The Trial of Strife

Posted on Sat Jun 15th, 2019 @ 10:08pm by Thane & Bomoor Thort & Amare

7,571 words; about a 38 minute read

Chapter: Chapter V: Unbound
Location: Inside the Mind Prison
Timeline: After "Trial Separation" (Concurrent with "Trial of Treason" and early "Trial of Sacrifice")

OLD

"Yes," he said simply, walking past and around her so that he stood between the woman and Amare. "Mind yourself with this creature and be mindful of your own recent transformations," he whispered in a hushed tone. "This is undoubtedly your game, suited to your talents and/or pitfalls. You will succeed."

With a small nod to her, Thane turned away from Amare without waiting for further comment as she made her way to her target. In turn, the armoured man faced his own Sith contact, a deep sense of satisfaction and achievement buoying his mood, leaving his heart feeling oddly lighter following his conversation with Amare than it had at the start of their adventure within the Mind Prison.

Whilst there was a long way to go for the Sith master and apprentice to know each other in the intimate fashion that would be necessary for their gambit as Dark Lords of the new age to be truly successful, he knew he would recognise this as the first time he had pulled the veil to reveal Lord Serus to Amare.

It was only fitting it be on Korriban.

NEW

PART ONE

The Fabricant Storm

Thane marched apace with the Pureblood warrior that had brought the dark tidings of the Infernal Engine and Soa's turncoat forces, buoyed as they had been by the legion of flesh-machine undead Fabricants that rode and rose within its shadow. His hand had instinctively fallen upon the garnet-esque pommel of his sheathed sword, a gesture that had felt surprisingly more comfortable than when he held the hilt of his own weapon, seemingly better-attuned within the dark side than his violet-hued Jedi weapon.

Equally, his striding alongside the warrior down from the pyramid to greet what few forces would serve him in the coming battle was not subdued, as Thane had felt in battles past, but was instead assured; a sensation of natural adjustment had taken hold of his spirit, as though the impending conflict was a matter of destiny (not that he believed such things), and suited entirely to who he was, and who he wanted to be, in this moment.

From his Force bond with 'High Protector' Bomoor, Thane knew that his old friend was not experiencing quite the same wave of confident enthusiasm for their tasks. As he and the warrior finally drew close to their destination, his own enthusiasm began to falter, so pitiful was the sight of the forces left to him.

Arrayed around the Atâmsgate, so named was the eastern entrance to the city due to the road that led to Trayset from the fallen city of Atâmsol, were the forces not being abstracted for the Wraith Box gambit. Poorly-armoured and armed with second-rate weapons and tools, there were ten untrained fighters for each of the trained warriors ready to stand firm against whatever nature of conflict the Fabricants would bring to the city's border, and there were few of those, even.

Poorly-assembled siege machinery was entangled about the battlements and there was little by way of static defences prepared. Holes dug before the impending battle had already been filled with the dead from previous engagements; the fighters before Thane were already weakened, wearied from numerous battles both inside and outside of Trayset, which was already overrun in several districts by the predominantly-Pureblood martial forces of the Builders. For those still alive, it was disheartening enough to know that you were vastly outnumbered by an interstellar invader, let alone one that was manned largely by your own kin.

It gave Thane only some comfort to know that this was a mere facsimile of the actual prehistoric invasion of Korriban, and to know that King Adas the Ax would ultimately be victorious in expelling the alien invaders. What gave him less comfort, however, was not knowing what part Trayset actually played in that victory. It was not a city whose name had been passed down through the ages, after all.

Thane walked ahead from his escort to the gate itself, which was huge and insecure. If the Fabricants fought and moved like normal men, it could serve as a bottleneck, but looking ahead at the colossal flying machine zooming towards them, he knew that the thought alone was a mere flight of fancy. Although it was still a mere shape in the distance, its size against the mountains that crowned the edges of the valley it now traversed made clear how gargantuan the floating citadel of the Infernal Engine truly was. Beneath it, a great orange sandstorm billowed upwards to touch the base of the Builder war machine, obscuring all sight of whatever rested below the monstrosity.

"That's no storm," Thane stated to his escorting companion, eyes narrowed as he tried to make out the forms within the orange mass. "It's their army."

A trained Sith acting as one of Thane's lieutenants gripped his polearm tight with sweaty calloused palms, his broad shoulders steeled with corded muscles tensed up for a fight as he leaning a bit forward, as if bracing himself for the impact of a tidal wave. The Sith looked strong enough to part an entire sea if it had struck him. "My spear has longed to taste Builder blood, my lord," said the lieutenant, his eyes fixed on the sandstorm. "By the blood of the fallen, we will destroy them!"

