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Krath Inmortos

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Everything posted by Krath Inmortos

  1. From where she stood beside the tree wartching @Atrid Torsen trying simultaneously slay abd domesticate the monstrous abomination @Darth Calypso had summoned, the approach of another, untamed and raw, caught her attention on an almost subconcious level. Inmortos, the spirit that now cohabitated and, frankly, rules over the enslaved Mandalorian woman had felt it first; his powers saturating the woman’s form as they formed a parasitic symbiotic relationship. He bid her turn and they did to find a stranger adorned in armor kneeling, professing a desire to become not a Mandalorian as portrayed by their mortal outer vestments, but a Sith; a Sith like Fiochmar, the apprentice, who even now battled with the beast in the distance. There was not another Sith in sight. The woman blinked slowly, her eyes flashing a momentary golden yellow glow, as the power of Inmortos took hold. The necromancer saw through her eyes, but not in the way a warrior sees. No, he stared down upon @Thought Bomb, through his armored trappings and mortal form. He stared upon the soul of the man, laid bare before him and he saw it. Not the weak pining of one unfit for anything but to die on the field of battle for a lord who cares nothing for his demise. No, he saw potential, raw power and emotion bellied upon the back of a warrior who sought refinement. Refinement, that perhaps he did not know would come not from the smelter’s fiery heat, but from the cold eternity of the cosmos as it twisted him into a weapon of death itself. Yes, someone like this Inmortos had use of. And if he failed? Another body by which to convey his eternal presence to the galaxy. The air grew frigid about the Sith and seeker, condensing fog from the thick air as it froze on anything within their aura. A subtle side effect of the profane practitioners daliance into the powers of stillness, death frozen in time eternal. Reaching out an armored hand, the woman’s voice spoke firmly, as one warrior to another, “You were right to have come to me. Any lesser Sith would not have seen your potential and cast you upon a bunk with the other rabble.” Except her voice had a frigid icy tone, as if death itself hung on every word, unnatural and imprisoned within the confines of her fleshy tongue. “Rise and if you are fit, become the apprentice of the god king of death eternal.” And as they reached to take the hand of the seeker, the Mandalorian suddenly withdrew, leaving the warrior to stand himself as her arms buckled in pain and she clawed at her face. Across her brow, lumps began to well and pierce the skin, blue soul-bound ice erupting from within, from the mixing of untainted mortal and eternal damnation. The Crown of Desolation that bound Inmortos’ soul across the cosmos to his devestated and desolate homeworld, his font of power itself, the icy Throne of Inmortod. The mortal woman’s eyes rolled back in her head as she screamed, blood running down her cheeks from the furrows carved by her nails and oozing, mingling woth the ichor produced by the crown itself. ”I am Inmortose,” the voice came from the woman’s maw, deep and otherworldly, reverberating with contained power and damnation. “We will join the others as we pay homage to the new mistress of darkness; but to gaze upon they who are worthy you must first prove your own worthiness. A test.” The Mandalorian’s hand pointed into the distance. “My former apprentice, Nok Morliss, has taken my lightsaber and held it faithfully until my return. Retrieve the blade from Lord Apothos and bring it to me as we gather with the others. If you can do this, you will be found worthy to become my acolyte abd learn to break free of your chains.” Slowly the hand lowered and the voice, faded back to the mortal tone of the Mandalorian her eyes having righted themselves, although they were now bloody and pinpointed. “But be warned, when asked what has become of Inmortos, do not tell them of who I am. Carry my saber as a sign of my blessing and damnation. I will reveal myself when the time is right.” Taking the T-visored Mandalorian helm beneath her other arm, they fit it over the crowned head, gingerly covering the crystalline tiarra of somidified soulfrost and gems of eternity. Shooting a glance back at Mavanger’s apprentice as he battled the beast, the Mandalorian shrugged. There was no longer interest in the boy, for Inmortos had found himself an apprentice he hoped to deem worthy of his profane knowledge and power, a new tool to carry his eternal vision to fruition. Inmortos propelled the form of his newest vessel forward, away from Bernon. He had not yet bothered to learn his name. He had to prove himself first. But still, they paused and looked back at the newest Sith hopeful to call out a warning. “Should @Krath Apothos resist, remind him, but for I, he would still be languishing in that Republic prison for his failure to subdue the Jedi Grandmaster’s soul for me on Mon Cal.”
  2. After what could have been hours, minutes, or even days, the woman slowly sat up. Her head was pounding. Even as she sat up, she leaned forward grasping the sides of her skull In pain. Her body hurt. It ached. Everywhere. Yet still, she felt something else. Something seemed to gnaw at the back of her mind, just out of conscious grasp. She could not seem to put her mind on it. As much as she tried, it eluded her, but each time she tried to grasp it it surged with power. The Mandalorian woman’s nerves tingled. She hurt, but she felt so so alive. She sat until she felt the power to move. Picking herself up, the warrioress turned to stare at the ship she had been guarding before looking out to the vast uncharted wilds of this dark planet. Something called to her. Moreover something within her urged her forward away from the ship, out into the wild. A surge of dark invisible power beyond the horizon called to her. Each time the force was darkened by the unseen displays of @Darth Calypso, it drew the woman’s thoughts to the foreign darkness that grew at the base of her skull. And each time she was drawn to it, power surged in her veins and her eyes wluld flash a glowing Sith-yellow for a moment. “Kad Ha’rangir,” she whispered; the name forming on her lips as if out of nowhere. She smiled, the memory coming back in pieces. She could taste her own fear, metallic and foul in her mouth. With jolted steps, she walked forward. A lopsided smile playing across her fractured teeth and face. She stooped to scoop up her fallen helm, leaving her sidearm where it was. Then, without stopping, as if dazed walked straight out into the wilderness toward the draw of dark power. Into the trees, an untouched forest, the Mandalorian wandered. Every step, the dark presence of Inmortos took ahold. She welcomed it, to become the avatar of her god of destruction, of that which represented so much more. Inmortos’ spirit flooded the woman’s unconsciousness, their minds entangling together, symbiote and host, master and servant, mortal and eternal. As they moved into the wilderness, the transformation continued until it was all but complete. When he emerged from the forest, it was to the cry of a great beast as it charged the singular form of @Atrid Torsen. Leaning against a tree, the woman held her T-visored helmet beneath her arm to watch. The force swirled in the area as if it were a living beast itself writhing in turmoil. The hostess of Inmortos smiled as icy cold seemed to radiate from her very subconscious soul.
  3. The spirit of Inmortos swooped about the planet hungering for that which me might devour. The spirit of @Darth Calypso was tempting, but to challenge the newfound lord of their order at such a time as this was undesirable. To do so, there must be a great cloud of witnesses. His glory must be grown, burned upon the memories of all who bore witness to it. The apprentice that trailed in her shadow, @Atrid Torsen, he was within the protection of the warlord @Mavanger. Out of respect, he too would be left, for the time being. The undead armies that followed the queen of darkness were his own; servants worthy of little more than the eternity he had bestowed upon their forms. The world crawled with intangible darkness. It was a darkness that crawled beyond the physical and soaked into the spiritual realm that Inmortos now claimed as his own, a world he sought to return from and command. The armored Mandalorians were something else entirely. Their leader @saberforce was an emotional wall, bound to by the spirits of those closest to him. To touch any of them would invite carnage upon Inmortos’ newfound body should the possession not go according to plan. And yet, they were the only spirits that roved upon this world that were not entirely mindless beasts or servants to the Sith Order of which Inmortos had pledged his fealty in exchange for immeasurable power. The formless form of Inmortos tasted the world of darkness. More. There were more of these marauding barbarians. He had but to find them. As a cold and mighty wind, the lord of death eternal moved, a front blowing across the world until he found them, the ships of the foreigners, guarded by but a handful of the armored acolytes of the way of the Mandalore. Inmortos knew them well, servants of the Sith in their many wars. One of them, carefully selected, would serve anew until, like their brethren, their use had been dissipated in the grand scheme. The winds of Inmortos calmed as an icy chill enveloped the pair of Kom’rk transports. A fog welling up as the heat was sucked from the air itself and in the middle of it, Inmortos descended. The sole watchman began to shiver beneath her plate as she adjusted her sensors to attempt to see through the growing fog. It was just an anomaly of this world, so why did she feel such a sense of growing fear as her fingers began to succumb to the cold. It was as if, as if there was something, someone, out there . . . “Can you feel it?” A voice whispered from the fog. The Mandalorian guardian whipped about her shivering hand dropping to the blaster at her side. There was nobody there. Nothing. “Whose there?” She demanded. “Show yourself!” A frigid laughter echoed in the fog, “But I have; or have you forgotten me already, my faithful worshipper.” The warrior pulled her holster from her holster and spun around. She tried to call for backup, but the comm buzzed dead in her ear. The cold seemed to leech the life from her gear. “I do not know you, but I warn you, we are not to be trifled with. Identify yourself!!” She spun about as her visor began to ice over. “Do you not remember me? Can you not feel it in your bones?” Inmortos feigned offense as his disembodied form coalesced within the fog into a amorphous shape that mirrored his original form, pale blue and translucent. Inmortos blew a wind emanating from his ghostly lips. It blew across the Mandalorian’s neck to raise goosebumps and draw her attention. Trying in vain to see, the warrioress nearly jumped as the icy breath caressed her. She tensed as the cold eeked its way beneath her armor to encircle her heart. Sighing in resignation, she ripped her helm from her head and let it fall, crunching upon the icy grass below. What she saw, took her breath away. Feet from her stood the pale shifting form of Inmortos. Without thinking, she pulled the trigger of her weapon time and time again. Nothing happened, the power of the blast packs drained in their entirety. That did not stop her though as years of training took their course. Fear, hesitation, even the cold, was all pushed to the back of her mind as she grasped the knife she kept strapped beneath her arm and pulled it free. In the same fluid motion, she lunged for the spirit intent on impaling him upon her blade. The Mandalorian stumbled, the spirit of Inmortos dissipating on an unseen wind. With her knife hanging loosely in her hand, the blonde stared up into the cold fog that enveloped her. “Who are you?” She whispered as tears began to well in her eyes and freeze upon her face. ”I am they that dwell beyond The Veil,” the voice whispered in her left ear as the woman turned to look. “I am the Scorekeeper,” he hissed in her right as she spun around searching. “Some know me as Drol” the voice woo’d from behind. “Others call me Krath incarnate,” the voice chortled as it began to whirl about, dizzying the girl. “The Mistress, Andeddu, Father of Shadows, Byllaya, and many more. I am known to all who trod the mortal coil; but to you,” the voice chilled the air as the fog swirled in a vortex about the Mandalorian warrioress, before going silent. Suddenly the face of Inmortos materialized before the Mandalorian’s. “I am Kad Ha’rangir!” He snarled, eliciting a frightened scream from the woman before charging forward upon her face and snaking into her open mouth where he vanished. The body of the woman went stiff and fell backward, landing with a crackling thump upon the frozen ground. Suddenly the fog began to disappear, whisked away on the warm evening breeze leaving no sign but the seemingly lifeless body of the Mandalorian watchman, her helmet and blaster lying a short distance away in the cold wet grass.
