Ziost

[Krath Inmortos]

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.

[Krath Inmortos]

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.

[Krath Inmortos]

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.

[Krath Inmortos]

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.

[Krath Inmortos]

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.”

[Krath Inmortos]

The slight lurch in the Mandalorian woman’s gait was the only outward betrayal of Inmortos possession; inly betrayal that was visible behind the helm and armored plates that is. As they walked they seemed to grow heavier and heavier, but for the moment they remained, an outward facade to shadow the true turmoil of being inhabited by the spirit of Inmortos while still living. Even now the warrior woman’s spirit tasted the turmoil of her inhabitation and regret bubbled to life deep within only to be frozen in the fearful inward gaze of death itself. Death. It would be a welcome retreat she thought somewhere in the recesses of her mind. While the warrioress seemed to maintain control of her body, it seemed that in spite of her desires to howl at the sky, to tear off her armor and ravage each and every one of these dark men and women of magic that stood before her, she could not. Fear and the urge to inflict the pain that now ravaged her on others was almost blinding in excruciation and yet she was paralyzed to it all, her will disconnected from her body but by the overshadowing will of her god. And in that fear and rage a reminder embered, she was serving her god, painful as it may be.

 

Stopping on the fringes of the assembled Mandalorians, where the Sith were assembled they stood, her body angled oddly, held straight but almost hunched in her armor. A cold aura seemed to radiate in the air around her as the presence of the god-king of death inhaled through the foreign feminine nostrils. He could sense it, almost smell it before he was drawn to it’s hidden location through the T’d visor. There in the boot of his newest project he felt them, their bound torments contained within the silvery handle. They called to him in sweet whispers of lust and hopeless desire. A smile played across the hidden face of the woman, it was Inmortos’ twisted smile splayed across her face.

 

The lord of death’s icy gaze lingered for a chilling moment on @Thought Bomb before silently turning to behold the rest. There were so many gone. So many who claimed to be the most powerful  had been destroyed, fled to beyond the bounds of civilized space, abandoned their oath and feigned dedication. Their ranks were thin, thin enough that Inmortos was surprised to see a Mandalorian clan, ancient servants of the Sith, even there. The power of the Sith was not what it had been; but with so few, their power was manifest even more; a deeper well

of power from what to draw with fewer greedy hands. Their eyes settled on @Darth Calypso, an ancient Sith reborn from the ashes of a war that had never truly ended, a war Inmortos still fought and would never forget. In the end, they would all know of these Sith, the true heirs of power, of Inmortos as the galaxy was frozen with his name the final cry on their lips. All they need do now was wait. These Sith, old and new, had heeded the call. Now let this ancient dark woman prove her worth.

[Krath Inmortos]

The Mandalorian Inmortos amalgamation stood listening to the newly proclaimed Dark Lord on high. It was the same rallying speech given a thousand times by a thousand different would be lords; and yet, a smile played across the woman’s face, for she knew. She knew. Inmortos knew. This war was not over. It had never been over. They were just the next cog in the machine of eternal damnation. They would do their part and then they would fall away, forgotten chaff all but they who struck their sigil upon eternity. All, but eternity, those bound by immortality. All but Inmortos, the god-king of death itself.

 

And yet that was what was missing as @Darth Calypso pontificated from

on high. She claimed a throne of blood. Inmortos had been there since her rebirth. She had no claim to this throne, this world,  these people. She spoke of the weakness of words, but her claim was only just that: words. When she had been reborn, she had shed no blood. @Karys Narat iv-Adas had shed blood. @Solus had spilled blood. Inmortos had spilled blood. The trio summoned to her crypt to bring forth she that stood now before them. But she, the self-proclaimed Lord of the Sith, had not cemented her claim in blood. The harbingers of her return, lords @Mavanger and @Darth Nyrys and @Exodus had carved the path for her, a path of destruction, of blood, marred on the force their feeble marks upon the eternal scroll.

 

And so he listened, his eyes scanning the feeble few who remained loyal to their ancient right, the legions of undead that now stood ready to ‘serve’ Calypso; the undead of Inmortos’ eternal plan. None stepped forward to fulfill the ancient bond. None dared throw themselves at the mercy of the dark side to do what need done. The shard had merit, Inmortos could feel it. He would still adorn the god-king’s saber some day; so was his destiny.

 

And as Calypso and her suckling apprentice leapt to the ground, she called forth a challenge. The crowd rustled and none dared move, none but . . .