Thane eyed the lieutenant, unsure of his feelings towards the bold warrior. He let his gaze pass from the Sith up towards the pyramid that loomed large nearby over all of Trayset, its own spectacle almost one to rival that of the oncoming Engine, barring the grotesque nature of the Rakatan war machine. As he found himself, yet again, wondering at how many of the gathered fighters were genuine souls trapped within the ancient Mind Prison, he mused at the cyclical nature of the galaxy's conflicts.

Even here, in this replication of a prehistoric war, gargantuan structures and weapons were being poised against one another in cataclysmic melees to determine the fate of their contemporaries. And, as always was the case, a lot of people were about to die in the name of the cause they had aligned themselves with.

In this instance, more so than in others, the defenders of Trayset were fighting to defend their very culture and way of life. Worse, if the abilities of the Infernal Engine were to be believed, they would soon be facing down the reanimated and polluted man-machine remnants of their own kin, tireless marauders without desire or feeling, beyond the commands of their twisted commanders.

And Thane thought droids were unpleasant.

“Did you have kin in Atâmsol?” He asked the nearby commander after issuing orders to the other lieutenants, who were now arranging themselves in the final battle formation before the foe arrived.

Although his voice was loud enough to have been heard by the warrior, the thudding of their enemies’ feet upon the dry earth was already reverberating loudly, and an inorganic hissing-groaning sound was being carried upon the warm winds towards them. Many of the soldiers were shifting uncomfortably, their insignificant weapons being palmed awkwardly as the dust storm grew larger ahead of them, and the woeful and ghastly sounds of their undead cyborg enemies grew louder. Above, the Infernal Engine glided in a serene fashion, but could now be seen to be slowing behind the dust cloud below.

Although there was still a good distance between the Atâmsgate and the Fabricants, the gap was being closed at an alarming rate, and Thane could now even make out the misshapen limbs of the enemy thrashing about from the horde beyond. An array of flickering and glowing lights shone from within the undead army, and Thane genuinely considered that, for the first time since Hazzarah set out his plot, his mind would not be returning to his body.

There were thousands of them.

The Sith at Thane's side shifted his yellow eyes away from the colossal Eternal Engine and focused on the sea of doom ahead. As the seconds ticked closer towards the mass-butchery, the lieutenant's face slowly shifted from stony determination to a vicious grin.

"Their shed blood fuels my power," the Sith warrior replied with a nod. It was clear he had nothing left to lose, and everything to gain. "They shall be avenged in battle this day. None are more fearless than you or I, but the men do not know that. Behold their eyes, for it is you, the Archzealot, and the King's Wrath, whom they look upon. You must give them the fuel to burn their hearts with rage, or Trayset will fall."

Thane’s eyes washed over the looming monstrosity crashing towards them and could feel his heart pounding within his chest – regardless of its nature as an artificial replica or not. Around him, the genuine fear of his wards was palpable within the Force, surging out in all directions, a hazy and hateful mess in the face of their perceived imminent destruction.

Truthfully, he was unsure what to say to them, or if there was indeed anything he could say to manage that woeful expectation. Regarding the oncoming Fabricants, he knew the demise of the majority of these beings – real or otherwise – was assured. The numbers were simply insurmountable and his warriors too incapable, and if he fell here, King Hazzarah’s game was lost; he, Amare and Bomoor were lost, doomed to eternity within this Mind Prison, assuming his mind was even permitted existence beyond ‘death’ within this warped realm.

He appreciated, perhaps more than he had properly before, how terribly underprepared he was to lead numbers of figures into conflict on scales such as these. Thane understood the tactics and the philosophies, including his own, but had not yet seen himself pitted against odds such as these. The Nea Dea Heretics, whilst heavily-armed and holding vast numbers of civilians at gunpoint, had still been smaller than the true force of the Jedi and Republic, had they chosen to truly stand against the zealots en masse. And on Onderon, whilst Thane had seen and been hardened by the brutality of civil war first-hand in one of its rawest forms, the conflicting factions had been playthings of a tangible and conventional foe, and a peace was achieved without excessive or inhumane bloodshed.

The Siege of Trayset, however, was going to be far from conventional.

If Thane survived today, he knew now to question Bane’s holocron on the matter of Battle Meditation.

