Confrontation Litanies of the Dark Side: Bygone Age

[Ahalir Gafaron]

@Darth Sylvia​

The jungles of Vendaxa were vast. The particular continent was laid with thick flora, rooting into the stagnant shallows that covered almost every bit of ground, save for the occasional hill, spiked with feral plants, most of which carnivorus. The canopy was established high, some ten meters off the bogs, with thick eonic trunks like columns, supporting the greenish, vine-infested ceilings from collapsing onto the bogs. The roots were a chaotic maze of rotting branches, trunk crossings and large leaf plants, tracing their roots beneath the mold-covered bogs. The hills, formed either from earth or rotting trunks that had fallen into piles by the passing of time, gradually accumulating dirt and dead plants enough to make a semi-stable soil over the bogs. Screeching and occasional distant roaring from the beasts and insectoids that dwelt in the feral place decorated the landscape with sound most fitting of the forsaken, untouched environment of Vendaxa.

The durasteel platform hovered over the wilderness, barely differentiated from the dense top of the canopy beneath it. Several twin repeating blasters were mounted on the metallic railings around the edges of the platform, while a ray shield generator was operating on neutral, behind the large console, providing disturbed scans of the surrounding continent. Most of the screen was blank, actually. With data corrupt, or insufficient to provide any reliable information, barely providing the speculated or confirmed locations of the several squads deployed.

"Report." General Gafaron intoned. His voice commanding, coloured by the decades he had served under the Imperial banner, in the countless wars fought throughout the years of the Second and First Galactic War. He was there. He remembered. His eyes a testament of will and determination, refusing to be driven to the whirl of insignificance as the Sith befell in an ever-increasing in scale Civil War. He would be there, to serve the Empire he had served so many years ago.

"All squads advancing, general, sir." the nearby Imperial Guardsman reported. He was knelt down, operating the heavy, sizeable boxed communications device, from which three long antenas protruded, to improve the chances of successfully coordinating the deployed troops. "No stable ground yet. Squad 3 has encountered enemy opposition."

"Where?" the General almost instinctivelly inquired. His eyes fixated on the projected information on the screen. His gloved finger trailing the edge of the tea cup, resting on the small table besides the chair he sat on.

"G8. Imperial."

"Rebel, Lieutenant..." Gafaron snarled. "Rebel..."

"Yes sir. Apologies."

"Inform the air force transport to be on stand by. Maintain altitude. Have Squads 2 and 6 to investigate. Flanking maneuvers."

 

[Darth Fauste]

​

The scent of decay thickened as Lyanna descended the broken slope of moss-draped stone, every step sinking into the sodden rot of Vendaxa’s mire. Her cloak clung to her form, soaked in the dampness of the bog, though she neither faltered nor slowed. Trees twisted above her like gnarled hands raised to bar her path, but they dared not move. She had followed the thread of Desmundor’s presence—no, his imprint, left behind like the smeared ink of a half-written prophecy.

She hated that she could feel it. Hated more that she’d needed it.

The Force whispered with madness here, yet his signature had been like a wound bleeding into the world—deep and undeniable. A scar across the canvas of the living jungle. And so, reluctantly, she followed.

Now, she arrived.

The darkness reeked of death—not natural death, but the kind that lingered, insidious and conscious, animated by something ancient and vile. Lyanna stopped at the edge of the clearing, peering through the lashing vines just in time to see Desmundor’s blade flash—a midnight cut through the air—and the foul construct it struck wither into a plume of corrupted vapor.

Bog water sloshed at his waist. Mist clung to his silhouette like a shroud. And from below, the mire moved.

Her lip curled, but she did not wait to be welcomed.

She stepped forward from the treeline with an almost lazy elegance, her presence crashing into the scene like a tide of pressure. Cloak rippling behind her, Lyanna raised a single hand, palm outward. The Force trembled in response.

A pulse of invisible power rippled out from her, an echoing wave that parted the rot-cloaked swamp water in a perfect crescent, revealing the fetid husks crawling beneath the surface. The momentary exposure was all the warriors needed—Desmundor and the Mandalorians—to see, to strike.

Her other hand flicked forward, and with it, a black-and-silver saber snapped to life. She walked calmly into the battle, the blade humming as it carved through the air in elegant arcs, dissecting three of the creatures before they could pull themselves upright. Every strike was precise. Surgical. Detached.

Only once they had a moment’s respite did she address him.

“Well,” she breathed, voice smooth as silk yet sharp as glass, “I suppose I should thank you, Desmundor. You always seem to bleed just loud enough to be found.”

She turned her gaze to the ancient archway behind him, half-submerged and swarmed by crawling things. There it was—the heart of the ruins she sought.

Her saber hissed back into its hilt. Her tone dropped into something almost conspiratorial.

“I needed to find this place. And you, ever the faithful beacon of suffering, led the way.”

Then, with that same mocking sweetness, she added, “I could have let them tear you apart, of course. But where’s the poetry in that?”

The Force coiled around her like a serpent, rippling outward in unspoken threat even as she smiled. The Sith Lord strode toward the temple mouth, boots splashing through blood and bile.

There was always a price to pay for power unearthed in places like this.

And Lyanna intended to collect.

