~Continues from Crimson Tides: Dark Force Rising~



--The Crusader hurled itself through hyperspace with an uncanny grace that belied its size. An Action V bulk transport hauler; the Crusader was the their prize, reclaimed from the invading forces that had been the cause of their initial liberation. Time had not been kind to the aging old ship. The crimson brotherhood, their numbers dwindling, had resorted to slavery; the skeleton crew composed mostly of captured slaves pilfered from the space lanes in these few short months of freedom.

Lord Dioan Silk seemed unconcerned with the plight of those caught in his wake. The Sovereign Protector, without a protectorate, had his eyes fixed firmly on the future. His intentions were masked behind a veil of crimson fabric, from the Force and from his crew.

“Brother,” spoke a crimson clad guardsman.

Silk had been daydreaming, again. His visions were coming with increasing clarity now, and increasing frequency. The bridge of the Crusader flooded his perceptions. From the high rising command deck he stood staring into convalescing blur of hyperspace.

“We are nearing the first jump point. It is conceivable that we will be detected by local traffic on the Hydian Way.” The guardsmen tapped the activation pad on a holopad. He suggested an alternate route detailed in broken lines.

“You suggest an additional two days voyage.” Stated Silk as a simple matter-of-fact. “Why?”

He did not allow a reply.

“Our weapons are functional. We have full combat capability.”

“The crew is not experienced. They are mostly slaves,” countered the other.

“Then they will have to become experienced.”

At that, the conversation was over. The guardsmen bowed and departed leaving Silk, once again, to his own thoughts. He plunged into his own inner awareness and did not rouse from it until the noise of a blaring klaxon drew his attention.

Silk forced open his eyes. An eerie red glow washed over the bridge with the pulsating scream of emergency sirens. He expected a fury of activity, but in stead opened his eyes to an utterly desolate bridge. He was alone.

Silk blinked and the Crusader stood still in hyperspace. He peered down the length of the star destroyer. From the nose of his vessel an explosion erupted in slow motion. Frame by frame he watched as the ship barreled headlong into an invisible obstacle.

Silk turned away. The alarms fell abruptly silent.

The Crusader had reverted to real space. Silk almost pressed his face against the trasnparisteel. He could see no stars or any damage to his ship.

A light flashed in the distance. Nebulas shot past him. Stars rocketed by with planets plodding along behind. Starships of unimaginable variety moved between the stars. Then, the galaxy shot past.

Booming thuds reverberated against the hull of the Crusader and Silk was thrown to the deck. His head clipped a hand rail. Pain shot through his head while blood rushed over his fingers. A loud clank echoed across the bridge of the Crusader as if it were suddenly cavernous in dimensions.

Bodies, frozen in time, hung in the air around him. His brothers in crimson capes floated as if in suspended animation. Their bodies did not move though their capes fluttered against an unfelt breeze.

A figure made of shadow emerged between the bodies. It brushed them aside as it passed while it’s touched turned the crimson capes black where they melted like dripping tar. The figure loomed over Silk who lay sprawled across the deck while clutching his bleeding wound.

His head throbbed.

“Who are you?!” Silk screamed. His fear and his anger twisted in his belly. His voice cracked. It felt as though his jaw had been broken.

The figure loomed ever closer until it was so close Silk could smell the cold stink of death radiating from it. It swallowed the warmth and caused his body to tremble. In one motion all of Silks anger fled; leaving only his immense fear.

I am you.

The figure did not speak in words. It spoke inside his head, bending Silks thoughts to its own.

The future flashed before his minds eye.

Silk saw himself as a King of men. He saw bloody fields strewn with the bodies of his enemies. In his right hand he held a scepter and in his left the still warm entrails of the galaxy.

The most intense drug stimulated hallucinations could not compare.

He imagined the races of the galaxy broken and bowing before himself. But even as he watched himself rise up and conquer the galaxy he could see the shadows behind himself. The shadows plagued him and wished for his death. The shadows wanted to become like him and they would destroy everything to have nothing.

