Chapter 55 (Patreon)

“Why did it take you so long?” XoXaan looked irritated. As always, really, so the sorcerer clearly ignored the grumbling note beneath the infernal overtones of her voice.

“Miss me?” he asked with a sweet smile, looking at the ghost hovering beside the little holocron pyramid.

“I couldn’t even eat,” the ancient gifted replied acidly. “Oh, wait… I can’t eat in the first place!”

“Look what missing a friend does to a Sith Lord.” Siith brushed away a nonexistent tear of emotion, then turned serious. “But seriously, Xo, I don’t understand what you’re complaining about. Everything went about as expected. Master Kuro, despite that whole little performance of ours with the junk we hauled out of your neighbors’ tombs…”

“Heh-heh-heh.” For a moment, XoXaan dropped the majestic Lady act, allowing herself a few chuckles full of vengeful anticipation.

“Ahem. If you’re done imagining the looks on your colleagues’ faces…”

“Yes, yes, go on, sorcerer.” The ancient gifted waved a hand regally, settling back into her usual expression of peevish irritation.

“Yes, my Lady! Thank you, my Lady!”

“Wasn’t someone just begging me to be more serious?!” the Sith Lady grimaced, lazily raising her left hand and unleashing Force lightning. The technique crackled against the spherical shield that sprang up around the sorcerer, leaving him unharmed.

“That bored, were you?” Siith’khara’Dziha asked with a hint of sympathy.

“I browsed the HoloNet, watched a few shows now and then.” The ghost shrugged. “Some of them were actually pretty decent. The only thing that ruins most of them is the Jedi who inevitably shows up right when things get difficult, saves the heroes, and then drags out some tedious monologue for a couple of episodes, complete with flashbacks and moralizing. It gets so dreary I found myself wanting to destroy a couple of holofilm studios.”

“Oh, did you try that game I recommended?”

“Boring,” the gifted summed it up curtly.

“What about the terraforming simulator? The one where you start as a lone droid on a planet with insanely hostile conditions…”

“Are you out of your mind? You might as well have recommended a factory-worker simulator! Sith Lords do not concern themselves with such trifles! We command Empires!”

“You and I clearly have very different ideas of how to kill time when we’re bored,” the red-eyed man said, shaking his head. “But all right, enough of that. Just as I expected, Master Kuro didn’t completely buy the act. She didn’t leave with the antiquities experts and Master Windu, but stayed on Jabiim for another week. Officially, to see how the healer Knights were getting on with chimerology. Unofficially… she went right back to playing hide-and-seek around every place on the planet she found suspicious and kept a very close eye on the girls from Dathomir. Nice work, by the way. Even the Master didn’t notice you’d temporarily scrambled their brains.”

“When the victim doesn’t resist—and even cooperates—you can avoid a great many problems. As you’ve probably gathered, I’ve had some experience with that sort of thing before. Let’s just say… a couple of my ‘friends’ were very surprised to learn that the apprentices who had betrayed me hadn’t actually betrayed me at all.”

“I don’t like mind-crawlers.”

“We’re not a peggat; we don’t have to please everyone. Your words, not mine.” The ghost shrugged. “And yes, those little creatures of yours that you released into our slaves’ bloodstream are absolutely vile. Compared to them, mental suggestion is child’s play.”

“Adorable little arterial worms,” Siith disagreed. “Simple creatures, like most worms. And thanks to their nature, they’re perfectly at home in the bloodstream. Modifying them to filter midi-chlorians out of the blood wasn’t any trouble at all, either. The witches of Dathomir are missing out by using them only for executions. One day’s work, and they turned into absolutely splendid symbiotes. Karray is delighted—she’s already brought me four fascinating projects!”

“Thrilling,” XoXaan said with absolutely no enthusiasm, her face utterly indifferent. “So, all the unwanted guests are gone?”

“Yes. Everything’s quiet on our Jabiim. They even let me keep a couple dozen little gadgets that belonged to your colleagues.”

“Throw them out. It’s all junk,” the woman said, curling her lip contemptuously. “I don’t understand this reverence for ‘ancient heritage.’ Rakatan technology, fine—but Sith creations from thousands of years ago? Anything worthwhile was destroyed long ago, and whatever still exists isn’t something anyone would leave hidden in the tombs of Korriban.”

“What happened to ‘things were better in the old days’?”