“To those who can hear me, I say: despair not!” Thane had turned and was now calling upon the Force to make his voice carry across his small legion, and, as per his teachings, was allowing his fear to fuel his power. Whereas he had always rejected his fear in some measure of embarrassment and denial in his past, Darth Bane had emphasised its necessity in the psychology and arsenal of a triumphant Dark Lord of the Sith. Fear of discovery had been his constant companion. Now, a new fear had arisen within him, permeating all facets of his being; the genuine and coherent fear of absolute and final failure within this Mind Prison, in this mystical artefact he, his apprentice and Bomoor had merely stumbled upon during their plundering of Korriban.

It was a fear of all that Thane aspired to be and achieve within his galaxy could be silenced by the warped games of an echo of a once-mighty and now-forgotten king, that his designs for his new Sith and his newfound powers would be swatted in this puerile and insignificant puzzle he and his compatriots had been forced into playing. And with that fear came rage. A deep and profound rage, felt keenly within his core.

Not only that, but their whole endeavour against the Cult of Axion would be lost to this unnecessary distraction, the three of them swatted by a creature that had not even known of such a thing as a Jedi Knight. Axion would obtain his kaiburr shards, evade the justice he so sorely deserved, and would continue to inflict his unique brand of malice upon the galaxy at large, in whatever warped fashion his egocentric mind so desired.

It sickened Thane, and he let that fester now as he continued to speak.

“The misery that is now upon you is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of alien sorcerers that fear the might of Sith majesty. Their envy will pass, and their lords will turn to dust, forgotten by the ages. The slaves and power they took from the peoples they have conquered will never be of the Builders, no matter their torturous ways; your kin are, and will ever remain, Sith. So long as we stand, the name ‘Sith’ will never perish.

“My soldiers! Do not give yourselves to slavers – aliens that despise you and enslave you! Who will regiment your lines and tell you what to do, what to think, and what to feel! They will marshal you, warp you, treat you as fodder and cattle. Do not give yourselves to these unnatural abomination – these machine monsters, with machine minds and machine hearts. They are unnatural. You are not cattle; you are not machines. You will never be machines. You. Are. Sith!”

Not knowing their kind well and not entirely aware, anyway, of their state of being, Thane was unsure if his words or power had permeated into the Purebloods at all, but he raised his sword with his final declaration, an action mirrored by many of the followers. His grip tight and the fury of the dark side surging through him, he turned back towards the approaching blight. The sound of their feet, either booted or naked and scarred upon the dusty earth of Korriban below, had grown to a maddening din, and they were now just seconds away from falling upon the walls of Trayset.

The Fabricant husks, now plain to see in all their disgusting glory, were, for lack of a better description, upsetting to behold. Horrific and mangled, they were in various states of decay and undress, but were still a far cry from the undead monsters faced on Vaa. Their eyes glowed golden, as if bulbs had been forcibly inserted within the sockets of their skulls, and their once-crimson skin and faded to a pale pink, the skulls beneath having risen to the surface, giving sharp shape to the thin flesh lining them.
Metallic prostheses, appearing improvised and shoddily-made, had replaced limbs and various tubes and metal had replaced other visible elements of the revenant warriors. Their arms and legs moved out of sync, as if drunk, and due to their sheer numbers, they frequently collapsed over one another, but it did nothing to stall their alarming advance. Instead, they simply clambered over the fallen, hiss-groaning as they neared their prey, never showing any signs of tiring. Some wore the remnants of native Sith armour and others still wielded Sith weapons. A few were toting firearms of Builder origin, but most were unarmed, and claws seemed to have sprouted from their elongated metallic fingers. Dried blood was aplenty across their animated cadavers and more than a few were still garbed in the clothing of the peasantry. The number of youths making up their numbers did nothing to allay the fears of Trayset’s defenders.

Before Thane had even the chance to bark further orders to the lieutenants, the siege equipment began flinging their ammunition into the Fabricant horde. Archers, spearmen and marksmen loosed their weapons at the foe, whilst the other defenders readied themselves for the inevitable onslaught. Within a few loud minutes, the machine-men had crashed into the walls and archways of Atâmsgate, obliterating ancient stonework and smashing their way into the city with not so much as the slightest dent to their numbers.

The Infernal Engine had halted its advance a mile away from the city limits whilst the Fabricants now stormed the ‘gate or piled up against Trayset’s walls, using the fallen bodies of their fellows to create new means of falling into the city of their living prey. Each fighter, for their worth, advanced and sliced at the undead Pureblood creatures, who clawed and gnashed at their alive brethren.

