Interlude One: The Sleeping Wolf

As my feet walk from the ashes of Katarr I shall not fear, for in fear lies death.

There was a sound, and that sound was emptiness.

Visas Marr put a hand to her heart, her mantra forgotten. She drew a shuddering breath as the echoes of the empty sound faded slowly into a deeper silence. What are you? She wanted to reach out, to recapture that sound, that feeling. She felt ash against her face, the lash of hot wind.

And then it was gone, and she heard her master calling.


Her soft leather boots made no sound on the command deck's corroded plating. The filtered air was cold, touched by the void, and the low drone of her master's slaves plucked and hummed at the edges of her awareness as they swarmed around their stations in the crew pits to either side of the deck. Through the Force, through what he had left to her of her vision, she saw her master standing like a beacon of pure nothingness amidst the black. Darker and deeper, roiling with hunger.

"I felt it, too, my lord," she said. "A disturbance in the Force."

His words caught at her, pulled at her perceptions. There was sound, a glottal rasp like a drowned man coughing up water, but it carried no meaning in itself. His true words were in her mind, images that swelled and changed, burst and flared. He spoke the language of the Force.

She saw a world that was a grave and a woman that was a world, a burial ground, skin bristling with unmarked tombs. She saw burning blades in the dark, a hand cupped around a single point of light, an empty robe from which serpents crawled, thick and black, coils writhing. She saw a dead planet blooming with arms that groped and trembled.

She saw a woman whose face was void.

Exile.

"It was like a sound. Soft, but as I listened I found that I could hear it even over the background noise of the universe."

His presence expanded, tendrils lashing. She saw a mouth gnashing, teeth discolored, blood running down a chin. She saw a table set for many, the seats empty.

Hunger.

"My lord," she said. It was a struggle to speak in his presence, a struggle to lift her face to meet his ineffable gaze. She longed to lie down on her side, to curl in small upon herself and weep. "Do you believe she is a threat?"

He reached out through the Force to bind her throat with his will. She saw it happen. Visas wheezed as her feet left the deck, as her toes scuffed against it, kicking. "You...are the darkness in which all life...dies, my lord."

He shook her once, like a vrelt shaking prey, and dropped her. She fell to her knees and prostrated herself. "Life exists to...to feed your power, my lord." She swallowed past the lump in her raw throat. "I will follow the disturbance to its source and snuff it out. I will kill her. My life...my life is yours."

His voice washed over her again. She saw a dragon rising from still water, jaws agape. She saw a world afire, a woman robed in snow, a flight of some wild avians that burst from long grass near a sleeping giant. A dead sun shed its burning skin and showed the rot nestling deep within its heart.

All.

His hands, his real hands, lifted her. She felt the cold weight of his mask against her brow, smelled the rot and mildew of his robes. His touch was frigid, death to all that lived. He released her, drifted away to resume his contemplation of the void.

She bowed, swaying slightly with exhaustion. "I beg you," she said, her own words ringing distant in her ears, "let me die."

He said nothing.