The Helvault -- Nespis VIII

[Krath Inmortos]

The journey to the Nespis system passed without incident, more so, it passed in silence. The frozen interior of the ship surpassed even the temperatures of the void of space that hung about the Eternus. The coordinates were easy enough to find, even as Inmortos had to take control of the lifeless body that had ferried his chariot thus far. There was only so much a dead man could do without any spark of eternity. Flying in low over the treetops, the yacht had hopefully avoided any unwanted attentions.

 

Landing, Inmortos was surprised to see another craft setting amongst the trees. As the landing ramp silently lowered, Inmortos was struck by the warmth, the life, of the planet. Even without a living and thriving civilization the place stank of life. Wrinkling his elongated scales face in disgust, the necromancer slowly descended the ramp. Plumes of frigid air rolled out from beneath the charred and tattered Jedi robes that hung over Inmortos’ Vurk body, the body of the Jedi who had fallen Calypso thousands of years ago and had been gifted to the god-king by the reawakened Sith Lord.

 

At the bottom of the ramp, they started again. The whispers of the dead; millennia old ensnared in the lost histories of this world. The necromancer grimaced. This newfound doorway into death’s deepest reservoirs torn open to never be shut again. It was not the face he intended as @Mavanger came into view.

 

Pushing the frustrations of the damned from the forefront of his mind even as they whispered to him, Inmortos regarded the Sith Warmaster with his burning red reptilian eyes. “Well met Lord Mavanger,” he called aloud, his voice deep, rhaspy and booming, a byproduct of still coming to grips with the new body that he possessed. “The spirits spoke of your presence and I will admit I am pleased to see you. It is my hope that Lord Akheron and his apprentice will be joining us. Together, we will free my wayward apprentice.”

[Krath Inmortos]

“Krath Apothos still has use to the Sith, to me.” Inmortos murmured aloud to no one in peticular as he slowly raised a tridactyl hand as if to swat at some invisible pest buzzing about his robed head. “Waste not, want not.” 
 

He swatted again at the air, this time with both hands, fighting an annoyance it would seem was unseen by the others. The spirits, giddy with the revelations of such a gathering of Sith buzzed about the necromancer’s head like gnats. Their excitement at the knowledge they had gleaned from the world of the living and impending destruction, addition of souls to their own tortured remnants excited some. Others swirled angrily, Inmortos their only recognized path of release, desiring not the advent upon the orbital platform and sure destruction that was to follow. Here on this placid world they had found a sense of solace; a peace the Sith seemed fated to disrupt.

 

With a touch of the force, Inmortos was able to seat away the swarm casting it into the brush beyond the group. The scrub rustled and cracked as if an animal had been lurking within, only to grow still again as the invisible spirits circled back into the air. And yet, it granted the necromancer a moment of respite as he continued to grapple with this newfound avenue of the worlds beyond.  
 

Following the direction of Lord Mavanger and the excitement of the lightsaber-blade-to-be, Inmortos shuffled towards the revealed means of their alightment above. Pausing at the threshold of the ship, Inmortos did something quite unnatural. He inhaled deeply and sharply. It was a gasp of a breath, one that came as much as a surprise to him as it rattled the body of the ancient Jedi he now possessed, as it would to any of the others.

 

He felt it. The aura of the force-repelling lizards seemed to envelope him in their cocoon of repellant, an odd embrace that to Solus seemed to present a mere hiccup against his mechanized for. To the average sentient soul it might be little more than a douse of cold water in the face as their grasp upon the metaphysical was swept away. To Inmortos; however, it was different. Having walked the road of death and strayed upon both sides of the divide, sustained by the force itself, the revelation of the  ysalamiri was twofold.
 

First, it served to dull the buzzing twitterpating of the spirits that now seemed to hound him until he could regain a mastery over their kind; opening up a strange aura of peace as he finally became aware of the distant chirping birds and nature that lay behind him and the sterile machine-washed glow of the craft he now stood before. It was almost familiar, line the cousin of an old friend; different but recognizable. Was this what death was meant to be? A sense of peace that washed over one’s haggard life’s work in the final moments?

 

And the final moments were what it seemed, for unlike the others, bound to the trail of life, Inmortos’ newfound body suddenly convulsed as the physical began to react to the unnatural horrors necromancy by it’s very nature enacted upon it. The filling and cleansing of souls, the wresting of control between two consciouses. The sudden ebb of death itself as it reached out from the grave to grasp at Inmortos’ bodily form, recognizing it and him for what they were, an imposter, powerless within the tranquility of the ysalamiri.

