Post by Darth Kairos on Jan 12, 2021 11:10:29 GMT
The Valley of the Dark Lords, Korriban
Many years after the Slaughter of Tython
The entity known as Exolus had little cause to rise from his throne of late. He had long since risen above such needs as rest or nourishment, and long before that he had dispensed of the need to speak, or move. Time had little relevance, and thus he had no need to track the time since he had stirred. He sat upon a throne fit for a King, or perhaps a Dark Lord, although these too were concepts that had long since fallen beneath him. His names, his titles, all of these had fallen away until all that remained was the name he had chosen to keep for himself, a singular word that encompassed all that he was, and would become.
From his throne, he could behold the only object that mattered: the Divinity Engine, with its great spires of twisting metal and stone that defied chemistry, rising from the Valley’s heart to thrust into the heavens. The only ‘time’ that mattered to him, that he bothered to measure, was that which concerned its completion. The culmination of lifetimes of work, lived again and again, lived in the sideways places where eons passed in moments and black things gnawed at the matter of unreality. Hunting for scraps of those who dwelled above, for the progeny of gods and the wavering shapes left by those who spread bedlam.
While the galaxy had burned, the man that he had been had hunted, lifetime after indeterminate lifetime, for the truths upon which the galaxy spun. Only once his search had been completed had he turned his attention to the crude matter that surrounded him, and at the precise moment he had struck, destroying all opposition to become master of the galaxy – a necessary step. It was not long after that ordained ascension that the man that he had been, had ceased to be. The sacrifice of New Bethrezen, the glorious agony of its residents’ final moments, had elevated him.
He was no longer a man, and unconstrained by simple flesh he lived now in all of those who served him. In the pointless creatures that toiled away to give meaning to their lives, constructing the Divinity Engine as their hands moved of Exolus’ accord, working without cease until their strength was spent and they were walked into the great gears at the foot of the Engine, their fertile blood serving a final purpose as lubricant. He would relinquish his control at that moment, delighting in their horror and pain as they became themselves again for a last instant of pain. It was one of his few pleasures, a guilty tie to the man that he had once been.
And therein lay the greatest of secrets, the truth behind the tyrant that mercilessly ground down those that dwelled in his galaxy: he too was but temporary. As he had once been a man, so too would his current being be but past tense. He would elevate further, to join the ranks of the divine, or perhaps he would become an entity of bedlam, or simply a new constant in the universe, like gravity, or dark energy, or the Force. Exolus’ thoughts did not dwell on what lay after the moment of final ascension, for what mind, no matter how prescient or enlightened, could comprehend the notions or the motivations of the divine?
It was for this reason that he feared no interference from those above, from the spirits of bedlam making games of the void or the deeper beings that dwelled within the fountainhead. He bore them no malice nor harm nor threat to their power, and remained in their eyes a curiosity that they doubtless assumed was doomed to a mortal fate. They would not threaten him; it was the machinations of the lesser beings that could delay the inevitable.
Once, in the time of foundation following his first ascension, he had been confronted by surviving Jedi, burning with righteous light, and swearing to end his mad tyranny. He had smote them exceedingly, but in the moments that Exolus’ focus was taken away, work on the Divinity Engine had faltered, the synchrony of skilled hands growing still. Such a distraction had set back the Engine’s completion by half a year, and so Exolus had spared a precious second instant and called out through the Force, seeking a being of unspeakable cruelty, strong in the Force and hungry for power that would answer summons to Korriban.
When they arrived before him, Exolus gifted them a fraction of his own power, and implanted within his new servant the idea that he could use that power to overthrow him. When the servant had struck, Exolus crushed them, feeding upon the being’s shock and horror at his defeat and powerlessness and using it to hollow them out. In that state, they had finally been ready to serve as his voice, and Exolus’ final command was to gather other servants. The Maw of Exolus became his new servant’s title, and he had built a Brotherhood into which Exolus placed further fragments of his power – paltry, but sufficient to quell any threats to his focus. He had blooded them against what few Jedi remained or arose, permitting them to salt the earth until even Skywalker’s light had dimmed, and vanished from his sight. And those that had harboured thoughts of blasphemy and betrayal had knelt before him and been crushed.
A pale shadow of the Brotherhood that Exolus had once served, then ruled, then consumed, but a useful tool nonetheless.
They had built the palace in which he, and the Brotherhood, now dwelled, at the foot of the Divinity Engine. The Nightmare Origin where he himself rested housed the only entrance to the holy sepulcher at the base of the Divinity Engine, into which he would enter when the work was complete. The great catalyst, forged of the Left Hand, broken down by the perverted matter of otherspace and crushed into shape by the Black Holes of the Maw, would then be inserted, and he would rise above.