“That applies more to people,” the gifted said, a venomous smile spreading across her face. “Tools, on the other hand, are superseded by better versions over time. Lightsabers themselves once replaced ordinary blades. Then they gained compact power cells in the hilt and got rid of that dreadful cable running to a battery pack on the wearer’s back. Same with those ‘artifacts’ the Jedi left you. There wasn’t a single thing among them that doesn’t have a more advanced equivalent. The real problem is that there are hardly any proper Sith left in the galaxy…”

“Taking another swipe at the Baneites?”

“Well… in all fairness… what is that look on your face?!” the Sith Lady demanded, glaring at the sorcerer in annoyance.

“I was just admiring the word ‘fairness’ coming out of your mouth.”

“Are you deliberately trying to piss me off?” XoXaan felt an overwhelming urge to put on one of her skins just so she could grind her teeth in anger. “There were some genuinely worthwhile sentients among those rats. No match for me, naturally—nor for hundreds of worthier members of my Order. I even knew a few Jedi who were stronger and smarter than Bane himself. Darth Bane. Pfft… They couldn’t even preserve the proper pronunciation!”

“What do you mean?” The sorcerer immediately looked far more interested now that she had said something that actually intrigued him.

“The title Darth. Your contemporaries don’t even know for certain what it means, or how it’s properly pronounced. *Darr Tah! If I chose to take the title, I would be called Darr Tah XoXaan. Conqueror through Death! In Rakatan, darr means victory, a successful conquest, an achieved subjugation. Tah means death, killing, extermination. A victor who brings death. A conquering killer. Darth, on the other hand… well, it’s just a nice-sounding prefix attached to a name, its meaning long since lost.*”

“Young people love that sort of thing,” the sorcerer said, nodding with satisfaction as he took the holocron from its pedestal and placed it into the box standing nearby. “Come on, make yourself nice and transparent already. The housewarming won’t wait.”

“You are unbelievably annoying,” came a whisper from the now-empty space right beside the red-eyed man’s ear.

“That’s not true.” The sorcerer smirked. “Believe me, I’ve seen more than enough of all those villain masks. I used to put on that kind of show myself, once upon a time. I wouldn’t exactly call you cute, of course, and your temperament is difficult, to put it mildly. Then there are the sadistic tendencies. The lust for power. The greed. That annoying voice…”

The man left the secret room, muttering something a couple of times in a guttural language unfamiliar to the gifted as he picked his way through piles of assorted cleaning tools. Probably swearing. Eventually, he emerged into the Academy corridor with his burden, accompanied by the Sith Lady hovering invisibly beside him. Next to the door of the room they had just left hung a sign that read: JANITORIAL SUPPLIES.

“I… am going to kill you, sorcerer… someday!” XoXaan couldn’t sigh while incorporeal, but the urge to do so was overwhelming. Right after she strangled this impossible, insolent, shameless idiot!!!

“Do you have any idea how many people are already in line for my life? And I’ve only got one! There isn’t enough of me to go around!” Another obnoxious chuckle was her only answer, and XoXaan found herself wondering how she might go about meeting those exceedingly pleasant sentients.

Though… perhaps she would have to kill them after all. First, the Sith Lady had already counted the sorcerer among her assets, and second, sharing was not in her nature. She would kill him herself when the time came.

Or… oh, let him live. He could stay on his Jabiim and keep pushing her Empire’s magical progress forward.

The important thing was not to repeat the Jedi’s mistakes: if that red-eyed son of a bitch ever needed to fly off to some planet full of ancient tombs, XoXaan would send observers with him. Perhaps even apprentices. The appearance of one of her old acquaintances would be extremely undesirable. At least for now. And in general, XoXaan had no desire whatsoever to let the awakening of ancient Sith become some kind of “fine tradition.”

“Siith, listen.” Alto took a deep breath and fixed the sorcerer with a hard look. “Don’t you think an ancient Sith Lady is maybe a little too much?”

“A little?” Cordelia raised an eyebrow. “A little too much is one Dathomiri witch! Five witches and a damn Sith isn’t just too much, it’s… it’s…”

“Cordelia, don’t exaggerate.” The red-eyed man sighed and shook his head. “So there’s a Sith. So there are witches. What exactly is new about that in this galaxy? The Dathomiri already have something to do, and Xo’s busy too—she’s studying.”

“And you’re delighted, aren’t you? So many opportunities to dissect them,” the head of Jabiim Security grimaced.

“Already did! Several times! With weaves and the old-fashioned way!” the sorcerer said with a satisfied squint, taking a sip of caf from an enormous mug.

“Siith, why bother with the old-fashioned way?” Alto Stratus suddenly asked. “You said yourself that spells and rituals are easier. And Karray told me she doesn’t do dissections anymore either.”

