Once Awake

[jadus]

He had read the signs, seen the inevitable diminution. The fall of Adas had opened the galaxy to the sith, and yet his advisors already tore them apart. Could he rule such a people? Perhaps. But it would break him to try, and he would not permit this. Remaining in the shadows too would be pointless. Instead, he would travel to a most secluded vault, hidden on a planet deep within the Stygian Caldera, the dense and treacherous nebula that protected their world.

He left final gifts to his most faithful, and then sealed himself in, alone. His body joined with the half-living alchemy within. Cold, stinging fumes hissed into his lungs, and every breath came slower. His heart beat twenty times in a minute.

Twelve.
Two.

None.

His mind persisted. It was almost free of his body, almost what it should be, but the cold still touched it as well, slowing his thoughts to the scale of decades. The galaxy seemed to roiled with life and pain and fear, shimmering with ceaseless change. At first, it was overwhelming.

But there were patterns. He could not yet describe their form nor predict their course. They were intriguing. And he had so much time to study them.

He was oblivious to the smaller, briefer things around him. He stared unblinking through twenty-four thousand years. His presence in the Force seemed to almost have melded with the land itself, his presence had so thoroughly tainted it over the centuries. But he remained at its center, deathly still yet somehow living.

No one had found him since his servants had departed, and so undisturbed his meditation could persist for eons more.

The vault was set deep into stable, solid bedrock. The water that had once dug these caverns ran dry millennia ago. Though creatures that could stand the Dark made their home here, they avoided the passage that led to him. He had been aware of them much as he had felt the rest of the galaxy: in aggregate, a rustling of many limbs and lives in the darkness.

In this myriad of years, the sith were of little interest to him. The invaders driven from Korriban still shaped the galaxy, and he watched the darkness they wove into steel. Then suddenly, they were gone. Wars guttered in their absence, arcing from the galaxy's core to the rim. A world that had split in two spread a poisonous Light that pained him to witness, but it cast more shadows in its wake. A wave of minds crawled from the core.

In the next myriad, something far distant caught his attention, beyond the galaxy's edge. The loss of something he had not consciously seen before its end. He dimly saw something in its echo, but the nothingness was swallowed up by the roiling of the worlds around him: the core fractured, a new palace of misery to the east, while to the west, twisting skeins of gravity kept the worlds beyond enmeshed in their own constructs of conflict and life. The piercing Light retreated, pushed outward, and broke itself again. The jagged edges left in its wake sprang up around him, bleeding the Sith until they mirrored the light. He felt no grief, only growing disinterest in their fate. The more he meditated, the more the patterns of the Force itself began to make sense.

In this millennium, a sudden crescendo. A war pushed outward from the worlds around him like a wave, then retreated. All around him, death. And then, so soon as to be almost instant, absence. A hole where a planet had once been, an echoing void. He watched the remains, but there were few stirrings in the darkness to explain it. An event in passing. But it slowed his thoughts with consideration. There was a Dark that left it, singular, splitting, settling, leeching. It was of interest, but there was something he had seen in the nothingness it left behind. He would need more time to think on it.

In these centuries, the growing Dark reached hidden tendrils across the galaxy. The formless Light rose in brittle spires, rotted through, and shattered. The Dark around it fed mindlessly on it, but there was no will to shape it further. He was now so vast and uncaring, but even he could reach out with slow sieving grasp and catch those echoes, draw them out into filaments of pure, glimmering fire. In its shimmer, he saw the forms of great and distant things.

Another world disappeared, and this time he stared directly into its un-light, heard the chord it sang for only the briefest moment. In this flash he saw again, and it was as he had desired.

In these years, the shock of seeing had been too much to sustain. He retreated back into cold, into something forgotten.

And in these lengthening days, he grew to dim awareness: something crawled along his surfaces.

He did not see the smooth black curves of his vault, or hear the voices it stole to whisper with. It had done this before, and each time it brought conflict and ruin to the bare rock above, the caves it nested in, the door it had refused to open.