Thane jumped down from the battlements to face the core of the Fabricants, wielding his blade as an extension of himself, having dropped into a sword variant of Vaapad to fell as many foes as he could. The Fabricants jumped, spun, bit and swept at him from all angles, flooding the Atâmsgate. About him, his soldiers were falling quickly, either slashed apart by the monsters or simply crushed under the enormity of the beasts. Blood oozed, bones cracked and Sith screamed. The suffering and carnage was beyond anything Thane had experienced before, and the claustrophobia was nauseating.

As panic began to seep into him, the fallen Jedi called upon the Force and blasted great numbers of the Fabricants back, crushing dozens with his dark power and tearing others apart. As his sword bit into Fabricant after Fabricant, Thane released great waves of Force lightning upon the advancing machine-corpses, yelling furiously as the bodies began to pile upon around them.

Within an hour, not even into the earliest stages of the Battle for Atâmsgate, no inch of the city’s ground was visible beneath the mounting corpses.

PART TWO

The Fall of Atâmsgate

Thane’s chest heaved and his heart clenched tightly, pain permeating every joint within his exhausted body. Bloody, dried and fresh, caked most of his skin, and the Sith armour Hazzarah had adorned him in was either dented or had broken away. Deep lacerations decorated whatever exposed flesh he had, whilst several of his ribs were broken. Unseen bruises lined most of his ailing form.

Panting, he pulled his sword from the fizzing and twitching remains of his last victim: a Fabricant that looked little older than an adolescent, and whose shape and form had been largely untouched, as if the Infernal Engine had required little work do on his corpse after his untimely death. Black blood seeped from the Fabricant-Sith’s final wound, and the gold lights that were his eyes dimmed to nothing, lifeless once more.

Falling to his knee in exhaustion, Thane barely managed to survey the cataclysm about him. Only he and three of the original fighting force had remained; literally hundreds-to-thousands of corpses, predominantly Fabricant, piled up around the Atâmsgate, both within and outside of the city. The Atâmsgate itself had crumbled to nothing under the Builder onslaught and many of the buildings within the city’s limit had physically fallen to the invasion. This entire section of Trayset was a ruin, lost in the defence of whatever ploy Bomoor was engaged in within the pyramid that still overshadowed the catastrophe of Atâmsgate.

Thane was barely able to lift his eyes up from the corpse-laden ground, so heavy was the pain and fatigue that wracked his body. The Force and self-preservation had sustained him for the duration of the battle, but both were now beginning to ebb. New pains were now throbbing within him and his eyes threatened to seal shut without his permission. He had also not felt Bomoor clearly for some time within the bond, and his connection to Amare, as his apprentice, had faltered. Not for the first time, he wondered if either had failed in their respective challenges, or if whatever they were facing had taken them ‘outside’ of his current perception of time or reality; he wondered if what they were experiencing was concurrent with his own ordeal, if what he had been doing had any impact on their own success or failure.

A terrible booming siren then screamed out across the city, piercing his ears and shaking Thane to his core. Above and now looming large, moving in closer and casting a great shadow that enveloped at least half of the city, was the Infernal Engine. For the entirety of the battle, it had hovered harmlessly beyond their reaches, high above and doing nothing but exist. No noise or movement had come from the flying fortress. No figure had appeared upon its platforms and no vessels had flown to or from it – it had merely floated menacingly beyond their grasp, overseeing the carnage below.

Thane, for his part, had not devoted time to even considering it, so bloody and traumatic was the conflict. Only now, as it emitted this deathly scream, did he pay it any mind, especially as it now shifted to darken Trayset from far above. Great violet lights were growing brighter from unknown light sources across its base, bright enough even to sear through the scorching Korriban sun, and the churning of machinery could be heard within the gargantuan machine above.

His pure golden eyes looking to the machine above, his felt his ire growing once more, flooding to each of his limbs with a violent rage that was barely managing to animate his ailing energy. With a deep weariness that threatened to tumble him back over, the aspirant Dark Lord rose to his feet and looked to one of the remaining trio – the Sith lieutenant that had spoken to him just prior to the battle – and addressed him.

“This… is all for nothing… if we do not stop the Engine…” Thane managed, his voice husky. “It will restore the Fabricants… turn our fallen forces… the High Protector will fail, if we do… I must get to the Engine…”

The bold Sith warrior that fought by Thane's side was down on one knee bruised and bloodied; his breathing heavy and laboured; his right shoulder cut deep through the corded deltoid muscle to the bone; his right eye had been savagely gashed out with the severed nerve ending still visible in the socket; his one remaining eye wide and wild as if he were shell-shocked. Concussed from a sharp blow to the head, he slowly nodded his agreement with Thane and rose back to his feet, his scant battle gear torn and tattered revealing his shredded red flesh. His senses were overwhelmed in a world of extreme post-battle pain that almost made him want to reach for his knife and slash his own throat, but his battlemaster still had a purpose, and it kept the adrenaline flowing, and the dark side pushing him to fulfill his destiny.

