Private Last Rites

[Vesta]

They called her evil, knew her as death incarnate, she was the terror that spelled a doom far worse than simple loss. If the Brotherhood of the Maw was the great evil rearing its ugly head, then she was the teeth that lined its jaws; she called herself Darth Mori, an attempt at gaining control over her identity in a galaxy that understood only how to force its people onto a narrow road towards an ultimate fate. The last days were quickly approaching now, its stale air carried even on the winds in worlds far from the most recent battle between the Maw and the so-called free peoples of the remaining galaxy, and yet the ones that stood in opposition to it remained incapable of stemming the tide out of sheer ignorance to the plurality of the Maw. Those within knew the subtle, sometimes major, differences between its many figures while those on the outside only saw one man and a cult of personality behind him.

"I won't feel an ounce of pity for anyone who dies." She said matter-of-factly, unprompted, to the woman at her left.

They were walking through a garden of stone and sand at the perimeter of her fortress, the massive depiction of a Shi'ido that was etched into the face of the structure looming over them. Onrai had made herself more familiar than most thought was generally healthy, given the toxic nature of the Sith lord, but Mori seemed less inclined to separate herself further from someone she had come to conclude as relatively harmless. They had been discussing the future, particularly the near future, and Mori was in the process of voicing her very unrestrained desires to destroy what Onrai felt was better conserved, even if perverted as a result. "There's nothing special about it, it only matters to the people we want to kill - destroying it will hurt anyone who survives or stays away." She added.

"You ought to learn from the failures of your generation, of my cousin's and parents', that holding onto the past is the only thing that keeps us from creating something new."

Her gaze shifted out towards the desert expanse beyond her estate's perimeter.

"Everything that is created comes from something that is destroyed, without death there is no life."

 

[Onrai]

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

The relationship between Onrai and the woman she had come to check in with was one of the most unorthodox. Never had two individuals so incredibly immersed in the Dark Side had as complex an interfacing, as complicated a methodology of mutual operation as had the twice-false goddess and her purely mortuaric cohort. The woman since her intaking of the incredibly profane relic that was the Heart of Typhojem had led(or perhaps accelerated) a transition into a very consumptive force with a need to fill the ever gaping hole of hunger within her being.

Onrai’s actions had for the most part been nothing but independent from the Maw’s core mission. She had turned Kiross into a new Nathema, a self-sustaining world with the industrial capacity to serve her military efforts as necessary. Her more peaceful nature had encouraged such dissidents as Sasmay Cull to become a part of her ever-expanding presence there.

“There are many deficiencies the Sith possessed during your family’s dominion over the Empire. The inability to reach a state of benevolent godhood was such a critical cause for collapse that I swore even as an individual to not make the same mistake.” She motioned to the shadowed form, the natural form she felt comfortable enough taking in the presence of her compatriot. “To grant the prayers of those who offer themselves to you is one of the duties delineating pretenders from those who truly hold the title of god. And yet, I do not hold onto the Sith any more than I need to.”

She pondered over the circumstances that had led the duo to the place they were at presently. “Onrai - the old Onrai - was a power-hungry creature, an entity whose very existence made the Celestials tremble with fear at the threat of the monopoly of their dominion over mortal kind being demolished. But while many speculate about her faces, her identity as the goddess of so many cultures that looked at her through the lens of their own nature, there is one great secret regarding Onrai that so very few have ever gleaned and understood. You would have to have slain such a being who understood, to have tasted their knowledge and memories in order to be able to act.” She paused for a moment as though she hesitated to elucidate before the revelation was made.

“El’Shuddem, the perfidious deity known as the Soulworm, who devours their own tail and brings forth naught but misery - that is, or was, the end of Onrai.”

Darth Mori