Tyrant Queen of Darkness
"Rumours, sweet rumours."
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Viscountess Pandora
The smell hit her first.
Even through the advanced filtration systems of her helm, Darth Virelia could taste the atmosphere—molten slag, ozone, ferrocrete dust, and the sweet stench of burnt protein. This was Itsū, the mechanized womb of Dromund Kaas' conquest, where machines bred war, and flesh became obsolete.
And yet it was here, of all places, that a whisper had reached her ear.
A thing with horns. A woman—or something like it—preying upon the workers and wastrels that scuttled through the maintenance veins of the continent's lower levels. This one fed. Something personal. Something hungry.
She walked through the arterial hall of a secondary subforge now, deep beneath the fortress-city of Dûrtar Machanon. The hiss of pressurized coolant and the seismic thud of arc welders shattering iron bulkheads gave her no pause. Her presence was unannounced, though it did not go unnoticed. Droids halted mid-task, turning to scan her silhouette as she passed. Slaves lowered their eyes instinctively, as if catching her gaze would draw death—or worse, interest.
The hem of her segmented cape dragged through layers of powdered durasteel and electro-slag, its motion liquid and serpentine, its weight a whisper of domination. Her six violet eyes swept the chamber with predatory calm, each slanted facet in her helm illuminating faintly as they captured detail invisible to the unaugmented. Virelia moved like shadow through machinery, her armored heels silent on the metal decking.
She wasn't here to challenge the ruler of this world. She knew better.
Darth Prazutis
was gravity itself, a force that warped space and consequence. She had no desire to test that mass. But within his dominion there were always fractures, hairline cracks in the obsidian monolith. Virelia knew how to slide herself into those cracks and profit.A whisper. A rumor. That was all she needed.
Her fingers brushed along the wall of a maintenance corridor—no idle caress, but a search. Beneath the layers of blacked-out cabling and mineral grime, she could feel it: dried blood. Human. Two days old. Coagulated in a spray against the power conduit behind the plating. The cameras in this section had conveniently suffered a "thermal surge."
How elegant.
She turned toward a sealed access shaft leading to the waste recycling chambers three levels below. Her claws extended with a graceful flex, just enough to test the air pressure seal, then retracted again with a faint hiss. No maintenance droid had been assigned to this route in seventy-two hours. She had already checked. The administrative silence was conspicuous in a place so concerned with order.
A single flick of her wrist, and the panel hissed open.
Warm air, wet and vile, washed over her.
She inhaled deeply through the helm, savoring the sensory violation.
Mmm. Yes. This is where she went.
The rumors had been contradictory, of course. Some said the horned woman walked in the skin of a Sith who had died decades ago. Others swore she was a labor experiment gone wrong, spliced with feeding tendrils and neuroweaves meant for biological integration. A few said she sang to those she devoured. Sang until they didn't want to run anymore.
Virelia smiled beneath the mask. How quaint.
"Monster," she murmured, her voice projected in a tone both sultry and severe. "If you can hear me… let's see if you're clever enough to listen."
The echo of her voice danced down the shaft like silk over a blade.
She stepped inside, the hiss of the door sealing behind her like the mouth of a predator snapping shut.
It was dark, but she didn't need light. Her helm interpreted the world in spectrums beyond color. Heat, pressure, motion, decay—all layered into her perception like strokes of abstract art. She moved with the grace of ritual, with the certainty of a queen attending her own execution and daring the axe to fall.
One level. Two. Three.
Down into the belly of Itsū.
Down into the bones of the machine, where blood and oil were one.