  4. Far from the mountains where the Sith Lord in waiting had made her place a dark unnatural storm began to churn. Fed by the less-than-latent dark side energies that transcended the entirety of the place billowing purple clouds began to pour forth from thin air. A tear in the realities of life itself, toxic plumes spiraled outward, unnatural peals of thunder and claps of yellow-green lightning called forth in roars and flashes of ethereal anger. The very air, charged with the energy of the storm became chilled, sucking the warmth out of Ziost itself as the energies were drawn forth and extinguished. And so did the storm continue to grow in size and power until it presented an inky blot of electrified ice across the landscape; until it’s very presence touched the natural order of the world beneath it. Then, and only then, at the heart of the storm, did a portal begin to form. It was a doorway comprised of tombstones and ice and blood, cloaked by a thin black veil, the curtain that separated this world from the next. It was the curtain of death. As snow began to fall, swept to a frenzy of cutting glass by the whipping winds, the veil itself billowed. As if breathed upon by something beyond, a beast unseen and unheard of upon the mortal coil. With a belch the veil swam upwards in a flash of evil green light accompanied by the loudest thunderclap yet. Surging from the gate came a cacophony of spirits, moaning on the wind as they snarled and snapped at one another, at anything before them as they were caught up into the storm itself. After this there remained but one, an ethereal visage of a man, a young and handsome Firrereo, blued and luminescent with the power of the storm. The spirit of Inmortos, no longer content to rule a shadowy kingdom beyond had returned to this workd. But a spirit, he stood unaffected by the storm, and yet unable to write his will upon this world. To challenge those that would see him fall and to punish those that had disappointed him he would need a body. It would not be his own. No, that time had passed. Those deemed worthy enough would serve by will or by force would be chosen. By their hand would they carry out the will of the god king. And when he was through with them? They would be granted passage into the peace that lied beyond the veil. For Inmortos had traveled to the deepest recesses of death and had come eye to eye with abominations unfit for this world. And he had returned. He had returned as much a servant as a king. Bound by profane oaths uttered in accursed tongues forgotten to the cosmic planes of the galaxy, Inmortos had been freed from this mortal coil only to be shackled by something greater. Something that was unspeakable in the tongues of man. He was a broken man. And so, he stood, the power of the storm washing over him. Every clap of thunder, every snap of electric power that dwarfed that of the stars, they powered him, gave his army of spirits a half-life as they began to scream outward into the world of Ziost, a torturous paradise that allowed their invisible near-immortal hands to claw at the edge of reality, to rend the living with tastes of eternal damnation. He stood, for hours until the door itself sealed, vanishing as if it never was. He stood still, until the storm itself came to pass. Hours, days, years, it did not matter. He did not know. Such passages of time were nothing to an immortal shade. But when it was done and the storm had passed and the spirits passed beyond the horizons, only then, glimmering against the moonlight, did the spirit move. Alighting from the ground, Inmortos became a nigh invisible blur of spiritual energies seeking a mortal form to inhabit, a mind to twist to his own machinations, a hand by which to enact his will. Everywhere he went, he heard the whispers. Whispers of invisible spirits that scoured the land looking for weakness to transform, failed lives by which to regain their own failed mortality. He heard them, voices that he had long discredited. He heard them and he listened. They spoke of an army, of a woman, of warriors and servants assembled upon a plain, about a mountain surging with unnatural dark side energies. He heard them and he knew, @Darth Calypso remained. Right where he had left her. Where the new dark lady stood, so too existed the minions of Immortos, torn from Aaris III, the most loyal of his servants, spared by eternal damnation the suffering of their people. And so he streaked across the nighttime sky, billows of blackened snowstorms trailing in his wake, sucking the heat from the very air. He moved, a foul wind, until there, in the distance, he saw them. A mighty host, ten thousand strong, stood as silent undead sentinels awaiting command. Oh would they have their command. A gift to the dark ruler of the fragmented Sith Empire, yes they were; but that did bot mean they had forgotten their true master, reviled him, feared him. They were right too; for now, he held sway not over their lives and undead existence, but over their eternal souls as well. From a great distance the dark spirit circled in silence. He sifted every undead soul, studied the unnaturally bond of bound flesh. Generals and footmen, all kobold-like lizards, strong born from a life of labor. None were worthy of the spirit of Inmortos and yet he had little choice. For they were more worthy than the few other foreigners who even now trod the landscape.
  5. The voice of Inmortos cracked as his hissed whispers of pain radiated outward on the billowing plumes of purple-black smoke. It filled the room. It carried into the halls and recesses unhindered by the vortex of space as it clawed like a feral cat through the station. Every word, ancient and powerful, uttered to bind the spirit world and fray the edges between mortal and immortal. The undead all about him were soon dissolved to dust, their very essence becoming that of the growing torrents of smoke. The prison station itself continued in it’s preprogrammed decent towards the vacant world below. Its rotation increasing in speed as it passed a point where initial dampeners and high tech braking systems failed. The artificial gravity generators were the next to fail. The entire station shook, final death throws as it plunged towards it’s inevitable destruction. Final system reports and scans, prisoner rosters and security reports, were broadcast into the cosmos. The highest levels of encryption protected the broadcasts. They were even more scrambled by the foreign code that played havoc on the station. Inside, death did not need to wait. The door had been opened by the Sith rescue team. Death was invited in the open door, summoned by the gods of chaos. Once inside, it gorged itself on the entrapped spirits of the deceased and the dying, violent and visceral, throughout the station. The raw emotions of the freed tortured beings fed into growing darkness. Inmortos hands wove through the smoke carving long-lost runes in the amorphous air. They glowed for a moment and then were absorbed alongside the haunting whispering chants. Bits of flesh freeze-dried in the smoke and fell from Inmortos heavy hands and head. His robe fluttered in the smoke, aging and fraying in moments what would have taken decades of unaffected wear. In moments where there had been a hulking body of an undead Vurk chanting and weaving the spirits of the undead into the smoke of the mortal world, there stood a ragged rotting body, muscles and sinews and bones visible through the rotting frozen scales skin. Flaking off, the bits of Inmortos were absorbed by the smoke, tying the necromancer’s own mortal form to his spell. Through the yard, the smoke ate away at the existence of any that still lived. Throughout the station the life force of any that remained was tugged upon; drawn closer and closer to the flickering veiled doorway of the eternal. Anyone who was injured stood no chance. They were enveloped in a black mist, their screams vanishing as surely as their bodies until nothing was left but soot that blew down the windswept halls. Klaxons screamed all over the ship. Warnings for those that remained that their destruction was imminent. The mechanized voice encouraged anyone who could to strap themselves in to do so, immediately. Anyone who could not was warned to brace for impact. It would not matter. The impact would be lethal. It was designed to be so. Inmortos’ body continued to fail, his skeleton becoming clearly visible beneath the dissolving gases. Organs tumbled in a bloody mess from their nestled positions within the ancient Jedi structure. Foul smoke filled their spaces, gnawing hungrily at the shell of mortality. Inmortos raised his hands towards the ceiling. His head rolled back on his neck, no linger able to support the heavy sloped skull of the saurian. He screamed. Oh how he screamed. His voice, amplified by the force, rang through the station and beyond. It was pain, pure agony. The spirits reached out from the great void greedy to grab ahold of something tangible. Every invisible clawed hand pulled the very spirit of the necromancer out of his mortal coil, drawing him into the eternal void. Fluids and fuels began to spill from their containers, their vacuum-sealed ports released; explosives designed to flood the station. Elsewhere, crates of blaster compressed tibanna gas tumbled free from their bindings alongside other supplies thrown by the centrifugal power of the plummeting station. And finally, Inmortos voice fell silent. A rift in the force, silent and empty followed it’s wake, as the spirits of the dead, spirits from across the known and unknown cosmos dissolved the last of his vocal cords. The necromancers body fell, hilted and awkward as his bones and what remained of his robes clattered to the floor. The smoke swirled and the spirits whispered, screamed in the minds of any who still struggled to survive, thrown against the bulkheads by the force of the plummeting station as it burned through the atmosphere. Flames trailed from the station. Without a shield, it’s hull became superheated. Armored panels were flung free of the twisting station. Fire clawed inward to do battle with the frigid spirit-filled smoke. It was destruction at it’s purest form. The freezing smoke erupted. The flames raced through the station, a literal fire that transcended the mortal plane burning hot enough to dissolve bodies and durasteel; glowing with such intensity it pierced the realms of the spiritual. The flames consumed the spirits ensnared within, casting their meager immortal shadows eons into the great veiled beyond. The storm of ethereal power crackled as it was consumed by the flames. Within the smoke, the skeletal form slowly began to stand. The spirit of Inmortos, still bound to the bones, overcame the limitations of death. Standing, the necromancer pulled his ragged robe about his shoulders. His vacant eye sockets blindly scanned the smoke as the first signs of the immortal flame began to pierce the thickest billows of smoke that poured from the maw of the necromancer; his words transformed into the pure undead magics of death as they flowed freely from one realm to another. The flames raced towards Inmortos, engulfing the necromancer, shrouding him from the world beyond. They were held at bay by the frigid powers of the dark lord, for the moment. The station continued to gain speed as it streaked an inky trail of midnight black interspersed with flashes of flaming orange and yellow and frigid billowing purple across the sky. Death lived, even thrived, within the station. It was fully enthralled as the bridge between the living and the dead was torn open, the stopper pulled for a moment allowing raw emotions and spiritual apparitions to manifest where they might never do so again; not without a catalyst. And a short time later the flaming station slammed into the forested ground. Within, the immortal flames crossed from the mortal into the immortal, overwhelming Inmortos frigid persona, consuming him. The bones were burnt to dust. The dust was consumed and swept into the eternal void. The presence of Inmortos was swept from the galaxy, cast into void beyond as a huge fireball engulfed the station. The forests shook for miles in every direction blasting trees downwards in an outward angle. The plume of purple fire climbed high into the sky etching an ancient runic symbol of death and eternity into the air itself above the world. It was visible from horizon to horizon. Then it was gone from view, its eternal magics burned not into just the air, but the cosmos beyond, the stars it shrouded. Forest fires began to rage, tracing outwards into the untouched wilds of the world. A flaming crater sat at the impact point, driven deep and wife into the crust of the world. Pieces of twisted jagged metal rained downward for miles. At the impact site, there was nothing left. All of it had been blown free from the force of the station’s detonation. Nothing was left. There was nothing organic, even most of the metals had been turned into dust and ash as it wafted through the air.
  6. All about them the newly dead arose, their crippled bodes, wounds still fresh and oozing, shambling towards their oppressors, foes, and stranger alike with undead ferocity. Those whose bodies had long since been devoured by the incinerators, their ashes little more than space dust spreading across the cosmos, swirled. Their invisible hands grasping at the edges of reality, their assign subtle chills as unseen winds passed by. In this paling of the boundary between life and death, they could reach across the veil, unseen claws rendering exposed flesh as they whispered of the imminent demise of all aboard. For they that were not bound by the mortal world could see what those bound to life could not. They had seen it and whispered amongst themselves, delighted that oppressor, stranger, friend and foe would be joining with them soon enough. It was inevitable as the station continued to accelerate towards the world below, it’s axis becoming the epicenter as the gravitational dampeners strained and began to fail against the centrifugal force. Throughout the station a new series of klaxons began to wail. It meant little as the mechanized voice warned of imminent impact, urging those aboard to brace themselves. Had it been a rogue ship, perhaps; but what the sensors that now triggered the automated sensors now sensed was Nephis VIII itself. All that mechanized warning did was increase the fear that already flowed like a river through the station. Not that it mattered to the droids. They had their orders: no one escaped. Within the control room, panic had set in. The looming doom was taking ahold, empowered by the flow of darkness that now ravaged the station by both design and intrusion. Finally, the first man broke. The thought of his family, a half a galaxy away, his children, going on without a father; it was too much for him. Shoving himself back from his console, the jailer shouted. He could not take it. Running to the doorway he began to shout in panic and fear, a righteous anger boiling over as he bashed ineffectively at the door’s control console. That was all It took. Beneath the professional exterior, the tension broke. The command room broke into chaos as crewmen began to scramble inputting codes in desperation, trying to stop the inevitable, trying to escape. It would be of little use; the station’s designers had taken such a catastrophe into consideration. Their actions meant nothing, or they would not have, had the station not been hacked by an unknown entity at the same time. It should not have happened; but the state-of-the-art programming that had been put into place upon the station’s construction had slowly not been kept up to the highest levels as designed. In a state of chaos, it had been just one other thing that slipped through the cracks. Because of all this, one inadvertent code frantically keyed in on the bridge at just the right moment, at just the right place, on just the right console, had its intended effect, only . . . more so. Every door on the station hissed open. Locked latrine doors where political prisoners had taken refuge; cell doors; access shafts; the doors to the command center; all of them, the entire station was open to to everyone, everywhere. The maze becoming infinitely more complex. That was not what made it even more dangerous though, in addition, the bastardization of the codes opened garbage chutes, access ports, docking bays, doorways to the vacuum of space. In a moment, entire corridors and rooms became vacuum tubes as their contents were sucked into the void of space. The cafeteria instantly was torn asunder via a simple garbage disposal. Doors ripped from hinges, tables and chairs putting dents in the walls as they were vacuumed into a tornadic maelstrom of nothingness. Other areas of the station took similar damage as the temperatures across the station began to plummet even where the vacuum had yet to reach. Back in the courtyard, Inmortos felt the increase of death around the station. The voices of the undead howled in rage and glee at their predicament. His magics had taken on a life of their own. More accurately, regained the lives that had been taken from them. He needed to do little else to maintain it; life, the twisted dark side of the force, together would maintain what he had unnaturally sparked back into creation. He heard the voices as they cackled. He heard their whispers above the cacophony. Their doom was imminent. His, Inmortos, doom was imminent. ”NO!” He snarled. It would not end this way. His eyes flashed with ice as his vision took in Apothos. He would not be destroyed again because of his wayward former apprentice. Akheron, Solus, this unknown Sith imprisoned for crimes that had not even been a blip on the radar of the Sith Empire, none of them were worthy of his death; and as they stood here discussing their philosophies ignorant it seemed of their looming destruction, Inmortos made his choice. Even Mavanger urged that they flee. Stepping forward, the death lord approached the throne of Apothos, lightsaber hilt held before him. “Morlissssssss,” he hissed with a snarl, “do not lose this or,” he nodded at Solus’ mechanized corpse, “my future tool. I will return to you for this when you are free of this prison and I of mine.” The specter of a Sith stepped back, leaving a path towards the door clear, cleansed by the shambling hungry undead that innately bent to his will. The winds of the spirits seemed to blow towards the doorway; or it might have been the touch of the void reaching this far into the station, clawing for one and all. Inmortos hands were already moving, his arthritic hands pained as they danced intricately in the air. “Flee you fools,” he snapped as the force pulled stoppered vials from his robes, elixirs made from a dying world, souls snared at the point of damnation. Ancient words of power, the spells of long lost cultures, death cults, and god-kings that pre-dated the Sith and their dark Jedi ancestors by millenia poured from the Krath Lord’s dehydrated cracked lips. His teeth mashed his tongue as blood and ichor dribbled from his mouth down his robes. Frigid purple-black smoke billowed out of the necromancer’s robes seemingly unaffected by the devolving world around him. Each hard syllable cracked like soft thunder as the magics of long forgotten sinners called forth their ancient spirits from deep within the void, forgotten shadows of eternity. The sacrifices of the world below served as a conduit for the atrocities, the sacrifices, aboard the station all around him. Inmortos had accepted his circumstances, but not his lot in it. The presence of the spirits all around him spoke of yet another means to unnaturally extend his life. He would not be exiting this station, not lime the others. Once again, his body would die here. If all went accordingly, his spirit would be free of this mortal coil; free to possess the bodies of the weak willed and willing as his needs saw fit. The zombies all about him sensed the necromancic energies that radiated from the death lord. They were drawn to it, empowered by it. They salivated as they clawed and gnawed at anyone who dared approach the font of power they desired, that whispered to them the sweet lies thst they might be able to regain their own lives if they consumed enough life energy from others.
