Aaris III

[Krath Inmortos]

The two ships, a yacht and a shuttle, were little to get excited about as they entered the atmosphere of Aaris III. For the few beings planetside that had the technological abilities to note the ships, there was little to incite a response. The Death Striker base, long abandoned by that organization, was on the far side of the world. It was currently home to a small loosely-organized band of smugglers who used the wayward world as a storehouse and ad-hoc base for this portion of the galaxy. These two ships that swung low over the treetops presented little threat or fear to the minor criminal enterprise and their ill-gotten booty.
 

It was not entirely uncommon for ships to descend planetside. In as much as Aaris III was out of the way, forgotten, and of little use to the galaxy at large, it still attracted the occasional band of rich partying socialites or treasure-hunting history buffs. Nothing threatening to burly smugglers and sleazy fences. 
 

It was not an entirely wrong assessment. Inmortos and Apothos were fans of the historical. They did not present a true threat to the smugglers’ compound; at least not yet.

 

Inmortos’ Imperial shuttle hummed above the treetops. The world shone like a jewel both from space and on the surface. Every inch of industrialization had been taken back by the natural. The metallic cities were now covered by the sea, the sands, or the jungle. The external vents of the craft opened and began to scoop up the unadulterated air of the world. It replaced the reprocessed death-tainted air within the craft.

 

Inhaling deeply, the necromancer breathed in the heavy humid air above the jungles. Where another would have smiled at the fresh nutrient-filled life-tinged air, Inmortos did not. His smile was different, his dry cracked lips twisted in a demented cackle of delight. Where others smelled life, Inmortos tasted the lingering odor of death. Death was here alright, wherever life existed, death followed. The death here was different. It was planet-consumning. It was violent. It was omnipresent.

 

As the ships settled into a clearing along the sand-covered beach a short hike through the dense undergrowth from the forgotten city, their engine blasts kicked up plumes of sand and churned the beach waters into a froth. The vessels settled in as they began to go through their shutdown procedures. The landing ramp to The Eternus descended to the beach and the dozen undead Mon Cal residents shambles out to the world below, forming up two equal lines on either side of the walkway out towards the moss-covered trees.

 

Slowly, the Sith Lord descended the ramp. Each step was accompanied by a deep-seated clang from his heavy walking stick. Making the sandy beach, Inmortos paused. He inhaled deeply as he awaited his cohorts arrival on the world. A lesser man would have thought such a pristine and peaceful place would be beneficial for the soothing of a ravaged soul, the healing of a wracked husk. Inmortos was not a lesser man.

 

Closing his eyes, Inmortos adjusted his focus. Instead of focusing on the world before his eyes, his sight turned to that of eternity, of times present and past. Where his natural sight struggled, his view into the world of souls, life and death, was keen. Instead of jungles and trees, the Sith Lord saw the distance flickers of life, of souls, weak and pathetic as they might be. They were drawn to the rumble of the ships; curious but wary. Some visitors brought gifts; sweets, treats, and shiny knick knacks. Other visitors terrorized the primitives of this world. They had once ruled until an unnamed malady nearly drove them to extinction. They had nearly killed their entire race, pulled from the pinnacle of their status to where they now languished. They were lost in the bowels, within tunnels dug with their own bare lizarded hands underneath the now nature-reclaimed metallic cities and their ancient foreign technologies they once ruled. Inmortos could see them. He could sense their patheticness. He nodded in silence, assuring himself. They would do.

[Krath Inmortos]

Apothos wasted no time. Inmortos raised a questioning eyebrow as his fellow sorcerer crashed into the underbrush. So many Sith were occupied with the here and now when eternity was all that mattered. Inmortos shrugged. The warped and twisted Neimodian had a role to play. In fact, the lizard wizard was proving to be quite useful now that his shackles had been removed.

 

Standing on the beach, a beachhead to his new dominion, Inmortos surveyed the lush growth that turned up in wall-like fashion at the edge ls of the sand. Vines, limbs, and greenery were all that could be seen when one tried to survey beyond. Yet still, Inmortos could sense them, their spirits, as they eked closer, their curiosity overcoming their sense of self-preservation.

 

Apothos was off, Inmortos could feel his ripples in the force as clearly as the winds overhead washed through the swaying trees. The subjugation of Aaris III was beginning and unlike the bread and butter warriors of the Sith, sorcerers had a different tact. There were no army-laden menaces falling from the sky to spill forth their conquering cargo. Bloodshed; Inmortos delighted in it even if it was not always the most direct application to a problem. There would be plenty of it in the coming days; just not yet. There were quicker, more efficient, subtler ways to accomplish the same goal. This world would fall not just to the Sith, not just the lords of Mon Cal, but to his dark touch: his eternal touch.

 

As the curious reptilian eyes began to peer through the foliage, Inmortos acted. Apothos would handle the offworlders. The locals here were now within Inmortos domain. Inhaling deeply, the air about the Necromancer paled; it’s temperatures dropping several noticable degrees. Taking a step forward, ice began to snake out from the Sith Lord’s feet and staff as they touched the ground.

 

Exhaling, a gale of frigid wind bellowed forth. Greenery shriveled and withered in a moment as the cone of cold sprung forth from the frail Lord’s lungs. Plumes of what seemed to be steamy smoke billowed upwards into the yet untouched humid air as anything caught in the projectiled blast of arctic air succumbed to the assault. Arcing out in lighting-like all-embracing patterns, ice spread at a rapid rate outwards from the font of power: the darkly swathed sorcerer himself. The sand crystalized into a solid, the sea began to solidify and break apart only to welcome in more rapidly cooling water that froze and repeated the cycle, the jungle withdrew as it might before the first trees bowed before the might of the cryomancer’s spells. They toppled with groans and crashes of thunder beneath the onslaught as they were iced over, their humid homeworld entombing them as they fell.

 

And there as the ice advanced, so to did Inmortos.

 

Within the wood, curiosity turned to shock, awe, and trembling at the display of power. The scaly cold-blooded primitives hissed warnings back and forth filling the jungle with a cacophony of noise as they watched and fell back before the onslaught of one man, his undead minions standing motionless behind him, towering sentinels of unknown purpose. Perhaps they too possessed the powers of the gods?

[Krath Inmortos]

Carving a swath of ice and downed trees, Inmortos advanced a sole entity of entropy on the humid worldscape before him. Creature and primitive alike fled before the icy tendrils that branched out into the undergrowth. As he passed, a path of dense ice coated the way in a glassy smooth frigid walkway. As he progressed deeper and deeper, the reptilian residents of the world began to cautiously appear at the edges of the ice, gingerly touching the solidified liquid and chittering in hushed clicking tones. What was this thing that subjugated their world at will? Did it not appear in the same way as the offworld interlopers, in a smooth stone from the sky? What then was this power this darkness-clad being commanded? Where others commanded light in fixed displays, this one subjugated all that stood in his path. Even the ancient forests fell at a breath.

 

Inmortos drew upon the darkness all around him. Life and death were prevalent here amongst the green. Tipping the scales drove the life-filled jungles towards the inevitability of death. With each moss heap that withered and tree that fell, the cryomancer’s necromancic powers grew infinitesimally. Every step was a surety towards the eternal guarantee. This world was ripe for the plucking, all Inmortos need do was reach out and grasp it. With Apothos having set off to handle the small off world remnants, Inmortos was free to subjugate all that befell him.

 

Finally, Inmortos lowered his hands, the direct blasts of frigid air dwindling, remaining only in the deathly aura of cold and shadow that seemed to cling to the Sith like a uncleaned coating of barnacles. With a trail of glassy cold coated destruction behind him, the Sith stood alone. Before him rose the collapsed and rusted walls of an ancient citadel. Forgotten by time, lost to the grasp of eternity. Beyond, Inmortos could see collapsed towers, skyscrapers, and other structures that boasted of an ancient civilization that had ruled this world. Forgotten to all, but not to the Sith. He could see beyond. With a glance, Inmortos could see what had been and he knew what would be. With that realization, he began to laugh, a raspy cackle that echoed along the ice trail and down along the deserted twisted streets. Forgotten no more, here, in the service of a Sith Lord who would not be forgotten, the city would be returned to a glory that it’s former might could ne’ar hold a candle to.

 

The dark Krath was wrenched from his machinations of glee by the crashing of a mighty, albeit derelict vessel, into the desolate city. The screeches of destruction mingled with the tangible cries of terror and pain that seemed to radiate from the ground itself. Immediately, Inmortos’ eyes glazed with unholy anger. This was his city, who dared touch it?

 

Leaning heavily on his cane, Inmortos plunged himslef at a rapid clip-clopping walk into the desecrated city. At the fringnes, emerging cautiously to glance were the innumerable reptilian residents who had once owned the city only to have become the slums of their own failures. The Sith Lord was cognizant of it, he did not care. This city would serve him, her occupants would serve, subjugate, or become the mortar upon which eternity was crafted.

 

Into the city he moved, a solitary reaper. Fallen obstacles  dissolved at the press of his hand to clear a pathway towards the city center. The closer he came to the downed vessel, the more Inmortos could taste the putridness of Apothos. What had he done? Had his power overwhelmed him already? Had he been but a pawn that strove for eternal glory only to be snuffed out?

 

As he finally neared the ravaged ship, a twisted thing of metal from a bygone technological boom, he tasted them, rising on the winds: the souls of the men desecrated by the Sith’s display of electric rage, bound in the cackling static of the force as even in death, they struggled to find peace.

 

Touching his hands to the bulkhead, Inmortos leaned, pouring necromaric energies of destruction and decay from his fingertips into the metal. The hull glowed an eerie orange as if it were superheated. It’s glow heightened in  intensity before suddenly the entire panel gave wave in a plume of rusted dust leaving a hole large enough for the necromancer to stoop and enter.

 

Inside he could smell the death. The tendrils of electricity and dark magics doing little mask their aura. The mangled bodies of the soldiers, burned and crushed would be of little use; not in that form at least.

 

Sweeping his hands outward, Inmortos began to quietly chant in a tongue more ancient than that of the original Sith. He called upon powers that ruled before civilization itself was more than an infant in the womb of the galaxy. The Sith’s raspy voice cracked and boomed with each horrid whisper. The temperature dropped with each syllable. He moved as a carrion bird, almost hopping from meal to meal, surveying each for the choicest of morsels. Running his hands across their ragged forms, Inmortos drew the last puff of breath from their lungs, carrying with them the essence of those who had died at Apothos’s hands. Each breath materialized into a glassy coat of snow across the fallen’s bodies. It was swept up by a telekinetic wave of the sorcerer, vanishing into the folds of his robes. Soulfrost. The temple had begun.

 

Only once his dark ritual was complete, the husks of the damned left to somidify in the cold or rot in the hest did Inmortos right himself to a fully standing position. He turned to look upon Apothos. “Worthy sacrifices my brother; but it is not enough. There are more here. More to be seen and subjugated to my will. Here, in this forgotten city, will my legacy be born for eternity.”

 

Outside the ship, numerous lizard-folk had gathered eying the ship and who or what it might contain. They withdrew fearfully at the swelling of cold that seemed to breathe from the ship itself in a steam as it met the humid airs all about. They hissed and whispered to one another as their hunter-caste, if it could be called even than, clutched their primitive spears and clubs in nervous anticipation of what was to come. The cry had gone out, something had come to their world. The bravest had gathered to investigate and if need be confront it.

 

Inmortos could feel them outside. He could taste them. He hoped to use them in life and in death. For now, he hoped that their lives would serve. Death was a readily available commodity; but each had it’s value. One not needless waste it when life could hold such a gift until the proper time.

[Krath Inmortos]

Inmortos stepped from the shadow of the ship, exiting the breach he had made. Outside he surveyed nearly a dozen skin, tunic, and leather clad lizardfolk. Each clutches a spear or some other makeshift weapon. Towards the back there were even some with crude bows of wood and sinew. 
 

The locals eyed the interloping Sith nervously. He could taste their fear. It was almost more sweet than the fear of the fish folk Apothos commanded. These base minds knew much less and feared even more. There was one thing they did know however: power. Power was what subjugated them to their false jungle deities. Power they feared and could not match. Power was what kept order in their subterrainian commonwealths. The rule of might still clung ahold to them, even if they were relatively peaceful.

 

It was true, they were not warriors. Still, Inmortos could taste the baseless death and destruction they had wrought upon this world as if it was yesterday. So fresh, so blurred was the passage of time to the decrepit Sith Lord.

 

All these people needed was a push. A push to show them true power. A push to inspire and invoke fear. A push to bring them under his thumb.

 

Looking out over the gathered few, the chosen, Inmortos knew what he must do. They did not share a language or culture. They did not need to.

 

Stepping forward, Inmortos footsteps crinkled with icy intensity as the moss and growth froze and snapped beneath his death-shod feet. He approached the militia, licking his dry lips and tasting their unease. He did not stop moving forward, slowly. They withdrew, pressed against one another until they were practically crushing their comrades for fear of this man and the aura of death that radiated from his very visage.

 

And then it happened. Finally. With no where else to go, no where to run, no where to turn, a young male drove his stoney spear point into Inmortos. The carved edges sliced through his cloak with ease and the weapon lodged in the Sith Lord’s side drawing blood and ichor in equal amounts to pool and saturate his garment.

 

Only then did Inmortos stop his progress. The dark Firrerreo locked eyes with the lizard-like local who was even now shaking uncontrollably with fear.

 

Not a word was said as silence seemed to fill the air and press in heavily from every side. Running his hand upon his blood-soaked robe Inmortos drew his hand up to look at his own mortality before he turned his attention back to the trembling cowardly soldier before him. Slowly, with the intensity and purpose of oncoming death, Inmortos reached down to grasp the haft of the spear in his bloody hand.

 

With a hiss the weapon dissolved in a crackling of splinters, falling downwards in a fine dust of aged sawdust. The offending lizard gasped as he held out his hands to see the dust that was his weapon sticking to his palms. His shock was not over though, far from it.

 

The Sith Lord lunged closer, his hands shooting out to grasp a limb and face of a lizard on either side of he who had struck him. In a ethereal tidal surge of power that vibrated the leaves of trees down the way, Inmortos unleashed his power so that all might behold. Both the lizard to the right and the left disintegrated to dust amid screams of agony. No one dared to move even as they cringed at the sounds of the pain.

