Ozymandias


The Sundering Dawn | Act II: Galaxy in Crisis
OOC Note:
This will be a Junction between the Sith Order, the Royal Naboo Republic, Mandalorian Neo-Crusaders, and The Diarchy. The missions stated are a reference to the linked Visions people had, where they can follow up in character on their guesses as to what the missions will entail. Each mission has clues that I am willing to DM. I will post daily, or at least page-wise summaries of all actions per objective using Chapters. If you have any questions, feel free to tag me here. The DM account will be

Will go live, April 18th.
The Galaxy’s fractures have deepened from rumor to waking terror. Hyperlanes once thought immutable now collapse without warning, stranding whole sectors in days‑long isolation. Freighters emerge from half‑finished jumps with hulls scarred by Starweird talons; military couriers report entire convoys lost to pockets of non‑space. Every major power—Jedi enclaves, Sith orders, Mandalorian clans, imperial governments, corporate federations—agrees on one thing: the fabric of realspace is tearing faster than any single faction can stitch it closed.
Compounding the panic, thousands of Force‑sensitives across every culture have experienced shared nightmare‑visions. Some dream of a crimson fissure beating backward beneath eternal blizzards; others see a derelict fleet adrift in silence, its distress pings arriving before they’re sent. Still more awaken tasting metal after glimpsing a rust‑red spire where gravity forgets its direction. Scholars now dub these phenomena the Visions of Blood, Echo, and Axis—three “keys” that, according to prophecy, could either mend or shatter the Galaxy’s future.
Recognizing the need for rapid, collective action, an emergency conclave has been convened aboard Karath Station—a decommissioned Muunilinst trade‑hub newly declared neutral ground. Envoys, archivists, pathfinders, and bodyguards from every major faction have safe‑passage guarantees: no battles here, only negotiation, data‑sharing, and the uneasy hum of rival agendas rubbing shoulders. Holoprojectors stand ready to display dream‑recordings; secured war‑rooms wait for side bargains; a joint peace‑keeping detail patrols every airlock to enforce decorum.
The summit’s mandate is simple in writing, impossible in practice: cross‑reference every fragment of vision, chart a coordinated response, and assign expedition teams to recover the three Keys before hyperlane entropy turns the Galaxy feral. Succeed, and the conclave may pinpoint the mysterious world‑machine called Calladene—the gear at the heart of the crisis. Fail, and each faction will face the Sundering Dawn alone, armed with only half‑truths and a dwindling map of stars.
—

Objective 1 | Cross Roads
Karath Station, Neutral Mid‑Rim Orbit
The ancient trade‑hub shuddered as the last diplomatic shuttle eased into its cradle. Once the pride of Muunilinst’s banking fleets, Karath Station now floated half‑lit and half‑lawless in lonely orbit—refurbished just enough for a single, fragile purpose: bring the Galaxy’s rivals to the same table before the Sundering finished what entropy had begun.
Armored peacekeepers in split‑color livery ringed every airlock. Their neural pikes crackled warning arcs while a prerecorded announcement rolled across the concourse in Basic, Huttese, Mando’a, and High Sith: “Karath Station is sovereign neutral ground. Discharge of plasma or Force will trigger auto‑vent protocols. You have been advised.” The words echoed beneath the oxidized ribs of a vaulted promenade where merch‑stalls once hawked banking bonds; now holoprojectors hovered in their place, looping fragments of nightmare‑visions captured from Jedi temples, Sith oubliettes, Mandalorian spirit‑walks.
Delegations trickled in: crimson‑robed Sith archivists flanked by silent, tattooed enforcers; Jedi researchers cloaked against imagined Sinister auras; Mandalorian field‑marshals in storm‑scored beskar, helmet visors flickering tactical readouts. Corporate attaches in synth‑silk discreetly traded data‑chips for transit permits while GA officers logged every exchange with stoic efficiency. No one sat. The tension kept participants on their feet, pivoting always toward the nearest exit—or the nearest potential adversary.
At the chamber’s center, a circular holotable roared to life. Foliated glyphs—triangle‑and‑line of Blood, fractured mirror of Echo, compass‑rose of Axis—rotated above a star‑map speckled with red “X” markers where hyperlanes had imploded only hours before. A Jedi archivist cleared her throat, blue eyes sweeping the hall. “We are gathered,” she announced, voice carrying through comm‑magnifiers, “to assemble our shards of prophecy into a single, survivable truth.” A Sith loremaster replied with a dry laugh. “Survivable—for whom?”
The holotable cycled to live‑feed panes: Odacer‑Faustin’s polar storm fronts; the Silent Mirror pocket’s ghost‑fleet telemetry; the rusted spire’s gravity‑sheared cartography. Microphones unlocked. Slices of vacant airtime ticked away like countdowns. Somewhere behind the escorts’ mirrored visors, blasters loosened in holsters; beneath robe sleeves, thumbs brushed activator studs of hidden sabers.
Now the floor was open—every faction free to project its vision recordings, levy accusations, or bargain for missing coordinates. For a breathless moment no one moved, the Galaxy balanced on the edge of its own unraveling. Then, almost simultaneously, light and darkness flickered across the holoscreens as rivals stepped forward to speak—each wondering whether the next words traded here would stitch reality together… or slit it a little wider.
—

