That Which Was Forgotten

[Vrak Nashar]

Nathema
[member="Yidhra"]

The shuttle swooped low over the barren, lifeless waste of a world that was Nathema.

Vrak watched out of the viewport in his meditation chamber, his eyes following the curve of the planet as they drew closer to the desert surface. His lips thinned slightly, the force rippling as they neared the world. He could almost feel it. Not a nexus, no, something else. A remnant of something dark, pieces that were left behind and never properly cleared away. It was unsettling to say the least.

The Darkside was here, but it was broken and fractured, torn apart in a way that Vrak couldn't quite understand.

His fingers slowly curled.

The Pureblood knew that this place was, at least in part. The homeworld of the greatest of them, the place that he had been born and raised. He frowned slightly as he glanced towards the scrolls that lay in the corner of the room, each one covered with writings in Ancient Sith. They had told him of this place, it's location deep within the Caldera. They had not said a word of what had happened, only that he had been born here.

Slowly his gaze returned to the viewport, the barren rock that drew closer and closer.

"My Lord, we've found a Plateau suitable for landing."

The voice rang out over the comm, interrupting his thoughts.

Vrak scowled slightly, his fingers slowly curling into tight fists. He had no idea what had happened here, what Vitiate had done, but he intended on finding out.

 

[Yidhra]

Yidhra, likewise, was poring over texts scribbled in Ancient Sith. The script crawled across the page like some kind of malevolent spider, dripping poisonous secrets all across the weathered parchment. She was absorbing the wisdoms of old like a dry sponge, gorging on the knowledge stored within. It took patience to unfurl the convoluted syntax and complex vocabulary employed by their ancestors, but this was far from her first rodeo with old tomes.

[member="Vrak Nashar"] was pacing near the bridge, hands clasped tightly behind his back. Normally the clicking of his boots against the polished metal floor would have annoyed her, but the sith was completely absorbed by her reading material. Nothing short of a ship-wide attack would’ve torn her away from the scrolls.

This world had everything to do with Vitiate, forbidden knowledge of insane scope, and the Dark side of the Force. Naturally, Yidhra was completely sold. She had everything to gain from scouring the broken planet. To think what they could learn in observing and studying what had happened here!

The pureblood smiled and joined Nashar, mirroring the age-old pose of undisguised disdain. They stood like that while the vessel descended into atmosphere, navigating the thick webbing of clouds that hung above the earth.

With a shudder they kissed the ground. This low, the air seemed much clearer, but the soil was a sickly green hue of hangover puke left out to dry. Yidhra frowned, ignoring the unappealing scenery in favor of the heavy weight that pressed down upon her through the Force. It felt like the world itself were trying to expel them, a rejected graft in a rotting body.

“Shall we?”

 

[Vrak Nashar]

[member="Yidhra"]

He frowned for a moment more, ignoring the other Pureblood and closing his eyes. He tried to get a sense of this place, tried to feel what had happened here, yet all that came to him was that fracture. The odd broken pieces that seemed to have been left in complete shambles. His frown deepened, his eyes slowly opening as he peered across the barren landscape. There seemed to be nothing here, no life, no cities, not even ruins. His lips thinned as he slowly turned.

"Yes." Vrak answered finally, though in truth he had no idea what they were even doing here.

By all accounts this world was dead, long forgotten by even his own people and left completely devastated by whatever Vitiate had done here. Vrak didn't even know if they would find a remnant of a remnant. As they wandered through the ship Vrak motioned to one of the Massassi lounging within the common area, the great hulking warriors bowing slightly and then falling into step behind the two Purebloods. A moment later they found themselves stepping off the ship's ramp.

The odd fracture within the world seemed to pulse slightly as the Pureblood landed his foot upon the earth.

The air was stale, the vast nothingness seemingly offering nothing.

"Scan the area." He told the warrior. "Something...something is here."

There had to be.

 

[Yidhra]

With closed eyes she took air into her lungs, let its metallic taint settle deep. It was like tasting spilled oil on her tongue, the salt of blood and the tingle of iron. Screams echoed in her ears. Fingers scratched down her spine, desperate and pleading. The atmosphere was shivering, but the planet was dead, cold.

