Private KORRIBANNED

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

So as luck would have it, the Galactic Alliance recently broke the Sith Empire's control over Korriban. I've always liked Korriban. Been its Empress and its Jedi Watchman at one point or another. And conveniently, the Worm Emperor sold me the location of a hidden pit in the sand, a Netherworld rift or something like it - a maw that leads to somewhere that could be holding Spencer's soul.

Suffice it to say, Seydon, you have a relevant set of skills for this trip.

***​

Ashin's generic freighter touched down in an extremely remote sector of Korriban. She turned off the flight systems with a satisfied nod. "That was a cleaner run than I'd anticipated. The Alliance really did a number on the sector's Imperial presence; I hadn't realized this kind of war was their strong suit. A thing of beauty."

Outside the freighter's cockpit, the pit was clearly visible. It looked like nothing much: a dead sarlacc's hole, maybe, not quite big enough to eat the freighter. She hadn't sensed the place's strange power until just recently. "Let's hope this is worth me selling my service and subservience for a year," she grumped, unbuckling. "The Worm Emperor is an nerf herder."

Just aft of the cockpit, she cracked a weapons locker and selected a gun and a pack. Her fingers lingered on a new favorite, a Dire Wolves M-114 designated marksman rifle, nimble enough for indoor use but quite decent at her preferred ranges too. But instead, she slung a classic Valicore Chiru tranquilizer rifle over her shoulder - an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

Seydon of Arda Darth Voyance

 

[Darth Voyance]

[HOURS AFTER THE DUEL OF FAITHS]​

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[Surface of Korriban]

She awoke from the cries of her body. Every sinew, muscle, and grinded joint howled at her mind, startling her nerves and igniting her reflexes to summon her consciousness from its pummeled stupor. Darth Voyance awoke in the wreckage, her body in ruins. The battle with the former Sith Emperor Carnifex had ripped her ship asunder and it had taken all her powers within the Dark Side to protect herself from the sinking of the Soothsayer. She had fended of the Emperor but, had nearly destroyed herself in the process.​

Moving gingerly Voyance discovered she was laid out on her back, tucked between fallen hull plates, hulking cables, and ship circuitry panels. The small movement she made to raise her torso was immediately hampered by the screaming feedback her battered body supplied her overwhelmed mind. Her right arm was broken. Her right ribs shattered, and her legs trapped beneath the rubble. Strength, whether from flesh or the Dark Side was scarce, and she could only sense a trickle of its powers within her. Even if she could summon the Dark Side in ample flowing torrents, she could not heal herself. The Dark Sides powers over the Force did not mend, it could only destroy and control. Voyance tried to control her damage.​

Closing her eyes she let the Dark Side, fuelled by pain and the urgency of escaping her deadly entombment, pour itself in. She tried to quiet the thoughts that crashed against each other and clouded her focus. A meditative trance gripped her very organs and bones, and she used all that was left of her ability to channel the Dark Side to wrap its oppressive powers around her shattered body, holding organs, bones, and flesh in place. The trade-off was she could not use it to remove the debris that covered it. So, in excruciating pain, Voyance physically moved piece by piece, creating a subterranean tunnel from the debris. Tall enough so she could roll onto her stomach and open enough for her to drag herself free. She crawled for hours, only using one arm and the rigid push of whatever muscles still worked in her legs. All the while cuts to her face and body, exposed by the tattered openings of her now shredded Sith robes, left a bloody trail of stains.​

Reaching an opening, Darth Voyance froze. The Dark Elder had returned, standing before her beneath an archway made from the collapsed ruin that once was the hull plating of the corridor. Voyance gritted her teeth, smeared by blood streaming from her ripped lips and throat. Her eyes twitched and strained to focus on the impish Dark Master. “Have you come to kill me?” Voyance softly whispered. “Come to end your failed apprentice?” The Elder shook his head, “Reward you I have come.” Voyance’s face contorted from an expression of perpetual anguish to confused fury. “Reward me?” Voyance parroted, continuing, “Reward me with what? I have repulsed the Alliance and the Imperials, but I am in ruins, Master.” The Dark Elder pointed to a gaping alcove of the ship’s wreckage that had led out into the nameless dune sea of Korriban. “A great tool of your machinations awaits. One desperate for power, power she had once. Power, supply her you will,” the Elder said. “Find her you must. Win her trust you shall. Together, end the Empire you will.” The Dark Elder faded and Voyance lunged out her only good hand in protest, but the imp was gone.​