And then he saw another galaxy.

The galaxy burned. Everything lay dead.

Silk cried out.

He blinked tears from his eyes. Crimson capes surrounded him.

“Brother, can you stand?” The familiar voice of an Imperial guardsman drove away the fog that clouded his thoughts.

He could indeed, and though it pained him to do so, the Sovereign Protector retook his feet. The wound on his head throbbed.

“What happened?” He demanded.

“We collided with a hyperspace anomaly. It blew out our hyperdrive motivators.” Silk was uncertain who had spoken. The wound on his head was obviously worse then he’d first guessed. Streaks of black tugged at the edge of his perceptions.

“Where are we?”

No one responded at first. Silk repeated the question unsteadily.

“We don’t know.”

Silk spun on his heels. The action caused him to stumble back against the handrail. His boots squeaked in the puddle of blood forming at his feet.

“Where are we?”

“Brother,” spoke on of the guardsmen. “You moved us. You touched the Force and…”

His vision began to fail.

“We don’t know.”

And deep within himself, as the blackness rushed up to overtake him, Silk knew the answer would only be found in the reaches of his own soul.

A cold wind, desolate, mournful, blew across the desert of imagination. The landscape of dreams manifest itself as an endless plateau of sand swept dunes. Portentous clouds crowded on the horizon.

Silk stood in his dreamscape of cliché omens wrapped in a sheet of his own preconceptions. He was reminded of the cold Yinchorri night.

Distant and slow, the chanting of alien voices echoed across the plain. Impossible tongues hissed and spat fire behind the mountains while dancing to the beat of tribal drums.

Silk thought, every sapient has their drum to beat.

The ground trembled beneath his feet. A plume of sand shot into the sky obscuring the clouds and the hills and the chanting tribes. An inverted hour glass spewed caged time loose into the atmosphere. It seemed the geyser could never end. Silk watched it for a century.

His dream grew more obscure, filled with sadly unoriginal omens and empty allusions to some unnamed mysticism.

An orb, not a moon per say, formed low in the roiling stratosphere behind a parting bank of unsettlingly morbid smoke plumes. Somewhere on the horizon a massive funeral pyre was throwing up an unearthly stink. He forgot the smell. Watching with wide eyes he fought the urge to run as the orb began to fall toward the planet. Muscles tense, his legs twitching instinctively, he resisted the instinct that said; flee.

A thousand tiny streaks shot up from the planet. They flew on tails of bright blue energy with an angry intensity driving them towards the stars. Scared but hopeful, a million lives prayed to their gods for salvation from the seats of their escaping chariots.

Silk understood, but his vision did not end there as he had half expected.

The explosion baptized him by fire. The shockwave turned him to dust. From his own ashes he arose reborn.

Grass brushed against his toes, teasingly provocative. Song birds sung to a chorus of gusting winds blowing ethereally through a forest. Flowers of a dazzling variety grew up from the dirt and spread their petals to the sunlight. Life surrounded him.

I am a warrior, thought Silk. I am not a poet who dreams of peaceful pastures.

No, spoke a voice without words. You are a warrior. You draw your strength from passion.

Upright and wearing the skins of tribesmen, a band of hunter gatherers moved into the clearing from a stand of trees. Green scaled and reptilian, they seemed to shimmer in the mist. They clutched spears and slings, tools to help them conquer their environment.

Watching them move, his sights fixed on their weapons and their clothes, Silk truly understood.

And then he awoke.

His eyes opened to the glare of an Imperial medical bay. The smell of sterile beds flooded his nostrils. A soft ping-pong noise sounded over and over. Feeling no pain in his body, Dioan Silk sat up.

“Bring me my cape,” he demanded of the medical droid hovering attentively at his side.

The droid responded accordingly all the while pleading for the patient to please return to bed. It continued its incessant chatter even as the patient, a crimson cape wrapped about his nether regions, stormed out of the medical bay half naked and trailing a number of probes and intravenous injection units.

