AMAIMON

Born into a family that loved all of its members except him, Amaimon soon learned the cheapness of emotion. At a young age, he found respite in the ways of the Sith, who, upon seeing him torture a infant Tuk'ata to death without laying hand or weapon against it, welcomed him to their brutal and merciless circle. Amaimon's neglected childhood was drawn upon by his teachers and fellow students alike, but this did not deter him, as rejection from those who should love you will numb to rejection from all else.

Early in his training, he noticed that all of the students were treated harshly, abused, almost as if they were all together hated by those above them. After this, he saw hatred echoed between the students as well. Through this he learned of what made the dark side so strong with the Sith; hatred was the maxim for all Sith. It was a strong emotion, stronger than any other he knew of. And where it was not generalised, it was exploitable. He began to twist his fellow students hate, directing it at whomsoever may have been its target, and made them fight. Against each other, against their masters, before they were strong enough to best them, and against themselves on rare occasions.

This lesson, which inspired him to push further into the dark than he had ever previously dared, also compelled him to perform his darkest act yet...

Gaining permission from his masters, and stealing an artefact to bolster his mental powers, Amaimon travelled to his family's estate on Dromund Kaas. There, he stalked his family, learning everything about them, weaknesses and strengths alike. He studied every aspect of them, from their most admirable traits to their most hideous tendencies. And for the whole time he watched them, they never mentioned him between themselves, not once...

He saw his moment, and he took it, though not in the way many Sith would. His specialty, his masters had said, lay in his mind; the means by which he had killed the Tuk'ata was not the quintessential 'force-push-force-crush-everything' kind of brutality. He had the gift of subtlety. He had ruptured blood vessels in the Tuk'ata's legs first, nullifying its advantage in size and strength. Next, he had projected his feelings of abandonment into its bestial mind while he dismembered it joint by joint. Finally, he had forced its mind into believing it had been buried alive, allowing him easier means of sending it into convulsive shock, boiling the blood in its heart and lungs as he did.

He slew his father first, the only one to actually go out of his way to hurt him. That actually meant something to Amaimon, however much he hated himself for it...

He tugged his mind toward an out-of-the-way area, where no one would hear him. Then, after immobilizing him in the same way he had the beast, Amaimon set to work, projecting images of horror and agony stored in the artefact into his father's mind while he boiled him with his own fluids.

Next, his eldest sibling, much in the same way, only this time he granted his victim awareness of the situation, so that he might finally be acknowledged as being there by him.

Next his second eldest, the last of his siblings. He had decided to leave his mother for last.

Only things didn't go as he had planed...

Amaimon had waited until his last remaining sibling was alone in the family estate, their mother out talking with the authorities about the disappearance of their missing patriarch and sibling. He moved in, confronting his remaining sibling more openly than he had his last two victims; this relative, his sister, had at one time been kind toward him, before being caught up in the status quo of neglecting him. He demanded an explanation, growling venomously at her when she tried to justify or excuse her actions. She said, in the end, that she was sorry.

"Sorry?"

That this person would dare to apologise to him, to offer him pity, drove him over the edge. The room, and the building as well, all but exploded with his telekinetic fury; furniture burst apart, the shrapnel hanging in suspended animation until being swept into the tornado of flesh-corrupting lightning and life-draining energies. Fragments of building, floor, and all other items tossed up by ethereal might were sucked into the maelstrom, thrown to and fro like flimsiplast. The ground compressed and cracked sinking down into a dozen metre crater. And at the centre of this, Amaimon, his hands gouging into his sister's face.

He boiled the blood in her limbs, her back and face as well. He tore her eardrums out of her head, while forcing his thumbs into her eye sockets. His screams and curses were drowned along with that of his sister's within the sounds of storm and exploding flesh, as his rage intensified the Force storm and he dismembered his sister, dismantling her limbs muscle by muscle, vein from nerve, ligament from bone.

And at this point, at hate's climax, at the pinnacle of the bloody vengeful orgy-

His mother came home.

