<![CDATA[House Horuset - Stories]]> https://www.horuset.com/ Mon, 20 Apr 2026 08:33:44 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[[IC-Journal] - The Cookbook]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1526 Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:48:01 +0000 Amara]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1526 ((The following is an IC review of the character Amara Thayne. The observations, notes and thoughts are the characters. Now, I'm sure I don't have to mention this but getting your hands on the things in here IS possible. But should be difficult - if you want to make the attempt. Let me know ;) ))

Hidden, deep in the personal files upon the datapad registered to Apprentice Amara Thayne there was a file. Oddly named: "Cookbook" - the name meant to distract from the true nature of the work. A series of both text and audio files recorded by the pale faced apprentice herself. Ranging as far back as her first day at the Horuset estates. Those first entries were often filled with questions, self pitty - reflections and angry rants about those red skinned bastards. There was one red skinned bastard she'd spoken off fondly, though mentions of him had slowly faded away.

One entry remembers meeting the twi'lek overseer for the first time. Being choked out for no apparent reason and left freezing in the snow. Another entry remembers Apprentice Mharn, chewing out another acolyte - then throwing her into the wall. Again, for no apparent reason. 

The more modern entries are starting to sound colder. More calculating, though she will still occasionally rant about the red skinned menace. Her tone however about some of them having changed. 

//Open secure file
//Password - ********************
//Authorizing
//Authorising
//Password accepted
//Begin recording...

The voice of Amara broke into the dark silence..

Entry - 23

I smell like a swamp - no surprise, that operation might as well have been in a swamp given how sweaty.. Why would I care about that. The hunt was a success, the sith have once more conquered.. wildlife. Though I must admit, like the vine-cat those lizards were magnificent creatures. Don't see what Nivalis plans to do with that damned frog - and I don't want to know either. 

There was a pause in the monologue - the sounds of clasps being undone, and something heavyish being heaved off of a body. A sigh of relief also followed.

Blacksqualls great tits does it feel to be out of that thing.. it is a fine piece of armor.. but horrible in heat. Where was I? Right.. the frog, and the operation. The island was clamed - I just hope it was worth the effort. 

Another brief pause. Sounds of movement in whatever room Amara was occupying at the moment.

Veilak.. Zveris - I'm just going to keep calling him 'the overseer', easier that way. Has taught me the basics of Jar'kai - still no word on that saberstaff.. maybe one day. 

Neithyra.. my.. unofficial sister, something seems to grind her gears. Blacksqualls tits that woman - I didn't think anything could get past her shields. But seems someone shot an ion torpedo right at her exhaustport.

Another pause.

Someone's coming...

//End log]]> ((The following is an IC review of the character Amara Thayne. The observations, notes and thoughts are the characters. Now, I'm sure I don't have to mention this but getting your hands on the things in here IS possible. But should be difficult - if you want to make the attempt. Let me know ;) ))

Hidden, deep in the personal files upon the datapad registered to Apprentice Amara Thayne there was a file. Oddly named: "Cookbook" - the name meant to distract from the true nature of the work. A series of both text and audio files recorded by the pale faced apprentice herself. Ranging as far back as her first day at the Horuset estates. Those first entries were often filled with questions, self pitty - reflections and angry rants about those red skinned bastards. There was one red skinned bastard she'd spoken off fondly, though mentions of him had slowly faded away.

One entry remembers meeting the twi'lek overseer for the first time. Being choked out for no apparent reason and left freezing in the snow. Another entry remembers Apprentice Mharn, chewing out another acolyte - then throwing her into the wall. Again, for no apparent reason. 

The more modern entries are starting to sound colder. More calculating, though she will still occasionally rant about the red skinned menace. Her tone however about some of them having changed. 

//Open secure file
//Password - ********************
//Authorizing
//Authorising
//Password accepted
//Begin recording...

The voice of Amara broke into the dark silence..

Entry - 23

I smell like a swamp - no surprise, that operation might as well have been in a swamp given how sweaty.. Why would I care about that. The hunt was a success, the sith have once more conquered.. wildlife. Though I must admit, like the vine-cat those lizards were magnificent creatures. Don't see what Nivalis plans to do with that damned frog - and I don't want to know either. 

There was a pause in the monologue - the sounds of clasps being undone, and something heavyish being heaved off of a body. A sigh of relief also followed.

Blacksqualls great tits does it feel to be out of that thing.. it is a fine piece of armor.. but horrible in heat. Where was I? Right.. the frog, and the operation. The island was clamed - I just hope it was worth the effort. 

Another brief pause. Sounds of movement in whatever room Amara was occupying at the moment.

Veilak.. Zveris - I'm just going to keep calling him 'the overseer', easier that way. Has taught me the basics of Jar'kai - still no word on that saberstaff.. maybe one day. 

Neithyra.. my.. unofficial sister, something seems to grind her gears. Blacksqualls tits that woman - I didn't think anything could get past her shields. But seems someone shot an ion torpedo right at her exhaustport.

Another pause.

Someone's coming...

//End log]]> <![CDATA[[IC] Holocron - Darth Trakaton Kalkoran]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1478 Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:58:36 +0000 Trakaton Kalkoran]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1478
The Holocron of Darth Trakaton Kalkoran

[Image: 4Po9r5D.png]
The Holocron of Darth Trakaton Kalkoran was an imposing creation. Pyramid shaped with four sides, each was detailed in a different way telling some tale that the Dark Lord wished to ensure some remnants of was passed down through the millenia. To those who knew the tales and stories they depicted, what was on the holocron itself was clear enough. The first face was of Darth Kalkoran and Lord Sanguinis's faces, turned towards one another both without helmet, revealing their Pureblood features. The second face was a depiction of Darth Kalkoran, Lord Sanguinis, Lord Hazlem and some others defeating Zarrious Zynn, those fateful final moments captured forever. The third face was of Darth Kalkoran himself, stood on a rocky outcrop commanding a legion of Imperial Soldiers in battle. The fourth face was taken up in it's entirety by a detailed and runed version of the House Kalkoran sigil, High Sith script used to repeat the word 'Dominion' around the circularity of the blazoned symbol.

The holocron was always cold to the touch. It's metal features made entirely of Sith Steel and designed alike old architecture from Korriban. Finer details were inlaid with gold, silver and platinum alike to give stark constrast between the robust and ancient Sith Steel metals and the more modern stylised decorations. The finer metals were used to punctuate certain aspects of each of the designs on the separate faces of the holocron itself. Between the metal structures, purple crystal lattices could be seen criss-crossed throughout and filling in many of the gaps, adding designwork and revealing the holocron's constant inner glow. The holocron was seeped in the Dark Side of the force, a presence not too dissimilar to Darth Kalkoran's own laying in wait within. It was clear that the Holocron had been created with longevity in mind, it would likely take centuries before the holocron even began to show any signs of what may become it's own storied history.

If accessed and the Gatekeeper within was willing, the user of the Holocron would see Darth Kalkoran in full. His blackened armour was proudly presented, the long cloak hung from his shoulders heavily, giving away the weight of it just as it did in life. The Gatekeeper's arms would be folded across his chest and the custom-fit plates of his armour looked as comfortable as an embrace. The scar on the right side of his face would be barely visible, his head ever so slightly turned to the right of the user, as if looking over their shoulder at something behind them. 

The holocron was newly made and it's contents was still being added to religously by Darth Kalkoran. Not everything that the Dark Lord would wish to be part of the holocron was added to it yet.
The History and Life of Darth Trakaton Kalkoran:
Spoiler: Before Acolytehood:
Spoiler: Acolytehood within the Horuset Powerbase:
Spoiler: Ascending:
Spoiler: The Apprentice of Lord Saud:
Spoiler: The Apprentice of Darth Crannus Horuset:
Spoiler: Ascending II:
Spoiler: A Lord of the Sith I:
Spoiler: A Lord of the Sith II:
Spoiler: A Lord of the Sith III:
Spoiler: A Lord of the Sith IV:
Spoiler: A Lord of the Sith V:
Spoiler: Ascending III:
Spoiler: A Dark Lord of the Sith I:
Spoiler: A Dark Lord of the Sith II:
The Teachings of Darth Trakaton Kalkoran:
Spoiler: Philosophy:
Spoiler: The Sith Code:
Spoiler: Tradition within the Sith Empire:
Spoiler: Small Scale Military Land Tactics:
Spoiler: Grand Scale Military Land Strategies:
Spoiler: Grand Scale Military Naval Strategies:
Spoiler: Lightsaber Combat I:
Spoiler: Lightsaber Combat II:
Spoiler: Lightsaber Combat III:
Spoiler: Lightsaber Combat IV:
Spoiler: Telekinetic Force Powers:
Spoiler: Barrier Force Powers:
Spoiler: Form V: Djem So:
Spoiler: Form V: Shien:
Spoiler: Control Force Powers:
Spoiler: Sith Sorcery:
[Image: oJUse2q.png]
]]>
The Holocron of Darth Trakaton Kalkoran

[Image: 4Po9r5D.png]
The Holocron of Darth Trakaton Kalkoran was an imposing creation. Pyramid shaped with four sides, each was detailed in a different way telling some tale that the Dark Lord wished to ensure some remnants of was passed down through the millenia. To those who knew the tales and stories they depicted, what was on the holocron itself was clear enough. The first face was of Darth Kalkoran and Lord Sanguinis's faces, turned towards one another both without helmet, revealing their Pureblood features. The second face was a depiction of Darth Kalkoran, Lord Sanguinis, Lord Hazlem and some others defeating Zarrious Zynn, those fateful final moments captured forever. The third face was of Darth Kalkoran himself, stood on a rocky outcrop commanding a legion of Imperial Soldiers in battle. The fourth face was taken up in it's entirety by a detailed and runed version of the House Kalkoran sigil, High Sith script used to repeat the word 'Dominion' around the circularity of the blazoned symbol.

The holocron was always cold to the touch. It's metal features made entirely of Sith Steel and designed alike old architecture from Korriban. Finer details were inlaid with gold, silver and platinum alike to give stark constrast between the robust and ancient Sith Steel metals and the more modern stylised decorations. The finer metals were used to punctuate certain aspects of each of the designs on the separate faces of the holocron itself. Between the metal structures, purple crystal lattices could be seen criss-crossed throughout and filling in many of the gaps, adding designwork and revealing the holocron's constant inner glow. The holocron was seeped in the Dark Side of the force, a presence not too dissimilar to Darth Kalkoran's own laying in wait within. It was clear that the Holocron had been created with longevity in mind, it would likely take centuries before the holocron even began to show any signs of what may become it's own storied history.

If accessed and the Gatekeeper within was willing, the user of the Holocron would see Darth Kalkoran in full. His blackened armour was proudly presented, the long cloak hung from his shoulders heavily, giving away the weight of it just as it did in life. The Gatekeeper's arms would be folded across his chest and the custom-fit plates of his armour looked as comfortable as an embrace. The scar on the right side of his face would be barely visible, his head ever so slightly turned to the right of the user, as if looking over their shoulder at something behind them. 

The holocron was newly made and it's contents was still being added to religously by Darth Kalkoran. Not everything that the Dark Lord would wish to be part of the holocron was added to it yet.
The History and Life of Darth Trakaton Kalkoran:
Spoiler: Before Acolytehood:
Spoiler: Acolytehood within the Horuset Powerbase:
Spoiler: Ascending:
Spoiler: The Apprentice of Lord Saud:
Spoiler: The Apprentice of Darth Crannus Horuset:
Spoiler: Ascending II:
Spoiler: A Lord of the Sith I:
Spoiler: A Lord of the Sith II:
Spoiler: A Lord of the Sith III:
Spoiler: A Lord of the Sith IV:
Spoiler: A Lord of the Sith V:
Spoiler: Ascending III:
Spoiler: A Dark Lord of the Sith I:
Spoiler: A Dark Lord of the Sith II:
The Teachings of Darth Trakaton Kalkoran:
Spoiler: Philosophy:
Spoiler: The Sith Code:
Spoiler: Tradition within the Sith Empire:
Spoiler: Small Scale Military Land Tactics:
Spoiler: Grand Scale Military Land Strategies:
Spoiler: Grand Scale Military Naval Strategies:
Spoiler: Lightsaber Combat I:
Spoiler: Lightsaber Combat II:
Spoiler: Lightsaber Combat III:
Spoiler: Lightsaber Combat IV:
Spoiler: Telekinetic Force Powers:
Spoiler: Barrier Force Powers:
Spoiler: Form V: Djem So:
Spoiler: Form V: Shien:
Spoiler: Control Force Powers:
Spoiler: Sith Sorcery:
[Image: oJUse2q.png]
]]> <![CDATA[The Moff's Hunt]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1458 Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:54:04 +0000 Krassus Horuset]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1458 Part I:

The glow of the cig rendered the speeder’s tinted viewport briefly opaque as Kemma took another drag, the dimmed view of the thorny brushes whipping past giving way to the governor of Nam’ta’s own reflection. Dark circles ringed her deep-set emerald eyes, and her once vibrant orange hair, now streaked with silvery gray at the edges, was tied into a bun above her head. For a moment, Kemma barely recognized the woman staring back at her, so worn down by the pressures of recent years, yet the thought faded as the reflection was obscured by a soft plume of smoke. Her attention shifted from the window as the speeder door slid open with a mechanical hiss.

“We’ll be arriving shortly, Governor. I took the liberty of confirming our arrival with the Moff’s staff,” Ensign Ernhard announced with his distinct Kaasian accent, offering a curt bow before seating himself across from her again. His face was gaunt, his raven-black hair trimmed tightly in perfect military fashion. His Imperial Ensign’s uniform clung to his frame with meticulous precision, as if tailored to perfection.

“Very good, Ensign,” Kemma replied, taking a final drag before snuffing the cig in the ashtray. She regarded her new aide a moment longer as he gathered the datapads into his suitcase. Handpicked by Moff Graush, Ensign Ernhard Kolinth was effective enough. Loyal, diligent, and obedient on the surface. The embodiment of Imperial precision. But Kemma knew he was also the Moff’s eyes and ears in her office. It was simply part of the game played within the Court of Governors of the Atrivis Sector.

A court that had once again been summoned to convene on the sector capital of Horuz, at the Moff’s pleasure, to discuss the war. Normally such meetings occurred via holo-connection or at the Moff’s palace when he desired a more personal touch. But today, the location was different. Kemma and her staff had barely stepped off their shuttle when they were informed by the Moff’s aide, Ensign Loring, that the day’s meeting would take place at one of the Moff’s illustrious hunts.

Kemma had heard rumors of these hunts, though she had never attended one. The thought of such an event, rife with decadence, sycophancy, and debauchery, hardly excited her. Nevertheless, she obliged and boarded the landspeeder that would take them nearly an hour into the dense, toxic, barb-filled, and humid jungles of Horuz.

When the vehicle finally came to a halt, Kemma slipped the cig container into her uniform pocket and steeled herself. She ensured her Governor’s insignia was secure, placed her cap atop her head, and slid her pale fingers into her leather gloves before stepping out. She inhaled one last breath of climate-controlled air before facing the oppressive humidity of Horuz.

Sweat formed instantly on her brow as her eyes adjusted to the brightness. She and her staff marched up the hill toward the Moff’s so-called hunting party. For someone accustomed to the austerity of wartime Nam’ta, the aristocratic spectacle was almost grotesque. The hilltop was alive with activity. Lavish tents, larger and better stocked than most hotel suites, dotted the crest. Tables overflowed with extravagant dishes. Attendants, slaves, servants, and courtiers moved fluidly among clusters of Imperial high society, each group engaged in its own web of pleasantries and politics.

Guests ranged from high-ranking military officials to sharply dressed nobles of Dromund Kaas, influential business magnates, scientists of the Imperial Science Bureau, and even Sith. Among the crowd, her eyes caught a familiar likeness.

Wilhuff Kaldon, younger brother of Ozil Kaldon and newly appointed Director of the Imperial Kaldon Industrial Group, sat among Imperial officers and corporate magnates. His new Imperial position had elevated him to a table closer to the Moff’s own. He offered Kemma nothing more than a passing nod as she moved past him. The hunt and camp itself truly a celebration of the strange social norms within the highest echelons of Imperial society. Even among the gathered masses, all in their own right important enough to be here by the personal invitation of Moff Graush, Kemma knew there was a clear divide to those with the eyes to see it.

The home planet and standing of Imperial Nobles could be distinguished by the knowing eye by the slightest variations in their otherwise highly fashionable attires. Marking them as haling from the Northern Territories or even distinguishably from the various worlds of the the Imperial Heartland itself.

