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]

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.