A/N: We didn't reach 800 stones but are quite near, and I wanted to wrap up this part, so enjoy the bonus chapter.
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"My life spans millennia. Legions have risen to test me… My ascendance is inevitable. A day, a year, a millennium—it matters not. I hold the patience of stone and the will of stars. Your striving is insignificant. Let your death be the same." ―The Sith Emperor to the Hero of Tython
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[Present]
The boy's last words hung in the stale air.
I don't believe for a second that you woke up a forest full of terentateks just to give me directions.
Vitiate did not respond immediately.
He had not survived the collapse of empires, the slow grinding extinction of his own cult, the long and humiliating silence of centuries by responding immediately to anything. Patience was not a virtue he had cultivated. It was something closer to his native tongue.
He simply observed the child.
The mud-soaked undersuit. The cracked armor pieces scattered across the floor like discarded husks. The lightsaber held in a hand that was too small for the hilt, belonging to a body that was too young for the eyes sitting inside it. The posture was carefully arranged.
That was a bit interesting.
Even more was how he had deliberately concealed every bit of his emotional emissions through the force. With a competence that had absolutely no business existing in a frame this small.
And despite the non-chalance in his voice, the boy was alert. And prepared. The micro-tensions in his body. The exact way he postured. The hand on the lightsaber hadn't loosened its grip since the moment he had appeared.
Curious.
He drifted back, just slightly, creating enough distance that the instinctive defensive tension in the boy's shoulders would have room to ease. Small gestures. Environment management. The child was clearly intelligent enough to notice overt manipulation, so overt manipulation was simply not on the table.
"You called me a fragment," Vitiate said, shifting subjects with the smoothness of someone who had been having conversations at multiple levels simultaneously for longer than most civilizations had existed. "When describing my current state."
He let the crimson aura settle, deliberately drawing it back down to something less aggressive. A pressure reduction. Another small environmental adjustment.
"That implies," he continued, drifting a slow, wide arc around the perimeter of the boy's position without crossing into his immediate space, "that you possess some framework for understanding what a Force-bound consciousness looks like when it is... incomplete."
He glanced at the boy sidelong.
"For a child carrying a weapon that not yours, in a crashed ship on a world that does not appear on current navigational records..." He allowed mild, authentic curiosity into his voice. "That is a rather specialized body of knowledge."
He stopped his drift. Faced the boy squarely.
"Where did you learn to see that?"
The question hung in the air.
The boy's expression didn't change. Those too-old eyes simply tracked him with the focus of someone watching a card dealer's hands.
"Oh, so instead of answering why you brought me here," the child said flatly, "you're questioning me?"
A pause.
"What is that, deflection?"
Vitiate's left eye twitched. Barely. A micro-movement that lasted perhaps a tenth of a second.
Irritating.
"I brought you nowhere," Vitiate replied smoothly, recovering the neutral tone without missing a beat. "Your ship fell from the sky of its own accord. I merely... suggested a direction when the predators closed in."
"Right." The boy shifted his weight slightly, the lightsaber still held in a loose but ready grip. "And the terentateks just happened to chase me in a perfectly straight line toward your front door. Pure coincidence."
"The beasts hunt Force-sensitives," Vitiate said. "You are Force-sensitive. The mechanisms of instinct require no conspiracy."
"Sure." The child tilted his head. "But you didn't answer my question either, did you?"
Vitiate said nothing.
The boy smiled but it didn't reach his eyes.
"You asked where I learned to see fragments," the child continued, his tone conversational. "But I seem to feel that you don't actually care about the answer."
The boy took a half-step to the side, adjusting his angle without breaking eye contact.
"But to return your courtesy, here's my answer," he said. "I'm not playing your game. You want information? Great. Start with why you woke up a forest full of Sith-spawn murder-lizards and funneled me into this temple like a rat into a maze."
Vitiate observed the child for a long moment.
Interesting.
"You are quite perceptive for someone so young," Vitiate said.
"And you're quite evasive for someone who's supposedly been alone for centuries," the boy shot back. "I'd think you'd be dying for a real conversation by now."
Another twitch came to him through he buried this one deeper.
The boy had called him a fragment.
