[ALL SITH, IMPERIALS AND ALLIES] Inauguration

[Negative Blessing]

As the inaguration of the new Sith empress was complete, Grima shrugged her shoulders. Her loyalty was to the Sith Order not its ruler. Being ruled by another was like being enslaved....chained and she broke her chains many years ago. However, the new Empress was right. The Sith were becoming to complacent and it was time to move forward. Though she never truly understood the politics of the Order she understood one thing....as long as the Empress called upon her she will do what is asked of her.

While standing there she began to sense treachery....a plot perhaps. Well it is the Sith way to take power from those who have it but who would be so foolish to make a grab now. Still she was here because she was asked by her master to attend. So now that she attended what was left to do. Out of the corner of her eye she saw several Sith leaving whilst others where gathering whispering amongst themselves. Well if trouble was going to erupt she rather distance herself from it. Best to be on the neutral side then finding her head on the chopping block for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Still....if a fight was to erupt perhaps by standing and observing she can study how the others fought.

 

[TAC]

Rareth, caught in the flames of his fellow cultist, burnt to a crisp.

It was a simple death for a simple warrior.

 

[Jake]

((OOC: Tommy and TAC okay'd me doing this. Many thanks to them. I hope they like the direction I will take with this.))

Power is a word so many fail to understand in its depth.

Every aspect of sapient life is based off power. The power to stand on your own two (or more!) feet. The power to speak, to reason, to live and die and take that life or preserve it. To struggle. The power to defy fate, or to write it. Power for power's sake is the power to control all these things, a motivation more complex than the Jedi would have you believe. It is easier to balance lives on the weight of a sword when the bodies left behind are faceless save for the masks of "evil" they wear. The power to kill with full knowledge of who is left behind is another kind of strength.

As the world around him whirled into a frenzy of movement and death and blistering heat, Casimir felt that he had all the power he would ever need, could ever possibly desire. His senses had never been so sharp. His body had never felt so light, his mind so focused. Silen's attempts to pry into his mind felt like a child beating at his legs and accordingly he kicked it away, a feat he could never have imagined mere seconds prior. Power. Power. Power to be and to do what he wanted. The power to break a crown.

The power to want more.

He did not even realize he had dropped to both knees, eyes staring blankly at the empty throne. He had not even noticed Andraste despite her retinue and the power that radiated from her. The power he wanted.

Scorching wind churned up by Varek's fire blew his hair around, tickled his face, burned his eyes. Immolated screams. A girl severing her own arm in the bedlam. A Barabel scorched silently, too much a warrior to cry out, not yet trained enough to extinguish the flames which claimed his life. Varek was hungry too he could see; hungry for ruin, for a blade to be rammed up that gorget and into his brain. Fire was powerful, to be sure, but so wasteful... A waste he would not allow. Never moving from his knees, Casimir gathered some of his power into a cocoon around himself, shielding his body from the chaos as his mind was projected from his body into a place far darker and far colder.

...

Sunlight hadn't touched the abyss since the universe began its slow grind towards heat death. Varek's fire did nothing to assuage the chill of this place, a chill that settles on the bones like winter frosts to sap them of the warmth of the living. Yet even without seeing there was an impression of vastness immeasurable, a trench so deep it could swallow the galaxy a dozen times without burping, a crushing weight like staring at the vault of a cathedral. It's no place for trivial loudmouth bullshit, no land in which Casimir's favored monologues had any place. Here you were commanded by presence, reeled in by power.

But here, even with all the light he had mustered around himself, light borrowed from Varek and Arcturus both, Casimir was a guttering candle in a windstorm. At any moment he might be snuffed out, thrust forever into this bleak blackness, his soul left to wander blind and deaf and mute in a place where there were no hands to help him ever again...

Some scholars spoke of things that lived in Chaos, demons who resided here. A discredited few said life originated in this unfriendly place. It couldn't have been an easy birth if it was true, for whatever monsters remained had been twisted into nightmare shapes by sheer starvation in this lightless place where time hobbles by like an old beggar down destiny's road. He opened his mouth to call out and the darkness sucked the breath from his lungs. He closed it and did not open it again.

As his eyes... adjusted... to this strange place he began to see the outlines, suggestions of spirals winding deeper and deeper into the bowels of this brobdingnagian place, souls spinning down to their judgment. Through instinct or desire given form in this place where the Force was law and physics a convenient standard he saw two motes of light impossibly distant but approaching at even more impossible speeds, motes of light that became spectral orbs of ectoplasm that became the rough sketches of shapes imposed on a dark background. Two souls hung there, soft and delicate like corpses groomed for their funeral, Alcaeus' beard no longer a tangle of knots but a long well-combed serpentine thing, and Rareth's scales shining as they had the first day he cracked the shell of his egg to devour his crechemates and claw his way onto the earth.

Beneath them the darkness rippled and it was then a turbulent ocean, and they drops of water hanging at the crest of a wave. Casimir's hands lifted. He manipulated his own spirit ichor, the substance from which his avatar here was formed, and the two wayward souls began to react. As his limbs extended they began to blend into a patch of ectoplasm on the ghosts' torsos: a bridge to guide them, a chain to bind them and a double helix to graft them into place.

No words. A three-way staring contest on which floated the words Typhojem and vengeance and life. A flash of light and a meeting of minds and suddenly Casimir's power was not enough to connect him to that dark barren nest of wraiths and he was back on his knees before an empty throne. Here, however, another consciousness brushed his own, and Casimir instinctively knew it was that of the being which at Varek's command lent him its power. The Shard. There were no words there, a sound without cognate, a feeling raw and true. The Zabrak, despite his words, had gone to great lengths to enslave this life, farther lengths perhaps than the ones he had gone to in order to protect Andraste from similar enslavement.

Remember the touch of my mind to yours, Casimir thought to himself, and knew it could hear, and that perhaps its master could not.

He rose to his feet from the throne room floor. He was not entirely sure of what had happened, or what would happen in the coming days. He felt as if in one moment he had made a decision that would change his life. As Alcaeus' monstrosity began to wrench itself free from the black, gnarled claw which had once been his, Casimir felt a twinge of longing: the alien ache of a soul that was not his own. He smothered the impulse before it had time to take root. Suddenly very tired and very hungry, he took Andraste's lead and left the room in all its chaos and fire, and if they so wished, to the dogs who would tear themselves apart for no reason other than to shed blood.

As his eyes looked upon the wreckage of the throne room, so another pair gazed upon the tombs of Necropolis in all their grim glory, and another upon the steaming seas and smoldering craters of Barab I, and another into the mists of time to an era where Typhojem ruled. He moved his hands and their hands, in those places where his thoughts took him, moved in unison. Their power had merged, and like the water of many tributaries join together to form one almighty river, so too had a single mind formed.

He had things to meditate upon. Things which were larger and greater than himself, but not than all the selves Casimir sheltered.