Hyperspace
23 BTC
Several Hours Later
Ever onward stretched the plateau of the silent planet, till shadow faded into shadow and only the dull, distant veil of stars, which had long since given up their flame and died, cast a glow upon the silhouette of the dark temple.
It was utterly, inhumanly cold.
A hundred thousand years of ice lay thick upon the world, smothering all but the uppermost limits of the burned city. Ancient, titanic blocks of smooth, unmarked black stone cast out forever in darkness, their sole purpose to show that something had once been and was now no longer. The Sith stood upon the snow and the ice and the ruin of the planet and felt the absence of the pervading Force. The soul of the universe did not dwell here, but, rather, like the roar of water toppling off a precipice into some great, bottomless chasm, it rushed ever towards the temple, pulling the Sith along in its rush to be consumed.
...
The Sith's eyes closed.
Opened again.
A soft electronic glow from the ship's control panels illuminated the vessel's interior. The holoterminal buzzed once more, and the Sith moved to answer the call.
"You're late," the Dark Lord did not mince words.
"I'm sorry, Master."
The man considered his apprentice, though his expression remained concealed beneath the shadow of his hood. "What were you dreaming of, Apprentice, that kept you from making a call?" Irritation lingered in his voice, though a note of curiosity, and...something else, something calculating.
"Nothing unusual, Master. Something about playing sabaac with the Republic Chancellor."
"Continue to be flippant with me, Apprentice, and I'll cut out your tongue," was the growled interruption. The Sith refrained from pointing out that the Dark Lord was the one who'd taught his apprentice to be flippant in the first place, not certain he would appreciate the comment right now. He seemed to have something on his mind. Which brought them back to the point of his call.
"I have a task for you."
You usually do.
"Your prediction was accurate," the Sith responded evenly.
"Did you doubt me?" the Dark Lord sneered.
"No, Master."
I very rarely do.
"What would you have me do?"
The Dark Lord smiled. It was more unsettling than his frown. "A pair of thieves owe me a favor for getting them out of an unpleasant situation several years ago. I've finally decided to collect."
...
Pourhiri Province
Vitheon
23 BTC
One Week Later
Vitheon was a hot, humid, miserable hellhole of a jungle planet. The four of them were silent as the shuttle dipped into the atmosphere, beginning a gentle descent to the surface. Brilliant crimson light bloomed like a wound on the horizon as the craft raced across the boundless verdant sea.
As the sun rose, the topography gradually came into focus, the unbroken carpet of green melting into low lying mountains and uplands and winding, muddy rivers that glittered like brown silken threads in the new morning light. Up here, high above the surface, they seemed like such miniscule things, hardly the great and mighty rivers they were in reality, serving as the lifeblood of the inhabitants who lived near their shores.
To anyone else, anyone who hadn't spent time here, Vitheon was just another jungle planet like so many others. Nameless to all the important people of the galaxy. Pretty to look at, sure, from a distance, but there wasn't any real reason to go there outside of those few bored nobles itching for an adventure in the wilderness.
And, had the Empire never stumbled across the planet's hidden gem, its rich medicinal plants that rivalled kolto in potency, it might have remained overlooked. But the galaxy wasn't often so kind, and adventure seekers had a tendency to brag about their exploits to the wrong people.
It wasn't so much an invasion as a gradual expansion across the landscape. The locals, a non space faring species, were neither overly hostile nor particularly welcoming, preferring instead to deal with the Empire at arm's length. For a while, that had worked.
Increasing hostilities with the Republic had made the Empire less willing to play Vitheon's game of supply and demand. Gradual shipment increases by the government hadn't kept pace with the Empire's demand, and the latter had finally decided to take what it wanted.
The trouble was that the prized Daro root really wasn't all that common to begin with, and, when it did grow, it wasn't in any clearly discernible pattern. When potentially resource heavy sites were identified, it was often cheaper to simply clear cut whole swathes of the forest than it would have been to try to use specialized droids or ground teams to pinpoint precise trees. The latter option also came with the risk of missing one, and the Empire wasn't really known for doing things by halves. Even when individual specimens could be located without total destruction of the surrounding forest, the removal of the massive, ancient trees often disrupted their immediate environment anyway, just on a smaller scale.
