  • Force Light: Extreme
  • Sonic: Very Low
  • Electromagnetic: Very High
  • Elemental: Very High
  • Radiation: Very Low
  • Corrosives: Very High
  • Tensor: Very Low

• Zîrkaris Crystalline Shell - The entire helmet is forged from solid Zîrkaris, a rare Sith-alchemized crystal-metal that harmonizes with the Force and stores psychic impressions. This material allows the helmet to resonate with lingering thoughts, emotions, and memories; making it not only physically durable but spiritually alive. The helm reflects its wearer's aura, grows more attuned over time, and passively absorbs the metaphysical weight of each soul encountered.
• Blood-Forged Aurodium Inlay - Ornamental filigree and ritual channels throughout the helm are made from Blood-Forged Aurodium, a semi-sentient gold alloy forged through Sith blood rites. It responds to Carnifex's genetic signature and acts as a reservoir for incantations, curses, and binding spells; awakening when fed blood or hate.
• Obsidian Voidshard Nodes - Obsidian Voidshards are embedded into the crown and interior brow, creating zones of Force-negation that devour light, emotion, and awareness. These shards deaden psychic fields around Carnifex, weakening enemy Force-users and disrupting mental clarity in his presence.
• Emotion-Harvesting Alchemical Matrix - Zîrkaris amplifies this matrix, drawing upon battlefield despair, rage, and terror to feed into dark-side reservoirs housed within the helmet. This energy can be discharged in bursts of raw power, woven into alchemical attacks, or stored for ritual use.
• Precognitive Sight Enhancer - The helmet sharpens precognitive sensitivity, using stored impressions within Zîrkaris to extrapolate future paths and outcomes. While clear in moments of violence, its accuracy degrades the further into time Carnifex attempts to see, often presenting layered or conflicting visions.
• Runic Force Wards and Sigils - Sith runes inscribed throughout the Zîrkaris surface, combined with Blood-Forged Aurodium tracery, form a metaphysical lattice that guards against Force Light, exorcism, mind-affecting powers, and spiritual intrusion. These wards glow dimly when under strain, and can lash out with backlash if directly assaulted.
• Sensory Deprivation Shell - The Visage blocks all natural senses, including sight, hearing, smell, and touch, inducing a profound void-state in the wearer. Carnifex must rely entirely on the Force to perceive reality, entering a deep meditative trance known as the Crucible of Silence, becoming a vessel of pure Will unanchored from flesh.
• Blackstone Lattice Substructure - Zîrkaris is interwoven with a lattice of Blackstone filaments that suppress Carnifex's Force signature and shield his presence from sensing or detection. This combination of soul-resonance and void insulation makes the helmet simultaneously radiant to dark-siders and invisible to light.
• Neural Overload Regulators - Alchemized focus nodes and organic heat-sinks are installed within the helm's interior, absorbing the strain of catastrophic Force usage. These regulators ensure Carnifex remains lucid even when channeling powers that would rupture a lesser Sith's mind.
• Living Hemosteel Interface - The inner structure of the helmet is bonded with ritually altered blood-mixed steel that binds to Carnifex's skin when worn. This makes removal an ordeal without proper ritual, and ensures the helmet behaves more like a symbiotic parasite than an inert object.
• Combat Spinal Relay Link - The base of the helm connects directly to the warplate's spinal armor, transferring Force-derived spatial awareness, emotional impressions, and danger signals in real time. This allows Carnifex to react instantly to attacks without needing to "see" them conventionally.
• Ghoul-Speak Harmonic Circuitry - Etched in Ghoul-Speak glyphs, the helm functions as a conduit for encrypted psychic commands, delivered through subvocal harmonics, thought pulses, or gestural modulation. These messages can be received only by those implanted or indoctrinated into the Kainate's forbidden tongue.
• Psychospiritual Feedback Loop - Zîrkaris naturally absorbs psychic residue, especially death echoes, sacrificial pain, and ancestral trauma, through its crystalline lattice. The helmet stores these impressions and gradually feeds them back into Carnifex's Force aura, making his presence heavier, more ancient, and increasingly oppressive the longer he remains in battle.

• Force-Conductive Zîrkaris Shell - The helmet's body is forged from Zîrkaris, enabling it to absorb and resonate with Force energies, psychic impressions, and the emotional residue of battle.
• Soul-Attuned Psychometry - Through its crystal lattice, the helmet allows Carnifex to experience echoes of death, trauma, and memory, granting him insight into events, places, and minds long faded.
• Voidshard Psychic Suppression - Obsidian Voidshards embedded within the helm radiate a nullifying field that weakens enemy Force-users nearby, eroding their will and severing subtle psychic threads.
• Sensory Deprivation Trance - By sealing off all natural senses, the helmet forces Carnifex into a heightened Force state where instinct and will become the only guides, removing distractions and mortal hesitation.
• Blood-Bound Ritual Enhancements - The Blood-Forged Aurodium channels ancient Sith rites, enabling the wearer to store, cast, or amplify alchemical spells and curses drawn from his lineage and sacrifice.
• Immunity to Force Detection - Thanks to its Blackstone substructure, the helmet renders Carnifex metaphysically invisible, blocking most Force-based sensing, tracking, or precognitive targeting.
• Resilience to Physical and Energy Assault - While crystalline in nature, Zîrkaris is reinforced through alchemical transmutation, granting it formidable resistance to lightsabers, blasters, and kinetic force.
• Resistance to Force Light - The synergistic protection of Sith runes, Blood-Forged Aurodium, and Zîrkaris crystal plating grants the Visage a potent resistance to Force Light and purification rituals. Only rare consecrated relics or divine interventions can breach its layered metaphysical defenses.