The most prominent class of them seemingly of the Kaasian High Nobility of the Imperial Capital, to which kemma Knew, their host Maximilian Graush himself also belonged. Military officers mingled either among themselves or with the nobles and goverment officials from similar planetary backgrounds. There even seemed to be some divide between the Imperial Military officers depending on their belonging to the Imperial Nobility, or lack thereof. Not even military rank and prestige seeming to overcome the divide between family lines, sith blood ties and ancient ancestry that still reigned supreme among the highest echelons of Imperial Society. 

All of this was foreign to Kemma, an intricate and suffocating dance of etiquette, rivalry, and power. Centuries of scheming hid beneath laughter and fine wine, like a heavy fog that never lifted.

Even the faint shimmer of the ray shield surrounding the camp felt symbolic of this tension. Broad-shouldered Imperial commandos served as quiet sentries along the perimeter, the Moff’s personal fist reduced to background adornment. Little more than sentries lingering in the background of his aristocratic display that threatened to give Kemma a headache as she marched on into the center of the cesspit of decadence. Moff Maximilian Graush himself.

The Sector Moff of the Atrivis Sector was stood socialising at the far edge of camp, the cliffside that overlooked the clearing of the hunt’s killing field below. Ringed by several more commandos that stood nearby, acting as little more than glorified footmen as they held onto the hunting rifles of Graush’s esteemed guests. The Moff himself was surrounded by several shady-looking figures of the Imperial elite and military. Some she could instantly recognise as the other governors of the sector. The eldest of which, Governor Keersk of Imperial Gibbela, set his sunken gaze upon Kemma first, standing closest to the Moff.

If the Court of the Atrivis Sector’s governors was indeed little more than a kennel of dogs snarling desperately for the Moff’s favour, Governor Keersk was the one who barked the loudest. Old, entrenched and entirely too pleased with himself, he always sought to mount the dais above the rest of them. And over her in particular. Seeing Nam’ta and Kemma herself as little more than youthful upstarts and alien outsiders.

And so he cleared his throat to steel the Moff's attention away from his chat with an Imperial Admiral, setting his gaze upon Kemma as he spoke in his nasal tone. “Your Excellency, it seems Ralter has at last deigned to join us. How wonderful of you to finally arrive. We had been waiting...” He offered as he set his hatefilled eyes upon the younger Governor from over the bridge of his crooker nose.

Kemma did not acknowledge him, only offering the Moff a short bow as she came to a halt. Keeping her eyes fixed upon Moff Graush as she answered. “That would still be Governor Ralter to you, Governor Keersk… and I am certain the Moff can forgive my lateness. Such delays are inevitable when one’s system fights a war… and not only plays at one.” She hissed out, sparing only the briefest sideways glance to Keersk. Who parted his chapped lips to reply before he was interrupted by a raised, monstrous hand from the mountainous Moff who let out a bemused “Hah!”

His gibbs trembling like puddings as he silenced the display. The dealings of his governors amusing but no less unimportant. “Governor Ralter, my dear… how good it is to see you again.” Graush offered with a welcoming gesture of his arms, as an uncanny imitation of a smile tugged at his large lips. The rolls of his face gleamed with sweat from the Horuz heat and humidity, but it did not seem to bother the Moff in the slightest. His deep-set hate-filled black eyes shone with amusement at the day’s festivities.  “Indeed, your delay was expected… the duties of war can make latecomers of us all.” He said, voice thick as tar. “And I know how fond you are of overseeing things directly… yet I hope you find Ensign Kolinth a useful addition to your staff despite such?” He offered.

“He serves well enough, your Excellency…” Kemma replied, unflinching. “He is quick and efficient and never misses a detail in his reports. Something I am certain you know well.” She offered, her eyes meeting the Moff’s gaze. Her accusation veiled just thinly enough to be acceptable. And, it seemed, amusing.

The Moff simply chuckled, his cheeks rippling like pudding. “Quite right, Governor Ralter…” He offered before leaning forward subtly. “It is why I know as well as you that there are ample things for us to discuss today.” He offered, towering over the Governor of Imperial Nam’ta as his expression hardened.

But before another word could be exchanged, the tension was broken by the approach of today’s huntmaster: Colonel Demetrius Cabbel of the Alien Control Initiative, who Kemma knew all too well.

The Colonel had kept slightly off to the side, a finger on his earpiece as he gazed into the jungle with his binoculars, but had now approached directly, clearing his throat to grab the Moff’s attention. “Your Excellency. First patrol reports another flock of them should enter the killing field shortly.” News that seemed to make Graush once again perk up with enthusiasm as he smiled and let out an “Excellent!” Turning away from Kemma and the governors to the party itself, bringing his large hands to his lips to propel his booming voice over the festivities.

“Friends, to your rifles! There is good sport to be had!” He called out, as several individuals rose from their seats and moved to collect their hunting rifles from their retainers. Marching to the crest of the hill as Graush turned to his governors, shooing them away with little more than a stern glance. Kemma stepped back just a moment later than her more acquainted peers. Letting out a soft sigh as she set her eyes back to Moff Graush. Watching on as the Moff snapped his fingers.

A broad-framed commando that lingered nearby holding Graush’s rifle sprang into action at once. Moving forward to offer Graush the large rifle before he turned on his axis and knelt down into the dirt before Graush. The soldier angling his back forward, letting Graush rest his rifle upon his shoulders. The Imperial commando’s years of training culminating in service as a human bipod. A role, Kemma noted, he had fulfilled countless times today during this hunt based on the dried mud staining his knee pads.

Moff Graush popped his aim-assisting reticle back in front of his eyes as he rested the weapon on the soldier’s right shoulder and steadied his aim. Taking a deep breath as he adjusted his footing alongside other members partaking in the hunt. The rest of the nobles joined to spectate with bated breath alongside the cluster of governors as they waited in silence.

The silence lingered for some time, broken only by the occasional cough, before the familiar snarls and barks of Akk Dogs sounded from the jungle below. Soft at first, then ever closer. Closing in toward the clearing the hill was situated above, a rumbling in the brush moving right to left as they drove their prey forwards. Anticipation building. Kemma could not help but look to the clearing as well, waiting the final moments before… there. The first… prey? Would emerge from the dense, thorny shrubbery.

Kemma’s eyes went wide with shock as they appeared to be not beasts, but sentients! Humanoid aliens of all shapes, species and sizes appearing from the brush. Their clothes and skin torn and tattered by the barbs and thorns of Horuz’s inhospitable jungle as they darted into the clearing like scared hares. The Akk Dogs close on their heels when suddenly… BLAM. The first shot rang out through the clearing. Striking one of the aliens, a young Rodian, cleanly in the torso as he collapsed there in the grass.

A hail of bolts from the mound followed. The assembled line of nobility, moguls and officers alike reveling in the barbaric pleasantry as they fired away. Kemma watched on in horror as they picked off the aliens that darted across the field. Those who stopped were caught by the hunting hounds that chased them, the Akks tearing them to pieces.

The hounds’ Imperial handlers halted by the edge of the jungle clearing. Waiting. Blasters trained on the running prey, picking off any that were missed by the hunting party before they could disappear into the opposite treeline. Ensuring all died there in the killing field.

It was a massacre. One that made Ralter’s stomach twist and turn in her gut. And one the gathered masses seemed to delight in.

Kemma watched, sickened, as the clearing became a slaughter pit. Around her, the crowd cheered. The Empire’s finest; its elite, its masters, its nobles, basked in the pleasure of killing. And all she could do was stand there and bear witness...]]> Part I:

The glow of the cig rendered the speeder’s tinted viewport briefly opaque as Kemma took another drag, the dimmed view of the thorny brushes whipping past giving way to the governor of Nam’ta’s own reflection. Dark circles ringed her deep-set emerald eyes, and her once vibrant orange hair, now streaked with silvery gray at the edges, was tied into a bun above her head. For a moment, Kemma barely recognized the woman staring back at her, so worn down by the pressures of recent years, yet the thought faded as the reflection was obscured by a soft plume of smoke. Her attention shifted from the window as the speeder door slid open with a mechanical hiss.

“We’ll be arriving shortly, Governor. I took the liberty of confirming our arrival with the Moff’s staff,” Ensign Ernhard announced with his distinct Kaasian accent, offering a curt bow before seating himself across from her again. His face was gaunt, his raven-black hair trimmed tightly in perfect military fashion. His Imperial Ensign’s uniform clung to his frame with meticulous precision, as if tailored to perfection.

“Very good, Ensign,” Kemma replied, taking a final drag before snuffing the cig in the ashtray. She regarded her new aide a moment longer as he gathered the datapads into his suitcase. Handpicked by Moff Graush, Ensign Ernhard Kolinth was effective enough. Loyal, diligent, and obedient on the surface. The embodiment of Imperial precision. But Kemma knew he was also the Moff’s eyes and ears in her office. It was simply part of the game played within the Court of Governors of the Atrivis Sector.

A court that had once again been summoned to convene on the sector capital of Horuz, at the Moff’s pleasure, to discuss the war. Normally such meetings occurred via holo-connection or at the Moff’s palace when he desired a more personal touch. But today, the location was different. Kemma and her staff had barely stepped off their shuttle when they were informed by the Moff’s aide, Ensign Loring, that the day’s meeting would take place at one of the Moff’s illustrious hunts.

Kemma had heard rumors of these hunts, though she had never attended one. The thought of such an event, rife with decadence, sycophancy, and debauchery, hardly excited her. Nevertheless, she obliged and boarded the landspeeder that would take them nearly an hour into the dense, toxic, barb-filled, and humid jungles of Horuz.

When the vehicle finally came to a halt, Kemma slipped the cig container into her uniform pocket and steeled herself. She ensured her Governor’s insignia was secure, placed her cap atop her head, and slid her pale fingers into her leather gloves before stepping out. She inhaled one last breath of climate-controlled air before facing the oppressive humidity of Horuz.

Sweat formed instantly on her brow as her eyes adjusted to the brightness. She and her staff marched up the hill toward the Moff’s so-called hunting party. For someone accustomed to the austerity of wartime Nam’ta, the aristocratic spectacle was almost grotesque. The hilltop was alive with activity. Lavish tents, larger and better stocked than most hotel suites, dotted the crest. Tables overflowed with extravagant dishes. Attendants, slaves, servants, and courtiers moved fluidly among clusters of Imperial high society, each group engaged in its own web of pleasantries and politics.

Guests ranged from high-ranking military officials to sharply dressed nobles of Dromund Kaas, influential business magnates, scientists of the Imperial Science Bureau, and even Sith. Among the crowd, her eyes caught a familiar likeness.

Wilhuff Kaldon, younger brother of Ozil Kaldon and newly appointed Director of the Imperial Kaldon Industrial Group, sat among Imperial officers and corporate magnates. His new Imperial position had elevated him to a table closer to the Moff’s own. He offered Kemma nothing more than a passing nod as she moved past him. The hunt and camp itself truly a celebration of the strange social norms within the highest echelons of Imperial society. Even among the gathered masses, all in their own right important enough to be here by the personal invitation of Moff Graush, Kemma knew there was a clear divide to those with the eyes to see it.

The home planet and standing of Imperial Nobles could be distinguished by the knowing eye by the slightest variations in their otherwise highly fashionable attires. Marking them as haling from the Northern Territories or even distinguishably from the various worlds of the the Imperial Heartland itself.

The most prominent class of them seemingly of the Kaasian High Nobility of the Imperial Capital, to which kemma Knew, their host Maximilian Graush himself also belonged. Military officers mingled either among themselves or with the nobles and goverment officials from similar planetary backgrounds. There even seemed to be some divide between the Imperial Military officers depending on their belonging to the Imperial Nobility, or lack thereof. Not even military rank and prestige seeming to overcome the divide between family lines, sith blood ties and ancient ancestry that still reigned supreme among the highest echelons of Imperial Society. 

All of this was foreign to Kemma, an intricate and suffocating dance of etiquette, rivalry, and power. Centuries of scheming hid beneath laughter and fine wine, like a heavy fog that never lifted.

Even the faint shimmer of the ray shield surrounding the camp felt symbolic of this tension. Broad-shouldered Imperial commandos served as quiet sentries along the perimeter, the Moff’s personal fist reduced to background adornment. Little more than sentries lingering in the background of his aristocratic display that threatened to give Kemma a headache as she marched on into the center of the cesspit of decadence. Moff Maximilian Graush himself.

The Sector Moff of the Atrivis Sector was stood socialising at the far edge of camp, the cliffside that overlooked the clearing of the hunt’s killing field below. Ringed by several more commandos that stood nearby, acting as little more than glorified footmen as they held onto the hunting rifles of Graush’s esteemed guests. The Moff himself was surrounded by several shady-looking figures of the Imperial elite and military. Some she could instantly recognise as the other governors of the sector. The eldest of which, Governor Keersk of Imperial Gibbela, set his sunken gaze upon Kemma first, standing closest to the Moff.

If the Court of the Atrivis Sector’s governors was indeed little more than a kennel of dogs snarling desperately for the Moff’s favour, Governor Keersk was the one who barked the loudest. Old, entrenched and entirely too pleased with himself, he always sought to mount the dais above the rest of them. And over her in particular. Seeing Nam’ta and Kemma herself as little more than youthful upstarts and alien outsiders.

And so he cleared his throat to steel the Moff's attention away from his chat with an Imperial Admiral, setting his gaze upon Kemma as he spoke in his nasal tone. “Your Excellency, it seems Ralter has at last deigned to join us. How wonderful of you to finally arrive. We had been waiting...” He offered as he set his hatefilled eyes upon the younger Governor from over the bridge of his crooker nose.

Kemma did not acknowledge him, only offering the Moff a short bow as she came to a halt. Keeping her eyes fixed upon Moff Graush as she answered. “That would still be Governor Ralter to you, Governor Keersk… and I am certain the Moff can forgive my lateness. Such delays are inevitable when one’s system fights a war… and not only plays at one.” She hissed out, sparing only the briefest sideways glance to Keersk. Who parted his chapped lips to reply before he was interrupted by a raised, monstrous hand from the mountainous Moff who let out a bemused “Hah!”

His gibbs trembling like puddings as he silenced the display. The dealings of his governors amusing but no less unimportant. “Governor Ralter, my dear… how good it is to see you again.” Graush offered with a welcoming gesture of his arms, as an uncanny imitation of a smile tugged at his large lips. The rolls of his face gleamed with sweat from the Horuz heat and humidity, but it did not seem to bother the Moff in the slightest. His deep-set hate-filled black eyes shone with amusement at the day’s festivities.  “Indeed, your delay was expected… the duties of war can make latecomers of us all.” He said, voice thick as tar. “And I know how fond you are of overseeing things directly… yet I hope you find Ensign Kolinth a useful addition to your staff despite such?” He offered.

“He serves well enough, your Excellency…” Kemma replied, unflinching. “He is quick and efficient and never misses a detail in his reports. Something I am certain you know well.” She offered, her eyes meeting the Moff’s gaze. Her accusation veiled just thinly enough to be acceptable. And, it seemed, amusing.

The Moff simply chuckled, his cheeks rippling like pudding. “Quite right, Governor Ralter…” He offered before leaning forward subtly. “It is why I know as well as you that there are ample things for us to discuss today.” He offered, towering over the Governor of Imperial Nam’ta as his expression hardened.

But before another word could be exchanged, the tension was broken by the approach of today’s huntmaster: Colonel Demetrius Cabbel of the Alien Control Initiative, who Kemma knew all too well.

The Colonel had kept slightly off to the side, a finger on his earpiece as he gazed into the jungle with his binoculars, but had now approached directly, clearing his throat to grab the Moff’s attention. “Your Excellency. First patrol reports another flock of them should enter the killing field shortly.” News that seemed to make Graush once again perk up with enthusiasm as he smiled and let out an “Excellent!” Turning away from Kemma and the governors to the party itself, bringing his large hands to his lips to propel his booming voice over the festivities.

“Friends, to your rifles! There is good sport to be had!” He called out, as several individuals rose from their seats and moved to collect their hunting rifles from their retainers. Marching to the crest of the hill as Graush turned to his governors, shooing them away with little more than a stern glance. Kemma stepped back just a moment later than her more acquainted peers. Letting out a soft sigh as she set her eyes back to Moff Graush. Watching on as the Moff snapped his fingers.

A broad-framed commando that lingered nearby holding Graush’s rifle sprang into action at once. Moving forward to offer Graush the large rifle before he turned on his axis and knelt down into the dirt before Graush. The soldier angling his back forward, letting Graush rest his rifle upon his shoulders. The Imperial commando’s years of training culminating in service as a human bipod. A role, Kemma noted, he had fulfilled countless times today during this hunt based on the dried mud staining his knee pads.

Moff Graush popped his aim-assisting reticle back in front of his eyes as he rested the weapon on the soldier’s right shoulder and steadied his aim. Taking a deep breath as he adjusted his footing alongside other members partaking in the hunt. The rest of the nobles joined to spectate with bated breath alongside the cluster of governors as they waited in silence.