They had gathered beneath him now, his subservients, here to oversee and celebrate the completion of the great work. When the last stone was laid, he would reclaim the fragments of power that he had granted them, for their tasks would be complete. They talked now in low voices, their thoughts and emotions open to him, as all beings’ were. It was but white noise that he processed using what remained of his unconscious mind.
At the approach of the moment, he felt his transient heart stir. All had grown stagnant within him, but now he felt trepidation, and perhaps a hint of euphoria, at what was to come.
There came a sense of concern and confusion among the Brotherhood, alerting him, and loathe though he was to look elsewhere he could permit no threats to the great work. He spared a sliver of his focus and opened the inner eye to seek threats. High above Korriban, he observed a battered old freighter, a YT-1300, its engines out of sync and its hyperdrive motivator exhibiting a picosecond lag, as it emerged from hyperspace. It contained a solitary occupant – a former brother of the man that he had been, with a weak, tar-stained soul and a lack of vision that had driven him to contest his ascension until the mortal Exolus had broken his might and cast him down.
Kairos. Ares. Tora Venaris. Sith Lord. The Son. Ragnos’ Champion. The many names that he had worn spoke to his frail nature, chasing whatever cause or purpose materialized in front of him with no thought to grand designs or divine truths. The man that Exolus had been’s only mistake had been the speed of his walk – in the moments after Kairos had been bested, the mortal Exolus had stalked slowly towards him, seeing in his inner eye the man’s broken spirit and the barren future that awaited him on a lonely planet where he might ruminate on his failures. But this ‘certain truth’ had proved his one and only mistake, for in that moment of self-indulgence Kairos had stubbornly slipped away, fleeing beyond Exolus’ sight into the empty places of the galaxy.
He had ceased to matter until this moment, for now Exolus’ euphoria blossomed into joy. Here at last was a witness to the second ascension, perhaps the only being in the galaxy aside from Skywalker who had the eyes to see the superliminal truth of the being he would become. In the observing of the thing, it would become tangible, and so Exolus welcomed him. Instead of obliterating the starship where it flew, he instead had the Maw utter commands, welcoming the vessel into the atmosphere and waiting until Kairos would survive the crash to have skycannons open fire. In a commendable display of skill, Kairos deftly avoided the streams of fire and continued his approach, and so Exolus directed a mote of his strength and crushed the freighter’s engine, for he could permit no possible threat to the Divinity Engine.
It fell from the sky, but such momentum and skill remained that its pilot could yet guide its fall. It swung towards the Divinity Engine, and Exolus again moved to obliterate the threat. Yet there soon proved no need, for Exolus saw in his inner eye the pilot’s vision of what was to come should he target the great work, and the freighter instead angled itself instead towards the palace. Weakening the outer walls with laser fire, it came to rest upon the barren sands of Korriban, at the end of a long furrow that terminated close to the palace. The pilot lived, and so the Maw spoke again, this time sending forth the might of the Brotherhood to bring him before Exolus.
Exolus returned his whole attention to the Divinity Engine. He cared little for time, yet he marked its brevity when the souls of the Brotherhood were snuffed out, one by one, and the fragments of his power flowed back into him of their own accord. He fractionalized his attention again and watched the last of the Brotherhood fall dead, and so he instilled those fragments into the Maw of Exolus and handed down a command of execution. He would instead raise Kairos’ body with the strings of his puppet, for a poor witness was better than a weak threat, and focused once more upon his great work.
--
The palace was a maze of blackstone corridors, devoid of any lights or torches. Illuminated only by the red of his lightsaber blade, Kairos ran forward – he didn’t need the light, but even the unique vision of his people seemed to struggle and waver in the supernatural gloom. There was no question of where to go – Exolus was a void that Kairos, even huddled small as he hid himself away, could sense half a galaxy away, and here in the heart of his foe’s power there might as well have been painted lines on the floor to guide him.
He wasn’t a young man anymore, and his breathing came sharply. The mob that had accosted him had been children playing with lightsabers, but they had been numerous. Once, he wouldn’t have even broken a sweat – but that was a long time past. He pressed on, regulating his breathing and coming to a towering set of obsidian doors. Pushing one open, he entered cautiously, lightsaber held ready.
Inky shadows seemed to rise from the floor and cling to his feet, but his gaze went skyward, and he felt a wrenching pang of nostalgia as, for just a moment, he thought he beheld the Dark Council chambers before reality asserted itself over memory. Light shone in from the barren planet outside through a series of red-stained windows, behind which Kairos could see the base of the great tower. The room itself was dominated by a structure like an amphitheater, a semi-circular obsidian structure dotted with chairs that rose in tiers to terminate with a single platform atop which sat a great throne. Its occupant faced away from him, but Kairos saw him in his mind’s eye, saw the skull-mask and the black robes, and felt just a sliver of its attention on him.