• Heavy and Burdensome - Zîrkaris and Blackstone are dense, and the helmet's mass can strain even enhanced physiology during extended engagements without Force augmentation.
• Total Sensory Isolation - The complete loss of sight, hearing, and touch requires constant Force immersion; a sudden disconnection from the Force can leave the wearer blind, deaf, and vulnerable.
• Emotionally Corrosive - By channeling ambient agony and rage, the helmet risks overwhelming its wearer with psychic residue, especially in areas saturated with suffering, leading to visions, madness, or ego fracture.
• Spell Storage is Finite - The Blood-Forged Aurodium can only hold a limited number of alchemical or ritual energies; excessive use requires recharging through sacrifice or ceremony.
• Compulsion of the Mask - The Visage may develop semi-sentient impulses over time, especially when saturated with psychic death, leading to whispering compulsions or intrusive visions that test the wearer's will.
• Requires Full Integration with Warplate - Several systems (combat relay, hemosteel interface, spinal link) only function properly when integrated with Carnifex's full armor. Without the warplate, the helmet loses tactical synergy and combat prediction capabilities.
• Vulnerability to Void Saturation - In places utterly devoid of emotional or psychic energy, such as sterile environments, vacuum-voids, or alchemically "cleansed" zones, the helmet's resonance systems weaken significantly, leaving its emotion-fueled and psychometric features inert.
• Susceptibility to Light-Side Empathy and Serenity - While resistant to Force Light and holy attack, the helmet's emotional saturation leaves it paradoxically vulnerable to acts of pure empathy, serenity, or passive communion. In rare cases, pacifying Force presences may cause temporary feedback, disorientation, or even psychic recoil as the mask violently rejects incompatible emotional states.

Many years ago, the Core of the Galaxy was set aflame.

The One Sith arose from the Deep Core, spreading out across the heart of the Republic like a virus. Leading them was an enigmatic lord, Darth Sortis, who was only known by his followers as the Dark Lord. This Dark Lord was endowed with the gift of prophecy, his divination of the future shaping the One Sith's assault against the unbalanced Republic and their Jedi. In one foul swoop, the One Sith drove the Republic from Coruscant; the glimmering jewel of the galaxy.

Sequestered in his new center of power on Coruscant, the Dark Lord of the One Sith went about gathering onto him all manner of oracles, Sith artifacts, and ancient relics from precursor empires to a storehouse located deep below Coruscant's underbelly. The Dark Lord sought an end to the Eternal War between the Sith and the Jedi, and he believed that by seizing control of the flow of time was how victory for the Sith was to be achieved.

He delved too greedily into the Cosmic Force, and the Dark Lord's mind shattered.

What emerged from the depths of Coruscant was not the calculating tactician the One Sith had rallied under, but a broken and paranoid madman that killed just as many allies as he did enemies. Under his rule, the One Sith would endure certain destruction. A conspiracy was formed, plotted by the Dark Lord's closest allies and advisors, that would seen him toppled from the throne and destroyed. Darth Ophidia Darth Ophidia and Darth Vornskr ventured deep below Coruscant, and unsealed the Dark Lord's sanctum.

The battle that ensued broke the sanctum's gate and unroofed its halls, but in the end the Dark Lord was slain. He was cut down as he attempted to shift his spirit into another body, the combined might of Ophidia and Vornskr utterly annihilating his spirit in its entirety. With the Darth Sortis thus destroyed, Ophidia and Vornskr ransacked his sanctum and took for themselves great objects of power. Vornskr in particular took many items for himself, stealing away Sortis' cloning technology, and forcing his oracles to bend the knee before him. Greatest of all, however, was the helmet that once adorned Darth Sortis' brow, and thus Vornskr took that for himself.

With Sortis destroyed, the One Sith was reorganized, but it too would fall. Vornskr cast aside his old name, rechristening himself as Darth Carnifex. He continued many of Sortis' experiments, and he likewise became fascinated with unraveling the mysteries of the future. Henceforth, Darth Carnifex would wear the Visage of Darth Sortis, carrying on the legacy of a madman whose name was forever lost to history.

Decades later, Darth Carnifex improved upon the helmet's design by incorporation new alchemical components, restructuring the interior with a latticework of crystalline nodes and glyph circuitry. He bathed it in an alchemical bath, strengthening both the material and it's connection to the Dark Side. He further integrated the helmet with his armor, allowing for seamless connectivity when both are worn simultaneously.