Voyance slammed her fist into the scorched durasteel plates of the floor and whimpered an exhaled cry. She fell into another deep sleep afterwards. When she awoke again, Voyance dragged herself to a peeling hull plate and propped herself up. With scrap metal and torn ribbons from her robes, she created an arm split to cradle her broken arm and reenforce the proper posture of her broken ribs. She did not know where lightsaber was and did not care to look for it. Limping forward she tried to walk. She fell many times before she reached the alcove and grappled hanging wires and cables to pull herself onto her feet. Out before her was an open dune that fell into a deep chasm, a deep sarlacc pit but one long abandoned or rotted into a simple fissure in the dunes. The very air that blew from this dark abyss was charged with the Dark Side, much like the Dark Nexus that spewed Dark Side efflux back on Sepulcher. In the distance, she saw a freighter land and two figures exit. Darth Voyance’s scarred lips bent into a frown and she now knew what the Dark Elder had said. Ripping a pipe from the wreckage, she used it as a large walking staff and slowly moved to explore this radiating abyss of power and the two strangers the Dark Elder had foretold would greet her.​

Ashin Cardé Varanin Seydon of Arda​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

During the length of the flight interim, Seydon had busied himself with regaining vigor. A pumice stone was taking to scruffing his skin, raking his hair until the dust and earth washed free, locked for half a cycle inside the freighter’s modest ‘fresher. Afterward turning the temperature dials to opposite degrees, reversing the scalding heat to arctic cold. He groomed down his beard, cut and trimmed his hair, letting the reflection in the foggy mirrors regain its semblance of humanness. Then he was gone to the cargo-holds, utilizing makeshift courtyards to run fighting exercises with hardlight holograms. His form returned easily as he worked through circular parries and oblique guards, transitioning stances while retreading the footwork, pushing his thoughts into forward focus even while his blade cut and slashed in liquid arcs and lancing thrusts.

In the now, a curtain of oak-stained rock surrounded a deep pit outside the cockpit viewports. Seydon leaned atop instrumentation panels, looking in as deep as the view allowed. The pit was itself unremarkable, like an aged and weathered geyser pothole. Mineral discolourations rimmed the pit’s edge where striations showed in the bare stone. And yet there was some unsettling element, Seydon felt. He pulled back on a sleeve; the hairs on his forearm hadn’t relaxed since they landed and he felt a jolt strike his extra-senses. He wished for a proper Dunaan medallion, or Rave’s precious Korriban compass, both lost now. He didn’t trust anything in the tremulous Force whispers that crawled through the Dark Side; much as it empowered him in rare moments, that same wellspring played on vulnerabilities.

There was little left to observe remotely. Seydon turned and quit the cockpit, joining Ashin in readying. A plain black jumpsuit, a relatively new harness web, good boots, gloves, a snug comm-piece wedged up tight in his ear, and his twin-swords anchored in place across his back and shoulders. A handful of palm-sized bombs and a trio of discoloured potion phials rounded out the selection; the last of his already severely depleted armoury. He noted Ashin’s seasoned touch arming and charging her hardware.

“Be sure that agreement will come with caveats,” He said, walking with her down the debarkation ramp.

Their boots touched gravel and broken stone. Now a hot wind blew over their heads, carrying trace granules of something ashy and corrupt elements apparent to Seydon’s heightened olfactory receptors. Inky things skittered at the edge of his peripherals, disappearing before he’d turned his head. Walking to the edge of the pit, he knelt down and again tried peering in. After a handful of metres, the light met a screen of featureless dark, blackness that cavorted with the colours of deep sleep. Seydon fished a small sandcoin from a harness pouch and tossed it into the pit’s mouth, cocking his ear. After a very, very long soundless beat, he came to his feet briskly, fishing a spool of wire from his belt.

“Best guess is it’s a spatial chasm, something with warped geometric rules. Could very well be separated going in there. We’ll probably have to suffer visions, hallucinations. Getting a sense of…” His hand rolled forward, grappling for the right wording. “Spiritual decay? If anything’s lairing within, my bet is on spectres, elementa, maybe even a brood of old necrophages semi-hibernating. This wouldn’t be out here without some kind… of… safeguards - do you feel that?”

Seydon knotted the spool back into place and drew Razorlight free, snapping the blade up into a hang-guard. A half-bloodied shape in ragged swathes of robes limped towards them from across a stony tundra waste, banging a crude walking stick fashioned out of a length of broken duct piping. Seydon had never been particularly empathic, relied instead on his superhuman senses, but even his belly roiled at the approach.

Ashin Cardé Varanin Darth Voyance​

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

On the way down they'd seen the marks of violence throughout the system. Two powers had warred against the Sith Empire and broken its hold here: the Alliance and the Sith heretics under Darth Voyance , if Ashin's sources were clear. Subsequently, not in cooperation. Voyance and the Jedi had no use for each other.