It was as if there was a thin veil, a transparent sheet of satin wrapped around a swarm of hovering corpses. Moving forward was much like wading through the viscous liquid that oft leaked from decaying cadavers; a mixture of putrefaction, lymph, and blood. It smelled faintly of it as well, though it lacked the comforting undertones of laboratory disinfectants Yidhra associated with the stench.

“A lot of people died here,” the sorceress stated as she looked at [member="Vrak Nashar"] again. The Massassi was just finishing up the scans with a deep crease in his dark brow, staring at the datapad in his hand like he wanted to smash it.

“A lot of Sith. Thousands.”

She traced her fingers absently along a tendril, biting the inside of her cheek. “But not here here. There,” she said, gesturing over the broken ridge of a nearby hill. Yidhra wrinkled her nose as she pilfered the datapad from the Massassi.

“It’s fetid.”

 

[Vrak Nashar]

[member="Yidhra"]

He could feel it as well.

The unpleasantness within the air, the slight lingering bile in his throat. Yidhra was right to say there had been death here, death of their people. Vrak frowned slightly as she pointed to a nearby hill, his lips thinning as he slowly began to move forward. He ignored the other two, though they quickly followed after him even as he moved closer.

As they drew nearer to the hill the fracture within the force began to pierce towards him.

It wasn't the same sort of absence in the force as a wound, it wasn't like Malachor or above Endor. This was something else, something different. Not worse, but simply divergent. It was like nothing he'd ever felt before. As though the force itself had been splintered and folded in upon itself. The death of their people could not have done this, not unless it was all at once. He frowned slightly, his gaze glancing towards Yidhra for a brief moment. "There."

He said, half turning towards an odd plateau on the distant hill.

"The force..." He trailed off, knowing that Yidhra would guess what he was about to say.

Slowly the Pureblood continued to ascent the small hill, wandering up the dirt mound until finally his boot rang out with a clash of stone.

 

[Yidhra]

The closer they got, the stronger it grew. Yidhra found herself struggling for every gasp of air as the oppressive, twisted presence pressed in from all sides. Each breath was thin, insubstantial, each step a chore as they advanced towards the plateau. The Massassi escort beside them trudged on with similar difficulty, stumbling over stones like a drunkard three bottles too deep.

When they crested another slope in their rocky path, a craggy gorge opened up ahead. It was the mouth of a giant skull, with the jagged edges jutting out like so many blackened teeth. Every surface seemed a light step away from crumbling into dust.

Yidhra swore under her breath and tried to gather the Force around her to bridge the gap… and nothing.

She frowned. Tried again.

Scowled. Tried again.

“Can you… ?”

 

[Vrak Nashar]

[member="Yidhra"]

"No." The force was not beyond his reach, he could still feel it. It seemed to linger there, hovering in place and calling to him, but touching it seemed foolish. It was like a divide had been formed, an line that was etched into the stand. Reaching across it seemed dangerous, as if he would end up sliced in two. He frowned slightly, his lips thinning as they moved onto the flat of the hill. His gaze fell towards the bottom of the plateau.

"Go." He commanded the Massassi. "Fetch the others."

There was something here, buried beneath the surface of sand and rock, he could sense it.

The freactured lines of the force all seemed to lead here, an origin point of sorts. He frowned slightly as he glanced towards Yidhra, consideration falling over his features. "We'll have them dig."

What had VItiate done to cause this?

The odd break that seemed to loom upon this world.

 

[Yidhra]

The Massassi legged it back towards the landing zone like all the Hounds of the Alliance were at his heels. Didn’t surprise her, really. She was more attuned to the Force than the warrior, that was for sure, but you’d have to be dead as a Vong not to feel anything here.

Even the inferior races would doubtless notice the discomfort fraying at the edges of their senses. 'Gut feeling', they called it.

If anyone else were standing where they were standing now, their entrails would be squirming like worms in a can, dragging them away from the vortex of Force fault lines. Yidhra could taste the color red on the air, seeping from the scarred ridge around the plateau. It looked like ghosts crawling from the earth, like soil shifting, like mountains moving.

