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

[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.

[jadus]

"They will sense a change. They will not sense my presence." He walked in the direction he knew led to Cipher Nine's ship.

"And they will not know my location, for you are skilled in such things." The command was implicit, but it was there. "And you have no great desire to obey them." He had seen that much in the being's mind.

[tagential]

"They'll check the vault." They might not. They'd been too cowardly to come here themselves, so it was more likely that they'd send someone else to verify that the vault was sealed. Someone who might not make it that far, because this place was still dangerous, even without a being inside the vault driving people mad.

He knew what Jadus wanted, but while it was true that he wasn't all that inclined to obey the Sith, he also didn't want to take commands from this ancient creature. He was insubordinate by nature, but he liked his job, and Jadus might not survive very long. Jadus was powerful, but there were powerful Sith as well. He had no real way to gauge his comparative strength.

"I'll see what I can do."

[jadus]

"They saw signs of my presence, and they did nothing. Not even to destroy me, as they did to so many others." There had been a constellation of unchanging things that amassed around him during his meditation. In recent centuries, so many had suddenly vanished.

"Perhaps the thing you bow to believes nothing can stop it now. It has consumed so much. Does it still hunger?"

[tagential]

"But they can't just ignore you now." They could, especially if Jadus wanted to stay hidden... Which, if he really was that powerful, was the ideal outcome of this. They didn't want to turn this man into an enemy if he could destroy them all.

Maybe it would be better to let him hide, to watch him and make sure he wasn't planning anything too destructive, and to gather information to use against him if he did. Maybe reporting back would be a mistake. It wouldn't be the first time he went against orders. Even if Jadus was starting to annoy him now.

"I'm not one for bowing." The Sith were. "And I'm not sure what plans the Emperor has currently. Only a handful of people would be able to answer that."

[jadus]

It knew those words were false, so he saw no reason to respond to them.

"This Emperor has built its power on the ending of worlds. But it has not seen as I have. Should it gorge itself, it will be broken." Cipher Nine's ship was now in sight. A slighter thing than the Rakatan ships they had commandeered, and he sensed no attunement to the Force within it. A disappointment, but not unexpected.

[tagential]

"Everything can be broken." It didn't have much to do with him, except for the fact that technically, he worked for the Emperor. But these grand scheme plots were not for him. They never impressed. And Jadus wasn't proving himself much different from the rest.

His ship opened as he approached, and he led the way up the ramp. "I'll find a room for you to use. R2-R8 will get it ready for you, and if there's anything you need, it will get it for you if possible."

[jadus]

"Even life." It did not understand, but neither did he, not yet.

"There is a planet I wish to see," he entered the ship, lightly touching a wall to feel the contours of its halls. "To view the shape of your Emperor's designs upon the universe."

[tagential]

"Especially life."

His first priority should be to report back, and to bring Jadus to Dromund Kaas, but he was leaning more towards tricking this being into cooperating. He didn't want to piss Jadus off just yet. A detour wouldn't hurt, especially if he could learn more in the process. "Give me the coordinates, then."

[jadus]

"I will require a map, or your mind." And it was clear which the creature would prefer, though the choice was a fiction. He already required a foothold in its mind to understand it.

But he still had little knowledge of it, and there were aspects of it that were intriguing. "What are you?"

[tagential]

"Follow me, then," Edwon said. He'd lead Jadus to the cockpit, where he could easily pull up a holographic map of the galaxy for him. It might be quicker to let him use his mind, but... No, he had enough of his presence in there already, and he was trying not to think about it. He really needed to get him some language lessons.

The question was a little surprising, though not because Jadus didn't recognize his species. He just hadn't seemed interested. "Miraluka," he said. "We're not that common, especially in this part of the galaxy. You'll see more humans."

[jadus]

There were unfamiliar devices here. He could pull their meaning from the mind of Cipher Nine, but he would instead observe their function for now, as he would observe the Miraluka himself.

"These creatures are unknown to me." And, for the moment, not a subject of interest. "You are attuned, yet only to sense the world, not work your will upon it. Is this common?"

[tagential]

"For Miraluka. We're all Force sensitive, though not necessarily especially strong beyond being able to see. Most of the people who receive training are human or sith." A pause. "The Jedi do things differently, or at least they claim that they do. But they have other strict requirements."