He jerked his focus back to what was in front of him as another figure stepped from the penultimate platform and began to glide gracefully down to the ground. Kairos thought it might have been a man once, based on the general physique, but there was no way to be sure, for the being was wrapped in a swirling sable cloak and its pallid, grey skin was devoid of almost any kind of feature. Slits for nostrils, slits for ears, slits for eyelids, with jerking black-grey eyes watching from behind them. His voice, when it came, was impossibly deep, reaching into a spectrum Kairos couldn’t quite hear that made his spine ache.
“The blind betrayer arrives to defy the future,” the being intoned as he descended from on high. Prostrate thyself in penance, and the Maw of Exolus shall grant a merciful death. To challenge Exolus is to challenge entropy, and thus shall-“
In the old days, Kairos would have gone back and forth with banter with this being, maybe some witty philosophical debate that went nowhere. But he was old now, so instead he took out the lightsaber he had picked up from the mob outside, locked it on, and threw it at the being’s head. It curved jerkily off to one side and buried itself in the obsidian platform, and the being dropped the rest of the way to the ground before rising menacingly as a long, curved Sith Sword emerged from the shadows into his hands. Kairos felt a swell of power as tendrils of red lightning crackled along the blade’s length, and the shadows sharpened into swords that launched at the former Sith Lord like a barrage of blaster fire.
It was an old trick, tastelessly done. The Brotherhood’s Assassins would have only needed one, right in his spine. While Kairos couldn’t control the shadows, it was an easy enough matter to part them around him and stalk towards the being who then lunged at him with his crackling blade, falling on him with heavy blows that exploded with thunderclaps of lightning and rumbling waves of pure kinetic force each time they met Kairos’ lightsaber. He avoided or shielded himself from these, and let the being drive the fight, avoiding or parrying his weighty blows and throwing just enough back to encourage further aggression. When the inevitable mistake occurred, Kairos scored an agonizing blow against his opponent’s shoulder, and then braced himself against the swell of power that followed. The being released an ear-shattering Force Scream that demolished the windows but could do little to penetrate the defenses Kairos erected around himself, and then followed it up by channeling his rage into a rolling wave of sparking Force energy, the old and raw technique of Force Destruction.
Faced with such power, Kairos stepped momentarily into the past where it dwelled in his memories, and brought the simmering rage and frustration that he still lived there into the present with him. His darkness proved the greater, and he walked through the energy without harm, emerging on the far side to the being’s shock and fury. The being, an untrained child to the end, leaped forward with a reckless attack, which Kairos parried and turned into a swift decapitation.
As the body slumped and the head rolled away, Kairos felt a greater fraction of that transient attention focus itself upon him. He left the body where it lay, and walked to the center of the chamber. Aside from the hum of his lightsaber, the room was now quiet, punctuated by the sound of hammering from outside, by the sound of grinding gears and chants of reverential prayer.
He could glimpse now the uncountable threads that spiralled out from the throne’s occupant above, the strings of a puppetmaster guiding the jerky motions of his troupe. The throne remained facing away from him, towards the tower outside.
In the long years since their last meeting, Kairos had thought often about what he would say in this moment. ‘You should have killed me when you had the chance’, or ‘What a pale shade you’ve become brother’, or maybe even ‘It ends today, brother. One way or another, it ends.’ But even if he had still wanted to say any of those – he knew that his words would fall upon dead space.
Maybe it was the memories of the Dark Council chamber, or the pregnant silence in the air that underscored the relentless hammering, that drove him to say what he did. Maybe he just wanted to say it to somebody, and Exolus didn’t seem to be rushing to end this confrontation.
“You know, we had it all wrong,” he said quietly. “Xaos. Bane. Ragnos. Even the fools on Tython all those years ago. About the Dark Side. It’s such a simple, quiet truth that we never wanted to admit. There’s no such thing as the Dark Side. Darkness is the absence of light, but we, the Dark Side, the Sith – we could never exist without our ‘other’. The Jedi, the Light Side. We define ourselves by our opposition to them – they are our frame of reference. We can’t exist without them to define ourselves against. But they, they’re their own frame of reference, a constant – they exist regardless of whether or not the Sith do. We aren’t Darkness – we are their shadow.
The Sith cause was always a lost cause, because if the last Jedi died, the shadows they cast would fade with them, leaving nothing behind. Xaos and Ragnos were both wrong – the Sith had no fate but to die, a slow and agonizing death across countless millennia as we railed against inevitability. We never had an endgame save destroying the very thing that defined us.”
