No matter where you go, I will find you

[jadus]

He had seen the future, and its the inevitable diminution of the Sith. Could he change such a future? 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 had once protected the Sith Empire.

He left final gifts to his most faithful, and then sealed himself in, alone. His armor joined with the machines within. Cold, stinging fumes hissed into his mask, 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 three and a half 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.

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 was 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.

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

Comments

[sitharikin]

Unfortunately, what one wills and what the Force wills - those are two entirely different, often conflicting, things. Anakin himself had no desire to run into a living Sith of any kind ever again. Or even a ghost of one. Holocrons and artifacts could be useful a Sith still clinging to life? Anakin could do without ever having that happen again.

But that didn't mean he didn't still go looking for things. At least, in a way - he knew there were items and knowledge hidden and left behind, and he didn't believe knowledge should be lost. Used was another matter, but lost? Never. Perhaps he was making amends, in a fashion, of the destruction of the Jedi archives. Of course, his methods were unorthodox.

Fly to a system. Turn off the guidance. Allow his instincts to lead, while he meditated. Allowed the Force to guide.

Which is how he found his boots on the ground outside some Dark-twisted-corrupted mess that had probably once been a city, hidden within the Old Sith Empire. Anakin picked his way slowly, keeping a light but well spread out touch around him. Not that thought he'd need it - predators tended to avoid him, even ones driven mad by exposure to the Dark side. But he still carried a lightsaber. A handful of knives. A blaster. Lockpicks. Versatility had suited him over the years.

[jadus]

The sith collapsed around him, though he did not care to record if they were splintered from within, or overrun. The Light expanded from the core, yet wars still spread guttering fires across the galaxy.

In the next millennium, the Light splintered. Rotted through with Dark. Turned against itself. Spread through the systems surrounding him, as blind to his presence as he was to the individual lives that swirled through the Force.

In the next five hundred years, the two forces grappled, questing tendrils flickering forward and dying out, over and over again. Then a surge of Light, and again it shattered in a burst of death and decay, echoing across the galaxy.

He was now so vast and uncaring, reaching 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. He pondered this for centuries.

Then a sudden ending--a briefest flicker of Ziost's fate, remade. 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 seared him to do so.

In the next thousand years, his mind slowly recovered. The Dark around him had collapsed, back into the boiling chaos of impure life. And yet he could now see it all more clearly, an intuition for them was growing.

The Light grew brittle spries once more, and he watched for its inevitable shattering. For the Dark around it to feed mindlessly as before. He watched carefully, preparing to see again.

And then something touched his mind, and all became still. Frozen. Time had slowed to a crawl. He recoiled, drawing into himself. Into his body as well.

Deep within his vault, he was waking up.

[sitharikin]

Anakin - despite his size - had a deceptively light step. He couldn't be silent in his heavy boots but picking it out of the normal sounds of vegetation growing and moving and wildlife moving about would be very difficult. You certainly wouldn't place someone of his size with them and he'd learned to step mostly on the front of his foot and keep his heel up slightly to further hide himself from others. Of course, it was easier when he was in a place where the wildlife didn't go silent when he got too close.

And the Dark in this place was sticky and slick all at once, of course, it sang its sweet song, of power and promise (like the sweet scent of fruit rot, intoxicating and so pungent, his mouth almost watered). It was so solid Anakin felt he could almost stick his finger into it, leave a hole that would slowly fill like the gelled juice sometimes given to children or the very old for ease of eating. Leave fingerprints in the shape of starburst scars. He knows he could. They might even be permanent. He knows he could also pick up something, anything, and meditate with it, bleed the Dark out and set it to grow. He'd have to do a lot of it to give the Light a chance to grow here - but given where this place? Most likely something was buried here.

Anakin took a breath, mouth open smelling and tasting while he focused, then turned slowly in a circle, spinning out his own presence, flowing from him like water to investigate every nook and peaky, a barely-there covering, the softest breath of breeze on the frost and ice. And the planet answered he could feel it, like a knot in the wood of a tree. Solid and real and yet not solid, more amorphous, like an aquatic egg. A center alive and there, a gel over it, protecting it and yet if lifted into the air it would die. Would the Light do that to whatever this was? Because he knew, for all he thought 'egg' - this was nothing new.

No, it was ancient and well-entrenched. He thought of water, so cold, the temperature needed to freeze more than three times surpassed but under so much pressure it couldn't. That feeling of thick oil and syrup, and yet so very alive-

Was it a 'who' and not a 'what'? He moved on, compelled. He stopped and lit several glowrods, levitating him above his head to give him the ability to decend into one of the tunnels.

[jadus]

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

Sensation returned, and with each heartbeat, pain. The return to his body, should he ever chose 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 blood back into his veins, laced with a cocktail to protect his body from the too-soon return of life.

His mind turned to the interloper, grasping, diffuse, re-learning focus, settling around it like a haze. He wavered, mind flickering as he heard sound, silence, sound returned, but still he had found it. What had woken him? What was it?

The cave was carved from fine-grained stone, unchanged 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. Some seemed untouched, but not peaceful.

And above them all, there was a door. The outer wall of the vault was dark and smooth, with no visible controls. It was not meant to be open from the outside.

[sitharikin]

It took almost three hours to transverse the ground to the cave. Some false turns, descents and ascents, careful squeezing his frame through cracks in stone. The entire time while he is still reaching out, it keeps that light touch, the rest of his presence drawing tightly against him, like armor.