Comments

[tagential]

This mission was different. In fact, it was so far outside of Edwon's area of expertise that he suspected they wanted him to fail. At the very least, they weren't expecting him to succeed, and they wouldn't exactly be broken up about it if he died in the attempt. It was win-win, for everyone except Edwon.

Edwon had never been one to back down from a challenge, though. He'd made it this far, fought his way through this structure, and now he sat outside the door, old and heavy, impossible to move, and he focused his mind on it. The Force was heavy here, suffocating, which made it difficult to see clearly. He wasn't Sith. He wasn't trained for this. He felt like the door was watching him back, burrowing into his mind, peeling him open. He wasn't easily scared, but this?

This more than terrified him.

But unlike Sith, who hid behind brute strength and used others to do their dirty work, he wasn't one to run because of a little fear. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck, but the danger was reminding him that right now, he was alive. He suspected he might not be for much longer. There was no point in worrying about that. He stood up, hand pressing against the door, feeling it, trying to sense its mechanisms. Someone had closed it once, which meant it could be opened again.

He wasn't sure how long he'd stood there when he heard a loud creaking sound. He was losing track of time, of his senses, and he couldn't even remember doing anything that might have caused it to move... But the door was opening.

And here he'd been wondering if he should just resort to explosives.

[jadus]

Time had slowed to a crawl. He drew deeper into himself, into his body as well.

His heart begin to beat again, and it was thunderously loud to his deprived ears. Unwanted. Repulsive. But it would not stop.

His mind turned to an approaching creature, grasping, diffuse, re-learning focus, settling around it like a haze. What had woken him? What was it? He willed it closer, and the vault responded. Two doors began to slide open: The outer vault door, and at the other end of a pitch black hallway, the door to his chamber. The red glow of a force field behind it was the only light source, placing one last barrier between the invading mind and his body.

He hung in the midst of the machine, its leechlike conduits twitching slightly as they pulsed.

[tagential]

Edwon didn't immediately move. He couldn't tell how long he stood frozen, but his legs wouldn't move, refused to take even a small step forward. He didn't want to go through that door. It felt like standing at the edge of a pressurized chamber, or maybe like trying to step out of a vacuum. It felt like a bad idea.

But he had to.

What was that about not letting fear stop him? Edwon took a slow breath, and slowly, carefully, he stepped past that threshhold. It didn't get any easier, but he'd always been far more stubborn than was good for him. He took pride in that. Five steps, fifty, and he reached the second door, stopping so close to the force field that it felt like it sparked off his skin.

He sensed something beyond it. It didn't feel natural, but at the same time, he was fairly sure it was a person, or some sort of powerful creature. Whatever it was, he hoped the machine was there to keep it trapped, although it might as well be a part of it. He couldn't tell.

He inclined his head.

"Hello."

[jadus]

Sensation returned, and with each heartbeat, pain. The return to his body, should he ever choose it, was meant to be slower. More controlled. The sound of his heart and sharp creaking of weakly spasming muscles was soon joined by the hiss of life support systems carefully feeding new blood into his veins, laced with a cocktail to protect his body from the too-soon return of life. He felt it pulse, from his core to the strands of flesh that fed the polished carapace of his skull, and the living weave of his robes. The body that had been the proof of his mastery. It now felt so insufficient.

He wavered, mind flickering as he heard sound, silence, sound returned, but still he had it. He had found the thing, the mind so close. It had sought him. Perhaps in error.

He reached out, the deliberate and calculated lines of his body still serving their purpose: a lens to focus his mind. He would learn this creature. This unknown thing. This first in so many centuries to reach him.

He would reach into its thoughts and understand. This was his greeting.

[tagential]

No answer. Edwon wasn't sure if he'd expected one. With as old as this vault was, the creature might not understand basic, if it was even capable of language at all. He'd have to use other methods to gather the information needed to complete this mission.

His attention was still mostly on the creature, but he walked along the edge of the force field, stopping where it reached the wall. There was no gap. There was no visible control panel, or any way for him to shut it down. He'd need more specialized equipment to break through it, which would be too heavy for one person to carry. But he couldn't bring anyone else down here, not without risking them going mad.