 

Righting himself, Inmortos ran a hand down his wounded side, his innate abilities  already trying to stitch the wound. He coated his hand in blood and with it reached out. The lizardman who had attacked him nearly fell in fear, his knees knocking together. Inmortos grabbed his face and the lizard hissed in pain as the blood seemed to burn and freeze leaving a blackened raised scar across his maw.

 

Then and only then, did the Sith throw back his head and cackle. It was a laughter that reached to the sky. The air above them plummeted downwards in a whoosh of wind, it’s tempersture dropping rapidly at the touch of Inmortos’ voice.

 

And all here would know that he, Krath Inmortos, carried forth the powers of life and death, that by the touch of his hand eternal damnation was wrought, and by the kiss of his lips their gods would fall.

[Krath Inmortos]

Over the coming days, the foundries that Apothos had discovered beneath the city churned evermore to life. There was all the taw materials a fledgling foundry could ask for. Soon enough the dull roar of their fires could be heard grumbling faintly beneath the city. Weapons, armor, and even the beginnings of an ancient lizard-designed corvette began to take shape beneath the surface. The entry to the foundry that Apothos had found was but one of a chain of such structure, some larger and smaller. Most of them were still secured; although a couple had to be rid of lizardly inhabitants and their primitive abodes.

 

On the surface, Inmortos’ will began to reverberate from his display of power. The lizardfolk warriors who had witnessed the dark lord’s display of power had been quick to spread the news of what they had seen to the others until hisses and chirps were resounding about the island. Within a day’s time, the people were bringing offerings to appease this new being that had descended from the heavens and called forth powers to overthrow their own gods with a wave of his hand.

 

Nothing they brought was good enough. Nothing could appease Inmortos’ appetite. A chosen few, given the mark of the beast, for that is what they called the blackened palm print Inmortos bestowed upon those who quivered bjt dared to stand up to him, had become a sort of vanguard for Inmortos. While they could not stand against his undead Mon Cal and Quarren servants, they served a purpose. They were allowed into the presence of their dark deity. They alone were not struck down in his presence without a gift. They became his hands in their tribes.

 

Over the weeks they began to assemble vast populations of their kin. Some began to slave away in Apothos subterranean realm of fire and shadow. Others worked to clear the rust and overgrowth from the downed city. When one died, his soul was drawn forth by Inmortos himself. It was the only time labor ceased, when the dark deity strode forth to reclaim the life lost. In grief, hope was found; for those who died in the service of their new god-king were reborn, stronger, fearless, and strange. Those blessed enough to die in service worked without ceasing, elevated in status over their mushy mortal brethren. The secrets of necromancy were Inmortos’ alone; but to the primitives, he was their god. He was a defier of death, conqueror of all that was seen and unseen.

 

Those who did not work were sent into the abyss of fire and darkness to slave before the master of the hellscape, never to be seen again.

 

Long dead warriors, ancestors, and friends were unearthed and brought before Inmortos. They too received his touch and rose again to ‘live’ and serve alongside those that had counted them lost for all eternity. 

 

And so, the peoples worked diligently. They harvested their foods and purged their city at the will of their overlord.

 

Each lizard that was worked to death had his soul frost harvested, the beginnings of Inmortos’ temple and tomb. Atop the toppled spire of the city’s highest point, a ziggurat of ice began to take shape, it’s cold tendrils branching outwards over the city blanketing the area in an eternal autumn of cool winds and cold nights. Fallen sheets of metal and stones were hoisted by the primitives sheer strength of numbers and desire to please their new god-king. The tower took shape looming over the landscape.

 

The city was coming to life. The world was bowing before the Sith and in that submission, the ancient prosperity was coming to the present and growing exponentially.

 

Within a grand circular central chamber atop the ziggurat, Inmortos stood, his hands raised high and blackened by the frigid air that whirled and swirled about him. He chanted, dark ancient words of prophecy, older than the Sith Empire, older than the Jedi or the Sith, almost as old as the universe itself.  From his maw spilled the frost of countless souls, primitives, Mon Cal, any and everyone Inmortos had harvested from. He poured their deaths, their darkest emotions into his creation until it was complete. An ornate throne of swirling whirls and jagged maws of mythical creatures sat there. It was the center of the room and from it radiated an ink cold darkness. It was the lack of fire, lack of heat and light. It was an analogy of death itself, sustained by the darkness and frost and blood that were poured into it. For days, Inmortos carved bloody deathly runes into every sacrifice his enforcers brought to him until the blood  flowed freely down the throne and poured forth from the ziggurat unto the masses below. 
 

As the days turned to weeks and the weeks to almost a month a vast horde of living and dead assembled beneath the command of Krath Inmortos, deity of life and death. They were armed with fanged blades and clothed in feral armors of night.

 

The dread corvettes that slowly chugged out of the atmosphere were unable to contain the mass army of undead that were being pulled from the soil. The city continued to serve. The ziggurat grew and it’s icy halls expanded outwards, bolstering the foundation and oozing darkness, cold, and ice.

 

It was only then that Inmortos and Apothos opted to depart their newfound conquered world, to return to the lair of water and machine, to Apothos’ den of iniquity. A fleet needed to be commanded to augment the smaller ships of Aaris III and carry forth the armies of Inmortos and the navy of Apothos unto the galaxy.

[Krath Inmortos]

With a gasp of hot heavy humid air, the eyelids of the still clone flittered open and the spirit of the dead and damned took hold. Inmortos opened and closed his jaw, working every muscle in his head and face as blood surged through his newfound body. It was terrible. 
 

He clacked his dry tongue against the roof of his mouth. He could taste it, “Life.” He spat the word from his pristine white teeth. His Firrereo skin was radiant with life, a far cry from the decrepit form struck down on Mon Cal. His hair flowed back over his shoulders in a rainbow array; but already the roots were beginning to fade as the darkness took hold, sapping the very life that now surged through the necromancer.   

 

Stumbling forward in the stillness of the underground crypt, the necromancer fell to the floor. He was unfamiliar with the life and agility that was within, too familiar with the compensations of his past form. The elongated stone structure was filled with solitude and darkness save for the faint glowing bank of machinery that sustained the clone bodies of Inmortos’ master plan, his scraping against the floor the only sound.

 

Picking himself up, Inmortos made his way hesitantly at first, but with more surety at each step, back towards the cask from which he had been reborn. Next to it, like each yet lifeless clone, sat a blackened trunk containing equipment new hosts may require upon their return. With a scan of his palm, the case hissed and popped open. A lightsaber, robes, sacrificial dagger, it was all there save for his sword. It was a loss for sure; but one that may serve him yet. The paltry souls he had carried were lost, but they had been lost the moment he had seized them. They were replaceable.

 

Donning the robes and tunic over his naked form, Inmortos secured the gear he had available and made his way out through the labyrinthing tunnels up and up into the permanent tower of soul frost and stone until he emerged within the empty throne room at it’s zenith. 
 

There, standing at the guardless window, Inmortos looked across the teaming city below. What had once been ransacked ruins now bustled under the servitude of his will, worshippers by the thousands toiled to reform the city in his visions. Now, as he emerged, the masses below turned their attention to the tower as a thunder claps drew their attention skyward. Raising his arms, the worship of their god-king began anew; dark ripples radiated out and sacrifices were prepared.

[Krath Inmortos]

The darkness flowed hear even as the air within the obeliskibg tower set heavily with an unnatural heaviness. Death was not uncommon here and it did not take long for Inmortos to amass a gathering of necromancers from within the ranks of the lizardlings that called upon him as their god. Of course, they were taught only so much so as to carry about sacrificial ceremonies and harvest the needed soul jade and frost, reincarnating their brethren into shambling worker drones that did not tire so as to continue to carve out their city within the jungle, revealing ancient ruins and expanding their dark lord’s holdings and eventual tomb. This world would fall and his chosen servants would live forever.

 

Deep within his frozen abode, Inmortos ran his fingers through the containers of talismaned soulfrost. There was plenty here to be used for construction and still enough to be diverted. Waiving his hands, Inmortos summoned a half dozen worshippers, instructing them to take them to the precipice of his tower, where his frozen throne sat overlooking the world below. He followed after shortly.

 

As the sun set and a cloudless night blanketed the city, the living found their ways to rest, the undead toiling without rest. High in his tower, Inmortos labored, the passage of time unknown and uncared for. Hunched over in his throne, he chanted profane spells as he shattered one soulfrost talisman after another, binding the essence within, the screaming souls of the departed into an icy cloud. Each shattered talisman decreased the temperature until dense fog began to roll from the humid air about the planet down unto the city below. The entire temple complex was clouded in icy fog, it’s dense liquid clinging to and coating everything in slick layers of frigid ice. Still he toiled. The night passed and the sun obscured by the growing layers of fog, unable to be burnt away faster than it was produced. The essences were solidified by the elongated fingers of the Necromancer, chanting and manipulating the essence into a condensed circulate of unbreakable soul ice.

 

Frozen sweat soaked the sorcerer’s robes causing them to crinkle and snap with his every move. His new body, stooping and frozen, his joints solidifying as if aged 100 years in a night, Inmortos bound the delicate lattices of every soul to the temple about him, to his throne, to the world itself, to his own soul and mind. 

As a last step, Inmortos crafted the crown about his brow. He curved it about his cranium, his skin burning beneath the cold as it split and accepted the crown as part of it’s own. The crown bound itself to Inmortos in darkness and frozen flesh as it grew, blue jeweled orbs forming with pure congealed time and suffering. 
 

As he finished, Inmortos collapsed back into his throne, the ice there meshing with the damp frozen robes of the god-king. The lifeless colors of his flesh were blued and spoke of the draining of warmth and color from the very essence of the man. The world about him was unnaturally still, even the darkness of the force stalled and heavy as it reigned driving life and the living force out before it. 
 

The ritual complete, Inmortos was bound across time and space to this place; his crown a part of his body and an outward sign of his lordship; his throne his beacon of power to the cosmos. 
 

____________________________
 

For days, Inmortos sat unmoving, the fog of his ritual settling unnaturally over the city, binding her residents within a fog of eternity, unaware and uncaring about the outside world or anything beyond what was just in front of them. The worship of their master was their purpose, nothing else mattered.

 

Slowly, even in his twisted state, Inmortos, bound by the thinnest of cellular bounds to the life the galaxy deposited on his body, regained his strength. To sap it or to regain it was a task of titanic undertaking. Finally, he had enough to stand. Pushing himself from his slumped position, the sorcerer stood; his body was stooped and pain hovered about his body. It was all that broke the stillness. Raising a gnarled hand, Inmortos snapped. The sound carried across the temple summoning a servant to him by the tendrils of the force. With a rasp, Inmortos directed his ship to be prepared, a guard assembled, and his elixirs brought to him. The Sith had need of him, he felt it.

[Krath Inmortos]

Amongst the dark chill shadows of Inmortos’ sprawling ziggurat, within the windowless throne room at the center, encased in a ice of deathly etherealness, a lifeless husk sat embedded on the throne of Inmortos. Far below, across the once overgrown  jungled city, amongst the sprawling citadel of soulfrost, carcass, and stone, millions of lizardmen toiled. Covered in the shadows of the ziggurat, their voices rose, a chaotic symphony of anguish and devotion. The cries of the dying carried above the din as lives were extinguished beneath the blades of lesser necromancers; Inmortos’ choice servants set to carry out his will in his absence. It was these same dark practitioners that had first sensed the death of their master’s physical body across the cosmos. It was these who now performed the black rituals to bring their master back to them. For days they danced and cut themselves, sacrificing those chosen by divine lots, their soul stuff harvested to lend power the profane and arcane. and as the power built a bridge was made across the sprawling chasm that separated life from death. To summon such a cursed soul required the powers to reach into the deepest recesses of beyond and struggle against the eternal bonds of divine punishment. From the deepest depths of hades they wrought Inmortos fractured frozen soul; summoning it back to the material plane. There, in blood and ice they bound the soul to the freshly hewn body atop the throne.

 

Sinews and bones shorn from sacrifices, knit together with dark magics, the body quivered as the highest necromancers anointed the frozen corpse in cursed blood gathered from the sacrificial altars across the city. Their cries filled the dark hall. The force itself shuddered beneath their reality-warping words. After days and nights, finally, the body itself shivered as the cool touch of Inmortos returned to his throne world. A dark presence filled the room as outside, above the city, storm clouds began to swirl in an icy storming vortex centered on the tower of the sorcerer’s power.

 

Beneath the blood drenched ice, eyes blinked. With a great heave, the soul borne ice cracked and splintered, cascading down the from the body leaving the pale naked grotesque form seated atop the throne. All that he wore was an icy crown of souls infused by forbidden magics to his brow.

 

The wave of cold that burst from the body as the soul of the Reaper inhabited it was enough to freeze solid every necromancer in the room. It bound their final moments of pain into eternal statues of torment; their final sacrifice. A single cold breath emanated from Inmortos’ body as he tasted the final sacrifices in the air. 
 

A dark smile twisted across his face. This fresh body already torn from the hands of death, but a temporary vessel; a vessel of power nevertheless. He could feel his death with the apprentice Solus. In his death, Solus, a Sith, had granted Inmortos a victory of his very own. He was home.

 

Standing, the necromancer felt every joint in his body resist. He felt every muscle strain against the ravages of life. He forced his will upon the frankensteined body. It was his. This body, like this world, like the Sith upon Naboo, would bend to his will. Raising a hand, Inmortos called a fine black robe to him. The force itself carried it across the room to swarth his nakedness, shrouding him in mystery and darkness. From beside his throne, a cane rose to his hand. The monstrous wizard leaned on it heavily; the task of living anew sapping his strength. Faintly he could hear the chants and cries of those below. He could feel the deaths of so many rising on the frigid air that clung to his Necropolic citadel. They strengthened him as he knew every sacrifice of life powered his own and in their death each servant would continue to serve for eternity. They would be bent to the necromancer’s will evermore.   
 

Here in his throne room, Inmortos’ power felt unending. He knew to achieve his eternal goal he must leave it, for now. Before he did so, the frozen soul of Inmortos reached out into the frozen plane of the force, carried by the interconnected web of death that spread across the galaxy. He sought the glowing abyss that was once the life world of Naboo, for upon it he knew that the apprentice he had sought to instruct might still be found. In the stillness of death he sought to touch the mind of Akheron’s pet, to let him know that he had failed. Inmortos lived and as long as he did so, the lesson remained incomplete.