Tag; @Desmundor Alcademon @Lok

 

[Empor]

The Labyrinth was finally in silence. Fumes and black mist, gradually consumed, the aftermath of a battle too foul, fought too long. The black Tempest broken, scattered across the many corridors, as if snatched behind portculis of Will and trapdoors of Malice. The Netherworld rested, as the chorus had concluded to a miasmatic end.

There was silence...

The bogs in Vendaxa befallen in tranquility. The dismembered cadavers of the stormtroopers scattered, torn from within by the blight that had infested them. Souls claimed, in a battle lost. For few moments, there was the sensation of accomplishment, as if whichever devilish entity had ambushed Veraxis, had finally been put in chains deep in the dungeons of the Sith Master's mind.

And then, it happened...

Chains...

Chains....

Chains...

Or Scythe...

Scythe...

Scythe...​

Whispers echoing from the depths of the labyrinth. Behind the torn flesh of the walls, where the nerves dictated will upon the tissue, a cacophony of crawling hummed like a hymn of inevitability.

Scarabs.

Faceless.

Eyeless.

Crawling inbetween the tinny cracks and tears of the Labyrinth, reaching far beneath the surface like Stone mites, infesting the bottomless hollows that were Veraxis' mind...

His eyes recognized, for as soon as they rested their gaze upon his very hands, the fabric of his cloth rot and fell, as if a hundred years had passed within moments of existence. The skin grew pale, cracking like porcelain, blackened from within by decay... The scent fading, as if the nostrils themselves refused to identify the most foul aroma.

To be One With Death, is to be Fear.

Corruption.

As the fragments of his hands fell, the skeletal remaints within appeared wrapped by chains, cold and weightless. Reality had once again been defiled by yet another foul witchery conjoured by the entity, though this time, the freezing sensation of its presence banished, giving way to hallucinations that spoke in meaning...

The scarabs spread beneath the Labyrinth, an infestation unfathomable and corruptive.

A single shadow landed before Veraxis. Its wings made of black eather, its bones decayed, dressed with membrane that had lost any past identity. The eyes of the beast hollow, black gates to the realm of the Dead. It landed on the bogs as if the stagnant water was solid as stone. The Gargoyle limbed forth, approaching the Sith Master, scenting the life essence he had still within him.

The figh was over.

Now, came the Pact...

 

[Sith Master Veraxis]

The Bogs of Vendaxa – The Pact

The stillness was never true.

Not in the Labyrinth. Not in the bog.

And certainly not in the mind of Veraxis.

Even silence here had teeth.

He knelt in it—surrounded by the carcasses of troopers whose screams still echoed in the folds of the Force. His breath came in slow exhales now, ragged but measured. He felt the tremble in his own decayed limbs. The rot peeling from his hands. The illusion of time accelerated, the fabric of flesh unspooling.

Chains.
Scythe.

It was not just madness. It was message.

The scarabs whispered it.

The bones remembered it.

“To be One With Death is to be Fear…”
And Veraxis listened.

His eyes lifted slowly to the gargoyle that landed before him—its wings not merely bone, but negation, like reality itself sloughed off its form in rejection. Where it walked, the rot paused. Where it gazed, the Force recoiled.

It did not attack.
It did not threaten.

It offered.

The Sith Master did not rise. Not fully. He remained kneeling in the water as if it were an altar now. His cracked palm reached down into the bog, fingers clawing into the damp mud, into the remnants of the dead that had come before. He clenched a fist—bones grinding beneath the surface like memory and defiance compressed into shape.

He had caged the hound.
He had sealed the hunt.

But now came the deeper revelation—the thing behind the Hunt. Behind even the chase.

This wasn’t just about Death.

This was about what Death served.

He raised his head. Where once there was the mask of cold fury and command, now there was something more ancient. Something resigned and accepting, and yet wholly undiminished.

“If you mean to take what remains…” Veraxis rasped, his voice withered, scorched by shadow, “…then know I give nothing freely.”

The gargoyle watched.

Its hunger did not twitch. It waited.

So Veraxis, seated still in the mire of his own rot, raised one hand. The blackened skin cracked like volcanic stone, revealing the chain-wrapped bone beneath.

And he did not recoil from it.

“I see it now,” he said, eyes glowing dimly. “It was never freedom you offered. It was survival. A barter. A binding.”

The pact was not spoken.
It was understood.

To be the hunted was to die.
To be the cage was to rot.
But to be the threshold—to stand between death and dominion—that was a different fate entirely.

Veraxis leaned forward. His hand brushed the stone-solid water, and from that touch, black veins spiraled outward in perfect symmetry—a sigil born of thought, of desperation, of dark genius.

“Then let it be done,” he said, voice no louder than a breath yet heavy as a tomb.

“The Pact is mine to command.”

He looked the beast in its hollow eyes and whispered:

“You are not the end. You are the beginning of my next shape.”

The scarabs, now everywhere, did not devour him.
They entered him.

They crawled beneath his skin, into his marrow, into the memory of who he had been—cleaving the past from the future.

His body twitched.
His mind split.
And the Labyrinth shifted.

A new door opened—not out of the nether…

But deeper in.

The Sith Master, Veraxis, did not rise.

He descended.

Not in defeat.

But in evolution.

The Pact was sealed.
And Death would learn what it meant…
…to make a bargain with the damned.