 

Lurching forward, Inmortos grasped the frame of the door heavily as he leaned against it, his legs feeling weak beneath him. Clutching the doorway, he stumbled forward, moving from one supportive handhold to another as he leaned on his ever present cane until at last he could turn and fall into a seat. His breathing was ragged as he held up a three-fingered hand, already the onslaught of the grave was beginning to make it’s mark, his green fingers blackened as if by severe frostbite; the sensation of his appendages growing numb and tingling. Without the power of the force, all that held the finality of the end at bay was the will of the spirit of Inmortos himself, unwilling to meet his end. Not this way. Not now. Not ever.

[Krath Inmortos]

Inmortos’ face was twisted in a way that could only relay the fact that he was probably sick to his stomach. The truth was that was not quite it, not really. His stomach was churning, but not from something he had eaten. This body was not the original vessel of Eligreen, the Firrerreo son of Coruscant’s factory workers. This one had been stolen from an ancient Jedi, he that had imprisoned Calypso, new dark lady of the Sith. It was a body that had been sustained for centuries by the force. In its past life, the living force had flowed through the Jedi. Recently, the spirit of the Jedi had been forcibly evicted and Inmortos had taken up residency. The body now was possessed by the dark twisted powers of death itself. Well, it had been. The bubble of anti-force was doing more than muffling the power of that cosmic energy that held the galaxy together; it was holding Inmortos together on a metaphysical level. By pure force of will, the body remained together, possessed by the spirit of a master of death. He could feel the body falling apart at the seams as it decayed from the inside out.

 

As the ship clanged to a rough landing with the shields flaring back to life behind them, the reptilian Sith groaned in pain, the taste of bile filling his mouth. If anything, the lack of force connectivity seemed even stronger within the prison. If this was where Nok Morliss was being held, they would be lucky if he was only insane. 
 

As Solus clanged off the craft and vanished into the malfunctioning bowels of the prison craft, Inmortos could not help but smile weakly. “Always something to prove, the young have.”

 

Akheron followed shortly after. Klaxons began to scream up and down the ship. The bisection of a security droid, on camera no less, was cause for an even higher security alert. Mechanical malfunctions were one thing, but an invasion? That was entirely different. Prisoners would be herded and contained. Those that resisted would be subdued, lethally if necessary. Squadrons of security droids were activated throughout the ship. Blast doors began to slam shut all over the station. Gone was the idea of ever trying to salvage the slowly plummeting prison yard in the sky.

 

With a sigh, Inmortos shoved against his chair, his revolting body creaking to a standing position. Leaning heavily in his cane, Inmortos shuffled forward. The clump of his cane seemed to echo against the very air; a reverberating sign that the necromancer still carried with him the aura of death. 
 

Stepping into the landing bay, Inmortos was scanned by the turret over top of the doorway into the station. That doorway was quickly closing; a response to the triggered security measures. The turret did not open fire. Inmortos body was already dead by all scientific measures.

 

Lurching forward, Inmortos fumbled with the chromium hilt that fell from his sleeve into his hand. Catching it before it fell to the floor, Inmortos ignited the weapon. Instead of the usual energized hiss the red blade erupted in rush of whispers. Spirits bound to the blade beyond the touch of the force. The room seemed to darken as shadows grew longer bathed in a deep blood red.

 

Holding the saber in the air the defensive cannons locked onto them. Inmortos could hear them spiraling to life with energy as they targeted the known hostile weapon. Just before they erupted, Inmortos fell forward face planting on the deck plates as his saber sizzled against the slamming doors. The cannons fired. They filled the room with the din of warfare echoing in a cacophony of ear-splitting destruction. Blaster fire to destroy a ship tore into the blast door in showers of slag and sparks. Just beneath it all Inmortos clenched his eyes as destruction broke loose above him.

[Krath Inmortos]

Inmortos slid haphazardly into a secured alcove out of sight of the turrets bearing down on the hallways. Then Mavanger toppled backwards in the hallway beside him. Bracing himself the necromancer pushed against the sealed cell door until he reached a standing position . Looking to his comrade, the warrior grunted. He was alive. Disappointing.

 

Or it would have been had the Sith had the ability to touch the powers of life and death. As it was, the wizard’s mind felt overwhelmingly cut off from everything he had known for years. He was dependent on the warrior more than he would have liked to admit. Even with his new body, he felt frail, old, aged beyond the natural state of being.

 

___________________________
 

Elsewhere across the station, the realization of an assault had become all too clear. The station had been breached. The finality of what that meant had begun to set in across the crew. There was no time for goodbye comms. Each man and woman had been required to complete end of life documents, goodbye letters, wills, and the like. It was a boring task that nobody really took that seriously. The station had stood to this day unaccosted. The clock continued to count down. When it reached zero, they would all die; a station plummeting towards the world below, all exits sealed and antimatter cores primed for detonation. Knowing their demise was near, each member of the crew set about the ending of their lives with grim determination.
 