The Empire, however, spared little thought for the destruction of life on alien world they'd claimed as a colony. Efforts to propagate the root off world had failed. The committee Baara had served on prior to joining forces with the professor had emphasized that point.
...But that was the concern of scientists, an issue relegated to the distant future while military affairs took immediate precedence. The welfare of other life on the planet, from the meanest worm that wriggled through the dirt to the Vitheon themselves, patrons of art and builders of vast, sprawling complexes of carved stone, was of little consequence. The Vitheon should have counted themselves fortunate to be allowed to remain, relatively uninterrupted, on their home world.
It was in the outer courtyard of one of these stone complexes that their shuttle now settled down with a slight jerking motion, shifting its occupants in their seats as its struts found purchase at last on the uneven cobblestone floor. Holberi grimaced, her lips pursing in a thin line but she didn't say anything. All of them looked tired, eyes drawn and faces pale. Baara knew she herself must look much the same. They'd all had something invested in this venture. It hadn't been the same thing, sure, but they'd been all committed to its success. And now it had failed, and each dwelled privately in their own contemplation of where to go from here. There had been some quiet discussions between the two doctoral students of the group that Baara had thankfully not been drawn into. She didn't feel like mediating in their private argument, though she had an idea what they'd been talking about.
Witwar had tried to speak with her as well, to thank her for helping over the past couple of years, but Baara hadn't been able to bear it. She'd been blunt with him, had told him in no uncertain terms that her help hadn't meant a damn thing in the end. The doctor hadn't seemed to know what to say to that, at a loss for words. They'd looked at each other, saying all that couldn't possibly be expressed verbally. She hadn't realized when he'd gone from being a colleague to a friend, but, well, one tended to grow to care about those one worked closely with, especially when both parties shared a passion for something that they were willing to work for with all their heart and soul.
She hadn't brought up the woman she'd seen in the audience to him, as they sat over a glass of brandy in his office (with much badmouthing of the Board on her part), but the stranger continued to linger around the back of her mind like a bothersome insect, more irritating in retrospect than unsettling. Thinking about it too long only made her angrier than she already was, but it was a kind of anger tinged with shame. She couldn't really blame her own failings on a stranger, much as she'd like to. And, honestly, once she'd calmed down from the heat of the moment and actually listened to her friend's advice, she knew she couldn't really blame herself all that much either. The Board had made up their minds months, if not years ago. She and the others had done their best, but, ultimately, there were just some things that couldn't be done in this galaxy, some doors that would never be opened no matter how just and righteous a reason was presented for opening them.
That bothered her more than anything. She knew, logically, she wasn't so much to blame, but...god, something in her just ached at the thought that she'd failed these people she'd grown to call friends. It was wrong. It was all wrong, and it disgusted her. She didn't want to stop fighting, but she had no idea what more she could do at this point besides help mitigate the fallout of the Board's decision. Perhaps help the Vitheon ease into the transition of having their planet stripped out from beneath their feet. Because that's really what this came down to.
For a short time, the possibility of uncovering something of archaeological significance to the Empire had put a halt on harvesting. No one wanted to get on the bad side of a Sith by destroying Sith relics, after all.
That time had passed. The preliminary indications that the ruins held artifacts of primitive Force users, driven by reports of the unusual behavior of Donnic Ingsam's crew, had amounted to nothing. Three people had died, but it wasn't due to some malignant archaic artifact of the Dark Side.
The crew's medic, a man named Parlinn, wasn't trained in dealing with the dead. Thus, official autopsies on the three bodies had been carried out by Imperial personnel attached in some unclear way to the Reclamation Service's representative on the planet. Toxicology reports had pointed unanimously at a weaponized neurotoxin, another product of local flora that had of late been adopted by members of the Dho Valk, a religiously motivated organization of guerrilla fighters that had begun popping up around the time of the excavation. In the end, it all amounted to nothing more than a delayed terrorist attack.
A few months had passed by the time this news was released, though. The bodies had been kept secluded in some military storage facility, no doubt in an attempt to derive an antidote to the poison. Excavation had already begun though, unhampered by the local authorities who had been rounded up for questioning on the matter. The poison appeared to have been a one off thing, a single trap set for the unwary Imperials. Ever careful though, the initial groundbreaking on the pre cleared land had been carried out by droids under the direction of the Reclamation Service before authority had been turned over to Dr. Witwar and his team.