  7. Inmortos watched woth a detached horror as the surging amalgamation of bodily fluids, eyeballs, and filth surged down the physical confines of the station. It seemed to be chasing Solus, and yet; in spite of it’s interactions with the physical, only seemed to exist as a metaphysical temporal being of the force and by the force, plucked from somewhere beyond. The icy touch of the specters the necromancer now sought to command coupled with the hissing strikes of the Lord Mavanger’s blades seemed to slow it. And then, as if in some cosmically herculean effort, Solus of all beings, seemed to cast the beast into the ethereal beyond. It was gone. As if it had never even been, save for the warped passageways and crushed metal that spoke of its passing. Inmortos’ reptilian eyes twisted in suspicion. Something seemed amiss, he intended to find out what it was, even here. He rounded on the Sith apprentice of Lord Akheron intent on drilling the knowledge from his crystalline latticework only to watch the entire chassis of the being slump forward. Life leached from all but the core, the physical existence of the wayward apprentice. ”Fool.” He spat, the hostility on his detached voice clearly belaying the anger he felt at such a distraction from their cause. Anywhere else and the necromancer might have invited such a task, to study it, to control it; but not here. And before he could do any more, the spirits were back, more cautious, whispers of hate, lust, and discontent playing at the edges of his consciousness even as they questioned from whence the immaterial had manifest beyond the veil. “Yes. Yes” he responded, waving his hand towards the downed Solus, granting permission to the spirits to manifest within his mortal form. Should the apprentice be strong enough, he would live. Should he not; well, it would be a finality in a lesson that he should not have tampered with that beyond his control. The necromancer had items of more importance to attend to even as the crush of droids before them sparked and fizzled. At least Mavanger had the droids he had desired. From where he hung weightless in the air, Inmortos offered a solemn nod to the harbinger of destruction, a true master of his craft. A silent note of respect for his fellow master of their respected crafts. There was little time for anything else. Time was, after all, of the essence. Behind them the form of Somus slowly stood, jilted and wobbly as it was possessed by the spirits of the damned, enslaved by their fear of that which the dark lord that commanded them seemed to control. With a breath of icy vapors from his outstretched fingertips, Inmortos drifted forward, a ghostly silent wraith. There was more to be attended to. Behind him the spirit-bound Sithling followed, it’s unsteady and tumbling steps the first steps of an infant as it discovered itself. The droid-being clattered along behind. The droid might be of use to Darth Apothos in this prison; and, on a more personal note, perhaps finally his former apprentice could extract the Shard so that Inmortos might again use the spirit of Akheron’s next failed acolyte as his own. This time, a lightsaber might suffice. The entire station was in chaos. As the force surged into crevices and cells untouched for decades, it awoke long dormant sins and desires amongst the accused. Those who could manifest the force trained or not unleashed upon it in utter rage, blowing the doors from their fells and flooding the station with years of pent up rage-fueled vengeance. Even the highly skilled droids, as they cut down swarths of inmates were eventually overwhelmed. Killers, monsters, lords of the underworld regained their bearing and each in their own way began upon paths of revenge and rebirth. And still, the timer ticked steadily downward. The command center sealed and isolated in it’s entirety behind layers and layers of durasteel and phrik and cortosis infused metals. They were safe from the chaos, safe from the ravages of the force, within their tomb. And so Inmortos moved unhindered down the devastated hallways until he entered into the din behind Akheron, Solus lurching to a halt behind the lord of death. He listened as the chaos of the compound howled over the chaoslord’s words, the revolution of suppressed hostilities overcoming reason as bodies were cut down with impunity and droids beat down by overwhelming numbers; and for the first time since being subjected to the unnatural aura of the Force-repellent lizards that lay dead across the station, Inmortos smiled. His dry tongue snaked across his lizardly lipless maw. He could taste it. Death. Fresh, not of ages gone by, spirits entombed bodiless in this orbital prison. No, these were newly fallen, their souls still clinging helplessly to their mortal bonds, shattered as they may be. With a press of cold, Inmortos drifted downwards until his feet touched the cold steel decking. His gnarled swollen fingers danced in the air, a madman’s touch upon the eternal to any uninformed of the black clad’ reaper’s true intent. Ancient tongues spilled in whispers from his mouth that seemed to carry across the cavernous bay in a hiss of wind that blew the icy touch of death across the battlefield. Whispers of the damned, drowned out by the screams of the dying, moved unnaturally as they were carried by the magical words of life and death, incarnation, incarceration, and blasphemy. Across the battlefield, the crushed decrepit forms of those who had only minutes before been crushed to death began to rise. Their faces were twisted in the pains of eternity wrought from the solace of death. It was the only pain they felt, a pain beyond what the living could bear as they were immune to the broken limbs and tortured states of their mortal forms. It was this pain, the magics called upon by Inmortos that gsge them life. He did not need to control them, not that he could not with a wave of his hand; no, they would do what came naturally to the undead. They would seek revenge. The targets of that vengeance varied, fellow prisoners who had wronged them, but mostly the enforcers of an long lost unseen Republic and Empire’s will. unfazed by blaster fire and the touch of the stun baton and boasting the power of their bodies uninhibited by life-saving measures, they struck back, turning the tide until any who opposed them fell silent, dead and lifeless, leaving ichor-oozing shamblers groaning about the battlefield awaiting further instruction in their simple zombified state. ”Lord Apothos.” Inmortos rasped loudly across the silence. “My apprentice. Come.” The body of Solus clattered to the ground before Inmortos. “A gift by which to expedite our departure.”
  8. The mag-locks on the droids feet allowed them to continue mostly unaffected by the sudden shift of gravity, or lack thereof. The last of the prisoners were locked down at last, either in their individual cells or the small mass in the recreation area (if one could call it that). Any resistance was now met with a lethal albeit brutal beat down. There were no life-saving protocols anymore. The only programming that remained intact was to prevent any escape, by any means necessary. Anyone seen or scanned in the hallways was designated a hostile entity. The tuning up of blaster cannons followed by explosive blasts traced after any unauthorized entity. Escaped prisoner, invader, it did not matter. They were all as good as dead. They would all be condemned to death in the next 20 minutes anyway. After that, the planet would be spun into complete and irreparable free fall; a fiery plummet towards an inevitable end on the surface. Drifting against the sealed security door, Inmortos pushed off following after Lord @Mavanger. Moving from cleft to cleft the duo of Sith Masters kept the turrets popping, albeit inaccurately. Even without the force, the necromancer knew that the steely right-hand of the former Sith Empress was a force to be reckoned with. No mere turret would stop him. Inmortos, well, he was dead, technically. Even computers recognized there was no use shooting a dead body. Computers did not need the satisfaction. Still, the inability of the the turret to stop the encroachment necessitated reinforcements. As they passed the halfway point a half dozen armed security droids rounded the corner at the end of the hallway. Stun batons and wrist mounted blasters, it kept the prisoners from stealing them. Disconnected from the droid they would deactivate. Nothing more than a gangly hunk of metal. Pressed into the alcove, Inmortos felt worthless. He could feel the very foreign body he now inhabited deteriorating. Without the force, the familiar horizon of death loomed ever nearer; a one way trip into the beyond. It was not a path Inmortos sought to journey down a final time just yet. He had not yet achieved his goals. The fear heightened his senses. There was little he could do, decrepit and dying as he was. Without the force, he was nothing. And then, it happened. A strange wave seemed to sweep down the passageway. The necromancer’s fragmented body was caught up in the tide. His mind, entrapped within a world of flesh not his own was suddenly immersed in the depths of the cosmos of an eternal silence. The veil beyond the realm of the living fluttered and opened to the eternal blackness beyond. Peace and tranquility, life spread from the tips of the Vurk fingers and toes possessed by Inmortos all the way to the sloping crest atop his head. For a moment, it was as if all the troubles of the mortal plane were swept away. In that moment, Inmortos was at peace. Inmortos was dead and he never felt more alive. Until he was not. On the heels of the peace that came with death, came the dogs. Howling, ravenous, caged unto death and driven to madness before they passed into the great beyond. The spirits of the dead, hundreds killed on the prison station, their bodies long since incinerated, tore past the veil. They flooded the area about Inmortos, a beacon to serve as their servant to the realms of mortality. They assaulted the necromancer’s sensed, blinding him, deafening him. The necromancer doubled over in the air. Pain, the pain of every injury inflicted upon the lives that were not his own, replaced the fear he had felt as it wracked his body. ”No!” He cried out, his voice cracking in pain as his body contorted unnaturally in the air. The air temperature dropped. The humidity crystallizing in an icy glaze all about the Krath master. He was the master of death. Those who failed in this life would not best him. They could not. They had already lost. They needed him and as vengeful as they were, they knew it too. ”NO!!!” He cried in anguish and anger, his mind forcing his body to fought against the rigor that sought to overcome it. Muscles tore as pain shot red-hot pain across his senses. The icy mind of the necromancer began to revert to its natural state, frigid, cold, a lifeless void, unassailable by anyone or thing. As he writhed, Inmortos’ resistance to the spirits grew with each passing moment until his mind had become an icy palace of solitude reaching across the cosmos to the barren hellscape of Aaris III and the Krath’s throne upon the desolate planet. ”NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!” He snarled in defiance as his eyes shot open. The pupils that had rolled back into his head centered and began to focus as his clawed hands slammed into the durasteel wall plating strong enough to leave dents. Had his feet not been braced in the alcove, the necromancer would have drifted out into the hallway. Icy wisps snaked from the Vurk’s nostrils. The air about him dropping dramatically well below freezing in an instant. The cold was more than a physical frigidness, it was ethereal, spiritual. It drove back the swirling chaos of the recently released undead wraiths. It slowed them, froze those that did not retreat, their bodiless existence falling invisibly to the floor and shattering in a glassy spray of broken soulfrost. It was cold. The deathly chill offered clarity. It offered silence. And in it, Inmortos could feel the ever expanding presence of the force, freed from the grasp of the sickening mutant repellent that surrounded the station. He could feel the lives of all aboard, Mavanger, @Karys Narat iv-Adas, @Solus, the unknown @Lord Ōk Rägnär, and even his wayward apprentice @Krath Apothos. Yes. He was here and he was alive. If one could call such a miserable existence such a thing. The specters of prisoners passed on sensed the connection the necromancer felt, even if for but a moment, to the technological wizard and they seized upon it to assault one that might be of value to the necromancer; to teach him a lesson for denying them. Several screamed into the prisoner-laden hall to assail the senses and mind of Nok Morliss and anyone else who got in their way. In minutes the entire haul was in chaos as poltergeists and wraiths materialized and vanished intermittently, bursting through walls, droids, and chests with icy touches, blinding sensors and senses. Screams of anger and fear contributed to the din. The droids were hard-pressed to control such a breakdown in order and they began to bash in the skulls of the nearest prisoners to begin restoring order, permanently. Inmortos was only concerned with Apothos for a mere moment before his senses were diverted to Akheron’s droid-y apprentice. The lightsaber crystal seemed to have unleashed some sort of netherworld force monster, a being of rotting multiplying flesh and dried blood. Hunger and death. An invisible being that devoured anyone or thing connected to the force; a monster that did not exist but for the dark side of the force itself; a monster from beyond the veil hungering for life. “What have you done?!” Inmortos mind sparked with icy anger. Meddling in spheres he did not know and had no right to be in touch with, the Shard had seemingly inadvertently stumbled upon something larger than himself. Redirecting his focus from Apothos, Inmortos summoned upon the ethereal chill of the void beyond the grave. The veil that separated life and death billowed in eternity, its subtle echoes felt across the cosmos upon his trailing link to his chilled throne. He cast it beyond himself, the chill freezing the air as it slammed into the rolling boil of force-based flesh that pursued Solus. The spirits screamed after, their hunger being keened onto an even greater target, the monster from beyond the purgatory they had been cast unto. With ravaging hunger and the ability to inflict wanton damage on the frost-slowed abomination. Cold death radiated out from the necromancer. The spirits recognizing a master that could finally give them what they desired.
