Hoth: Blood and Ice

[Darth Bellious]

Yavin

I don't begrudge you for this attempt, Oddyn Vizsla. Darth Bellious knelt by the body lying in the bloodied thicket, swaying from sustained wounds. The jungle continued its noisy existence as if nothing had ever happened, and the statues of Sith Lords lining up the entrance to the temple overshadowing the recent duel to the death beheld the scene in silence. I recognise your right to seek revenge. I killed your sister in cold blood. I betrayed her. I betrayed your kin. This is a stain on my self I will never erase. When you found me here, no easy feat, I even thought about letting you have your justice. I had once sought out my own vengeance, and I was not complete until I had it. There would have been something poetic about it. She closed the big man's eyelids and put his helmet back on. Alas. I need whatever life I still have to commit my final act of defiance. After that, your next of kin may seek me out. Mando'ad draar digu. Though it may be hard, because there are no known ways to where I am going.

She took a deep breath and rose to drag the body into the temple square, onto an altar. It took her a good while, but she managed.

Not a proper kote k'ram, Oddyn Vizsla, but it'll have to make do. You were a warrior, I'll honour you as one. Predators don't deserve you. She doused him with the fuel from his own flamethrower, then ignited. It would take time before fire would penetrate his armour and take over the flesh beneath, mostly through the gashes Passion strikes had made. She would watch, long, sustaining flames with the Force. Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum. I'm still alive, but you are dead. I remember you, so you are eternal. Oddyn Vizsla.

---

Serenno

The Count studied the reports, and frowned. The push into the Gordian Reach had apparently stalled because the Eternal Empire couldn't keep territorial control over Junction and nearby systems. Revolts kept paralysing the effort as supply lines were being torn over and over again. Without securing this bottleneck on the Hydian Way he couldn't drive the offensive forward. There were no alternative hyperlanes that would let the Zakuul seal off the Stygian Caldera and finally have the Sith at their mercy.

He knew what will directed those efforts. He had been facing off the elusive Darth Bellious for a time now, he had known her playbook. And yet, he was not able to thwart her. The only straightforward way now to deal with the problem would be to eradicate the rebelling populations. And that he would never do. There was no nobility in mass murder of misguided peons. In the end, his disdain of chaos acted to his disadvantage, he could not outbid her in ruthlessness, but he would not stray.

Especially that he already might have tried daring tactics, to no avail. The man with the shriek-hawk emblem he had given free passage to Yavin to didn't return. As the guerilla activities weren't abating, the man's vendetta against Darth Bellious must have failed. The failure wasn't the worst, however. The Count tormented himself whether at a moment of weakness he had authorised an assassination. Was it any different from when he had employed Mandalorians many times before? Less honourable?

Not truly, he concluded in the end, as one has to have means to exercise justice against those who evade it. That Darth had blood of billions on her hands. By all galactic standards, she was a criminal of the worst kind. The Eternal Empire had to end her mayhem and impose order. If anything, the hunt for Darth Bellious was just beginning. She would be ferreted out and cornered, justice would be meted out, and the sacrifice of Oddyn Vizsla would not be in vain.

To my descendants: Bow not to a lord you disdain for lack of noblesse. Be the lord you won't disdain for lack of noblesse. A noble tyrant shall ever prevail over a ruthless rebel just as just order shall ever prevail over jungle law. Inscribe it in your hearts just as I inscribe my name: Valorus Dooku, Count of Serenno, Moff of the Eternal Empire. He recorded it by own hand on a crystal sheet and carefully stored for posterity.

---

The Unknown

Darth Bellious was looking at the lush world beneath with both passion and concern. And yet the sense of vergence was unmistakable. Suppressed as it was by the abundance of ordinary life, it slumbered. It would have to be unleashed. The planet's docile, complacent equilibrium would be fundamentally distorted and altered. It may take decades or centuries, but she would harden the life down there into one to survive in deprivation, one to thrive in adversity. Like the other worlds that had shaped her, where life struggled, won or died. Ryloth, Korriban... this marble would be like them. She would remake it to train the faithful of the Sith Code. Not its simplistic perversions that had led so many a Sith to seek unlimited power or immortality. She would use this planet to educate all future acolytes how to achieve freedom, and let them scatter to seed the gospel of the Dark Side to the last frontiers of the Unknown. And here, the Sith would erect their temples and tombs, a repository that would preserve Sith lore regardless of what happens with the Sith Empire. To all their pursuers and detractors, the Sith should ever be one step above, one step ahead, untangled, unhinged, unpredictable, unknown. Whether to the Eternal Empire, or others to come.

This planet was such a step. Nestled in a nebula so impenetrable that no-one would ever reach it without precisely knowing how. She wouldn't have reached it without the Chiss either, but now it was hers and not theirs, her last act of defiance against the galaxy and all its despicable regimes. She had once dreamt of a life with others, loved ones, but they were gone now. Hers was a lonely path... leading here, where one day she would die nameless.

To the future of the Sith. Ixigul.

And yet, deep inside, she knew there was more to this pursuit of hers. The passions and drives that would never be fulfilled for her in this life, and so would ever fuel her hunger, regardless of how successful she would be with Sith rebirth. For she was never only just Sith, she was ever more, a woman who loved so deeply that it transcended Light and Dark, life and death. And because of that, she would actually leave a personal legacy, etched onto the stones of the very first temple she would erect on Ixigul. That of a Dyad in the Force that may come one day and change everything. She hadn't reached it, and she never would. But because of him she at least knew it was real.