Silk, having encountered a trio of senior guardsmen, swept onto the bridge still plucking the horrible adhesive units from his flesh. The officer of the watch stood at attention.

“We are glad to see you up so soon, brother.” The guardsmen commented. Since escaping Yinchorr the others had begun to refer to themselves independently of the Sovereign Protector. He had to notice by and large.

“I have rested enough,” replied Silk. For his part Silk was filling the role though he seemed not to know it.

“We have been meditating for you.”

That explained his unusual abundance of energy though it was highly unusual. The methods they employed were reserved for the…

“You make me a heretic.” Silk commented under his breath. His vision plagued him. And then a memory, vague and distant.

He had bent space and time to his will. Lost, they had said.

“Where are we?" He asked urgently, but within his soul knew the answer.

Neither man spoke, neither man was required to.

They had returned to Yinchorr...

The quick death…

The silent death…

Death, he mused, I know you.

Death spread out around him fanning its endlessly desolate wings across the slag ridden surface of the planet from hemisphere to hemisphere, pole to pole. It was death, and he was responsible for it.

Dioan Silk stood upon the height of Mount Overlook regarding at great length the isolated prison that had become their own. What had happened? He knew not, doubted the honest truth would resolve itself for some time to come. Blaring and obvious, the fact that he had somehow returned them to the very place he and his brethren fought to escape did not escape any.

Worse yet was the painful irony, like being run through upon ones own pike. Cutting your own throat, they called it. Gut and run. At the time it had seemed a good idea, one inspired not of clarity or preparation but the vengeful celebration of liberation from forced internment, freedom. But now, returned here, he looked upon the rubble and debris that had been their home, their temple.

High above, in a degrading orbit, a handful of his men worked to keep their starship in orbit but all knew it was a hopeless effort. Whatever the source of the temporal disturbance channeled through Lord Silk, the disturbing of the very fabric of reality that had catapulted them light-years in a blink, the energy that had passed through the elderly vessel had devastated its operating systems. Slowly it would succumb to the same inexorable demise that had claimed the remainder of the Crimson Fleet stowed above the planet by Dark Lord Maim those many years ago but for now the vessel remained a beacon of hope.

Struggling in the mud, the dirt, the grime, Silk could see a number of his brothers toiling to clear the temple but this too would not win them any great victory. He had set them to the task knowing full well that it was little an opportunity then to keep their minds and bodies busy. Assuming that by some superhuman feat they managed to clear the tunnels, reach the warren that had been their subterranean home, Silk did not favor the idea of taking up residence in the temple, he did not favor the idea of admitting defeat.

You are defeated, mocked an ethereal, disembodied voice from behind him, Lord Silk.

He whirled, spun about upon his heel and stood ready to face his tormentor but nothing, neither face nor fate met him in return. Looking in this direction he could see a building bank of storm clouds looming upon the horizon and it seemed to him a metaphor for life, his life. Snarling, he cursed the sky.

Yinchorr was known to Silk and his brothers well, too well. Once upon a time it had been dominated by a powerfully build lizard people, a tribal species called the Yinchorri. He had seen them many times in his visions, most recently following the… But now the planet was home only to him and his brothers though, supposedly, small pickets of that hardy species had endured the slagging of their planet and, much like the brotherhood, found safety below ground. These pocket tribes existed as rumors. In the eclipsing years of isolation the brotherhood had come to understand the planet in a way that even the Yinchorri of old could not. They had changed the planet in every way shape and form, bombarding it from space not once, but on three separate occasions. What was left was a lifeless rock rife with jutting rock, endless expanses of mud and an ever shifting topography. Torn by storms that roamed the planet, Yinchorr was subject and victim of fierce electrical storms and intense flash flooding. The storm upon the horizon, like the one brewing in his soul, would raze the area.

Time is running out, snipped the mocking voice again. Act fast Silk, or you are surely doomed.