Maybe he could blast through the wall instead.

Those thoughts distracted him just enough that when something seemed to shift, it startled him, and he jumped back, reaching for his blaster. Then he felt it. His blaster fell as he gripped his head, pain shooting through it, sharp enough that for a second he forgot to breathe. The Force was drowning him. He gripped the wall, but didn't fall, too stubborn to even let his legs buckle. He shouldn't have come here, but there was no going back now.

So he was really going to die here?

[jadus]

It resisted, but feebly so. His own senses were overwhelmed by disuse, but he could see the world as it saw, feel its pain, and with that, an understanding grew of what it was. One who moved in stealth. Who found and watched and twisted and killed.

But his body demanded his submission. He was losing his grip on its mind, on life, his heart growing louder and--

The first instinctive breath sent another spasm through him, pinned in place by the machine. He could feel it moving with his heart, pumping into him, a sensation viscerally abhorrent to him, but he could not allow it to stop. Its conduits had once filled him with the preservatives that set him in his journey across time. They now ensured he could live long enough in these waking moments, to return to that greater expanse if he saw fit.

For the galaxy had not felt ready. He struggled to hold onto the last shivvering moment of pan-galactic sight, try to think within the bounds of himself and a single point in time. There had been a sudden flickering of death so soon before it, of balance shifting. A glimpse of the things greater. He had only just begun considering its meaning before he had woke.

He breathed again as the shaking slowly began to subside. He reached out again. Slow. Careful. Questioning. Why was it here?

[tagential]

For a moment the pressure eased, just slightly, and Edwon gasped for air, relieved to find he could breathe again. He straightened up, but kept a hand on the wall, just in case he'd need it for balance again. He didn't trust this thing, and eplosives was sounding more tempting by the second.

"Hello--" He tried again, and then it was back. He nearly screamed. It felt like his mind was on fire. His legs were shaking, and if he didn't fall yet, he doubted it would last. It had to be the creature doing this to him. It had to be doing this on purpose.

Punishment for disturbing it?

"If you want me to leave you alone, you should try using your words."

He had to force the words out through gritted teeth, but he did it. Not that there was a point, if it didn't understand.

[jadus]

He breathed, and then spoke. "Why?" His voice was soft, throat dry, but he could still be heard. A thought tugged at him, and he turned back to considering the last moments of his meditation. There had been more, decades that had passed as he awoke...

Death. "Worlds are consumed." But he could feel no void left in its place. This was not the consumption of a world. No grand ritual. It had burned like war, like eradication. "And by strength of arms alone." He had felt this many times before. His people had only just begun to reach beyond the world of their birth when he had left them, each new star a wonder to them. A handful among uncounted billions that he had never seen, knew only as shivering specks in the black.

[tagential]

It took a second for Edwon to pick up on those sounds. He wanted to just collapse. No, he wanted to run away, and he never ran away. Not that he'd be able to, so it didn't matter.

But... Those sounds sounded deliberate.

Was it speaking?

"I guess it would have been too much to ask to expect you to speak basic."

[jadus]

The creature was uncomprehending. It did not see him as he saw it. He sought to enmesh himself more deeply, more completely, to numb it to the weight of him and speak his questions into it. He saw war within it. Vast, terrible, burning like embers through dry roots, waiting to erupt anew.

This war would plant terror in the hearts of all beings. "Have Sith done this?" Sith remembered him enough to seek him out, but he had felt nothing of his works, not here before him, nor in the galaxy beyond. The deaths had not been for higher purpose.

"Or do you come because their might has been challenged?" It was simple destruction, the long shadow cast by death over days and months. But those roots that reached into the galaxy, out from that single, many-headed thing.

[tagential]

The pressure was starting to become a little bit more bearable, like he was being given the chance to adjust. He wasn't sure if it was enough of a concession from this creature for him to waste any gratitude on it. It didn't seem friendly, it just wanted something from him, and it wasn't to break him completely. Yet.

He straightened up, then turned to lean against the wall. He was no longer facing the creature, but that didn't change where his attention was focused. "The Sith always want more power."