He looked up at the throne again, feeling the cold indifference that permeated the room. It was an honest sort of indifference, one unrooted in emotion or logic. “I doubt it was intentional, but I think you hit upon the same conclusion. Leaving the whole war of Light Side and Dark Side behind and ascending beyond it. Revan would be proud.”
Is philosophy to be your shield?
The words were not spoken – they simply were, emanating from the deepest reaches of the room and rumbling up from below his feet. Kairos felt a chill run down his spine.
“Call it an old man wanting to get a few truths off of his chest,” Kairos admitted. He had had a lot of time to think lately. “A last diatribe, for old time’s sake when we both thought we knew the truth of the universe, before we really figured it out.” He tightened his grip on his lightsaber, readying himself.
Such truths are beyond your comprehension. This exchange is over.
Kairos perceived then a box, one comprised of raw black matter that slammed down around him and began to rapidly shrink. He called deep on the reservoirs of his power, waters of the Force that remained stained black from his time as The Son, and fought against it. The box’s constriction slowed, and then stopped, an inexorable weight arresting an unstoppable force. The stalemate lasted three heartbeats, and then Kairos felt the focus upon him increase. The box shattered his resistance and began swiftly to crush upon his body, its purpose to reduce the Miraluka to a bloody cube of matter.
The former Sith Lord turned his attention then to a small pyramidal object concealed on his person and wrapped in glamour spells to hide it from the senses of his opponent. It was a conduit, and through it Kairos accessed a far greater power from a realm deep, deep below, pushing back against the shrinking box. It loosened again, and he thrust his arms out and called upon everything he had to bring forth the boundless and red energy that dwelled on the far side of the conduit. The box shattered, and Kairos collapsed to one knee, panting heavily barely able to hear over the sound of his breath in his ears. So loud was it that Kairos only noticed that the sound of hammering and work outside had ceased entirely when the throne finally swiveled to face him, and he sensed that a vast and mighty being had focused all of its attention squarely on him.
Another chill ran down his spine, and he returned to his feet.
Such strength is beyond your ken.
“It is,” Kairos agreed, and reached into his tunic to pull out a small, pyramidal red object – a glowing Sith holocron. “But look what I found? The Holocron of Darth Xaos. Right where Lumiya left it, although she really didn’t make it easy to find.”
A holocron does not possess such strength.
“It doesn’t either,” Kairos conceded. “But it’s a connection. A connection to Darth Xaos and the Hells where he dwells, and it gave me a few lessons on how to tap into that power. It took a bit of convincing though.”
He smirked at his own private joke. When he had finally, finally recovered the Holocron, from the forgotten blackness where Lumiya had left it, the Holocron’s Gatekeeper had been wholly resistant to his whims. But although it bore Darth Xaos’ visage, it bore none of his strength of will, and so Kairos had bent the Gatekeeper to serve him and learned all it had to teach. The Spirit of Darth Xaos had disagreed as well, of course, but Kairos was long past giving a frak what he thought.
This is a pointless defiance. Would you struggle against the death of stars? Do you resist gravity, or the turning of the galaxy? To challenge the final ascension is to challenge the blackness of space or the emptiness of the void.
Kairos perceived then another box slamming down, but this one was smaller, blacker, and stronger. Its target wasn’t him – it was his shield, the Holocron in his hand. Kairos threw his strength and the strength of Hell against it, but even these were found wanting against the focused attention of a greater being. The box closed and closed and closed until the Holocron began to crack; the red glow faded, and a moment later the Sith artifact crumbled to dust.
Just what he was waiting for.
In the instant of the Holocron’s destruction, Kairos seized all of the energy that was released and drew it into himself, embracing the infernal power and using it as fuel to employ the final technique he had learned, not from the Holocron but from the Aang-Tii of the Kathol Rift. Expending all of that burning energy, he folded space itself and connected the Nightmare Origin with a distant point on the far side of the galaxy.
The darkness of the chamber melted away as a shining light was brought in to replace it – five lights, columns of pure energy erupting from around him that defined themselves into passages through which stepped five figures, carrying with them the hopes and defiance of a galaxy as they stepped into the heart of the enemy’s power and ignited their lightsabers.
Five Jedi – the last of the Jedi. Kyle Katarn, Ben Skywalker, Allana Solo, Leia Organa Solo – and Luke Skywalker. Taking up their arms, they stood shoulder to shoulder to Kairos and faced down the black being who reigned above them.
Kairos stepped forward, the shadow cast by the light, and leveled his lightsaber at Exolus.