Some people, he knew, were bitter about that. He just didn't care. Racism was a fact of life, and there were ways to work around it. And he'd never been interested in receiving any sort of training.

As he talked, he pulled up the map, quickly demonstrating how to use it by moving it around, highlighting different parts of the galaxy. The map was especially designed to allow him to use it, even without eyes, and he worked it intuitively. For now he was just waiting for instructions, or at least a reaction from Jadus as he showed him different planets he might be interested in.

[jadus]

"And you were not trained. Do you wish that for yourself?" He watched the map spring to life, viewing the whirl of the galaxy from an perspective he had never before witnessed.

"I do not know of them." Perhaps the name referred to something he had seen, or perhaps it had escaped his notice in the roiling mass of life. Regardless, he rejected the worlds Cipher Nine showed to him. Perhaps he would see them one day, but they did not interest him now. He reached instead for the controls, simply resting fingertips upon them for a long moment as he considered.

[tagential]

"And become a Sith? I'll pass." He didn't bother hiding the contempt in his voice. "I prefer the job I have."

He pulled back, letting Jadus take over control of the map. He wouldn't be able to lock onto a destination, only Edwon could do that, but he could explore as much as he wanted. The galaxy must have changed a lot in the time he'd been sealed away.

"The Jedi are in opposition to the Sith," he said. Judging by his tone, he wasn't very fond of them either. "They use the light side of the Force, instead of the dark side. They claim to have more of a moral code, although I haven't seen much proof of it personally. They don't kill each other as often as the Sith do."

[jadus]

He did not pursue the question further, instead turning his attention to the map. With careful movements, he adjusted it until the view reoriented to the ship's present position: the planet from which he had seen so much. He let the map spin, thinking further. Where was it?

"There are no sides, only aspects. What possesses them to think this? Where did the come from?"

[tagential]

"If you're looking for a history lesson on the development of Sith and Jedi, I can pull up a holo," Edwon said. He shrugged lightly, because while he did know some of it - as much of it as was available to regular people - he'd never been too interested. In the end, it was politics. "But if you present your enemy as your complete opposite, it's easier to justify attacking them. Your way is the right way, and theirs is a threat."

And the Jedi and Sith did love fighting, and they particularly loved dragging everyone else into their war. He doubted it would ever change. If the Sith or the Jedi disappeared, someone else would replace them, and conflict would continue.

Of course, saying all this was tantamount to treason, according to some, but Edwon had never kept his opinions as secret as he should. And he suspected that all of this was what Jadus wanted to hear, and right now he was the more immediate threat to be dealt with. It was easier to stay on his good side, if he had one.

On the other hand, just "staying on someone's good side" was a boring way to live. "You don't actually seem that much different from them. Your arrogance is the same."

[jadus]

"I have seen all histories that followed my entombment, but their names are unknown to me." The description given was enough to learn what he needed. "I know now what the Jedi are. The paralyzing, brittle light. It shatters too easily, as do these sith arrayed against it."

A roiling of defiance and contrary thought. "Do not mistake the surface for the depths." He had rejected the call of his followers to name him Sith'ari in the wake of Adas' fall. There was no place for him in this time, either. "I am a relic of their legends. An object to be coveted and enslaved. This I know--and it is why I will not extend trust you."

[tagential]

"That's a fairly accurate assessment," Edwon agreed. Though now he wondered how much Jadus did know of the galaxy's history, how much he'd really seen, down in that vault. He'd have to ask him more about that later.

For now he was exhausted, and no matter what Jadus said, his arrogance continued to remind him too much of the Sith he was familiar with. That was never going to hold his interest for long. He walked over to one of the chairs in the cockpit and dropped into it, resting his arms behind his head. "If I wanted your trust, I wouldn't be insulting you. I won't be stabbing you in the back unless you give me reason to, but I know we're not on the same side."

[jadus]

"Openness is not how one seeks to gain trust?" Perhaps Miraluka could not sense intent as Sith could. Or perhaps customs were simply different here. In either case, the defiance was not his concern.

He had continued scanning the map as he spoke, moving closer to the planet that interested him. What he found did not surprise him. "There." He pointed to an empty point on the map, far off the safe passages the ship knew. "The planet is there."