 

Bernon ( @Thought Bomb ) the necromancer’s newfound apprentice. Inmortos could sense the turmoil in him, raw and untamed. He would be shaped into a great cleaver of darkness. In time. For now, he must be brought to heel. As the heavily armored warrior knelt and spoke, he produced the saber of Inmortos for all to see. Surely Akheron and the saber crystal Solus would know of Inmortos new form; his ambiguity, a powerful wraith on the wind betrayed into one body, the body of a slave.

 

The Mandalorian’s eyes rolled back painfully in her skull as the ire of Inmortos was aroused; and yet, a smile played across her face. To disobey, an eternal sin; and yet, the courage to do so so openly. It would be acknowledged as well.  Such an act would need punished. To disobey publicly, one must right the wrong equally. To kill this vessel of sin; however, would be premature and would reveal a weakness of the god-king.

 

Stepping forward, the gauntleted hand of the Inmortos-bound woman, brushed Bernon’s shoulder gently. With her free hand, she reached up to remove her T-visored helm. She tossed it aside, her face ravaged by the claws of her own fingernails, blood caked and cracked as it oozed between the cracked scabs mingled with the ichor of pure darkness, her eyes white and bloodshot, their pupils bound in pain backwards in her skull until the rage of Inmortos was sated, the tiara of impermeable soulfrost bound to her skull and a symbol of Inmortos claim

to the body and to his throne world Aaris III, as ashen and desolate as it now was. “My apprentice,” she hissed as she raised her hand and one by one tugged at the fingers of her armored gloves, dropping them to the ground. “You have done as I instructed.” Her icy white hand gingerly played across the intricate ultrachrome of the hilt in his hands as the whispers of her spirits within manifest curling up the Mandalorian’s arm like snakes return to their master. She grasped the hilt, her knuckles whitening even more if such a thing was possible. With hilt-clenched fist she backhanded her apprentice with a feeble blow that radiated upon the force in a surge of rage to knock him back. Stepping forward, her bloodshot eyes rolled back to behold the human, “defy me again and your punishment shall

be eternal!”

 

Steppibg forward, she began to strip the cumbersome Mandalorian armor that had been the facade of the god that now possessed her body. Each piece fell to the ground as she walked along the assembled Sith and their armies. “You claim a throne of naught but words,” she dropped another piece of armor with a thud in the snow that was beginning to accumulate beneath their feet. “The ancient blood rights remain unfulfilled.” The woman turned, her eyes flashing a wicked deathly yellow as they locked for a moment with the mechanized eyes of Solus relaying a simple message, one even he could attain. ‘Should the apprentice of Inmortos interfere, destroy him’

 

”You claim to be a god, to rule the chaos of the Sith and yet,” they gestured to the assembled Mandalorians under @saberforce, “was it not they who unfurled your royal carpet in blood? Was it not we three,” she gestured to Akheron and Solus, “who released you from your mortal bonds? Did not the Sith who scourged worlds, scarred the force, and languished in life pave the way for you to awaken from your blissful slumber?” Reaching the end of those assembled, Inmortos and his host turned to walk back towards the middle of the open area betwixt pyramid and assembled. “You claim a throne already claimed.” They came to a stop directly in front of Calypso and perhaps twenty-five yards back. The dark echoing voice of the god king boomed on the winds as they turned cruel and cold, it’s cold bite clawing at metal and flesh. “You claim the throne of an imposter, of an exiled spider who may yet rule from afar; and yet, you have shed no blood for it. As emissary of the dark empire, master of death, god-king of the damned, and one who has seen eternity and not slept idly by, I invite you; prove yourself worthy.”

 

Cold air billowed from the Krath in rolling clouds of icy fog mingling with the wind and untouched by it’s growing howl, mixing with the snow to shroud the black-body suit clad frozen acolyte (possessed body). The winds continued to plummet the temperature and without a word, Inmortos hung his hilt on his belt, the wind itself turning as to his will to drive at the self-appointed queen, to drive her back with a headwind, the edge of the storm.

 

Biting her lip in concentration, blood and ichor spilled forth as the host of Inmortos’ will exhaled deeply through her nose like a reek preparing to charge. Even possessed as she was, as the cold tendrils

of death played about her soul, she was still fresh, a child of Mandalore born and bred for battle. And then they struck, as she pushed the last remnants of air from her lungs, Inmortos struck at the fear that encircle her soul and she inhaled. A deep startled gasp that crystallized the air, the force, as she went to draw air into her lungs and by it suck all of the heat and warmth, the powers and energies of the battlefield away to dissipate them into frozen unending stillness.

