Imperial-I class Star Destroyer Adamant
I was in my chambers onboard the Adamant. I knew why I had returned to my ship in orbit above N'Zoth, and, due to the perks of being in charge, it was an easy task to commandeer a shuttle ride up to my star destroyer.
I looked around the pitch black room. I could see nothing but knew the space inside and out. To my right was the kitchenette and fridge with the closet further down the wall. To my left was the desk and various terminals I had connected to the ship's networks and various parts of the HoloNet's vast web of data and communication. The refresher was past the desk. On the far side of the room was the recessed alcove where my cot sat, and the surrounding wall was dotted with hidden drawers and shelves. The middle of my chamber had been padded with matting, where I practiced saber forms and Teras Kasi katas. Training droids could be summoned from the ceiling as I wished.
So I did not need the room lights to guide me.
With a pull of the Force and a mental command, a stone altar, carved from the stone of Lettow, removed itself from its hidden cubby hole and floated to the center of the room. It settled onto the floor with a muffled 'whump'.
I walked up to it, feeling the Dark Side coiling around me as I moved. I felt detached from the waking world almost, as if half of myself was still caught in that terribly cold mist from my dream. Or was my vision?
I reached out with the Force again. Another hidden compartment opened, two objects flew out of it. I caught them with both hands. These were the lightsabers I had taken from the Inquisitors I had slain on Prakith so many months ago. Familiar, constructed in the same mold as mine had been but different. Additions had been put onto these, a groove was missing there.
Familiar, but different.
And entirely cold.
I frowned and commanded with the Force. With the clicking of metal, the two lightsabers came apart. Each component hovering just out of reach of the other. Four crystals pulled away from the mass of parts to float in front of my face. With an errant hand wave, the parts settled down on the face of the altar.
I looked into those red crystals, seeing not with my eyes but with my unseen eyes, and found them to be cold. Machine produced, machine shaped, assembled in a mass batch of lightsabers that itself was produced by machines.
Fake, fake, fake.
I clapped my hands together and crushed the four crystals into dust. As I felt the dust pour out from my fingers to settle on the top of the altar and the lightsaber parts, I felt the Force respond to my unthought command. It prodded me towards a particular hidden drawer underneath my cot.
I pulled, and the thin sith primer came flying across the room. I opened my eyes and grabbed the primer, flipping through the pages rapidly. My eyes danced across now familiar text. The basic spells and enchanting proceeds that someone had exactingly marked down with ink. The Sith alphabet and a scant few excerpts of cultural and religious significance.
I already knew this but now, now more was being revealed to me. Urged on by the Dark Side, I jumped from section to section, making new connections, gaining new insight.
Piece by piece, brought about by my command alone, a new ritual was created in my mind's eye. The Dark Side hummed in pleasure once the final picture was firmly held in place in my mind. I bent the Force to my will again, and a path forward settled in front of me.
Yes, this was what I had been missing before!
In an almost-trance, I went out from my chambers following the guidance I had commanded from the Force. Despite my eyes being half opened from the trance I was in, my steps were sure and my stride unbroken as I moved about my ship.
At the Adamant's forges, I took metals from the storage bays, purposefully examining each bar with my unseen sight, and setting aside all of them until I grabbed the metals that were right. Further components were chosen from the storage rooms in short order. After the looting spree was done, I went to the machine shops, evicted some mechanics from their booths, and shaped the chosen metals and components into what I sensed they were meant to be. There was no waste, no mistakes made in the entire process. Everything flowed as I willed it to.
I welcomed the utter darkness of my chambers. It blanketed everything in my room equally, removing all possible distractions. The universe narrowed down to me, the Force and the darkness all existed in.
With the utmost care, I arranged the chosen parts and the needed electronic components from my trophies on the stop of the altar into the proper position. Then I summoned a wide, shallow bowl from the kitchenette and placed it in the middle of the altar. Everything was in place, I could feel it.
Sulfur filled my nostrils as I breathed in deep, pulling at the Dark Side. It tensed around me, eager to do my bidding. The darkness in the room became almost tangible, hunching over me in anticipation. I summoned a ritual knife from across the room and raised it in the air, admiring for an instant how the sith runes carved onto the blade glistened in the umbral darkness. The burning yellow glow of power in my eyes the only illumination the Dark Side would seemingly allow.
Then I slit my wrists.
Blood flowed quickly and steadily into the shallow bowl as I held my hands over it. I began to hear war drums in the back of my mind and the iron scent of fresh blood filled the air.
Once the bottom of the bowl was filled with my blood, I squeezed the cuts shut with the Force and backed away from the pillar. Then the blood ran again from one wrist as I drew a circle around the altar. After that was complete, I cut off the flow of blood, stepped closer to the altar and drew another circle with blood from my other wrist.
Then I drew a line with the blood from both wrists that connected the base of the altar, the inner circle and the outer circle together. I returned to the altar, holding my hands over the bowl and its pool of blood.
Drip, drip, drip. I tightened my grip on the wounds, so that only one drop of blood fell into the bowl at a time. The torrent I had previously used was constrained by my will to a tiny trickle. I felt the heat coming off my blood. It felt right.
The mental strain grew as I grabbed at the fine particles of the crushed kyber crystals, shaped the dust into four rough lines, and started feeding the dust into the hot blood in the bowl. As the first particles made contact with my blood, I pushed my will and the dark power I commanded down into the altar and all that touched it.
My blood lit up, glowing in the all encompassing darkness that engulfed my chambers. I realized that the verdant red light ebbed and flowed in intensity in synch with my heartbeat and the war drums in the back of my head.
