Umbrous - Empire's Shadow

Part 1 - Awakening of Shadow


Chapter 7

Kaan had been seventeen years old when he first seen an Inquisitor. A group of them in fact, sent to Ukio to acquire lightsabers.

The Grand Inquisitor had recently been killed in an encounter with a Jedi, and so Darth Vader had hurriedly sent a batch of new Inquisitors to get kyber crystals from one of the largest collections of lightsabers which wasn't actively monitored by a group of Imperial scientists.

The hidden machinations through which Shara Pritcher had achieved this were her secret alone. When she had received the news that she was to receive a team of the most ruthless and feared Jedi-killers in the galaxy, she had swiftly sent Kaan to Bongo's house, and had them wander around the Market. She had admitted that she didn't know much about how sensing through the Force worked except that a trained Force-sensitive individual could sense others around them, but that the Inquisitors tended not to be so strong in the Force so Vader could control them.

This, she hoped, would mean that if Kaan and Bongo wandered around the Market, Kaan's Force presence would be masked by the generic Force presence that any large gathering of sentient life forms, such as the Market, would generate.

Kaan had been quite far away from his home when he suddenly began to feel very sick, and Bongo had to carry him back. When they were leaving the Market, Kaan had felt the dark side presence of the Inquisitors more strongly and had stopped by the side of the road to throw up multiple times, before going to Bongo's house until his mother called him back.

Entering his own house after the Inquisitors left had been an unpleasant experience too, so his mother had consulted some Jedi texts and found that placing Jedi artifacts in the spots where the Inquisitors had been alleviated her son's suffering, their light side presence appearing to balance the dark.

Ever since, Kaan had been wary of the dark side, and though he understood that it was a means to achieve great power, it was to be handled very delicately. Nevertheless, he had eagerly watched over the footage from the secret recording devices that his mother had kept running, to learn more about the people who would have stopped at nothing to kidnap and convert him had they found him.


Looking at the footage, he had seen eight Inquisitors-to-be led by a massive Dowutin Inquisitor with a prosthetic hand and leg, and a red face guard who called herself the Ninth Sister.

There had been a female Gran, a male Lethan Twi'lek, a green male Besalisk, a male and female human, a female Iridonian Zabrak, a coal-skinned female that looked like a Delphidian, and Kaan blinked twice before realising that the last initiate was indeed a lanky male Muun, towering over even the Ninth Sister. Kaan knew all of them had to be Force-sensitive, but he had also never heard of a Force-sensitive Muun before.

All of the initiates looked to be around his age, some a little older, and the Zabrak seemed to be around twelve, meaning they had all probably been found and trained by the Inquisitors from an early age, not too differently to how the Jedi had abducted and trained infants. The group had been received by his mother, and the Ninth Sister had gruffly declined refreshments, despite the clearly famished expressions on the initiates' faces.

They had gone into the living room and were told to stretch out with the Force to see which crystals called to them. After they had all gotten their lightsaber – or lightsabers for some – the Ninth Sister told them how to corrupt it,

"Open the lightsaber and take the crystal in your hands. The crystals are in their own way, alive, and you must make them hurt, and bleed. The dark side in you is fuelled by your pain, and right now your hunger. Use that to consume the energy of the crystal, weakening and corrupting it until it bleeds the red of your anger."

With this guidance, they had each been sent to a different room in the mansion to perform the corruption. This, Kaan reasoned, was when he'd begun to feel sick at the market, and even now he felt an uneasy feeling walking around the rooms where the Inquisitors had corrupted their crystals.

Each Inquisitor seemed to have their own approach to the task, with some simply meditating while the crystal levitated above them, such as the Muun and the male human, while others, like the Gran and the Zabrak, bleated and growled in rage while the crystal slowly turned red in their hands. Kaan was especially interested to see the Besalisk, who had grabbed a crystal in each one of his hands, his head crests shaking feverishly as he poured the dark side into them, turning them red in a bright flash.

Before long, the Inquisitors had put their newly red lightsabers back together and presented them to the Ninth Sister, who sent them all to the Pritcher's main hall. It was a large unused space which Shara Pritcher had fitted with mattresses and climbing frames and turned into a sort of training room, in which Kaan and Bongo had played as children, and which Kaan used to practice acrobatics and lightsaber swinging, though without a proper teacher or access to Jedi holocrons, he hadn't gotten far.

The Ninth Sister then split the initiates up into pairs. "Now you must defeat your opponent and prove yourselves worthy of the dark side, of the position of Inquisitor, and of your Empire. You have trained with the person before you, grown up with them, and now you must strike them down and take your place amongst the Galaxy's most powerful people."

The initiates had all looked back at the Ninth Sister and each other with varying degrees of certainty in their eyes. The Gran's eyestalks drooped slightly as she looked towards the Zabrak she was paired with, who in turn looked up at her with rage dancing in her eyes. The Besalisk stared down at the diminutive woman standing before him, both of them looking unsure, while the Muun looked at the man paired with him calmly, displaying the dispassionate indifference to cruelty which had served his species so well in the law firms and banks of Muunilinst.

The Twi'lek and Delphidian, however, looked at each other with what appeared to be sorrow, and Kaan had to wonder whether they had a relationship, and whether the Ninth Sister had paired them together for that purpose. He had heard that loss and pain were quick paths to the dark side, and he supposed that while cruel, the Ninth Sister was ensuring that this pairing would result in a powerful Inquisitor, embittered by the loss of a partner to serve the Empire.


Next two chapters focus on the battles between the Inquisitors.