“There won’t be any bones,” she said, sobering. Vitiate was too powerful, too collected for such an oversight. There were, of course, also the several millennia that had passed since whatever cataclysmic event had taken place here. Even skeletons eventually returned whence they came.

[member="Vrak Nashar"]

 

[Vrak Nashar]

[member="Yidhra"]

"I'm not looking for bones." Vrak said simply. She was right though. Vitiate would have wiped all traces of whatever he had done from this place, that added with the millenia that had passed over this world would mean likely everything had changed. Yet he could still feel it, that origin point, like the center of a web of cracks within glass. He frowned slightly, looking back towards the ship where he saw half a dozen Massassi trudging foward.

"There must be a mark." He said quietly. "Some remnant of what he did."

Perhaps not a physical mark, but something was down there. "The fracture of this place, it's not like Malachor or Kaas. It's something else."

Describing it seemed an impossible task.

The difficulty with all of this was in Vitiate himself. The man had been powerful enough to wipe away entire worlds with a single stroke of his palm. He had been strong enough to escape death on more than one occasion. His Empire had taken half the galaxy before he'd simply gotten bored of it. There was something to say about that, something impossible to describe. Vrak scowled as the Massassi arrived, slowly stepping into place around the plateau he and Yidhra stood on.

"Dig." He commanded them.

 

[Yidhra]

“Quite,” she said, narrowing her eyes at the company of Massassi that had joined them on the bare cliff. “It’s not… gone. It’s just broken. Changed?” Yidhra gave a half-hearted shrug. No use debating the finer points of how the Force on Nathema made her want to vomit everything all the way back to yesterday’s breakfast.

“Well, whatever we find, it’ll surely be powerful.”

How useful it would be, however, remained to be seen. Or if they would even find anything, for that matter. Vitiate had committed this ritual atrocity thousands of years ago, and Yidhra, who spent nearly as much time with her nose buried in a book as she did with her nose buried in a corpse; well, Yidhra knew how astronomically unlikely it was that no Sith had ever gotten the same idea they did, come here, and tried to dig up the proverbial bones.

Operative word being ‘tried’, because though the planet looked like a textbook wasteland, it looked like an untouched wasteland.

In the extremely high likelihood that others had come here before, what happened to them that they hadn’t left any marks?

Yidhra cast a furtive glance to her surroundings, suppressing a chilly shiver that clawed down her tattooed spine. Unpleasant, these mass Sith Lord graveyards. At this scale death didn’t even seem real anymore; it was reduced to something less – or more, if you were the one doing it.

Her train of thought derailed then, because whose wouldn’t when Massassi started screaming?

[member="Vrak Nashar"]

 

[Vrak Nashar]

[member="Yidhra"]

The creatures let out screeches as though they were being stabbed and tortured, their flesh torn from their very bones. Vrak stood off a ways to the side with Yidhra, his eyebrow slowly raising as he watched the creatures writhe and fall to the ground. Each one landed onto a heavy marble like stone, their bodies thrashing about as though they were being controlled by something...foreign. The Purebloods lips thinned, immediately reaching out in the force.

Massassi, like Purebloods, had a connection with the force that was symbiotic. The creatures had originally come from Purebloods, and that was marked in their won abilities. The odd fracture in the force was lashing out and them, breaking their connection to the Darkside which drove them wild within an instant.

The great red hulks smashed against each other, clawing, biting. "Interesting."

Vrak said as he simply observed the chaos.

The Massassi began to tear into each other, like wild beasts finding prey. Blood spurted over the marble like stone, howls and screams of rage echoed in the great empty wastelands around the two Purebloods.

 

[Yidhra]

“Well, shet.”

Yidhra was an educated pureblood. That often led people to draw the tragically wrong conclusion that she was also cultured.

“They’re eating each other,” she observed with a hint of a smirk on her thin lips. “Whatever’s down there is driving them mad.”

The ‘down there’ in question was the impressive hole the warriors had managed to carve into the face of the dead earth before they’d gone insane. At least they gave a splash of color to the uniform gray of the landscape as they fell to the ground one by one. With a pitiful croak, the last Massassi knelt into the dust, then tumbled over the edge of the plateau.