 

Leaving his throne room, I mortos made his way through the pitch blue still catacombed tunnels of soul-bound ice and death. Pools of weeped waters, excess of emotions in death pooled in the corners, yet unharvested by his minions. Inmortos ignored them. He descended the stairs until he emerged upon an ice-ringed balcony closer to the bloody rituals of his servants, those that worshiped him a god. Stepping into sight, a hush of fear and awe swept over the cityscape as activity ground to a halt. Here was their master, he who granted life, granted death, granted immortality. Raising his hands into the air, Inmortos spoke, his voice a harsh and crackling hiss that carried on the stillness. “Let the Feast of Souls begin!”

[Krath Inmortos]

The monthlong period of feasting and ceremony began with roars of excitement. Games would be played to determine the greatest and weakest amongst the people. Victors would have their souls torn from their bodies, implanted in both mechanized and biological dark side creations, minsters born from the minds of Inmortos’ high priests. Such an eternity was seen as an honor and vast crowds gathered to watch the bloody and violent games. Prisoners of war were sacrificed with great pomp and circumstance, their blood allow to pour down the steps of the great elevated temples to their god-king. Smoke from great fires mi  by led with the icy gray skies above as the lifeless bodies of these sacrifices were cooked. They were devoured in the great feastings that spanned well into the night at the close of each day.

 

For each life taken, souls were gathered, transformed into jade riches or harvested as soul frost to be added to the ever expanding necropolis of Inmortos. Death ran as freely as blood down the streets of the jungled fortress of ice nestled within Aaris III. From the furthest villages and encampments came more. Devout followers who sought the favor of their deity. They brought with them shackles prisoners; those who had resisted the globe-encompassing expanse of Inmortos’ will. Forced to bow before the innate and grotesque throne of jagged ice, their throats were cut and their blood flowed to the ground, making the icy floors of the ziggurat red with blood. With the rising sun of each day, the icy expanse of the city glowed pink with blood and ice. Catacombs became torrented rivers of blood that gargled and flowed beneath the city.

 

And through it all, fear, awe, and worship fueled the bottomless expanse that was the dark side, carving deeper into the untouched depths of the force itself. From his throne, Inmortos sat overseeing it all from within his minds’ eye. Each death tugged at his ragged soul, fracturing it and drawing it deeper into the mine of the force itself. Even the air over the city twisted and warped with the ravages wrought upon the life forces of this world. Inmortos’ body twisted and bent with the waves of the force; contorted in pain as he gave himself over to the depravity of his worshippers. Gritting his teeth until they shattered, he cried out. Bits of tooth, blood and ichor spew from his mouth as an ethereal undead wail rose into the air. It smelled of pain, drenched in power, upon it was born the fears of Inmortos, the fears that gave him power. The cry carried upwards tugging the darkness with it until the skies above were blanketed in a whirling pitch of blackened darkness and icy shooting tendrils of blue lightning and permafrost. And still, he clung to his throne of soulfrost, his knuckles whitened and bulging with the pressure. Electric blue tendrils of power arced from the Reaper’s throne to the crown upon his brow. It bound all of the dark evils of this world, any sin committed within the shadows of the ever growing spire, to Inmortos himself. It served as a grounding rod against the universe powering death and timelessness through Inmortos into the world around him.

 

Within the fortified cityscape below the revelry groaned to a halt as all attention was directed to the font of undead energy that magnetized their works to it.  The priests and necromancers were the first to give themselves over to the draw of doom. They gave their minds over to the madness. With knives, teeth, and claws, they tore their flesh and clothes, spilling from their homes and temples as they danced with abandon in the streets. Like a fast-moving plague it spread as the madness touched warrior and cleric, slave and peasant, living, dead and undead alike. None would be left untouched as sin and evil reigned freely beneath the wicked sky. Temperatures dropped and the flowing blood began to coagulate into cold molasses moving sludge. Still, they danced on. The wind began to howl and tear at any that was not secured, tearing life from the maws of many. Still, they danced on. Each that fell was reanimated by the power that seemed to swirl and surge about the Necropolis of Eternity. Empowered by the touch of the eternal lifeless state of being an undead, immune from pain and aging and pleasure and warmth, caught in a twilight existence a soul unnaturally ensnared in a prison that sought release. Still, they danced in.

 

Within his tower, Inmortos’ body was overcome by the power of the darkside. His muscles caught and spasmed snapping his very bones with their power. His eyes rolled back in his head as every nerve in his body burned with the touch of fiery death, frozen in an instant entombed in a bed of lifeless numbness. Against his throne, his fingers snapped and nails shattered. His tongue wagged about his mouth, flicking blood and bone onto the undying scream. The very blood within his body boiled at the surge of power in the force. His flesh, dead already and reanimated, peeled backwards in pages revealing his ichor bound twitching muscles. And just as his unnaturally woven facade could bear no more, his scream faded, the last echoes of it carrying forth to the maelstrom that crossed both this planet’s plane and beyond death into the hellscape of eternity contained within the force. With his scream carried the pieces of blood and flesh that has been shorn from his body, leaving a skeletal visage of cracked bones and tendons, blanketed in burnt tattoos of flash-frozen nerves. Broken bones were held together with fear and pain, leaving a cannibalized skeleton moist with blood and slacked off flesh, dripping ichor, seated where the vessel of Inmortos had sat.

 

And as his mind touched the expanse, it was washed in the surge of time itself from the conception of the universe to it’s final end in blackened fire and absolute cold nothingness. It reached upon the expanse across the cosmos, over people and worlds, tasting of the deaths of the countless forgotten. Sensing them, the heart of Inmortos tensed and raced. This would not be his fate. He would not become one of them. It did not matter, in pain and cold he was forced beyond that which a mortal mind could be capable of. It ravaged his very being, tearing it apart and stretching it beyond shape and recognition.

 

Just as suddenly, his attention was caught, drawn to a point within the cosmos. He reached for it, a beacon of blackened power beyond what he could fathom. And as he reached, he felt his skeletal fingers claw at the surface before the maelstrom spat him out. Back unto his throne on Aaris III, broken, twisted, and transformed.

 

Overhead, the storm let out a deafening peal of thunder. Such a journey that had seemed to have taken moments had in reality been weeks, drawn from the powers of the maddened dancing and death below until all but the strongest had died. Even the undead had grown silent, collapsed in heaps, worn into oblivion.  The storm pelted the citadel and ziggurat with sheets of icy rain and wind as it blew itself out. Within his tower, atop his icy throne, the desiccated corpse, or what remained of it, that was Inmortos breathed.  In a sibgle icy exhalation that rattled bones, the necromancer stood. He was hunched. To gaze upon him was to gaze upon the ravages of death itself. Bits of flesh and muscle clung to the fractures skeleton that composed his mortal vessel. Lidless eyes rotated in the sockets of an exposed skeletal face. Bone, flesh, and death held together in fear and pain. Calling his fine black cloak to cover his putrid form, Inmortos stood. He was the visage of a lich king of yore. His lipless mouth formed a single word, “Sullust.” Whatever the power had been to solely consume an entire world was now upon the surface of Sullust. Inmortos knew he had to learn this power; to tap deeper into the force than he had even now descended, to give himself fully over to the depravity of the dark side so that he might achieve his life-ending goal.

 

Seizing upon his cane, the Reaper made his way from his tower. Through the frozen blood drenched streets he wandered. Amongst the fallen in exhaustion and death, wiped by the very powers that had now crafted him he moved raising up the most grotesque and powerful where he found them to form an entourage as he made for his ship. Those that remained would eventually rise, by the whip or word of his faithful priests this world would continue. It had to. It was all part of his grand vision.

 

Arriving at his vessel, Inmortos’ boarded and they departed without another though; vapors of icy fear and pain trailing in his wake.

 

 

[Krath Inmortos]

Inmortos’ shuttle broke the perpetual cloud cover over the forgotten city that now housed his towering ziggurat and expanding citadel of lifeless ice. From within his black sarcophagus, the Lich-king slowly sat up. He could taste the life within this world, beings, the press of the jungle, all of it. It was invigorating. It spoke of untapped power. It’s stench mingled with the tumultuous odors of the force. Massive sacrificial pits and fires belched smoke, putridity, and heaving force injuries high into the cold wintery sky. The thin snow-choked air churned with the powers of death and the darkside.

 

Slowly, as with great effort, Inmortos clasped the edges of his crate with boney hands. Pain radiated outward as his joints clacked and the god-king of Aaris III stood. He shuffled to the viewport to gaze out at the city below. Reclaimed from the dense jungles, the forgotten cities and technological traps were laid bare, engulfed by the expanding crystalline walls of soulfrost and ice. The people, living in squalor beneath the surface, had scurried like rats before Inmortos had come. He had elevated them from their despair, bringing them civilization and purpose beneath his protective wings. All he asked of them was their lives. In exchange, he offered them that which he craved the most, immortality. 
 

Inmortos mind hovered on the words of the great quivering Hutt master. He could be loved. Didn’t these people love him now? Did they not worship him, the very ground he walked on? They loved him. Right? And love, wasn’t that why he was doing all this? It was his love for his father and his mother, forgotten by everyone, everyone but he, that had led him to where he stood now. No one would forget him. No one would forget the name Inmortos. These people, they loved him.

 

The corpse at the helm brought the ship in to land. Inmortos stared out the window lost in thought the entire time. It was easy to control the mindless dead. It did not even require thought for such a simple task.

 

As he stepped from the gangplank, Inmortos leaned heavily on the smoothed hilt of the dagger affixed within the top of his cane. All that came to meet him was a small cabal of necromancers. Sorcerers trained by his own hand in the arts beyond death. Surely they loved him. He had given them the keys to all but his innermost sanctum of his kingdom. So why did he feel nothing but disdain from these lizard men  as they laid their eyes upon him? Did they desire him to never return? To take what he had built for himself? Would these people remember him if all they wanted was to take the gifts he so freely gave?

 

The whole thing made him sick.

 

Inmortos shouldered his way through the diminutive wizards. He had no time for them, not if their joy would not be the penance they paid to be in his majestic presence.

 

Inmortos stalked to his ziggurat and ascended the circling stairs upwards into the sky. Within his cupped throne room atop the world, Inmortos slumped into his icy throne. His power radiated with his confliction, magnified by his throne and crown. His anger oozed from his rotted flesh and poured like ichor-filled blood across his bleach-white exposed bones. These people, surely they loved him, even if those he had granted the most power to did not.

 

To be loved for eternity, spoken of as the great provider of an eternal existence worth living. That was what he  desired. To dedicate that love to the might of the Sith would only  exponentially magnify his legacy. So why did he not feel it was so? Why did he, Inmortos, the god-king, feel so alone?

 

The walls of his throne room oozed soul frost. The frozen temperatures crystalized Inmortos’ undead breath. Within the dark side writhed and twisted echoing Inmortos’ internal conflict. Outside the first flakes of snow began to fall as temperatures dropped across the jungled continent, progressing into a winter storm. 

[Krath Inmortos]

Inmortos sat in the dark for hours. The only sounds that broke the ethereal dark stillness were the nevromancer’s raspy breathing and the howl of the wind outside. The storm was blowing a wintery gale unto the city once again; an outlet for the power that condensed within the cracked soul of the Lich-king. As he sat, slumped forward in his throne, hands holding his head resting atop his knees, Inmortos’ mind whirled, considering all that had taken place on Sullust. The Krath Master Sheog had power that Inmortos could only dream of. And yet he wanted just a sliver of it. That meeting had relayed a truth long hidden, Inmortos would need to do more to be remembered for eternity.

 

Deep below in the snow-blanketed citadel, the people that Inmortos has favored to bring from darkness to light lived and prospered. They did so under his authority. He had pulled them from their primitive mire and gave to them that which he too sought, eternity. Surely they loved him for it. Didn't they? Wouldn’t they love him for all time, worshiping at his temple long after he had gone from among them?

 

The idea nagged at his mind over the hours until it became an all consuming thought. He could not put it from his mind. His people, these people, loved him. He gave them no reason to hate him, to fear him, or cast him in any light but that of their savior. He knew it; but he had to hear it.

 

With the snap of his cold boney fingers, the heavy winter silence within the throne room was shattered. The snap echoed on the dense thick air seeming to echo out the doors and throughout the tower. Within moments a single tiny lizardman materialized in the darkness. He was swarthed in dark heavy robes, the unnatural spark in his slitted eyes speaking to his undead nature. “Yessss my master?” He hissed as he bowed low, clasping an ornate staff in his right hand.

 

”I require your body.” Inmortos responded. “It will be returned once I have completed my walk among our people.”

 

”It issss assss you desssire my master.” The lizard coo’d without looking up from the floor.

 

In an instant, the heavy dead cold air was whipped to a frenzy. It pulled at the robes of the undead necromancer and his master. The winds of the storm outside blew through the throne room with an icy blast. On that surge, Inmortos’ soul leapt from his body into the maelstrom until it was carried to the reptilian necromancer. Pitching it’s head back, the lizard’s mouth gapped in sheer pain and horror as the spirit of Inmortos dove inside taking root within the being’s chest. In the throne, Inmortos’ body slumped, lifeless.

 

The winds died in an instant. The heavy cold air returned. Inmortos, inhabiting the body of the undead priest, suppressed his servant’s spirit as he took control. Lifting his free left hand, Inmortos fanned his clawed fingers as he looked at them through slitted eyes. His tongue whipped out of his mouth, forked and snakelike. He tasted the heavy air. It tasted cold. It tasted of death.

 

”Many thankssss” he hissed, his voice that of the lizards.

 

Turning, Inmortos made his way to the stairs and began the great descent to the city below. He followed the winding paths and hallways of the soulfrost necropolis until he stood before the great wood-hewn doors that separated his private sanctum from the lives of his subjects. There, he paused. He was still alone. He had no need for guards here. His people loved him enough.

 

Taking a deep breath, Inmortos calmed himself. He was about to receive confirmation of that which he knew to be true. Leaning against the doors, he pushed them open and set off afoot through the drifting snow into the empty streets of his citadel.

 

The wind blew high overhead and the snow wafted down. The streets were empty as the last rays of the planet’s sun flickered through the hazy storm cover. Inmortos knew where to go. It was meal time and that meant the lizards, his people, were gathering for their evening meal and communal time in one of the many great halls he had them erect throughout the city.