Safety protocols were removed. Droids designed to secure at all costs had long forgotten programming activated from the main control core. While lethal before, they were contained by a level of protective lines of code. No more. Any resistance would be met with beyond lethal force; preservation of the station was no longer of any concern.

 

Amongst it all, corrupt lines of computer code continued to play havoc across the station. Even amongst the plummeting prison, industrialized cleaning supplies and processing equipment continued to activate and deactivate as if possessed by a phantom. While concerning, it had little overall effect on the prison as it moved towards its doom; that is, until it had replicated enough to touch on the systems controlling both life support and artificial gravity.

 

Bodies began to float upwards, the magnetized feet of the security droids the only thing keeping them grounded. What breathable air remained aboard was all that there was or was ever going to be. In population dense and tightly sealed small areas there was less conscious time left than the plummeting station had remaining.

 

Anyone clearing one meter above the floor was determined to be in flight, a prohibited act. It was an act classified as attempted escape. It was a punishable offense. With restrictions removed, stun batons were cranked to eleven. Anything beyond a brief touch would result in complete bodily incapacitation and death.

 

____________________________ 
 

As he quietly cursed his lack of connectivity to the force, the sorcerer felt a ripple. It felt almost like, like death. The moment that Solus undertook the slaughter of the fragile force-repellent lizards several walls away, the repelling bubble of the force rippled and flickered. For a mere moment those closest to the center of the assault could feel something. For a moment, the force shimmered before its glimmer was forces back beyond the breach by the overlapping bubbles of ysalamir bubbles.

 

In that brief moment, Inmortos could taste it. This station reeked of death. Countless lives had been snuffed out here, forgotten by the galaxy as a whole. Voices of the spirits that haunted the halls of this penitentiary cried out. Unheard by the unattuned, their long stifled cries assailed the Vurk bombarding him with hissing whispers and shrieks.

 

And then they were gone. The silence fell like a blanket and Inmortos blinked heavily trying to understand what had just happened. Bits of information that had filtered through the cacophony floated in his mind.

 

The turret at the opposite end of the hall began to belch volleys of red destruction. Reaching out, Inmortos’ arthritic hand grasped at  the now floating @Mavanger hoping to pull him to safety. As he moved, floating upwards with the lack of artificial

gravity, the necromancer’s eyes saw through the small security window high in the door. What he saw within was a prisoner who was too dangerous to be released into the general populace. A huge slathering whipid covered in matted hair floated in his cell clawing at the walls leaving deep grooves in the reinforced plating, seeing the floating robed being outside his cell, the monstrous beast launched himself across the weightless room. His weight rattled the door as he slammed into it.

[Krath Inmortos]

The mag-locks on the droids feet allowed them to continue mostly unaffected by the sudden shift of gravity, or lack thereof. The last of the prisoners were locked down at last, either in their individual cells or the small mass in the recreation area (if one could call it that). Any resistance was now met with a lethal albeit brutal beat down. There were no life-saving protocols anymore. The only programming that remained intact was to prevent any escape, by any means necessary. 
 

Anyone seen or scanned in the hallways was designated a hostile entity. The tuning up of blaster cannons followed by explosive blasts traced after any unauthorized entity. Escaped prisoner, invader, it did not matter. They were all as good as dead. They would all be condemned to death in the next 20 minutes anyway. After that, the planet would be spun into complete and irreparable free fall; a fiery plummet towards an inevitable end on the surface.

 

Drifting against the sealed security door, Inmortos pushed off following after Lord @Mavanger. Moving from cleft to cleft the duo of Sith Masters kept the turrets popping, albeit inaccurately. Even without the force, the necromancer knew that the steely right-hand of the former Sith Empress was a force to be reckoned with. No mere turret would stop him. Inmortos, well, he was dead, technically. Even computers recognized there was no use shooting a dead body. Computers did not need the satisfaction. 
 

Still, the inability of the the turret to stop the encroachment necessitated reinforcements. As they passed the halfway point a half dozen armed security droids rounded the corner at the end of the hallway. Stun batons and wrist mounted blasters, it kept the prisoners from stealing them. Disconnected from the droid they would deactivate. Nothing more than a gangly hunk of metal. Pressed into the alcove, Inmortos felt worthless. He could feel the very foreign body he now inhabited deteriorating. Without the force, the familiar horizon of death loomed ever nearer; a one way trip into the beyond. It was not a path Inmortos sought to journey down a final time just yet. He had not yet achieved his goals. The fear heightened his senses. There was little he could do, decrepit and dying as he was. Without the force, he was nothing.

