The Lady of Deceit
"I am the lie they will love."
"The lie must be elegant. The silence must be total."
The flames of Mustafar licked the sky like a lover denied, furious and trembling, their heat not merely felt but remembered, as if the world itself could punish trespass with memory. The ancient fortress built upon obsidian cliffs—once the site of legendary duel, now repurposed into vault and sanctum—stood like a wound carved into the planet's black heart. This was not a temple, nor a laboratory. It was a library of condemned ideas. The Vault of Ash. And few ever entered without leaving something of themselves behind.
Tonight, something entered that would leave far more.
The sentries—half-awake apprentices assigned as punishment, stationed before the sealed gates of the Vault—never saw her. They heard only a shift in the wind. A faint sweetness in the air, like perfume and blood. Then stillness. Complete.
She moved through the cracks of perception. Her presence was not registered. It was assumed—as though she had always been there, always belonged. The door did not open. The wall did not part. And yet she passed through. Reality around her was complicit in the lie. It knew her. It obeyed.
The corridor descended in a slow, spiraling arc of volcanic stone and darksteel, its light provided not by torches but by the slow drip of magma veins behind glass that pulsed like arteries. The air was thick with the scent of scorched vellum, ancient ink, the musk of burned parchment that hadn't been read in centuries. She inhaled deeply.
It reminded her of worship.
Her robes tonight were not the ragged vestments of a mad priestess nor the over-armored garb of a warlord. They were... tailored. Silken. Designed to cling to suggestion. The black fabric shimmered with barely-perceptible glyphs, patterns that flickered in peripheral vision but vanished upon inspection. The hood framed her masked face in shadow, and where her mouth might be, the silver glinted like a tongue mid-whisper. Her hands were gloved, not to protect them—but to protect the world from what they might touch.
She reached the first chamber of records—restricted, classified, disavowed. Here lay the fragments the Sith no longer claimed. Scrolls too dangerous, holocrons too unstable, tablets too sacrilegious to destroy yet too damning to display. The shameful children of millennia of conquest. Ideas too true, or too false, to be allowed air. It was perfect.
From her robe she withdrew a scroll, worn at the edges, ink faded and smeared by time—or so it would appear. The paper was aged by alchemy, frayed by artifice. Its symbols had no verifiable source, no nameable author. The language was familiar but wrong, inverted just enough to be unsettling. The verses were written in a tongue never spoken, but somehow understood.
It was not a relic.
It was a weapon.
And it was hers.
She placed it not among the most valuable texts, but among the convincing ones. Buried beneath a cluster of philosophical discourses. In the second shelf, precisely where an obsessive scholar might find it—not too easily, not too obscurely. It would appear misfiled. Accidentally preserved. A lone scroll covered in soot and held shut by a braided cord.
There were verses within. But not the first. She would never place the first. Only a later one—Verse VI, ambiguous and maddening:
The Force remembers what the galaxy forgets. But who taught the Force to speak? Find that voice, and you may teach it silence.
A gift for the desperate. A challenge for the arrogant. A key for the lost.
As she placed the scroll, her hand lingered on the other tomes nearby. She trailed a fingertip across one titled The Soul's Dominion, and another, On Sith Essence and the Sublimation of the Self. With a slow, deliberate breath, she whispered—not to the books, but to the idea that they represented.