The silence lingered for some time, broken only by the occasional cough, before the familiar snarls and barks of Akk Dogs sounded from the jungle below. Soft at first, then ever closer. Closing in toward the clearing the hill was situated above, a rumbling in the brush moving right to left as they drove their prey forwards. Anticipation building. Kemma could not help but look to the clearing as well, waiting the final moments before… there. The first… prey? Would emerge from the dense, thorny shrubbery.

Kemma’s eyes went wide with shock as they appeared to be not beasts, but sentients! Humanoid aliens of all shapes, species and sizes appearing from the brush. Their clothes and skin torn and tattered by the barbs and thorns of Horuz’s inhospitable jungle as they darted into the clearing like scared hares. The Akk Dogs close on their heels when suddenly… BLAM. The first shot rang out through the clearing. Striking one of the aliens, a young Rodian, cleanly in the torso as he collapsed there in the grass.

A hail of bolts from the mound followed. The assembled line of nobility, moguls and officers alike reveling in the barbaric pleasantry as they fired away. Kemma watched on in horror as they picked off the aliens that darted across the field. Those who stopped were caught by the hunting hounds that chased them, the Akks tearing them to pieces.

The hounds’ Imperial handlers halted by the edge of the jungle clearing. Waiting. Blasters trained on the running prey, picking off any that were missed by the hunting party before they could disappear into the opposite treeline. Ensuring all died there in the killing field.

It was a massacre. One that made Ralter’s stomach twist and turn in her gut. And one the gathered masses seemed to delight in.

Kemma watched, sickened, as the clearing became a slaughter pit. Around her, the crowd cheered. The Empire’s finest; its elite, its masters, its nobles, basked in the pleasure of killing. And all she could do was stand there and bear witness...]]> <![CDATA[A Pilgrim's Return]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1453 Sun, 30 Nov 2025 19:39:08 +0000 Gaybam]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1453 The storm over Dromund Kaas had been building for hours, thick and heavy, like a bruise swelling across the sky. Lightning spidered through the clouds—brief, violent flashes that turned the Horuset estate into a landscape of stark angles and long shadows.


The shuttle lurched through that storm like a wounded animal struggling toward familiar ground.

It didn’t descend with grace. It couldn’t. 
Instead it limped—listing sideways, engines coughing smoke, hull shuddering with every gust of wind. One stabilizer dragged a ragged trail of sparks as it scraped the air, refusing to release the vessel until the final approach forced it down.

The engines screamed - or tried to, at least, only offering a long, tortured whine - and then cut.

The ship hit the landing pad not with a crash, but with the heavy, miserable groan of something that had held itself together for far too long. It sank into the duracrete beneath, as if the harsh stone were the softest embrace it had felt in the longest of times.

Smoke curled from vents.
Panels hung loose.
The whole frame vibrated like a creature taking its last breath.

Then it went quiet.
The kind of quiet that feels like relief.

For a time, nothing moved.

Kaas’ rains pattered against the hull, breaking the silence. Wind tugged at torn plating. A single external light flickered, guttered, then died.

At last, the side ramp bucked inward, catching, grinding, then forcing itself open with a low metallic snarl. The air that poured out was thick with sweat, blood, stale heat, and the harsh metallic bite of long-burnt fuel.

Saarkha stepped into the storm.

She looked carved from the same brutality as the thunder rolling overhead.

Her robes were ruined—charred at the edges, ripped at the seams, soaked through with dried blood that rain slowly coaxed back into life. Ash clung to her skin in uneven patches, caught in the creases of her knuckles and the hollows of her collarbones. Her forearms were wrapped in filthy, makeshift bandages, dark with old and new stains that the downpour only partially washed away.

Every burn, every cut, every bruise stood stark beneath the dim landing lights. Some wounds were crude—stitched in the field, jagged and ugly. Others looked days old, barely healed, cracked open again by the strain of the journey.

She moved stiffly at first, not from weakness, but from the kind of deep ache that lived in the bones—earned through repetition, endurance, and suffering. The storm plastered her hair across her face, revealing more hollow cheekbones, a sharper jaw, eyes sunken from sleepless nights and too many vigils under foreign skies.

Five worlds had taken their tribute.

They had not taken her.

She descended the ramp slowly, each step measured, each footfall leaving behind a smear of diluted blood that rainwater chased toward the cracks in the stone. The air around her carried the scent of journeys that demanded more than strength—sacrifice clung to her like a second skin.

Her shuttle hissed behind her—metal expanding, coolant venting, engines cooling for the last time. It sagged on its struts, exhausted, as if it had been waiting for her to disembark before allowing itself to die.

She did not look back.

Saarkha crossed the courtyard without urgency, without hesitation, without the slightest tremor of doubt. The estate’s lights cast her in pale gold and sharp, onyx shadow, shaping her into something half-statue, half-priestess. Rain carved lines down her face, mixing with soot, blood, and filth until it looked like warpaint being washed away by degrees.

She reached the main steps.
Ascended.
Then vanished into the estate’s darkened threshold.

The storm swallowed her silhouette, thunder rolling after her like a closing curtain.

Far behind her, the shuttle gave one last settling groan—metal collapsing inward, systems finally giving out now that their duty was done.

And in the courtyard’s heavy silence, marked only by rain and scorched stone, one truth settled like an omen:

The Bloodwrought had returned.

.jpeg   image0.jpeg (Size: 56.62 KB / Downloads: 7) ]]> The storm over Dromund Kaas had been building for hours, thick and heavy, like a bruise swelling across the sky. Lightning spidered through the clouds—brief, violent flashes that turned the Horuset estate into a landscape of stark angles and long shadows.


The shuttle lurched through that storm like a wounded animal struggling toward familiar ground.

It didn’t descend with grace. It couldn’t. 
Instead it limped—listing sideways, engines coughing smoke, hull shuddering with every gust of wind. One stabilizer dragged a ragged trail of sparks as it scraped the air, refusing to release the vessel until the final approach forced it down.

The engines screamed - or tried to, at least, only offering a long, tortured whine - and then cut.

The ship hit the landing pad not with a crash, but with the heavy, miserable groan of something that had held itself together for far too long. It sank into the duracrete beneath, as if the harsh stone were the softest embrace it had felt in the longest of times.

Smoke curled from vents.
Panels hung loose.
The whole frame vibrated like a creature taking its last breath.

Then it went quiet.
The kind of quiet that feels like relief.

For a time, nothing moved.

Kaas’ rains pattered against the hull, breaking the silence. Wind tugged at torn plating. A single external light flickered, guttered, then died.

At last, the side ramp bucked inward, catching, grinding, then forcing itself open with a low metallic snarl. The air that poured out was thick with sweat, blood, stale heat, and the harsh metallic bite of long-burnt fuel.

Saarkha stepped into the storm.

She looked carved from the same brutality as the thunder rolling overhead.

Her robes were ruined—charred at the edges, ripped at the seams, soaked through with dried blood that rain slowly coaxed back into life. Ash clung to her skin in uneven patches, caught in the creases of her knuckles and the hollows of her collarbones. Her forearms were wrapped in filthy, makeshift bandages, dark with old and new stains that the downpour only partially washed away.

Every burn, every cut, every bruise stood stark beneath the dim landing lights. Some wounds were crude—stitched in the field, jagged and ugly. Others looked days old, barely healed, cracked open again by the strain of the journey.

She moved stiffly at first, not from weakness, but from the kind of deep ache that lived in the bones—earned through repetition, endurance, and suffering. The storm plastered her hair across her face, revealing more hollow cheekbones, a sharper jaw, eyes sunken from sleepless nights and too many vigils under foreign skies.

Five worlds had taken their tribute.

They had not taken her.

She descended the ramp slowly, each step measured, each footfall leaving behind a smear of diluted blood that rainwater chased toward the cracks in the stone. The air around her carried the scent of journeys that demanded more than strength—sacrifice clung to her like a second skin.

Her shuttle hissed behind her—metal expanding, coolant venting, engines cooling for the last time. It sagged on its struts, exhausted, as if it had been waiting for her to disembark before allowing itself to die.

She did not look back.

Saarkha crossed the courtyard without urgency, without hesitation, without the slightest tremor of doubt. The estate’s lights cast her in pale gold and sharp, onyx shadow, shaping her into something half-statue, half-priestess. Rain carved lines down her face, mixing with soot, blood, and filth until it looked like warpaint being washed away by degrees.

She reached the main steps.
Ascended.
Then vanished into the estate’s darkened threshold.

The storm swallowed her silhouette, thunder rolling after her like a closing curtain.

Far behind her, the shuttle gave one last settling groan—metal collapsing inward, systems finally giving out now that their duty was done.

And in the courtyard’s heavy silence, marked only by rain and scorched stone, one truth settled like an omen:

The Bloodwrought had returned.

.jpeg   image0.jpeg (Size: 56.62 KB / Downloads: 7) ]]> <![CDATA[Stand, Worm!]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1436 Wed, 22 Oct 2025 17:50:24 +0000 Krassus Horuset]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1436 thud that shook the rivets in his  Warrior's armor. A heartbeat later, he was sent crashing into the dirt with a crunch that instantly robbed the air from his lungs.  He barely managed not to bisect himself on his own blade as it threatened to tumble from his grasp. The blaster fire outside became a distant echo, barely audible over the sharp ringing in his ears.
The young Horuset warrior left laying, gasping for air. Struggling to move. To breathe. The world narrowed around him.

It is then she appeared above him. 

The armored faceplate of Daxze loomed over him, her presence in the Force reeking of rot, of corruption, of the draining void of the Dark Side. Her attempt to Force Drain their enemy; having done little else than drain her of her last semblance of sanity. The mania in her voice mirrored only by the glint of madness in her eyes, barely visible behind the visor. “Get up, Krassssusss! Run!” she hissed, voice fractured, lisping, and unhinged; her grasp on Basic deteriorating almost as quickly as her grip on sanity.

Then she was gone. Bolting for the exit. Cloak whipping behind her as she disappeared from Krassus vision. His head pounding like a drum as the mine shaft spun.

"Krassus, is it?"   The Jedi's voice offered from deeper inside the cavern. Measured, calm, amused. The Radiant glow of his lightsaber lit the mineshaft with a tranquil, almost sacred light as he continued his leiusurely stroll towards the Sith. Pale skin glowing faintly in the illumination, white eyes creased in a kindly smile that did not belong on a battlefield.

He bowed, blade in hand, moving with theatrical grace.

"Well, young Krassus, what a pleasure it is to make your acquaintance." He spoke. His voice was gentle. Almost sincere. The Light flowed from him like a breeze of spring wind. Warm, clean, soft. Like a gentle breeze rolling through a calm meadow. A faint hint of lovely flowers and freshly cut grass. It sickened Krassus. The serenity, the confident, self-assured peace oozing off him like a perfume. Unbearable in its arrogance. The Light Side flowed around the jedi like a storm in bloom as he gathered the Force around himself once more.

Krassus pressed his fist into the dirt, pushing himself up. Biting through the burning pain in his left Thigh. The Shiim wound screaming with pain with each excruciating movement. He could barely put weight on it. But still, he rose. One knee. Then both feet. Saber in hand. Breath ragged. Sliding his right leg behind his left as he assumed his Djem So stance.

The Jedi paused his advance, but did not raise his own blade. "You have real spirit, young Krassus.... Yet is seems your allies do not share it." The Jedi offered, bowing again. Smiling as if they were exchanging pleasantries at a dinner. Sliding one leg behind the other as he continued. "It would be wise  of you to surrender, young Krassus. I do not believe you are cut out for this fight... To be Sith. Lay down your weapon, my friend. Come with me. Let us discuss your... Redemption, hmm?" He extended his off-hand, lowering his defenses, as if he had already won. The very air swirling around him like a building hurricane. 

The insult in the gesture wasn't loud, nor crude.
But it was the greatest unsult a warrior could suffer: an attempt to be ignored.
Not Challenged. Not defeated.
Dismissed.

The Jedi saw not a Sith. Not a warrior. Not an Enemy.
Only a child in need of Mercy.

It disgusted Krassus to his core. He had no need for it. He felt it all snap. The mask of the Stoic warrior shattering as the Dark Side surged into him like floodwaters through a broken dam. A tidal swell of rage washing over him as tears rushed down his sweat and blood caked cheeks beneath his mask. He screamed, a guttural roar that echoed through the mine as the young Sith exploded outwards like the solar winds of the Horuset sun. 

Augmentation doing what it could to compensate for the missing muscle mass in his thigh. Surging forward, saber drawn. A blur of crimson and hatred as he crashed into the Jedi's defences. Yet it did him little good.

The Jedi hardly blinked. The parry; elegant, effortless. Krassus' saber knocked from his hand. Another Shiim, a streak of smoltering orange across his back. A flash, a lesson as the Jedi effortlessly moved past him.

Krassus barely staying upright. Stumbling forwards before he suddenly trips and falls. Not over his own feet. But over the corpse of Lord Teius. The mud beneath his hands twisting into stone tiles. The stone tiles of the Horuset Throne room. The air thick with the scorched scent of brimstone.

Smoke curling into the air from the smoldering hole in his father's chest. Eyes all around him in the shadows. The jedi's face towering over him morphing into the equally pale visage of Lord Kelsa's face, half exposed from his ruined helmet. The world around Krassus fading into shadow as he locks eyes with the cold, dead eyes of his father's corpse. Still twisted in his skull with the same glare. The same disdain. 

And then, impossible, the eyes stirred. Breath catching in Krassus' throat as the corpse of Lord Teius rose. Not just from the dead, but above him. To tower over Krassus as it might have done once when he was but a child in the Horuset Spire. Its face twisted, lips drawn back in a grimacing snarl as it reeled back an iron fist.

Krassus hadn't even the time to raise his arms to cover his face. 

The blow struck like a hammer.

KRassus falling hard with his back onto the gleaming, polished floors of the Horuset Spire's training hall. The Durasteel cold beneath him. The taste of blood in his mouth as his small hands scrape across the floor in search of the the wooden training blade he had dropped. Heat swelling in his swollen lips as a trickle of dark blood makes its way down his face from the gash in them.

"Again!" The Armsman's voice echoed around the ring. As Krassus got back to his feet as his opponent backed away and reformed their Shii-Cho stance. The rest of the Children watching from outside the ring. Seranaus scared, Xulia eager to seem interested, Kromus amused. All awaiting their turn.

Krassus' gaze falling onto his opponent. The tall lanky frame of his elder brother..  Krassus recognised him instantly even if the long years since his brother's death had twisted his face into a patchwork of forgotten features. Morphing, blurred by time, but unmistakably Valeus Horuset.

Valeus was several years Krassus' elder; soon to be sent off to the Academy if word around the spire was to be believed. But he had always preferred his books, scrolls and long studies over his bladework. And it had given him a matching bookish disposition. 

And so the armsman deemed it a not entirely unfair match. Pitting the more martial younger brother against the eldest more often than not. 
Krassus cherished it really, even if he could never hope to match the reach of Valeus' blade. It was after all one of the only times he actually got to spend time with his brother. 

And so Krassus nodded, sliding his dominant foot behind the other with practiced precision. Deliving into his fledgling mastery of the Dark Side. The world narrowing around him until his focus was on nothing else but Valeus and the spar. Pushing himself forwards with a rush. Stick crashing against stick as the two sparred.

High. Low. Parry. Riposte. Swing. Jab. A step back. A lunge forwards! High. Low. An opening! No? A feint!

A blow of Valeus' stick found his right hand. Bruising his knuckles as Krassus almost loses his grasp on his blade. A following low sweep. Krassus tried to avoid it. Tumbling backwards before the boy tripped over his own footing. Hitting the floor with a soft thud; Valeus' blade follows him down. Pausing mere inches from his face.

"Yield! I yield!" Krassus said. Letting his stick roll from his grasp as he raised his arms in surrender.

"KRASSUS!" Lord Teius' voice boomed like thunder through the hall. Everything stopped. Even the air froze in place as a shakey breath caught in Krassus' throat. A wave of cold Sweat rolling down his back as his eyes go wide. Heart pounding in his chest.

He had been so focused on his on the spar he hadn't even noticed that the armsman has slinked away and fallen to a knee. Hadn't noticed the arrival of his father. Lord Teius stormed in, the Sith Lord's presence flaring outwards like an incinerating burst of hellish fire and brimstone spewed out from the depths of the Horuset suns's hateful core. Rage incarnate as the armored behemoth clenched his hands into fists. Every step judgement manifest.

"WHAT IN THE EMPEROR'S NAME DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING, YOU USELESS VERMIN!" 