 

And then, it happened. A strange wave seemed to sweep down the passageway. The necromancer’s fragmented body was caught up in the tide. His mind, entrapped within a world of flesh not his own was suddenly immersed in the depths of the cosmos of an eternal silence. The veil beyond the realm of the living fluttered and opened to the eternal blackness beyond. Peace and tranquility, life spread from the tips of the Vurk fingers and toes possessed by Inmortos all the way to the sloping crest atop his head. For a moment, it was as if all the troubles of the mortal plane were swept away. In that moment, Inmortos was at peace. Inmortos was dead and he never felt more alive.

 

Until he was not.

 

On the heels of the peace that came with death, came the dogs. Howling, ravenous, caged unto death and driven to madness before they passed into the great beyond. The spirits of the dead, hundreds killed on the prison station, their bodies long since incinerated, tore past the veil. They flooded the area about Inmortos, a beacon to serve as their servant to the realms of mortality. They assaulted the necromancer’s sensed, blinding him, deafening him. The necromancer doubled over in the air. Pain, the pain of every injury inflicted upon the lives that were not his own, replaced the fear he had felt as it wracked his body.

 

”No!” He cried out, his voice cracking in pain as his body contorted unnaturally in the air. The air temperature dropped. The humidity crystallizing in an icy glaze all about the Krath master. He was the master of death. Those who failed in this life would not best him. They could not. They had already lost. They needed him and as vengeful as they were, they knew it too.

 

”NO!!!” He cried in anguish and anger, his mind forcing his body to fought against the rigor that sought to overcome it. Muscles tore as pain shot red-hot pain across his senses. The icy mind of the necromancer began to revert to its natural state, frigid, cold, a lifeless void, unassailable by anyone or thing. As he writhed, Inmortos’ resistance to the spirits grew with each passing moment until his mind had become an icy palace of solitude reaching across the cosmos to the barren hellscape of Aaris III and the Krath’s throne upon the desolate planet.

 

”NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!” He snarled in defiance as his eyes shot open. The pupils that had rolled back into his head centered and began to focus as his clawed hands slammed into the durasteel wall plating strong enough to leave dents. Had his feet not been braced in the alcove, the necromancer would have drifted out into the hallway. Icy wisps snaked from the Vurk’s nostrils. The air about him dropping dramatically well below freezing in an instant. The cold was more than a physical frigidness, it was ethereal, spiritual. It drove back the swirling chaos of the recently released undead wraiths. It slowed them, froze those that did not retreat, their bodiless existence falling invisibly to the floor and shattering in a glassy spray of broken soulfrost.
 

It was cold. The deathly chill offered clarity. It offered silence. And in it, Inmortos could feel the ever expanding presence of the force, freed from the grasp of the sickening mutant repellent that surrounded the station. He could feel the lives of all aboard, Mavanger, @Karys Narat iv-Adas, @Solus, the unknown @Lord Ōk Rägnär, and even his wayward apprentice @Krath Apothos. Yes. He was here and he was alive. If one could call such a miserable existence such a thing. The specters of prisoners passed on sensed the connection the necromancer felt, even if for but a moment, to the technological wizard and they seized upon it to assault one that might be of value to the necromancer; to teach him a lesson for denying them. Several screamed into the prisoner-laden hall to assail the senses and mind of Nok Morliss and anyone else who got in their way.

 

In minutes the entire haul was in chaos as poltergeists and wraiths materialized and vanished intermittently, bursting through walls, droids, and chests with icy touches, blinding sensors and senses. Screams of anger and fear contributed to the din. The droids were hard-pressed to control such a breakdown in order and they began to bash in the skulls of the nearest prisoners to begin restoring order, permanently.

 

Inmortos was only concerned with Apothos for a mere moment before his senses were diverted to Akheron’s droid-y apprentice. The lightsaber crystal seemed to have unleashed some sort of netherworld force monster, a being of rotting multiplying flesh and dried blood. Hunger and death. An invisible being that devoured anyone or thing connected to the force; a monster that did not exist but for the dark side of the force itself; a monster from beyond the veil hungering for life.

 

“What have you done?!” Inmortos mind sparked with icy anger. Meddling in spheres he did not know and had no right to be in touch with, the Shard had seemingly inadvertently stumbled upon something larger than himself. Redirecting  his focus from Apothos, Inmortos summoned upon the ethereal chill of the void beyond the grave. The veil that separated life and death billowed in eternity, its subtle echoes felt across the cosmos upon his trailing link to his chilled throne. He cast it beyond himself, the chill freezing the air as it slammed into the rolling boil of force-based flesh that pursued Solus. The spirits screamed after, their hunger being keened onto an even greater target, the monster from beyond the purgatory they had been cast unto. With ravaging hunger and the ability to inflict wanton damage on the frost-slowed abomination.