“I challenge you, Exolus,” he declared. "One last chapter for the Sith to write.”
Many years after the Slaughter of Tython
The entity known as Exolus had little cause to rise from his throne of late. He had long since risen above such needs as rest or nourishment, and long before that he had dispensed of the need to speak, or move. Time had little relevance, and thus he had no need to track the time since he had stirred. He sat upon a throne fit for a King, or perhaps a Dark Lord, although these too were concepts that had long since fallen beneath him. His names, his titles, all of these had fallen away until all that remained was the name he had chosen to keep for himself, a singular word that encompassed all that he was, and would become.
From his throne, he could behold the only object that mattered: the Divinity Engine, with its great spires of twisting metal and stone that defied chemistry, rising from the Valley’s heart to thrust into the heavens. The only ‘time’ that mattered to him, that he bothered to measure, was that which concerned its completion. The culmination of lifetimes of work, lived again and again, lived in the sideways places where eons passed in moments and black things gnawed at the matter of unreality. Hunting for scraps of those who dwelled above, for the progeny of gods and the wavering shapes left by those who spread bedlam.
While the galaxy had burned, the man that he had been had hunted, lifetime after indeterminate lifetime, for the truths upon which the galaxy spun. Only once his search had been completed had he turned his attention to the crude matter that surrounded him, and at the precise moment he had struck, destroying all opposition to become master of the galaxy – a necessary step. It was not long after that ordained ascension that the man that he had been, had ceased to be. The sacrifice of New Bethrezen, the glorious agony of its residents’ final moments, had elevated him.
He was no longer a man, and unconstrained by simple flesh he lived now in all of those who served him. In the pointless creatures that toiled away to give meaning to their lives, constructing the Divinity Engine as their hands moved of Exolus’ accord, working without cease until their strength was spent and they were walked into the great gears at the foot of the Engine, their fertile blood serving a final purpose as lubricant. He would relinquish his control at that moment, delighting in their horror and pain as they became themselves again for a last instant of pain. It was one of his few pleasures, a guilty tie to the man that he had once been.
And therein lay the greatest of secrets, the truth behind the tyrant that mercilessly ground down those that dwelled in his galaxy: he too was but temporary. As he had once been a man, so too would his current being be but past tense. He would elevate further, to join the ranks of the divine, or perhaps he would become an entity of bedlam, or simply a new constant in the universe, like gravity, or dark energy, or the Force. Exolus’ thoughts did not dwell on what lay after the moment of final ascension, for what mind, no matter how prescient or enlightened, could comprehend the notions or the motivations of the divine?
It was for this reason that he feared no interference from those above, from the spirits of bedlam making games of the void or the deeper beings that dwelled within the fountainhead. He bore them no malice nor harm nor threat to their power, and remained in their eyes a curiosity that they doubtless assumed was doomed to a mortal fate. They would not threaten him; it was the machinations of the lesser beings that could delay the inevitable.
Once, in the time of foundation following his first ascension, he had been confronted by surviving Jedi, burning with righteous light, and swearing to end his mad tyranny. He had smote them exceedingly, but in the moments that Exolus’ focus was taken away, work on the Divinity Engine had faltered, the synchrony of skilled hands growing still. Such a distraction had set back the Engine’s completion by half a year, and so Exolus had spared a precious second instant and called out through the Force, seeking a being of unspeakable cruelty, strong in the Force and hungry for power that would answer summons to Korriban.
When they arrived before him, Exolus gifted them a fraction of his own power, and implanted within his new servant the idea that he could use that power to overthrow him. When the servant had struck, Exolus crushed them, feeding upon the being’s shock and horror at his defeat and powerlessness and using it to hollow them out. In that state, they had finally been ready to serve as his voice, and Exolus’ final command was to gather other servants. The Maw of Exolus became his new servant’s title, and he had built a Brotherhood into which Exolus placed further fragments of his power – paltry, but sufficient to quell any threats to his focus. He had blooded them against what few Jedi remained or arose, permitting them to salt the earth until even Skywalker’s light had dimmed, and vanished from his sight. And those that had harboured thoughts of blasphemy and betrayal had knelt before him and been crushed.
A pale shadow of the Brotherhood that Exolus had once served, then ruled, then consumed, but a useful tool nonetheless.
They had built the palace in which he, and the Brotherhood, now dwelled, at the foot of the Divinity Engine. The Nightmare Origin where he himself rested housed the only entrance to the holy sepulcher at the base of the Divinity Engine, into which he would enter when the work was complete. The great catalyst, forged of the Left Hand, broken down by the perverted matter of otherspace and crushed into shape by the Black Holes of the Maw, would then be inserted, and he would rise above.