  9. Inmortos slid haphazardly into a secured alcove out of sight of the turrets bearing down on the hallways. Then Mavanger toppled backwards in the hallway beside him. Bracing himself the necromancer pushed against the sealed cell door until he reached a standing position . Looking to his comrade, the warrior grunted. He was alive. Disappointing. Or it would have been had the Sith had the ability to touch the powers of life and death. As it was, the wizard’s mind felt overwhelmingly cut off from everything he had known for years. He was dependent on the warrior more than he would have liked to admit. Even with his new body, he felt frail, old, aged beyond the natural state of being. ___________________________ Elsewhere across the station, the realization of an assault had become all too clear. The station had been breached. The finality of what that meant had begun to set in across the crew. There was no time for goodbye comms. Each man and woman had been required to complete end of life documents, goodbye letters, wills, and the like. It was a boring task that nobody really took that seriously. The station had stood to this day unaccosted. The clock continued to count down. When it reached zero, they would all die; a station plummeting towards the world below, all exits sealed and antimatter cores primed for detonation. Knowing their demise was near, each member of the crew set about the ending of their lives with grim determination. Safety protocols were removed. Droids designed to secure at all costs had long forgotten programming activated from the main control core. While lethal before, they were contained by a level of protective lines of code. No more. Any resistance would be met with beyond lethal force; preservation of the station was no longer of any concern. Amongst it all, corrupt lines of computer code continued to play havoc across the station. Even amongst the plummeting prison, industrialized cleaning supplies and processing equipment continued to activate and deactivate as if possessed by a phantom. While concerning, it had little overall effect on the prison as it moved towards its doom; that is, until it had replicated enough to touch on the systems controlling both life support and artificial gravity. Bodies began to float upwards, the magnetized feet of the security droids the only thing keeping them grounded. What breathable air remained aboard was all that there was or was ever going to be. In population dense and tightly sealed small areas there was less conscious time left than the plummeting station had remaining. Anyone clearing one meter above the floor was determined to be in flight, a prohibited act. It was an act classified as attempted escape. It was a punishable offense. With restrictions removed, stun batons were cranked to eleven. Anything beyond a brief touch would result in complete bodily incapacitation and death. ____________________________ As he quietly cursed his lack of connectivity to the force, the sorcerer felt a ripple. It felt almost like, like death. The moment that Solus undertook the slaughter of the fragile force-repellent lizards several walls away, the repelling bubble of the force rippled and flickered. For a mere moment those closest to the center of the assault could feel something. For a moment, the force shimmered before its glimmer was forces back beyond the breach by the overlapping bubbles of ysalamir bubbles. In that brief moment, Inmortos could taste it. This station reeked of death. Countless lives had been snuffed out here, forgotten by the galaxy as a whole. Voices of the spirits that haunted the halls of this penitentiary cried out. Unheard by the unattuned, their long stifled cries assailed the Vurk bombarding him with hissing whispers and shrieks. And then they were gone. The silence fell like a blanket and Inmortos blinked heavily trying to understand what had just happened. Bits of information that had filtered through the cacophony floated in his mind. The turret at the opposite end of the hall began to belch volleys of red destruction. Reaching out, Inmortos’ arthritic hand grasped at the now floating @Mavanger hoping to pull him to safety. As he moved, floating upwards with the lack of artificial gravity, the necromancer’s eyes saw through the small security window high in the door. What he saw within was a prisoner who was too dangerous to be released into the general populace. A huge slathering whipid covered in matted hair floated in his cell clawing at the walls leaving deep grooves in the reinforced plating, seeing the floating robed being outside his cell, the monstrous beast launched himself across the weightless room. His weight rattled the door as he slammed into it.
  10. Inmortos’ face was twisted in a way that could only relay the fact that he was probably sick to his stomach. The truth was that was not quite it, not really. His stomach was churning, but not from something he had eaten. This body was not the original vessel of Eligreen, the Firrerreo son of Coruscant’s factory workers. This one had been stolen from an ancient Jedi, he that had imprisoned Calypso, new dark lady of the Sith. It was a body that had been sustained for centuries by the force. In its past life, the living force had flowed through the Jedi. Recently, the spirit of the Jedi had been forcibly evicted and Inmortos had taken up residency. The body now was possessed by the dark twisted powers of death itself. Well, it had been. The bubble of anti-force was doing more than muffling the power of that cosmic energy that held the galaxy together; it was holding Inmortos together on a metaphysical level. By pure force of will, the body remained together, possessed by the spirit of a master of death. He could feel the body falling apart at the seams as it decayed from the inside out. As the ship clanged to a rough landing with the shields flaring back to life behind them, the reptilian Sith groaned in pain, the taste of bile filling his mouth. If anything, the lack of force connectivity seemed even stronger within the prison. If this was where Nok Morliss was being held, they would be lucky if he was only insane. As Solus clanged off the craft and vanished into the malfunctioning bowels of the prison craft, Inmortos could not help but smile weakly. “Always something to prove, the young have.” Akheron followed shortly after. Klaxons began to scream up and down the ship. The bisection of a security droid, on camera no less, was cause for an even higher security alert. Mechanical malfunctions were one thing, but an invasion? That was entirely different. Prisoners would be herded and contained. Those that resisted would be subdued, lethally if necessary. Squadrons of security droids were activated throughout the ship. Blast doors began to slam shut all over the station. Gone was the idea of ever trying to salvage the slowly plummeting prison yard in the sky. With a sigh, Inmortos shoved against his chair, his revolting body creaking to a standing position. Leaning heavily in his cane, Inmortos shuffled forward. The clump of his cane seemed to echo against the very air; a reverberating sign that the necromancer still carried with him the aura of death. Stepping into the landing bay, Inmortos was scanned by the turret over top of the doorway into the station. That doorway was quickly closing; a response to the triggered security measures. The turret did not open fire. Inmortos body was already dead by all scientific measures. Lurching forward, Inmortos fumbled with the chromium hilt that fell from his sleeve into his hand. Catching it before it fell to the floor, Inmortos ignited the weapon. Instead of the usual energized hiss the red blade erupted in rush of whispers. Spirits bound to the blade beyond the touch of the force. The room seemed to darken as shadows grew longer bathed in a deep blood red. Holding the saber in the air the defensive cannons locked onto them. Inmortos could hear them spiraling to life with energy as they targeted the known hostile weapon. Just before they erupted, Inmortos fell forward face planting on the deck plates as his saber sizzled against the slamming doors. The cannons fired. They filled the room with the din of warfare echoing in a cacophony of ear-splitting destruction. Blaster fire to destroy a ship tore into the blast door in showers of slag and sparks. Just beneath it all Inmortos clenched his eyes as destruction broke loose above him.
  11. “Krath Apothos still has use to the Sith, to me.” Inmortos murmured aloud to no one in peticular as he slowly raised a tridactyl hand as if to swat at some invisible pest buzzing about his robed head. “Waste not, want not.” He swatted again at the air, this time with both hands, fighting an annoyance it would seem was unseen by the others. The spirits, giddy with the revelations of such a gathering of Sith buzzed about the necromancer’s head like gnats. Their excitement at the knowledge they had gleaned from the world of the living and impending destruction, addition of souls to their own tortured remnants excited some. Others swirled angrily, Inmortos their only recognized path of release, desiring not the advent upon the orbital platform and sure destruction that was to follow. Here on this placid world they had found a sense of solace; a peace the Sith seemed fated to disrupt. With a touch of the force, Inmortos was able to seat away the swarm casting it into the brush beyond the group. The scrub rustled and cracked as if an animal had been lurking within, only to grow still again as the invisible spirits circled back into the air. And yet, it granted the necromancer a moment of respite as he continued to grapple with this newfound avenue of the worlds beyond. Following the direction of Lord Mavanger and the excitement of the lightsaber-blade-to-be, Inmortos shuffled towards the revealed means of their alightment above. Pausing at the threshold of the ship, Inmortos did something quite unnatural. He inhaled deeply and sharply. It was a gasp of a breath, one that came as much as a surprise to him as it rattled the body of the ancient Jedi he now possessed, as it would to any of the others. He felt it. The aura of the force-repelling lizards seemed to envelope him in their cocoon of repellant, an odd embrace that to Solus seemed to present a mere hiccup against his mechanized for. To the average sentient soul it might be little more than a douse of cold water in the face as their grasp upon the metaphysical was swept away. To Inmortos; however, it was different. Having walked the road of death and strayed upon both sides of the divide, sustained by the force itself, the revelation of the ysalamiri was twofold. First, it served to dull the buzzing twitterpating of the spirits that now seemed to hound him until he could regain a mastery over their kind; opening up a strange aura of peace as he finally became aware of the distant chirping birds and nature that lay behind him and the sterile machine-washed glow of the craft he now stood before. It was almost familiar, line the cousin of an old friend; different but recognizable. Was this what death was meant to be? A sense of peace that washed over one’s haggard life’s work in the final moments? And the final moments were what it seemed, for unlike the others, bound to the trail of life, Inmortos’ newfound body suddenly convulsed as the physical began to react to the unnatural horrors necromancy by it’s very nature enacted upon it. The filling and cleansing of souls, the wresting of control between two consciouses. The sudden ebb of death itself as it reached out from the grave to grasp at Inmortos’ bodily form, recognizing it and him for what they were, an imposter, powerless within the tranquility of the ysalamiri. Lurching forward, Inmortos grasped the frame of the door heavily as he leaned against it, his legs feeling weak beneath him. Clutching the doorway, he stumbled forward, moving from one supportive handhold to another as he leaned on his ever present cane until at last he could turn and fall into a seat. His breathing was ragged as he held up a three-fingered hand, already the onslaught of the grave was beginning to make it’s mark, his green fingers blackened as if by severe frostbite; the sensation of his appendages growing numb and tingling. Without the power of the force, all that held the finality of the end at bay was the will of the spirit of Inmortos himself, unwilling to meet his end. Not this way. Not now. Not ever.