This time he did not try to meet the voice. To confront it he would need time, a precious commodity that was swiftly running out.

He and his men, they would have to respond with speed and ferocity of the distant lightning and clapping thunder that echoed in the distance.

"The bloody, cursed rock is our hell. It is our salvation," Silk was preaching to his men, the ragged, bruised remains of his once proud cohort. "By fate or by force, it is the will of the Force that we should be stranded here once more."

Distant rumblings, the rolling storms breaking thunderously over the broken terrain, resonated through the rock walls that supported the small chamber he and his men had managed to salvage from the wreckage. Crowded in to the oval shaped hollow like sardines to a can the men stood or sat shoulder to shoulder their smells, inspired of the days hard labor, collaborated to form an oppressive, odorous heat. Rivers of condensation joined with streams of ground water, seeping through the cracks in the bedrock to drip incessantly upon those assembled in those tight quarters, to form cascading puddles in the lowest reaches of their cave. Incandescent orbs, glow balls filled with a luminescent substance, cast their brilliant white glow on the faces of the brotherhood showing them as haggard and smeared with the grim, the dirt of their toiling.

"In the strength of the Dark Side we will find our answer and absolution," he tried to sound as if he believed it, but he did not. "Regardless, this is our lot and we must embrace it!"

Lord Silk, leader of the rabble dubbed the Crimson Brotherhood, stood foremost among his companions once regarded as peers but now little more then subjects drawn, subjected by the lure of power. In the center of their collective mass he stood proud and tall in his robes and despite their being dirtied, torn he managed to appear as resolved in his posture as his soldiers training would allow.

Realization, like the birth of a new day, had stretched out across the horizon of his consciousness when standing high upon the mount he had seen a change in his men visible upon their faces and perceptible through their connection in the Force. He was loosing them, he knew.

Fate had been unkind to them. It had forced them to share in his destiny, to accompany him along the long, jagged road (beset by constant forking and curving) that had lead him here, was leading him... where? He did not know but felt a portentous coming in the future.

He felt...

In the confines of their enclosed chamber, caught below the storm and between fates, Silk sudden brewing cold welling up beneath his feet. Creeping darkness, intangible but real none-the-less, expanded upwards from some unknown depth below to encase his feet with the weight of the planet itself. Time itself seemed to stand still as the glow orbs and their brilliant glow succumbed to a growing darkness that seemed to spread out across the shapes that he knew to be the bodies of his men. Consumed by the unfolding dark their faces seemed to loose contrast, seemed to become featureless plates of crimson slit through by an onyx beam.

"What is this?"

He asked aloud but was met with nothing. His men, like statues, resolved in to the background and despite their closed quarters melted away like the ghosts of a forgotten impossibility. A pounding, like the beating of war drums, thumped in his chest threatening to envelop his shoulders, his head, his soul. The choking weight drove from his lungs the very air keeping him upright.

"Who are you?"

He screamed at the nothingness before collapsing to his feet an exhausted heap overwhelmed by the weight pulling at him from below.

We are you, responded the faceless bodies. What are you without us?

"I do not understand! I am..."

Hands feeling like lead, he collapsed further only managing to keep his chest and chin off of the cold, wet stone. His clothes felt like they were woven of the heaviest steel, as though his stomach has been devoured by a black hole, replaced with the atomic weight of black matter.

You are Imperial Sovereign Protector of no Sovereign. You are Imperial Royal Guard with no Empire. You are a Hand without a body. We make of you these things. What are you without us?

"No," he screamed. He cursed. "I am Dioan Silk and I have made myself the man I have become. I owe no man!"

Fool, mocked the voice without a face, without a soul or a name to curse. You are nothing yourself. The Empire made of you a soldier and the Emperor made of you a weapon. Dark Lord Maim made of you a Knight, gave you the tools to spread your power across the stars. What have you done?

"I have dominated planets! I have touched the Dark Force and made slaves of men! I have bent the fabric of reality to my will!"