They had gathered beneath him now, his subservients, here to oversee and celebrate the completion of the great work. When the last stone was laid, he would reclaim the fragments of power that he had granted them, for their tasks would be complete. They talked now in low voices, their thoughts and emotions open to him, as all beings’ were. It was but white noise that he processed using what remained of his unconscious mind.
At the approach of the moment, he felt his transient heart stir. All had grown stagnant within him, but now he felt trepidation, and perhaps a hint of euphoria, at what was to come.
There came a sense of concern and confusion among the Brotherhood, alerting him, and loathe though he was to look elsewhere he could permit no threats to the great work. He spared a sliver of his focus and opened the inner eye to seek threats. High above Korriban, he observed a battered old freighter, a YT-1300, its engines out of sync and its hyperdrive motivator exhibiting a picosecond lag, as it emerged from hyperspace. It contained a solitary occupant – a former brother of the man that he had been, with a weak, tar-stained soul and a lack of vision that had driven him to contest his ascension until the mortal Exolus had broken his might and cast him down.
Kairos. Ares. Tora Venaris. Sith Lord. The Son. Ragnos’ Champion. The many names that he had worn spoke to his frail nature, chasing whatever cause or purpose materialized in front of him with no thought to grand designs or divine truths. The man that Exolus had been’s only mistake had been the speed of his walk – in the moments after Kairos had been bested, the mortal Exolus had stalked slowly towards him, seeing in his inner eye the man’s broken spirit and the barren future that awaited him on a lonely planet where he might ruminate on his failures. But this ‘certain truth’ had proved his one and only mistake, for in that moment of self-indulgence Kairos had stubbornly slipped away, fleeing beyond Exolus’ sight into the empty places of the galaxy.
He had ceased to matter until this moment, for now Exolus’ euphoria blossomed into joy. Here at last was a witness to the second ascension, perhaps the only being in the galaxy aside from Skywalker who had the eyes to see the superliminal truth of the being he would become. In the observing of the thing, it would become tangible, and so Exolus welcomed him. Instead of obliterating the starship where it flew, he instead had the Maw utter commands, welcoming the vessel into the atmosphere and waiting until Kairos would survive the crash to have skycannons open fire. In a commendable display of skill, Kairos deftly avoided the streams of fire and continued his approach, and so Exolus directed a mote of his strength and crushed the freighter’s engine, for he could permit no possible threat to the Divinity Engine.
It fell from the sky, but such momentum and skill remained that its pilot could yet guide its fall. It swung towards the Divinity Engine, and Exolus again moved to obliterate the threat. Yet there soon proved no need, for Exolus saw in his inner eye the pilot’s vision of what was to come should he target the great work, and the freighter instead angled itself instead towards the palace. Weakening the outer walls with laser fire, it came to rest upon the barren sands of Korriban, at the end of a long furrow that terminated close to the palace. The pilot lived, and so the Maw spoke again, this time sending forth the might of the Brotherhood to bring him before Exolus.
Exolus returned his whole attention to the Divinity Engine. He cared little for time, yet he marked its brevity when the souls of the Brotherhood were snuffed out, one by one, and the fragments of his power flowed back into him of their own accord. He fractionalized his attention again and watched the last of the Brotherhood fall dead, and so he instilled those fragments into the Maw of Exolus and handed down a command of execution. He would instead raise Kairos’ body with the strings of his puppet, for a poor witness was better than a weak threat, and focused once more upon his great work.
--
The palace was a maze of blackstone corridors, devoid of any lights or torches. Illuminated only by the red of his lightsaber blade, Kairos ran forward – he didn’t need the light, but even the unique vision of his people seemed to struggle and waver in the supernatural gloom. There was no question of where to go – Exolus was a void that Kairos, even huddled small as he hid himself away, could sense half a galaxy away, and here in the heart of his foe’s power there might as well have been painted lines on the floor to guide him.
He wasn’t a young man anymore, and his breathing came sharply. The mob that had accosted him had been children playing with lightsabers, but they had been numerous. Once, he wouldn’t have even broken a sweat – but that was a long time past. He pressed on, regulating his breathing and coming to a towering set of obsidian doors. Pushing one open, he entered cautiously, lightsaber held ready.
Inky shadows seemed to rise from the floor and cling to his feet, but his gaze went skyward, and he felt a wrenching pang of nostalgia as, for just a moment, he thought he beheld the Dark Council chambers before reality asserted itself over memory. Light shone in from the barren planet outside through a series of red-stained windows, behind which Kairos could see the base of the great tower. The room itself was dominated by a structure like an amphitheater, a semi-circular obsidian structure dotted with chairs that rose in tiers to terminate with a single platform atop which sat a great throne. Its occupant faced away from him, but Kairos saw him in his mind’s eye, saw the skull-mask and the black robes, and felt just a sliver of its attention on him.