And yet, the lieutenant couldn't shake the feeling that he was in fact better off now than before...as if he experienced all of this before. Every blow from the Fabricants, every swing of the sword and maul he took from the corpses of his fellow soldiers, all of it felt somehow...nostalgic. And yet he could have sworn he had never fought such a battle before, but couldn't help but be unable to shake the feeling that he had in fact did, but never survived, or that he wasn't meant to survive. Something had changed, and it was good.

"This...this all feels familiar somehow," the lieutenant remarked. "I am Sith, and yet...I feel something more. Destiny is calling. Can you feel it? I can feel it. This was meant to be. I'm ready for this. We'll slaughter them all... together. Come, there is a craft we can use. We'll take the war to them and avenge the fallen."

Despite himself, Thane admired the Pureblood, but wondered at how many futile cycles his damned soul had been forced to endure within this faux realm. The dogged determination, valour and loyalty of the warrior was awe-inspiring, a true testament to both the man and the species from which he originated. If he was but even a simple example of the Sith species, the early Dark Lords must have cut a bloody swathe to claim their self-declared mantle.

Thane was determined to do that title justice.

Proud though both men were, they did not shy from supporting one another across the remnants of the battlefield, dragging their worn and wearied feet over the fallen heaps. Even with the sheer fatigue pulling them down, the pair were animated and spurred forward by a final and desperate desire to end the Infernal Engine, to ensure the day’s worth of agony and death had not been fruitless.

They reached the craft the lieutenant had mentioned, being of Builder design. Suitably, it was a two-seated machine and entirely unlike most speeders Thane had seen employed across the galaxy in his home era. Appearing to be three differently-sized stone cuboids woven together, it seemed remarkable that the vehicle would fly, but, sure enough, it levitated away from the ruins of the Atâmsgate. There were no visible controls within the craft beside from the steering device, but there was a peculiar sense of intuitiveness that accompanied the experience, and Thane found no difficulty in guiding the speeder towards the Infernal Engine, close above them and darkening ever more of the Trayset skies.

Over the side, Thane watched the chaos that was still unfolding across the city below. Builders and their thralls were falling upon the native Sith in great waves. With each passing minute, he could see more and more checkpoints and quarters falling to the alien invaders. Whilst their defence was valiant, Thane could see it was ultimately futile: there was no defence against a foe that wielded such dark power.

As the agony and exhaustion from his wounds threatened to seize his consciousness once more, the former Jedi Knight tore his eyes away and set them upon their destination, calling upon every reserve of willpower, energy and the Force to spur himself forward, knowing that rest could wait until the conclusion of Hazzarah’s warped games – until their success.

His weapon gripped tightly in his hand, Thane had been poised to launch into yet another battle as the speeder settled upon one of the various platforms along the Infernal Engine, situated at least halfway up the floating monstrosity’s bulk. From a distance, the Engine had appeared to be a gargantuan fortress, an absolute feat of engineering that inspired a deep and resonant fear within all that dared cast their gaze upon it. Upon closer inspection, the flying machine was no less depressing, but the mystique of the marvel had been lost. They had arrived.

PART THREE

Welcome to the Machine

No combat-ready Fabricants or Builders awaited them upon the platform, with only a heavy, hot wind brushing against the two beleaguered warriors. Climbing from the speeder with a slight stumble, Thane paused as his feet set upon the surface of the Engine. A few thick drops of blood fell to the ground and his head began to spin once more. It was only a mechanical gurgling that drew his attention back to the task at hand. The sound had echoed from within the nearby opening.

Rather than being of that stone material that typified Builder technology, the Engine was instead a bastardised marriage of misshapen metal and heavy tubing, woven this way and that in a jumbled mess that spoke of no sane designer. From within the opening, which itself was an archway of ribbed tubes and pipes, shambled two Fabricants at a walking pace. Although he had at first raised his sword, Thane noticed the undead pair were unarmed, and nor were they flailing at him with the reckless and murderous abandon of the husks that had fallen upon them since the day before.

Instead, they paused in front of Thane and his lieutenant and then arched their flesh/machine-mesh skulls back towards the opening they had appeared from. With only the briefest of glances to his companion, Thane began pacing into the Engine. Immediately, the Fabricant guides fell in just ahead of them, guiding them through the labyrinthine network of tube-and-metal-laden halls of the Infernal Engine.