Objective II | Crimson Wake
Odacer‑Faustin, Silent Meridian Polar Shelf
Hurricane‑force snow peeled layers of paint from the shuttle’s heat‑tiles before landing struts found purchase on a makeshift repulsor pad of glowing orange ferrocrete. Seconds after touchdown the blizzard swallowed the sky again, casting the expedition party into a grainy tunnel of white where vibro‑compass needles spun uselessly. Flood‑lights stabbed outward and revealed row upon row of obsidian sarcophagi half‑entombed in the ice—carbonite graves resonating with a subsonic hum that chattered across helmet comms. Somewhere beneath, undead silhouettes scraped at transparent frost, locked forever in a twitching salute.
Forward scouts unpacked atmosphere tents that snapped rigid in cutters’ arcs of blue plasma. Inside, holotables flickered alive with the triangle‑and‑line glyph, overlaid on a subterranean schematic showing Vault A‑9 three kilometers southwest and ninety meters down. The path was a gauntlet of fissured crevasses and rogue carbonite geysers capable of flash‑freezing a sentient in seconds. Navigators passed around echo‑locators tuned to the backward pulse—thump‑thump… thump‑thump…—that every dreamer had felt. The beat now pulsed through the ice like a hidden sub‑ocean tide, guiding and mocking at once.
Breakthrough crews advanced with mag‑torches, seismic hammers, or ritual censer‑flames—each faction choosing its method. As the first blast door emerged from the glacier’s clutch, Sith acolytes began carving runes of binding while Jedi healers prepared bacta for frostbite triage. Mandalorian shock‑troops laid breaching charges, and corporate salvage drones snaked cables toward the vault’s data port, hoping to skim profits before history sealed them in footnotes. Beyond the reinforced iris lay midichlorian‑rich stasis chambers and the rumored Crimson Cauterizer—a living lattice that could stitch reality or rip it wider. The ice moaned overhead like a warning. One heartbeat, backward, then another. The door groaned, the wind screamed, and the expedition pushed into the dark, each footstep crunching on snow that had never known the warmth of a living sun.
—

Objective III | Mirror's Edge
Silent Mirror Pocket, Mid‑Rim
Jump‑beacons flickered and died the instant the strike flotilla slipped from realspace. Stars doubled—ghostly twins hovering half a breath out of phase—and the nav‑computers’ chronometers disagreed by three exact minutes. Here, in the Silent Mirror, even time lost its bearings. Ahead loomed the lost convoy: thirty hulks frozen mid‑formation, plating shredded, drive cones yawning open like ruptured lungs. The lead freighter’s name—Chemra’s Hope—floated across the viewscreen twice, the second echo chasing the first by a heartbeat.
Boarding craft launched in pairs. Tractor beams had no purchase; pilots feathered thrusters to drift alongside rent airlocks while Starweird silhouettes flickered at the edge of running‑lights, watching with unblinking hollows. The void was silent until an unexpected ping tremored along hull plates—one note, metallic and lonely, repeating at odd intervals. Every second ping preceded the first, a sound arriving before it was struck. Familiar déjà vu vertigo washed over boarding teams; some muted audio feeds to keep their own hearts from racing three beats ahead.
Inside, the corridors were littered with flash‑frozen crew still strapped to crash webbing, faces frozen mid‑scream. Emergency lighting cycled forward, then rewound. Each bulkhead carried a stencilled beacon code—N‑57, K‑12, D‑34—letters shimmering in reverse order each time the lights hiccupped. Data‑tabs clamped to permafrosted consoles showed corrupted cargo manifests: the final entry on every ship read simply ΔT = –3 min.
At the convoy’s core lay Hold Sigma, once a secure vault for Celestial salvage. Its blast door was half‑sheared, mauled by Starweird claws. Within, the Echo Resonator floated in zero‑G: a lattice of shattered transmitter rings still sparking with impossible fore‑signals. Touching it without stabilizing the cracked focus lens would dump boarding parties into 60‑second recursion loops—time folding, events re‑playing, casualties un‑dying and re‑dying in sickening cascades. But capture it intact and a fleet could read hyperspace threats three minutes before they happen—or spoof a rival’s lane echoes to vanish entire armadas.
The hull ping reverberated again, second note first. Boarding lights flickered out of sequence. Somewhere beyond the viewport, moth‑white figures converged on the breach like dust drawn into a lung. Teams fixed mag‑boots to deck plating and readied grav‑anchors; in the Silent Mirror, the future approached you before you stepped into it, and every breath might be one you’d already taken.
—