  12. The journey to the Nespis system passed without incident, more so, it passed in silence. The frozen interior of the ship surpassed even the temperatures of the void of space that hung about the Eternus. The coordinates were easy enough to find, even as Inmortos had to take control of the lifeless body that had ferried his chariot thus far. There was only so much a dead man could do without any spark of eternity. Flying in low over the treetops, the yacht had hopefully avoided any unwanted attentions. Landing, Inmortos was surprised to see another craft setting amongst the trees. As the landing ramp silently lowered, Inmortos was struck by the warmth, the life, of the planet. Even without a living and thriving civilization the place stank of life. Wrinkling his elongated scales face in disgust, the necromancer slowly descended the ramp. Plumes of frigid air rolled out from beneath the charred and tattered Jedi robes that hung over Inmortos’ Vurk body, the body of the Jedi who had fallen Calypso thousands of years ago and had been gifted to the god-king by the reawakened Sith Lord. At the bottom of the ramp, they started again. The whispers of the dead; millennia old ensnared in the lost histories of this world. The necromancer grimaced. This newfound doorway into death’s deepest reservoirs torn open to never be shut again. It was not the face he intended as @Mavanger came into view. Pushing the frustrations of the damned from the forefront of his mind even as they whispered to him, Inmortos regarded the Sith Warmaster with his burning red reptilian eyes. “Well met Lord Mavanger,” he called aloud, his voice deep, rhaspy and booming, a byproduct of still coming to grips with the new body that he possessed. “The spirits spoke of your presence and I will admit I am pleased to see you. It is my hope that Lord Akheron and his apprentice will be joining us. Together, we will free my wayward apprentice.”
  13. The Eternus trailed in the wake of the Fangs of Darkness. The dead pilot’s head lolled to the left at an unnatural angle, his hands locked rigidity to the yoke of the yacht. Aside from him, who did not count as a dead man, the only entity aboard the hollow vessel. The Sith had spent the journey sitting in silence, bathed in the washing whispers of the souls of the dead he carried contained on his person, contained within his person. Jedi, Sith, soldiers, artisans and commoners mixed their voices along those of priests and necromancers and rulers. Each spoke with an individuality that Inmortos had not known to carry so well beyond the ethereal plane of death; at least not without special care. These souls presented new opportunities and fearsome truths. Inmortos barely conversed, his eyes sunken back in unblinking fear as his deepest secrets were laid bare before him. Even as he sought to be remembered in this world, the name of Inmortos was known and whispered of by the spirits of the next, of the eternal silence. Ah, yes, the eternal silence; it was not as silent as Inmortos had believed. This changed everything. No longer could he pry the last vestiges of secrets from the mind of a dead with a sacrificial dagger and the force, nor more mist he just induce the freshly fallen to babble that which brought about their untimely ends. No, now he, Inmortos, could have the histories he so fervently studied lived out before him. He would no longer study dying moans and dusty tomes. Now, he would watch as the greatest dramas of the galaxy were reenacted before him at his very will, all he would need do is subject these specters. ”ENOUGH!!” The necromancer bellowed into the empty blackness that filled his ship like ink. His hands snapped up cover the holes that made up his reptilian ears as if that would stop the babbling of the damned. It did not; nor did his command. They only surged harder sensing the Sith’s frustration at their very existence. Slamming his thick three-fingered appendages onto the edges of the stone coffin he sat in, his blunted claws cracked as they ground against the ancient stone of the kingly burial box. With each crack, ice began to lace outward from the Vurk’s body. His breath exhaled in plumes of crystalized steam. The temperature within the ship rapidly began to descend to that outside. The fact that Ziost even existed was lost on the necromancer as he battled the demons that he now was privy to, a world within the world, a galaxy within the galaxy, a cosmos inside a cosmos. With a crescendoing by snarl, Inmortos pushed himself to his feet, his breath snorting in plumes of steam from his nose like an angry bull; and with his voice’s rise the temperatures of both realities plummeted until ice and frost coated the inner surfaces of the Eternus . The view screen grew opaque with frozen condensation until it was as solid as a whitewashed wall. Finally Inmortos’ ears were assaulted by silence, pure, sweet, unending silence. The spirits, like the world around him were frozen, unable to talk, unable to move, unable to speak. Sinking back into his coffin, thr Vurk turned his seething embered eyes to the frozen corpse draped about the console. “The Nespis System. NOW!” He snarled as the body jerked to life, his actions guided by the shadows of life left at his passing and not by another chattering soul of the dead. With jerking unnatural movements the body righted itself, ligaments snapping against the cold as the pilot’s rotted frame animated and began the process to jump to hyperspace. In a matter minutes the sleek black yacht leapt towards the arcing blue white stars leaving Ziost and the future of the Sith Empire behind him.
  14. Aboard the Eternus, Inmortos stood regarding the almost seemingly frail woman that was to be the new dark lord, his new dark lord. In the heavy silence, he could feel the force churn, her presence carving a wake that rippled out to unknown means and ends. There was more. The eternal expanse of death that cradled this once civilized world torn by war and devastation was ever present. It pressed in from all corners; his touch heavy even on the ghostly echoes of the force. On that invisible fog, specters moved; wraiths bound beyond their own demise, souls lost to wander eternity, shackled just beyond the mortal coil. It was a fate worse than death, a fate that awaited any unclaimed by their god and carried to a place of rest or torment beyond the horizon. They whispered to Inmortos, their tongues a dozen languages if a thousand and yet he heard them, understood their desires. It was an entire spectrum of death unseen; an invisible door opened to the power of Inmortos, the necromancer, god and yet student of death. And as they whispered, one voice carried above the rest. It was a nameless form, crystalline in light as freshly fallen snow. The spirit of the Jedi body he now inhabited called out from beyond his prison of ebon steel. It echoed in the flesh that even now began to rot beneath the necromancer’s touch. It mingled itself with the very essence of the lord of the dead. So he stood, regarding @Darth Calypso with the eyes of both a Sith and something more, the echoes of a Jedi. It was not hate, but as it mingled with the vileness of the dead that was how it bloomed; a wicked flower of contempt and sorrow that bid Inmortos lash out, here, in this his own ship, with none to play witness. His red eyes shimmered wickedly. The necromancer’s hands were stayed. Even as a Sith was tied to his emotion, Inmortos knew better. He was not a mere warrior or apprentice tossed by his flaming desires of passion. There was more at stake, history, eternity, the new horizons of the damned that now presented themselves. This queen, prophesied about across the annals of history, had not yet grown into the blossom and thus was offered the armor of prophecy itself, the shield of fate. He would follow her, bend his knee to her will that his own might grow; even as the voices urged him to lash out, to kill her before her time. A slight smile twisted across the necromancer’s face as the twisted rotted remains of his pilot began to lift the sleek evil yacht from the ground. “Calypso,” he ket the name hang in the air. “Surely that would prophecy guide your hand as sure as your will is bound to it’s writings. I am but a servant of the force, of death itself, manifest upon the nightmares of those who stand in our way ne’er to be forgotten.” The ship rumbled silently, leaving @Karys Narat iv-Adas and @Solus to find their own landing craft to ferry them upwards. After all, he had complete his end of the bargain; to see to the logistics was below his station, assigned to the lord of wrath. As the ship broke the atmosphere, the last remaining longship of Clan Brasganu stood in the distance, a floating specter against the debris-clouded stars. “Death; however, offers mercy to those that might accept my embrace Lord Calypso. To that end, my apprentice, the sniveling Nok Morliss, transformed beneath my hand into the fearsome and gluttonous @Krath Apothos was captured by the forces of light as they sought to overcome the walls of despair and corruption by which he ruled the blue pearl of Dac. He was taken by them and lost beyond my view. Lost beyond death I had believed; but even now, the voices of the damned whisper to me, their blood spilled into sacred geometries that need but interpretation. They speak of his tortured existence, imprisoned within a void of the force itself. If we, the might of the Sith, are to fall into shadows, it would not do to abandon one whose loyalty is indebted to me even yet. For someday, he might become a foe worthy of laying waste to worlds commanded by the Jedi. With your permission, I will leave you aboard the ship of Brasganu, their fear of their masters to keep them bayed. I will then venture to the prison of Apothos and with those Sith who do not fear the forces of light, liberate a brother whose name may yet be spoken of in whispers of fear by the damned.” Once aboard the clan’s massive remaining ship, joined by Akheron and Solus, Inmortos laid out his visions, the whispers of the dead and dying carried across the cosmos. Nok Morliss was alive and he, Krath Inmortos, god-king of death, would be sallying forth to return him to the fold. He had but one offer, “Join me. Leave your ship in the command of our new lord, for servant and steel will be of little use to us where we go. Purge the cages of our enemies, show them that even as our brethren are beaten back, we will not falter, will not fall.” Without the distraction of baubles and acolytes, Inmortos hoped for a chance to use the Shard’s seemingly unique skills. If he lived, he would gain, if he died, Inmortos would enshrine his soul in eternity within a new blade. If all else failed, the brute strength of Akheron might yet carry the day. Regardless of their decision, Inmortos would soon alight aboard his solitary vessel, the Eternus; his quest set.
  15. After sitting for what seemed like hours, offering bits of information no mortal man ought to to complete the tales wove by @Karys Narat iv-Adas, Inmortos smiled. It was not a pleasant smile, as he grew accustomed to his new monstrous form. Still, the prophesied @Darth Calypso witch’s words hummed like a piercing note that bypassed sinews, flesh, and mental defense. She had acknowledged his skill, his godhood in even a way that Akheron and Solus could not, were too blind to see. He was a master of the Sith, a master of death itself. Yet still, her words of empowerment came with a challenge, a caveat, a chink in his proverbial armor. Hidden within his soul beyond the grasp of his body, chains that still clawed at his mind holding it back from true unrestrained greatness. A deep bow of his head to the dark witch was all he offered in return. Words would cheapen such a moment and by now all too many words had been offered. Gather an army, nearly 10,000 souls cleaved from their bodies given a half-life in a Sith magick-filled ritual of death and blasphemy; forced into unnatural spectral bodies to serve yet again. To gather such a force, a fraction of the tide of devastation that could be wrought, would be challenging amongst the flames and even moreso the enemy patrols. To march their army from this place would bring attention to their existence. To land the final remaining flagship of the Clan would be to invite certain hellfire the likes of which escape would be folly. Yet he had been given a task, one that the prophesied one had bestowed, another chain to be broken. As he considered the monumental task before him, the Shard @Solus was already scurrying from the scene like a stone tumbling down a hill. Inmortos sighed heavily, his eyes rolling unnaturally far back into his triangular head. Summoning a mangled piece of bent metal, the necromancer leaned heavily on the makeshift cane. He moved to follow the skittering stone, his presence on the force a vast cloud of icy spikes that lanced into the superheated air of the temple indentation. He moved after the others, a slow creeping methodical pace. Ever step an echo of the past into eternity. His mind churned with his task as he processed it, a wicked smile lighting his undead eyes. He was to gather the army. It was up to Akheron to board it aboard his ship; the necromancer’s having been destroyed by the unchecked greed of Sith left to their own devices. Once beyond the devastated crater, Inmortos would summon an army of mangled dead from across the history of the world, fallen Taung and forgotten slaves, none that remained hidden within the graves of Coruscant would be left untouched; but first… the flames and hell-scared lava fields before them radiated with fingernail curling destruction. Already he could feel scales warming to blistering on his new body. The void that was the force stretched across the cosmos to the lifeless fields of Aaris III, chilled to absolute solidification by the vastness of space and despair. It was enough. A frigid wind whipped the charred robes about the undead lizard. They erupted from the very air about them ripping past the gathered Sith feeding the flames even as they extinguished the heat that radiated outward. The winds curled the flames like elongated reaching fingers that clawed at the air. The red-orange flames morphed beneath the touch of the dark side, paling as they turned blue, glowing with unnatural power. The lava fields began to solidify, the very heat of Coruscant unable to stand against the onslaught of the necromancer’s power. From there, they could traverse easily until they climbed from the crevasse into the slums that surrounded the morphed and mangled destruction.