Krassus trembled on hands and knees. "I-I... M-my Lord, I-"

"He was beaten," Valeus offered. "I won." 

"No," Teius growled, cutting him off. Burning eyes locked on Krassus. "He yielded." The Lord corrected. The word was spat like poison. With one motion he yanked Seranaus up from his knees by the scruff of his neck. Left hand on the boy's neck, the other on his stick-blade.

A tug seeing them separated. The latter now finding it's way into the Lord's vice like grasp, as his other hand discarded the boy like trash. Throwing Seranaus hard to the ground in the wake of his passing as he stormed into the training pit.

Their Lord Father wrath incarnate as the Dark Side swelled with him. The first strike, like a blur, struck Valeus on the side of his head. Almost knocking his eyes out of their sockets as the wood crashed into his skull; sending the eldest son sprawling on the floor.

"And the fact that you accepted it makes you just as weak." The Lord declared as he knelt down over Valeus; an armored fist striking down into his chest. Driving the air from his lungs before Lord Teius unfurled his fingers; clawed digits digging into the fabric of Valeus' shirt as the Sith Lord lifted him bodily and hurled him from the ring like refuse. 

The Armsman stopping Valeus' flopping and rolling body with his right foot. 

"Take him." The Lord barked. The armsman obeyed. Bowing his bald head, keeping his gaze averted as he dragged Valeus from the hall. The rest of the children following them out like a scattering of ducks. 

Now it was only Teius and Krassus.

"Stand, Worm!"

Krassus didn't move fast enough. A clawed fist seized his crimson hair, dragging him upright as his scalp screamed in protest. 

A tug of the force saw the dropped training blade find Teius' palm. The Sith Lord pressing it hard against his son's chest.

"No son of mine will yield so meekly! No would-be Sith Warrior of the Horuset blood! You will fight until you no longer can. You do not stop until I say you are done. Opening stance, Shii-cho!" He demanded, letting the crying, trembling boy slide his right leg behind the other as he waited. 

Then it began. 

The Sith Lord burst forward, like a Tukata let of its leash. Blow after blow. Krassus' training blade batted aside in an instant. The wood in Lord Teius' grasp almost splintering under the force behind the strike. Then came another, and another swing. Blow after blow. To his back. His Arms. His ribs.
An armored fist cracked into his left eye socket, stars exploded in his vision. Blood ran down his cheek as Krassus was sent sprawling. 

The boy gasping for breath, barely conscious.

"GET. UP."

The Force snared around him like tendrils, yanking him into the air. Tears streemed freely now, mixing with blood as Krassus was thrown down onto his knees. The stick blade pressed  into him again. 

"OPENING STANCE, SHII-CHO!" 

Krassus obeyed.

Another beatdown.
Fists. Fury. Spite. 
Lord Teius swung the blade so hard that the wood cracked and splintered in his grasp, sending wood shavings sprawling across the ring. He had no further use for it. He throttled Krassus onto the ground and wailed down on his swollen, red face with his fists. Again, and again. Each blow sending the Sith Lord's own son crashing in and out of consciousness. 

The world spinning as the command came again.

"GET. UP."

He did. 

Barely standing. Face split open. A gargled wheeze blowing bubbled of dark blood between his lips as he just barely dragged his dominant foot behind the other. Teius was upon him not a moment later.

Strike after strike. 

A snap.
A wet, crushing crack.
His sword arm broken. As Lord Teius threw him to the ground and stomped down on his chest. Pinning him. Canting his head offset as he looked down at his son. Not a shred of love behind his eyes. Cold, calculating. Judging. Deeming Krassus, at last, unable to continue to fight.

"Only now are you defeated. I will not have you -yield- for less." He said. Turning. The lesson ended.

Krassus lay still. Blood in his mouth. His face almost split in half. breath shallow. Heart pounding. The Shadows rise around him, drowning out the world until there is nothing but his father. His back turning towards him. The shape of him. It arose nothing but rage. For once, Krassus wasn't afraid anymore. The Dark Side rose within his broken body as he moved. Once twice. Leveraging the momentum of his body to flip himself onto his side with a wet, bloody thud.

Then another swing saw him move onto his chest. Fingers trembling. One hand found the stick he had long since dropped. He took it. Pushed it into the ground with a blood gurgling groan of strain. He pushed. 

He fell. 

Face first in the blood pooling beneath him. 

He pushed again. And Again. On his knees. One knee. Then both feet.

He stood. Barely Resting his full weight onto the stick. 

Teius halted. Then turned. A deep, bone-grinding groan. Half roar, half laugh. The only approval Krassus would ever earn as he changed his course. Turning back to Krassus. Towering over the broken boy. Reeling back his iron fist.

A final blow. Clean, brutal. Two punches. One clean to his solar plexus; the other an upper cut to his nose.

Darkness claimed him.

Krassus awoke in his bed in the medbay of the Horuset estate. Reaching out with his left hand; he sees only the robotic steel of his cybernetic replacement. Himself once more. Chest heaving, cold sweat clinging to his skin as he sits up. Covered in kolto-patches on his shrapnel wounds. 
The taste of blood in his mouth, but no wound.
Only memory.

Ignoring the protests of the medical droid he pushes himself out of bed and finds the wash basin. Letting the water run; he splashes it into his face. Yet as he looks up into the mirror he sees only his father's scowl staring back at him, etched into his own face.

He grits his teeth; fire burning behind his crimson gaze as he reels back his fist. Slamming it into the mirror; the reflective surface shattering beneath the weight of the blow.]]> thud that shook the rivets in his  Warrior's armor. A heartbeat later, he was sent crashing into the dirt with a crunch that instantly robbed the air from his lungs.  He barely managed not to bisect himself on his own blade as it threatened to tumble from his grasp. The blaster fire outside became a distant echo, barely audible over the sharp ringing in his ears.
The young Horuset warrior left laying, gasping for air. Struggling to move. To breathe. The world narrowed around him.

It is then she appeared above him. 

The armored faceplate of Daxze loomed over him, her presence in the Force reeking of rot, of corruption, of the draining void of the Dark Side. Her attempt to Force Drain their enemy; having done little else than drain her of her last semblance of sanity. The mania in her voice mirrored only by the glint of madness in her eyes, barely visible behind the visor. “Get up, Krassssusss! Run!” she hissed, voice fractured, lisping, and unhinged; her grasp on Basic deteriorating almost as quickly as her grip on sanity.

Then she was gone. Bolting for the exit. Cloak whipping behind her as she disappeared from Krassus vision. His head pounding like a drum as the mine shaft spun.

"Krassus, is it?"   The Jedi's voice offered from deeper inside the cavern. Measured, calm, amused. The Radiant glow of his lightsaber lit the mineshaft with a tranquil, almost sacred light as he continued his leiusurely stroll towards the Sith. Pale skin glowing faintly in the illumination, white eyes creased in a kindly smile that did not belong on a battlefield.

He bowed, blade in hand, moving with theatrical grace.

"Well, young Krassus, what a pleasure it is to make your acquaintance." He spoke. His voice was gentle. Almost sincere. The Light flowed from him like a breeze of spring wind. Warm, clean, soft. Like a gentle breeze rolling through a calm meadow. A faint hint of lovely flowers and freshly cut grass. It sickened Krassus. The serenity, the confident, self-assured peace oozing off him like a perfume. Unbearable in its arrogance. The Light Side flowed around the jedi like a storm in bloom as he gathered the Force around himself once more.

Krassus pressed his fist into the dirt, pushing himself up. Biting through the burning pain in his left Thigh. The Shiim wound screaming with pain with each excruciating movement. He could barely put weight on it. But still, he rose. One knee. Then both feet. Saber in hand. Breath ragged. Sliding his right leg behind his left as he assumed his Djem So stance.

The Jedi paused his advance, but did not raise his own blade. "You have real spirit, young Krassus.... Yet is seems your allies do not share it." The Jedi offered, bowing again. Smiling as if they were exchanging pleasantries at a dinner. Sliding one leg behind the other as he continued. "It would be wise  of you to surrender, young Krassus. I do not believe you are cut out for this fight... To be Sith. Lay down your weapon, my friend. Come with me. Let us discuss your... Redemption, hmm?" He extended his off-hand, lowering his defenses, as if he had already won. The very air swirling around him like a building hurricane. 

The insult in the gesture wasn't loud, nor crude.
But it was the greatest unsult a warrior could suffer: an attempt to be ignored.
Not Challenged. Not defeated.
Dismissed.

The Jedi saw not a Sith. Not a warrior. Not an Enemy.
Only a child in need of Mercy.

It disgusted Krassus to his core. He had no need for it. He felt it all snap. The mask of the Stoic warrior shattering as the Dark Side surged into him like floodwaters through a broken dam. A tidal swell of rage washing over him as tears rushed down his sweat and blood caked cheeks beneath his mask. He screamed, a guttural roar that echoed through the mine as the young Sith exploded outwards like the solar winds of the Horuset sun. 

Augmentation doing what it could to compensate for the missing muscle mass in his thigh. Surging forward, saber drawn. A blur of crimson and hatred as he crashed into the Jedi's defences. Yet it did him little good.

The Jedi hardly blinked. The parry; elegant, effortless. Krassus' saber knocked from his hand. Another Shiim, a streak of smoltering orange across his back. A flash, a lesson as the Jedi effortlessly moved past him.

Krassus barely staying upright. Stumbling forwards before he suddenly trips and falls. Not over his own feet. But over the corpse of Lord Teius. The mud beneath his hands twisting into stone tiles. The stone tiles of the Horuset Throne room. The air thick with the scorched scent of brimstone.

Smoke curling into the air from the smoldering hole in his father's chest. Eyes all around him in the shadows. The jedi's face towering over him morphing into the equally pale visage of Lord Kelsa's face, half exposed from his ruined helmet. The world around Krassus fading into shadow as he locks eyes with the cold, dead eyes of his father's corpse. Still twisted in his skull with the same glare. The same disdain. 

And then, impossible, the eyes stirred. Breath catching in Krassus' throat as the corpse of Lord Teius rose. Not just from the dead, but above him. To tower over Krassus as it might have done once when he was but a child in the Horuset Spire. Its face twisted, lips drawn back in a grimacing snarl as it reeled back an iron fist.

Krassus hadn't even the time to raise his arms to cover his face. 

The blow struck like a hammer.

KRassus falling hard with his back onto the gleaming, polished floors of the Horuset Spire's training hall. The Durasteel cold beneath him. The taste of blood in his mouth as his small hands scrape across the floor in search of the the wooden training blade he had dropped. Heat swelling in his swollen lips as a trickle of dark blood makes its way down his face from the gash in them.

"Again!" The Armsman's voice echoed around the ring. As Krassus got back to his feet as his opponent backed away and reformed their Shii-Cho stance. The rest of the Children watching from outside the ring. Seranaus scared, Xulia eager to seem interested, Kromus amused. All awaiting their turn.

Krassus' gaze falling onto his opponent. The tall lanky frame of his elder brother..  Krassus recognised him instantly even if the long years since his brother's death had twisted his face into a patchwork of forgotten features. Morphing, blurred by time, but unmistakably Valeus Horuset.

Valeus was several years Krassus' elder; soon to be sent off to the Academy if word around the spire was to be believed. But he had always preferred his books, scrolls and long studies over his bladework. And it had given him a matching bookish disposition. 

And so the armsman deemed it a not entirely unfair match. Pitting the more martial younger brother against the eldest more often than not. 
Krassus cherished it really, even if he could never hope to match the reach of Valeus' blade. It was after all one of the only times he actually got to spend time with his brother. 

And so Krassus nodded, sliding his dominant foot behind the other with practiced precision. Deliving into his fledgling mastery of the Dark Side. The world narrowing around him until his focus was on nothing else but Valeus and the spar. Pushing himself forwards with a rush. Stick crashing against stick as the two sparred.

High. Low. Parry. Riposte. Swing. Jab. A step back. A lunge forwards! High. Low. An opening! No? A feint!

A blow of Valeus' stick found his right hand. Bruising his knuckles as Krassus almost loses his grasp on his blade. A following low sweep. Krassus tried to avoid it. Tumbling backwards before the boy tripped over his own footing. Hitting the floor with a soft thud; Valeus' blade follows him down. Pausing mere inches from his face.

"Yield! I yield!" Krassus said. Letting his stick roll from his grasp as he raised his arms in surrender.

"KRASSUS!" Lord Teius' voice boomed like thunder through the hall. Everything stopped. Even the air froze in place as a shakey breath caught in Krassus' throat. A wave of cold Sweat rolling down his back as his eyes go wide. Heart pounding in his chest.

He had been so focused on his on the spar he hadn't even noticed that the armsman has slinked away and fallen to a knee. Hadn't noticed the arrival of his father. Lord Teius stormed in, the Sith Lord's presence flaring outwards like an incinerating burst of hellish fire and brimstone spewed out from the depths of the Horuset suns's hateful core. Rage incarnate as the armored behemoth clenched his hands into fists. Every step judgement manifest.

"WHAT IN THE EMPEROR'S NAME DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING, YOU USELESS VERMIN!" 

Krassus trembled on hands and knees. "I-I... M-my Lord, I-"

"He was beaten," Valeus offered. "I won." 

"No," Teius growled, cutting him off. Burning eyes locked on Krassus. "He yielded." The Lord corrected. The word was spat like poison. With one motion he yanked Seranaus up from his knees by the scruff of his neck. Left hand on the boy's neck, the other on his stick-blade.

A tug seeing them separated. The latter now finding it's way into the Lord's vice like grasp, as his other hand discarded the boy like trash. Throwing Seranaus hard to the ground in the wake of his passing as he stormed into the training pit.

Their Lord Father wrath incarnate as the Dark Side swelled with him. The first strike, like a blur, struck Valeus on the side of his head. Almost knocking his eyes out of their sockets as the wood crashed into his skull; sending the eldest son sprawling on the floor.

"And the fact that you accepted it makes you just as weak." The Lord declared as he knelt down over Valeus; an armored fist striking down into his chest. Driving the air from his lungs before Lord Teius unfurled his fingers; clawed digits digging into the fabric of Valeus' shirt as the Sith Lord lifted him bodily and hurled him from the ring like refuse. 

The Armsman stopping Valeus' flopping and rolling body with his right foot. 

"Take him." The Lord barked. The armsman obeyed. Bowing his bald head, keeping his gaze averted as he dragged Valeus from the hall. The rest of the children following them out like a scattering of ducks. 

Now it was only Teius and Krassus.

"Stand, Worm!"

Krassus didn't move fast enough. A clawed fist seized his crimson hair, dragging him upright as his scalp screamed in protest. 

A tug of the force saw the dropped training blade find Teius' palm. The Sith Lord pressing it hard against his son's chest.

"No son of mine will yield so meekly! No would-be Sith Warrior of the Horuset blood! You will fight until you no longer can. You do not stop until I say you are done. Opening stance, Shii-cho!" He demanded, letting the crying, trembling boy slide his right leg behind the other as he waited. 

Then it began. 

The Sith Lord burst forward, like a Tukata let of its leash. Blow after blow. Krassus' training blade batted aside in an instant. The wood in Lord Teius' grasp almost splintering under the force behind the strike. Then came another, and another swing. Blow after blow. To his back. His Arms. His ribs.
An armored fist cracked into his left eye socket, stars exploded in his vision. Blood ran down his cheek as Krassus was sent sprawling. 

The boy gasping for breath, barely conscious.

"GET. UP."

The Force snared around him like tendrils, yanking him into the air. Tears streemed freely now, mixing with blood as Krassus was thrown down onto his knees. The stick blade pressed  into him again. 

"OPENING STANCE, SHII-CHO!" 

Krassus obeyed.

Another beatdown.
Fists. Fury. Spite. 
Lord Teius swung the blade so hard that the wood cracked and splintered in his grasp, sending wood shavings sprawling across the ring. He had no further use for it. He throttled Krassus onto the ground and wailed down on his swollen, red face with his fists. Again, and again. Each blow sending the Sith Lord's own son crashing in and out of consciousness. 

The world spinning as the command came again.

"GET. UP."

He did. 

Barely standing. Face split open. A gargled wheeze blowing bubbled of dark blood between his lips as he just barely dragged his dominant foot behind the other. Teius was upon him not a moment later.

Strike after strike. 

A snap.
A wet, crushing crack.
His sword arm broken. As Lord Teius threw him to the ground and stomped down on his chest. Pinning him. Canting his head offset as he looked down at his son. Not a shred of love behind his eyes. Cold, calculating. Judging. Deeming Krassus, at last, unable to continue to fight.

"Only now are you defeated. I will not have you -yield- for less." He said. Turning. The lesson ended.