 

Cold and frigid darkness fell over the battlefield as the winds blew and an unnatural permawinter drew upon the dark forces that bound this world together. All who were there would bear witness to the death storm of eternal stillness unleashed by the god-king and no one would walk away untouched by his bitter touch. In the midst of it all stood Inmortos, his challenge apparent as the forces of eternal damnation came at his beck and call. 
 

CALYPSO V INMORTOS ((1))

[Krath Inmortos]

Power, by it’s nature, it is not created, nor is it destroyed. It simply changes form.
 

Such a scientific fact, while true, was brushed away in the great inhalation of the  god-king of death. As Inmortos sought to drain the power of she that would make false claim to the mantle of lord of darkness, the power that flowed from her, drawn by the world around them was nigh but endless. The little heat that remained in the air from Inmortos’ cryomantic display of power was whisked away, dissipated into nothingness. The frail legion of undead, an artificial gift from Inmortos to @Darth Calypso upon her resurrection at his hand, fell away like chaff, their soul-bound corpses collapsing where they stood. Their weapons clattered to the ground. The necromancic energies that bound these undead soldiers unnaturally to the realm of the living were sucked away and dissipated in the cold, drawn unnaturally from them into Calypso and from her into the host of Inmortos to be rendered no more. And yet, the vessel of Inmortos inhaled, the attack only ceasing as the physical limitations of the Mandalorian body he possessed reached it’s limits.

 

It was then that Calypso spoke, her attack rebounding in turn. Fiery red bolts of jagged energy, energy drawn from the world about them arced through the air even as Inmortos’ host exhaled in brief. The bolts struck the woman’s flesh with an explosion of power, of dark raw energy coalescing with the infinite icy stillness of eternal damnation. It sent Inmortos and his host careening backwards with the sheer kinetic energy the attack possessed. They landed amongst the recently fallen foot soldiers of Aaris III. The rotted bodies of his servants cushioning their blow as they sank amongst the fallen. Still the energy pressed on, playing across the fallen bodies, exploding some in bloated gouts of rotted flesh and ichor as it reached for the necromancer within the bodies, searching for the living amongst the dead. Lancing forth it would have found it’s mark, the still sizzling flesh of the possessed warrioress; but for the scourge of Inmortos, his will, and her strength of a lifetime of battle fighting off the residual energies of the initial blast. A crimson beam erupted upward from the mass of bodies, not followed by the telltale hiss of a lightsaber, but accompanied by the press of spiritual whispers and chants, of eternity unbound. The world about them muted to a deep red as all other color seemed to be leeched from the world. Whispering voices cackled with glee, sinful souls bound within the blade itself inviting their eternally tortured comrades from the world beyond; the veil of separation between this present mortality and eternal damnation beyond growing thin.

 

Inmortos eyes flashed a wicked yellow as he, as she, as they stood; the blade held before them like a wizard’s wand, extended outward in one white-knuckled hand catching the crimson bolts of retribution on it’s burning hissing shaft of energy. The darl lady’s power coursed upon the blade as it was transformed into an ethereal energy and in turn wrought unto the veil, parting to allow the spirits of eternal damnation to flood all bit unhindered into this realm. They cried out. They screamed. They chanted. Their emotions plagued the battlefield swarming and overwhelming the forces of mortality of their feeble emotions. The vengeful spirits sensed their keeper’s will and coursed onto the field of battle. Without direction, they felt the force, they could sense Inmortos’ raw emotion beneath his frigid facade and they followed it. They could feel Inmortos’ dark desires for @Bernon Mrrgwharr, his future in the god-king’s hands. They hated it. Did he not know that Inmortos was theirs alone? They could feel the blood oaths that bound @Karys Narat iv-Adas and @Solus to the god-king, the despise he felt for the one who would become his next blade. They could feel the oath sworn by their keeper to she that he now fought. They could feel his disdain and his devotion to his oath. The dead, wraiths and specters, phantasmal ghosts and amorphous spirits hated the living and they that they found they sought to destroy. With chanting wails and unearthly screams they swarmed their targets, physical protections of little use against a extraplanar foe. Seeking to destroy them, reason abandoned, they screamed through the billowing fog and wind to seek and to tear at their flesh with unseen maws and claws; physical wounds from an ethereal foe.