She waited a beat, then rushed over when nothing moved. The danger of the situation was painfully obvious, but no-one had ever gained anything hiding at home. Certainly bloodshed wasn’t her specialty – rather the opposite – but Yidhra would sooner gouge out her own eyes than pass up an opportunity like this.

How often in their life did a Sith have a chance to study someone as powerful as Vitiate?

No. This was hers.

She glanced over at [member="Vrak Nashar"]… well. Theirs.

Yidhra maneuvered past the cooling corpses and their mangled remains, carefully pacing around the broken earth. It was rather deep, and the soil was an off-black color under the surface – it was hard to distinguish anything unusual.

With her eyes, at least.

The Force, though… the Force was howling.

 

[Vrak Nashar]

[member="Yidhra"]

He watched for a time in silence.

Unlike Yidhra, Vrak was in no hurry to wander into the epicenter of the massacre that had just occurred. Whatever was done there had effected the Massassi quite...harshly, and he was none too eager to meet their fate. So he allowed her to test tot he grounds so to speak, wander onto the blackened marble that seemed to sprawl beneath the hill. He frowned for a moment as she moved, his eyes following her as she stood still in the center of the plateau.

When nothing happened to her, when she didn't fall, Vrak slowly moved after her. "This is where he did it."

The statement was a bit obvious at this point, but Vrak didn't particularly care. He slowly wandered to stand besides Yidhra, his lips thinning as he peered at the ground in front of him. There was a blackness to it, like an abyss that went on and on. Slowly the Pureblood crouched low, his fingers reaching out and gently running over the black stone. When he lifted them they returned slick with blood, his lips thinning as he looked at the corpses of the Massassi.

Without thought, he reached for the force.

The odd divide that had sat there, the strange fracture that ruptured through everything was gone.

"Right..." He trailed off as he seized the power, the darkside flooding into him as he stood. "Here."

 

[Yidhra]

Someone other than a pair of power-hungry purebloods might’ve drawn parallels to a freshly blooming flower in spring. With an inaudible yet satisfying click, the world around them realigned to its rightful axis once again. The mismatched pieces slid together to merge into the whole they knew and abused.

The air tasted of blood, still. It felt lighter, though, and her head wasn’t full of screams anymore.

She reached down and sank her long fingers into the charred soil. It was wet, cool to the touch, but Yidhra was used to rooting around in corpses and didn’t mind. She dug deeper, brow furrowed with effort until triumph washed it all away.

Her hand closed around the buried shard of black marble, a possessive claw. She found her feet again, turning the sharp splinter around in her palms. It seemed to shun light itself, black as space against the overcast sky.

And it was pulsing, with life, with whispers, with echoes of whispers of thoughts. Force knew how many lives had been snuffed out in this very spot, in a single instant. Consumed. Erased.

Yidhra cradled the icy stone to her chest with hungry yellow eyes and a hungry red smile.

“He took them,” she said, words reduced to a reverent murmur. “He took them and made them all his. Their lives.”

[member="Vrak Nashar"]

 

[Vrak Nashar]

[member="Yidhra"]

"Amazing." For once, he meant it. There was no hint of sarcasm in his tone, no subtle quip, nothing. Vrak was quite simply startled by what he had just learned. His eyes lowered towards the marbled black surface, his mouth felt dry, his skin prickled with goosebumps. He frowned slightly as he tried to put it all together, his eyes wandering over the black surface that the Massassi had dug out before their death. For a moment, he found himself dumbfounded.

Vitiate had always been powerful.

The stories, the ancient histories, they had all painted him as a Titan. The Sith that never died, the man who could have conquered it all had it not been for his disappearance. Among the Sith he was a legend in it of itself, greater than Revan, stronger than Ragnos himself, a pillar that seemed to loom above every SIth that had ever lived, yet to think his power had been gained through this.

"He slaughtered them all." He frowned, his own people, but did that really matter? Vrak would do the same to Athiss in a heartbeat. "Left this world little more than a husk of what it was."

Slowly Vrak squatted down to touch the black marble once again.

"But how?" He breathed quietly, more than a hint of jealousy in his tone.