 

Making his way to the hall, Inmortos slipped in a side door. There he was greeted by a trio of spear-toting armored guards, living ones. They stared into his eyes and labeling him a necromancer, and an undead one at that, led him, rather more forcefully than he would have expected, to a pen of like-looking undead in a corner cast in shadows by the roaring hearthfire. “Another of Inmortossss’ssss exxxxpeeramentsss.” One of the guards hissed as a fourth lizardman, opened the gate to the miniature palisade, reaponding,

 

“Pray that it is not too late for the elders to recall him from beyond.” the guardian of the gate added forlornly as he stared into the blank undead eyes of Inmortos’ host.

 

Scrunching his nose, Inmortos went along with what was happening, confused by the act as he was jostled into the docile herd of undead lizards. Shouldering his way to the wickered fence, Inmortos could feel the heat of the flames as pots were removed from the fires and bits of meat and exotic jungle vegetables were removed and the gathered people fed. They started with the young and the old. Even they, however, got distinctly small servings. As he watched, Inmortos heard a child blaspheme his holy name only to be fearfully shushed by a parent or elder with a warning that Inmortos had spies, eyes and ears, everywhere.

 

The longer he watched, the more he saw of the same. An ungrateful people who distrusted his gift of immortality. A people who lived in fear of catching the eye of Inmortos or the hungering attentions of his cabal of necromancers. The Lich-king felt the heart in the chest of his host grow heavy. These people did not love him. They despised him, feared his wrath, as should any from their god, he though.

 

But in this sobering realization, Inmortos saw a glimmer of hope. Perhaps these did not love him. They were the fools upon whose backs this glorious eternity was built; ungrateful wretched peasants, nothing more. His priests, those who served him and rules at his command, surely they loved him; as do they who have been granted the gift of eternal servitude without pain or cold or death. All he would need to do was get out of hear. In this body, his force powers were limited and while these would be punished, they who dared to complain about the gifts they were given beneath the stoney visage of their god-king where they supped; that would not be yet. 
 

And so for hours, late into the night, as the wind and snow blew against the wooden walls and shutters, Inmortos stood, an unmoving undead, listening to the complaints of his people as they cursed him for everything from the food on their plates to the cold that he had summoned to protect them. Nothing, it seemed, was good enough for this wretched ungrateful people.

 

At the end of the night, the guards opened the gates and led the undead to the doors, pushing them into the mounting piles of snow; but not before flicking handfuls of black glittering dust in each undead’s face first. When they did this to Inmortos, he felt his face burn and had he been a living being, he would have sneezed. Such a reaction was missing in the undead. As he stumbled into the snow, Inmortos’ mind began to blur, a bulk of the evening, it seemed, was trying to disappear in a haze. But they would not succeed, bound in this body, Inmortos’ soul was still strong in the force. Even as his undead body writhed against the magical powder, the necromancer called upon the force to preserve his own mind.

 

As the other undead eventually righted themselves and set off through the snow towards their assigned positions, Inmortos picked himself up. Using his staff, he cut a path through the snow back towards his ziggurat and throne. He had learned things; but the thoughts of one great hall was hardly enough proof to prove that they did not love him. They had to. If they did not; well, he would use these blasphemers as a lesson. They would love him, just as his servants loved him.

Edited January 28, 2022 by Krath Inmortos

[Krath Inmortos]

Back inside the silent crypts of his frigid necropolis, the lizard body borne Inmortos stalked. Through angled winding corridors, up and down stairs, splashing through deathly cold puddles of soul frost that solidified in icy layers on his robes, he moved until he came to the winding stairs that led upwards. Upwards through the cold and dark, empty stillness in a winding circular spiral that finally opened up into the frozen throne room of the god-king himself.

 

Seeing his lifeless body slumped atop his soul bound throne, the body Inmortos inhabited lurched forward, his mouth falling open as his chin hit the floor. A whisp of ethereal vapor exhaled as the body returned to it’s lifeless state. Wafting upwards through the still heavy icy air the spirit of Inmortos passed through the rotted lips and maw of the skull exposed Lich, the shadow of life returned to it’s roost.

 

With a flicker, Inmortos’ eyes rolled forward, bulging from the dark recesses of his black cowl. He sat up, his boney fingers clawing at the edges of his throne, pulling him upright.

 

At his feet, his undead servant slowly pushed himself upwards, “Thank you, my master,” the lizardling spat.

 

Inmortos sat, his mind a whirling vortex. It was not the cold coolness of death, but that of a soul, a mind tormented. They did not love him, the rabble. They did not need too. For they were the cattle from which he chose to love. The worthy, the chosen, elevated beyond even their peers, a chosen few amongst a chosen people. They would love him and in time, teach the masses to love as well; to love as he loved his mother and father. They would remember him, with love; as he remembered them.

 

”Rise.” He hissed to his servant. The undead scrambled to his feet. “Your gift is appreciated. Ask, and your reward will be yours. Anything you ask, up to a kingdom of your own.”

 

The undead man shuddered, a chill of opportunity, a courage of ignorance granted by the dark side. A glimmer shone, perhaps, even now, months of service, pained on a metaphysical level, not dead, but not alive either; bound in a purgatory between two worlds; perhaps, this was a worthy sacrifice. Eons of torture bound in each minute of being finally collected enough to now warrant a reward, a release from this eternal condemnation.

 

”Freedom.” The undead lizardling hissed. “I want my life back.”

 

”What??” Inmortos snapped, his eyes flashing a cold danger, his temper rising.  What could he mean?

 

”I wish to live, to love, to feel. To live and die with my family. To return to my brood and barrow in the jungle.”

 

Slowly, Inmortos rose as the lizard spoke. The diminuative soul was so lost in the perception that perhaps his nightmare was ending that he did not recognize the cold frothing rage that sublimed from the Lich’s exposed bones. An icy fog poured from his orifices as Inmortos soul sank into a tepid eternal pool of nothingness. This one did not love him either. He pled to be released from the greatest gift the god-king could grant. This was not love. He spat upon all Inmortos gave to him, desiring a return to his unelevated primitiveness.

 

And then, a ripple. On the unblemished surface of the eternal stillness that was the depth of the untouched force. It moved. With it so did Inmortos; his body not his own, a vessel of the darkest most ancient twisted roots of the force itself. His hand shot outwards, carrying the force of time immortal. The neuranium sacrificial dagger in the hilt of his Ithor wood cane erupted, sending splinters of sacred wood in all directions. The blade flew, an extension of the necromancer’s will, burying itself in the lizardman’s throat with a gurgle of blood.

 

A sacrificial blade, designed to pull forth the lifeblood of the chosen and to draw their soul upwards for harvest, the weapon would do the same now. Empowered by the deepest recesses of the darkness of the primordial force, the blade sunk itself into the gargle sunset bound blood of the undead, his body sucking at the weapon and drawing it inward. And outward came the twisted soul of the undead lizard, a soul freed from life by death, but bound to a plain it was not meant for.

 

Striding forward, Inmortos cradled the soul in his skeletal hand, as if a mother caressing the face of a child. It was a thing of beauty really, cracked as it was bound to a plain it had been freed from. Inmortos mind drifted to thoughts of his own mother, how she had loved him and cared for him. How she was gone, forgotten and discarded by the galaxy. He felt anger at the thought that she who was so beautiful, who meant so much to him, had been so easily cast aside. He loved her and it had not been enough!

 

And these, they did not even love him. He had tried to give them what he had desired, what he needed. They rejected it, spat in his face. Inmortos’ hand snapped into a fist crushing the soul within until it’s light went out. It was no linger bound to this world, but neither would it be freed to the next. It was crushed, destroyed, gone as if the life had never existed.

 

The dead body fell to the floor. It was useless for any sorcery now, a husk whose resources had been exhausted.

 

Inmortos sank back into his chair a heavy sigh escaping his mouth. The masses did not love him. Those given his greatest gift did not love him. There was but one more, his priests. Surely they loved him. They worshiped the ground he walked upon did they not? Taught all that they knew, the powers of life and death. Even now, they gathered in the Temple of Inmortos preparing the profane rituals.

[Krath Inmortos]

Inmortos sat. He was unmoving, as the dead. His rage at the people, his people, was palpable. It manifest as a deadly humid cold that rolled from he and his throne. In the force, it was a heavy blanket in the void, a snow covered stillness that reached as far as he could perceive, a calm deathly cold stillness uninterrupted. It was as if the force itself was heavy and frozen within the grasp of his undead furor.

 

And so he remained until he felt a disturbance. Something above. A presence he had known before. The thick clouds that extended over and out from his city thickened in innate reaction, the winds high up in the atmosphere increasing to a howl. The people of Inmortos had little in the lines of air defenses, a few anti-aircraft emplacements from the smugglers that he had routed upon his ascension to godhood. There was little need. The powers of cold and death were enough. The people could retreat to their underground boroughs.

 

Inmortos slowly stood, staring at the ceiling as if he could perceive through the icy ceiling. It was the stench of the shard that had tried to slay him on Naboo. A smile twisted the rotted flesh across the exposed bone of his face. This would be a surprise.

 

Something else. Something he had felt on Solus and on his former apprentice, Apothos, the touch, the mark of he who had trained them. The Sith Warrior, Akheron.

 

They had come at his behest afterall, to receive the anointment of blood; and oh would there be blood. Such would be the wound in the force with the powers death that Inmortos would bestow upon them; should they survive it.

 

Channelled through the power of his throne, Inmortos called to the legions of undead. They may despise him, but he had given the him life. He alone held the power to control them, to bend them to his will; and he would do so now.

 

Assembling a Legion of armored and armed undead, decaying and mangled, murderous and hungering, Inmortos directed them to the sole landing pad within his citadel, alongside where his own shuttle sat. These blackened grotesque lizards would meet the envoy of his fellow Sith. Should they prove true, they would escort him to his throne room.

 

So they stood, the legion of undead. Buffeted as the craft landed, they stood, staring unblinkingly with cold lifeless eyes in the cold heavy air. As the craft opened to regurgitate it’s passengers, the undead commander of the legion, a musclebound beast with fractured linbs and head dangling at an odd angle, one eye lolling from his eye socket, stepped forward. In his hands he held a wickedly barbed spear of blackened metal. “Our Master Inmortossss bidsss thee welcome Lordsss of the Sssssith. He hassss commanded that we are to essscort you to his throne room where you may beg pennance for your ssssinssss.” The undead’s voice dripped with scorn and hatred as his forked tongue flicked in and out trying to smell the new arrivals in the snowy air.

 

Forming around the Sith, the rotting undead encircled Akheron and Solus and their escort of linworms, leading them through the city; their short bodies carving a path through the ever falling heavy snow. In the near distance, rose the necropolis of Inmortos, crafted from alchemically formed ice and soul frost. Thick jagged walls encircled a castle of darkness, the middle of which rose spiraling to the clouds in an intricately carved ziggurat that seemed to radiate extreme cold, drawing the gray light from the air and casting the world around it in shadows.

 

At the massive sealed gates the legion stopped until unseen guards pushed open the doors with a slow yawning creak. Inside, darkness and cold reigned in the absolute still silence. None of the legions dared break it. There was no one inside it seemed. If they were, thy were well hidden in alcoves and winding halls.

 

Through it all they marched, weapons held at the ready to subdue any that tried to escape with undead violence of steel, tooth, and poisoned claw. They dod not stop until they reached the narrow winding steps that curved to the right up the exterior of Inmortos’ tower. The winds whipped loudly above, sending shards of snow and ice tearing like razors through the air. It was here the escort stopped, parting to allow the party access to the narrow stairs that circled upwards about the exterior of the massive spire. “Climb. Those who live will have gained an audience with our god.” The lizard spat before returning to the ranks where they stood, motionless.

 

The thick walls of eternally frozen souls and suffering emotions were slick with the wept overflow of the damned, weeping from the very pores of the ice, slowly solidified by the cold winds; an ever expanding growth of Inmortos’ throne.

 

Atop the spire, a walkway rhat was a mere foot and a half wide, curved to connect to the balcony of Inmortos’ throne room that overlooked the world below. Within, the balcony turned into the pressing darkness of the frozen throne room. Atop a dias of dozens od icy stairs on his massive throne of power, a conduit of Inmortos’ world power, sat the Lich King. He was slumped against one arm rest, his jaw agape and maw hanging open. He looked dead and even the force was dead around him in this room.

 

As those who survived the climb to the throne room entered, Inmortos slowly righted himself. His body creaked and cracked. His skeletal joints popped. Any smile or sense of joy was gone from his face. Seeing the Sith he asked one question. “Did you feel it? They hate he who has given them eternity, he who plucked them from the gutter unto eternal salvation.”

[Krath Inmortos]

A wicked smile crept across Inmortos’ face. “To kill. It seems so simple to the uniformed. When one is a master over the gateways of life and death, things become . . . complex young saber stone.” He addressed Solus as he stood. Inclining his head to Akheron he offered a bow. “Your gifts are of great kindness; but we both serve under the Dark Lord. We are brothers in the Sith. No gift is necessary from an equal.” Not that he would not take them.

 

Reaching forward, Inmortos grasped the sacrificial blade in his hand. He felt the weight it bore, a dark soul-pulling weight; bearing the weight of the countless lives. It was heavy in his hand. “This blade,” he spoke reverently, “has spilled immeasurable blood. A fitting gift my friend. Come.” He gestured to the duo as he walked, slowly and purposely towards the inner stairwell, a much safer, albeit dark and cold, descent than the narrow windswept stairs outside. “We should test out this new tool. Did you not come for a Baptism?”He tucked the gift into his swirling black robes.

 

It was a lonely descent bare of the pomp, circumstance, and servants usually afforded a god or a king. It was more like a decrepit miser alone in his castle; yet the palace seemed to yield to the dark shadow of a man, the Lich. Leaning heavily on his staff, Inmortos led the way through the dripping stairs and halls. “Soulfrost.” He said of the drips, pointing out a pool of it on the floor. “Avoid it lest you wish to be frozen in time. Nasty way to lose a foot. The sword I gifted you Akheron, is bonded with it. It will draw energy, even from souls, and dissipate it.”

