First Reply Ashes of the First Schism | The Sundering Dawn

[Darth Apophion]

There are places in the galaxy where even the Force seems to hold its breath.

The coordinates had been corrupted, scattered through fragmented transmissions and corrupted astrogation logs, but he had followed them all the same. A transport carrying members of the Sangre Tercio, veterans of the Core Wars, had vanished during their withdrawal from the Deep Core. No debris, no wreckage, no activity from the Alliance interceptors. The only evidence was the classified jumps the ship had ordered to use before withdrawing to the Outer Rim.

Apophion had followed the trail in his personal TIE fighter. The Sith had pushed the thoughts of his nightmares from his mind. Instead, he focused on searching from jump point to jump point. He made another jump into hyperspace.

Then the stars started screaming as the lane collapsed.

Apophion's knuckles whitened on the controls as his TIE tore through the unraveling remnants of hyperspace. The navigational array spasmed with static, the stars outside stretching and convulsing as reality buckled. A rift had opened impossible, uncharted, and the emergency systems were already fried.

The starfighter groaned as it fell, not into space, but into something older.

With a final jolt, the TIE was ejected and hurled into realspace like a corpse breaching the surface of a black tide. Outside, the sky was already coming apart.

Jagged clouds knifed across a blood-tinged atmosphere. Forked lightning painted the horizon with brief, violent glimpses of a world lost to myth. The planet below was a labyrinth of mountains and chasms, its surface carved with lines like scars across flesh. His systems blinked red, altitude dropping fast, stabilizers fried.

He wrestled the craft through the upper atmosphere, steering by instinct and fury alone.

Wind howled like a chorus of the damned. The storm churned with unnatural intensity, not weather but judgment, as if the planet itself rejected intrusion. The instruments were blind. Only the Force guided him now, and it pulsed from the world like a heartbeat buried beneath the earth.

Through the gale, a name whispered unbidden into his thoughts.

Lettow.

He braced himself as the shuttle crashed through the upper canopy of twisted ironwood-like trees, the ground racing to meet him in flashes of lightning. Metal screamed as he angled the descent toward a ridge of broken stone—barely enough room.

Then darkness, chaos, impact.

When silence returned, Apophion emerged from the wreckage alone. Cloak torn, saber at his side, boots crunching against ancient stone slick with rain. Around him, monoliths rose from the mist like the ribs of a buried titan. The storm raged above, unrelenting.

 

[Imperius Indomitus]

Lettow
Darth Apophion

The path 'home' was riddled with interferences, disturbances and the requirement to adjust hyperspace jumps frequently. The effects of the visions that would not leave his mind and the aftertaste of the boarding of his ship by un-beings from wherever they came made not only Imperius beware of the dangers, but also made his crew restless and tired. They were not ready to risk too long exposure to hyperspace and if they did, it was under immense tension. He did not know if they felt fear, his mind was set on the path ahead, to see clear and present danger for himself and the ship.

When it left hyperspace, he saw a glimpse of someone, not otherworldly, not transdimensional or whatever these messed up creatures were that had attacked them. No, a normal soul, not ordinary by any means, but with the terrors of the past days, a welcome sight to see such. A dark presence, not unlike his own, but which then was fading. With an impulse of his will, he connected his armor's system to the ship's own and reviewed what happened. Apparently a single contact had gone down on the world.

It was a tactical decision to give the crew time to rest while he ventured to the world to figure out what happened. His own drive was more curiousity though, the chaos of hyperspace was a mystery and the more information he could gather, the better. So Darth Imperius boarded his shuttle, alone this time, and went to the surface of the world that spawned a schism so many millennia earlier - even way before his own birth.

The descent was everything but smooth, yet the ship and it's pilot managed it in one piece. He had navigated the shuttle through worse and despite various warning sigils lighting up, alarms screaming and the engines running hot at capacity, Imperius made the landing somewhere not too far from the estimates of where the stranger crashed.

Clad in his black plate from head to toe, a deep red tabard and hood covering parts that were now exposed to the winds, he left the vessel and looked around. He stood in the middle of what seemed to have been some ruin. His red lensed gaze wandered from left to right.