  16. In the silence that followed his pledge, Inmortos held the talisman, waiting. It was but a moment before it was broken, not by accolades or challenge from this dark enchantress, no, but by words that tumbled from the mouth of Lord Akheron with limnal blade in hand. And oh how he drolled on. Inmortos’ elongated teeth ground together as the Sith Warrior openly contradicted him even as he openly questioned his own moral high ground. When he finally stopped his monologue, Inmortos turned, calmly, his presence that of a glassy lake surface, a lake of untold depths, depths that contained secrets and monsters untold. ”Lord Akheron,” he spoke, the iciness of his reptilian voice doing little to camouflage the soul contained within this new hulking form or the disdain he felt for the one who would dishonor him so openly before another. “As an acolyte of the Fanged God, priest of The Father of Dust, and fellow lord-captain, you dishonor me.” Taking a single thunderous booted step forward, Inmortos stared into Akheron’s eyes, his pulsating red orbs glowing like soulless hellscapes from within his triangular Vurk head. “Have you read the prophecies?” His voice burned with disdain, a side effect of the new mind and body he now possessed. Emotions that now reared their heads under the freedom of the broken chains of the Jedi. “Studied the teachings of the ancients, the musings of the enlightened, the lost manuscripts of our forefathers? Have you translated the works of forgotten religions, the scrolls of the damned? Where were you when I, by the lamplight, poured over the accursed tomes of the abyss? Have you probed the minds of the dead, or merely rendered them so, to see the secrets of lifetimes laid bare before your eyes” The more he spoke, the more the revile in his voice coalesced back into pure icy nothingness, the emotionless pit of the void untouched by mortal emotions “Where are your libraries of forbidden knowledges and profane words unheard by mortal ears since before the galaxy was tamed? Are you a scholar of the profane mystery or are you a warrior to lead our remaining people in holy battle? Sheath your tongue then. Sheath that worthless blade and loose your true weapon of war that you were bestowed by the Fanged God.” “I am that scholar; and do you know what I have found? Prophesies from a thousand cultures, tales of a million peoples, whispered secrets of countless loose-lipped and love-lorn beings long dead, that point to this place, this world, this manifestation of the true Fanged God!” He pointed to Calypso behind him as he stated matter-of-factly, “She is the culmination of them all.” Inmortos leaned back from his looming step forward, his cold voice continuing to cool from the fire that had touched it. “The spark has left the Sith. The avatar of the Fanged God, defiled. In our own wisdom, the Sith chose a leader, thinking ourselves greater than The Golden Slave. In that choice, the Fanged God saw fit to favor us in our disobedience, a reward to sate it’s hunger, in our punishment. The wastes of Nar Shadaa even now are laid bare, the Sith destroyed alongside the forces of the Rebellion; and yet, our foes, our oppressors, the Jedi, stand tall. We grew too haughty and defiled the dark and have paid. The prophecies foretold of this day, but did any listen? I say we did not. And we were cut down for it, the weak left to die in the dust of a Hutt’s latrine, where you and the crystal would have met your end, had it been not for me. My ship is gone. My crew, awaiting my touch for life everlasting, wantonly cut down by Sith vain pride. And yet, you dare to question the ancients who foretold of this day. I, a Lord-Captain of Clan Brasganu, and holy priest of The Father have seen it. Let us bow low before the Fanged God, defile ourselves in dust that we might regain favor in it’s eyes, regaining our rightful place as the House of Dragons at the head of the Sith war machine.
  17. Cold, dark, stillness, eternal nothingness confined within the tapered span of a dagger’s razored edge; it was nearly peaceful if it was not suffocating. Time spanned eternal and eternity seemed bit a moment. Within, a single soul existed, completely and totally alone, hanging in the balance of a prison that spanned forever and yet imprisoned him within it’s crushing walls. It was a void that threatened to collapse one into itself, into utter nothingness, at a moment’s notice. It was here that the frozen soul, all that remained, of Inmortos existed, tortured in a purgatory of eternal despair. That was, until, it wasn’t. With a sickeningly wet thud the dagger rocketed into the chest of the legion-possessed Jedi, dead yet alive, preserved by sick machinations of the force both good and bad. In an instant, the prison walls of Inmortos’ penitentiary of despair were washed away, replaced by howls of agony and the cacophony of chaos bound souls that screamed. Oh how they screamed. Ten thousand tortured existences fighting for control of a single body, a single mind. The soul of the ten thousand slain howled, sacrifices to the god-king of Aaris III; plus another, that of the ancient Jedi buried deep, the only beacon of peace in the ravaged mindscape they know fought in. Ibto the fray of ten thousand and one plunged one other, the god-king himself, the flayer of Aaris III, the master of death. Inmortos was pounced upon by the spirits he had freed; but even in their undead state, torn from their lives prematurely and held from completing their transitory journey upon the mists, they knew him. They recognized his scent, the scent of death, the master of death. They recognized their former god and recoiled in fear. Priests, acolytes, peasants, soldiers, and kings alike shrank back in fear at the overwhelming presence of their god. Their howls of pain that escaped from the writhing body of the Jedi ceased replaced by fearful whimpers and yelps of pain. The body of the Jedi stood, clawing at the air as if it was trying to climb an invisible ladder, a coordination of fear by the spirits as they tried to grab onto anything, nothing, to escape the wrath of he who had imprisoned them. And with each clawing grasp the body rose into the air on icy winds that seemed to manifest from nowhere, on the force. Each contraction of muscle slowed until the body froze solid, encapsulated in ice hundreds of feet in the air. Within, the soul of Inmortos moved. Without mortal form to slow him, he coursed through the ancient Jedi’s frigid body. He gave chase to the spirits, ferreting them from the shadows, the shadows of a Jedi, where they cowered in fear. Most were cut down in a icy blast of raw void-filled force power. Each one contributing to the freezing of their host’s body. Each one sapping the life from the very thing they craved, driven back towards the gagger from whence they had come. The few who stood when cornered were seized and shaken, cast out of the corpse’s maw, frigidnicy shadows that plummeted to the ground below where they righted themselves, shadows of their former selves. They charged at any who lived, @Darth Calypso @Karys Narat iv-Adas @Solus. It did not matter, all were equal to them, their souls tortured and fractured. They screamed an ethereal scream that penetrated bones and steel with reverberations of destruction as they charged. High up in the air, the unfettered fractured frozen soul of Inmortos poured forth soulfrost, excess from his ragged soul until not just the body of the Jedi, but the souls within were frozen. The incorporeal made corporeal. All but one, the tattered soul of the nameless Jedi instructor. It radiated a soft warmth that rejected the blasts of soul-binding eternally frozen servitude that Inmortos spewed. Inmortos could not bear it. He heard the words of the unknown Sith they had discovered, the ancient sorceress he had read of in long forgotten tomes. She had cast his eternal damnation into the heart of he who had felled her and bid him rise. To prove he was a Sith, to ravage the beast that had fallen she who had been spoken of in the prophesies of a thousand tribes and tongues, a dark witch who heralded a new age of shadow against the sunrise. He had to prove his worth to her. He had to earn his place in her new order. His task beneath the master of the Krath, the great jostling Sheog, had been set. He had destroyed his own legacy, brought a world low, and for what? He had not gained the power to inhale the life from a planet and render it lifeless. He still needed his minions, his acolytes and worshipers. To accomplish the task to become as great as the circus master, to surpass him, Inmortos had but one trial left, to claim the soul of a foe greater than he. This dark witch, she who would become the master of the remnants of the Sith, those strong enough to survive the onslaught, had fallen to this, this thing. This beast that had slain her with his mastery of the force so many years ago would serve as his final sacrifice. “prove it” she said. and so he would. Charging forward, the spirit of Inmortos tore through the ice-encased frozen body. Line a jagged blade his essence cut from deep within, veins bursting and freezing in explosions of solidified droplets of blood that rained down from the heavens. The spirit of the Jedi sat there, peacefully pulsating. It did not rise, it did not taunt or challenge him. Inmortos screamed as he neared the spirit. His otherworldly cry pierced the ice like rice paper. Just before they collided, the spirit of the Jedi reacted, throwing up a shield of purified peace drawn from the echoed of life, the same echoes of death that fed Inmortos. They slammed together and the frozen body in the air began to shudder, great blocks of ice breaking off with chunks of frozen flesh and robe caught up in them. They too plummeted downward. Sparks of light seemed to flash through the frozen body as two souls locked in combat eternal. Souls lived eternal and their battle could be, would be, timeless. It could not be. To do so would condemn the god of death to a fate worse than that he commanded. Inmortos knew it. He would not accept it. Grappling soul to soul high in the sky above his devastated home world, Inmortos felt it growing within his bodiless soul. It was not fear, that was always there; it fueled his every step. No, it was a cold fire, a cold indignant anger that bubbled up from beneath the ice. Anger that this prophesied priestess would dare to question his abilities. Rage that she would dare submit him to a test that she had failed. Ire that the Sith would fall so willingly in a pointless crusade, to give up a galaxy ripe for the plucking. Outrage that this vain-filled Jedi spirit thought it could stand up to him. Wrath that anyone would threaten his legacy. Fueled by his own bone-chilling firey passion. Inmortos slammed himself into the soul of the Jedi Sage with enough force that the body itself rocked in the air, the winds of cryogenic cold falling still. And they began to tumble, two disembodied cries echoing from the same twisted open maw as the body of the Jedi plummeted to the exposed warehouse and land below. The struggle was immortal, relentless. Time meant nothing when trapped between life and death. Life was but a fleeting moment and death was a destination, the journey to which could last eons. And so the spirit of the Jedi and that of Inmortos traded blows for centuries, millennia, even more; and in a matter of seconds, they slammed into the ground. Plumes of blue white flames erupted from the impact obscuring the form from view. The screams of burning flesh, of ten thousand thousand burning corpses erupted from the flames. From those flames rose a solitary figure draped in burnt and blackened robes, the body of the Jedi, his eyes lifeless, glowing a blood- red radiation of hatred and pain from beneath the deep cowl. ”I am Inmortos.” the form cried out from within the freezing blue flames that licked about him but did not touch him. His voice was different, mutated, deep, alien, powerful, alive. Withdrawing a three-fingered reptilian hand from his robes, the form clutched the dagger that had contained the ten thousand, that had contained Inmortos, that now contained . . . ”Your Jedi foe.” He spat, throwing the dagger to the earth with a clatter against the compacted soil and steel at the feet of Calypso. Turning his head first to the left and then to the right, Inmortos saw his brothers, Akheron and Solus. He gestured to them. “My brothers,” he said turning his attention back to the dark witch. “We have come to serve you mistress.” Slowly, the new form of Inmortos bowed low, holding the pose as he continued. “But your armies have been depleted. Lost by the wastefulness of youth. Allow me to bestow upon you your first gifts worthy of claiming the title of prophecy.” Slowly rising, Inmortos began to chant. It was an ancient tongue, as profane as it was forgotten. It predated the Sith, the Jedaii, it even predated star travel itself. The frost spewing flames began to expand out from the necromancer’s epicenter of power. Blue-white embers erupted upwards in a plume of flame that drifted downward to the ground beyond the sinkhole. Each contained a frozen soul, those of the ten thousand that had not been slain in the battle. As they touched the parched thirsty ground, each ember erupted in flames leaving a ghostly kobold-esque being standing there; rotted undead beings of flesh, called up from the nether regions of the force to grotesque mutated monstrous shadows of their former selfes . Each bore claws, spears, blades, weapons that could pierce flesh and bone to destroy the souls, the energized life forces of every single thing that stood in their way. Nearly ten thousand souls stood bound to this plane, their pain consuming, their fear intoxicating, their rage boiling. They surrounded them all, circling the sinkhole in ranks. ”An army,” he hissed. With a wave of his hand the bodies fell, the rotted stench of their true forms rising freely. A solitary flicker of fire kindled upwards from Inmortos’ massive paw. “For you.” The flame went out, leaving a deep blue crystal that seemed to shift in shade, like it contained a magical blue flame, the longer one looked at it. He extended his hand, his thick reptilian forearm jutting forth from the robes. He tilted his hand and the totem fell, catching on the silvery chain that held it. The power to command this army of the dead, called from beyond the grave, across the cosmos, bound to this galactic plane by their chained souls within the totem.