 

Moving through the winding inner channels of the necropolis, Inmortos followed a map only imprinted on his mind. In truth, the tunnels moved with the will of the dark side, bound to his crystalline throne, bound to Inmortos by way of the icy soulfrost diadem fused to his skull. He continued to speak as they moved. “Look at my body saber stone. You thought you destroyed me on Naboo. In truth, you released me from the forces that sought my indentured servitude, from my weak form. Now, I rule here as a god. To punish such a people who controlled this power, to destroy them takes more than snuffing their lives like candles.” It was an admission, Inmortos had willed his death at the hands of Solus. An orchestrated  plan to return to his own world, this world, a world that seemed revolted by his mere presence.

 

And they continued, into the underground of the city, the crypts and catacombs of an ancient people long forgotten. Here Inmortos fell silent. The ancient pale of death reverently held in the air. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, were buried here. Their lives and even their deaths forgotten; but in those deaths they served a greater purpose. Such was the way of Inmortos’ own undead legions, only . . . only these had died willingly for the greater good. He could taste it. Such devotion made him feel sick now. Their descendants so fallen from their honorary lineage.

 

Through undisturbed dust and heavy cobwebs they moved until they found a stair. Upwards, finally, into a holy sepulcher full of splendid jewels and precious metal laden furniture. It was a burial chamber fit for a king, containing all that was needed in the afterlife. The treasures of systems and worlds. Even some of the treasures of Apothos’ storehouses of artifacts on Mon Cal. “Behold. My crypt. Touch not the cursed treasure. It will bring death” Central to the room, a gold covered sarcophagi bearing the visage of Inmortos, but in his prime, sat open. It’s silken lining showing impressions of having been used.

 

Walking to the only wall that was not gilded in depictions of Inmortos’ life abd power, the Lich king ran a skeletal finger along the ruins carved into the stone. He muttered and mumbled the words as he read. It was an ancient forgotten tongue that predated even the Sith; a language from before the galaxies had been explored. Ancient spells that secured the tomb. The walls began to shake and the great rune-inscribed stone rolled back from the mouth of the crypt exposing a glistening temple on the other side. It was the Temple of Inmortos.

 

The chanting was apparent as soon as the stone was moved away. Nearly one-hundred shrouded necromancers raised their voices, their spells caused the ornate statues and decorations to swirl in the heavy force-laden air. It was unnatural and evil. It was worshipful, ancients chants of unforeseen power. Inmortos had raised the best and brightest of the force-sensitive children of the lizardfolk up as necromancers in his own image. They ruled the people in his place. His power, was their own.

 

As the dark master came into the sight of his acolytes, their disdain was palpable, as was their fear. Before, Inmortos had not cared. The words of Sheog still played at the back of his mind. What was the good of it all.

 

None of this was what drew the eye of any who were brought into this inner sanctum. A full-sized pool of churning blood, deep and long. One could easily submerge within.

 

“Blood.” Inmortos spat the word. “Sacrifices to the god-king gleaned by ad from the warriors of the Sith, of The Spider-King himself. Gifts to a loyal servant.”

 

Inmortos stepped up the golden gilded steps that descended into the pool. His eyes surveilled his acolytes. Their chanting continued uninterrupted, but their eyes; their eyes darted too and fro, glancing at the Sith who had entered the room from the sealed burial chamber.

 

”Do you feel it my brothers? Step into the pool, wade into it’s warm embrace. Feel the taste of life on your tongues, knowing it is mine to command. This is the Baptism of Blood and I, Inmortos, the god-king of Death, will induct you into the grasp of the death and will bathe you in the life of the lost.” Before the Sith could enter however, Inmortos’ hand shot outwards to catch Solus in the chest. He stared at Akheron. With a furor in his bulging lidless eyes he whispered, “No machine. No technology. Just the naked body and soul; lest the blood boil and the initiate become a sacrifice!”

 

The voices of the necromancer cabal rose with fervor all about them. They knew what was about to come and they hungered for another life to add to the pool.

[Krath Inmortos]

The chanting continued into a crescendo of long lost languages and words, spells that wove the very fabrics of the force and bound it with unnatural intricacies to the blood itself. The surface of the pool began to gurgle and sway. The thick concoction stirred to to life, the life of the lost contained within it’s very earthen grasp. And as the voices rose, so too did the blood until it danced atop the pool like it was being pelted by vicious drops of invisible rain. It was the force bound to the life.

 

Inmortos turned back to Solus, reaching his free hand up to drop back his deep cowl revealing a skeletonized face, a liplessly framed maw of ragged teeth, lidless eyes, and rotted flesh peeling from the bleached bone beneath. “The spirit may be willing, but the body is but a vessel, weak . . . and replaceable, unable to contain the power of the dark side.” Stepping to the edge of the pool, Inmortos gestured again bidding them enter. “No sacrifice is without cost Lord Akheron. You know that to defile a fellow Sith invites retribution by the Dark Lord. This gift is for me as much as it is you. It is my contribution to the fall of the Rebellion. What you do with this power afterwards will be to the glory of the Sith Empire, to the praise of our Empress, and the rending of the force itself. ”

Steam rose from the writhing blood. The temperatures of the air within the Temple plummeting to below freezing in mere moments until the only source of heat within the hall was the viciously churning blood itself.
 

Focusing his unblinking eyes on the Sith Warrior he spoke, his voice low. “Your servant speaks of things he does not know Lord Akheron.”

 

He smiled, his skulled face twisted in evil delight as he extebded his hands in gracious explanation. ”The secrets of the Father of Dust are not to be trifled with. You know this. Enter the blood. Receive the gifts offered by the shedding of innocence. Taste true darkness. Become invigorated with the powers of a true Sith. Powers of life that transcend death. Powers of death that envelope life. Be consumed by the lifeblood of eternity and transformed into servants of The Maimed Beast made whole.”

 

Yes, Inmortos knew of these servants of the Fanged God. Their religion as ancient as the spells he himself controlled. They both extended beyond the meager origins of the Sith people. Inmortos had studied their manuscripts in his quest to control death itself. In them he found a fanatic zeal that rivaled his own. He would enable these servants of the Fanged God to serve their deity, to serve the Sith, to fulfill Inmortos’ oath. In return, they would be filled with the lives of countless beings not their own, with souls shackled to the blood seeking release; unleashed upon a galaxy unknowing and deserving of destruction. In their path, Inmortos would call forth the legions of the dead. Their lives and deaths serving to advance his own agenda of immortality. 
 

Stepping backwards, the chanting of Inmortos’ acolytes hung in the frigid air as the temperatures continued to plummet. The lizards’ green-hued skin paled and turned blue, their bodies shaking as their very life was drawn from their cold-blooded bodies, lost to the cold bottomless hunger of stillness. And yet they chanted onward, knowing the punishments that would await them should their magics fail.
 

The necromancer-king looked at the Sith Warrior and his Apprentice. His voice grated lowly and with power. “Enter the blood. Be unshackled from that which holds you back.” His words were cold and commanding. He would not offer such a gift again. To rebuff him would be to insult the god-king’s hospitality, to insult Inmortos himself.

 

[Krath Inmortos]

Inmortos stood silently, the hateful chanting of his minions a backdrop to the impromptu training offered by Master to Apprentice. This was not his place and he would allow it uncontested for it furthered his own agenda.

 

As the warrior disrobed, Inmortos watched with keen fascination, taking in the old wounds and tattoos. The mechanized limbs almost caused the necromancer to lurch forward, to grab the hulking Sith; but he refrained. He was a warrior; if he chose to take these limbs into the pool, he would need to be strong enough to weather what was to come. If he could not, he was unworthy the titles he carried.

 

As the Tsis slid into the hot volatile blood, Inmortos’ eyes were called to the mechanical chassis of Solus. In the warping vortex of the force, he could feel the shard reaching out to touch the sea of churned icy power. Slowly he exposed his true self, a crystal, and wavering in the air currents plunked into the boil of blood, quickly vanishing from sight.

 

Inmortos knew what must come next, as did his followers. To toss a stitched amalgamation of corpses into the pool would birth a Sithspawn powered by the lives of countless other tormented lives and souls. To do so to the living, the willing, changed the formula.

 

Ancient magics were often best left untrifled with.

 

Raising his skeletal hands into the air, Inmortos seemed to direct the howling symphony of the cabal’s chants as they dissolved into vicious screams of forgotten tongues and forbidden spells. The air itself, cold and dead, pulsated with an otherworldly life, like that of a heartbeat of a massive monster held just beyond the veil. The candelabras along the walls seemed to dim before they were snuffed out by the vortex’s cold icy breath. The room was bathed in inky black for but a moment until arcing spears of ice traced invisible lines through the air, crackibg and arcing like a solidified extension of force lightning. The ice glowed, a spiderweb of eerie blue that caused the blood to appear black. It raced forward and in a moment struck each necromancer acolyte in the chest with an explosion of fiery dark side power.

 

Their bodies tumbled forward into the pool, each landing with a splatter before it was violently expelled outward and upward in a gout of blood red flame. Tossed to the edges and corners of the chamber the bodies fizzled and burned melting the icy tendrils as they were turned to vapor in the swirling air. Blood flowed from open wounds and gaping mouths, winding towards the chaotic pool. 

 

The wind howled in the temple. The temperatures began to solidify everything it touched and in the din, the banshee wails of madness erupted from each fallen servant of the god-king mixing with the tempest of dark side power and wind. In it, Inmortos stood at the head of the pool, his hands raised upwards, bathed in the flickering red light of the burning bodies. He looked like a demon called forth from the deepest pits, hewn from the chamber floors of hell itself.

 

Gone were the chants, gone were the hateful acolytes. What remained was Inmortos, the manifestation of the dark side itself, and the two Sith in the blood. 

The blood would burn acidic and hungry against the unnatural extensions of Akheron, seeking to dissolve them and not stopping there as they sought to eat away at the body they were sewn to.

 

Bathing the Shard entirely, the blood seemed to search and prod for any cleft or crack upon which it could slither towards the center of the stone, to touch and intermingle with it’s soul.

 

Inmortos stepped forward, his rotted feet submerging into the blood on the first step as he looked above into the vortex calling the spirits of the hateful dead necromancers, bidding them towards his outstretched undead hands. They screamed; their ethereal voices driven to madness by their darkness fueled deaths; unable to leave the chamber and commanded by he that was neither alive nor dead. They continued to scream until they coalesced into one shimmering unstable vortex between Inmortos’s hands. The bone of the Lich-king began to smoke as the raw spirits dissolved bot just flesh but any semblance of life. Holding them there in the dark side maelstrom Inmortos screamed. 

“ODAKLE SI DOŚAO, VEZAN VEČOM ZA MOIU VOLIU. BUDINSLOBODAN NIKAD VIŠE JER SI MOJ U SMRTI KAO U ŽIVOTU. TVOJA MOĆ VIŠE NIJE TVOJA; VEZANI GRIJESIMA VAŠIM ZA DRUGOGA. IDI!!!”

 

His voice howled into the vortex seeming to both draw from the presence and feed into it, fueling the necromancer’s power as he heaved the sphere of burning souls downwards slamming it into the blood. Upon touch the sphere shattered the final eternal death screams erupting as the souls spread across the pool and were enveloped by the blood in fiery columns of eternal destruction. The bodies were quick to follow as they turned to ash whipped by the wind and clasped by the darkness until they seemed to cease to be or ever existed save for the fires that burned where the bodies once had laid.

 

Inmortos, still smoking as pain radiated from his melted hands, reached into the deep sleeves of his heavy robe. Gingerly he removed the sacrificial dagger he had been presented. He felt it’s weight, the weight of deaths innumerable. Using it, he slashed himself, tearing his robes to ribbons and raking deep grooves across the rotted flesh that still covered some of his body. Blood and ichor flowed freely down the bleached exposed bone and tattered robes until it reached the pool he stood in. “KREV Z KRVE, ŽIVOT SE ZNOVU ROZIL. VŠECHNY SILNICE MEANDEUJÍ, ALE MAKONEC VESOU K POŠETILOSTI.” He chanted as he set about mutulating his flesh, strips of rotted meat abd flesh splashing into the ever increasingly tumultuous bloody pool. The heavy liquid lapped at the god-king’s

 

With each surging wave within the pool, the pulsating presence’s power was bound to the blood until it grew even heavier, as liquified steel. It clung to the bodies of Akheron and Solus and pulled at them, seeking to burn away any impurity of life, of the mind, to wash them anew and to fill their voids with life. For in these two presented a dark hope, a folly once given up eternally begotten. In every man there was life, and where life ended, death. The lives of those slain, ensnared within the pool fought one another, clashing against one another like saber against saber. The strongest life forces would bind themselves to the shadows of death found within those in the pool and be carried unto the promise of new life upon their backs.

 

The blood at Inmortos’ feet retreated from the cold stench of death that carried upon his aura. For he was an enigma, one who might give the gift of the life of another, but unable to partake himself. He stood alone. Casting the Sith blade into the blood, a plume of smoke and fire erupted as if lava spewed forth from a fissure. The blood pulled the heavy weapon downwards into the abyss, the same abyss that sought to drown the lives of Akheron and Solus; to snuff them out and fill them anew, vessels of escape from the torments of undying back to the world of the living.

 

The blade, saturated with death itself, was quickly consumed, it’s power leeched and replenished into an unholy weapon of might and ritual deep within the pit.

 

The very seams of reality seemed to strain above the pool, a monstrous presence straining against the binding shackles of reality and time. A deep and wicked voice bellowed in a strange tongue rarely heard by those of mortal ears; and one that when heard would drive those who heard it beyond the brink into utter madness. 

 

“PUB RAWS LI TUS PLIGIS

TXHUA LUB NEEJ POOB UBDOS KUV SAW HLUA

TXHUA TUS TUAG NPLIG TAU KUV TCOM NYEM

UA TXHUA YARN RAU KUV YUAV THIAB PUB RAWS LI LUB TEEB”

 

Even Inmortos shuddered at the words, tumbling backwards to fall upon the stairs in a pile of his own bones and robes. He looked up just as a searing bolt of red lightning arced from the void and struck the blood filled pool. With a thunderclap the room erupted in a blinding flash of red. In that moment, all life ceased within the confines of the temple. Death, souls, they mattered not as the beast that was the netherside of the force itself consumed all. A black hole void of insatiable hunger; and then it was gone.

 

For what could have been minutes or days, but in truth was hours. The temple lay a desolate and barren waste until the force retreated, bound once again by the shackles of the living force. The blood was gone. At the bottom of the stone pool lay the Shard, the Tsis or what remained of him, and the dagger. Esch swelled with unholy energy, life that was not their own that cried out for vengeance. Beside the pool, Inmortos lay, a mass of bone and blood and ichor.