He jerked his focus back to what was in front of him as another figure stepped from the penultimate platform and began to glide gracefully down to the ground. Kairos thought it might have been a man once, based on the general physique, but there was no way to be sure, for the being was wrapped in a swirling sable cloak and its pallid, grey skin was devoid of almost any kind of feature. Slits for nostrils, slits for ears, slits for eyelids, with jerking black-grey eyes watching from behind them. His voice, when it came, was impossibly deep, reaching into a spectrum Kairos couldn’t quite hear that made his spine ache.
“The blind betrayer arrives to defy the future,” the being intoned as he descended from on high. Prostrate thyself in penance, and the Maw of Exolus shall grant a merciful death. To challenge Exolus is to challenge entropy, and thus shall-“
In the old days, Kairos would have gone back and forth with banter with this being, maybe some witty philosophical debate that went nowhere. But he was old now, so instead he took out the lightsaber he had picked up from the mob outside, locked it on, and threw it at the being’s head. It curved jerkily off to one side and buried itself in the obsidian platform, and the being dropped the rest of the way to the ground before rising menacingly as a long, curved Sith Sword emerged from the shadows into his hands. Kairos felt a swell of power as tendrils of red lightning crackled along the blade’s length, and the shadows sharpened into swords that launched at the former Sith Lord like a barrage of blaster fire.
It was an old trick, tastelessly done. The Brotherhood’s Assassins would have only needed one, right in his spine. While Kairos couldn’t control the shadows, it was an easy enough matter to part them around him and stalk towards the being who then lunged at him with his crackling blade, falling on him with heavy blows that exploded with thunderclaps of lightning and rumbling waves of pure kinetic force each time they met Kairos’ lightsaber. He avoided or shielded himself from these, and let the being drive the fight, avoiding or parrying his weighty blows and throwing just enough back to encourage further aggression. When the inevitable mistake occurred, Kairos scored an agonizing blow against his opponent’s shoulder, and then braced himself against the swell of power that followed. The being released an ear-shattering Force Scream that demolished the windows but could do little to penetrate the defenses Kairos erected around himself, and then followed it up by channeling his rage into a rolling wave of sparking Force energy, the old and raw technique of Force Destruction.
Faced with such power, Kairos stepped momentarily into the past where it dwelled in his memories, and brought the simmering rage and frustration that he still lived there into the present with him. His darkness proved the greater, and he walked through the energy without harm, emerging on the far side to the being’s shock and fury. The being, an untrained child to the end, leaped forward with a reckless attack, which Kairos parried and turned into a swift decapitation.
As the body slumped and the head rolled away, Kairos felt a greater fraction of that transient attention focus itself upon him. He left the body where it lay, and walked to the center of the chamber. Aside from the hum of his lightsaber, the room was now quiet, punctuated by the sound of hammering from outside, by the sound of grinding gears and chants of reverential prayer.
He could glimpse now the uncountable threads that spiralled out from the throne’s occupant above, the strings of a puppetmaster guiding the jerky motions of his troupe. The throne remained facing away from him, towards the tower outside.
In the long years since their last meeting, Kairos had thought often about what he would say in this moment. ‘You should have killed me when you had the chance’, or ‘What a pale shade you’ve become brother’, or maybe even ‘It ends today, brother. One way or another, it ends.’ But even if he had still wanted to say any of those – he knew that his words would fall upon dead space.
Maybe it was the memories of the Dark Council chamber, or the pregnant silence in the air that underscored the relentless hammering, that drove him to say what he did. Maybe he just wanted to say it to somebody, and Exolus didn’t seem to be rushing to end this confrontation.
“You know, we had it all wrong,” he said quietly. “Xaos. Bane. Ragnos. Even the fools on Tython all those years ago. About the Dark Side. It’s such a simple, quiet truth that we never wanted to admit. There’s no such thing as the Dark Side. Darkness is the absence of light, but we, the Dark Side, the Sith – we could never exist without our ‘other’. The Jedi, the Light Side. We define ourselves by our opposition to them – they are our frame of reference. We can’t exist without them to define ourselves against. But they, they’re their own frame of reference, a constant – they exist regardless of whether or not the Sith do. We aren’t Darkness – we are their shadow.
The Sith cause was always a lost cause, because if the last Jedi died, the shadows they cast would fade with them, leaving nothing behind. Xaos and Ragnos were both wrong – the Sith had no fate but to die, a slow and agonizing death across countless millennia as we railed against inevitability. We never had an endgame save destroying the very thing that defined us.”