They were treated to a macabre freak show of twisted sights as they turned this way and that within the Builder fortress, dim though the lighting was. Skeletal structures purely formed of shining metal adorned several walls, whilst half-decomposed corpses hung from the ceilings, several metal protrusions angling in and out from various points, echoing the same mad patterns that formed the basis for the Engine’s own backwards design. Machines could be heard whirring and grinding from unknown chambers far within the fortress, although the sounds of the materials they were smashing against resonated with a distinctly fleshy sound. Whatever ghastly machinations that were taking place within this unholiest of Rakatan devices, especially after the day’s slaughter, it left little to the imagination.

After what seemed like an hour’s worth of endless pacing through identical and identically-ghastly hallways, an opening finally revealed a wide and tall chamber, better-lit and humming loudly with the deeper engines and workings of the fortress. The two Fabricants slinked away before they entered the room, which contained a litany of devices reminiscent of a madman’s laboratory, although all were arrayed in a manner more befitting a museum than a true scientist’s workplace. Predictably, at the far end and sat within a grotesque throne of black and fleshy rubber, was the creature Thane presumed responsible for these ancient atrocities, renewed eternally by King Hazzarah’s Mind Prison.

As his mind offered him flashes of the battle and tragedy he had just endured, Thane began to forget that this was a simulation that had been twisted for the benefit of him and his allies. At this moment, battle-weary and not too far from death, Thane saw only the creature that had inflicted the insanity of Atâmsgate upon him and his fellow Sith for two days and a night. A familiar rage began to surge through him, and he raised his weapon in preparation to end the miserable monster’s life-

-but two vice-like hands gripped either wrist and yanked him backwards, almost causing him to tumble to his knees once more. Beside him, the lieutenant was also grabbed, and Thane heard an audible snap as the Pureblood’s wrist was broken under the pressure of their captor’s grip.

The master of the Fabricants rose from his throne and paced wordlessly forwards. In the disrupted light that was cast down by the spotlights set into the ceiling of the room, Thane could see that the being was neither Pureblood Sith nor any other species he had encountered in the outside world. There was a certain familiarity to his form though, whether it was from his borrowed memories inside the Mind Prison or from elsewhere, this was clearly the race known as the Builders.

The master of this place was old, with creases in his rubbery skin that blended into scars that carved across his wide lips and to the peak of his oval head, which was adored with two golden bands, perhaps symbolic of his status. His eyes were not set into his head but were, instead, on short stalks that protruded from either side of the lower half of his face.

He bent down and peered at the bruised and bloodied face of Thane’s pureblood visage as well as looking at the groaning lieutenant, holding back the pain of his broken body, “Strong mortal specimens,” he announced finally, “Proof that my creations are not yet perfect. But evolution is always a science of trial and error and to err is… to grow.”

He stood back to his full height and pointed towards the lieutenant, “Take this one for conversion. He is already close to death and the less decay, the better.”

"RARRGH!" the lieutenant growled in rage.

Had he still been whole and at full strength as he was before the siege, he would have likely overpowered his mindless escorts and lunged at the Rakata with hands ripping the invader to bloody pieces. As he was now, numbness in his extremities, only one good eye, wrists freshly snapped to uselessness, he was helpless. There was pure, unbridled anger and hatred on his blood caked and scarred red face, but his yellow eyes gave away the overwhelming fear. Not fear of death, but of great soul-crushing shame to meet his end helpless and unarmed, and worse, become one of the undead forced to fight his people.

"It will not end like this!" he roared as he was taken away, flailing in a futile struggle to break free. "You will pay with your life, Builder! I would die a thousand deaths afore I give in to you! This I swear! The Sith will never fall!"

Thane struggled limply against his captors as the lieutenant was taken from his sight, away back into the depths of this malformed metal jungle. He felt the muscle and sinew tear in his exhausted limbs as he fought against the robots holding him back. After only a few short moments, the lieutenant now entirely beyond his vision and hearing, Thane thought better of the waste of energy, and instead turned his hate-filled eyes towards the mastermind before him.

“Now you,” the Builder now spoke to him, “You still cling to life. Your victory against my Fabricants below has brought you before me, the Herald of the Rakata. I am the visionary that will ensure our eternal dominance over the slave races, who will conquer life itself and make it a tool for our glory. Tell me, what did you feel as you fought your own people? Do you see horror like the others, or do you perhaps see more clearly as I do?”