He understood it now. He rubbed at his temples, and tried his best to focus. Considering how old this thing was, he was surprised it knew about the Sith. "Did you mean the species, or the Force users?" he asked, after a short pause. "It's the Force users who wanted me to investigate."

[jadus]

He did not understand the distinction. All sith could work the Force to their will. Had they lost that power? Had they been extinguished in their entirety? Were they the wretched things that he felt in the stars around him? He had cared so little for them that he had not sought to consider their fate in recent millennia as he had watched the galaxy. "They do not know my works. They know nothing but to mirror the Light. I am not what they desire. Why do they seek me?"

He wished to return to hibernation. The galaxy was still not as he wished it, and he had learned so much as he stared through the centuries. He had felt so close to greater revelation. Only a few centuries more, and he would understand.

But the vault had been found and breached. If he returned to meditation now, he would be awakened again before he was complete. And he could not forget the things he had seen, beyond the void. He needed to prepare himself before he faced that again. Before the next world was consumed. He would not have long to wait.

...No, he would not. Why did he believe that?

[tagential]

"They seek you because they don't know you," Edwon said. He'd been given almost no information before this mission, and he'd suspected that for once it was because they just didn't know, and not because he didn't deserve to be told. "All they know is that there's power here."

Rest sounded good to Edwon, too, but that was a luxury reserved for other people. He exhaled slowly, and wondered if injecting himself with an adrenal would help. If he had less of a headache, he'd at least be able to think more clearly, which would make these negotiations go a lot easier. Though the creature - person, he supposed, it had proven itself to deserve that title if it wanted it - likely wouldn't be cooperative either way.

"Whatever you're doing to me, would you mind stopping it?"

[jadus]

"Their desires do not hold me."

He vanished, the machine's tendrils hanging limply from their sockets. The pressure of his mind disappeared.

Then he returned, standing before the creature, the forcefield still flickering red behind him, undisturbed.

"But I am awakened", he spoke, and his words had no meaning to the other. "I will see this time, walk amongst its people. Find the truth of these new Sith. But I will leave when I see fit."

[tagential]

The lack of pressure was so sudden that it was jarring. He'd been doing his best to resist for so long that having nothing there made his mind stumble, made him disoriented for just long enough that he didn't notice the strange person disappearing into thin air.

And then it was in front of him. Fear spiked inside him again, and Edwon instinctively activated his stealth generator, forcing himself to move. His blaster was still on the floor. He doubted it would help, so he didn't try to make a grab for it, just tried to position himself behind the creature instead.

He didn't understand anymore. He had to assume that whatever it was saying, it was a threat.

[jadus]

It moved now in stealth, but the eyes beneath his smooth skin were irrelevant. Just as it saw without eyes, so did he. And there would be others in the stars beyond who saw to the heart of a creature. Once he left this land, he would be forced to mask his presence. He would become ever smaller, more myopic. But it was necessary.

Without another word, he began to walk towards the exit, a heavy, sealed container sliding quietly out of a wall niche to hover behind them. Deeper within the vault, its systems were ordered to die. It would never function again.

[tagential]

That was... unexpected. It was leaving, ignoring him completely instead of killing him. Maybe he wasn't even worth the effort.

It should be a relief, except he was going to have to follow after it. Edwon picked up his blaster and strapped it back to his belt, and then deactivated his stealth generator again. It was a peace offering, though he doubted it believed his intentions were really peaceful. It was a small concession, at any rate, and he hoped it was enough to help him survive a little longer.

He ran to catch up, making no effort to stay quiet, while normally he'd barely make a sound, before falling into step beside it. "Do you have a name?"

[jadus]

He did not stop, nor look back at the creature. He exited the vault, the ground beneath his feet transitioning from the polished crystalline material of his creation, onto the fine-grained stone of the cave beyond. The cave had not changed through all the years of his hibernation--too dry to be shaped by water, too stable to crumble.

The only thing that had changed were the bodies. Desiccated and stretched taut, the mummified forms of creatures he had never seen before were scattered throughout the cave. Some were intact, locked in combat with their doomed compatriots, others were torn to pieces by those that followed.

