A LONG TIME AGO IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR, AWAY...
Deep in a forgotten corner of a disused trade route along the Outer Rim, a dull-grey moon silently spun. Its surface was bare save for a handful of loose rocks and a few pockmark craters, long since caked in dust. Beneath the moon's orbit, a starship hovered just as still. Just as deathly quiet.
Inside, two beings hunched over a tracker-field console, waiting. Like the ship, the machine was old but had been something of a designer item in ages past. Nowadays, nobody would have remembered the name of the hardware company who produced it, let alone its finest work.
One of the beings, a male Gungan with deep red, white-lined skin clinging to his skull, eye stalks and long ears, looked up. It was as though he had heard a reverberation of sound against the roof of their old hull. The long ears of the rangy creature's species were well-known to be more perceptive than those of the average humanoid, since Gungans had evolved between water and grass, with giant predators on either side. The struggle for survival had taught them to grow, to swim, to run and always to observe. But inside the small ship, there was nothing to hear.
At last, the younger creature - a heavy, stocky Ortolan with deep blue skin and black, round eyes – spoke. "Do you sense something, master?"
"Nossa," replied the other. "Merely a tremor."
Both men straightened their backs, and the Master adjusted his loose black robe. For a moment, one of his eyes got caught against the hood and bent the stalk painfully against the back of his head, but he calmly rectified the problem. Lord Perniteus, the dark master of the ancient Order of the Sith, was used to that. And as they had the lights off, it went unnoticed.
"The merchant scouts have passed," he told his apprentice. "Their presence has been swallowed up, for now. We are free to study the moon's surface, and the powerful presence that summoned us."
"The dark side," the student droned, "is strong in this place." Darth Flagetus had only recently begun his training as the great Sith's chosen apprentice, but he was already on the correct path and determined to impress.
"Yessssss..." Perniteus agreed. "I can almost taste it. If you are to succeed me one day, then youssa must learn to find your way in the emptiness of the Force. The dark side must be your guide, even as your will commands its path."
"The dark will be my home," the student whispered.
"Yes, good one. It is your home as well as your guide, and your slave. And you are its slave."
Flagetus scratched his trunk. "And yet I will wield it as a weapon against our sworn enemies, the Jedi."
"Yes. It is our weapon and we are the instruments of its will."
"I... see..."
"And as the dark guides us, so too will it cloak us, and we will protect it from the light, by preserving it inside ourselves, and allowing it to thrive and spread, a glut of darkness such as secretly grips the stars in place, and yet the stars are bodies of pure entropy, so in a way they are the true source of the..."
A long moment passed.
"Never mind," Perniteus said. "I thought I was going somewhere with that."
"Let's have lunch," Flagetus replied.
"Bombad," the master muttered, his tall eyes staring into nothingness. The Universe and his gaze seemed, for a moment, to meet in the middle, in quiet acknowledgement of one another's strength of will. "Let me use the refresher first."
As the Dark Lord and his follower parted company and sensed their way through the unlit room, they knew that soon their hunger would be sated by the last of the good sandwiches. They would then leave the Corbos system, re-trace their hyperspace route and go home, their curiosity appeased for now and the strange emanations of this moon safely under their watch. And that would have been a pretty productive weekend for them.
STAR WARS:
BLACKNESS OF THE DARK:
THE REIGN OF DARTH PERNITEUS
PART I OF THE RISE OF PERNITEUS HEXAGY
(ASCENT OF THE SITH ERA)
by Mister Buch