The universe seemed to balance on a knife's edge, waiting for my push to send all this power that now strummed through my very lifeblood into action. For me to give purpose to its existence. It begged for it.
So I gave it what it wanted: I began to chant.
Sith flowed off my tongue with a smoothness that I never imagined it could.
I chanted my commands at the mixture, pushing more power into it as I spoke. I spoke of my desires, my need for the hearts of my blade to be forged in this crucible. My rage at how my enemies had robbed me of the chance to forge my own blade in earlier times. My hatred of all who opposed me. I spat cursed at foes long dead and those I yearned to kill but who still lived. The glowind red mixture began to bubble and the heat coming off it grew stronger.
You will be the hearts of my blade, I chanted, you will be like me, you will be of me, and we will strike all who oppose me down! The blood circles I had drawn began to smolder and crackle with unseen flame.
Take shape, I chanted in twisting words. Holding the vision of the kyber crystals in my mind and with both mind and chanted spells, forcing those exact shapes and dimensions into existence. Tiny arcs of crimson lightning flew from my fingertips into the bubbling mixture. Foul fumes tugged at my senses, striving to throw my mind out of balance, ruin my concentration. My own ritual fought me like a barely constrained beast.
If my control, my will, weakened for but a second, then disaster would occur. I could feel that truth in the Force.
The war drums of the Dark Side grew to a mighty crescendo.
I grit my teeth in anger at the magicks impudence, and rallied myself for the final stroke of the ritual.
"Zhol kash dinora!" I bellowed.
There was the roar of flames, the crackle of lightning. An explosive gust of hot air that buffeted my face and sent my cape billowing behind me. For a heartbeat, blood red light blinded me before the surrounding darkness rushed in and smothered the light.
I could hear just my heartbeat and my ragged breathing as the umbral darkness faded back into the realm from which I had inadvertently summoned it from. A new recognition of it was left in my mind though and I felt that, if I were to find the right wording for the spell, I could bring that darkness purposefully to bear against my enemies. But that was a fleeting thought.
As the last tendrils of black ichor vanished, I gazed down at the altar. With a clammy hand, I reached down into the carbonized, no fossilized, bowl. From the center of it's pitted and cracked bottom, I pulled out two red crystals. Cupping them in my palm, I leaned in to examine them.
Twins in every way, they had emerged from the ritualistic ooze in perfect condition. Already cut in a way that felt right to me. Not cut, but created in perfection. Ready for use as I had willed them to be.
And most importantly of all, the two kyber crystals were hot. Their innate heat almost uncomfortable to hold in my bare hand. But they would not burn me, could not burn me. These crystals had been forged from my own blood and had become just as much a part of me as any of my limbs.
I commanded with the Force and the two crystals floated up and away, coming to hover over the destroyed womb of their birth. I gestured with my other hand, and the parts of my true lightsaber floated up as well and started to lazily orbit the red crystals.
The Force worked as I willed it to, showing me the path needed to reach my goal. Without active thought, my hands pulled and pushed the empty air. With each motion my hands made a conjoining part floated into place.
First the containment chambers were fitted over kyber crystals, then the power cells and magnifying lenses clicked into their greater parts before slotting perfectly into place. The emitters connected themselves to either end of the growing lightsaber before I made a twisting motion with both hands and the Force resonated with the feeling of binding.
This was the power of Force crafting. I knew that all of these parts, down to the very molecules, had been aligned in the most perfect fashion. Nothing short of my deliberate will or destruction could now break my lightsaber apart.
Next the coverings slide along the lightsaber, a matte black grip forming in the center of the blade. Then shiny chromium switches followed the grip. Nine thin bands of aurodium, five on the upper piece and four on the bottom, had been fitted into the chromium. I may hate where I had come from, but I could not deny it. Two beveled emitter shrouds were the final pieces to be assembled.
It was done.
I breathed out, gazing at my lightsaber with reverent eyes as it gently floated into my hands. My lightsaber retained the same rough hilt size as my prior weapon. Thirty or thirty-two centimeters if I wanted to sully it with scientifics. Easily wielded with one hand or two, in any style.
It had no visible switches on its surface, those were internal. Only I could use my lightsaber. Only I would know its secrets. It was a part of me, I realized, as much as any of my limbs. A rush of completeness came over me. It was shocking, I had not known what I was missing nor how much I had ached for it until this moment.
Snap-hiss! One blood red blade blossomed.
Snap-hiss! Followed by its twin.
I extinguished both blades at once, then activated both blades at the same time. I twirled my lightsaber over head, trading it between hands. All the while activating the blades in random order
Faster and faster I went, flowing through katas at breakneck speed. My ears were filled with the buzzsaw humming of the saber's blades as they cut merrily through empty air.
I stopped just as suddenly as I started, returning to my original position: lightsaber held out horizontally with both blood red blades ignited. I was bathed in the blade's red glow, and so was all that I could see in the blade's light.
Pushed by a guiding nudge, I looked at the wall's embedded chrono. A new day was dawning on N'Zoth.
A new day had dawned for me.
A/N: I wanted to go for a more mystical lightsaber construction for this story. Except this was a darksider's version of mystical, so no connecting with the crystals in the Force like the Jedi. And the chapter greatly fits into Andorak's views as a character. His values and methods of using the Force and the impact his history of training has had on that.
Over all, I'm very pleased with this chapter. Next time we start the blitz towards the Battle of Brentaal IV and the fall of the first Imperial Ruling Council.