I am everything.

I am nothing.

“So, are you going to kill me, Zark? That wouldn't be very...honorable, would it?”

I am every single sentient being to have ever lived and died.

I am one man, cold and dead, buried in the ground.

“You would love that wouldn’t you? But you know as well as I do that it is not meant to be.”

I know everyone who has ever been and who ever will be.

I know no one. I am alone in the dark.

“I’m staying right here. I’m going to end it.”

I know and understand everything.

[FONT=Century Gothic]Not…everything…[/FONT]

Who are you?

[FONT=Century Gothic]…a friend.[/FONT]

I do not know you. That is not possible.

[FONT=Century Gothic]Some things…no man is meant to know…not even in death…[/FONT]

This…cannot be.

[FONT=Century Gothic]I can show you those things. I can help you understand. I can give you power…just like you always wanted.[/FONT]

Just like I?...yes…just like I always wanted…

[FONT=Century Gothic]Would you like that? Would you like that…Xoverus?[/FONT]

I am…I am no longer…who are you? How are you doing this?

[FONT=Century Gothic]I know and do much that goes unseen by even you. I can show you these things. I can give you power, just like you always wanted in life. All you must do…is serve me.[/FONT]

Yes…power…no! I serve nothing! I am the master!

[FONT=Century Gothic]Come now, Xoverus. Do not be prideful. I can show and give you much. I can give you power. I can give you life. I can give you…him…[/FONT]

Him? You can give…you can give me him?

[FONT=Century Gothic]Yes, Xoverus. I can give you much. I can give you him, but first you must serve me…for a while…[/FONT]

Who are you? Tell me.

[FONT=Century Gothic]All will be explained. Do you accept my most generous offer?[/FONT]

You can…you can really give me life?

[FONT=Century Gothic]And power.[/FONT]

…I accept.

[FONT=Century Gothic]Good.[/FONT]

What is…what is happening?





“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh wgah'nagl fhtagn.”

His eyes opened.

The sensation of having eyes once more was enough to be a wholly disturbing experience, but the experience of actually opening them proved too much, and he shut them tightly. After a few moments, once his senses had returned (and how long had they been gone?), he hazarded another attempt.

A dark ceiling stared back at him. Exercising his neck muscles for the first time in what seemed like aeons, Xoverus slowly turned his head from side to side, catching glimpses of the room around him. He was elevated from the ground, and the room around him was just as dark as the ceiling above him. It was lit, dimly, by something he could not see. Shadows flickered about the walls, dancing and playing as they were apt to do.

Feeling a little more ambitious, Xoverus slowly arose from his resting place, and caught his first good glimpse of the room he had found himself within. Candles lit the room, casting their dim glows over countless runes and glyphs, symbols that Xoverus knew he had never seen before yet felt such a feeling of intimate understanding toward. Looking down, he found himself upon a monolith, made of some sort of course stone.

A smell permeated the room. All other scents he remembered from so long ago were gone now, but the presence of this smell in the room still lingered. And as he took a closer look upon the symbols drawn in the ground below him, a closer look at the crimson color they were drawn in, Xoverus remembered what that smell was.

There was no one in the room with him, yet he remembered the words that had greeted him vaguely, and wondered who had uttered them. He wondered much, and there was no one in this room to answer him. Squinting, Xoverus located a door on one of the walls, and swung his legs off of the monolith. As he stood, the room dimmed slightly, and he looked down. He had stepped on one of the candles…

And he had not felt it.

No burning sensation, no feeling of wax upon skin. He had felt nothing.

Before he had time to contemplate this, the door he had seen burst open, as if by a strong gust of wind. And slowly…a candle hovered in. Xoverus peered at it, and realized that the candle was not alone. A hand held it, one of a pair. Wispy bluish ethereal things, they floated in midair. The free hand slowly reached out toward him, turned its palm upright, and bent back the index finger in a gesture that got the point across.

Xoverus was to follow it.

The pair of hands slowly floated back out of the room, and through the doorway Xoverus saw the gesture repeated. Seeing no alternative, Xoverus followed the hands out of the room in compliance. As soon as he was in the hallway, the hands took off at a pace that was unmistakably hurried. He had to break into a small trot in order to properly keep up.

Through a myriad of corridors and down a myriad of staircases the hands led him. Always down, never up. So far down they went Xoverus began to fear that the descent would be never ending, and he would be following the ghostly hands until once again he was sent to the Nether. Down and down and down they went, through corridors too many for him to keep count of.

And finally, at the end of a particularly long and wide corridor, two large wooden doors burst open with the same gust of wind, and he found himself in a huge room. Xoverus recognized what it was immediately. He had become acquainted with one that looked very similar in the past.

It was a cathedral.

And at the altar, a robed figure stood.

The ghostly hands were gone now. They had not disappeared, as far as Xoverus knew, but he had forgotten them when the doors had burst open and now they were nowhere to be found. He found himself alone in the cathedral with the robed man. A hundred questions coursed through his mind. Questions…something he had thought he had left behind in death. He had been proven wrong. Hundreds of questions he had not thought to ask now filled him.