Thane's rage was almost blinding, and it was only a traumatic blend of sheer fatigue and a small flickering of remaining common sense that kept it contained. Regarding this 'Herald' - yet another name of antiquated standing - he was not entirely sure if that rage was even truly directed at this being, given its false reality. The rage was for Hazzarah, and the sheer torment of this puerile game.

"All change..." he began, his voice raspy and slow to speak, "is nearly always horrific to those... that came before." With the lessons of Darth Bane resonating weakly within him, he knew it better to play the part he needed and to conserve his energy for the appropriate moment, to best make a victory of this near-defeat. And it was always better to throw some truth into the lie.

The Herald’s eye’s lit up, seeming to rise slightly on their short stalks, “So you do understand,” he said before, dropping back into his previous tone, “Of course, you would have to see past the restrictions of the flesh to have come this far for yourself. Thus far, the focus of my Fabricants has been on the strength of the body: beginning with my original mechanical model…”

The Builder paced to an archway just beside his throne and flipped a switch, illuminating an odd-looking droid that had been concealed in the darkness. It appeared lifeless and deactivated, but the way it hung limp in the archway made it look more like a skeleton than any droid Thane had previously seen, which was not helped by the large lower jaw it possessed, which hung open as if expelling a silent scream.

Placing both hands around the droid’s head, the Herald continued, “But a machine alone cannot supplant the living. No! They can develop only so far without making themselves obsolete in the process. Our living minds, with the aid of mechanical augmentation… why, this is the future! Minds like yours, my red friend!”

He pushed the droid’s head aside, leaving it to crumple over further in the archway before turning around and signalling to the lone Fabricant that still held Thane’s arm, “Bring him over here, let him see.”

The Herald paced over slowly towards the other side of the room, where a view port looked down into another section of the irregular ship. Thane and his captor moved over to his side together so he could look follow the Builder’s gaze. They were looking down upon what seemed to be some kind of staging area containing thousands more of the Fabricants, all arranged in perfect units on the floor below.

“Here! You look upon the next stage of the Fabricant programme,” the Herald announced proudly, arms flung wide, “Units that can recognise and interact with each other and form intelligent strategic units. I am sure you will appreciate the beauty in intelligent warfare. Your friend will join this unit but you…”

He turned with a hunger in his eyes, “Your mind could build a unit to command them all!”

Before Thane could answer, the Herald had already begun fiddling with a control panel next to the view port, “Yes, right now I must control the Fabricants like simple droids from here but imagine a mobile command unit, capable of making tactical decisions in the heat of battle. Your mind connected to tens of thousands of units. Now that is evolution!”

Thane regarded the battalions of undead cyborgs languishing in the staging area, their unearthly eyes glimmering soullessly within their neatly arranged legions. Regarding their warped forms, uniform though they were in their organisation and ghastly depictions, Thane actually felt at once both horrified by the Herald's vision incarnate, and also enthralled. This had clearly been one of the insurmountable turmoils of Hazzarah's time, coupled with a galactic threat that dwarfed any military might the Sith species could have ever hoped to muster. Should such a threat exist in the time of the Third Galactic Republic, Thane wondered at the unwieldy and disorganised superstate would cope with the pressures of an organised and relentless dominator, both ingenious and tyrannical in its designs against the galaxy.

But the wonderment was brief: he knew that they would fall. The Jedi were weak and crippled in their numbers, and the Judicial Forces were little more than the militias of senators and megacorporations.

"It is remarkable," he said to his captor, his voice having recovered some of its usual stark crispness since it last spoke, Thane having found reserves of energy within his inner musings, the Force and his focus steadily rejuvenating his mind and body. "Your vision... for a galaxy unified, in purpose and will." Thane began seeding small tendrils of the Force across the Fabricant holding him, winding into the bone and servos that melded to form its neck's skeletal structure, preparing to tear its form asunder. "The weak - the old - will always be victims, cast down by the inevitable storm of change. Evil... is a word used by the ignorant."

Wrapped in in the grand display of his work, the Herald did not notice Thane’s shift in concentration, content only to bask in his own ideals being reflected back at him by this red stranger, brought to him by the tremendous warfare and bloodshed between their two peoples.

“All of us are so different in our biology,” continued the Herald, “But it gives me hope to find one such as you, on this dry world, that shares my vision. Even my own brethren don’t see fit to respect my grand plan, seeing it only as a tool for conquering the slave races. But it is the glorious utopia we all should seek; a unity of flesh, brought together by machine. Yes, we will be united within the Infinite Empire, but we will take strength from all races, all chains of evolution that came to thrive in all corners of this galaxy.”