Krassus lay still. Blood in his mouth. His face almost split in half. breath shallow. Heart pounding. The Shadows rise around him, drowning out the world until there is nothing but his father. His back turning towards him. The shape of him. It arose nothing but rage. For once, Krassus wasn't afraid anymore. The Dark Side rose within his broken body as he moved. Once twice. Leveraging the momentum of his body to flip himself onto his side with a wet, bloody thud.

Then another swing saw him move onto his chest. Fingers trembling. One hand found the stick he had long since dropped. He took it. Pushed it into the ground with a blood gurgling groan of strain. He pushed. 

He fell. 

Face first in the blood pooling beneath him. 

He pushed again. And Again. On his knees. One knee. Then both feet.

He stood. Barely Resting his full weight onto the stick. 

Teius halted. Then turned. A deep, bone-grinding groan. Half roar, half laugh. The only approval Krassus would ever earn as he changed his course. Turning back to Krassus. Towering over the broken boy. Reeling back his iron fist.

A final blow. Clean, brutal. Two punches. One clean to his solar plexus; the other an upper cut to his nose.

Darkness claimed him.

Krassus awoke in his bed in the medbay of the Horuset estate. Reaching out with his left hand; he sees only the robotic steel of his cybernetic replacement. Himself once more. Chest heaving, cold sweat clinging to his skin as he sits up. Covered in kolto-patches on his shrapnel wounds. 
The taste of blood in his mouth, but no wound.
Only memory.

Ignoring the protests of the medical droid he pushes himself out of bed and finds the wash basin. Letting the water run; he splashes it into his face. Yet as he looks up into the mirror he sees only his father's scowl staring back at him, etched into his own face.

He grits his teeth; fire burning behind his crimson gaze as he reels back his fist. Slamming it into the mirror; the reflective surface shattering beneath the weight of the blow.]]> <![CDATA[The Pyre]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1423 Fri, 19 Sep 2025 13:02:02 +0000 Gaybam]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1423 Korriban. 

The wind was dead when she began.

Saarkha worked in silence, stacking thorned wood and heavy stone until her arms shook. Bark bit into her palms, splinters embedding beneath her nails. Ash and dirt smeared the sweat that crawled down her forearms. Each breath was a jagged blade of iron, blood and old smoke, threatening to cut her throat from within.

At the pyre’s base the beast waited, trussed with cord, eyes rolling white. It knew. They always knew.

She scored her own wrist first. The blade drew a slow crimson line, deliberate, until warmth slicked her hand and dripped into the dust. She pressed the knife to her lips, swallowed copper, and whispered the names of the Gods. Those whose presence she sought in the dark. Then she laid the edge against the animal’s throat.

The cut was ugly. A violent tearing more than a clean slice. Blood erupted hot against her face, soaking her collar. Her hair. She held the body steady as it spasmed, guiding the flow of deep crimson into the waiting bowl, then thrust her bleeding arm through muscle and sinew, stirring until their lives were indistinguishable. 

Until their tithes were indistinguishable. 

Fire licked the pyre as she split the carcass further, hands burrowing through wet warmth until entrails spilled like ropes across the timber. Smoke rose heavy, choking, and she bent her head over the gore, searching for a pattern.

Whispers slid between her ears — brittle, mocking.

Daughter of scars. Always on your knees. Always begging. Searching for a path in the dust. What will you trade this time?

Her lip curled. “Enough,” she said, voice raw. “I bleed. I burn. I keep your name alive while the rest forget. No more riddles.”

She thrust her cut wrist deeper into the wet, forearm parting muscle, mixing her blood with the beast’s until the surface beneath churned black-red.

“I am Saarkha of Mharn,” she hissed. “I will not crawl. You will speak plain, or I’ll scatter this offering to the sand and curse your silence.”

The air tightened, as if the sands themselves held their breath. The smoke thickened, shaping itself into shadowed figures, vast and watchful. The voices came again — not mocking now, but edged with iron. With warning. 

Then hear, scar-born. You are the hand that steadies the hammer. Guide your brother, or break him before the line is lost.

Heat clawed her face. The entrails shifted in her shadowed vision, blurred with sweat and soot and delirium, forming a chain around a sword, a woman’s shadow keeping it from snapping. She felt a terrible clarity settle in her bones. A weight. A terror. The price of daring to demand.

Her body trembled, but not from fear alone. From realisation. 

They had listened. They had answered.

She fed the remains to the flames, pushing them down until bone cracked and sparks burst skyward. Blisters rose on her palms; she didn’t release the pyre until her task was complete.

When only embers remained, she stood among them, slick with blood and smoke. The Gods — or her own madness — had answered, and now her path was laid bare.

She would be the shadow behind Qailan’s throne, the unseen spine in the House’s back. Should he falter, she would drive him straight — or into the fire.

Saarkha turned from the pyre, leaving the smell of burnt marrow behind. Whatever claimed her tonight had accepted her terms. 

But she knew.

It would demand more. ]]> Korriban. 

The wind was dead when she began.

Saarkha worked in silence, stacking thorned wood and heavy stone until her arms shook. Bark bit into her palms, splinters embedding beneath her nails. Ash and dirt smeared the sweat that crawled down her forearms. Each breath was a jagged blade of iron, blood and old smoke, threatening to cut her throat from within.

At the pyre’s base the beast waited, trussed with cord, eyes rolling white. It knew. They always knew.

She scored her own wrist first. The blade drew a slow crimson line, deliberate, until warmth slicked her hand and dripped into the dust. She pressed the knife to her lips, swallowed copper, and whispered the names of the Gods. Those whose presence she sought in the dark. Then she laid the edge against the animal’s throat.

The cut was ugly. A violent tearing more than a clean slice. Blood erupted hot against her face, soaking her collar. Her hair. She held the body steady as it spasmed, guiding the flow of deep crimson into the waiting bowl, then thrust her bleeding arm through muscle and sinew, stirring until their lives were indistinguishable. 

Until their tithes were indistinguishable. 

Fire licked the pyre as she split the carcass further, hands burrowing through wet warmth until entrails spilled like ropes across the timber. Smoke rose heavy, choking, and she bent her head over the gore, searching for a pattern.

Whispers slid between her ears — brittle, mocking.

Daughter of scars. Always on your knees. Always begging. Searching for a path in the dust. What will you trade this time?

Her lip curled. “Enough,” she said, voice raw. “I bleed. I burn. I keep your name alive while the rest forget. No more riddles.”

She thrust her cut wrist deeper into the wet, forearm parting muscle, mixing her blood with the beast’s until the surface beneath churned black-red.

“I am Saarkha of Mharn,” she hissed. “I will not crawl. You will speak plain, or I’ll scatter this offering to the sand and curse your silence.”

The air tightened, as if the sands themselves held their breath. The smoke thickened, shaping itself into shadowed figures, vast and watchful. The voices came again — not mocking now, but edged with iron. With warning. 

Then hear, scar-born. You are the hand that steadies the hammer. Guide your brother, or break him before the line is lost.

Heat clawed her face. The entrails shifted in her shadowed vision, blurred with sweat and soot and delirium, forming a chain around a sword, a woman’s shadow keeping it from snapping. She felt a terrible clarity settle in her bones. A weight. A terror. The price of daring to demand.

Her body trembled, but not from fear alone. From realisation. 

They had listened. They had answered.

She fed the remains to the flames, pushing them down until bone cracked and sparks burst skyward. Blisters rose on her palms; she didn’t release the pyre until her task was complete.

When only embers remained, she stood among them, slick with blood and smoke. The Gods — or her own madness — had answered, and now her path was laid bare.

She would be the shadow behind Qailan’s throne, the unseen spine in the House’s back. Should he falter, she would drive him straight — or into the fire.

Saarkha turned from the pyre, leaving the smell of burnt marrow behind. Whatever claimed her tonight had accepted her terms. 

But she knew.

It would demand more. ]]> <![CDATA[Solitary Grief]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1422 Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:57:27 +0000 Joslae]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1422
She was alone, as she often was, watching the rain beat against the thick glass. Darkness, occasionally illuminated by the flash of lightning, and the glimmer of nearby towers. The flashes of blue light would illuminate the room she was in before fading again, highlighting the sole occupier in stark blue against the deep maroon shadows under the folds of skin, deep scars, and spurs. Though their eyes of red with dark sclera, they had little difficulty seeing in the low light; they had adjusted to it long ago. The room around her would at one point have been considered luxurious with well-made furniture, physical books, and paintings on the wall. But it was now covered under a thick layer of dust, only disturbed by a single line of foot steps from the door to a chair at a desk. Stale and cold air was more appropriate for a tomb.


Sitting with a tall crystal glass in one hand, it was filled nearly to the brim with a dark, viscous wine; its open bottle sat on the ground by her feet, but the wine itself had become too aerated, functionally ruined. Lips were dry and cracked, needing a drink, but the expensive alcohol did not whet her thirst. Heavy robes clung to her, looking almost like a statue of granite carved to guard a treasure, and thick hair lay loose on her head to resemble a messy hood. Had anyone been observing they might have assumed the solitary guardian was asleep, but the eyes were awake, staring into nothing, moist with pain and agitation.


An electronic device beeps once, then twice, and her only reaction is to close her eyes and sigh. Rousing herself from a trance-like state, she looks down at the untouched glass in her hand and frowns; wasted and pointless. Stretching in the uncomfortable chair, rolling her ankles as she prepares to stand. Lips part, and she wheezes, sounding like a corpse releasing its last breath, before speaking into the dark.


"Immortality is the state of remembrance ever after you are dead and buried; somebody must remember. Talk about you, consider you, fear you. There aren't many who still remember you. Even less remember the one who took you. I consider that a soft comfort, that the memory of your assassins has nearly faded. The coward is entirely gone, only remaining in my own head. The sorcerer still lingers, but less of him every day. Nobody will remember them, but you...." Words are caught, stumbled over, and swallowed. "I remember you still, until my last day. I remember the crimes that were ignored. Vengeance matters little to you now, you're gone, but I still want it. It's all I dream of, hurting those who allowed this hurt to come to me. You'd take some consolation of what has happened, our rivals are broken down, shadows of their former selves."


She lifts her glass, careful not to spill anything, in a mock toast in the aftermath of a victory. She blinks, but her eyes remain agitated, and dampness grows to barely holding back a torrent of tears. Though she doesn't appear sad, maybe sorrow had left this revenant long ago, or she was just too disconnected from her physical body. "I celebrate my continued victory, but doing it alone feels hollow." The glass is lowered again, and a short-lived celebration is finished. "At the top of the pyramid, without anyone to share it with."


Her other hand clenches tight, knuckles nearly white through highly pigmented skin, and nails dig deep into hard skin. Slowly opening the hand to loom down at an item she held: a ring of black lumpy metal, barely resembling a ring at all if not for the hole in the middle. Nobody could wear it anymore; it was far too misshapen. "You are immortal as long as I live. You'll never stop living in my head. That is my passion, the strength that will break my chains."


Outside the dust-laden room, a whole living world carried on just past the rain-covered glass, the ongoings of an Empire and its mighty capital. Hundreds of thousands nearby, millions outside the city, billions across the nearby systems. Uncountable across the areas where she had influence. Busy, always busy, never stopping to consider the small details. Never stopping to acknowledge the effects of war. But in the dust-laden room, she was alone.
]]>
She was alone, as she often was, watching the rain beat against the thick glass. Darkness, occasionally illuminated by the flash of lightning, and the glimmer of nearby towers. The flashes of blue light would illuminate the room she was in before fading again, highlighting the sole occupier in stark blue against the deep maroon shadows under the folds of skin, deep scars, and spurs. Though their eyes of red with dark sclera, they had little difficulty seeing in the low light; they had adjusted to it long ago. The room around her would at one point have been considered luxurious with well-made furniture, physical books, and paintings on the wall. But it was now covered under a thick layer of dust, only disturbed by a single line of foot steps from the door to a chair at a desk. Stale and cold air was more appropriate for a tomb.


Sitting with a tall crystal glass in one hand, it was filled nearly to the brim with a dark, viscous wine; its open bottle sat on the ground by her feet, but the wine itself had become too aerated, functionally ruined. Lips were dry and cracked, needing a drink, but the expensive alcohol did not whet her thirst. Heavy robes clung to her, looking almost like a statue of granite carved to guard a treasure, and thick hair lay loose on her head to resemble a messy hood. Had anyone been observing they might have assumed the solitary guardian was asleep, but the eyes were awake, staring into nothing, moist with pain and agitation.


An electronic device beeps once, then twice, and her only reaction is to close her eyes and sigh. Rousing herself from a trance-like state, she looks down at the untouched glass in her hand and frowns; wasted and pointless. Stretching in the uncomfortable chair, rolling her ankles as she prepares to stand. Lips part, and she wheezes, sounding like a corpse releasing its last breath, before speaking into the dark.


"Immortality is the state of remembrance ever after you are dead and buried; somebody must remember. Talk about you, consider you, fear you. There aren't many who still remember you. Even less remember the one who took you. I consider that a soft comfort, that the memory of your assassins has nearly faded. The coward is entirely gone, only remaining in my own head. The sorcerer still lingers, but less of him every day. Nobody will remember them, but you...." Words are caught, stumbled over, and swallowed. "I remember you still, until my last day. I remember the crimes that were ignored. Vengeance matters little to you now, you're gone, but I still want it. It's all I dream of, hurting those who allowed this hurt to come to me. You'd take some consolation of what has happened, our rivals are broken down, shadows of their former selves."


She lifts her glass, careful not to spill anything, in a mock toast in the aftermath of a victory. She blinks, but her eyes remain agitated, and dampness grows to barely holding back a torrent of tears. Though she doesn't appear sad, maybe sorrow had left this revenant long ago, or she was just too disconnected from her physical body. "I celebrate my continued victory, but doing it alone feels hollow." The glass is lowered again, and a short-lived celebration is finished. "At the top of the pyramid, without anyone to share it with."


Her other hand clenches tight, knuckles nearly white through highly pigmented skin, and nails dig deep into hard skin. Slowly opening the hand to loom down at an item she held: a ring of black lumpy metal, barely resembling a ring at all if not for the hole in the middle. Nobody could wear it anymore; it was far too misshapen. "You are immortal as long as I live. You'll never stop living in my head. That is my passion, the strength that will break my chains."


Outside the dust-laden room, a whole living world carried on just past the rain-covered glass, the ongoings of an Empire and its mighty capital. Hundreds of thousands nearby, millions outside the city, billions across the nearby systems. Uncountable across the areas where she had influence. Busy, always busy, never stopping to consider the small details. Never stopping to acknowledge the effects of war. But in the dust-laden room, she was alone.
]]> <![CDATA[[IC] Private Journal]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1421 Thu, 18 Sep 2025 22:52:31 +0000 Sith Stûza]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1421 The following is a recording of Sith Stuza's personal journal. The writing is short and cryptic, much like the nature of the person behind it. 

Unavailable for the public unless shared by the Sith alone.


"I've outlasted them."

His hand trembled against his side.

"Is this how the Dark Lords of the past felt, outlasting their rivals?"

No.

"I once thought it cunning to reach this far without expression, without damage... Preparation. For what?"

"I am dying."

He knew this. He knew what was due.

"By the end, it won't be a title they will remember."

"I've thought of my role in the Sith Order. Order. Structure. Preparation. To create something that will outlast."

His augmented lungs rattled, exhaled to the thought of a future. Without him.

"Tradition, for one not born into it, must be seized through conquest."

"I outlasted my rivals, I did not conquer them."

"I will train to remove all thoughts of titles. Only to witness power, I cannot allow defeat before ever beginning."

His hand steadied at the thought of merely having to face a Sith. For that, he was more than prepared.

Eager.]]> The following is a recording of Sith Stuza's personal journal. The writing is short and cryptic, much like the nature of the person behind it. 

Unavailable for the public unless shared by the Sith alone.


"I've outlasted them."

His hand trembled against his side.

"Is this how the Dark Lords of the past felt, outlasting their rivals?"

No.

"I once thought it cunning to reach this far without expression, without damage... Preparation. For what?"

"I am dying."

He knew this. He knew what was due.

"By the end, it won't be a title they will remember."

"I've thought of my role in the Sith Order. Order. Structure. Preparation. To create something that will outlast."

His augmented lungs rattled, exhaled to the thought of a future. Without him.

"Tradition, for one not born into it, must be seized through conquest."

"I outlasted my rivals, I did not conquer them."

"I will train to remove all thoughts of titles. Only to witness power, I cannot allow defeat before ever beginning."

His hand steadied at the thought of merely having to face a Sith. For that, he was more than prepared.