 

And as the unnatural life that he possessed returned to him, Inmortos had but the strength to right himself, to feel a clarity wrought by the purge of the darkness. He knew what must be done and he looked towards the coming battle to complete it. He needed more.

 

With a dry rattled cough, he wheezed. “No soul must be left unsundered. Take what you can. Destroy them all. This world will serve as a catalyst to the power of the dark side; to the dark lord.”

[Krath Inmortos]

Slowly the necromancer picked himself off of the hallowed floor, standing as tall as he could face to face with the warrior. His robes were tattered revealing a mixture of rotted peeling flesh and bleached skeletonized bones; the truth of being an accursed Lich. Neither dead, nor fully living, bound in the gray shadows of twilight. Reaching forward, he places a withered skeletal hand on the muscled shoulder of Akheron’s mutant arm. Before he could speak, Somus clanked into view, babbling unintelligibly as he jerked and heaved towards the door. “Your apprentice. He has been filled with the power of the Baptism.”

 

Clearing his throat, Inmortos called to the apprentice. “Find a youth. Bind him in my tower. It will be a witness to our sacrifice.” Turning back to Akheron his voice lowered, “that is if you will allow it? The dark side does not bequeath these gifts without goal or gain. A power like this demands sacrifice. These people are ungrateful, more so they seek to usurp my power. They do not understand the gifts they have been given or the sacrifices such a gift entails. You and I, perhaps even your follower, know this. Our service to the Dark Lord comes with sacrifice. Take your gifts. Join me in one final great sacrifice. Together, we will burn this world. Have your servants gather what treasures you may desire as payment.”

 

Inmortos turned, his skeletal form gliding ghost-like towards the doorway of his temple. Stopping he looked out over the city as it splayed outward, the horizon captivated by the towering swirled blue ziggurat.  Staring out over the world he had been given godship over, Inmortos regarded it for a long moment. The words of Sheog hovered in his mind. He knew what he had to do. Did he have the strength? 
 

Suddenly, a flash, deep within the god-king’s mind’s eye. A world of ash, blown on the wind, clouding the sky. Sulfur and brimstone, death, seared the nostrils. All that remained was one spiraling tower. A world destroyed. The force heaving in grief.

 

And then just as suddenly, he was back. A vision. It had been a vision. Letting go of the mantle he had instinctively gripped to remain standing, long boney indentations left in the soft gold, Inmortos turned back to the interior where Akheron stood. Raising his hand, ripples of then force swirled. The sacrificial dagger that lay within the empty pool careened through the air. It landed heavily in the undead Sith’s outstretched hand. His arm dropped several inches as the weight settled in. It was heavier than before. Laden with the deaths it had inflicted, the razored blade vibrated with the number of lives held within the void. All it would take was a death wrought by the blade to unleash a life within transforming foe to friend; crushing one life and soul to make room for one bound unnaturally to this plane.

 

“Solus.” He called out after the mechanized monster, “death here is a different matter. These lizards are primitive and vicious. They carry the power of the necromancer. Bodies must be vanquished and souls crushed. On Aaris, the dead do not remain so for long.”

 

”Akheron. These ships you brought me. How might I command them? Bend them to my will and together we will turn this vibrant world into a cursed graveyard. Even the force will be dead here, a testament to those who defy the will of the Sith, a message to those who might defy the Lord of Darkness.”Inmortos turned, gliding back into the temple. He whirled by the Sith Warrior carried on an aura of icy breath back towards his burial chamber. Within he cast off his tattered robes, his elixirs and weapons clattering to the floor. From a skeletal mannequin, Inmortos withdrew a splendid cloak of refined denebrillan star silk and wrapped it about himself calling his tools and blades uoward, concealing them in his robes.

 

Clasping his blackened saber hilt in his morphed hand, Inmortos activated his accursed weapon. A blackened void erupted from the hilt. It drew in the light, casting long shadows as steam rolled off the weapon bathing the area about the necromancer in fog. “COME.” the voice of Inmortos carried on the force itself as it spread across his citadel, broadcasting from his throne in the sky.

 

”I am calling  my necromancers to me. They will assemble here, at my temple, or outside my throne room. They are the key to the eternal resurrection and damnation of these people. Kill them. Destroy their souls, a sacrifice of my power to the force and the Dark Lord. Then kill the rest, casting their souls beyond the void to to the nether regions of the force.”

 

 

 

[Krath Inmortos]

Inmortos watched as Akheron dressed. He did not watch the Sith warrior, his gaze remained outward down the steps unto the gathering of shadowy clad agents of death. As the Tsis covered his face to step up beside the Lich-king, Inmortos spoke, having considered the man’s lengthy offer. “Let it be so. We shall feast together on blood and souls.”

 

Looking out to the amassed crowd of sorcerers, he spoke again. The necromancer’s voice was a low hiss between his exposed cracked teeth. “Your gifts are most welcome. The limnal blade can be used to sap their souls” he spoke referencing the gift he had given Akheron. “But be warned. These apprentices of mine have been trained in the arts of death and dying.”

 

Raising his hands, Inmortos’ melted boney fingers flicked up and down manipulating the deep stillness of the force that pooled beneath the waves kf fear that were beginning to cascade about the city. Inmortos’ dry raspy tongue flicked across the fronts of his teeth. He could taste it. They knew something was going on.

 

The air cracked as icy spikes materialized from the street up. They angled inwards forming a crisscrossed palisade of razored spears preventing any escape.

 

”My gift for the Clan.” He hissed to Akheron as he turned to disappear into the temple 

_________________________
 

At the base of the tower, more necromancers began to gather. Their chants rose through the air up towards the top of the tower, their ancient words calling forth ancient powers from beyond the graves buried and forgotten beneath the surface of the world.

 

All of it. It all needed to be purged. Death beyond the powers of even the greatest necromancer to return.
 

_________________________

 

Back into his burial chamber. Back down into the catacombs. Inmortos was carried by the winds of his own cryomancic power; a fast-moving wraith of icy death. In the depths of the catacombs, through the walls of stacked bodies, he moved. He could feel the lingering power of death. Extending his hands as he walked, the god-king of Aaris III raked his boney fingers against the exposed bones. A scratchey ratcheting sound followed in the winds that carried him. The very power of souls leeched from the bones, pooling as icy waters in the floors of the catacombs. Drawing from the bones throughout the underground, warrens froze, cementing families in place, settling an eerie stillness, a stillness even absent in death, within the graves. The icy waters began to pool until they coated the floors in slick frigid liqiud. To touch it invited death and over it, the Lich-king flowed like a nightmare.

The cleanse of Aaris III had begun.

 

[Krath Inmortos]

The frigid soulfrost soaked into the hard packed tunnels and catacombs beneath the ancient mechanized city. Their icy tendrils a death of cold fear that sapped the lifeblood and soul-stuff from the victims caught within it’s grasp. As Inmortos moved, so did the icy touch of death spread until it became a self-powered force of death that spread outwards, soaking into the soils and sapping the life from the jungles beyond with it’s deathly touch. Trees withered and fell, the green lush life that shrouded Inmortos’ death cult city and distant villages dying as if winter came upon them in an instant. The snapping of limbs echoed through the stillness of the jungles as it contained everything in an eternal tomb of cold stillness. Animals, plants, even the force slowed into silence at it’s touch. When it reached the outlying villages, it was as if a curse of old had been cast upon them. Cries of anguish and pain pierced the air in hot steamy breathes only to be choked out of existence. And it continued to spread, growing as it fed on the eternal entropy of nothingness; a cold wake of emptiness in it’s shadow.

 

And as Inmortos moved, so too did the levels of freezing liquid rise until they began to bubble forth through sewers and toilets and basement entrances. Screams filled the city as the people, his people, were driven into the streets or consumed in icy pallor, their bodies twisted and broken in grotesque forms, statues to showcase the absolute power of darkness. Their very souls consumed and obliterated; condemned to eternity between worlds, neither existing or passed on, useless to the necromancer, useless beyond their pain and anguish stilled in the freezing wet air. Such was a world that would serve as a testament to those who defied the Sith; to those who would refuse to embrace the gifts granted to them by the rule of the Dark Lord. Such a world had been plucked by Inmortos, a chosen jewel, to complete his own crown; but now in icy eternal stillness, would stand as a testament to the zeal by which those who served darkness would go in the service of their lord. 

 

Emerging from the catacombs, a flush of soul-snaring ice water crashing behind and about him; Inmortos entered the panic-stricken streets. Not one of those who had worshipped at his feet clung to him for salvation. They did bot beg for forgiveness, for that he would have granted. Instead they raced about in fear as their ways of escape were cut off by tendrils of ice and soulfrost, and frigid damnation. Raising his hands the waters crashed about him, freezing all they touched. Inmortos own breath clouded on the air, mingling with the last breaths of those he had sought to save. Their cries fell silent about them. Overhead, the gray clouds churned as the vortexes of temperatures and humidity mixed and mingled. Thunderclaps rolled like heavenly invisible beasts across the sky. I. The distance, jagged fingers of lightning leapt downward to ignite the dried and dead jungles, an inferno that clashed and contrasted with the stillness. It was two sides of the same coin, icy death and raging destruction, a symbol of the Sith that carved their place on this world. It would all end the same, in ash and dust, eternal stillness across a world devoid of all bit the barest of life.

 

In the distance, billows of smoke poured upwards, the blacks and grays mingling with the sky. It was impossible to tell where one began and the other ended.  The winds of the storms w the tower and the world, uncontrolled by the Sith, a byproduct of the devastation as it tore outwards across the world.

 

And through it all, Inmortos moved, a specter, Dust, a god-king, the herald of damnation to the unworthy, a servant to the dark lord Nyrys, kin to the Fanged God himself. Cold was his crown and ice his mantle, his scepter a dagger of undead, and his cloak death itself.

 

Raising the communicator, Inmortos rasped. “Lord Akheron. Crystal of The Blade of Darkness. Bring the ships in closer. Reduce this world to rubble. Unleash your servants. Kill the rest. Stack the unfrozen bodies as cordwood, a gift the Empress from our unholy triad. Leave those bound to the ice.”

[Krath Inmortos]

The onslaught of Linworm forces added to the sheer chaos that had taken ahold of Aaris III. Death was present everywhere. No prisoners were taken. None left alive as the magics of Inmortos spread like a frozen silent stain across the world, radiating from the Lich as an epicenter. The decent of warships into the atmosphere, spilling their loads of death in waves of energy and craft levelled who sections of the world, sending flames and greasy ink-comored smoke into the sky where it melded with the dull overcast of death.

 

It was here, one could taste death on the air. It was here that the force itself rolled and churned and was then extinguished as it was drawn into the cracks the Sith carved within the very realities of life.

 

Solus, Lord Akheron, Krath Inmortos, where they went, the silence of the grave trailed behind as a cape fit a king.

 

High in the tower, the young girl watched in absolute horror. The ability to speak striped from her in absolute fear. The demon-droid that had bound her only added to her fright as he spoke now in tongues she could understand. No reassurances of life were enough as she was forced to behold the carnage of  the only home, the only people she had ever known.

 

Over the rising tide of icy soulfrost-bound liquid, Inmortos moved as a spectre. He carried no weapon in his malformed hands. His robe and infused crown of ice his only markings of grandeur. None stood in his way; for all that might were touched by the cool hand of crystalized eternity well before they beheld him. He moved as if through a garden of statues, each one perfectly capturing the pain and anguish of the frozen body within’s last surge of emotion. There was fear. There was agony. There was rage. There was defeat. Each one a twisted display of what would become those who sinned against the Sith with their pride and ungratefulness. Their souls bound forever beyond the horizon, unable to live and yet unable to die. Useless to the  necromancer and untouchable by the healer. They were truly gone. Whatever heavens or hells awaited them left gaping forevermore.
 

As the city was laid waste about him, Inmortos moved towards his tower. It was a pinnacle, shrouded by ancient spells and entrapments, shielded from the onslaught within an eternal grasp of Inmortos’ icy power. Gone were the walls and labyrinths. No more guards or mazes stood to keep the tower from the people. The people were no more; their lives extinguished across the world. Snuffed out as if they never were. The crumbling foundations that remained would be turned to dust in a short time as the storms of the world unleashed themselves with pure intensity. There was nothing to stop them as the world itself grieved the loss of it’s facade, born back to a primordial time before life came to exist on the rock.

 

Ascending the tower, Inmortos found Somus and his charge. “You have done well Apprentice. I will see to it that you are rewarded in kind.” He hissed, a mixture of pleasure and pain permeating his voice as utter coldness filled the throne room and spilled forth from the balcony in hazy waves of destruction. “I would ask but one more thing. Turn the fiery breath of The Dragon unto the seas. Boil them. See to it that nothing of life remains hidden from your sight. Once this world is purged, we will take all that we have learned to a galaxy that opposes the Sith.” Reaching into his robes, Inmortos removed a heavy skeleton key of polished brass. He handed it to the assassin. “This will grant you access to the subterranean levels of my tower. There within my libraries lies a laboratory. In it are potions and elixirs. Use them. Pour them   Into the sea. Destroy all life there and perhaps, if you are strong enough, a Sithspawn demon might emerge to complete the rending of my world.”

 

”But be warned.” He added with earnest. “To touch my library, invites death beyond that your crystalline shell could imagine or behold.”

 

With a skeletal hand, Inmortos caressed the girl’s face. Even as she was bound, her flesh recoiled in terror at the cold evil that exuded from the cryomancer. Without a word, Inmortos turned. He plunged himself into the darkness of his throne room and made his way ro his throne. Turning he sat, his hands finding their natural places along the great armrests. For one last time, Inmortos the god-king of Aaris III would sit enthroned over his people. He would lead them to the end; for he was their king.

 

Outside overhead and across the world, loud cracks shattered the sky as all heat began to be drawn from the world, consumed by the vortex of power that was a god enthroned. In it’s last, the world would know it’s place, at the feet of the Sith.

 

[Krath Inmortos]

 

As the other Sith departed his tower, the cold darkness of Inmortos’ inner soul radiated on the force as it heaved and strained beneath the unrelenting onslaught of death until it, death, was all that was left.