 

And through it all, the energy of Calypso’s assault crackled and sparked against the cursed blade of the god-king. A wicked smile played across the Mandalorian’s twisted face, her face half-burned, her blonde hair singed as bits of charred flesh fell sizzling and black to the snow. Her pain was palpable and yet she did not cry out, her body overtaken by the will of Inmortos and her spirit and mind ensnared within his power. They hissed, her Mandalorian voice carrying like that of the eternal whisper of the spectral dead across the field,

 

“You know naught of the chains I suffer.”

 

With a yellow flash of power, Inmortos’ jade-bound eyes fell upon the very soul of the dark lady. It was old. It was grotesque. It was coveted by Inmortos for the power he could drain from it. With a glance and a surge of ectoplasmic power his will wordlessly called forth a trio of smokey demons from beyond. It did not matter from whence they came. It did not matter what they sought, they were called into this world by a flash of necromancic power and bound to Inmortos so long as they were held within this mortal plane. Their will their own, their power that of the dark keeper of myth and legend, these inky black splotches of smoke in the fog made to set upon Calypso, the first to fall within their gaze, and with that they attempted to smother her with distractions and despair, to cloud her connection to the world about her, the force, and to life itself with their hateful false claims of her histories torn from the depths of Tartarus. They screamed and whispered, working to weave their taunting and mesmerizing sinful distractions as they made to close in upon her in the fog.

 

And as he stood, knee-deep in the bodies of those who had sworn their adoration to him, his gaze beholding Calypso through the eyes of the eternal judgement of the force, he struck.  The spirit within his host twisted in agony, a useful tool, but so too an annoyance; for even as he drew upon her lifeblood, so too did his foe. If she sought such power, a shadow of the power that Inmortos possessed; well then, she would have it and know herself judged unworthy. With her free hand, the necromancer wove a brief spell in the air across the Mandalorian’s chest pressing her own fingers inwards into her flesh. A cry of anguish, warbled with evil glee escaped their mouth, the glowing eyes of Inmortos never leaving Calypso. The spirit of the Mandalorian was cleft from the body whole, cast out of it’s living form leaving in it’s wake a pure muscled body, albeit singed, under the domain of the god-king of death. The spirit was unstable, unable to maintain a pure form having been plucked prematurely from existence. It howled in pain. It did not matter. Inmortos cast the spirit off, careening towards Calypso a pale translucent figure vaguely reminiscent of the host. Rapidly she broke down as she charged. In moments her spiritual existence would implode, a fragmentation grenade in reverse, drawing all about it inward at lethal velocities. 
 

The creeping doom of the ice left it’s mark as the snow and wind and fog billowed about them, and while Inmortos commanded the powers of stagnation, of eternal stillness, he was still a necromancer; a master of the dead and the bridge that stretched between mortality and the infinite. It was in that that his full mastery was on display, the legions of the damned called forth at the edge of Inmortos’ control, to make war on their god-king’s behalf. Standing there amongst his fallen worshippers, saber clenched like a magical wand of power, Inmortos trod the veiled edge of mortality and madness. He would stand here, his ancient oath to the Sith of eternity past culminating in this moment; to ensure that the Sith traditions and magics were answered, lest the order be cursed anew, again.

 

Calypso v Inmortos (2)

 

[Krath Inmortos]

Inmortos shifted slightly, his blade angling to brace for a blow that never came his free hand weaving an intricate spell by his side. If he had elicited this type of response, even in the cold, it meant only one thing. He, they, were winning. He felt it, her wrath, her rage, boiling over as she landed. She was almost within reach, within saber-striking distance of even a withered scion of death. She was close enough that even through the fog and snow he could see her outline, her saber only illuminating @Darth Calypso further.

 

Raising a withering undead hand, Inmortos began to form ancient words of power; but before he could do so, Calypso unleashed a storm of her own. The burning maelstrom of the cosmos turned towards the lord of the damned. It took Inmortos by surprise as the heat blasted the lifeless body that he now possessed and sent it careening backwards. The body glove offered what protection it could before it succumbed to the force of the blast, sizzling as it turned ashen and was blown away and consumed by the blast. Ethereal screams assaulted the woman’s eardrums, the undead woman’s ears. They mingled with the whispering cries of joy and hatred brought forth by the wraiths and spirits crossed back to the lands of the living. 