But, as the robed man had given no hint of noticing his presence, one found its way to his lips.

“Hello?”

As Xoverus entered the hallowed chamber, the robed figure he saw stood apparently transfixed in study of the walls that towered ahead of him. With no natural light to illuminate them, the murals that spread across the cathedrals innards appeared as little more than an indistinct mass of swirling and interlocking shapes – and yet the robed figure studied them with great interest. At least, until the voice of another disturbed his meditation. Unseen, a thin smile pressed onto his lips.

“Ah... you have awoken, at last.”

The figure turned, revealed to be an apparently near-human man, of some age. He spoke with an unearthly cadence, that seemed - perhaps simply because of the preternatural space it found itself projected into - to be threaded with some unsettling undercurrent. It was a voice that Xoverus knew somehow, as if it had once spoken to him before, perhaps in a dream or nightmare. His eyes, veiled beneath a heavy hood, appraised the figure before him, as a sculptor might his latest creation.

“Welcome, Xoverus.”

An overwhelming feeling of nostalgia hit him like a brick wall. The strength of it was so great that Xoverus felt as if a man he had known and spoken to his whole life had just addressed him and he had absolutely no recollection of his identity. Almost reflexively, he reached out in his mind for the repository of knowledge so breathtakingly vast and limitless that he had become so used to drawing upon to satisfying the otherwise mind numbingly boring experience of being dead.

But it was no longer there. It was not gone, he could still feel it there vaguely in the back of his mind. But it was inaccessible, and it was quickly fading. Soon, he knew, he would be just as mortal and ignorant as everyone else he had ever met in his original life. Death, which had seemed so boring and unsatisfying at the time, was now looking more and more like the lesser of two evils. At least in death he knew everything.

Well…almost everything, as had been proved to him just before he had been brought back into the fold of the living. That part of his death he still remembered. The man standing at the altar before him whose voice was so familiar had been responsible for that, Xoverus guessed. The man standing at the altar before him was so powerful he could keep secrets from the dead.

“It is, perhaps…” Xoverus exercised the use of his vocal chords for the first time in a long time carefully. His voice seemed much more guttural and insidious than he had remembered it being, “Unwise…to keep secrets from what shapes things to come. To hide from Fate could prove…disastrous…when the time comes for things that need to happen…to happen. I’m sure one as apparently powerful as you…realizes this. And I hope…that you have a good reason for it…”

Straightening his posture, Xoverus began to take slow, measured steps down the aisle in front of him leading up to the altar. The robed man, so familiar to him and yet so strange, showed no signs of emotional response at his comments. He continued his slow, deliberate walk up to the altar until he stood a little in front of the first pew, still separated from the man at the altar by a good six meters at least. The altar was elevated slightly, so that Xoverus had to crane his head upward slightly to look upon the man.

“You…returned me to life…in promise of…power. I thank you…and I am no doubt…in your debt. But in doing so…you have robbed me of…the greatest power I have ever known. The power of knowledge. So I am very…very curious…as to why.”

Xoverus peered at the man, staring at the shadows that concealed his eyes.

“What place is this…and who are you?”

“It was not I who brought you here, Xoverus. An entity of far greater power than I summoned you to this place, this hallowed chamber.” There was a conspiratorial tone to the figures voice now, a sense of foreboding. As if preempting the next logical question, the robed figure continued. “This place,” he said, spreading his arms in a wide all-encompassing gesture. “Is a monument to the very being that your life is now indebted to, and I am it's architect and keeper.”

“Darkside…all of this flare and pomp and I’m speaking with a servant?” Xoverus spat out, glaring at the robe figure. If the man gave any reaction, Xoverus didn’t see it. That only angered him more, “Well, where is he then? Why aren’t I speaking with him? Surely a Sith Lord powerful enough to resurrect the dead would not fear one of his own creations? Why the messenger boy?”

Xoverus let out a chuckle. It was a grating thing, not the high pitched titter it had been in his past life. Whoever had brought him back had brought him back in a different body, that was for sure. Could it really be called resurrection? Xoverus wondered for a moment whose body he wasinhabiting. He hadn't gotten a good look at himself since he had awoken. What did he look like?

He felt stronger, not just physically but in the Force. The man who had recreated him had definitely augmented his abilities in the Force. But as he reached out to grasp the tendrils of the Force in his mind he realized that his power was a different sort of power. It was more of a brute strength in the Force than a calculated knowledge of how things worked. He tried to remember one of the complicated spells he had known so well as a Dark Jedi and discovered, to his dismay...that he couldn't! He let out a gasp against his will. His power!

“What is this?!” he growled, “My power! My knowledge! I cannot…WHAT IS THIS?!”

As his fists curled into a ball they began to glow with a strong black aura. Pure Force energy. Was this what he had been reduced to? A mere rank in file soldier in the arsenal of this Sith Lord who had not even the decency to greet him personally? Xoverus would show him! He was not one to be toyed with!

“Take me to him! Do you here me, architect?!” Xoverus roared, “TAKE ME TO HIM!”