 

Cold death radiated out from the necromancer. The spirits recognizing a master that could finally give them what they desired.

 

[Krath Inmortos]

Inmortos watched woth a detached horror as the surging amalgamation of bodily fluids, eyeballs, and filth surged down the physical confines  of the station. It seemed to be chasing Solus, and yet; in spite of it’s interactions with the physical, only seemed to exist as a metaphysical temporal being of the force and by the force, plucked from somewhere beyond. The icy touch of the specters the necromancer now sought to command coupled with the hissing strikes of the Lord Mavanger’s blades seemed to slow it.

 

And then,

 

as if in some cosmically herculean effort, Solus of all beings, seemed to cast the beast into the ethereal beyond. It was gone. As if it had never even been, save for the warped passageways and crushed metal that spoke of its passing. Inmortos’ reptilian eyes twisted in suspicion. Something seemed amiss, he intended to find out what it was, even here. He rounded on the Sith apprentice of Lord Akheron intent on drilling the knowledge from his crystalline latticework only to watch the entire chassis of the being slump forward. Life leached from all

but the core, the physical existence of the wayward apprentice.

 

”Fool.” He spat, the hostility on his detached voice clearly belaying the anger he felt at such a distraction from their cause. Anywhere else and the necromancer might have invited such a task, to study it, to control it; but not here.

 

And before he could do any more, the spirits were back, more cautious, whispers of hate, lust, and discontent playing at the edges of his consciousness even as they questioned from whence the  immaterial had manifest beyond the veil. “Yes. Yes” he responded, waving his hand towards the downed Solus, granting permission to the spirits to manifest within his mortal form. Should the apprentice be strong enough, he would live. Should he not; well, it would be a finality in a lesson that he should not have tampered with that beyond his control.

 

The necromancer had items of more importance to attend to even as the crush of droids before them sparked and fizzled. At least Mavanger had the droids he had desired. From where he hung weightless in the air, Inmortos offered a solemn nod to the harbinger of destruction, a true master of his craft. A silent note of respect for his fellow master of their respected crafts. There was little time for anything else. Time was, after all, of the essence. Behind them the form of Somus slowly stood, jilted and wobbly as it was possessed by the spirits of the damned, enslaved by their fear of that which the dark lord that commanded them seemed to control.

 

With a breath of icy vapors from his outstretched fingertips, Inmortos drifted forward, a ghostly silent wraith. There was more to be attended to. Behind him the spirit-bound Sithling followed, it’s unsteady and tumbling steps the first steps of an infant as it discovered itself. The droid-being clattered along behind. The droid might be of use to Darth Apothos in this prison; and, on a more personal note, perhaps finally his former apprentice could extract the Shard so that Inmortos might again use the spirit of Akheron’s next failed acolyte as his own. This time, a lightsaber might suffice.

 

The entire station was in chaos. As the force surged into crevices and cells untouched for decades, it awoke long dormant sins and desires amongst the accused. Those who could manifest the force trained or not unleashed upon it in utter rage, blowing the doors from their fells and flooding the station with years of pent up rage-fueled vengeance. Even the highly skilled droids, as they cut down swarths of inmates were eventually overwhelmed. Killers, monsters, lords of the underworld regained their bearing and each in their own way began upon paths of revenge and rebirth. And still, the timer ticked steadily downward. The command center sealed and isolated in it’s entirety behind layers and layers of durasteel and phrik and cortosis infused metals. They were safe from the chaos, safe from the ravages of the force, within their tomb.

 

And so Inmortos moved unhindered down the devastated hallways until he entered into the din behind Akheron, Solus lurching to a halt behind the lord of death. He listened as the chaos of the compound howled over the chaoslord’s words, the revolution of suppressed hostilities overcoming reason as bodies were cut down with impunity and droids beat down by overwhelming numbers;

 

and for the first time since being subjected to the unnatural aura of the Force-repellent  lizards that lay dead across the station, Inmortos smiled. His dry tongue snaked across his lizardly lipless maw. He could taste it. Death. Fresh, not of ages gone by, spirits entombed bodiless in this orbital prison. No, these were newly fallen, their souls still clinging helplessly to their mortal bonds, shattered as they may be.