Objective IV | Axis Mundi
Tython
Blizzard skies parted only long enough for descent craft to pierce the cloud deck and behold the Rusted Spire—a needle of oxidized alloy plunging out of the ice cap like a planetary rivet. Scouring winds keened through petrified buttresses, carrying flakes of red oxide that stained snowscape and visor alike. Sensors spun wild: gravity readings slid from lunar‑low to crushing high in heartbeat spikes, and magnetic compasses corkscrewed into nonsense. The Spire’s own latent vergence repelled straight‑line landings; pilots were forced to belly‑skid across an icy shelf that cracked like glass beneath repulsor shockwaves.
Entry was a yawning breach where past prospectors had plasma‑cut the outer shell before disappearing. Inside, walls of weathered durasteel warped into a spiral passage that turned endlessly inward, rotating round a central gyroscope the size of a gunship. Its rings spun at blistering speed—molten streaks that cast strobing shadows across walkways. Dust cascaded up, down, sideways; footing shifted as gravity re‑wrote allegiance every dozen meters. Expedition members clipped safety tethers to handrails that might be ceiling in the next step.
Three equidistant archways loomed at the first major junction, each throat washed in alien luminance:
- Ashen Gold—corridor smooth, walls engraved with mantras of mercy and absolution.
- Midnight Violet—passage lit by violent crackles where engraved sigils bled Dark‑side static.
- Verdant Teal—a flickering hybrid path where glyphs of Light and Dark fought for space like competing lianas.
Challenges mounted: Light corridor presented “mercy puzzles” where saving an illusory prisoner cost precious minutes of shifting grav‑cycle; Dark corridor spawned alchemic guardians that rewarded brutality but devoured the faint‑hearted; Balance corridor forced pairs to traverse zero‑G chasms by exchanging counterweighted tether‑lines in perfect coordination. Only simultaneous solutions would unlock the next coil of the spiral. Fail, and the gyroscope rang like a colossal gong, resetting every solved mechanism two turns back.
Deep within the core lay the immobile Axis Loom—a rust‑clotted lattice of Celestial gyros frozen at a crooked tilt. Stasis energy emanated from it in temporal ripples that eroded personal memories: a name forgotten, a loyalty blurred, an oath half‑remembered. Re‑aligning the Loom (tilt precisely twenty‑nine degrees, thirteen minutes) promised dominion over local spacetime for a single hour—long enough to sync or sabotage Calladene’s faulty gear. But the recalibration demanded the simultaneous insertion of Light, Dark, and Balance crystals retrieved from each corridor apex. Sabotage one path—or betray its bearer—and the Loom would seize, freezing reality here and perhaps across far‑flung lanes for who‑knew how long.
As tri‑comms crackled with half‑intelligible status reports, the gyroscope’s rings began to slow—first time in millennia. Dust changed direction mid‑air. Somewhere above, the blizzard ceased, and an unseen choir whispered once more: “Turn the loom, mend the dawn… or let the axle snap.” Teams tightened grips on lost memories and stepped toward the final lock, knowing the choice ahead would set the Galaxy’s clock—or shatter its face forever.
—
BYOO