“Oh, well…” The sorcerer looked almost embarrassed. “It’s more of an old habit. The magical instruments I originally had at my disposal weren’t accurate enough to be called satisfactory. Some things I found, some I bought, some I modified myself, but by the time I finally had spells and rituals that could give me better data… the habit had already stuck.”

“To Sith with your vivisections!” Cordelia snapped, slamming her palms against the armrests of her chair. “We have an Ancient Sith on this planet, and you, sorcerer, lied to the Jedi!!! I don’t even know which is worse! No, wait! I do!!! What’s worse is that your witch out of the darkness of the past is obviously going to stir up another round of galactic turmoil sooner or later!!! What next? Do we let her open a branch of a Sith Academy here on Jabiim? Why not? We’ve already got a Lord, and five lunatics for her to take as apprentices! And then, a month from now, a year from now, when the Republic and the Temple finally find out, we’ll have a Justiciar fleet dropping on our heads and a Jedi assault force charging in with glowing sticks at the ready?”

“Cordelia, why are you always getting so worked up?” Siith let out a heavy sigh. “Seriously. You don’t need to believe everything you read on the HoloNet.”

“So now you’re going to try and sell me the idea that Sith are actually all sweetness and light?” The head of security’s eye began to twitch.

“No. I’m saying you shouldn’t assume they’re idiots,” the sorcerer said, shaking his head. “First, Xo is studying chimerology and ritualism right now. Neither is something you master overnight, and she’s only just getting started. Second, she doesn’t have the resources to stir up any trouble. Not yet, granted. She’s already making plans and all that. But third, she won’t touch Jabiim—we made a deal and sealed it with an oath before Hecate. Once she’s finished her business here, she’ll pack up her things and go be a Sith somewhere else. And fourth—the Sith are already stirring up trouble across the galaxy. I don’t see anything wrong with a Dark gifted taking over that whole operation when she’s bound to me by oaths of non-aggression toward me, the JMG, the Academy, and Jabiim as a whole.”

“That’s all just theory,” the woman said, pursing her lips.

“Oh, come on.” The sorcerer chopped one hand downward as though cleaving the air in two. “The entire Jedi Council keeps sighing about the Dark Side muddying the waters. Then, ‘all of a sudden,’ separatist sentiment starts blooming everywhere. For a thousand years, things stayed more or less within bounds, and now, suddenly, half the Republic has decided that ‘something needs to change’? Please. All those profiteers howling from podiums about ‘honest’ government, corruption, the oppression of the Outer Rim worlds… They’re the same people who spent all those years corrupting that government in the first place, enabling and cultivating the very corruption they’re complaining about. And they profited off worlds like ours every chance they got. You really think all of that is a coincidence? I, for one, have my doubts!”

“The separatists are rallying around Count Dooku, and he’s a Jedi,” Alto pointed out.

“A former Jedi,” Siith corrected Cordelia’s cousin. “And why do Jedi leave the Order, most of the time? Because they become disillusioned! It doesn’t happen all that often, but leaving the Order is a thing. Funny enough, far more often Jedi don’t leave at all—they simply fall to Darkness. Some Knights and Masters specialize in hunting down, or outright eliminating, those half-baked Sith. And by the way, the fallen always end up declaring themselves Sith anyway. Well, the ones who can still talk, rather than just scream like lunatics and start carving up anyone who looks at them the wrong way with their glowing sticks.”

“You think the Count of Serenno has fallen?”

“Maybe. Or maybe someone gave him a push. Or maybe he was always like that. The Count is far too normal for one of those deranged psychos Jedi turn into after falling. That’s actually one of the reasons I don’t believe every genuine member of the Order that opposed the Jedi was some bloodthirsty lunatic. A horde of idiots incapable of controlling their anger and rage simply couldn’t have built an Empire. Yet they did so regularly. And sentients lived in those Empires—sometimes quite well, even. Yes, the regime was a totalitarian dictatorship, but let’s not forget that one dictatorship can be very different from another. If the regime had been intolerable to the overwhelming majority, those Sith would simply have been buried under a mountain of bodies until they were destroyed—not fought for by people willingly joining their ‘dark’ legions.”

The sorcerer crossed one leg over the other and looked intently first into Alto’s eyes, then Cordelia’s.

“They KNEW how to handle their own nature,” Siith said. “Do you understand? XoXaan herself, despite being one of the first Sith Lords, knows how to keep herself under control. Believe me, I’m very good at driving people up the wall. I tried every way I could to piss her off. And what happened? She zaps me with lightning? That’s it? Pfft. Snaps her servants’ necks? Pfft number two. It’s not even funny—she stopped doing that as soon as she’d grasped the part of the healing process she currently had access to. Dead Man dies for stupider reasons than that!!!”

