Log:Sith Empire: Sorrow and Wind and Dust
Sith Empire: Sorrow and Wind and Dust
OOC Date: March 22, 2022
Location: Korriban
Participants: Sith Empire: Tamsin Cas, Syrus, and Darth Ferren
Korriban is a desolate place, full of emptiness and populated by tombs. The ruddy sand and rock that covers the landscape seems to culminate here in the Valley of Dead Lords, as though planet has been pouring itself gradually into this sink.
The largest of the tombs at the Valley's rear now stands open, the stone door blocking its entry broken open, one of the twin statues standing on either side toppled inward. Inside dust motes dance suspended in the light that spills through the broken door, illuminating the mosaic on the far wall.
The centerpiece of this mosaic has receded into the floor, revealing a passageway behind it. Lit lightsaber in hand, Darth Ferren waits and watches after the panel settles into the floor before wordlessly stepping inside.
The passageway is narrow and dark, cramped after the soaring ceiling and wide walls of the initial atrium. The red glow of the weapon in his hand casts the carved stone in ruby shades. "Most of these tombs are long empty," he states in a low, hushed voice. "Looted by whoever could bypass their safeguards. Well, empty other than the corpses of those who couldn't, rather. But not this one. Not Bane's."
Having made entry with the initial team, Tamsin had waited in silence as the holocron had been set into the mosaic, opening the way through which they now travelled. No lit saber was in her hand, as Tamsin allowed her natural eyesight to grant her better clarity in the low light. She studied what there was to see of the passage as they moved. "So why has your master decided that this tomb needs to be disturbed? And what precisely have we been brought here to do?"
Slowly making his way up to join the rest of the group, Syrus casts a silent look to both Tamsin and the Darth before he's taking in the interior of the tomb before them.
Tamsin's question piques Syrus' interest and he, too, is looking to Ferren for his answer.
As the group proceeds past the hidden entry into the passageway beyond, a sound of stone moving over stone interrupts the conversation as the mosaic panel displaying Darth Bane's image rises up from the floor to seal the entrance again, the wall moving forward back into place with a dull thud.
Ferren looks back over his shoulder at the black void that used to be a little circle of light. "No turning back now." The claustrophic atmosphere is intensified by the unsettling feeling that something about this place is wrong, hostile, the way the door had seemed to actively resist their efforts to move it, and the downward slope leading only deeper into this place centered around and designed for death.
"We are here to end the rule of two. It is not enough to simply stop its practice. The Sith are beholden to the past, more than most sects. This rule has held sway for a thousand years. We have to go back to its source to upend it."
Tamsin gave the door sliding back closed only a passing glance, before she continued on, retrieving her own saber to add to the light. "Odd, I suppose. I mean, I have certainly never met any of your particular sect save yourself, but I knew others who claimed to be Sith who believed in that way, or purported to. But none of it makes sense. If there are only two...why were other force sensitives like Xavier and Flex'ka Vana cultivated at all? Both were once beholden either to Palpatine himself, or to those who believe themselves following in his footsteps. they were raised up to be what? Cannon fodder? Experiments? Apprentices in waiting?" Tamsin's tone was not argumentative, but was truly curious. She was, after all, only recently come under the Sith's banner.
Sy can't help but frown as the full weight of the tomb's experience begins to gnaw at his being. Perhaps that's why nobody's managed to delve its depths before.
"Acolytes, Dark Jedi, apprentices in waiting," Syrus says, gesturing to Tamsin. "For millenia Sith have talked their way around the Rule without allowing themselves to fully balk in the face of it. There's no Sith Academy and hasn't been for a long long time. All because of Bane's fear of being overthrown," Syrus says, stalking along beside them.
They reach a divide in the passage - ideal for Tarq and Xavier to split off from the group and catch up at an undefined later point, almost like it was manufactured for that purpose. Then they proceed on.
"Harcourt /was/ an experiment, literally," Ferren reminds Tamsin as they move further down the cramped passageway in the dark, lit only by the pair of lightsabers. "Floating in a tank isn't exactly how you treat a prospective equal." Syrus receives a nod. "The Sith way has always been subterfuge and cunning. Tip-toeing around the rule with technicalities. To their detriment." The lightsaber gestures within the confines of the tunnels. "If it worked so well, whence cometh we?"