 

With a press of cold, Inmortos drifted downwards until his feet touched the cold steel decking. His gnarled swollen fingers danced in the air, a madman’s touch upon the eternal to any uninformed of the black clad’ reaper’s true intent. Ancient tongues spilled in whispers from his mouth that seemed to carry across the cavernous bay in a hiss of wind that blew the icy touch of death across the battlefield. Whispers of the damned, drowned out by the screams of the dying, moved unnaturally as they were carried by the magical words of life and death, incarnation, incarceration, and blasphemy. Across the battlefield, the crushed decrepit forms of those who had only minutes before been crushed to death began to rise. Their faces were twisted in the pains of eternity wrought from the solace of death. It was the only pain they felt, a pain beyond what the living could bear as they were immune to the broken limbs and tortured states of their mortal forms. It was this pain, the magics called upon by Inmortos that gsge them life. He did not need to control them, not that he could not with a wave of his hand; no, they would do what came naturally to the undead. They would seek revenge. The targets of that vengeance varied, fellow prisoners who had wronged them, but mostly the enforcers of an long lost unseen Republic and Empire’s will. unfazed by blaster fire and the touch of the stun baton and boasting the power of their bodies uninhibited by life-saving measures, they struck back, turning the tide until any who opposed them fell silent, dead and lifeless, leaving ichor-oozing shamblers groaning about the battlefield awaiting further instruction in their simple zombified state.

 

”Lord Apothos.” Inmortos rasped loudly across the silence. “My apprentice. Come.” The body of Solus clattered to the ground before Inmortos. “A gift by which to expedite our departure.” 

[Krath Inmortos]

All about them the newly dead arose, their crippled bodes, wounds still fresh and oozing, shambling towards their oppressors, foes, and stranger alike with undead ferocity. Those whose bodies had long since been devoured by the incinerators, their ashes little more than space dust spreading across the cosmos, swirled. Their invisible hands grasping at the edges of reality, their assign subtle chills as unseen winds passed by. In this paling of the boundary between life and death, they could reach across the veil, unseen claws rendering exposed flesh as they whispered of the imminent demise of all aboard.

 

For they that were not bound by the mortal world could see what those bound to life could not. They had seen it and whispered amongst themselves, delighted that oppressor, stranger, friend and foe would be joining with them soon enough. It was inevitable as the station continued to accelerate towards the world below, it’s axis becoming the epicenter as the gravitational dampeners strained and began to fail against the centrifugal force.

 

Throughout the station a new series of klaxons began to wail. It meant little as the mechanized voice warned of imminent impact, urging those aboard to brace themselves. Had it been a rogue ship, perhaps; but what the sensors that now triggered the automated sensors now sensed was Nephis VIII itself. All that mechanized warning did was increase the fear that already flowed like a river through the station. Not that it mattered to the droids. They had their orders: no one escaped. Within the control room, panic had set in. The looming doom was taking ahold, empowered by the flow of darkness that now ravaged the station by both design and intrusion.

 

Finally, the first man broke. The thought of his family, a half a galaxy away, his children, going on without a father; it was too much for him. Shoving himself back from his console, the jailer shouted. He could not take it. Running to the doorway he began to shout in panic and fear, a righteous anger boiling over as he bashed ineffectively at the door’s control

console.

 

That was all It took. Beneath the professional exterior, the tension broke. The command room broke into chaos as crewmen began to scramble inputting codes in desperation, trying to stop the inevitable, trying to escape. It would be of little use; the station’s designers had taken such a catastrophe into consideration. Their actions meant nothing, or they would not have, had the station not been hacked by an unknown entity at the same time. It should not have happened; but the state-of-the-art programming that had been put into place upon the station’s construction had slowly not been kept up to the highest levels as designed. In a state of chaos, it had been just one other thing that slipped through the cracks. Because of all this, one inadvertent code frantically keyed in on the bridge at just the right moment, at just the right place, on just the right console, had its intended effect, only . . . more so.  
 

Every door on the station hissed open. Locked latrine doors where political

prisoners had taken refuge; cell

doors; access shafts; the doors to the command center; all of them, the entire station was open to to everyone, everywhere. The maze becoming infinitely

more complex. That was not what made it even more dangerous though, in addition, the bastardization of the codes opened garbage chutes, access ports, docking bays, doorways to the vacuum

of space. In a moment, entire corridors and rooms became vacuum tubes as their contents were sucked into the void of space. The cafeteria instantly was torn asunder via a simple garbage disposal. Doors ripped from hinges, tables and chairs putting dents in the walls as they were vacuumed into a tornadic maelstrom of nothingness. Other areas

of the station took similar damage as the temperatures across the station began to plummet even where the vacuum had yet to reach.