“Siith,” Cordelia said, looking at the sorcerer with pity, “not every story about the Sith can be a lie or propaganda.”

“I’m not talking about all of them,” the red-eyed man said, raising his voice slightly and gesturing with both hands. “Even from Xo’s stories, there were plenty of Sith that their own people considered completely unhinged. I’m talking about her specifically! What is this Dark Lady famous for, huh? She invented Dark Healing! Do you understand? Not some uber-club or kill-everything technique, but a Dark Side equivalent of healing! Despite being no beauty and belonging to the ‘bad guys,’ she’s perfectly rational, reasonably level-headed, and someone you can actually negotiate and do business with. Carefully, with proper safety precautions, but you can! And what do we know about the Sith who are stirring things up in the galaxy right now? Nothing! Alto, hand on heart, who would you rather have leading a rebellion against the Republic? A sentient who physically cannot harm our home—or unknown individuals?”

“To begin with, I don’t understand why you assume she’ll inevitably end up leading the rebellion,” Alto replied, calmly taking a sip of caf.

“It’s the Sith way. From what I know about them, from what my new apprentice is like, and from what Xo has shown me, the Ancient Lady simply won’t be able to tolerate some ‘Baneite rat’ clawing its way to the top ahead of her. As for why I’m confident she’ll win… age and experience. XoXaan is several times older than I am. She’ll eat whoever currently stands at the head of the Two alive—just give her time. Alto, I swear, if not for the oath she gave me and the fact that Jabiim will be useful to whoever comes out on top, I wouldn’t even be entertaining anything like this. As a last resort, I’d simply have fled that tomb and sicced the Jedi on her if she’d refused to give us guarantees of safety.”

“If the Republic goes up in flames…” Alto said thoughtfully, then fell silent.

“And it will,” the sorcerer said with a nod and a smile, reaching for his mug again. “You showed me your analysts’ projections yourself.”

“Then better that it burns without touching Jabiim,” the leader of the rain-soaked world said with a grim smile. “It never came to our aid through all those centuries of need. I don’t think we owe anything to the Republic—or to the galaxy at large.”

“You’d have made an excellent sorcerer, Alto,” the red-eyed man said with a smirk into his mug of caf. “Traditionally, we only got involved in things like that when we had a personal stake in them.”

“I still don’t like any of this,” Cordelia said, looking darkly at the two men. “There’s no guarantee that, once the unrest starts, an invasion fleet won’t suddenly drop out of hyperspace over our world.”

“No one’s stopping Jabiim from simply wrapping itself in ion storms,” Siith said with a shrug. “We’ll lie and say we’re having problems with the weather-control artifacts, blah-blah-blah. We’d just need to stock up on essentials… enough for ten years or so. They’re not going to start bombarding us from orbit for that alone, right? They’ll be pissed, sure, but Alto had the right idea: we can always say, ‘what goes around comes around,’ ‘turnabout is fair play,’ ‘an eye for an eye,’ ‘you wrote us off, now we’re returning the favor.’ They’ll grind their teeth, there’ll be some bad blood left, but because of how unique we are, they’re not going to come down too hard on us. And afterward, once we’ve pretended to see the error of our ways, we’ll offer discounts and send gifts to whoever wins.”

“Sometimes I find it hard to believe you’re six hundred years old. Every now and then I look at you and you’re just a boy,” the head of Security said, covering her face with one hand. “But now I’m starting to doubt the Sith are actually any crazier than you are!”

“Ah-ha-ha-ha!” The red-eyed man burst out laughing, making the woman flinch in surprise. “You may not believe it, but back home I had a reputation roughly on par with your red-stick crowd. I won’t lie, there was plenty of exaggeration involved, but some of the things I practiced were punishable by death on the spot in certain places.”

“Raping everyone’s brains?” the woman raised an eyebrow.

“Funny enough, I’ve never liked mind-crawlers, even though mental magic was legal almost everywhere. Governments found it useful. Never understood why they considered necromancy any worse. You can make zombies with the first, and you can make zombies with the second… Hecate, grant idiots just a little logic. Even a quarter of what I have would do…”

Author’s Note:

*Darth: Darr Tah. There are several possible interpretations of the meaning behind the prefix—or title—Darth. This is one of them. Since XoXaan was practically one of the founders of the Sith Order, I decided it was reasonable to assume that she knew what it originally meant. Especially since she was among those who conquered the Sith species living on Korriban, a people who had previously had contact with the Rakatan Infinite Empire.