Eager.]]> <![CDATA[Freedom or Death]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1419 Mon, 15 Sep 2025 17:38:22 +0000 Krassus Horuset]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1419 CHAPTER I: Tarhan I


The Gruuvan Shaal parlor had a name once, an overlong thing in Old Nam’tees that promised spice and smoke, and the best cut of meat this side of Nam’ta Prime’s equator. The script still curled in pink neon over the window, but a third of the letters had gone dim, and two of the rest flickered like exhausted eyes.

Empty tables waited in fours, chrome legs and white laminate wiped near to the bone. The vibro-fan above the door turned on a dry bearing, creaking like a ship’s mast on windless seas. One slow groan every revolution.

A holobox in the corner dribbled out music meant for livelier hours, an auto-mix of synth pipes and drum loops, always almost about to be something anyone cared to hear, then wandering away again into generic slop. Perfect for restaurant ambience.


Derrek had the grill open and his shoulders rounded, the Besalisk’s four thick hands working with patient fury; polish, buff, turn, polish again. He said it got streaks if the paste set, and that had sounded like a reason the first time. By the fifth, even Derrek looked a little ashamed of the zeal in his elbows, sighing as he polished the hours away behind his unlit grill.

Tarhan sat on the high stool behind the register and slouched until his horns bumped the back wall. The young Zabrak had the holonet open on his pad, his tattooed face lit in shifting colors; Imperial teal, then the sunny saffron of adverts, then the lipstick red of a content warning he swiped away without reading. He wore the restaurant apron still, a once-white thing spattered in sauces and water rings, tied twice around a waist that had nothing spare on it. On a normal day his shift passed in bursts: orders, bites to wrap, oil spitting at his wrists, Derrek swearing like a freighter captain barking commands out to his deckhands.

But now there were no orders. A Twi’lek couple had come in at noon and bought tea, sitting in a corner without speaking, leaving half the cups as they went. After that? Nobody. The door rang only for the wind.

“Song change,” Derrek muttered from the kitchen without looking up.

“Uh-huh,” Tarhan replied, poking at the holo tile next to the register. The synth pipes playing from the holobox gave way to something with more drum, then to something more smooth. He returned to his scrolling.

With a touch the hutt-ball game playing on his pad made way for the sound of smooth, official brass that suggested medals and clean boots. Governor Ralter appearing in frame, a hard woman rendered soft by the algorithm that smoothed every face on this channel. Old footage, Tarhan thought. The Governor’s hair different; smoother. The frown and dark circles under her eyes not yet a part of the face displayed. “Nam’ta is safe,” she said. “Nam’ta is united.” Behind her ran a loop of parades, flags folded like bread, gift baskets for nameless veterans. “But only because of those who fight for her. The few, the brave, the—”

Tarhan’s thumb slid before she finished.

The brass chased him into the next tile and then cut at once to a youth with shoulders like a closet, all square angles and new Imperial armor. “Join the Imperial Sector Defence Forces,” the lettering demanded, not a question.
Do something. Be someone. Learn a trade. Serve your sector. Serve your Empire.
The boy clicked open a thermal detonator with the ease of a lighter and smiled at the camera as if expecting a kiss for his patriotism.


Tarhan scrolled, nose wrinkling. He found a holo of a man he’d seen three times before, an Arcona who gave cooking lessons with a blaster rifle slung across his back, making soup with the bored calm of a soldier on leave.

There were a series of funny edits made from his dry expression and alien accent. He snorted at one and watched it twice. Another scroll, then an advert for a sportsbook he could not legally use.

Then a music teaser, a local label’s banner; the grain in the picture said the artist was more talented than paid. The beat in his ears shifted into real rhythm for the first time that day. He disconnected his earbuds and connected it to the shop’s holobox. A trembling string counterpointed by a warm kick. The singer came in low and careful, like a secret shared behind closed doors. Derrek’s polishing slowed as he listened.
“Who’s that?”

“Sylvi Lumi,” Tarhan said. “Just a teaser.”

“Tell her to come in and eat eh?” Derrek said. “I’ll give her a discount if she posts about the shop. Is she pretty?”

“She’s a Bothan,” Tarhan said, waiting for Derrek’s reaction.

“Ah… Never mind then.” A smirk, then he scrolled on, earbuds connected once more.

Holo after holo, and then, there. A thumbnail that was just sky, the slanted line of a roof, and the corner of a torn banner flapping in burnt air.
The caption spelled F.N.A. with an emoji knife. One of Barracas’ rebel groups, Tarhan knew.
 His thumb hovered the way a hand hovers over a burn. The thing about these, other than that they were highly illegal to watch; posted by burner accounts on Nam’ta’s holonet, was that they were usually just noise.

A burst of static, rebel armor-cam footage. The ground too close. Some shouting, blaster fire, then the end. He knew better than to expect anything but the bitter taste of war footage in his mouth afterwards. He tapped anyway.


The shot began wide: Nam’ta Secundus, if the ruined industrial sector was anything to go by. Bulkheads of old factories risen around the recorder like teeth; the broken windows were teeth too. The area bombed out; the light brown and gray that came after fire. Somebody on the rooftop coughed; a thoughtless human cough. He swung the camera and caught them all in frame.

Imperial siege tanks; six in a straight line, each the size of a small townhouse, all flat plates and humped turrets. The column damaging the street by rolling down it. Soldiers flowed on either side of the snaking column as it crept through the ruined road. Armor clean at the shoulders where they were emblazoned with the Imperial banner and stained elsewhere.

The charcoal insignia of the Conquest Consolidation Corps gleaming in the plating of chestplates and tank hulls. They moved like the music playing in the background said they would, with precision. Trained and battle-hardened. Moving in formations, rifles at the same angle. Scanning alleys and windows. But seemingly missing the man with the camera.

In the background of the video a voice began to sing in a rasp friendly enough to seem harmless: “Go on home, Imperial soldiers, go on home…”

Tarhan almost smiled. Music was such a simple thing, but somehow everyone always found a song to do the bloody work.

“Have you got no kriffin’ homes of your own?” The voice continued, a drum behind it. The camera tightened a little; cropped as if the edge of the column was the edge of the very world.

“As long as you’re here, we’ll fight you without fear—”

An Imperial soldier looked up, idly, like a man noticing weather. The tune made Tarhan’s throat itch, and he swallowed and didn’t take his eyes off the feed.

“—Until Nam’ta is free once more….” The voice laughed and then took the melody someplace twisty and proud. “And if you stay, Imperial soldiers, if you stay?”


A blast.

The world whitened; the street awash with dust, fire, and a wash of petal color. And then there were no men any longer; a pink mist and hard pieces of what had been soldiers blew away in the shockwave.

 And the lead tank, gods. The tank lifted entire; all that weight and steel jumping up a solid three meters into the air, tearing open as it jumped; wrangled inside out violently by the force of the explosion as if a giant had pinched it and tossed it back in disgust.

The camera jumped. The rooftop cougher made a noise that might have been a prayer or a slur. A wash of dust overtaking the camera’s point of view.

The singer didn’t miss a beat as the image faded.

“You’ll never, ever beat the F.N.A!” The frame froze.

The Free Nam’ta coat of arms reared up. A green republic sigil with a wreath like forest around it, and the words overlaid in a heroic font that didn’t care you had just watched a platoon of men as precisely machined as their rifles turn to mist.

“FREEDOM OR DEATH!”


Tarhan realized he had not breathed properly since the tune began.

He let the breath go with a little hiss he was not proud of. He made himself roll the video back with his thumb, and then, because he already felt filthy, watched it again.

He saw details he had missed: the way the first two soldiers closest to the tank vanished entirely while the third had a spine to drop, the metal links on the treads coming off in stringers, the way the tank’s turret turned almost lazily as it went up, empty, showing the camera the open mouth of its barrel and nothing behind it before it flung out of frame.

The pink clung in the air afterwards like the vapor of sunsets on summer days. He hated the shiver it sent down his spine.

He watched to the sigil again and then closed the feed, putting the datapad outside as he took out his earbuds with shaky hands. A deep breath.

The shop was as before. Derrek was wiping the same oval with the same cloth. The fan above squawked once and creaked and soldiered on. Tarhan stared at his hands. He stood up, and his stool scraped the floor with a shriek that made Derrek flinch.
“Boss,” Tarhan said.

Derrek glanced his way, then to the grill, then back again. “Mmh?”

“Can I go? Early. There’s… I did the tables.”

Derrek held the cloth in the air like a captured flag. “You polished them. But did you do the legs? People’s feet, they leave—”

“Also the legs, yes.” Tarhan kept his voice careful. “Twice.” He had not done them twice, but had done them once well, and that was near enough to twice in any book that mattered.

“The register?”

“Counted. The same it was, almost.”

“You scrubbed the—”

“Floors?” Tarhan said, a little too fast. “Yes. Twice. Even did the edge under the counter where it gets sticky.”

Derrek sighed, long as a slow train, and let his shoulders sag under the weight of all his hands. He looked toward the door as if expecting salvation to come marching through. Nothing walked past but the wind and a piece of trash that had lived better days as a sandwich paper. “Go,” he said at last. “Go then, boy. I’ll close in a little bit… I think I’ll sit with the grill and polish him a sixth time.” He swallowed, lips pressed together. “Your paycheck—”

“I know,” Tarhan said. “It’s fine, I understand.”

“It’s not fine.” Derrek stared at the grill so he didn’t have to stare at Tarhan. “I won’t cheat you. You’re a good kid. Just… not today. Bring your father in one night, eh? I’ll feed him. It’ll be good to have the old chief around again, ey?” He smiled, or tried to, running two of his hands over his scalp. “You should eat something too, Tarhan, or the wind’ll carry you off.”

Tarhan nodded. “I’ll get something on the way home,” he said, and untied his apron, folding it into a narrow bundle.

He could imagine Derrek wearing grief like a bandolier. He put the apron under the counter and took his pad and slung his jacket over one shoulder. “Thanks,” he said. He meant: thank you for telling me you won’t cheat me. Thank you for talking about my father without asking if he had gone yellow and soft like the rumors said aliens do when you take their jobs.

The bell over the door chimed for the second time that day, marking his leaving like a sick private joke.

Outside, the day had bled into the hour when the city found its neon. Nam’ta Prime’s poorer blocks wore light like makeup, lines of color laying along the rain sluices and tracing out the cracks in stone. Tarhan tucked his pad into his jacket and set his feet for home. He kept to the side streets where the vendors knew him and the light smelled like the spices they burned to cover the smell of oil. Flats opened above in little balconies where women watered sour plants and the runoff splashed the passersby.
A Rodian cut a Bothan’s hair with clippers in a doorway.

As he turned the corner he passed a mural he had not seen the day before.

Fresh paint showed in the wet gloss. Ralter had the body of a horse in it, ridiculous long teeth and eyes pointing different ways like compass needles gone drunk. The artist had given her a bit, a saddle, and reins. And then, having already gone far enough, went further, setting her skittering beneath a thin rider whose nose and tight moustache wanted to be the whole portrait.

Kaldon, he imagined. His cloak was white and too big, a child wearing his father’s robe. A little brass plaque on his chest, oversized so one could read the figure was a Commodore.

Ralter had a silver platter in her forehooves, and on it the Nam’ta system, done like a child’s model with orbit rings and moons etched around the red bead of the Nam’ta gas giant.

She offered it up to a giant, green-and-gangrene troll in a white uniform, stained the color of old rust in places where blood does not reach. The face was a joke, a monstrous frog with sagging eyes and a cruel smirk lined with pointed teeth, nearly drowning in the fat rolls of his gibs. Moff Graush rendered in the shape artists reserved for monsters that had eaten villages in children’s stories.

The fatness did the work of two paragraphs of invective. Tarhan stopped in the neon-lit puddle at his boots and looked up at the thing until he felt absurd and still looked a heartbeat longer. Then he shook his head, half a grin on his mouth he didn’t feel. The artist had been brave and obvious. And from what he saw on the holos, the portrait of Graush was strikingly accurate. He wondered how long the thing would last before a brush of gray erased it back to wall.

He went on.

The alleys wound tighter in the old blocks and collected smells like coins: frying batter, the iron of cheap blood, damp clothes that never dried in the shade. As he walked he realized he was humming, and then realized what he was humming. “Go on home, Imperial soldiers…” He sang under his breath, the way a man talks to himself about bread and does not know he is hungry until he hears it.

“Go on home…” he mumbled. “…You’ll never ever beat the—”

“What was that, boy?!”


The voice came from a kink in the alley where the neon died and the wet concrete shined black as a boot. Tarhan stopped dead in his tracks.

The man who stepped out of the shadow wore the uniform of the Nam’ta Security Forces, the new version with the Imperial banner stitched where the Confederate sigil had been, like a rag to stop a hole. He was a big man with heavy wrists and a belly that said he ate at his leisure. His hair retreated from a forehead creased with the thinking he clearly seldom did. He had a stunstick at his hip and a blaster pistol he wore low like a promise.

The man stepped forward and set a palm on Tarhan’s chest, pushing the young Zabrak, not hard, but hard enough to make his back touch the wall. Tarhan took a breath and swallowed the song whole.

“Nothing!” he said, knowing the punishment for aliens associating with the rebellion. “Nothing! I wasn’t! I was—" 
The man’s eyes narrowed as he parted his lips to speak before they widened with something between recognition and pity. “You’re one of Zerrin’s boys, ain’t ya?” he said, letting go as he stepped back as if someone had called his name. “Zerrin Vahs. Used to be captain of the local riot forces…”

Tarhan rubbed at his jacket where the push had landed, and nodded. “My father, aye.” he said.

“How is he?” The man’s voice went solemn, the way men talk about ill kin. “I heard… well, I heard what they did to him. ‘Deemed surplus.’”

Tarhan nodded. “He’s looking,” he said. “For a new job.”

“Hmm.” The man’s mouth made a shape that wanted to be pity and settled for tired. “They told us about reorganization. Efficiency. Imperial standards. You say the words enough it sounds like a prayer. New flag, new stripes, same old blisters. Zebb.” He tapped his chest with two fingers. “Sergeant Zebb.”

“Tarhan,” Tarhan said, as if the sergeant did not know. He tried to make his shoulders settle away from the wall.

Zebb nodded at the alley mouth where the neon cast pale shapes on the wet floor. “Tell your old man I said hello… and mind where you sing, Tarhan Vahs,” he said. “I know where that tune is from, boy, and the Imperials—” He lifted a hand and let it fall. “They don’t have an ear for humor. And they have a taste for handing out hard labor off-world. Twenty years for a song if they say it’s sedition. Thirty for a flag the wrong way up. Thirty-five for spitting if the spit lands where it shouldn’t.”

He looked at Tarhan as if to put a blessing on the boy and found his hand empty instead. “Tell your father… tell him I wish him luck. And tell him I had no say, none of us did… It’s the Empire did all that nasty business.”

“Aye? And yet you still wear their uniform,” Tarhan said before he could stop himself, and flicked a glance at the new banner stitched on Zebb’s sleeve.

Zebb looked at it too, as if surprised to find it there. “Aye,” he said. “Somebody’s got to hold the door while the wolves pass… I still serve Nam’ta, and when these rebels are gone the Imps will leave us to ourselves again too…” He said, his eyes glazing over as if that is what he told himself to sleep at night. He shifted on his feet. “Go on home, boy. And be careful with your songs.” He hesitated. “Maybe stick to the old ones. The ones we sang before the cords on our throats grew  so tight.”


Tarhan slid out of the alley’s pinch and back into the street, and Zebb did not follow. He thought of telling his father about the encounter and then thought of the way his father’s mouth did not make much of smiles since dismissal, and kept the thought in his pocket instead.

The housing blocks rose with the dull authority of bad news, their faces pocked from decades of edits and undoings, laundry lines pulled like tripwires across inner courtyards. Since the dismissal they had moved into the three-room that barely took the couch they had and a table a cousin had given them begrudgingly. His little brother’s school was three stops farther, his mother said she liked the walk, and Tarhan pretended to believe her.

From two streets away he saw the smoke. Not the cooking smoke or the cold-weather ghost of bad heaters, but the clean, strong scent of something meant to frighten. He smelled the ash before he reached the corner. Then he heard the orders and saw them. Real soldiers; Imperial, the color of storms. They made triangles at the entrances with their bodies, lines tight and rifles held in the bored alert of men who expect to shoot, and might just do so if it would end the tedious task ahead.

They had surrounded the neighborhood, armored speeders and prison shuttles nearby. A corridor to block off any escape as the rest of their unit went to work.

The people who lived there, most of them aliens, were being hustled down the stairs by squads and stripped of belts and shoelaces as if they might hang themselves on the way to the shuttles. Taken out of their homes; told to leave to the shuttles. Once arriving outside, hands were bound in bright flex that cut skin like wire.