Amongst them was a body he recognized, red skin tanned almost to black by the mummification, still kneeling in supplication. One of his faithful, who had refused to leave. He paused there, for a moment. Knelt to touch the body, searching for the echoes of its spirit. "You were flawed and decayed," he pronounced. "But you honored that gift I gave to you."

[tagential]

No answer... He wasn't sure if he'd expected one.

Leaving the vault meant they were at risk of being attacked. There were still creatures roaming these caves, though Edwon had killed a lot of them on his way inside. Though if you were as powerful as this person was, it probably wasn't a concern at all. He only had to watch his own back.

He stopped, didn't say anything when it investigated the mummified Sith, just kept his attention on the caves around them. He could hear movement in the distance, sense life somewhere in the maze that made up these caves, but nothing close enough to be a threat, not yet.

"I can't understand you any longer," he said, a little after it spoke. And most likely, that's what had caused the painful pressure... It had forced him to understand somehow. He really should have figured that out sooner. Now he wasn't sure if it understood him at all, either. He hesitated.

He had no choice.

"I can tolerate it," he said, reluctantly. He tapped his forehead, hoping it would understand the gesture. "And I'll get you a dictionary once we're out of here."

[jadus]

He listened to the corpse for some time, until it had no more to tell him. He stood, turning to the living. The being was watchful, testing the strands of life that crawled through the cave.

And it held resignation and invitation. He reached out, touching its face. Gentle. Fingers still cold from so long unused.

A more careful sliding into its mind this time. Control at this minuscule range was slowly returning to him.

"I will leave this world. But these new sith will not benefit from my instruction. You know this."

[tagential]

Edwon flinched when it moved towards him, but then forced himself to hold still. If it wanted to kill him, it would have already. The touch was uncomfortable, cold, and its presence was still suffocating, but at least it wasn't painful now. That was an improvement.

"I suspected as much," he said. "But they'll still insist on meeting you. My job was just to gather as much information as I could, though."

He was never given any instruction to bring what he found back to Dormund Kaas. Why would they, when they'd expected him to fail, when these caves were supposed to induce madness in anyone who walked here. But that gave him a loophole, which meant he didn't have to fight this thing if it didn't want to come with him. He could just let it go.

If he thought it was safe.

"I have a ship here. I can offer you a ride off the planet."

[jadus]

It learned quickly. His hand slid away from its skin, as he turned to continue out of the cave. "This world has served its purpose. I will go. But I will not satisfy their desires."

Into the weak sunlight he went, surveying the barren land around the cave. It was uneven, treacherous, and dotted with abandoned and crashed ships. Offerings, of a sort. Though most had been unaware of this when they held themselves out to his sleeping mind.

[tagential]

Edwon followed, struggling a bit to keep up with its longer strides, but he wasn't about to complain. And he wasn't about to argue, either - if it didn't want to satisfy any desires, that was the Sith's problem, not his.

It was a relief to be out of the caves. It wasn't any safer outside, not when he'd brought the danger out with him, but it felt a little easier to breathe. "Do you have a name?" he asked. "Or a title I can call you."

[jadus]

"I am Jadus. The titles I held are meaningless." First sorcerer of Adas, life-shaper, priest of terror and music and concealed truth. Words without consequence, now.

Something hissed at the mouth of the cave, and he turned it away with a gesture. "I will remain unknown to these sith. They fell with Adas, and have fallen still further. I await their end, and that of the light they cling to like a hated companion."

[tagential]

"I'm Cipher Nine." Edwon made a small bow. Unlike Jadus, his name held no meaning any longer, and he only had his designation. At least in theory.

He felt the creature turn away, and it worried him as much as it impressed him. He was too exhausted to want a fight, though, so for now he allowed himself to feel relieved, for a very brief second. He had other things to worry about. "Even the Sith are going to notice what happened." They were monitoring the planet. Besides, Edwon would report back, as soon as he had a chance. "And not all of them are completely hopeless."

He generally thought they were, but his job required him to lie.