Once he was finally there, he stopped, examed the bodies closely. Not all of them, but enough to get a feel for them, to have an idea of what they might have been, at least in terms of carnivores or not, and what weapons they had at their disposal. Finally, Anakin placed a hand against the outer door. It was not meant to be opened from the outside, true. But that didn't mean he couldn't, just that he shouldn't. And because of everything he had learned (hard-won and bloody), he did not.

Instead, he waited. Which didn't mean he was still - he didn't know how to be still - but rather than the storm of his youth, the movement was like a river, an ocean. Which might appear still and calm but it was constantly moving.

[jadus]

There. It was so close, he could barely focus on it. It kept slipping into the mixture of life on so many worlds beyond. It was chaos, concentrated into a single point. Was it a life? Many? He could not tell. He tried to focus.

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.

But if something had found him here, others might follow. He could not bear to be woken again in a few short years. He would have to remain here, in this time, until he could be certain he could slip away once more.

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

He breathed again as the shaking slowly began to subside, keeping his eyes closed within his helmet. They were still of no use. All he wanted to see was the interloper's mind.

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.

[sitharikin]

Something in Anakin recognized something in the shape hidden inside the vault. No, not the person inside, not the physical form. Nothing so simple. Anakin had spent almost two Galatic years between his death in his son's arms and waking in a much younger (and whole) body, several of his loyal servants squirming on their toes to welcome their lost Lord back. He was familiar with trying to squelch back into skin and bones, to the rush of hot blood and push-pull of breathing. To parts of you not fitting and being left out of your physical space of reference. Of course, Anakin wasn't aware just how large he loomed, tendrils, feelers, and limbs shot out at every angle, plumes like smoke, like fire, roll and coil around and through him, jagged teeth-like projections that cast Light like crystal and slash at it like daggers. Didn't know how he appears to any strong enough in the Force to actually see him.

But seeing into his mind? That at long last Anakin has learned to lockdown. Oh there is an ocean around him of thought and emotion but it's superficial, a mirage of shallow water appearing deep and beckoning you to dive in, only to a slam into the bedrock, shattering your ankles and legs, if not your skull and neck. No one got in, not without his knowing consent.

As the doors slid open, Anakin shifted the glowrods, crossing two over and behind his head, casting light forward but not in his face and leaving him clothed in shadow. The third glided forward, hanging near the forefield, its green light intermingling with the red glow. Mostly so he could look at the conduits more than the body inside.

[jadus]

The machine was a design of his own invention. His entrapment upon a distant world had shown him new ways to shape life through the Force, to meld technology and flesh in ways that made the Eradicators seem primitive by comparison. This was a construct of gleaming carapace and metal that flowed with organic texture, melded obscenely to the simple curves of Imperial construction. Chemicals churned through the machine, seeds of delicate flesh sprouted deep within protective tanks, unfurling as they cleansed him of sleep.

Yet his senses were still diminishing, curling and compacting into the suffocating shell of a body, back behind barriers. Before his hibernation, his mind had been an unnerving thing to others. No emotion escaped him, only power, like the meaningless energy flared from a black hole. Featureless and untouchable.

He had become no more open in the intervening centuries. The barriers were stronger than ever, and yet they carried over the chaos of the millennia he had observed. They curled and writhed in fractal complexity, bound tightly in uncounted layers.

He did not open his eyes behind the mask. They were useless. What he saw enter his vault was beyond the physical senses.

It reminded him of another. A leviathan, puppeting its flesh as a lure, watching from the abyss.

He breathed, and then spoke. "Why?" His voice was soft, throat dry, but he could still be heard.

[sitharikin]

Anakin kept his distance, as much as the chamber allowed. Observed with the Force-sight and for the first time, ever, missed the lenses inside his helmet which had augmented his vision. Not enough to want to recreate them, but enough to know they may (maybe) have been useful.

His body was so much younger than it looked, grown to mid-adolescence in only a third of the time, then metabolically controlled to age at the normal rate (roughly) of a human while he was decades older. There was a hiccup in the connection between flesh and spirit that most would never be able to name but many could feel. Something about the young man simply was off. And even if he held his own presence tightly coiled around him, it wasn't still. it shifted and changed, like a well-polished opal held before a lit candle, like the spinning arms of a galaxy, like chaotic movements of particles caught in opposing gales. Too much, he was too much, not any one mortal thing, but something far beyond it expressed in a form it was perhaps never meant to. And what he pushed out flowed like a threat of touch, light, gentle, not actually there, but oh it carried a heaviness of death and destruction. Slight warmth which threatened blistering strikes, slight coolness which threatened sucking cold. A being which had touched Light at it's most bright and which had seeped the deepest Darkness.

Nothing should have survived one, and yet he'd survived both - although it wasn't even clear if the energy itself, for it was clearly some mortal form, was of a gender. Only his physical form truly said that, and Anakin himself only really minded in the sense of it being familiar when he didn't have much of that. Once he might have cared more but really, did it matter to someone who had licked at a star's core?

"The Force called. I answered." His voice wasn't as dry. Perhaps just a note or two higher than the first time he'd been this age, vocal cords undamaged by years of Tattooine's heat and dust and constant dehydration. But it was softer too. Barest hint of words, augmented with the Force to carry rather than to be loud, precision control which seemed almost impossible before. It was meant as a courtesy rather than a kindness, if the being is unused to hearing a voice, that wasn't his problem. But if the being preferred not to hear a voice - well, there Anakin could match a preference.