Objective 1 - Coffin |
The Ziggurat breathed without breath, moved without motion, and shifted in ways none could perceive. An exhale that rippled through stone, through the bones of the dead, through the souls of the living. The world seemed to shift, imperceptibly at first, but just enough to make them doubt their own senses. It was like a beast turning in its sleep, but its form so large none could see the edge of its claw.
Ghosts abound, the eyes of the World were ever present, ever watching. Ears unseen heard the words in their head, and the fears in their heart.
---
The doors groaned open.
Serina did not move at first.
The Ziggurat had been waiting.
The obsidian slabs shuddered, not in welcome, but in hesitation. A reluctant parting, a moment of resistance, before its inevitable surrender. The air beyond was thick, old in a way that went beyond mere time.
She stepped forward.
And the moment she did—the world breathed with her.
The doors sealed shut behind her, the sound grinding through her bones, final, absolute.
The voice in her mind, the one that had always been hers—was not alone now.
"Not yet?"
The Whisper coiled around her mind, layered, discordant—a dozen voices speaking as one, finishing each other's sentences.
"Then why did you come?" said the child, said the woman, said the crone.
The air around her shifted. It was not just the tomb now—it was the past.
The smell of battle.
Woostri.
Blasterfire in the air, the heat of impact, the bite of pain—but it was distant, like a memory just out of reach. She had bled for the Sith. She had fought for them, cut down their enemies, suffered in their name.
And when she had fallen—
They had left her there.
"They never came for me."
She had not spoken.
But the words dripped from the walls.
The runes bled, shifting as she moved, rearranging themselves into words she had never written, but had thought.
"No Sith Lord had called her name."
"No Legionnaire had scoured the battlefield for her remains."
Footsteps.
No—echoes.
She turned sharply, hand twitching toward a weapon she could not yet justify drawing. The corridor stretched before her, yet something had moved.
The walls had changed.
She saw herself.
Not in reflection.
Not in glass.
But in stone.
A carving, jagged, etched with unnatural precision. A woman, kneeling. A wound in her chest. No Sith at her side.
Another carving. A hand reaching for her.
And the whisper pressed against her skull like a lover's touch.
"But someone did."
It was not mockery. Not quite.
It was acknowledgment.
He was watching.
The Ziggurat had changed for her.
Reality was no longer stable.
Every step forward threatened to take her somewhere she had already been. Every memory she held onto could become a wall, a corridor, a path that never existed before.
This was not a tomb.
Not a ruin.
This was its mind.
And she was inside it now.
---
The stone Malum studied was familiar, yet wrong. An abberation of the Sith language, it was like something had once belonged to their people had been stolen and twisted into something else. Something foreign. Something disgusting. That which lay inlaid in the stone was in parts understandable, but in its whole was nothing but a garbled mess.
When he motioned to the stone, for
Zachariah Conway
to read it himself, the young apprentice would see an inkling of truth. Malum hadn't pointed at the stone - but off, just a few inches to its left. Just far enough that it was odd he had pointed to it at all, to some empty spot nearby.
When Malum would look again, he would see that the worn lettering was new, the new lettering old, and new words transcribed. Not in whole, but in part - enough that he could read some of it now. Something had changed, but what specific words or inscriptions neither could be certain.
"Come as you are.", it read, etched deep in stone.
---
"Squad, report."
Static.
The hallway did not change.
And yet, it was no longer the same.
QK-2510's rifle remained raised, her targeting reticule hovering over the form of Alana Calloway—a soldier who should have been marked as friendly on her HUD. But her visor did not recognize her. No IFF signal, no biometric signature.
Just a figure in armor, standing exactly where an enemy might stand.
The seconds stretched.
Alana, in turn, saw QK-2510's weapon aimed squarely at her chest. The silence of her vanished squad still pressed against her skull, the last thing she had heard before this moment was their voices being stolen. And now this soldier, this stranger—was aiming at her.
The air between them felt thick, a stillness like the moments before a shot was fired.
Then—
The lights flickered.
Not just the normal kind of flicker. Not a power fluctuation, not a disruption.
It was as if, for a fraction of a second, the hallway ceased to exist.
When it returned, it was not the same. The walls were closer. The runes had changed - subtly, but undeniably. The coffins lining the edges were not where they had been before.
And worst of all—they had no memory of moving.
QK-2510's visor finally registered Alana, but her name flickered in and out, replaced with something else.
MORROW.
Alana's lost squadmate.
For a moment, Alana was looking at QK-2510, but her mind was telling her she was looking at Morrow.
The comms crackled—just for a second.
"Sergeant—?"
Morrow's voice.
Coming from everywhere.
From the shadows, from the stone, from QK-2510's helmet.
Then, silence again.
No sign of anyone else.
Just the two of them, standing in a corridor that no longer made sense.
And the statues along the walls, which had been seated when they entered—were standing now.
---
The coffins trembled beneath her fingertips.
Adeline's magic had seeped into the long-rotted bones of the forgotten dead, her dark tendrils sliding between the cracks of their decay, pulling at what should have been theirs to give.
And yet—they did not rise.