Voyance: Kaine Zambrano's traitor student, now a Dark Lord in her own right. An architect, a plotter, a gatherer - and an implicit or explicit rival of the Worm Emperor, to whom Ashin had sworn her service on pragmatic grounds.

So when Ashin recognized the seriously injured Twi'lek limping toward them, when Seydon drew his sword with simple ease-

"My sources thought you died today, Darth Voyance," she called across the gaping pit. "Were they right?"

An aside to Seydon- "Major player, web-spinner, enemy of the Empire, not necessarily one of mine. Could be useful if she survives."

Darth Voyance Seydon of Arda

 

[Darth Voyance]

"My sources thought you died today, Darth Voyance. Were they right?"

​

Said Ashin Cardé Varanin , as Darth Voyance limped her way closer. A painful wheeze dripped from her cracked and bleeding lips as she coughed up a reply, "You are well informed...stranger." ​

Voyance continued, "My ship is destroyed and my body ruined, but no, I am not dead." The Rutian stopped just a few paces from the old woman and her grim-faced bodyguard. She could not read the old woman. She had a presence that was so scrambled that the Dark Side gave no answer even though both the Light and the Dark bleed from her like an open wound. Her soul in the Force was nothing but scars upon scars. Voyance's stare thinned into a glare, one that caused her upper lip to slightly rise in a frown.​

"You, however," began Voyance, "Should be. You reek of death and undeath."​

"Who are you, spectre?"​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Seydon put up Razorlight and took position off Ashin’s shoulder. Darth Voyance he’d never heard of; in spite of injury, listening to the grind of wrenched if not shattered bone and the heady, laboured heart tremulations, blood wheezing in her strained vessels, she possessed raw self-assurance only apparent in well-versed Sith. That she walked with the aid of a mangled length of piping did little lessening his caution. Seydon kept his hands stilled, remembered which harness catch held his throwing knives.

“So work your magic, Jen’ari,” Seydon muttered at Ashin. “See what she’s about.”

Ashin Cardé Varanin

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

She took Darth Voyance 's question and Seydon of Arda 's commentary in stride. Kept Jentaral sheathed at her hip, too, and the Chiru tranq rifle slung over her shoulder.

"I'm here as part of a task that can't harm your goals or help your rivals, Voyance. It would benefit neither Carnifex nor the Worm Emperor if I succeeded in resurrecting Spencer Jacobs. So I'll make you an offer. I keep a handful of Sith spells close to my heart. One's the same agonizing grasp that Sadow's shadow used to heal Exar Kun when the boy was crushed underground. I will fix you utterly. And since you're probably stronger than the Worm Himself, your pain will be useful to me. I'll drain that energy away and keep it to help me with my quest. All you have to do is accept.

"That's my offer. You know my name."

 

[Darth Voyance]

"You know my name," said the old woman.

Voyance did. Though she did not believe it. Ashin Varanin, Empress of the Sith Empire of the Old Post-Plague Sith Lords, her mind whispered to her. But how? Voyance deliberated on the discovery of this information. A long dead Sith Empress here, trudging through the wastes of Korriban and peering over a gaping chasm that belched the Dark Side in heavy wafts of the Force. She had come to resurrect someone? Such a task demanded untold powers of the Dark Side. The Rutian Twi'Lek looked down at the pit and then back to the former Empress. Voyance came closer. Stabbing her makeshift staff into the churning sands she stumbled her way to Ashin and inspected her with a grim glare - burning gold and red.​

"Hmph," Voyance laughed in a curt chuckle, continuing, "My sources thought you died long ago, your dark excellency. But I suppose we are both mistaken today."​

Voyance raised a heavy and shaking finger at the chasm of dark power, "Whatever you seek in your quest to wake the dead, you shall not find such power there. You will however find it with me and the world I have discovered beyond the eyes of Dark Lords and Emperors. One who holds the very nexus of the Dark Side as its core. Power beyond power - to fuel any ambition."​

Voyance suddenly cast aside her staff and fell to land cross-legged on the dunes, "Share with me this power to mend through the Dark Side...and I shall guide to it. Empress Varanin."

Ashin Cardé Varanin Seydon of Arda ​

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

Ashin bared her teeth in a smile.

"My pleasure."

Sith Magic was not a field known for its innovation, to put it mildly. The healing spell hailed from Sith prehistory by way of Naga Sadow, circa six thousand years before present. The original significance of the arcane gestures and precise finger positions involved was lost to time.

...or had been, before she became the caretaker of various especially significant holocrons during her term as Empress. And with that knowledge came the power of adaptation. The spell she wove was Naga Sadow's healing, true, but with the agony-feeding element she'd mentioned baked right into the sorcery.

Darth Voyance 's body began to knit itself together in terrible ways.