Tarhan could see blinds were torn from windows and the rooms behind laid out like organs, everything intimate and wrong under the open look of soldiers who didn’t see. Suitcases packed by those with more time to prepare as the Imperials made their way through the housing blocks were opened on the staircases and balconies, the contents poured into communal piles on the concrete, then kicked apart with the toes of boots. “No baggage!” one of the Imperials barked, flatly, as if the word had been a rebellion that needed to be stamped out.

The voice was echoed by another, then another. “No baggage!” A little girl cried because a soldier had taken her doll and thrown it into the pile that used to be breakfast bowls and shirts.

Somebody’s holo-radio played a dance song and then stuttered into static. A man tried to pick up a photograph that had slid and received a baton across the wrist that left a purple welt in the shape of a country he did not know. There was blaster fire somewhere inside, short and efficient, and then another burst like punctuation.

Tarhan stopped as if his bones had been pulled out and the meat left to learn balance. The world narrowed until it had room for only two faces: his mother’s, the set of her mouth when she bent over Eolat’s shoes, and Eolat’s, sticky with breakfast, his horns little budding curls as soft as any child’s hair. They were inside. Of course they were inside. They would have been at home waiting for him to finish and say how quiet it had been and they would have pretended it was enough.

As he watched the smoke rise from the housing block echoing with blaster fire and the cold shouts of Imperial diction he knew. Knew as well as the singer on the rooftop had known the next line of his song. That his mother was in that smoke and his brother besides her.

“Mom! Eolat!” he shouted, and the sound of his brother’s name in his own mouth gave him courage or made him twice the fool. He did not care which.

He ran forward…]]> CHAPTER I: Tarhan I


The Gruuvan Shaal parlor had a name once, an overlong thing in Old Nam’tees that promised spice and smoke, and the best cut of meat this side of Nam’ta Prime’s equator. The script still curled in pink neon over the window, but a third of the letters had gone dim, and two of the rest flickered like exhausted eyes.

Empty tables waited in fours, chrome legs and white laminate wiped near to the bone. The vibro-fan above the door turned on a dry bearing, creaking like a ship’s mast on windless seas. One slow groan every revolution.

A holobox in the corner dribbled out music meant for livelier hours, an auto-mix of synth pipes and drum loops, always almost about to be something anyone cared to hear, then wandering away again into generic slop. Perfect for restaurant ambience.


Derrek had the grill open and his shoulders rounded, the Besalisk’s four thick hands working with patient fury; polish, buff, turn, polish again. He said it got streaks if the paste set, and that had sounded like a reason the first time. By the fifth, even Derrek looked a little ashamed of the zeal in his elbows, sighing as he polished the hours away behind his unlit grill.

Tarhan sat on the high stool behind the register and slouched until his horns bumped the back wall. The young Zabrak had the holonet open on his pad, his tattooed face lit in shifting colors; Imperial teal, then the sunny saffron of adverts, then the lipstick red of a content warning he swiped away without reading. He wore the restaurant apron still, a once-white thing spattered in sauces and water rings, tied twice around a waist that had nothing spare on it. On a normal day his shift passed in bursts: orders, bites to wrap, oil spitting at his wrists, Derrek swearing like a freighter captain barking commands out to his deckhands.

But now there were no orders. A Twi’lek couple had come in at noon and bought tea, sitting in a corner without speaking, leaving half the cups as they went. After that? Nobody. The door rang only for the wind.

“Song change,” Derrek muttered from the kitchen without looking up.

“Uh-huh,” Tarhan replied, poking at the holo tile next to the register. The synth pipes playing from the holobox gave way to something with more drum, then to something more smooth. He returned to his scrolling.

With a touch the hutt-ball game playing on his pad made way for the sound of smooth, official brass that suggested medals and clean boots. Governor Ralter appearing in frame, a hard woman rendered soft by the algorithm that smoothed every face on this channel. Old footage, Tarhan thought. The Governor’s hair different; smoother. The frown and dark circles under her eyes not yet a part of the face displayed. “Nam’ta is safe,” she said. “Nam’ta is united.” Behind her ran a loop of parades, flags folded like bread, gift baskets for nameless veterans. “But only because of those who fight for her. The few, the brave, the—”

Tarhan’s thumb slid before she finished.

The brass chased him into the next tile and then cut at once to a youth with shoulders like a closet, all square angles and new Imperial armor. “Join the Imperial Sector Defence Forces,” the lettering demanded, not a question.
Do something. Be someone. Learn a trade. Serve your sector. Serve your Empire.
The boy clicked open a thermal detonator with the ease of a lighter and smiled at the camera as if expecting a kiss for his patriotism.


Tarhan scrolled, nose wrinkling. He found a holo of a man he’d seen three times before, an Arcona who gave cooking lessons with a blaster rifle slung across his back, making soup with the bored calm of a soldier on leave.

There were a series of funny edits made from his dry expression and alien accent. He snorted at one and watched it twice. Another scroll, then an advert for a sportsbook he could not legally use.

Then a music teaser, a local label’s banner; the grain in the picture said the artist was more talented than paid. The beat in his ears shifted into real rhythm for the first time that day. He disconnected his earbuds and connected it to the shop’s holobox. A trembling string counterpointed by a warm kick. The singer came in low and careful, like a secret shared behind closed doors. Derrek’s polishing slowed as he listened.
“Who’s that?”

“Sylvi Lumi,” Tarhan said. “Just a teaser.”

“Tell her to come in and eat eh?” Derrek said. “I’ll give her a discount if she posts about the shop. Is she pretty?”

“She’s a Bothan,” Tarhan said, waiting for Derrek’s reaction.

“Ah… Never mind then.” A smirk, then he scrolled on, earbuds connected once more.

Holo after holo, and then, there. A thumbnail that was just sky, the slanted line of a roof, and the corner of a torn banner flapping in burnt air.
The caption spelled F.N.A. with an emoji knife. One of Barracas’ rebel groups, Tarhan knew.
 His thumb hovered the way a hand hovers over a burn. The thing about these, other than that they were highly illegal to watch; posted by burner accounts on Nam’ta’s holonet, was that they were usually just noise.

A burst of static, rebel armor-cam footage. The ground too close. Some shouting, blaster fire, then the end. He knew better than to expect anything but the bitter taste of war footage in his mouth afterwards. He tapped anyway.


The shot began wide: Nam’ta Secundus, if the ruined industrial sector was anything to go by. Bulkheads of old factories risen around the recorder like teeth; the broken windows were teeth too. The area bombed out; the light brown and gray that came after fire. Somebody on the rooftop coughed; a thoughtless human cough. He swung the camera and caught them all in frame.

Imperial siege tanks; six in a straight line, each the size of a small townhouse, all flat plates and humped turrets. The column damaging the street by rolling down it. Soldiers flowed on either side of the snaking column as it crept through the ruined road. Armor clean at the shoulders where they were emblazoned with the Imperial banner and stained elsewhere.

The charcoal insignia of the Conquest Consolidation Corps gleaming in the plating of chestplates and tank hulls. They moved like the music playing in the background said they would, with precision. Trained and battle-hardened. Moving in formations, rifles at the same angle. Scanning alleys and windows. But seemingly missing the man with the camera.

In the background of the video a voice began to sing in a rasp friendly enough to seem harmless: “Go on home, Imperial soldiers, go on home…”

Tarhan almost smiled. Music was such a simple thing, but somehow everyone always found a song to do the bloody work.

“Have you got no kriffin’ homes of your own?” The voice continued, a drum behind it. The camera tightened a little; cropped as if the edge of the column was the edge of the very world.

“As long as you’re here, we’ll fight you without fear—”

An Imperial soldier looked up, idly, like a man noticing weather. The tune made Tarhan’s throat itch, and he swallowed and didn’t take his eyes off the feed.

“—Until Nam’ta is free once more….” The voice laughed and then took the melody someplace twisty and proud. “And if you stay, Imperial soldiers, if you stay?”


A blast.

The world whitened; the street awash with dust, fire, and a wash of petal color. And then there were no men any longer; a pink mist and hard pieces of what had been soldiers blew away in the shockwave.

 And the lead tank, gods. The tank lifted entire; all that weight and steel jumping up a solid three meters into the air, tearing open as it jumped; wrangled inside out violently by the force of the explosion as if a giant had pinched it and tossed it back in disgust.

The camera jumped. The rooftop cougher made a noise that might have been a prayer or a slur. A wash of dust overtaking the camera’s point of view.

The singer didn’t miss a beat as the image faded.

“You’ll never, ever beat the F.N.A!” The frame froze.

The Free Nam’ta coat of arms reared up. A green republic sigil with a wreath like forest around it, and the words overlaid in a heroic font that didn’t care you had just watched a platoon of men as precisely machined as their rifles turn to mist.

“FREEDOM OR DEATH!”


Tarhan realized he had not breathed properly since the tune began.

He let the breath go with a little hiss he was not proud of. He made himself roll the video back with his thumb, and then, because he already felt filthy, watched it again.

He saw details he had missed: the way the first two soldiers closest to the tank vanished entirely while the third had a spine to drop, the metal links on the treads coming off in stringers, the way the tank’s turret turned almost lazily as it went up, empty, showing the camera the open mouth of its barrel and nothing behind it before it flung out of frame.

The pink clung in the air afterwards like the vapor of sunsets on summer days. He hated the shiver it sent down his spine.

He watched to the sigil again and then closed the feed, putting the datapad outside as he took out his earbuds with shaky hands. A deep breath.

The shop was as before. Derrek was wiping the same oval with the same cloth. The fan above squawked once and creaked and soldiered on. Tarhan stared at his hands. He stood up, and his stool scraped the floor with a shriek that made Derrek flinch.
“Boss,” Tarhan said.

Derrek glanced his way, then to the grill, then back again. “Mmh?”

“Can I go? Early. There’s… I did the tables.”

Derrek held the cloth in the air like a captured flag. “You polished them. But did you do the legs? People’s feet, they leave—”

“Also the legs, yes.” Tarhan kept his voice careful. “Twice.” He had not done them twice, but had done them once well, and that was near enough to twice in any book that mattered.

“The register?”

“Counted. The same it was, almost.”

“You scrubbed the—”

“Floors?” Tarhan said, a little too fast. “Yes. Twice. Even did the edge under the counter where it gets sticky.”

Derrek sighed, long as a slow train, and let his shoulders sag under the weight of all his hands. He looked toward the door as if expecting salvation to come marching through. Nothing walked past but the wind and a piece of trash that had lived better days as a sandwich paper. “Go,” he said at last. “Go then, boy. I’ll close in a little bit… I think I’ll sit with the grill and polish him a sixth time.” He swallowed, lips pressed together. “Your paycheck—”

“I know,” Tarhan said. “It’s fine, I understand.”

“It’s not fine.” Derrek stared at the grill so he didn’t have to stare at Tarhan. “I won’t cheat you. You’re a good kid. Just… not today. Bring your father in one night, eh? I’ll feed him. It’ll be good to have the old chief around again, ey?” He smiled, or tried to, running two of his hands over his scalp. “You should eat something too, Tarhan, or the wind’ll carry you off.”

Tarhan nodded. “I’ll get something on the way home,” he said, and untied his apron, folding it into a narrow bundle.

He could imagine Derrek wearing grief like a bandolier. He put the apron under the counter and took his pad and slung his jacket over one shoulder. “Thanks,” he said. He meant: thank you for telling me you won’t cheat me. Thank you for talking about my father without asking if he had gone yellow and soft like the rumors said aliens do when you take their jobs.

The bell over the door chimed for the second time that day, marking his leaving like a sick private joke.

Outside, the day had bled into the hour when the city found its neon. Nam’ta Prime’s poorer blocks wore light like makeup, lines of color laying along the rain sluices and tracing out the cracks in stone. Tarhan tucked his pad into his jacket and set his feet for home. He kept to the side streets where the vendors knew him and the light smelled like the spices they burned to cover the smell of oil. Flats opened above in little balconies where women watered sour plants and the runoff splashed the passersby.
A Rodian cut a Bothan’s hair with clippers in a doorway.

As he turned the corner he passed a mural he had not seen the day before.

Fresh paint showed in the wet gloss. Ralter had the body of a horse in it, ridiculous long teeth and eyes pointing different ways like compass needles gone drunk. The artist had given her a bit, a saddle, and reins. And then, having already gone far enough, went further, setting her skittering beneath a thin rider whose nose and tight moustache wanted to be the whole portrait.

Kaldon, he imagined. His cloak was white and too big, a child wearing his father’s robe. A little brass plaque on his chest, oversized so one could read the figure was a Commodore.

Ralter had a silver platter in her forehooves, and on it the Nam’ta system, done like a child’s model with orbit rings and moons etched around the red bead of the Nam’ta gas giant.

She offered it up to a giant, green-and-gangrene troll in a white uniform, stained the color of old rust in places where blood does not reach. The face was a joke, a monstrous frog with sagging eyes and a cruel smirk lined with pointed teeth, nearly drowning in the fat rolls of his gibs. Moff Graush rendered in the shape artists reserved for monsters that had eaten villages in children’s stories.

The fatness did the work of two paragraphs of invective. Tarhan stopped in the neon-lit puddle at his boots and looked up at the thing until he felt absurd and still looked a heartbeat longer. Then he shook his head, half a grin on his mouth he didn’t feel. The artist had been brave and obvious. And from what he saw on the holos, the portrait of Graush was strikingly accurate. He wondered how long the thing would last before a brush of gray erased it back to wall.

He went on.

The alleys wound tighter in the old blocks and collected smells like coins: frying batter, the iron of cheap blood, damp clothes that never dried in the shade. As he walked he realized he was humming, and then realized what he was humming. “Go on home, Imperial soldiers…” He sang under his breath, the way a man talks to himself about bread and does not know he is hungry until he hears it.

“Go on home…” he mumbled. “…You’ll never ever beat the—”

“What was that, boy?!”


The voice came from a kink in the alley where the neon died and the wet concrete shined black as a boot. Tarhan stopped dead in his tracks.

The man who stepped out of the shadow wore the uniform of the Nam’ta Security Forces, the new version with the Imperial banner stitched where the Confederate sigil had been, like a rag to stop a hole. He was a big man with heavy wrists and a belly that said he ate at his leisure. His hair retreated from a forehead creased with the thinking he clearly seldom did. He had a stunstick at his hip and a blaster pistol he wore low like a promise.

The man stepped forward and set a palm on Tarhan’s chest, pushing the young Zabrak, not hard, but hard enough to make his back touch the wall. Tarhan took a breath and swallowed the song whole.

“Nothing!” he said, knowing the punishment for aliens associating with the rebellion. “Nothing! I wasn’t! I was—" 
The man’s eyes narrowed as he parted his lips to speak before they widened with something between recognition and pity. “You’re one of Zerrin’s boys, ain’t ya?” he said, letting go as he stepped back as if someone had called his name. “Zerrin Vahs. Used to be captain of the local riot forces…”

Tarhan rubbed at his jacket where the push had landed, and nodded. “My father, aye.” he said.

“How is he?” The man’s voice went solemn, the way men talk about ill kin. “I heard… well, I heard what they did to him. ‘Deemed surplus.’”

Tarhan nodded. “He’s looking,” he said. “For a new job.”

“Hmm.” The man’s mouth made a shape that wanted to be pity and settled for tired. “They told us about reorganization. Efficiency. Imperial standards. You say the words enough it sounds like a prayer. New flag, new stripes, same old blisters. Zebb.” He tapped his chest with two fingers. “Sergeant Zebb.”

“Tarhan,” Tarhan said, as if the sergeant did not know. He tried to make his shoulders settle away from the wall.

Zebb nodded at the alley mouth where the neon cast pale shapes on the wet floor. “Tell your old man I said hello… and mind where you sing, Tarhan Vahs,” he said. “I know where that tune is from, boy, and the Imperials—” He lifted a hand and let it fall. “They don’t have an ear for humor. And they have a taste for handing out hard labor off-world. Twenty years for a song if they say it’s sedition. Thirty for a flag the wrong way up. Thirty-five for spitting if the spit lands where it shouldn’t.”

He looked at Tarhan as if to put a blessing on the boy and found his hand empty instead. “Tell your father… tell him I wish him luck. And tell him I had no say, none of us did… It’s the Empire did all that nasty business.”

“Aye? And yet you still wear their uniform,” Tarhan said before he could stop himself, and flicked a glance at the new banner stitched on Zebb’s sleeve.

Zebb looked at it too, as if surprised to find it there. “Aye,” he said. “Somebody’s got to hold the door while the wolves pass… I still serve Nam’ta, and when these rebels are gone the Imps will leave us to ourselves again too…” He said, his eyes glazing over as if that is what he told himself to sleep at night. He shifted on his feet. “Go on home, boy. And be careful with your songs.” He hesitated. “Maybe stick to the old ones. The ones we sang before the cords on our throats grew  so tight.”