He sighed, then turned back to Thane, drawing close to him and seeming to look through him, gauging his composition, “You will bear witness to it all in your ascended form but, for now, you will watch as the Rakata take the city below before conquering the capitol city. Fear not, for these are no longer your people; they are our people.”

The breath of the queerly-shaped alien was sickly-sweet and thick, rancid as only a lifelong carnivore's halitosis could be. Thane's own eyes, having grown keener with each passing syllable the Herald spoke, did not waver as a new and sudden gush of that rotten stench escaped the Builder's mouth. And with that sudden breath, a trickle of viridian-crimson blood began to slide out of from corner of the invader's thin lips.

As his mind raced to catch up with his reality, the Herald's eyestalks peered down to his gut, from which the ornate Sith shortsword King Hazzarah had replaced Thane's lightsaber was now impaled, untouched though it was by Thane's hand. Whilst the Rakata took two stumbling steps backwards, the captured former Jedi allowed his sense of triumph to spread across his ego, coupled with his exhaustion and rage, and called upon the Force again. Great bolts of blue lightning sped out from his limbs and into the Fabricant restraining him, an awful metal screeching escaping its contorted reanimated cadaver.

As the Force lightning began shorting out the various ancient and uniquely-designed components of the metal zombie, Thane used the brief reprieve to wrench free one hand and blast the Fabricant to the back of the laboratory, impaling its still-writhing body onto an exposed spike with enough momentum to sheer it in half. The upper-half of the Fabricant twisted and screamed futilely for a few more seconds, the remnants of Thane's power illuminating its cybernetic skull sporadically, before it finally fell limp.

Thane stepped towards the Herald now, his agonisingly-sore feet walking over spatters of the Builder's blood as he approached him. With the blade still deep in his torso, the Herald had collapsed back into his metal throne, eyes looking imploringly up at his would-be killer. Thane, content that no reinforcements were responding to the situation in the Herald's laboratory, placed a hand on the hilt of the embedded blade and locked his own eyes upon the scientist warlord, but did not yet move the sword.

"I" he said in a near-whisper, "am the Lord of the Sith."

The Herald was panting heavily, drooped down in his seat as he found his strength and vigour draining away as his punctured body could no longer supply his vital organs with enough oxygen to function. Taking in several deep breaths, accepting now that they would be his last, the Herald twisted his eye stalks to stare deeply into his killer.

With bitter disappointment in his eyes, knowing that his creations would surely perish with him this day, he croaked his final words, choking back the pooling blood in his mouth, “You could have been… so much more…”

He clenched his muscles tight, expecting the final twist of the blade but, instead of a killing blow, a glowing green shot of energy pulsed into the wounded Builder and he lurched with the impact before crumbling away before Thane’s eyes into a fine dust that glowed with that same green energy for a moment before fading to nothing. Where the attack had come from was unknown but Thane was left holding an untarnished shortsword; not even the blood of the Herald remained.

It was not a leap for Thane to soon divine the cause of this magical occurrence, as unsettling as the immediacy of the green wisps had been. He had felt the commanding aura of Bomoor blasting in waves from the nearby pyramid in the centre of Trayset, thundering across the crumbling city and consuming all of the Builders within. The rush of power and pain splitting out from the Ithorian caused Thane to stumble once more, and he fell a few steps aside, near to the observation area that overlooked the arrayed Fabricants below.

Their lopsided and twisted skulls angled themselves towards Thane above them, the eerie glow of their dead eyes fixated entirely upon the man out of time, as if they were waiting for something to now happen, their maligned forms ready to take action.

Waiting for orders, Thane realised, pulling himself up now, dizzied though he was from the day's war and Bomoor's remarkable dark deeds. Waiting for me.

His bloodied hands felt their way instinctively across a nearby console, its alien displays and systems' purpose suddenly obvious to the unwilling participant in Hazzarah's war games. Knowing full well the power of this Infernal Engine was now at his fingertips, he considered carefully exactly what was being offered to him - which conclusion was the one that his captor deemed best for his military re-enactment.

The power of the Fabricants, unholy though they might be, could be instrumental in the final victory of the Sith over the Builders, and indeed any other foe that the fledgling empire might find themselves facing, but could also be quickly turned against their new masters, as it could now be turned against its old. Thane also mused, despite the unreality of this entire scenario, the extraordinary destructive might now on offer to him within this artificial microcosm.

Warlords had, throughout the aeons, started with less.

With one more prolonged glance to his Fabricant army, and a none-too-brief consideration of his fallen lieutenant, the Lord of the Sith made his decision.

TBC

 

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