 

Back in the courtyard, Inmortos felt the increase of death around the station. The voices of the undead howled in rage and glee at their predicament. His magics had taken on a life of their own. More accurately, regained the lives that had been taken from them. He needed to do little else to maintain it; life, the twisted dark side of the force, together would maintain what he had unnaturally sparked back into creation. He heard the voices as they cackled. He heard their whispers above the cacophony. Their doom was imminent. His, Inmortos, doom was imminent.

 

”NO!” He snarled. It would not end this way. His eyes flashed with ice as his vision took in Apothos. He would not be destroyed again because of his wayward former apprentice. Akheron, Solus, this unknown Sith imprisoned for crimes that had not even been a blip on the radar of the Sith Empire, none of them were worthy of his death; and as they stood here discussing their philosophies ignorant it seemed of their looming destruction, Inmortos made his choice. Even Mavanger urged that they flee.

 

Stepping forward, the death lord approached the throne of Apothos, lightsaber hilt held before him. “Morlissssssss,” he hissed with a snarl, “do not lose this or,” he nodded at Solus’ mechanized corpse, “my future tool. I will

return to you for this when you are free of this prison and I of mine.”

 

The specter of a Sith stepped back, leaving a path towards the door clear, cleansed by the shambling hungry undead that innately bent to his will. The winds of the spirits seemed to blow towards the doorway; or it might have been the touch of the void reaching this far into the station, clawing for one and all.
 

Inmortos hands were already moving, his arthritic hands pained as they danced intricately in the air. “Flee you fools,” he snapped as the force pulled stoppered vials from his robes, elixirs made from a dying world, souls snared at the point of damnation.

 

Ancient words of power, the spells of long lost cultures, death cults, and god-kings that pre-dated the Sith and their dark Jedi ancestors by millenia poured from the Krath Lord’s dehydrated cracked lips. His teeth mashed his tongue as blood and ichor dribbled from his mouth down his robes. Frigid purple-black smoke billowed out of the necromancer’s robes seemingly unaffected by the devolving world around him. Each hard syllable cracked like soft thunder as the magics of long forgotten sinners called forth their ancient spirits from deep within the void, forgotten shadows of eternity. The sacrifices of the world below served as a conduit for the atrocities, the sacrifices, aboard the station all around him.

 

Inmortos had accepted his circumstances, but not his lot in it. The presence of the spirits all around him spoke of yet another means to unnaturally extend his life. He would not be exiting this station, not lime the others. Once again, his body would die here. If all went accordingly, his spirit would be free of this mortal coil; free

to possess the bodies of the weak willed and willing as his needs saw fit.

 

The zombies all about him sensed the necromancic energies that radiated from the death lord. They were drawn to it, empowered by it. They salivated as they clawed and gnawed at anyone who dared approach the font of power they desired, that whispered to them the sweet lies thst they might be able to regain their own lives if they consumed enough life energy from others.

[Krath Inmortos]

The voice of Inmortos cracked as his hissed whispers of pain radiated outward on the billowing plumes of purple-black smoke. It filled the room. It carried into the halls and recesses unhindered by the vortex of space as it clawed like a feral cat through the station. Every word, ancient and powerful, uttered to bind the spirit world and fray the edges between mortal and immortal. The undead all about him were soon dissolved to dust, their very essence becoming that of the growing torrents of smoke.

 

The prison station itself continued in it’s preprogrammed decent towards the vacant world below. Its rotation increasing in speed as it passed a point where initial dampeners and high tech braking systems failed. The artificial gravity generators were the next to fail. The entire station shook, final death throws as it plunged towards it’s inevitable destruction. Final system reports and scans, prisoner rosters and security reports, were broadcast into the cosmos. The highest levels of encryption protected the broadcasts. They were even more scrambled by the foreign code that played havoc on the station.

 

Inside, death did not need to wait. The door had been opened by the Sith rescue team. Death was invited in the open door, summoned by the gods of chaos. Once inside, it gorged itself on the entrapped spirits of the deceased and the dying, violent and visceral, throughout the station. The raw emotions of the freed tortured beings fed into growing darkness.

 

Inmortos hands wove through the smoke carving long-lost runes in the amorphous air. They glowed for a moment and then were absorbed alongside the haunting whispering chants. Bits of flesh freeze-dried in the smoke and fell from Inmortos heavy hands and head. His robe fluttered in the smoke, aging and fraying in moments what would have taken decades of unaffected wear. In moments where there had been a hulking body of an undead Vurk chanting and weaving the spirits of the undead into the smoke of the mortal world, there stood a ragged rotting body, muscles and sinews and bones visible through the rotting frozen scales skin. Flaking off, the bits of Inmortos were absorbed by the smoke, tying the necromancer’s own mortal form to his spell.