The corpses shifted, their ancient forms stirred at her command, their bones obeyed—but something was missing.
The hall should have filled with the satisfaction of her work. The rattling of the coffins, the quiet groans of the long-dead bending to her will. But instead, something felt wrong.
The bodies moved, but the souls did not return.
They should have answered. But they were already claimed.
She felt it in the air, in the deep, yawning void that stretched between her magic and the coffins. Something was already there, something watching through their empty sockets.
Then, all at once—the corpses stopped.
Every skeletal head turned toward her in unison.
The jawbones did not move. The ribs did not rise. But they spoke.
"You have no claim here."
The words were not a whisper. They were inside her skull, clawing, sinking, bleeding into her thoughts like a rot that could not be scraped away.
Adeline's magic snapped back into her, recoiling like something burned.
And the corpses—they still stared.
Not with defiance. Not with will.
But with something else's gaze.
The runes in the room darkened, shadows thickening like blood in water.
Somewhere in the deep of the Ziggurat, beneath the thousand seals, something laughed.
---
The Ziggurat did not care for thieves.
And yet, it welcomed them.
Stone did not shift under Lirka's heavy steps, nor did dust stir in response to Helix's mechanical movements. Their presence was accepted—not because they belonged, but because they had already entered the His domain.
There were no alarms. No sentinels roused to stop them.
But something had noticed.
Something that had always noticed.
Lirka's words, casual and amused, echoed strangely in the vast corridor, bouncing back at her with a fraction of a delay—as if the tomb was considering her words before returning them to her.
But it was Helix's response that seemed to stir something.
"Ghosts, however, have plenty of good cause to be frightened of me."
A whisper.
Not a sound—a pressure. A vibration, deep and low, too low to hear, but felt in the metal of Helix's frame, in the marrow of Lirka's bones.
The battle droids halted, their optical sensors flickering. One of them adjusted its stance, its servos whining slightly, as if struggling against an unseen weight. The Helwolf growled, hackles rising, its augmented senses detecting something its mechanical master could not.
And then—the tomb responded.
The inscriptions on the wall, faded and half-eroded from time, rewrote themselves.
Not all at once. Not with a grand display of sorcery. But as if they had always been that way.
Lirka looked at a runestone she was certain had been blank moments ago, only to find it etched with fresh High Sith script.
Helix, scanning for anything of value, paused as his sensors picked up an impossible energy fluctuation—not in front of him, but behind.
He turned.
The hall was longer than it had been.
The corridor stretched into darkness, impossible in its depth, a path that neither of them had walked but had always existed.
The droids stiffened as their scanners began to contradict themselves. Their readings were looping, shifting—what had been a hallway of stone was now registering as open space.
A new scan insisted that the entrance they had walked through had never been there.
The tomb was not preventing them from entering.
It was preventing them from leaving.
Then, a voice.
Not spoken.
Not heard.
But pressing against their thoughts, clawing at the edges of logic.
"You take what is mine. Do you understand the price?"
And then—the walls exhaled.
Dust did not stir, yet the movement was undeniable. The runestones darkened, shifting to something deeper than black, as though the stone itself had hollowed out.
And at the edges of their vision, just beyond the reach of their scanners, something moved.
Not a person.
Not a droid.
Just—a figure.
One that had not been there before.
One that was not there at all.
---
The tomb was listening.
Taeli's fingers traced the ancient runes, her mind methodically unraveling their meaning. The unease in her voice was the first true thing spoken in this place.
"This isn't a tomb; it's a prison."
And the prison had been waiting for someone to realize that.
The words settled into the Ziggurat like stones dropped into a still lake. The air itself seemed to change, thickening as though unseen eyes had snapped toward them.
Something deep below stirred. Not physically. Not yet. But the presence seeped upward, curling into the cracks of reality, weaving itself into the air they were breathing.
Allyson felt it first.
Not through the Force—not in the way a Jedi or a Sith might feel a disturbance. No, she felt it in her body.
In the way the hall seemed just a little too quiet.
In the way her heartbeat sounded too loud in her own ears.
In the way the space behind her shoulders suddenly felt occupied.
The distant scrape of movement.
Not from ahead.
Not from behind.
From above.
The walls should not have had space to move. There were no doors, no cracks, no crawlspaces in the stone. But something had shifted.
The runes above them had changed.
Taeli, whose mind had been picking apart the inscriptions only moments ago, immediately noticed. The glyphs were no longer the same writings of warning.
They had rearranged themselves.
They were reading back.
A perfect reflection of her own words:
"This isn't a tomb; it's a prison."
Allyson's breath hitched. She had not spoken those words. But the walls had.
A vibration—low, humming, deep in the stone. Not mechanical. Not the work of old Sith traps or hidden mechanisms.
This was the Ziggurat exhaling.
Then—a flicker in the air.
For the briefest of moments, both of them saw it.
Not a ghost. Not a Sith spirit.
A figure standing inside the wall, as though the stone itself had become glass.
Staring at them.
Allyson's bow snapped up. Taeli turned just in time to see the figure disappear—
But the pressure remained.
The presence was not leaving. It was waiting.
Waiting to see if they would open the door for it.