 

[Yidhra]

Yes, how?

A question impossible to answer by staring at the stone slab any longer, Yidhra reckoned. For someone so well-read and well-studied, she was oddly impatient. Or was that a trait that all entitled purebloods shared?

“That rock won’t tell us,” she said after a beat, fingers still caressing the shard in her palm. It was small enough to fit snugly, yet sharp as a razor. True to her misfortune with such objects, Yidhra drew her hand away with a hiss. A breath after the sting, ruby blood beaded at the tip of her finger, mocking her washed-out skin. The sith frowned at the whole ensemble, then tucked the sliver of black marble into her dress.

The way it throbbed with the Dark side, with the lives extinguished, with the exquisite anguish of their passing – it was deserving of an amulet.

“This world, however… it feels, mm, pregnant.” She smiled at [member="Vrak Nashar"], tendrils curling with pleasure. “It would be a shame to let all this potential go untapped, no?”

Or, worse yet, allow for it to be claimed by someone else.

 

[Vrak Nashar]

[member="Yidhra"]

He frowned for a second, of course agreeing with her, but...there was an issue with her assumption. A simple one really, and that was born of who they were. They were Purebloods, yes, intimately familiar with the darkside of the force, linked to it in ways that others species could only imagine, yet here...this place.

"It would destroy us." He said quietly.

Vrak did not like admitting his failings. He did not like pointing out the obvious. The fracture in this place, what had happened to the Massassi, they were obviously connected. The red hulks drew on the force to make themselves stronger, while digging they had drawn on it's strength to allow them to work faster, harder, as soon as they had done so the fracture had reached them and instantly splintered their minds. It didn't take a genius to figure out.

"I am not eager to die." He told her. "Overconfidence would be our undoing."

Tapping the well of strength here would be foolish, at least if they did it themselves.

They would have to find another method, at least until they had the strength to do otherwise.

 

[Yidhra]

“Oh, I agree completely.” She clasped her hands behind her back, regarding the ebbing air in the distance. “It is good that we are so conscientious about our arrogance, then.”

Yidhra licked her lips as she ran a thoughtful tendril down her cheek. “Athiss is an old world, as you well know. There are libraries there where texts forgotten by history reside, and I’ve studied many,” she chuckled, “at least those whose authors weren’t too given to flowery language.”

“At any rate, some tomes reference rituals and even machines that would, perhaps, be able to harness this sort of power…” Trailing off, the pureblood glanced back at [member="Vrak Nashar"]. “It would be worth a try, at least.”

 

[Vrak Nashar]

[member="Yidhra"]

Vrak nodded slowly, knowing what she spoke of. The Darkside had been used in the past as a source of power for dozens, if not hundreds of different devices and machines. It would take time, but perhaps they would be able to build something that could help them. He frowned for a moment, glancing around the empty wasteland.

This planet had been stripped from the records, torn from most histories and discarded from the minds of even their people. It was unlikely that anyone else would venture here, yet he knew the value of this place. He glanced back towards his ship, then towards Yidhra. "This world must be kept hidden."

There was no question of that.

"I will send a cruiser to stand guard." That would stretch his resources thin, but it was doable. If they lost this world it would have...unfortunate consequences. Whoever seized this power first would have significant advantage, and with everything that was going to happen soon, Vrak couldn't allow it.

"An outpost will be built." He frowned. "Quickly."

 

[Yidhra]

“Quite. The Zuguruk must be warned of the danger that using the Force here presents.” Not that she particularly cared for anyone who lost their life to the madness that lurked in the fracture. That their movement currently wasn’t rife with manpower, however, was a fact so blatant that even a thoroughbred pureblood couldn’t deny it.

“While we work on protecting our interest here, I will consult our archives for any detailed accounts of such machines.” Vague references and stories were all fine and well when you were trying to scare young sithlings into obedience, but engineers required something else altogether.

“This power will be ours.”

What use they would find for it once it was secured was irrelevant. To the ambitious, power in and of itself was a reward so great that few others could match it.

And if [member="Vrak Nashar"] and Yidhra Dottash shared one trait, it was ambition.