 

Through the yard, the smoke ate away at the existence of any that still lived. Throughout the station the life force of any that remained was tugged upon; drawn closer and closer to the flickering veiled doorway of the eternal. Anyone who was injured stood no chance. They were enveloped in a black mist, their screams vanishing as surely as their bodies until nothing was left but soot that blew down the windswept halls.

 

Klaxons screamed all over the ship. Warnings for those that remained that their destruction was imminent. The mechanized voice encouraged anyone who could to strap themselves in to do so, immediately. Anyone who could not was warned to brace for impact. It would not matter. The impact would be lethal. It was designed to be so.

 

Inmortos’ body continued to fail, his skeleton becoming clearly visible beneath the dissolving gases. Organs tumbled in a bloody mess from their nestled positions within the ancient Jedi structure. Foul smoke filled their spaces, gnawing hungrily at the shell of mortality. Inmortos raised his hands towards the ceiling. His head rolled back on his neck, no linger able to support the heavy sloped skull of the saurian. He screamed. Oh how he screamed. His voice, amplified by the force, rang through the station and beyond. It was pain, pure agony. The spirits reached out from the great void greedy to grab ahold of something tangible. Every invisible clawed hand pulled the very spirit of the necromancer out of his mortal coil, drawing him into the eternal void.  

 

Fluids and fuels began to spill from their containers, their vacuum-sealed ports released; explosives designed to flood the station. Elsewhere, crates of blaster compressed tibanna gas tumbled free from their bindings alongside other supplies thrown by the centrifugal power of the plummeting station.

 

And finally, Inmortos voice fell silent. A rift in the force, silent and empty followed it’s wake, as the spirits of the dead, spirits from across the known and unknown cosmos dissolved the last of his vocal cords. The necromancers body fell, hilted and awkward as his bones and what remained of his robes clattered to the floor. The smoke swirled and the spirits whispered, screamed in the minds of any who still struggled to survive, thrown against the bulkheads by the force of the plummeting station as it burned through the atmosphere.

 

Flames trailed from the station. Without a shield, it’s hull became superheated. Armored panels were flung free of the twisting station. Fire clawed inward to do battle with the frigid spirit-filled smoke. It was destruction at it’s purest form. The freezing smoke erupted. The flames raced through the station, a literal fire that transcended the mortal plane burning hot enough to dissolve bodies and durasteel; glowing with such intensity it pierced the realms of the spiritual. The flames consumed the spirits ensnared within, casting their meager immortal shadows eons into the great veiled beyond.

 

The storm of ethereal power crackled as it was consumed by the flames. Within the smoke, the skeletal form slowly began to stand. The spirit of Inmortos, still bound to the bones, overcame the limitations of death. Standing, the necromancer pulled his ragged robe about his shoulders. His vacant eye sockets blindly scanned the smoke as the first signs of the immortal flame began to pierce the thickest billows of smoke that poured from the maw of the necromancer; his words transformed into the pure undead magics of death as they flowed freely from one realm to another. The flames raced towards Inmortos, engulfing the necromancer, shrouding him from the world beyond. They were held at bay by the frigid powers of the dark lord, for the moment.

 

The station continued to gain speed as it streaked an inky trail of midnight black interspersed with flashes of flaming orange and yellow and frigid billowing purple across the sky. Death lived, even thrived, within the station. It was fully enthralled as the bridge between the living and the dead was torn open, the stopper pulled for a moment allowing raw emotions and spiritual apparitions to manifest where they might never do so again; not without a catalyst.

 

And a short time later the flaming station slammed into the forested ground. Within, the immortal flames crossed from the mortal into the immortal, overwhelming Inmortos frigid persona, consuming him. The bones were burnt to dust. The dust was consumed and swept into the eternal void. The presence of Inmortos was swept from the galaxy, cast into void beyond as a huge fireball engulfed the station. The forests shook for miles in every direction blasting trees downwards in an outward angle. The plume of purple fire climbed high into the sky etching an ancient runic symbol of death and eternity into the air itself above the world. It was visible from horizon to horizon. Then it was gone from view, its eternal magics burned not into just the air, but the cosmos beyond, the stars it shrouded. Forest fires began to rage, tracing outwards into the untouched wilds of the world.

 

A flaming crater sat at the impact point, driven deep and wife into the crust of the world. Pieces of twisted jagged metal rained downward for miles. At the impact site, there was nothing left. All of it had been blown free from the force of the station’s detonation. Nothing was left. There was nothing organic, even most of the metals had been turned into dust and ash as it wafted through the air.