As if on cue, the passageway comes to an abrupt end. "Spare us all, not another hidden door," their leader frowns immediately as the end of the passage stares them down, an apparent dead end.
"Well, yes," Tamsin offered as the group divided itself, "But I have a feeling he did not start out as one. Or he would have been a fool to agree to service at all. So it does make me wonder what stories he and others like him were told to make them believe that they would someday be more useful than they were ever intended to be." As the passage came to an end, Tamsin turned, beginning to scan the walls, to see if she could find some clue in the makeup of the carved stone. Eyes and the lightest touch of her fingertips as she began on the side closest to her, the left. It took a few minutes, but she paused, as she reached one segment of the wall, "I can see a stone protruding from the wall here, perhaps a mechanism of some kind, but I can't reach it? Could one of you?" If you couldn't put your giant companions to use what good were you? Tamsin did point to where she had located the stone, with the tip of her saber, so there was the most light.
"The Sith have long been propped up by the ineptitude of the Jedi. If the Order were smart, the Sith would have been wiped out a long time ago. Fortunately for us...they're not," Syrus explains, turning to look at what Tamsin has indicated. His own saber is slide from his belt, but with his other hand, he's reaching up to depress the protrusion she's pointed out.
"Whatever they needed to tell him to get him near the tank, most likely," Ferren speculates, having been on Exegol for at least some of the time while Xavier was, you know, in the tank. "Better him than me."
When Syrus depresses the rock, nothing happens. It moves easily enough, sliding back into the deadended wall.
Then the energy of the place, that miasmic stank of bad vibes, wells up like high tide and the floor falls out from below them.
Down they plummet, into deeper and deeper darkness, until the light of their weapons seems useless against it; Ferren's vanishes entirely. The fall is finally stopped by a mound of sand that cushions their fall by a few degrees, preventing immediate death. That would be too great a mercy. The place they have fallen into is tall but narrow, and floundering to the edge of the sand will reveal it's a carved shaft rather than a natural pit.
There is one way forward, a high arched door beyond which an eerie, guttering light emanates.
As they fell, swallowed by darkness and the miasma that permeated the very foundations of the tomb, Tamsin allowed the saber to extinguish, hand and will keeping a grip on it as she fell. There was little she could do, as they descended into an impossibly deep pit, save to hug herself, her medical bag, and to try to position herself so that, one hoped, when she hit the ground, she would do so on her back, well enough to cushion the fall. Unless they landed on spikes. Or some other such trap. The shock of the impact, even on sand, was like being body-slammed into cement, such was their velocity, and it was only the fact that her helmet did not transmit her scream that made the impact a silent one, as she allowed the shock to explode along her body and dissipate. Feeling nothing broken, as yet, she rolled to the side, trying to use what little light their was to find the edge of the pit and come to her feet, looking back to search for the two whom, she presumed, had fallen with her.
The swelling of foul magicks was enough indication that Syrus wasn't caught completely flat-footed when the floor gave way. With a quick swing of his arm, Syrus' wholly-mechanic hand dug itself into the wall and managed to slow his descent enough that by the time he free fell onto the sand he was able to avoid injury. Shaking rocks and debris out of his hand, he turns to look at the other two in an assessing manner, his mind reaching out to try and fill in the blanks of his surroundings before he's turning to note the solitary light that likely marks their way out.
The foul magicks continue to swirl, and while the newly minted Sith councilors can feel each other's presence not far away... where are they? Both Syrus and Tamsin see the way forward and can sense the other in close proximity but they do not seem to be /there./ Proceeding into the next chamber does not alleviate the problem; there is no sign of their compatriots, other than the sensation that they are not far away.
The next chamber is short only in comparison to the pit they'd fallen down, a squarish room ringed by pillars awash in pale, wavering light. In the center of the room, a short altar rises, and on the far side, there is another door. The altar, for all its small size, exerts a strange pull over the space, drawing the eye no matter where one looks. It is made of stone blocks stacked in crosswise fashion, their ruddy hues tinted a dark rusty brown.