Vitiate turned the word over in his mind the way a gem-cutter turned a rough stone. Looking for the angle of cut. Looking for where the knowledge had originated.
The child knew his names. Plural. The layered forms of address that even his own acolytes had rarely been permitted to use simultaneously. Valkorion. Vitiate. Tenebrae.
An archive, perhaps. Some surviving cache of Old Republic records.
Dromund Kaas had been a sealed world for much of its history. But seals eroded. Records survived in unexpected places. It was not impossible that fragments of his history had leaked into whatever databases this era maintained.
What was more interesting — considerably more interesting — was the second thing the child had said.
Does this fragment even know what happened to your original self?
Vitiate was aware, in the abstract, that he was not whole. This was not a revelation the boy had delivered to him. He had known the moment his awareness had coalesced inside this temple again, some uncountable time ago, that something was missing. The vast reservoir of himself that should have been there, the accumulated essence of thousands of consumed worlds, was simply absent.
He was a fragment. He knew this.
What he did not know was the shape of the wound. What remained of his primary self. Whether anything of his greater design had survived the centuries.
The child had implied he knew.
And had chosen not to say.
Smart.
Not smart enough, of course. The boy was operating under the assumption that information withheld was information protected. But the information Vitiate actually needed was not the specific fate of his other self. That self of him was weak and if perished even with the power it commanded then it simply deserved the fate. He had discarded numerous selves in the past and that one shall just be another one.
What he needed was something far more specific.
Something that was currently sitting approximately two meters away from him, radiating a resonance that had no business existing in any era he recognized.
---
He had felt the moment the ship struck the ground.
But what allowed that was the pulse that had appeared some days prior, somewhere beyond the planet — an enormous, alien disturbance, something that had physically cracked open seals that had held for centuries. He had surged upward from his long dormancy riding that shockwave, pulling strength from the temple's nexus with a voracity he hadn't been capable of in... a very long time.
But the disturbance itself hadn't originated here. It had come from somewhere out in the galaxy and rolled through the Force like a stone dropped into still water.
Then the ship had fallen.
And curious yet, a life inside seemed to share some connection with that alien source.
He had felt the boy moving through the swamp immediately. And yes, the terentateks had registered the presence naturally — they were bred for exactly this, they didn't require his encouragement — but he had... assisted, slightly. Directed the trajectories. Ensured the child arrived at the temple rather than dying in the roots.
He hadn't been certain what he was drawing in.
He was still not entirely certain.
What he was certain of was that the resonance coming from this child was wrong in a way that deeply interested him.
It was not the clean signature of a Force-sensitive. It was neither the presence of a Jedi nor the burning of a Sith. Both existed in him, yes, the potential, as in every Force sensitive it did, but that was not what he was interested in. It was the strangeness in his existence that was so small that even him, who had millennia of experience, could barely perceive. It didn't belong to anything he had ever known. There was a hunger—
He stopped that particular line of thought from completing itself.
He needed more data before he named what he suspected.
---
"You carry pain," he observed, his tone gentle. Almost therapeutic. "Recent pain. I can sense it in the way you hold yourself. The way your thoughts spiral toward someone. That wasn't a lie, was it?"
He watched the boy's face carefully.
"That's quite the trick," the child said. His voice was level. "Reading emotions through the Force and pretending it's deep insight. Did that work on a lot of your cult members?"
Vitiate paused, perhaps wondering if he had sensed that wrong or had the boy really been pretending. No, the boy was just pretending...pretending not to care.
"I offer no tricks," Vitiate said. "Merely... understanding. You seek power to reclaim what was lost. This is not shameful. It is the most honest motivation that exists."
"Right." The boy shifted his grip on the lightsaber, waving it through the air, illuminating the dark "And let me guess — you can help me get strong enough to save her. All I have to do is trust you and walk into your definitely-not-a-trap magic basement."
"The trial is not a trap," Vitiate said. "It is an opportunity."
"For who?" the child asked. "Me, or you?"
Vitiate said nothing.
The boy smiled again. That same smile that didn't reach his eyes.
He was without a doubt one of the most irritating being that Vitiate had the displeasure of encountering in his last few millennium.
"You are quite confident in your analysis," Vitiate said.
