Prologue

He felt the masters die. One by one, in rapid succession. A matter of a few minutes from the first to the last. Each a swift, brutal bite taken from him; a piece ripped out of the soul, to leave only a gaping emptiness behind. By the time it was done he was naught but a shell, a flapping construction of flesh and armor wrapped around a void. The masters had been there, had suffused his core and made him strong. They had been his lodestone, the purpose around which he was built.

Now they were gone.

Something bubbled up from the depths of that cavernous hole within, a thing he had considered forgotten, buried behind the watchman, the being he'd become in order to better serve the masters. He almost did not recognize it, distracted by the overwhelming loss and the ongoing battle against the white-clad Republic invaders.

It was his name.

Viskene Joressal, that was the identity he had possessed, once, back when he was merely a Sith, a misguided fool. He had lost it upon becoming a vessel for the glory that was the Dread Masters. The agents of fear needed no names. It had returned to him now, and he wondered why.

Only the greatest servants of the masters had retained their names, preserved their identities; the commanders of the host. They were all dead now, having fallen to the fools who opposed the will of the masters, defeated by the numbers and fanaticism of the blind republic and misguided empire.

Viskene plunged his lightsaber through the armor of a republic soldier as he bounded down the walls of the palace. Turning, he blocked a short flurry of blaster bolts before slipping to step through the shadows and slash another soldier across the back, leaving the ruined body falling to the warm stones below.

Glancing around both with armor-filter concealed eyes and the enhanced sensitivity of the force, he discovered something strange.

The fighting was coming to an end. All about him the Dread Host was crumbling. They yet matched the republic invaders, despite the superior numbers of the unseeing horde from the Core, but the battle was done. He could feel the despair infecting all the others, even here on the walls of the palace, among the most loyal. Warriors of the host dropped blasters and lightsabers, raising their arms and letting the bolts and grenades of the enemy claim them. Other charged madly into storms of fire, or threw their bodies into Jedi attacks. Some stopped entirely, laying down their arms and falling prone, doing nothing when the enemy wrapped them in bonds. Only a handful still fought.

We will all die, Viskene realized, the power of the revelation dropped him to his knees. At the same moment a grenade passed over him, through the space his head had just occupied to explode well behind. He saw the future then. The republic horde would surmount the walls of the Fortress and the hidden Palace even as the imperial special forces cut off all avenues of retreat. The few remaining defenders could not hope to hold them back, and the masters were gone, there would be no deliverance. Those who did not die would be taken, captured to be remade into slaves of the empire or mind-slaves of the Jedi, those not simply executed for the actions these fools would label crimes.

All servants of the Dread Masters would be eliminated, and the memory of the masters, the true memory – not the lies and superstition of the enemies who could not understand the great working – would be lost.

That must not be.

I recall my name, Viskene decided. That makes me a commander of the Dread Host. Perhaps the only commander. I must act. The host was not destroyed. Much was lost, no doubt more would be in the final throes of this miserable battle, but there would be pockets that remained. He knew of outposts scattered across Oricon, hidden deployments, secret caches know only to the palace guardians.

They would rally.

Stepping through the darkness, Viskene cut down one soldier, and then another, carving a brutal path through the shadows, one sweeping slice at a time. His path ran not along the defensive works, but outward, ever outward, beyond the hidden warp-walls of the Dread Palace, over the great stone barriers of the Dread Fortress, and onto the lava-broken landscape of Oricon. He charged through the lines of battle, leaving them, and defeat, behind.

As he retreated, he saw he was not alone. Other members of the Dread Host, a pitiful fraction, but still extant, were also withdrawing. They abandoned the fortress and the strongpoints surrounding it between the walls and the encampments of the enemy. No point in defending them now, they fled into the wilds of Oricon.

Though he moved with them, Viskene was not giving up. The masters had given back his name. He would command, he would yet serve. The host would regain purpose.

Honor to the masters!

8 8 8

In the depths of the Dread Palace, monument to fear and suffering carved out by the sheer will of the Dread Masters, Biarae Sostroin battled the imperial strike team. She gathered the dark side and channeled all the might of her contempt, fear, and wrath into the face of the foe, these so-called elites who dared the sanctum of the masters. Lightning leapt from her fingertips to crash against armor and scatter down weapon barrels. Arcs touched and slashed across flesh in places, but not enough, never enough.

It was not a prolonged engagement. Though she and her comrades were champions of the Dread Host, the most chosen servants of the masters, these foes were skilled beyond any she had ever faced, and a match for the masters themselves. Their titles, what she had initially thought to be no more than gaudy labels tied to exaggerated smugglers' yarns, proved most well-earned.

As she watched one of her comrades cut in half by the bold, indomitable lightsaber blows of the Emperor's Wrath, Biarae came to recognize that they were not intended to win, or indeed to seriously damage the foe. These warriors, the honor guard of the palace, were nothing but a sacrifice to buy the masters time that they might hatch some plan to hold back these champions of the empire she had scorned so much.

The Emperor's Wrath turned their lightsaber upon her, and there was no time for thought, only the desperate channeling of the force in an effort to survive one second, then another, and another.

She called on the power of the force to tear at the innards of her enemy. She blasted every ounce of lightning she could muster, seeking to burn armor clean away. She even tried to wrap howling coils of the force about her foe in hopes of a moment's respite. All to no avail. The enemy was too strong, possessed of impenetrable guard, and all her attacks amounted to nothing more than sparks dancing across simmering plate.