  18. Inmortos’ bones shook as he was lambasted by the unfettered power of the apparitions made real. He felt the heat of the hellfire as it erupted all around him replacing the tomb within which they were confronted. The chill that had come to inhabit the necromancer’s bones was replaced as heat and fire licked at his form, igniting his robes into a blistering inferno all about him. His rotting flesh crackled and sparked as globules of fat burst and boiled over. His flesh began to cook and sizzle beneath the assault. In it all, through the pain and flame, the dark magician recoiled in fear. The apparitions swarmed him with the echoes of a thousand of his own memories and a million memories of those condemned to this place. He could not resist as the dark power sought to overwhelm him. He saw the faces of all who had fallen by his hand and deed, faces he did not even know or had forgotten, the countless worshipers of Aaris III, those who had stood against him in futility; they were all there and the echoes of their lives and deaths clawed at the flaming Lich’s very soul seeking to drag it into the depths. And then the voices came. From every direction they came. Their voices assaulted what remained of his devastated ears, their messages reverberating not just within his ears to hear but within his heart, his mind, his soul. They screamed and tormented him beyond the touch of the flames and visages of destruction. They tapped his very core in a different way playing off his deepest fears. He would be forgotten. He would be destroyed. He would die, an eternal death consumed by flames. He was too weak. He would not survive. The voices declared it and in the darkest most twisted aspects of evil, they spoke the truth, a cruelty far worse than any lie. Destroy the dagger, the voices commanded it. Inmortos saw the blade in his hand, felt it clutched within his heat-seared bones. The dagger. The force. One was before him. The other all around him burning in chaotic despair. His body was rapidly failing him, an undead husk unable to heal, baked to a crisp in this illusionary field of wickedness. Inmortos felt the pain, the suffering, as his own demise crested the horizon. The dagger. He felt it, cool in his hand. A vestigial connection to beyond the all consuming destruction that was overtaking him. Aaris III. The Baptism of Blood. The souls of @Karys Narat iv-Adas and @Solus . He felt them all, bound in some form to the dagger. The dagger the voices screeched to destroy. The 10,000 souls of sacrificial innocents lying within craving release, hopeless in their imprisonment. It was enough. Inmortos knew he would die, his mortal form already being consumed by the dark side energies that manifested about him. The cool abyss of Aaris III, the still darkness of the force torn asunder by the trio of dark practitioners, absolute in it’s destruction, absolute in it’s deathly calm. It was enough. The dagger. Inmortos screamed in pain. His voice was drowned out by the roar of the flames and screams of the shadows of the damned. In agony, he clasped the hilt of the blade in both hands before his melting face wreathed in flame. Summoning his last stores of strength, the strength of the undead, untapped by mortal hands, Inmortos plunged the dagger into his own chest. Ribs snapped and baked flesh parted as the piercing accursed weapon pierced his heart, his very soul. Blood and ichor poured forth freely, ignited by the dark fired. It was a final act of defiance as the souls within the blade found a conduit of escape. Like a charging horde they were loosed unto the mortal world, the illusionary bindings of the force broken by their charge. Thundering forth they pierced the flames and entered the darkness beyond seeking out 10,000 crushed bodies of Coruscant’s damned to overcome, to possess, to bring back unto a pained half-life unbridled by the shackles of life and unhindered by the barrier of death; for they had transcended it. In the vacuum that these souls left, Inmortos stood in the gap, his very soul the siphon which they shred upon their escape. The howling ethereal winds of the blade allowed for no escape. A soul must be contained, a life for a life, a soul for a soul. Inmortos tattered form vanished in an instant; his body erupting into a final burst of flames before he dissipated entirely into the dark. In that moment, the illusions were gone, the ravaged assault of the force ceased on the now vacant form lf the necromancer. The scorched cloak fell to the floor amidst the clatter of Inmortos’ fire seared possessions. The smoke that wafted upwards from the heat all that remained to the testament of destruction. Stabbed through the robe, into the stoney walkway beneath it, the dagger that had once contained the souls of 10,000 innocents stood straight, quivering as an icy chill exuded from it, daring anyone to touch it’s cold-welding hilt. Elsewhere, throughout the catacombs of destruction, the horde of souls raced, ravaging whatever might be in their path, seeking suitable bodies which to inhabit. They found none. So their anger grew, becoming more and more palpable as they sought the living, to destroy them, to take their bodies as their own.
  19. “Eligreen” the voice called out from the unnatural, giving the necromancer pause. As the Lich squinted his rotted features, his failing eyes strained to see as the gloom itself seemed to coalesce into a form. It was still dark all around them, but not quite as unnaturally so this far below ground with only the fissures of distant flames to illuminate the darkness in yawning shadows. Inmortos stopped in his tracks. “Eligreen,” it was a name he had not heard for years, a name he had left destined to a past life, but yet one that was his own. For was it not the name, bestowed upon him by his parents, that had brought him to where he was today. Here upon this very world they had toiled away in obscurity, even their deaths lost to the bustling chaos of the cosmos. And so, Inmortos stood, regarding the visage of a man before him. One who felt so familiar and yet so foreign. ”Father?” The Sith’s voice wavered slightly as he dared to question what he once thought impossible. Did this place, this darkness, too possess a power Inmortos craved, to bring from the dead true life reborn, not the half-existence he bound himself and those he commanded to? Of course, it was an admission Inmortos would not even utter to himself or dare dwell upon in any but his deepest depressions. No one need know that his power over death, life, existence, was naught but absolute. For he was the god-king, master of death, defiler of the grave, from he life was granted, and by his word it was snuffed out. Here, in this moment, standing a stone’s throw from this apparition, this being so far from himself that the devil within could not recognize it. And yet, for all his accomplishments, it chastised him. With but mere words it laid bare the necromancer’s soul. He was nothing. For all he had done, he had become less than what he was; and if this solitary wanderer of the hellscape of Coruscant was to be believed, he would amount to even less. It was the greatest fear of the dark lord. To be struck down, to die for all eternity, forgotten. The people of Aaris III were no more. They would not remember him. To the Sith, he was but a pawn, cast aside as easily as Akheron or his apprentice. To the galaxy, those that knew who and what he was, he was a monster, faceless and shapeless, whispered about in bedtime stories, but hardly believed by those who did not know. To the Jedi? He was just another foe to he felled in their crusade. All for nothing… Inmortos strained through his weak eyes, the cold air turning still and crystal about him. “I did this for you! For us!” He shouted. “For mother! So that we would not be forgotten!” He felt them then, their very essence, putrid, vile. They crept from the clefts and crevices clamoring all about him, surrounding him, tasting the air for the scent of his rotted flesh. Inmortos eyes flashed a pale wicked green in the shadows, a necromancer’s skill, a power to see beyond. Even as this mortal form decayed about his soul and his mortal vision obscured behind the opaqueness of age and degradation, his mind’s eye held true. In an instant, Inmortos no longer gazed upon a mortal world of flesh and blood, but upon a spiritual ethereal landscape. Obscured by shadows, the souls of the fell beasts who encircled him within their hunter’s snare came into sharp contrast. Worthless beyond but the most basic of uses the lot of them. He had little time to dwell on it; however, as his attention was harnessed by that which he had not expected. The visage of firereo power and beauty that was an unrecognizable alternate form of himself, he thst Inmortos could only see the disappointment of a father within, exploded in sharpest of contrasts. Not was such a being real, truthful flesh and blood, no. It was an amalgamation of dark side deceptions; powers wrapped in a burial shroud of deceit. Such a power Inmortos had never seen before, only read about in the most obscure forbidden tomes ferreted from the libraries of Korriban, Ossus, and private collections the galaxy over. Even he, the Lich god-king of Aaris thought such a fear but legend and yet… He had felt fear, it drove him. He would not be forgotten. This apparition of had cut him to the quick and pulled it into the open and still the necromancer stood in defiance. Now, but now, how could he, a demon, a legion of legions of those struck down, their pains carried beyond the grave amassed before him. To call forth a legion of undead from this place, scarred and tattered would be for nothing. They would be struck down by such a creation, bound to this palpable wraith, in an instant. Stepping back, Inmortos foot was clasped by a clasping icy hand and he fell to the ground a quivering mass. Before the might of such a guardian of hell how might he, a mere mortal, stand. Even if he might control the bridge that stretched beyond the grave, he was but a gatekeeper, privileged only to see into the mists beyond. He had delved deeper than most, but even he knew that beyond his trespasses lay greater and darker beings than he might possibly imagine. And here one had come. And for what purpose? To claim his soul for eternity? To snuff him out before he could fulfill his desires? To doom him to being forgotten? To punish him for delving too deep? Had the rift they carved in the force at Aaris III awoken a fallen hellspawn the likes of which these three Sith could not hope to stand? Inmortos’ quivered, his bones rattling beneath his robes as the cold about him, his own shroud of power, a frost he was immune to, sank into his very soul and chilled him bone, mind, and soul. To know true fear. Gone were the hollow words of the Sith creed. Gone were any allegiances to armies, allies, and gods. Here, in this moment, Inmortos was laid bare and he had not the strength to stand. He did not have the strength to kneel. To beg for forgiveness. He was sapped, the dead drawn back towards the grave itself. With the last reserves of his strength, Inmortos raised a skeletal hand as if to try and shield his eyes, his face from the horrific power before him. It did nothing. He was a master of the physically arcane, not the mystic. To stand against it was foregone to end in his destruction. Falling to his back, Inmortos felt the hot fetid breath of the unevolved beasts as their tongues and claws raked his body. He grasped for his waist, one last hope at staving off his final destiny. A sacrifice or a weapon, it would be as the fury before him perceived; Inmortos drew the blade that had been harvested from the pool of Aaris III. It was bound to him, it’s master, bound to the ritual of blood and the souls of @Karys Narat iv-Adas and @Solus through their baptism. 10,000 ensnared souls bent to his own will to appease or battle the demon-lord before him. Shivering, Inmortos thrust the blade forward, a feeble attack or a sacrifice. He knew, this would be the end.
  20. The Shard apprentice had set off in a rush on his own. Soon he was gone, quite literally swallowed up by the very ground itself, the dark side flurrying in a haze of assaultive emotions and foreign thoughts. Wherever the stone had gone, he was on his own, a victim for the force to do with as it willed. Akheron was next, even as Inmortos followed along in his wake. The deadly warrior swung his blade at unseen apparitions, battling the shadows of his own mind. Slowly, the shuffling necromancer fell further and further behind until Akheron too was lost to his blurred vision, the force fogging the very dark air within the heat-gutted lava tubes they moved through. Inmortos felt the force. It heaved as if the cataclysm that had stilled the galactic capitol still roiled within the unseen depths of pain and suffering. His eyes squinted in the darkness, their mortal existence next to worthless. His mind’s eye sought to stare through the force only to be rebuffed at every angle. Whatever was here clouded the very mind even as it sought to assail his consciousness. The force was a subtle riptide beneath the surface. It seemed to tear at anything it could grasp. Wether this was the effect of the necromancer’s heavy robes billowing before him as he moved or the icy stillness that oozed from the core of the Lich was unknown. The tunnels were hot, but with each step, an icy cold radiated on the shifting air currents about the undead walker of the precipice. Inmortos bore no weapon in his rotted hands. He needn’t one, for even here, clouded by the vortices of unknown power, his connection to the distant Aaris III, to the rift torn there, cut through the chaos like a molecularly bladed knife. From one cataclysm to the other, the Lich bound them together, their distinct shadows mixing as one. The absolute cold of his solitary tower within the wasteland across the cosmos crept from his bones. Death was present all around Inmortos, but moreso, death was present within; so as the hallucinations played havoc upon the living, the walking dead was assailed with blackness; the blackness of his own soul; the blackness of absolute nothingness, still, unrelenting, and eternal. He moved through it slowly, cautiously, a solitary predatory cat, hunting for a kill. A haunting smile played across the shrouded face of the skeletal form. “The dead do not lie.” His hissed joyfully even as he heard the scurrying of unknown living somewhere in the chasmed grotto he now walked.