"I'm confident you're full of shit," the boy replied. "There's a difference."
Answers, in his experience, were rarely delivered in words yet this boy was challenging whether rarely was perhaps an over expectation.
Vitiate let the silence stretch, closing his eyes to ponder.
The boy was too smart for the standard approach. That much was clear. Every angle he'd tried or could try — the gentle question, the emotional appeal, the philosophical framing or something else, it had and will be identified and deflected, that much he could sense without even the Force. It was slightly infuriating to admit, but this boy was similar to him in a way.
Interesting.
Who was he?
The Jedi didn't teach this certainly. And the brute that were the Sith had no patience for this.
This was something else.
Vitiate reassessed.
The boy understood the game too well. Which meant continuing to play the game was simply wasting time.
Amidst all this, he kept observing the boy's Force signature too. He couldn't be blamed. It was just too fascinating. Rarely did he encounter things that he couldn't understand. That Hero of Tython was one such anomaly, who in their conflict seemed to fight with a certainty and rhythm of having fought the same fight numerous time, capable of discerning his upcoming attacks before he even thought of them. Darth had spent eons pondering whether that it was just precognition taken to an extreme or something else yet he couldn't understand it till this day.
This boy...what he carried was a different flavor of irregularity, but an irregularity none-the-less.
The disturbance that had cracked his seals.
The disturbance that had woken him.
He had spent three thousand years consuming living essences. He knew what a Force-sensitive felt like from the inside, knew the specific flavor of potential, knew the texture of a strong bloodline versus a diluted one.
This was not that.
This was something the Force itself seemed to be oriented toward. Not the way iron filings oriented toward a magnet. More the way a river oriented toward the sea. As if something in this child's core was pulling at the fabric of the Force in a direction that had no name.
Somewhere out there, something had happened. Something had died and been replaced, or something had been born, or the Force itself had done something that he didn't have adequate vocabulary to describe because he had never felt anything like it before.
He just knew that what sat in front of him was the epicenter.
And he also knew — with the patience of someone who had dismantled civilizations by simply knowing more than everyone in the room — that the child did not understand what he was.
He could tell by the complete absence of any deliberate concealment around it. The child was actively guarding his mind — a technique of some competence, and recent acquisition if the slightly rough edges of it were any indicator — but the seed wasn't being hidden because the child simply didn't know it was there to hide.
He had initially intended to move quickly. Find an angle of psychological leverage, establish some form of trust or necessity, and guide the child toward the thing that was calling for him. The sacrifice that would allow this seed to bloom.
But if the boy didn't know what he was...
Then the boy couldn't be reasoned with about it.
And if he couldn't be reasoned with...
Vitiate allowed himself a very small, very internal shift of intent.
He would need to simply take what he needed.
It would be a waste. The child was genuinely interesting, in the way that a particularly complex puzzle was interesting. Given time and a cooperative subject, there would be much to learn here.
But cooperative subjects were rarely available, and time, in his current state, was not a resource he possessed in abundance.
He needed this. And he needed access to whatever had caused that alien pulse. And the most direct path to both of those things was through the boy's mind and body.
At that moment, whatever the secrets the boy held, all that would be his to consume. His to ponder.
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[Bonus Images]
Next update tomorrow at usual time, don't forget to vote!
END OF CHAPTER
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Author's Ramblings: You know, I had recently checked my bank account and encountered great disappointments between expectations and reality. Who knew that setting up auto-pay and buying extra fruits and stuff takes money and on top of that, because its all digital, you don't even feel it at the moment.
So began my desire to budget things and keep every transactions on records. As like anyone who had tried to do that, I found myself encountering dozen of apps with 5 features available and 10 behind premium. Some apps had one feature, while others another, but not one with all features that I wanted.
And cursed my decison making is, I thought why not make one ourself. And make it opensource and free. Also thought of some features like autoparsing messages to add transactions and even can add investments like stocks etfs etc and it will keep it updated for you and all
Lo and behold, I made one! through its still work in progress but I feel quite giddy seeing it. Will post image in the comment, feedback is welcome, even for designs etc.
END OF RAMBLING (Did someone say I was product pitching? teehee)
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