He looked up at the throne again, feeling the cold indifference that permeated the room. It was an honest sort of indifference, one unrooted in emotion or logic. “I doubt it was intentional, but I think you hit upon the same conclusion. Leaving the whole war of Light Side and Dark Side behind and ascending beyond it. Revan would be proud.”
Is philosophy to be your shield?
The words were not spoken – they simply were, emanating from the deepest reaches of the room and rumbling up from below his feet. Kairos felt a chill run down his spine.
“Call it an old man wanting to get a few truths off of his chest,” Kairos admitted. He had had a lot of time to think lately. “A last diatribe, for old time’s sake when we both thought we knew the truth of the universe, before we really figured it out.” He tightened his grip on his lightsaber, readying himself.
Such truths are beyond your comprehension. This exchange is over.
Kairos perceived then a box, one comprised of raw black matter that slammed down around him and began to rapidly shrink. He called deep on the reservoirs of his power, waters of the Force that remained stained black from his time as The Son, and fought against it. The box’s constriction slowed, and then stopped, an inexorable weight arresting an unstoppable force. The stalemate lasted three heartbeats, and then Kairos felt the focus upon him increase. The box shattered his resistance and began swiftly to crush upon his body, its purpose to reduce the Miraluka to a bloody cube of matter.
The former Sith Lord turned his attention then to a small pyramidal object concealed on his person and wrapped in glamour spells to hide it from the senses of his opponent. It was a conduit, and through it Kairos accessed a far greater power from a realm deep, deep below, pushing back against the shrinking box. It loosened again, and he thrust his arms out and called upon everything he had to bring forth the boundless and red energy that dwelled on the far side of the conduit. The box shattered, and Kairos collapsed to one knee, panting heavily barely able to hear over the sound of his breath in his ears. So loud was it that Kairos only noticed that the sound of hammering and work outside had ceased entirely when the throne finally swiveled to face him, and he sensed that a vast and mighty being had focused all of its attention squarely on him.
Another chill ran down his spine, and he returned to his feet.
Such strength is beyond your ken.
“It is,” Kairos agreed, and reached into his tunic to pull out a small, pyramidal red object – a glowing Sith holocron. “But look what I found? The Holocron of Darth Xaos. Right where Lumiya left it, although she really didn’t make it easy to find.”
A holocron does not possess such strength.
“It doesn’t either,” Kairos conceded. “But it’s a connection. A connection to Darth Xaos and the Hells where he dwells, and it gave me a few lessons on how to tap into that power. It took a bit of convincing though.”
He smirked at his own private joke. When he had finally, finally recovered the Holocron, from the forgotten blackness where Lumiya had left it, the Holocron’s Gatekeeper had been wholly resistant to his whims. But although it bore Darth Xaos’ visage, it bore none of his strength of will, and so Kairos had bent the Gatekeeper to serve him and learned all it had to teach. The Spirit of Darth Xaos had disagreed as well, of course, but Kairos was long past giving a frak what he thought.
This is a pointless defiance. Would you struggle against the death of stars? Do you resist gravity, or the turning of the galaxy? To challenge the final ascension is to challenge the blackness of space or the emptiness of the void.
Kairos perceived then another box slamming down, but this one was smaller, blacker, and stronger. Its target wasn’t him – it was his shield, the Holocron in his hand. Kairos threw his strength and the strength of Hell against it, but even these were found wanting against the focused attention of a greater being. The box closed and closed and closed until the Holocron began to crack; the red glow faded, and a moment later the Sith artifact crumbled to dust.
Just what he was waiting for.
In the instant of the Holocron’s destruction, Kairos seized all of the energy that was released and drew it into himself, embracing the infernal power and using it as fuel to employ the final technique he had learned, not from the Holocron but from the Aang-Tii of the Kathol Rift. Expending all of that burning energy, he folded space itself and connected the Nightmare Origin with a distant point on the far side of the galaxy.
The darkness of the chamber melted away as a shining light was brought in to replace it – five lights, columns of pure energy erupting from around him that defined themselves into passages through which stepped five figures, carrying with them the hopes and defiance of a galaxy as they stepped into the heart of the enemy’s power and ignited their lightsabers.
Five Jedi – the last of the Jedi. Kyle Katarn, Ben Skywalker, Allana Solo, Leia Organa Solo – and Luke Skywalker. Taking up their arms, they stood shoulder to shoulder to Kairos and faced down the black being who reigned above them.
Kairos stepped forward, the shadow cast by the light, and leveled his lightsaber at Exolus.
“I challenge you, Exolus,” he declared. "One last chapter for the Sith to write.”