Shadow Hand
- Intent: To establish a key city on the ruined continent of Chwûq, serving as a necropolis-fortress, a hub of Sith rituals, a repository of forbidden knowledge, and a major redoubt of the Kainate’s warriors.
- Image Credit:
- Click - ChatGPT by Me
- Headers - Teresa Zambrano | Darth Pellax
- Canon: N/A
- Permissions: N/A
- Links: N/A
- City Name: Zîsûvas’baal ("City of Black Graves")
- Classification: Necropolis-Fortress
- Location: Chwûq, Dromund Kaas
- Affiliation:
- Population: Moderate (Highly specialized inhabitants, military garrisons, Sith cultists, and necromantic caretakers)
- Demographics:
- Majority: Sith Purebloods (Overseers, Ritualists, Necromancers), Humans (Warriors, Sorcerers, Tomb Keepers), Epicanthix (Warrior-Priests, Guardians)
- Minority: Umbarans (Crypt-Keepers, Scholars), Chiss (Tactical Analysts, Researchers), Graug (Brute Enforcers, Grave Watchers)
- Outsiders: No non-Kainite species are permitted entry without explicit Sith authorization.
- Wealth: Low
- Zîsûvas’baal is not a city of commerce but one of duty, knowledge, and ritual. What wealth exists is in the form of ancient relics and the untold power buried beneath its surface.
- Stability: High
- There is no crime, no rebellion, no deviation. Order is enforced through absolute discipline, faith in the Eternal Rule, and the pervasive presence of Sith enforcers.
- Freedom & Oppression: Absolute Sith Domination
- This is a city where will and loyalty are everything. There are no markets, no leisure, no triviality, only duty, servitude, and the worship of Sith power. Those who falter are discarded into the Flesh Vats or buried alive beneath the Tomb-Spire.
- Description: Zîsûvas’baal is no ordinary city, it is a mausoleum-fortress, a place where the past and present exist as one. Built upon ash-choked ruins and surrounded by a landscape of eternal winter and forgotten death, it serves as the final sanctum for the most revered and feared warriors of the Kainate. Here, the Sith Embalmers prepare their dead, Seeker-Sorcerers hoard knowledge too dangerous for the living, and the Deathless Host stand in silent vigil over the city ready to protect it. No banners wave above the city. No songs of glory ring through its corridors. Only the hollow silence of the dead and the whispers of ancient specters fill its streets, reminding all who dwell here that Zîsûvas’baal is not a home, it is a grave that breathes.
City Layout: Zîsûvas’baal is not a city in the conventional sense, it is a mausoleum-fortress, a dark monument to the eternal cycle of Sith conquest, death, and rebirth. The entire settlement is sculpted into the icy ruins of Chwûq, built upon shattered remnants of an age-old civilization long buried beneath volcanic ash and glacial ice. Unlike other Sith strongholds, there is no towering skyline or sprawling urban network. Instead, Zîsûvas’baal is embedded deep into the frozen earth, with much of the city existing as an underground labyrinth of tombs, catacombs, and arcane sanctums.
At the surface, the city appears as a vast, walled necropolis, its black spires piercing the storm-choked sky, jagged and uneven like broken teeth. Its central pathways are lined with towering mausoleums, each bearing the frozen bodies of fallen Sith Lords, preserved for eternity. Snow and volcanic ash intermingle, coating the stone streets in a grey, deathly pallor. The city is divided into three primary layers, each reflecting its function within the Kainate’s war machine and necromantic rites.
- The Necropolis Citadel (The Heart of Zîsûvas’baal): The absolute center of the city, an obsidian monolith, towering over the rest of the necropolis like a tombstone to a world that has long since died. This is where the greatest Sith Lords, Warlords, and Dark Side champions of the Kainate are entombed in blackstone sarcophagi, their bodies preserved through dark alchemy. It is also where the ruling Sith of Zîsûvas’baal conduct their rituals and administrate the city’s unholy purpose.
- The Eternal Throne: A council chamber carved into the heart of the citadel, where Sith overseers, embalmers, and warlords dictate the governance of Zîsûvas’baal.
- The Hall of the Deathless: A shrine dedicated to Sith Lords of unparalleled power, their corpses kept in elaborate coffins of aurodium and obsidian. These figures are bound through Sith sorcery, capable of whispering visions to those worthy.
- The Shikkari Reliquary: The deepest sanctum of the necropolis, containing dark artifacts, cursed holocrons, and forbidden relics too dangerous to be left in the hands of living Sith.
- The Tomb-Spire (The Tower of the Condemned): A twisted, spiraling monument of darkness, surrounded by endless rows of shallow graves where traitors, heretics, and failed Sith are buried alive. The interior of the spire is an execution ground, where prisoners are tortured before being cast into its bottomless depths.
- The Black Pit: A chasm at the tower’s core where condemned Sith are flung into the abyss, never to be seen again. Some say their screams linger, even decades later.
- The Chamber of Unworthy Blood: A vast, dimly lit sacrificial chamber, where those who fail their Sith masters are bled dry, their essence siphoned into dark rituals.
- The Howling Galleries: Torture halls where echoes of suffering never cease, designed to break the spirit of those doomed to eternal confinement within the Spire.
- The Eternal Archive (The Vault of Forbidden Knowledge): A massive, inverted pyramid of blackstone, buried beneath the ice and rock of Zîsûvas’baal. Within it, the most forbidden Sith knowledge is kept, rituals of planetary devastation, curses that unravel the mind, and the schematics for weapons capable of consuming entire star systems.
- The Void Index: A library of forbidden texts and lost holocrons, maintained by blind Umbaran scholars, who have burned out their own eyes to prevent the temptation of the knowledge they protect.