 

In the distance, Inmortos felt the dakr beast’s birth. Formed from his own machinations and magicks, mingled with the dark powers of the warrior and mentalities of the Shard, the beast was drawn to the evil font within the force. Any survivor was hunted down, bound in durasteel-strong strands of web and their soul and life were sucked from their bodies. Nothing but a husk was left; a husk that quickly dissolved into dust that was carried on the ever present winds that tore over the destroyed surface of the world. So too was the world left behind in the wake of the Sith. The world was devastated. The jungled burned and the seas boiled. Cities had been torn down. The humid sun-filled skies were replaced by a force-fueled maelstrom that coated the planet in a gray blizzard that would not weaken for years. Fire and ice, cold death, destruction and stillness, the world was a message to the galaxy to any who might defy the will of the Sith.

 

Rising from his throne, his tower the only remaining structure that was not devastated on the world, protected by the force and power of Inmortos’ magic,  Inmortos moved through the darkness. He grasped the shoulder of the young lizard. She withdrew at his frigid touch with a gasp. “Feel it,” the Lich whispered, his voice rattling the bones within his head. “Take it all in. These were your people. You are the last. You are my herald to bring the truth to the galaxy. Soon you will be among friends.” The girl began to sob.

Clenching his fist, Inmortos seized the girl in an icy telekinetic grip and ripped her from her bonds where she had been secured. Walking to the edge of his tower, the ETERNUS rose to level itself with the balcony. The only occupant an undead body of a Mon Cal plucked from the watery world during Inmortos’ rule there. Stepping off the balcony, Inmortos stepped onto the extended gangplank drawing the girl in with him. The door closed behind them.

 

Depositing the girl in the corner, she was given free reign of the sparse interior of the ship. Inmortos moved to the main chamber where he gently lay down in the stone coffin raised upon a blackened dias. The 2 ton stone cover slid shut atop, sealing the beast within. 
 

Inmortos soul left his body swirling about the cabin before coming to possess the undead decaying fish-being.

 

Keying the comms, Inmortos’ slave activated the holo screen projecting images of the Linworm fleet commanders now under Inmortos’ command. “Fall in with the fleet until you receive orders from your new Master. We will accompany Lord Akheron and the fleet.”

 

 

[Krath Inmortos]

Aaris III; a once lush jungle-covered world inhabited by primitive diminutive kobold-like lizard-men as they swelled within ancient cities build into the jungle. Now, it was all gone. The jungles burned to nothingness. The seas boiled until their cracked beds were bone dry. The cities reduced beyond rubble to ash and dust. Even the people, erased from the cycles of life and death entirely. This place did not smell like death, for in it’s destruction, it had transcended it. Aside from the one survivor dropped upon an Alliance world and the undead army bound to @Darth Calypso as a gift from

Inmortos, there was nothing left. It was if they had never existed. Even their souls shattered so that they too along with their bodies could never be raised again. The world was vast and empty. Desolate as storms ravaged across the world unchecked by natural or artificial

barrier. The climate cataclysmically altered in passing bands of searing heat and unbearable cold. Aaris III was a world destroyed, a testament to the power of the Sith, the Dark Side, of Lords @Karys Narat iv-Adas and Inmortos, and even to the touch of the Shard Sithling @Solus who someday would adorn the crowned brow of Inmortos and act as a conduit of his will.

 

Life was gone from this place and in it’s stead even death was naught to be found. Vast swathes of emptiness from horizon to horizon were all that remained.

 

The only thing that broke the landscape as it was lashed by eternal lightning-laden blizzards was a towering ziggurat of soul-bound ice, soulfrost morphed and twisted to hold the throne room of Inmortos high above his kingdom and within it’s dripping dark frigid interiors, atop a dias of skulls and ice sat a magnificent icy throne that seemed to warp and morph the room

So that it was at the center, the focus, and dwarfed all within it’s presence. Below, icy walkways and frozen barren gardens twisted outward from the base of the tower leading to a fortress, walls and towers, halls and dungeons, all that sat atop a deeply buried library of ice, guarded by spells and incantations, wraiths and lethal traps: the secret library of Inmortos, gathered, stolen, and summoned from the dredges of history. Profane and lost texts that detailed ancients rights and civilizations long lost to eternity, forbidden magics even by Sith standards.

 

Outside, butied within the dust atop a webbed nest existed a solitary being, a caretaker of sorts, neither living nor dead, a Sith abomination whose invisibility and poisons haunted and hunted the world and consumed any that dare trespass upon these sacred profane grounds.

 

It was to this place that the veil between life and death split the sky with a monstrous clap of thunder. Souls, imprisoned for ages within death spewed forth to herald the return of their newly crowned god-king. And from this cleft descended an ethereal form, a ghost, a specter, a wraith; a being of form but not substance, a true embodiment of that young Firrerreo man cursed by the dredges of Coruscant so long ago. Inmortos, and yet, Eligreen, drifted down unsullied by the winds and darkness, cloaked in a veil of the damned, the very winds lashing put from his translucent form as he touched down upon the open balconies of his throne room. From there, he drifted to his throne, up the skulled stairs and turned to sit. As his ghostly form and his throne connected a flash of dark power erupted, consuming the tower itself in roiling clouds of deathly ice and lightning. The god-king was upon his throne once again. He only hoped that his servant @Bernon Mrrgwharr brought him a more suitable host this time, upon which he could exercise his will once more.

[Krath Inmortos]

Seated atop his frigid throne, the icy cold grew to encompass the wraith that was Inmortos. Within he was but a pale blue shadow of his former, a ghost of a man, beautiful and ethereal. His outward appearance; however, was frozen in place fixed to his throne that sat deathly still as a font of raw eternal stillness. The power of absolute nothingness frozen for all eternity. 
 

The stillness was interrupted by only one thing. The ravages of the howling storm outside were silenced within the inky black darkness of his throne room. Even the light could not reach his throne. The last gasps of a dying world had faded completely, damned to a fate worse than death. The roar of the cosmos was lost beyond the foggy veil. Even the tendrilled reaching grasp of the force, of the dark side failed to carry the whispers of any of the worlds outside. And the damned, the dead, they knew better than to whisper here in this hallowed hall. No, the only interruption that carried on the billowing winds were the petty arguments of the nature of the dark side, of Sith philosophy. Inmortos had libraries of such drabble stowed within his frozen libraries below and from more learned sages than these, they that sought power beyond their grasp.

 

And so the spirit of Inmortos trembled and the storm outside followed suit. Clashes lf thunder and bolts of sizzling lighting erupted from the storm as blinding snow and cutting ice began to whip on the wind. Those that survived the ascent would be found worthy to step foot within his throne room. Spirits of the dead, foreign and chained to this world after the decimation of her native peoples flew through the storm, cackling and shrieking as they sought to torment the fateful Sith who climbed the external circling stairs that spiraled higher and higher about the ziggurat that held the throne of the god-king.

 

Before they could enter the diased balconies that circled the throne room, a bolt of lightning split the sky and struck the body of the fated linworm, the pilot, one of the chosen acolytes of the sky pirates whom @Karys Narat iv-Adas and he had commanded before their destruction over Nar Shaddaa, fell, toppling from the railless stair steps and plummeting into the storm below with a scream as his body ignited in flames. He would be dead before he hit the ground, if he did in fact hit the ground, obscured by the storm, far below.

 

And then the rest of the group made it, their condition and wear their own. Who knew how long the ascent had taken them, how many times they too had fallen into the storm only to land atop the drifting snow at it’s base. When they entered; however, the sounds of the storm died away completely as it ravaged outside. Within the throne room the inky blackness and deathly cold muted sounds and colors as their very breaths crystalized before them and the cold played at exposed bits of flesh and metal. And in the darkness sat the visage of Inmortos, frozen atop his throne, the world about him, in this room, radiating with all the power, all the overwhelming unnatural unbreakable stillness of his domain. It was here that time itself might freeze in place and here that the veil between life and death was gone, leaving only an icy bridge upon which to cross, a coat of frozen fog the only separation between the two, a veil to freeze the souls of any damned that sought to cross over uninvited and to suck the life of any living who dared cross without proper penance. 
 

and in the stillness a single voice seemed to radiate in the cold.

 

”Our lord Inmortos welcomes the living damned to that where even the dead fear to trod.”

[Krath Inmortos]

The stillness of the room seemed to mute the deference of his apprentice. Inmortos would have to admit, he was surprised the untrained had come this far and seemingly unscathed overall. It was a testament to the vast pools untapped of power that lay nestled in the man’s mind. That, or Akheron and company had done well to protect him until he was ready. And yet, he had brought the saber, even know held it towards the frozen form atop the throne as an offering. A cold invisible finger would seem to pass across his apprentice’s chin; chilling and dead, yet a fleeting gesture of approval, a rarity indeed and the promise of training soon to come upon this cursed world.

 

To Ōk, Inmortos felt his presence. It was young in the scheme of the eternal darkness, but it carried with it an age of experience, of a dynasty of darkness. It was almost, almost recognizable, as if the souls of those that preceded this recently rescued Sith Lord were familiar to Inmortos, faces without names, identities lost upon the fringes of one’s mind just out of reach. Regardless, Inmortos recognized the deference the worldy blind Sith paid in his silence, and it was to he that the disembodied voice directed his first query. “Welcome Forsaken Lord of the Sith. My spirit recognizes these others, but you . . . pray tell, why have you come to the halls of the forgotten and the damned?”

 

Inmortos undead gaze fell across Akheron, the muscle to Inmortos’ magics, his equal in the physical application of the force while Inmortos touch played with what lay beyond. They were joined together in accursed oaths and profane ritual. Baptisms of blood and fire, and the former had called his fellow pirate lord to this forsaken hold, the throne of Inmortos, and a enclave from which to return retribution to the galaxy, a home to begin to see that the Sith, the name of Inmortos was never forgotten. The Sith had spoken true, Inmortos’ oath fulfilled, the Necromancer loosed upon the galaxy until called upon to serve the order of the moment.

 

And finally, the undead gaze of Inmortos passed over the twisting envies of Solus as they were sucked into the void leaving naught but stillness and cold in their wake. At least he was not speaking, perhaps his master’s brutal ways were finally showing results. Yet his unchecked emotions betrayed him. He would never have this power and the cold press of nothingness promised just that. 
 

And if Akheron could not tame the gravel, Inmortos was still more than willing to temper him in the ice cold flames of death’s forge, a frozen crystalline conduit for Inmortos’ eternal power bound into a blade.

 

And as the stillness pressed in from all sides the frigid fog that separated this world from the next seemed to thin, the icy blue crowding along the edges of the room as the dejarik board of eternity seemed to shimmer in the darkness as if from a long ways off.

 

Somewhere far below, the body of the fallen linworm smoldered, fractured and broken against the frozen snow. Spirits of the dead swirled around it, accepting the offering of another soul unto the void.  Smoking and hissing the body lay there, dead; and yet, after several minutes, a hand began to twitch.

 

((Want to give @Lord Ōk Rägnär a chance to answer before bringing Inmortos back in my next post. Then we’ll get rolling!))

[Krath Inmortos]

@Lord Ōk Rägnär‘s humility spoke to the spirit of Inmortos. The man acknowledged his place and yet asked for that beyond his station. It was the way of the Sith and such a bold request would be honored. Such a request would have a price. If it could be paid, the stores of knowledge that predated even the Sith and Jedi orders waited decyphering.

 

But before a response could be generated or carried across the unnaturally cold still air they were interrupted. A great crashing wind blasted through the darkness carrying a biting deathly chill. The doors that led to the balconies all burst inward as snow and ice billowed into the still unpierced gloom. Ringed in frozen white snow and ice, the fractured scorched body of the linworm shambled into the throne room.

 

With a thunderclap, the invisible spirit of the necromancer crashed into the billowing power of the storm and spirits that had carried the sacrifice to Inmortos’ throne. With a flash if icy lightning the entire room erupted in cold white light and then in an instant, the darkness was back, taking over as the visage of Inmortos atop his throne shattered into a million pieces.

 

In the darkness, the robe-draped skeletal frame of Inmortos rose, carried by an icy aura as the wraith given substance cracked and popped as the Lord of the Dead tested his new form, the tendons popping and cracking with each spiraled joint. Slowly he drifted across the room until the form settled atop his throne and the winds died down leaving nothing but the stillness, the darkness, the cold. A faint blue light began to glow on Inmortos’ naked skull; icy spears jutted through the smooth bone. His crown that bound him to the power of this world, to his throne, erupted confirming the blessing of Inmortos’ eternal spirit upon this latest host.

 

 

The wind roared and then died. The icy tendrils of death seemed to slowly crawl across every surface with ethereal frost, and the lidless eyes of the lich king surveyed those who stood before him. A frightful smile played across the skeletal lord’s face, “Welcome my brothers and servants.”

 

”My apprentice,” he beckoned to @Bernon Mrrgwharr  as he reached for the fractured saber hilt. “You have proven worthy in this. Let it be that you are worthy of greater things than this. A test then, remove your trappings of your prior life. You will not need them. Where you will go, the darkness will provide. Cast them into the vortex outside this sanctuary.”

 

Turning his gaze to @Karys Narat iv-Adas “My blood-bound brother,” he hissed, “May this sanctuary serve as a base of operations until your men are strong enough to claim another world for your own. Your men may reside within the frozen barracks below, but they may not trespass within this sanctuary or the inner chambers of my eternal crypt. Those that do so will be consumed.”

 

 

[Krath Inmortos]

Inmortos watched with a disconnected nonchalance as bees of Falleen’s assault became known to the group. In truth, he had known of such treachery before the communique had arrived. His spiritual brethren inbound by the mortal chains of time and space had seen the launch of Imperial warships and felt the haughtiness of the Jedi as they made themselves known, spied hidden amongst the populace that Lord Akheron had professed such control over. As the transmission ended and eyes returned to the skeletal Lich King, Inmortos stalked to his throne. Spinning he sat in his still empty splendor, the emperor eternal of a world deprived of all the side of light proclaimed to protect; a mere facade for their own power and shame. Raising a single hand, Inmortos waived @Karys Narat iv-Adas and @Solus off.

 

”Go. Attend to the mortal needs of your world. If it grows to dire for you to handle alert me and I shall rend your holdings as splendid as my own.”

 

And with that, they were gone from his mind and his sight. He had no army at this time to offer and remembering the words of their new Sith Lord, @Darth Calypso, knew that to involve any more Sith in such a reckoning would be a disobedience and threat to the nature of the Sith itself.