 

The body flew backwards through the air, Inmortos blocking out the screaming assault, shutting it up behind a wall of a spectral choir that screamed beyond natural hearing and simply releasing his power on the Mandalorian’s hearing

 

Landing at the edge of the battlefield with a squishing splurch amongst the rotted bodies of his fallen army, the necromancer lay there amongst the dead, amongst his people; a stark reminder of who he was, that which he had not yet overcome; at least, not entirely. Inmortos lay there, his host’s dead body burnt, scorched, and oozing blood and frigid ichor. The pain would be unbearable, had it been his own pain. One of the benefits of already being dead was that the corpse, suddenly spiritless and lifeless, felt none of it. Inmortos felt none of it The blast burned her, her skin, her hair, it melted and twisted her face and body from the outside leaving bubbling oozing flambéed flesh in it’s wake.

 

And yet, through the pain, the screams, all of it, Inmortos remained. He was more than a simple spirit within a body. He was Inmortos. He was eternal.

 

He lay there, the muscles of his host tensing either from the natural reaction of the dead or Inmortos’ innate control. With his spirit bound lightsaber still casting it’s crimson hues, the Mandalorian’s fist clenched white about the hilt and slammed downwards into the ground. The built up sorceries flowed freely. The snow packed surface cracked as the silvery hilt clanged into it, fracturing the powerful hilt’s exterior as a gutteral hysterical laugh erupted from the twisted lipless melted maw of Inmortos’ host.

 

It is finished.
 

Power. It flowed from everywhere. it came from everywhere. The bodies of the 10,000 fallen all about him. The air. The assembled Sith. The reborn Ziost held together by twisted black magics as dark as the necromancer’s soul. Even the veil. All of it. Their power. It was sapped in an instant, drawn into the powerful vacuum of the void. The temperatures about the battlefield plummeted, winds drawing inward to tear any vestiges of hope or heat away as the power of the battlefield was drawn into the spell, into the nothingness cast beyond eternity. The veil, thinned by the saber and it’s dark passengers and blackened sorcery, the same saber that now served as a conduit of the god-king’s power, tore all but in two, unleashing torrents of the damned upon the battlefield to swirl and cleave at any that stood in their path. Great spears of ice erupted from the ground in spiraling circles about the necromancer, shards of frozen eternity piercing through the power-sapped air. They cut into the air between Calypso and Inmortos, withering before the attack, but continuing to spiral outward as the dead hand of Inmortos clenched the activated saber hilt tighter still, her burnt skin cracked as even the bones beneath it began to strain beneath the undead power commanding the spell.

 

And still, Inmortos laughed; an insane cackle. If she but knew, he was already dead. She would not, could not, kill him. His chains were not her chains. Her chains would be her undoing.

 

CALYPSO V INMORTOS ((3))

[Krath Inmortos]

Even as Inmortos’ possessed body dissipated into the air, a spray of blood and ichor, the spirit of the dark lord was loosed; an ethereal being amongst the rising waves of darkness that seemed to roil from the very soil at their feet. A harsh wind seemed to draw back the legions of spirits loosed upon the field until

inly the few most powerful or local remained to haunt the fringes of the mind. @Darth Calypso’s words carried across the field and as she finished, the very breath of Ziost, a breeze, carried the essence of the necromancer upon it, his quiet whispering words to play upon her ears alone, 

 

“Blood has been spilt. The ancient codes appeased. Hail the new Lord of the Sith”

 

and then the voice was gone sweeping out across the landscape before being swept towards the veil, drawn back to that final resting place once again, not yet condemned to remain there. Before he could be dispersed completely however, he reached out, a skeletal ghostly finger of cold tl rake across the minds of @Karys Narat iv-Adas,  @Bernon Mrrgwharr, and finally @Solus.

 

To his fellow blood-bound Master, he wordlessly bid, a thought, a memory, of Aaris III, of the destruction they wrought there, of his grotesque tower of ice and a desire that his apprentice be brought to him there, alive or dead.

 

To his apprentice, he cast forth a cold and lustful desire, a task infinitely more and yet so simple he had filfilled it already, only to fail in the final stretch:

 

”Fetch my saber to me upon my throne.”

 

And finally, he passed over Solus, a cold disembodied soft laughter that faded into the sky. A reminder of experiences past and present and eternal.

 

And then, as if he never was, the presence of Inmortos passed from this realm into the next, a tortured soul, a king amongst the sodomites. He had accomplished that which he was bidden to do and now would attend to his affairs elsewhere in preparation for the great purge. Who said there was more use in life than death? Inmortos found it quite the opposite. The dead made much more obedient slaves.