As anticlimactic as it sounded, nothing else catastrophic had occurred since then.
Baara still couldn't shake the uneasy feeling that settled on her whenever she entered the ruins though. Whenever anyone mentioned it, Witwar chalked it up to paranoia and over exertion of the imagination, undoubtedly a side of effect of the events surrounding the site's discovery. Only a select few of his students had been permitted to join the excavation at the beginning, owing in part to the anticipated dangers of the ruins themselves and potential armed interference by the hostile minority. She'd reached out to him herself as the only avenue of preserving the planet that seemed left.
Lieutenant Torrou didn't seem to believe they'd find anything of worth. His only purpose for remaining on the planet and allowing the excavation to proceed in the first place was precautionary. Due diligence. But even the remote possibility of finding something meant the people currently carving holes in the planet were a hell of a lot more careful than they were before. It was something she could work with.
The project had ended up being a lot of false promises and borrowed time. The site had been...utterly alien, unlike anything the Professor or his students had ever heard of. Pre Republic, with vaguely humanoid statues so degraded and broken down they were barely recognizable as such. They weren't of the four armed Vitheon though. That much was clear, though they were incredibly abstract. The architecture didn't match the cities, didn't match the temples. In a way, it seemed to be a precursor to the most ancient of religious areas, the sites long since abandoned and given over to the jungle.
Witwar had called in every favor he could to keep them going, attempting to draw a connection between the obviously non Vitheon statuary (Force sensitivity being almost unheard of among the current populace) and some proto Sith entity. He'd appealed to the Siths' vanity, pointing out the obviously religious nature of the site. Clearly these primitive aliens had regarded this potentially human entity as some kind of god...and so on and so forth. His work with Sovann, the Minister of Antiquities on the planet, had yielded evidence to support the conclusion that the Dho Valk themselves were the modern version of a cult splinter of this religion...though the language wasn't any he'd ever seen, and they were really working off limited information...If you'd be so kind as to just give them another couple of weeks...
In the end, it hadn't been enough. The evidence wasn't conclusive, and they'd been given two weeks by the government to clear out as much as they could before the harvesting crews resumed their work. It was more than she'd expected, but, by this point, all of their crew was gone, either graduated or pulled out of a failing excavation. The whole thing had kind of turned into a joke at the university, if Dargla was to be believed. Bottom line, though: they were about to lose a lot of material and information due to being short handed.
They'd come now to meet with Sovann, to give the bad news in person. Witwar had insisted, though he'd left the location up to the man's own choosing. Sovann had called them here, of course. It didn't surprise her, but Baara wished he hadn't. She couldn't suppress the feeling that he knew. Even without the Force, he always seemed to know. Perhaps here, in this place of his gods, he found comfort. Or sought guidance.
Each breath of the sweet, blossom laden air was like biting into a piece of choice fruit. The courtyard was also a garden, and it was well loved. A dull drone of insects played in tandem with the distant sounds of wooden instruments echoing from some undisclosed room further within the Temple. Warm, liquid sunlight, partially filtered by the colossal trees whose roots crept up the side of the beehive shaped monument melted into the air, a gentle wind pulling at a few loose strands of Baara's hair and sending a pleasant sensation down the back of her neck. It was early morning still. Within an hour or so, the heat would become dense, a thick, muddy soup of humidity that would be nearly unbearable to walk in.
But now, with the early morning light on the steps of Aunjrir Vas, all of the natural beauty of the planet could really be appreciated. Breathtaking, Baara thought, was an odd word, but it fit, if only for the fact that she couldn't really find words to describe the scene. As beautiful as it was though, her favorite view of the place would always be the very first light of dawn, high on the summit of the temple. It had been a sacred privilege to be allowed to ascend the nearly vertical staircase of the artificial mountain.
A hell of a climb too.
But worth it. She'd only been once, but she'd never forget the way the sun had seemed to blossom like blood seeping into the waters of the atmosphere, before the great solar eye had fully opened, casting its rays once more over the dark jungle.
"My friends."
His smile didn't fail him, even now, though it grew pained by the point where it reached his eyes.
"Welcome," he said, his voice soft and melodic like the breeze and the wooden flutes drifting through the heavy stone to greet them.
"Let us speak in my office."
