"The lie must be elegant. The silence must be total."
The icewinds above Ziost howled like beasts in mourning, their shrill cries swallowed by the depthless chasms that cracked the planet's ashen surface. But far below, beneath the glacial skin and the bleached bones of dead empires, there lay a passage carved into the earth—not by machines, but by hands too ancient to name. Torchless and unseen, it awaited her return like a lover forgotten in a locked room, starved of touch and scent for centuries.
She descended in silence, her breath invisible in the stale, airless dark.
Each footfall echoed with ritual finality.
The stairwell spiraled downward in impossible geometry, its angles sharp and wrong, betraying the influence of Sith alchemy long since bled into the stone. Here, beneath the world's scars, was a structure older than memory—not a temple, not a tomb, but something far more dangerous: a library built for those who believed that truth was not found, but written. And rewritten. Again and again, until history forgot the first version ever existed.
She did not wear her face.
Not tonight.
The robe clung to her like a whispered sin—black silk stretched over a body both shapely and spectral, impossibly still as if carved from shadow. Beneath the hood, a silver mask bore the faintest suggestion of lips curved in amusement, neither smiling nor scornful, but somewhere between. The hem of her garment trailed behind her, kissing the ground with each step, and from her wake came not dust—but soot. Fine, black soot like ash falling in reverse.
She passed beneath archways inscribed with glyphs that had no translation, only feeling. They pulsed faintly at her proximity, responding to the presence of a mind that did not ask permission to enter.
She was not merely a visitor here.
She was what this place remembered.
At the bottom of the stairwell stood a pair of doors—massive, triangular, bound in petrified hide and studded with rusted metal. Their surface was carved in a design that moved when not directly observed. Something behind them breathed. It had no lungs.
She laid a single fingertip upon the seam.
Not a word.
Not a chant.
Not even the Force.
The doors peeled open like the mouth of something seduced, revealing a cavernous chamber lit by nothing, yet still visible to her eyes. Scrolls dangled from the ceiling on chains of black iron. Data-tomes lay shattered like forgotten bones. In the center, rising like a spire from the black marble, was an altar of inkstone, uncracked and smooth—waiting. Always waiting.
She stepped into the room and felt her heartbeat still. Not stop—still.
Her blood cooled, not from fear, but from anticipation.
Tonight, she would begin.
She moved to the altar and placed upon it a blank page, aged artificially with Sith alchemy to appear ancient, weathered, truthful. She uncorked a small vial from within her sleeve. Its contents shimmered like dark wine, thick and sweet-smelling. Not ink.
It was blood. Her own. Refined.
Filtered through desire, boiled in memory, aged in silence.
She dipped a quill—bone, not metal—and began to write.
The words came not from her mind, but from her bones.
They ached with truth that never was.
She did not record history. She summoned it.
Verse I: Every empire begins with a lie.
As she wrote, the room shivered.
Somewhere in the library, a scroll snapped its chain and fell.
Somewhere above, a Sith acolyte woke screaming.
She paused, her gloved hand hovering over the parchment, and for the briefest moment, her mask tilted upward—as if listening. Or perhaps relishing. Her voice, when it came, was velvet dipped in poison, low and luscious and not meant for any ear but the stone.
"I am the lie they will love."
And the quill dipped again.