Strikes cut into her own armor, piercing deep. A burning wound cleaved her side, ripping amongst entrails and organs, leaving her coughing and wretched, unable to properly breathe. Only the immolating churn of the lightsaber, sealing the wound even as it crafted it, saved her from bleeding out in seconds. Her guard faltered in the follow-through to this blow, and a poison dart from a stealthy enemy pierced her elbow, sapping the strength from her limbs. She sidestepped the next attack desperately, only to be bathed in the explosive blast from a streaking rocket.

Stumbling, she went to one knee, knowing her end had come.

The Wrath raised a hand, palm out, and a massive concussion of power slammed into her, from head to toe, every part of the body picked up and hurled by impossible, stone-breaking repulsion. She was taken and thrown, propelled by that invisible wave, to strike hard against the walls. Her body slumped down, feet striking uneven, bones cracking, everything a white blanket of agony and devastation.

Blackness covered all.

A terrible sensation restored awareness. Something was being pulled away, drawn out of her and down into a spiraling abyss. Great energy and potency siphoned out, and with it the essential current of fear, the central truth that had powered her and made her the terrible interrogator. Though her thoughts were clouded and buried deep beneath a choking weight of pain, it was impossible to ignore the meaning, to mistake this event as anything but what is was.

The Dread Masters were no more. The power that had been granted to her as one of their servants, the presence and the glimpse into the sovereignty of true fear, washed away on the tide of their departure.

Feeling this, Biarae came to the startling discovery that she lived.

With difficulty she forced open one eye. Her head would not bend, neck muscles refused to obey, but shifting the bruised orb back and forth was enough. She was lying seated against the wall of the Dread Palace, body damaged and broken, but not ended. A second frame, the larger heavyset form of one of the hulking Palace Guardians, lay atop her, obscuring her body. The hallway was filled with death, all her fellows shattered by the onslaught of the strike team.

Tentatively she probed with the force. There was nothing among the echoes there, only death. The enemy had come, they had slain, and she, by some random chance, had survived, life's fires sufficiently banked that no one had thought to finish her in the rush onward.

By this unforeseen probability alone, she had lasted beyond the death of the masters. It was almost inconceivable.

I will not live much longer. The next thought followed in the despair of the moment. With the masters dead, the shrouded walls of the palace would fall, the modified Rakatan technology used to restrict entry to portals alone would fail, and the enemy soldiers would flood within. She would be executed, if not immediately than after rounds of torture.

Many long nightmares had she spent within the depths of the Palace dungeons, awakening those who had been deemed insufficient to serve to the truth of fear, to the revelation of the masters. Recalling them now, she felt a great wash of bitterness tainting each and every one. The masters were not divine. They held no unequalled truth. The path to fear was defeated, revealed as no more than one path among many. Stronger than most perhaps, but in the end, not strong enough.

At the same time, the memories brought up inescapable recognition. Biarae knew the capabilities of the dark side to trap the imprisoned within their private hell. The torments were all that could be imagined and more.

I will not be taken!

She would not suffer the rack, the electrodes. No hands would claw apart her flesh piece by piece, with the terminal delicacy of maximal suffering. She would not allow it.

Yet neither would she die. The universe had spared her. Its cosmic whims had delivered her alive from the pummeling of the Wrath, even as the Masters had fallen. Her lips twitched slightly, moving towards the all-but-forgotten form of a smile. Having survived, she would not abandon life so easily.

Reaching down with the tendrils of her will, Biarae gathered the hideous pain filling every muscle and power and forged from them a net of hooks and barbs. Casting forth she grappled with the immensity of the dark side, capturing great gouts of power. Working swiftly, compelled by the immediacy of need and the fury of loss, she gathered that power and sent it racing through her limbs, shearing away damage, slashing apart necrotic tissue, smashing bones back into place, forcing damaged cells to grow and divide and replace the lost, scourging invading bacteria and viruses from her limbs. She cast up the revivification and made herself whole once again.

Then she blasted out a mighty pulse of electric force and threw the guardian's body off her frame.

With effort, and wincing at continuing pain, for the powers she had unleashed were far from completed in their work, Biarae stood. Moving as fast as she dared, feeling the stress against the terrible wound in her side and the scarcely knitted bones in her legs, she scampered away down the hall, seeking the throne of Bestia, and the secret exit portal she had used for members of her legion. She could use it to escape and find succor elsewhere on Oricon.

As she entered at a stumbling run, the former interrogator considered her next move. The masters were dead, their fortress fallen, and whatever members of the host survived were surely scattered. Much what they had made was doubtless lost forever, trapped within the skulls of the masters themselves, and now dragged into the deepest reaches of the dark side. Yet more remained. The dungeons had yielded up many secrets, overheard when pried out from the mounts of traitors and the unworthy.

There would be no return to the Empire, and defection to the Republic was an equally absurd prospect, but there were other paths, other places. The masters had been six, and had brought the Empire and Republic together to the brink of destruction. With even a fraction of their power, she could claim whatever she desired. Perhaps even the head of the Emperor's Wrath.

Smiling beneath her mask, Biarae ran for the portal, wondering what the universe, in its whims, might chose to leave behind.

Chapter Notes

While I dislike creating original characters for use in SWTOR, given the vast slate available, I saw no way around doing so for this story. The reality is that none of the named NPCs on Oricon is presumed to survive the Dread War episodes, leaving the cupboard rather bare on that front. So Biarae and Viskene are newly manufactured. Even so, they are derived directly from in game content. Both are members of trash mob groups encountered during the Dread Palace operation. Biarae is a Palace Interrogator, and Viskene a Palace Watchman.

The Emperor's Wrath makes a brief appearance in this prologue, in what will probably be the only appearance of one of the class characters in this tale. I have chosen to have the operations group that eliminated the masters be imperial because the principle characters are all imperials, but I will consider both endings of that operation as having happened, since they do not contradict each other.