 

Inmortos turned his lidless eyes toward @Lord Ōk Rägnär, an ancient Sith of mystery who had come to him for power, and his apprentice, @Bernon Mrrgwharr, a warrior of clay waiting to be shaped. Inmortos guestered about the throne room. 
 

“My world is yours.”

 

”But be warned. A dead world is even more treacherous for the living. It may serve your life better to plunge into the churning maw of Falleen alongside Akheron and his servant. There, you will at least die with honor.”

 

Inmortos slowly stood and approached Dictum and Bernon, “I sense more in each of you though, potential to touch the infinite.” 
 

Turning to Bernon, he smiled at his shivering form. “If you wish to become a true warrior of the Sith, you will need to surpass the strength of mind and body any military of THIS galaxy can offer you. To contend with the horrors and atrocities you must endure, you will need to bind yourself to the darkness and be warned, she does not give freely. Take this,” Inmortos held out a sinew draped hand and a rapier-like blade twirled and arced through the air, leaving a wake of crystalized icy air in it’s wake. “a limnal blade. Exercise caution my apprentice or you will find your place in my army sooner than you may have hoped.”

 

Walking onward, Inmortos hands did not touch the doors that exited into the dias, although they extend and a burst of wind crashed them open, allowing the storm’s bite to flow inward on a flurry of razored snow. “Little lives upon this world anymore, even the spirits are few. You shall not come to this tower uninvited again, lest you seek to challenge my lordship of this world. Deep beneath the foundations of stone and soul and ice lies a forbidden library. Within it lie countless tomes, relics of lost civilizations, accursed magics, and knowledge no mortal mind may grasp. The knowledge you seek is held within. To reach it you must trespass within the Maze of Insanity. There you will find your will tested by your deepest fears made living. You will be sapped of all your mortal strength and will. Give yourself over to your darkest desires, deny your mortal shackles, let the most primal instincts of your soul serve you; only then will you find the entrance. If you fail, your soul will become mine for eternity. Your test is not finished yet though. You must find the ancient texts laid out for you by the darkness. Touch naught but they; for any trespass into the forbidden may rend your mind beyond repair.”

 

The two Sith would need to descend the tower in the storm, wander the empty dark dripping halls of ice, find their ways to the depths of Inmortos’ fortress and then force their way into the hidden Maze of Insanity where only the most depraved spirits roamed and cursed and snares awaited any who dared trod within. If they remained together, the darkness would whisper to them until they turned upon one another, but separated they would be easier prey to the maddening of their own minds. 
 

((Lets make this a multi-post quest. 1st post: Finding the maze beneath the citadel and ziggurat. 2 or 3: Entering the maze and encountering the traps within. Feel free to delve into your characters’ own weaknesses as you are brought to the edge and pushed over, being forced to rely on the darkness (even untrained) to survive or be destroyed. 1 post finding the entrance to the library and then we’ll go from there. I will offer ambiance and response/GM as needed. Once inside the library, I have a few other surprises to test you both. There you’ll get some training in your given path.)) 

[Krath Inmortos]

The massive doors yawned open with a frigid creak revealing four separate hallways beyond that stretched forward into the darkness. The distant dripping of soulfrost, wept from the eternally tormented souls bound within the walls of the crypt. To trod in such waters would invite eternal suffering. The frozen blackness seemed impassable as the air itself seems to claw at the warmth of their exposed flesh, creeping tendrils of death seeking to pluck the warm life forces from their hearts. And yet, as the doors thudded open, their echo carrying into the eternal night below Inmortos’ tower, a pair of wisps seemed to materialize from the air. Cold, blue, and eternal spirits of savage servants from beyond the realms of the Sith come to guide the travelers to safety or, perhaps, certain doom. Their hunger and hatred was palpable. Regardless, their cool electric glow was all the light that dimly pierced the blackness; all that awaited was the choice made by the mortals who stood at the maw of what would very well eventually become the necropolis of the god-king himself.

 

The force itself seemed almost frozen here, attempts to pierce the veil and divine what was to come seemed impossible. To try would invite assault from unseen assailants, tearing mortal flesh to shreds.

 

The hallway to the left yawned off into the darkness before descending sharply downward along a slick path with few handholds. At the bottom of the unclimbable slope was a shallow pool

of collected soulfrost drippings, unnaturally cold and able to freeze flesh solid in an instant, it was the same material infused into the limnal blade Inmortos had gifted to @Bernon Mrrgwharr. To touch it was to have the energy sucked from your body instantly, lethally if one did not rely on the stagnant force itself to sustain them, to draw what little life could be leeched from the rock of this dead world.

 

The lefthand center passageway continued straight, unmolested

for what felt like eternity; for, in fact, it was. To turn around would result in an eternal path back, never to find the entrance. Wandering along the unblemished glass-like diamond ice, one would contend with their pale reflections, twisted and contorted by the dark side, prophesies of futures yet to come, of the eternal damnation that awaited the lost wanderer. Only when one succumbed to their madness would a bend in the path appear.

 

To the right, beyond where the light of the wisp touched, regal spiraling stairs led upwards into a collapsed passageway of jagged ice and soul-sucking frost. If one could traverse this ruse they would find themselves in a strange and frozen laboratory. Bubbling concoctions and potions lined the walls as the doors the wanderer entered through vanished, entrapping the trespasser in a windowless doorless room as the fumes from the potions begin to fill the room. Each one a mind altering concoction and poison that would effect the senses, sap life, and draw the ensnared deeper into their own subconscious, bringing the specters contained within to life, making them as real and deadly as any living thing, if not more so.

 

The final passageway, the middle right looked identical to the others, and yet it was littered with unforeseen traps, spikes that would erupt from all sides seeking to impale the wanderer, vats of soulfrost that would dump unseen from the ceilings, false T-intersections where the floor would drop out into eternal abysses that seemed to never end until the wanderer passed from the realm of the living into that of the dead where they would be separated from their bodies and their very souls set upon by demons clawing their way up from the abyss. Even as the air temperature continued to plummet, sucking the life from all who passed, freezing their muscles and  slowing their reactions the path would wind forth until eventually the trespasser succumbed to the traps, only then would they be forced to contend with the darkness, calling upon it for survival or be destroyed.

 

—————-

 

Far above, Inmortos sat upon his throne, motionless as his spirit escaped his body to wander his world. He had work to attend to and an apprentice to train. A necromancer’s work was never done.

 

(( @Bernon Mrrgwharr, pick a passageway and explore how it affects your character. Dive into the depths of what makes him tick. Allow yourself to be pushed to the brink and beyond. Let this post find you at the brink of failure or beyond; then next post allow yourself to grasp the force either by sheer will, accident, or whatever, and pull yourself clawing from the brink of destruction.

@Lord Ōk Rägnär you do your thing brother! Pick a passage and allow the darkness to guide you as you come to the edge of sanity and reason. Allow your fledgling assassin skills to begin to manifest

Pick DIFFERENT passages))

 

 

[Krath Inmortos]

The eternal tunnel yawed to the left as @Bernon Mrrgwharr’s mind scraped against the edges of sanity, as his mentality nearly forced his body almost to the point of death. He was mere moments from dying, from lashing out on his own emotion to touch the dark side when he clawed himself back into the physical world, the strength of a warrior. Had Inmortos been watching, he would have smiled. In the end, he would know; but for now, the overwhelming sense of loneliness told the necromancer’s apprentice he was alone.  
 

So as Bernon rounded the bend, the walls, the ceiling, even the floor faded from existence, faded into absolute and total nothingness and Bernon was left tumbling. Here there was no light, no heat, no cold, not even darkness. There was nothing to grasp, nothing to feel; in fact the mortal senses would scream out in pain as they were inundated with absolute nothingness, the void between life and death, the veil that fluttered. Here time would cease to exist, a thousand years would pass in a second and a minute would carry on for a millennia. To exist here was unnatural, even more so than passing into the realm beyond. To exist here was to condemn one’s own soul to eternal loss, lost to the void. 
 

Here, Bernon would be forced to confront his own inner demons, to have his own mind claw at the edges of his reality until he was driven to madness. Then and only then, when he was driven beyond the brink would he have no choice but to lash out with his deepest and darkest raw emotions; to grasp the force and drag himself free from the void, to the damned world of the living on Aaris III or beyond the veil into the eternal embrace of death itself.

 

((Great posts. Explore the inner workings

of your character. Allow him to be forced beyond any physical limit that he might be saved from. Force Bernon to lash out, to grasp the force and use it in a raw and wild grasp at survival. To become a true Sith one has to realize the power of the force, how much greater it is than he and the power that it presents to one who can control it. This gives you a chance to delve deep into Bernon, his inner workings or his backstory and then get wild and weird with the force. Don’t forget, the dark side always has a price to pay.

When you succeed, find yourself back in the maze. The dark side will guide you to the library.))

 

 

The spirit of Inmortos swirled through the stormy air, carried upon the winds of the never ending maelstrom as he descended toward the dead world below. Without a physical body, Inmortos passed through the frozen soil. He descended deep into the dead world traveling along untapped veins of soul frost that leeched outward from his ever expanding necropolis of silent solitude. If this was to become the academy for wayward youths that already had applicants, frozen dormitories and classrooms would need crafted. These piercing veins were the first signs of that creation. As long as Inmortos sat upon his throne the creation would continue led by his own hand and strength of will. He did not worry about the Sith lord and apprentice below in the maze; for if they survived, they would be forced to contend with his sacred library and it’s keeper.

 

____________________________________
 

As @Lord Ōk Rägnär stepped into the laboratory, he was inundated not with the hissing whispers of spirits or the overwhelming power of the dead world and the narrow veil between life and death. Instead he was greeted by a silent stillness only interrupted by the soft bubbling of of the boiling beakers, cauldrons, and vats of different colored chemicals, concoctions and potions. The laboratory of Inmortos was covered in a heavy layer of dust and yet it seemed as if it’s keeper had just stepped out. Acrid spirals of steam and smoke curled into the vaulted ceiling of the lab; it’s ice covered stone block build and lack of venting this deep underground allowed shifting hues of blues and browns and green to collect and pool above. 
 

As soon as Dictum entered, the door behind him vanished, sealed in stone and soul frost, cut off from the world around by Sith magic and miles of the soil and stone of Aaris III. Stone benches and tables were covered in ancient pre-Sith formulas and manuscripts in a variety of languages. Against the far wall lay the mummified form of a dried out long dead being, hulking in nature and covered in degraded fur. It could have been a wookiee, a whiphid, a yuzzem or some other beast of a being, it’s body split open and dried from the arid cold air. With the arrival of the Sith Lord, the lab seemed to purr back to life, roiling and bubbling as the thick steam filled the air. It was only a matter of time until the toxic gases began to play at Dictum’s body and mind. Then and only then would he finally be confronted by the single disembodied voice of the lab’s sole resident. It would speak but once when Dictum sought an escape.

 

”Your escape is Death’s door, become that  which you fear and touch the heart of they that can speak to them you once loved.”

 

((Dictum, we spoke in DM. Here is a chance to explore your hallucinations with a bit of chemical guidance and spiritual stimulation. Happy to chat further about opening the door or finding an assassin-y way around the entrapment. Once you are free, feel free to find yourself standing in the frozen cobweb strewn shadowy entrance of Inmortos’ library))

 

[Krath Inmortos]

The storm far overheard thundered and cracked with electricity as the aura of the world cracked with the sudden surge of dark side energy emanating from deep below the surface. A grisly purple hue spread over the citadel as the thin veil of death blew open and unleashed specters of a thousand wars of a thousand years upon the empty streets. The invisible guardians given pale form and limited substance as the Maze below channeled the newfound power of the Inmortos’ apprentice and the Lost Sith into the dizzying power conduit of soulfrost.

 

Structures of fearsome authority began to erupt from the world as the darkside power drew from the souls unleashed and the formation of Inmortos’ Sith academy began to take form. One by one the hellspawn reborn souls were ground by the storm into dust, their eternal form contained within the deep blue hues of eternal soul ice that formed dormitories, classrooms, towers and crenellations.

 

And deep below the world, Inmortos laughed as he felt the darkness seek to tug his own soul into the void of his creation. The dark side demanded sacrifice. It was the way of power and when it could no longer draw upon the physical it sought to leech the eternal.

 

Within the Maze, nothing changed. The world remained cold and dark, illuminated only by the faint blue light of the whisps. Yet again, both apprentice and lord had found themselves confronted by the inevitability of the dark side, of eternal damnation, death, and the realms beyond. Their power had been exponentially grown and exploited by the winding conduits of frozen souls that made up the Maze and it’s excess gave way to Inmortos’ master plan.

 

As death’s cold grasp encircled the souls of both ensnared Sith and sought to claim them, they had responded. His apprentice had lashed out, claiming his birthright as a son of the darkness. Clasping a cursed blade in his hand, he was baptized in the cold fury that transcended the raging fires of hate and as the Maze rematerialized about him a great steel door seemed to loom before him as tall and wide as the gates of the great forgotten cities of this world. Fitting his position, even as he came from years of stagnation, Dictum fought and yet gave himself over to the power that Inmortos knew, a power so forsaken by so many Sith. It was death itself, incarnate and omnipotent. And as Dictum gage himself over to his despair and claimed control over the eternal

void of destruction, a single invisible door within the forsaken lab came into existence. Beyond it was a unremarkable room within which the transfigured Bernon stood accursed blade in hand, beyond him stood the great weighted doors that led from the Maze and into the frozen hallowed halls of Inmortos’ library of the ages. All that remained to enter was this final test, the great guardian doors, bound not by lock or key, but frozen shut by the grasp of eternity itself. To enter in the lord and apprentice would be forced to pool their newfound power, a strength of will equal to that of the undead keeper of the crypt that lay beyond.

[Krath Inmortos]

The eternal vortex of the void swirled as it was touched by the minds of mete mortals. Dark tendrils of ghostly smoke seemed to waft from beneath the door as it creaked and rattled gently in it’s frame. Mortality and eternity clashed together as the veil swayed in an unseen icy breeze that seemed to sweep across the room.

 

Nothing. The door remained sealed and the temperature of the room began to drop, thin layers of icy mist beginning to materialize in the air and coat everyone and everything contained within.

 

To fail again would be to freeze, their souls encased in ice until they could be harvested.