V A I N G L O R Y
She could still taste it, smell it.
Putrid iron, coppery and sickly sweet, in its viscous red ichor. Black walls around her in an unlit hall, stone beneath her feet, and the disgusting filth dripping down as the only source of light. Screams that came from every direction, silenced one by one with the nightmarish squelch and pop that made them disembodied - it was just a dream, only a dream, but it felt so real. Memories of someone else's life, echoes of a distant past that didn't belong to her, haunted her every moment while she slept. Terrifying as it was, however, she'd lived with the scene for the last two and a half decades, ever since the woman she'd lost half of her lifetime to started killing. It was how the sith lord had coped with all of the murder, with every face she killed, none of them she could remember: because they all went to her instead.
-
Dromund Kaas was exactly as she thought it would have been from the holos she read and the holocrons she had consulted. Her mother had made it out to be so much worse than it appeared to be, like a desolation absent of whatever it was Braith thought made a world livable. It had been scarcely two weeks since Amara had made certain the nation she lived in knew she wasn't the dead strandcast that had taken her name and borrowed her face for a time, Vesta, but the steps her fallen sibling had left, faded as they were, were ones she'd nonetheless been retracing and to the cradle of the Sith it'd taken her. That wasn't entirely accurate, however, because Kaas itself wasn't the cause of her arrival -

"Amara Zambrano."
There was one last point of security left before she'd cross the threshold into a world that there was no coming back from, and the final bit of information she'd needed to give was little more than a string of words - a name, her name. There wasn't a verbal response to what she'd said, only a subtle nod and a gesture for her to continue through. A tall, towering really, steel door slid open for her to walk through and into a hall that wasn't quite so different from the one in her dreams. This was where her heart would have lurched and pulse quickened, only the thing that occupied the cavity in her chest was an object of gem and stone and the veins that branched out like roots through her body had no 'pulse' to speak of. In the back of her mind she knew this was something that should have caused her to turn back but if it gave her pause then she didn't show it. There weren't any familiar sounds except the echo of her footsteps as she walked down the hall, no blood dripping from the walls, and like staring down one's fear and finding it less intimidating than expected it only emboldened her. The tiny piece of her that had recognized the start of a terrible scene was silenced by the calmness that finding her nightmare absent from the waking world brought her.
Then, at last, she was there.
"What do I call you? Cousin?"
-
"She's here." The disembodied voice of Irina, Darth Ananta, said to the Dark Lord of the Sith.
"The other Vesta."