A bloodcurdling wail pierced the storm, bringing Amaimon's rage to conscious control. His mother rushed through the storm, her natural Force affinity as a Sith Pureblood allowing her to survive the power of the dark side. She crashed into him, knocking him away from his sister. He fell backward into a handspring with contemptuous ease, landing in a pose of arrogant superiority, stance casual, body relaxed, nose up and head tilted to one side, looking down at the two females huddled before him as if asking with his body, 'do you honestly think you can protect her from me?'

He decided he had sated his vengeance, and gathered himself for the coup de grace, however pathetically one-sided the confrontation was. He summoned the storm, breaking its form upon his will and gathering it up above their heads to build into a concentrated whirlwind, and with a final word of contempt, dropped it.

The storm-turned-whirlwind raged around the two Sith, Amaimon focusing the brunt of it on his sister. But...

It wasn't touching them. Either of them.

He refocused his efforts into draining their life through the storm, thinking they were gifted with some immunity to such a base power as lightning. And again, they were untouched by his fury. His confusion turned to frustration, then rage as he tried again and again to pierce whatever veil was thwarting him. He pushed into the Force, reaching into the barrier to find what the hell they were using against him and how to undermine it. He found it.

And it horrified him.

Love.

His mother loved her daughter. That love compelled her inexorably to protect his sister against anything. And it was this love that created a shield more powerful than he had ever faced. Ever imagined. He was powerless against it. Love, Hate's opposite, the very thing that was his by right yet was always denied, was saving the people that so selfishly hoarded it for themselves.

He couldn't understand. It didn't make sense. It wasn't possible. It wasn't fair. He didn't know how to fight it. He didn't know what to do.

So he screamed.

He staggered backwards, hunched over and gripping his head between his hands. The storm intensified with his hysteria, feeding on his sudden madness. The building was engulfed, every brick flying apart. Amaimon stood at the centre, bloodshot eyes streaming tears, fingers clawing into his head so hard as to draw blood, his voice made hoarse by his manic screams. He collapsed to his knees, doubling over as the storm reached a crescendo, his mute screams coming in tandem with each rapid increase of the storm.

Fear pierced his mother's maternal instinct, causing her shield of love to falter. She and her daughter screamed their last as the storm vaporised flesh and charred bone.

Amaimon awoke in the medical centre of Kaas city. He was strapped to a bed by his wrists and ankles, an oxygen tube in his nose and an I.V. in his arm. Over him was standing a Sith Lord, Darth Juggernaught. Darth Juggernaught explained that Amaimon had torn apart his family's estate, and that there was nothing but a flat field of rubble; one could merely take a broom to it and they would have no trouble building something else there instead. He went on to tell Amaimon that his family was killed in the explosion, and that the other Sith Lords knew what he had done to his father and brother, and what the reason for his destruction of his family home was meant to accomplish. Amaimon had tried to answer, but his throat had been severely damaged by his screaming during his temporary insanity. Darth Juggernaught told him finally that he had arranged for all charges of property damage, theft of sacred artefacts, and unauthorised assassination to be dropped. On one condition...

Amaimon was to become Darth Juggernaughts apprentice, and that included joining his covert reformation faction, the Legions of Darkness; a group of Sith Lords with immense power and influence, who were planning to overthrow the Emperor himself, accusing him of being a madman.

Faced with this choice, power and constant peril or imprisonment and death, there was one thing Amaimon could do.

And when he thought about it, it really wasn't a choice at all.

At night, in the deepest of sleeps, Amaimon still tosses and turns. He will wake in the night to the cries of his mother, the face of his sister. He will pace back and forth within his ship muttering to himself, stopping only to go to his personal stash of holocrons, tomes, and ancient scrolls. He will study for hours, days, on end searching desperately for an answer.

Love hinders the dark side, and it distracts from the light.

Yet, it is irrefutably the most powerful of emotions.

So why can't the Sith find a way to wield it?

Why was he never shown it...?