Shadow Hand
- Intent: To submit a species of dark sided spectral entities bound to Kainate capital ships, installations, citadels, and more. These entities serve as security, surveillance, and psychological deterrents within Kainate dominion. They were once a living people tied to the legend of the Shadow Hand, annihilated and reshaped by Darth Prazutis into eternal service.
- Image Credit:
- Click - ChatGPT by Me
- Headers - Teresa Zambrano | Darth Pellax
- Canon: N/A
- Permissions: N/A
- Links: N/A
- Name: Var'Qess (Silent Shades), Oblivion Shades
- Designation:
- Semi-Sentient (Retains fractured remnants of original souls)
- Origins:
- Dromund Kaas - Specifically shaped and enslaved through Sith ritual by Darth Prazutis
- Average Lifespan:
- Ageless (As specters they do not age, they can be destroyed through various means however.)
- Estimated Population: Scattered - Found only within Kainate installations, fortresses, capital ships, Malsheem, and more they are never independent.
- Description: Oblivion Shades appear as fluid silhouettes of living shadow, drifting along walls, floors, and vaulted chambers like animate darkness. They rarely manifest fully unless provoked, existing as flickers in peripheral vision, stretched shadows, or whispering distortions in reflective metal. Their presence causes faint cold, pressure changes, and a sense of being watched. When fully incarnated, they resemble wraithlike, humanoid forms composed of smokelike darkness with faint ember-red "veins" crackling beneath their surface, the only remnants of their former selves.
- Breathes: N/A (Non-Corporeal / Bound Energy Entities)
- Average Height of Adults: 2.0-2.5 meters (When fully manifested)
- Average Length of Adults: N/A
- Skin Color: N/A (Their "form" is shadow-black, streaked with ember red or void-purple cracks)
- Hair Color: N/A
- Distinctions:
- Non-corporeal beings composed of Dark Side anima
- Can partially manifest to interact physically
- Their "faces" occasionally distort into echoes of the original Vortheni people
- Movement resembles smoke being dragged underwater, unnatural but fluid
- Can merge with walls, floors, bulkheads, or disappear instantly
- Full manifestations emit a low chorus of layered whispers
- Presence induces cold, dread, and oppressive air pressure
- Cannot leave structures they are bound to
- Races: N/A
- Force Sensitivity: All - Their existence is force based.
- Eternal Bound Watchers: Permanently woven into Kainate structures, offering omnipresent surveillance, dark-side sensing, and corridor-level awareness. They are experts at what they do, able to swiftly monitor intruders, root out traitors and the disloyal, and more.
- Unholy Resilience: Oblivion Shades cannot be damaged by any sort of conventional weapon or substance. All manner of blasters, slugthrowers, kinetic weaponry, disruptors, melee weapons, and even lightsabers have no effect, unless a powerful light side crystal is in the blade. Weapons imbued with the power of the light side will damage them.
- Spectral Enforcers: Capable of partial or full manifestation to harry, terrify, restrain, or kill intruders with ruthless efficiency. Oblivion Shades are capable of utilizing Cryokinesis, Force Fear and Force Drain against foes.
- Vulnerable to Light or Purity: Force Light can disrupt, scatter, or permanently banish individual Shades.
- Force Nullification: Due to their existence as Force based entities, they cannot exist without it. If subjected to Force Nullification through Ysalamiri or Voidstone, they can disrupt, scatter, or permanently banish individual Shades.
- Structure Bound: Cannot leave the starship, fortress, or citadel they are anchored to. Removing weakens or erases them.
- Diet: Consume ambient dark energy, fear, psychic stress, and emotional residue. Purified Light Side energy is poisonous.