  21. Wax man . . . Inmortos left the words to hang in the heavy air without retort. They were words of a tortured soul, one uniformed of the ways of the galaxy. And why should he not be tortured? Did he not throw his life needlessly in the funeral pyre of the self-proclaimed dark lord on Nar Shaddaa alongside his master? And for what? Fortune and glory? A brief moment of recognition? Such a waste of good substance. Such ignorance, if only the saber crystal might kowtow before the god-king himself, perhaps he could receive truth and knowledge unfettered. Meanwhile, the stone’s master, his handler, found joy in sending fool hearty adventurers to their death. For what reason? To exude one’s sense of power over those weaker and unworthy? Such a worthless sacrifice to none but one’s own vain glory. Such a death wasted the power of the life. Retrieving a crystalline vail from his belt, Inmortos held it aloft to view the contents, a half white milky substance that crystallized within against the heat outside. He canted it towards the burning sacrifices of Akheron and unstoppered the flask, dark deep words rumbling from his parched frozen lips to call the souls of those worthlessly thrown away to him; to ensnare that of them which was eternal for his own devices. Regarding the new as it mingled with the spilled of Nar Shaddaa and Aaris III, a smile teisted across the morphing features of the necro-shade. Satisfied, he stoppered the vial and replaced it. ”Very fascinating.” He finally responded to the droid-Sith’s musing. “But nothing like the devastations we wrought upon Aaris III. Sacrifices for a cause, to harness absolute power from beyond. Not this, the mere machinations of chaos and destruction for temporary enjoyment. Remember this young crystal; waste not. Want not.” Scanning the devastated crater with its noxious gases and fissured pathways, the necromancer gestured his fellow Sith Lord. They had already wasted enough time on the surface. To dally further would result in more unneeded deaths, including their own. “Lord Akheron, that which we seek is beyond the surface. A dark presence beckons us onwards. Unleash your blade and lead the decent into the abyss, the tenth layer of the Corellian Hells. The blood of the damned cries out to me from beyond the grave.” The words the necromancer spoke were true, mostly. It was not the damned of Coruscant that spoke to him, their blood long since boiled to ash. It was the whispers of the dead from dozens of worlds giving up their grave-held secrets. Somewhere here, unearthed by the cataclysmic chaos of a fellow Sith, was a presence barely whispered about in shadowy crevices of society. Beasts that preyed upon the weak and foolhearty, guarding a prize that could survive even the collapse of a world civilization sandwiched by a exploding moon. And so, he bid Lord Akheron to proceed first, his linnorms a worthy sacrifice for whatever dark beast lay below. A chance to attain that violent glory all warriors seemed to crave. The prize that lay beyond drew the necromancer like the pooling blood of a freshly slain battlefield. Whatever sacrifices were made upon the way, so they too might be welcomed into the god-king’s harem of dark purgatory.
  22. A small fleet of shuttles broke away from the singular surviving pirating Sith cultists’ massive gun-bristling warship as it hung high up in the noxious thin atmosphere of the devastated once-galactic capital. At their lead, the Eternus cut a sharp shadow against the sky. aboard, the undead form of Inmortos sat at the helm, an unusual spot for the god-king to take; but these were unusual times. Crowded aboard his usually desolate craft, were a strike team of linworms, alive . . . . . . and breathing. It was a courtesy to Lord Akheron. These were his men, for now, and the Sith Lord had been most accommodating to the Necromancer’s mysterious ways; even if both he and his apprentice had been struck down against their opponents upon the surface of Nar Shaddaa. It was only the Baptism of Blood that had kept them from being destroyed outright. The fact that Inmortos had to himself descend to the planet to pull his two comrades to safety was a sickening sacrifice to these mortal inadequacies. Yet, now, here they were, descending into the most dangerous area of the devastated planet. Whispers from beyond the grave, dark messages spoken about in hushed tones to those with the knowledge and power to listen. From Naboo to Falleen, Lehon to Coruscant itself, lost secrets taken to the grave were given new life in Inmortos’ ear. It was only fitting that the brain-oozing body sent to him by Solus contained just enough to tie things together, to carry them here. It was unfortunate that their fleet had to pay the price for a shadowy ruse. Maybe some day, Inmortos would return to reclaim what remained of his fallen crew. In the dark shadows of the crater, the fleet of shuttles touched down. Plumes of cracked and compacted dust billowed into the air only to be engulfed in a fireball as flames shot forth from a variety of fissures in the rubble-strewn ground. Sensors were red-lined, heat and toxins were at lethal levels. Only time would tell if the heat would drop to a more acceptable level before flames erupted again roasting anyone too close. With the press of a button, the landing ramp descended to the baked battered earth. Heat rushed up to meet him like a foul wind, tearing at robes and melting the flesh that still hung from his skeletal form. Inmortos paused, extending his arms wide as he was washed over by not just the destructive power that still radiated from this place, but by the sheer amounts of death that hung in the burnt air. Elsewhere, the planet might be slowly rebuilding, ruled in fear by Mandalorian warlords; but not here. Here, death and destruction still reigned as gods. Inhaling deeply, Inmortos allowed the fiery air to crisp his lungs in painful glory. The voices and secrets of the dead coalescing into one, somewhere near this place.
  23. Gliding through the earth-rippling explosions of the world, Inmortos moved. He seemed completely unaffected and unphased, nearly drunk upon the rapidly rising tide of death. Even a world that was mostly evacuated had millions of lives left to claim. Their deaths in ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands filled the air with thick power, as thick as the blood that ran and sizzled beneath the fiery orbital onslaught. Seeing the stumbling Akheron materialize before him down the shifting and shattering block, Inmortos raised an intrigued eyebrow. He had hoped that the warrior would have faired better. He could smell the life-leaking wounds through the bacta. As they closed, Inmortos paused, his robes swirling about his skeletal form as the soldier of war spoke and closed the distance. He listened as Akheron spoke, his hands vanishing into his heavy robes just as his cowl obscured his rotted face. Once the Sith warlord stopped talking, Inmortos nodded forward, bidding the warrior fall into step with him, the canine Tear tailing along behind. He let the Sith’s words mull about his mind before he finally responded a block later as a skyscraper collapsed in on itself with a tungsten rod thread through it’s core. ”A soul,” he spoke, considering his words carefully as he gingerly removed the shattered true body of Solus and held it aloft in front of them as they walked. “Is of little use to me unclaimed. I had hoped to gather more than the refuse of the Rebellion.” The necromancer’s words were heavy with disappointment at the losses suffered by both of his fellow formulating Sith triad. “To be plucked from the grasp of death, by death itself is” . . . . . . “Distasteful.” The group approached the open ramp of the Eternus, the ornate vessel a dark void of stillness devoid of anything except the raised dias containing his ancient stone coffin. Inmortos rolled the fractured crystal from his hand into the air, allowing gravity to take it as it fell towards Akheron’s hand. He did not watch it fall as he swept upwards into the craft, his voice carrying over his shoulder. “Our fleet is suffering delightful losses in the skies above. Already my newest vessel has been erased from existence. Their lost lives empowering my soul. Come and we shall leave this place. Perhaps maybe then, you might repay me with a worthy soul in exchange.” At the entrance to his ship, Inmortos turned and gestured, bidding Akheron, Solus, and Tear aboard. Once aboard, the ramp retracted and doors closed with a deathly finality. Lying down within his coffin, Inmortos allowed his body to fall slack, his soul exiting ghostly with a final breath as it inhabited the dead mangled body of the Falleen prison Solus had sent him. The body sat up erect, angled and unnatural with rotting bodily fluid still dripping from it’s battered skull. ”Tell your ship to meet us at these rendezvous coordinates,” the undead body garbled as it tried, and failed, to look back over it’s shoulder at Akheron. He offered a bloodied slip of paper with coordinates scrawled in an unsteady hand. His onr eye rolled back in his head as the body turned and stared at the controls, the craft lifting off from the ground and rocketing upwards through the atmosphere.
  24. The Eternus shuddered as it dropped through the chaotic atmosphere. The yacht was a decidedly out of place craft in the swirling dogfights taking place the world over. And yet, it remained unoppressed by both Sith and Alliance craft alike. A nonthreatening craft with no life signs aboard. The taste of death hung heavy in the air. Unreaped souls ripe for the taking. The atmosphere was practically dripping with them to the point that Inmortos sat straight up from his death-lime trance, called back to life with the raw power washing over the planet. As the ship settled amongst the burned out rubble of a crater that had refently been a hospital, Inmortos could not exit his vessel fast enough. As his feet touched the soul, a dark sigh of contentment escaped his lipless mouth. The blood was still fresh in the parched earth. With empty vials held in each skeletal hand, Inmortos moved from his ship and through the bombed out medical ward. Not a soul lived here amongst the dead. Ancient words of power rained from the necromancer’s skin-draped skull summoning the recently released souls from their trajectories for afterlives to himself, capturing them for eternity within his vortex of will. Each bottle filled with multiple faceless unidentified souls. It did not matter whose they were, what the stories of their lives were, they were his to do with as he pleased now; bound to his desires. One bottle filled and was stoppered and replaced by another withdrawn from the cavernous robes of the Krath. Down the shattered street, Inmortos glode like a wraith, the specter of death on the battlefield. Where he found a survivor, their life was snuffed out and soul claimed. He did not stop until the pet of Akheron’s apprentice ran into view slowing to whimper as he looked at the necromancer. The muttering stream of words falling from Inmortos ceased. ”The crystal.” He whispered sensing the trouble that the young Shard had fallen into. He chuckled menacingly. He did not know what had befallen the Sithling, but he would be there to witness it. “Lead.” He growled to the canine as he approached the saddened wardog. The canine scurried away and Inmortos followed. He did not hurry. Keyed in to the apprentice’s pain, Inmortos telished it, following the trail of suffering, disgrace, and pain through this forest kf death as easy as the hunting dog could follow the dripping wounds of a wounded ronto. As he moved, pieces of metal, of droid, fell from the sky. Pieces of Solus. Clattering at his feet, the Shard’s lightsaber landing in the dust with a plume. It was enough to stop the god-king. In a world filled with death, here was an item that hungered for it. It disgusted the lord of death that any self-proclaimed Sith would not sate such a desire. Stooping, the Sith plucked the hilt from the dust and pocketed it knowing such a weapon meant something to many. He would not allow such a thing to fall into the hands of the Jedi. Moving onward, the necromancer did not stop until he stood over the shattered Shard. His shadow fell over the cracked crystal. He regarded the damage to the apprentice, not just his exposed form, but to his soul as well. He felt the turmoil of emotions that radiated from it. His rotted tongue flicked over his jagged teeth hungrily, his own deep deathly stillness eating them up like a black hole. He could feel the would-be-assassin’s fear, his cries for mercy from his master; a master who was not here. Slowly, Inmortos reached down and clasped the broken Sith’s crystalline body amongst his bony fingertips. He held Solus up to the sky, allowing the violence of the sunlight to refract crazily through the swirling vortex of emotions that poured from the stone. “Your master cannot save you now.” Pulling the Shard’s saber from his robes, he held it gingerly beside the crystal, clanking the two together. He did not need to say a word. He had made his intentions for the stone made well enough before. To carve down the imperfections of the Sith’s shattered body and hone him into an actual weapon of the Sith, to bind his soul within a saber, his eternal damnation the power by which he could claim worlds. He smiled as his glee washed over them both before his attention was called beyond the horizon of the devastated world. Explosions rocked the world around them. Turning his lidless eyes back to Solus he hissed, “I sense your master is in trouble as well. It is good that I have come to carry you both, lest your souls be lost to the Jedi forever.” Inmortos pocketed the Shard and his saber, one on each side of his skeletal form. The deep powers of death clawed at the Shard’s soul, unable to lay claim to his fractured form. Solus’ soul belonged to Inmortos now and death would not take the fallen until the god-king loosed it from it’s bounds. “Come. Your life may yet be of use to your master.”
  25. Krath Inmortos

    Naboo

    Krath Inmortos stood within sight of his viewfinder, a chilling visage presented in the video comms of the other Clan vessels. A skeletal head swarthed in black with unblinking lifeless eyes. He did not say a word as discussions were had. His men would do their job either in this life or the next. Those who carried the day would live on in service to their dark captain, those who died would be bound for eternity, servants of the god-king himself. Even now his magics had begun to seep into the very souls of his crew and the ship itself. Death had come to live in their midst. Just before ending the comms, Inmortos’ voice rasped gratingly across the speakers, “Drive your ship into the maelstrom. Leave none alive.” His eyes then seemed to focus squarely Solus with exclusion to all others, “next time, leave their mind intact. It hastens the process by which truth is laid bare.” And with that, his comms deactivated and the ship of the dead began to angle itself for immediate hyperspace departure
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