Within his mind he was livid, a caged beast of the most wild, fierce variety. But his body, his body was not his own. Taken and made supine he twisted on the ground according to a will that was not his own. It felt familiar and yet, unquantified as though combined of elements known and unknown to him.

You did nothing, Silk. Your manipulation of time and space was not your own, it was done to you, done for you but not done by you.

"Who are you?"

He could no longer yell, no longer shout. The edges of his vision were becoming dark as he swam on the edge of consciousness. The darkness threatened to overwhelm him, to pull him down in to the depths from which it had sought him out.

Not yet, Silk. Your torment is not over. You have been returned to Yinchorr for a reason, you have yet another task laid out before you. Come the morning your storm will have broken. You will take your men and make to recover your starship, to bring it to the planet and scavenge from it the materials you will need for your next, your final trial...

Now sleep, Silk. The morning will come soon...

... all too soon.

Life on Yinchorr was unkind.

It was unkind and sparse.

The Crimson Regime had seen to that.

In decades past it had been a lush, welcoming planet home to a host of flora and fauna as well as a thriving, naturally evolved sentient species. None of that splendor had survived the ravages of time.

Once, with each new day, the planet awoke to the sounds of singing avians, chirping insects and the other trivialities of the morning, the rising sun and the waking world. Now it awoke only to the disgruntled, grimacing faces of the exiled brotherhood; men who begrudgingly accepted the fact that this was their fate, welcomed or otherwise.

The spread their lips, yawning, and scratched at the stubble on their chins. They had slumbered in quarters so close as to be uncomfortable but these men were brothers in arms, brothers in life and brothers in death. In their midst lay Lord Silk, prone and sporting a blood soaked bandage on his forehead.

"What happened?" He asked again (it seemed he had been asking that question with disturbing frequency) diresivly. "I..."

He could not complete the thought. Fortunately he did not need to for the answer was soon supplied by his rousing comrades.

"You were overcome," spoke one, a battle worn man in a full beard of the blackest coils. "We all felt it. All at once you ceased speaking then collapsed cursing an unknown foe. We searched for it in the Force, tried lending our strength to you but..."

He silenced him with an upturned palm, surging to his feet with a strength that belied his condition. "Never mind that. You will turn your minds from the subject, you will not dwell upon an invisible being. We have a task before us..."

Bemused, his men did not initially respond. Perhaps they were as of yet too tired, lost in the void between waking and sleeping, to properly respond. Perhaps they did not wish to upset him. Perhaps they were pensive, scared. Perhas many things.

"What task is there but to break free of this rock?" One asked aloud. "What else can there be?"

With every waking moment Silk was feeling stronger, more powerful. Even the swelling pain in his head had subsided behind a wall of grim determination. He reached out in the Force and spilled his dark presence in to the souls of his brothers. This tactic of manipulation had been taught him by the Dark Lord Maim, a tool to keep ones subjects loyal but, as he had soon discovered, it was also a path to great power - one through which he could literally siphon energy from his so-called brothers. Their doubt became his resolve, their trepidation his determination and in this way he assuaged their concerns and steeled their resolve alongside his own.

"Brothers," Silk moved between them with the serpentine smoothness implied of his name. As he pushed through their bodies, one pressed against another, all pressing against all, his shoulders passed over theirs, his hands moving along their backs and touching their faces with an affection only they could share. His presence basked in their attention, he reveled in it spreading his tendrils through the Force weaving them with the very souls of his men. "I have had a vision. Our time to leave this planet is not yet come..."

Anger, sadness and abandonment seemed to pour off of his men, pour off of their bodies and in to the Force. But this too was a form of sustenance for the dark being, the ambitious Sith, Dioan Silk. He supped upon it and used it to redouble his own manipulative strength. In to his words he poured that intensity.

"There will come a time when we will be liberated from this god forbidden rock once and for all," he continued passionately, seriously. "But before that day can come there are plans that must be made. We must prepare and I must be ready for that day."