- The Black Vaults: Locked chambers of relics too dangerous to be used, guarded by undead sentinels and layered in Sith wards.
- The Oracle of the Dead: A secret chamber where Sith sorcerers commune with ancient Sith spirits, drawing upon their knowledge at great risk to their sanity.
- The Flesh Vats (The Wellspring of Horror): Deep beneath the necropolis, hidden within subterranean catacombs, are the Flesh Vats, twisted, grotesque laboratories where broken soldiers, failed Sith, and prisoners are repurposed into Sithspawn, experimental warriors, or raw biological material for necromantic rituals.
- The Maw of Rebirth: The central alchemical pit, where bodies are broken down into malleable biological essence to be reshaped into Sithspawn.
- The Alchemical Forges: Workshops where dark biologists experiment with genetics, producing monstrosities for war.
- The Cradle of the Hollowed: A twisted birthing chamber where mutated offspring and malformed Sith warriors are born through unnatural processes.
- The Shadowed Glade (The Forest of the Lost): A cursed forest beyond the city walls where initiates of the Deathless Host undergo their final trial, surviving against Sithspawn, spectral guardians, and the restless dead. Failure means eternal servitude in the glade's depths.
- The Sanguine Clearing: A training ground soaked in centuries of blood, where Veilwardens battle against the Sithspawn of the Glade in ritual combat.
- The Whispering Roots: A subterranean labyrinth beneath the trees, where something ancient, monstrous, and unseen waits to claim those who stray too far.
- The Cold Sepulcher: A burial site where Sith assassins of the past were entombed. Their spirits linger, testing those who enter their domain.
- The Charnel Rift: A massive canyon of slaughter, where alchemical horrors and Sithspawn roam freely, culling the unworthy.
- The Hollow Procession: A ritual ground where entire undead legions are summoned, bound together by Bloodbinders and Fleshweavers.
Maximum
- The Necropolis Guard: Elite undead sentinels, including Wraithbound specters, Iron Phantoms, and Ossuary Wardens, who patrol the tombs and corridors.
- Deathless Host: An elite order of undying warriors bound through Sith alchemy and necromantic rites, serving as the eternal guardians of Zîsûvas’baal. Even in death, they stand watch, rising again and again to defend the necropolis from any who dare trespass.
- Darkside Warding Runes: The entire city is layered with ancient Sith wards, disrupting enemy infiltration and obscuring its exact location from unwanted eyes.
- The Deathveil Cloak: A necrotic energy field that disorients light-sided intruders, causing them to weaken, hallucinate, or collapse before reaching the inner sanctum.
- A Living Graveyard: The undead horrors beneath Zîsûvas’baal’s foundations are bound to rise in defense should the city ever come under siege.
- Immortal Legion Reserves: Beneath Zîsûvas’baal lies a vast underground fortress, seamlessly integrated into the Kainate’s planetary bunker network, housing elite reserves of the Immortal Legions in perpetual readiness. Designed for rapid deployment and last-stand warfare, these hidden forces can strike from below, ensuring any enemy assault is met with overwhelming retaliation. Even if the surface city falls, the war will rage on beneath, with entire divisions prepared to rise from the depths and annihilate the invaders.
Zîsûvas’baal was forged upon the ruins of a thousand dead empires. When the Kainate reclaimed Dromund Kaas, the continent of Chwûq lay in absolute ruin, its once-thriving cities were ash, its fertile lands frozen beneath the remains of a manufactured ice age. Yet, where others saw devastation, the Sovereign of Dromund Kaas saw opportunity. Under Darth Prazutis’ command, the Kainate did not seek to rebuild Chwûq, but instead, embraced its ruin. He would make it a monument to death itself, a place where the fallen would never truly rest, where the cycle of war, power, and sacrifice would continue unbroken. Zîsûvas'baal would be no mere city, it would be a necropolis-fortress, a sanctum for Sith who had transcended mortality, and a crucible where only the most devoted could prove themselves worthy. Darth Prazutis personally orchestrated its design, overseeing its foundation from the ruined corpses of past civilizations. His architects did not carve new roads or restore old cities; instead, they sank the bones of fallen warlords into the stone, their bodies forming the first bricks of its black walls. The streets were paved with scorched ruins, lined with statues of warriors who had been sealed in carbonite or bound within alchemical sarcophagi, frozen in their moment of death to serve as eternal sentinels.
The Necropolis Citadel was raised at its beating heart, an impenetrable fortress-mausoleum, where the greatest Sith Lords, Kainite Warlords, and Champions of the Dark Side would be entombed. Here, the Shikkari Embalmers worked their rituals of preservation, binding the dead into elaborate sarcophagi laced with Sith runes and sorcerous inscriptions, ensuring that even in death, they remained tethered to the mortal realm, while the Sepulchral Necromancia worked their magicks pushing the boundaries of necromancy, along with devout members of the Seekers of Knowledge. Beneath the fortress, miles of death-choked catacombs snaked through the frozen bedrock, housing an unbroken chain of tombs, shrines, and laboratories where forbidden Sith knowledge lay dormant. The continent was reforged as a place of death, remembrance, and eternal vigilance, a monument to Sith power where the greatest warriors would be interred, the most dangerous knowledge hidden, and the most devoted followers tested. The city of Zîsûvas’baal became its beating heart, a fortress memorial where the living and the dead marched as one.
The landscape remained a harsh, frozen place of nightmares filled with horrific sithspawn monsters, roaming ghosts, and terrible shadows. It remains one of the most dangerous locations on the planet, a major center of power for the Seekers of Knowledge and the other esoteric elements of the Kainate. To those who have heard of this place know it is a mysterious place of shadow. It is whispered that no one truly leaves Zîsûvas’baal. Those who enter either become part of its legacy or are swallowed by its shadows forever.