Tamsin, stepping into the small altar room, moved, first, towards the altar, though she made no attempt to touch the bricks there. She did speak, calling out to the two whom she could feel, but not see. "I can't see either of you. But if you can hear me, I am in what appears to be an altar room of some kind. There are pillars all around me, and a door ahead. An alter in the center is piled with red stone bricks arranged in a crosswise pattern." And then, Tamsin, because, perhaps, there was no way but through, reached out to touch the bricks, her hand pulling back as she was instantly disoriented, and she staggered to keep herself from falling. "The room is spinning, or maybe I am. Terrible things were done here." Only a lifetime of deeply rooted self-control kept her voice even.
"I hate the Sith," Syrus grumbles under his breath as he realizes that the dark Force treachery has played a foul trick on their minds.
He begins his lumbering towards the light, a hand reaching up to press against his temple as he attempts to pierce the treacherous veil are for naught. "This will no doubt be the death of us all. Condemned to be buried alongside a coward."
The treacherous veil blinding them is, indeed, treacherous; each of them sees that they are alone, cannot hear the other speak, but the sensation that they are NOT alone persists, filling the mind with contradictions. If this were not bad enough, the guttering light is waning away; it's unclear where it was coming from to begin with, and now it fades into total darkness.
In this shade, the eye's tricks continue, spots and dim photorefractions of what they've seen before lingering, twisting, shifting, reshaping themselves. Images from the past. Their past. A familiar mask, broken now. It twists and fades, contorts itself into a new image. For Syrus, the dim figure of a robed woman, for Tamsin, a staid Muun with features shrouded in the twisting light. Both hear a question in the voice they know: "Why? Why did you leave?"
Tamsin knew that mask. She had been confronted by it on numerous occasions. Had spent countless hours on Coruscant searching for it, and the one who went with it. The sight of it did not flow easily, despite the feeling of the place from mask to Muun, but she walked the path, at least for now. When the question was posed, "The work was not finished." What other answer could she give save that one?
Once more Syrus reaches out into the blackness and once more it fights back. Syrus leans into the wall to steady himself before he regains his composure and continues his trek. Leia appears before him and he's frowning.
"Begone, specter," Syrus says, shaking his head. "You know well why I left. Because the Jedi were weak. Because they let you die."
When the pair give their answers, the visions offer no closure, no gratifying response to the questions. Instead they twist and deform into cruel mockeries of their representations, jibing caricatures of the people they were before dissolving away. It's not a voice they hear next, per se, but the words are forced into their heads soundlessly.
It is already too late for you.
The altar appears in the blackness, a pool of reality in the middle of the wyrd dark that surrounds them. There on the stone blocks, they see their own body, lifeless and cold.
"Yes. That is likely true. That has never stopped me before." Tamsin reached down, taking her lightsaber in hand, the blade igniting. She could feel that, whether she could see it or not. She had been bled for this blade, broken the crystal to her will and hers alone. It was a part of her, and she trusted it to do as she willed it to do. Stepping through where the figure had been 'standing' she raised the blade, bringing it down in an arc backed by her force of will, cutting through the body, her body, where it lay on the altar. There was only one Tamsin Cas, dead or alive. Not two. She would not tolerate another, whether real or in some dark, twisted effigy.
Walking up to his own stone block, Syrus reaches out to touch his own lifeless corpse, this one missing all of his aftermarket parts and just ends up looking like a sad, beat-up Kiffar who lived a terribly painful life. He allows this phantom a moment of sympathy that he'd never afford to the genuine article.
With a hand on this dead body's chest, Syrus' mind explodes outward, latching onto the first thing it finds. Darkness; pure unadulterated malevolence. He wants to know its game, but it wants to remain unknown. A contest of wills is had, and eventually Syrus has to relent, snapping back to the here and now, nearly spent.
Triggered by something they've done, the thin light creeps back into the room, puddling around their feet and accumulating up until the pillars that ring it are visible again, and with the light returns their sight. Their counterpart, there, gathered near the altar, and Ferren stands over it as well, frowning down at it, a sheen of sweat gathered in the creases of his skin. With the light comes a puff of stale air, coming from somewhere above. "There will be worse things to come." It's Ferren's voice this time, not some specter's. "This is the world we have entered. The mask is off now." And so they must descend further into the tomb.