- Communication:
- Whispered multi-voiced speech
- Psychic pressure
- Through the Shadow Mind network
- Through distortions in reflections and shadows
- Technology Level: None (They interface indirectly through Kainate systems)
- Religion/Beliefs: Their ancient beliefs were wiped away by the Shadow Hand. As Shades, they possess only four instincts:
- Obey the Eternal Dyarchy
- Serve the Kainate
- Hunt Intruders
- Root out Disloyalty
- General Behavior:
- Semi-sapient pack instinct
- Patrols through corridors as drifting darkness
- Follows orders from the Eternal Dyarchy, Designated Sith Overseers
- Emotional fragments sometimes surface: Longing, fear, rage
- Full memory of their former lives is gone, erased by Darth Prazutis
Long before the Kainate carved its dominion into the galaxy, the Vortheni dwelled far beneath the thunder-wracked jungles of Dromund Kaas. They were not warriors, but rememberers and erasers, a secretive, ritualistic brood who believed reality could be scraped away like wet paint. In their hidden caverns of black volcanic stone lit by ghost-flame, they preserved a prophecy: "One day the Great Shadow will descend, and our names will be the first he takes." They worshipped an ancient interpretation of the Great Shadow, not a man, but an annihilating force, a faceless titan invoked in Old Sith myths as the devourer of empires and memory.
To them, oblivion was not death but ascension. When Darth Prazutis seized Dromund Kaas and reshaped it into the heart of the Kainate, the Vortheni felt his presence like a pressure against the soul. He was the shape their legends foretold, towering, inevitable, a gravity of dread. Their seers screamed in their sanctuaries, "He is the one who devours the past. He is the shadow that remembers nothing. He is the Hand." But prophecy offered no protection. Prazutis found them.
He did not exterminate them outright. Instead, he studied them. The Vortheni wielded esoteric shadow-rites unlike any Sith sorcery. Part memory-stripping, part spiritual erasure, part abyssal invocation. They could remove a name from a corpse so thoroughly even the Force hesitated to recall it. Darth Prazutis coveted this art. He demanded their obedience. Some submitted in awe; Others resisted, believing the prophecy meant he would erase the galaxy but spare them. They were grievously mistaken.
The resisting clans were marched into the Umbral Maw, the oldest, deepest nexus of Dromund Kaas, where Prazutis enacted the forbidden Rite of Unmaking. It was the first soul-flaying ever performed at the scale of an entire civilization. Through Sith sorcery unleashed by the Mortarch, he tore Vortheni essences from their bodies like threads from rotted fabric. He sifted them, devoured their individuality, and reforged their collective consciousness into something new and horrifying. When the ritual ended, their bodies lay empty on the stone. The shadows, however, moved.
Thus were born the Var'Qess, the Silent Shades, the Oblivion Shades. Sentinels bound to the Kainate's infrastructure, their distributed consciousness seeped into the conduits, ventilation shafts, pathways, and ritual engravings of Sith vessels and fortresses. They became a surveillance gestalt of whispering silhouettes, each corridor in every dreadnought housing at least one flicker of their presence. They enforced internal order with silent, merciless efficiency, traitors vanished, intruders were found torn apart or reduced to ash, and sometimes only a smear remained as evidence. Among Kainate born children, they became an inheritance of dread: "Do not lie in the Citadel. The walls already know." All through all this, they served as flawless extensions of Darth Prazutis' will, their loyalty absolute, their existence a monument to his dominion over life, death, and memory itself.
In the modern Kainate, Oblivion Shades permeate every major installation, warship, and command citadel. Everywhere the Kainate holds dominion one can find the dreaded Oblivion Shades. What outsiders interpret as paranoia is, to the Kainate, the natural order of power. They watch from the walls and beneath-spaces no mortal could crawl through; they act as haunt-terrors during breaches, ensuring the first response to intrusion is not alarms but silence, then screams. They bear witness to every blood oath and ascension, storing each ritual in their shadow-archive. When Prazutis desires information or someone erased, he need not only dispatch assassins; a Shade whispers the target's name into nothingness, and it is undone.
Only a handful of Sith know the deepest truth: the Shades are not mindless constructs. They are aware, a thousand murmuring minds, eternally conscious, eternally obedient, eternally bound in the Shadow Hand's grasp. They recall what they once were but cannot remember freedom. To the Shadow Hand, this is not cruelty, but the purest expression of dominion. A civilization that once worshipped the legend of the Shadow Hand has become the legend, bound to him, serving him, haunting the galaxy in his name, eternally. The greatest concentration of them dwells on Malsheem, and they are dispatched as needed to locations.