"I have seen the future, I have glimpsed events set in motion by the Force. I have seen an noble soldier who will be sent from the stars to reclaim this planet and to secure it by whatever means."

As he spoke he moved with intention towards the narrow junction in the cave walls that lead back up to the surface. He paused there and regarded his men at length.

His eyes were like milky orbs, white portals in to the abyss. It was then that, to a man, they realized that he was not the same man they had first served under, under Maim, so long ago. It was as if a gradual transition had been taking place under their very noses but only now were they coming to understand, indeed accept, the sheer inevitablity of it. Dioan Silk was changing, growing beyond the role so long assigned him; that of the living weapon, the solider turned monster.

"When that day comes they will find the proud remains of the true Royal Guard. They will find the true protectors of the Dark Lords, true students of the Dark Arts and Warriors devoted to the word of one man, and one man alone... The true Dark Lord of the Sith..."

"Come that day we will shed ourselves of this cursed place for once and all, but that is why the Force returned me here, brought you with me to this place once more..."

He paused.

"So we can prepare for the coming of the next Dark Lord of the Sith."

All eyes upon him, none dared speak until he himself...

"I speak not of myself. I am but a steward, and you are but my comrades, my brothers in protecting a truth forgotten by this stagnant galaxy."

"But first we must prepare."

Motioning for them to follow he started up the winding corridors that would return them to the surface. They moved in silence, hundreds of men moving as one, like some sort of many limbed serpent clawing its way from within the planet itself.

Silk was first to emerge, but he remained motionless and silent until the rest of his brothers, his subjects, had arrived.

The storm had totally changed the landscape. Only the dominant shape of Mount Overlook remained an untouchable monolith and the only static landmark by which they could navigate. From high above the brilliant orange sun beat down upon them with the intensity of a furnace. The nights storms had brought flash flooding and though none of that water remained now, save in the thickest mud, a hollow, like the bed of a dry lake, had been formed at the foot of Mount Overlook and it was in this depression that the men congregated.

Standing upon high, looking down on his men, across the assembly of devoted man power, he spread his arms and spoke with the booming voice of Moses upon the Mount.

"We will bring our starship down from the heavens. We will kill it, we will break its bones and we will use its corpse to dig a new, better defended post in the hills. This will be no small task, but with Force we shall accomplish it in short order."

"Next we will embarg upon a quest to scout this blasted rock, to uncover the tribes of native Yinchorri still habituating in the deepest, darkest regions. We will subjugate them and make of them slaves..."

"But my plan ends not there my brothers..."

"We will reconstruct the tools of my Dark Lord Maim and bury them in the soil, we will use them to corrupt the native lizard people and to increase our own strength and then we will hide everything in the depths..."

"Rest assured, our efforts will not be in vain. Out of the darkness will come a warlord of noble stock and through him we will find liberation, we will find welcome in the Sith Order of old and we will meet our new Dark Lord..."

"He will come to us as a student, a learner of the Dark Arts but he will quickly rise to predominance. He will raze the Galaxy in his name and restore the honor of our great duty, our sole task..."

As Silk spoke he extended his presence, forced it go grow and meld with those of his brothers, to become one complete unit and from that cohesiveness began to coalece an image. The image rendered itself in the minds and imaginations of every man.

Within their minds' eye floated two disembodied orbs, two slits that were the eyes of distant galaxies.

"He will come to us and through him we will restore ourselves and then, my brothers, we will return to this planet to collect upon the fruits of our labors and to harvest our investment. And then, my brothers, the Galaxy will be ours."

The did not cheer. They did not clap.

They roared.







Ahh, thought a mind of pure energy, a mind long dead and forgotten. All is coming together. Soon, my friends, soon all will be ours once again. And though Silk was not present to feel it, to sense it through the Force, the trinity would be evident none-the-less. The ghosts of his past, and the fate of his future were not yet finished with the man known as Lord Silk, not by a far measure.