Tarhan slid out of the alley’s pinch and back into the street, and Zebb did not follow. He thought of telling his father about the encounter and then thought of the way his father’s mouth did not make much of smiles since dismissal, and kept the thought in his pocket instead.

The housing blocks rose with the dull authority of bad news, their faces pocked from decades of edits and undoings, laundry lines pulled like tripwires across inner courtyards. Since the dismissal they had moved into the three-room that barely took the couch they had and a table a cousin had given them begrudgingly. His little brother’s school was three stops farther, his mother said she liked the walk, and Tarhan pretended to believe her.

From two streets away he saw the smoke. Not the cooking smoke or the cold-weather ghost of bad heaters, but the clean, strong scent of something meant to frighten. He smelled the ash before he reached the corner. Then he heard the orders and saw them. Real soldiers; Imperial, the color of storms. They made triangles at the entrances with their bodies, lines tight and rifles held in the bored alert of men who expect to shoot, and might just do so if it would end the tedious task ahead.

They had surrounded the neighborhood, armored speeders and prison shuttles nearby. A corridor to block off any escape as the rest of their unit went to work.

The people who lived there, most of them aliens, were being hustled down the stairs by squads and stripped of belts and shoelaces as if they might hang themselves on the way to the shuttles. Taken out of their homes; told to leave to the shuttles. Once arriving outside, hands were bound in bright flex that cut skin like wire.

Tarhan could see blinds were torn from windows and the rooms behind laid out like organs, everything intimate and wrong under the open look of soldiers who didn’t see. Suitcases packed by those with more time to prepare as the Imperials made their way through the housing blocks were opened on the staircases and balconies, the contents poured into communal piles on the concrete, then kicked apart with the toes of boots. “No baggage!” one of the Imperials barked, flatly, as if the word had been a rebellion that needed to be stamped out.

The voice was echoed by another, then another. “No baggage!” A little girl cried because a soldier had taken her doll and thrown it into the pile that used to be breakfast bowls and shirts.

Somebody’s holo-radio played a dance song and then stuttered into static. A man tried to pick up a photograph that had slid and received a baton across the wrist that left a purple welt in the shape of a country he did not know. There was blaster fire somewhere inside, short and efficient, and then another burst like punctuation.

Tarhan stopped as if his bones had been pulled out and the meat left to learn balance. The world narrowed until it had room for only two faces: his mother’s, the set of her mouth when she bent over Eolat’s shoes, and Eolat’s, sticky with breakfast, his horns little budding curls as soft as any child’s hair. They were inside. Of course they were inside. They would have been at home waiting for him to finish and say how quiet it had been and they would have pretended it was enough.

As he watched the smoke rise from the housing block echoing with blaster fire and the cold shouts of Imperial diction he knew. Knew as well as the singer on the rooftop had known the next line of his song. That his mother was in that smoke and his brother besides her.

“Mom! Eolat!” he shouted, and the sound of his brother’s name in his own mouth gave him courage or made him twice the fool. He did not care which.

He ran forward…]]> <![CDATA[[IC] Holo-Diary - Gorbargh of Lorrad]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1391 Sun, 03 Aug 2025 14:13:54 +0000 Andnoa]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1391 >> STATUS: INTEGRITY 100%
>> SOURCE: PERSONAL DEVICE // Andnoa
>> OPENING FILE...ENTRY 328: The Inevitable Death of Lord Teius Horuset

Sitting in a chair by his fireplace, Sith Andnoa would speak to a holorecording device. His face would be marked with lines of black, as the echoes of the power he had conjured mere hours ago would wrack him and he would be naked from the waist up, revealing various tattoos etched onto his form. Not Sith in origin, they would speak to a life prior to this, a low level gangster on the Industrial Hellscape in which he was raised.

"It is the middle of the thirty first year since the Sacking of Coruscant. Two days prior to today, Lord Teius Horuset lost his life. He was slain by a rather excellent bit of Trakata from the now Lord Kelsa at the culmination of a duel by all rights he should have won."

Andnoa would pause for a long moment, contemplating.

"Inevitable, however that he would lose it. I have spoken to several other Sith and Lord since then who seemed confused at the result. Teius Horuset was by all rights a powerful Sith Lord, Uncle to the Dark Lord and had served the Empire for over half a century. He procreated and his children now serve too, those who still live at any rate. He did everything the Traditionalist elements of the Sith would expect one of noble blood to do. He mastered a lightsaber form, lead wars, opposed the infiltration of "alien filth" and yet... He lost to one such an alien. To the Pureblood mind, this is unthinkable, yet to the mind of one such as I, I knew he would die the moment I saw him arrive."

"I present my thesis: The Traditionalist Mind does not understand the Alien Mind and thus is doomed."

A short barking laugh.

"Ha! Now that is heresy worth purging, for those who believe that heresy exists. Luvane would string me up for that. But it is exactly because he would that the thesis is true. Let us look to our first example: Xulia Horuset, daughter of Teius and fierce traditionalist. While those words are true they mask a failing. Xulia Horuset is utterly incapable of supplication. She is inflexible to the point where when asked to perform a task to earn the right to new Sorcery, she refused to do so and still expected a reward! For it was her birth right to learn Sorcery. No little half-breed whelp could deny her that. She was of the Golden Sun! So the little half-breed whelp denied her Sorcery and now she claims she never wanted it in the first place, a pathetic lie to salve her wounded Ego."

Andnoa would shake his head.

"If she were capable of humility, she would be on her way to Sorcery now. I was considering her as an Apprentice, to re-ignite the fires of the Dark Side in House Horuset, yet even with all the advantages she had, she could not see past herself. And now I have Safiyya Tanamart, an Apprentice who is utterly without ego. In fact, let us make her example number two. Safiyya may have a drop of the black blood of Korriban in her, but she does not act like it. She is calm and quiet, even as the fire burns brightly within her. When ordered to perform a task she performs it. She is willing to do anything to grow and deepen her relationship with the dark side. Why is this? Humility. She knows she is an Apprentice and she has seen what I am capable of. She has seen hardship on her home-world and she knows that to learn from me is the quickest path to power and as such she has taken to her place with gusto. I am not so blinded by myself as to not see the irony. If it were not for Xulia, I would not have Safiyya. The Dark Side has turned a weak Red Sith away from the path to power and a human towards it. This is Teius' fault. He only saw an Alien reaching above his station. He did not see the true horror of what Kelsa is until it was too late."

Andnoa punctuate his words by slamming his fist into his armrest.

"Now to another of his children, Krassus Horuset. When dearest daddy was slain, Krassus decided to rush at Kelsa, drawing his weapon to strike. He now sits in the medical bay with his chest caved in and lightning burns, the latter from me, the former from Kelsa. This was a poor move, rushed into without thought out of sentiment... Ah sentiment, the second of Teius' faults. But, I hear you say, Teius was beyond sentiment. He proved that when he interrupted his own son's wedding. Ah, I respond, no he was not. What is traditionalism but affection for the past? The Sith of the past failed. Learn their lessons and move on. To go back and try again everything they did is a sure-fire method to another great failure that the Empire can not afford."

"But Krassus' foolishness did not begin there. In the weeks before Kelsa's ascension, it came to my attention that he was spreading rumours about Kelsa, no doubt on the orders of His Master, the Dark Lord. A test or a genuine attempt to foil Kelsa? I can not say. But the presence of Teius is no accident. Call me a conspiracy theorist but I believe the Dark Lord has been pushing behind the scenes against Kelsa. Not with her full might of course, but more than she would against any pureblood rising the ranks. Two aliens on the Pentarchy? Unthinkable to her antiquated mind. The next alien will be the most difficult to push up there, for a majority of aliens would have her Dear Father rising from his grave. But then a Pentarchy itself would, to my understanding. To share power? Impossible!"

"But of course, necessary. For we now rise to the next problem that Teius did not see, the rot that is the fault of the Dark Lord. She still believes a majority of her powerbase is traditionalist, rather than just going through the motions. She can not see the truth because her only eyes are the likes of Krassus, who is blind and she can not learn this for herself because she is so absent as to be a non-factor. What would I ascribe this to? Lack of humility and abundance of sentiment are taken so lets call this complacency on her part. The assumption that because she has power today that she will tomorrow without lifting a finger or maintaining that power for herself. Teius believed an alien rising above him could be swatted away like a gnat, for his power could not be approached by aliens. Both niece and uncle were mistaken."

Andnoa would go to turn off the camera again before stopping and thinking for some minutes. He would finally speak in a softer voice.

"There is another example, one closer to home that has not been adequately analysed, but serves as a predictive warning of what was to come and what might yet be. And that is Zarchas and Tarimra. Tarimra had a great many of the same faults as his father and siblings. Egoism, Traditionalism and a false sense of indestructability. Zarchas, for his flaws, shattered that view. A former slave yet a younger and superior sorcerer to the Golden Child of the Golden Sun. And ultimately despite the wound he left to Lord Saltaeon, Zarchas was the better Sith for that reason. I predict more death to come. Not only the names I have named, but other red skinned Sith are vulnerable in precisely the same way. Rhysand springs to mind, Tutki... They do not understand the Sith any more. They only understand the Sith a thousand years ago."

"Let us now explore that weakness. Why do the Red Sith have such overwhelming self-belief to the point of self destruction? Because it is drilled into them at every point of their lives. This is why the aliens are so quickly rising. They are told all their lives they are worthless scum and overcome this weakness to become Sith. They have long since abandoned dignity in the service of power. They will do anything to survive, abandon honour or decency, abandon old teachings, anything if it lets them see another day. Desperation is power in and of itself and those who can not comprehend the depths of despair are doomed to failure."

"The very structure of Sith training and of House Horuset itself are killing the Sith Purebloods. Thus Teius died because he could not see the change had happened and even if he could have, he would not react to it."

A laugh once again.

"Goodness me, that is funny. If they want to rectify it then, they must do the unthinkable: Treat the Red Sith like the Aliens are treated. No more special privileges, no more secret meetings or family bonds to weaken them. Force every Sith to abandon their family name and dignity upon entry to the Academy. True Sith are born in the depths hardship so this false comfort has made the Pure weaker. Vayek learned that when we clashed as acolytes."

The screen cuts to black.

[VISUAL END – static flood]

[AUDIO TERMINATED – no further signal detected]
>> END FRAGMENT.
>> FILE STATUS: LOCKED]]> >> STATUS: INTEGRITY 100%
>> SOURCE: PERSONAL DEVICE // Andnoa
>> OPENING FILE...ENTRY 328: The Inevitable Death of Lord Teius Horuset

Sitting in a chair by his fireplace, Sith Andnoa would speak to a holorecording device. His face would be marked with lines of black, as the echoes of the power he had conjured mere hours ago would wrack him and he would be naked from the waist up, revealing various tattoos etched onto his form. Not Sith in origin, they would speak to a life prior to this, a low level gangster on the Industrial Hellscape in which he was raised.

"It is the middle of the thirty first year since the Sacking of Coruscant. Two days prior to today, Lord Teius Horuset lost his life. He was slain by a rather excellent bit of Trakata from the now Lord Kelsa at the culmination of a duel by all rights he should have won."

Andnoa would pause for a long moment, contemplating.

"Inevitable, however that he would lose it. I have spoken to several other Sith and Lord since then who seemed confused at the result. Teius Horuset was by all rights a powerful Sith Lord, Uncle to the Dark Lord and had served the Empire for over half a century. He procreated and his children now serve too, those who still live at any rate. He did everything the Traditionalist elements of the Sith would expect one of noble blood to do. He mastered a lightsaber form, lead wars, opposed the infiltration of "alien filth" and yet... He lost to one such an alien. To the Pureblood mind, this is unthinkable, yet to the mind of one such as I, I knew he would die the moment I saw him arrive."

"I present my thesis: The Traditionalist Mind does not understand the Alien Mind and thus is doomed."

A short barking laugh.

"Ha! Now that is heresy worth purging, for those who believe that heresy exists. Luvane would string me up for that. But it is exactly because he would that the thesis is true. Let us look to our first example: Xulia Horuset, daughter of Teius and fierce traditionalist. While those words are true they mask a failing. Xulia Horuset is utterly incapable of supplication. She is inflexible to the point where when asked to perform a task to earn the right to new Sorcery, she refused to do so and still expected a reward! For it was her birth right to learn Sorcery. No little half-breed whelp could deny her that. She was of the Golden Sun! So the little half-breed whelp denied her Sorcery and now she claims she never wanted it in the first place, a pathetic lie to salve her wounded Ego."

Andnoa would shake his head.

"If she were capable of humility, she would be on her way to Sorcery now. I was considering her as an Apprentice, to re-ignite the fires of the Dark Side in House Horuset, yet even with all the advantages she had, she could not see past herself. And now I have Safiyya Tanamart, an Apprentice who is utterly without ego. In fact, let us make her example number two. Safiyya may have a drop of the black blood of Korriban in her, but she does not act like it. She is calm and quiet, even as the fire burns brightly within her. When ordered to perform a task she performs it. She is willing to do anything to grow and deepen her relationship with the dark side. Why is this? Humility. She knows she is an Apprentice and she has seen what I am capable of. She has seen hardship on her home-world and she knows that to learn from me is the quickest path to power and as such she has taken to her place with gusto. I am not so blinded by myself as to not see the irony. If it were not for Xulia, I would not have Safiyya. The Dark Side has turned a weak Red Sith away from the path to power and a human towards it. This is Teius' fault. He only saw an Alien reaching above his station. He did not see the true horror of what Kelsa is until it was too late."

Andnoa punctuate his words by slamming his fist into his armrest.

"Now to another of his children, Krassus Horuset. When dearest daddy was slain, Krassus decided to rush at Kelsa, drawing his weapon to strike. He now sits in the medical bay with his chest caved in and lightning burns, the latter from me, the former from Kelsa. This was a poor move, rushed into without thought out of sentiment... Ah sentiment, the second of Teius' faults. But, I hear you say, Teius was beyond sentiment. He proved that when he interrupted his own son's wedding. Ah, I respond, no he was not. What is traditionalism but affection for the past? The Sith of the past failed. Learn their lessons and move on. To go back and try again everything they did is a sure-fire method to another great failure that the Empire can not afford."

"But Krassus' foolishness did not begin there. In the weeks before Kelsa's ascension, it came to my attention that he was spreading rumours about Kelsa, no doubt on the orders of His Master, the Dark Lord. A test or a genuine attempt to foil Kelsa? I can not say. But the presence of Teius is no accident. Call me a conspiracy theorist but I believe the Dark Lord has been pushing behind the scenes against Kelsa. Not with her full might of course, but more than she would against any pureblood rising the ranks. Two aliens on the Pentarchy? Unthinkable to her antiquated mind. The next alien will be the most difficult to push up there, for a majority of aliens would have her Dear Father rising from his grave. But then a Pentarchy itself would, to my understanding. To share power? Impossible!"

"But of course, necessary. For we now rise to the next problem that Teius did not see, the rot that is the fault of the Dark Lord. She still believes a majority of her powerbase is traditionalist, rather than just going through the motions. She can not see the truth because her only eyes are the likes of Krassus, who is blind and she can not learn this for herself because she is so absent as to be a non-factor. What would I ascribe this to? Lack of humility and abundance of sentiment are taken so lets call this complacency on her part. The assumption that because she has power today that she will tomorrow without lifting a finger or maintaining that power for herself. Teius believed an alien rising above him could be swatted away like a gnat, for his power could not be approached by aliens. Both niece and uncle were mistaken."

Andnoa would go to turn off the camera again before stopping and thinking for some minutes. He would finally speak in a softer voice.

"There is another example, one closer to home that has not been adequately analysed, but serves as a predictive warning of what was to come and what might yet be. And that is Zarchas and Tarimra. Tarimra had a great many of the same faults as his father and siblings. Egoism, Traditionalism and a false sense of indestructability. Zarchas, for his flaws, shattered that view. A former slave yet a younger and superior sorcerer to the Golden Child of the Golden Sun. And ultimately despite the wound he left to Lord Saltaeon, Zarchas was the better Sith for that reason. I predict more death to come. Not only the names I have named, but other red skinned Sith are vulnerable in precisely the same way. Rhysand springs to mind, Tutki... They do not understand the Sith any more. They only understand the Sith a thousand years ago."

"Let us now explore that weakness. Why do the Red Sith have such overwhelming self-belief to the point of self destruction? Because it is drilled into them at every point of their lives. This is why the aliens are so quickly rising. They are told all their lives they are worthless scum and overcome this weakness to become Sith. They have long since abandoned dignity in the service of power. They will do anything to survive, abandon honour or decency, abandon old teachings, anything if it lets them see another day. Desperation is power in and of itself and those who can not comprehend the depths of despair are doomed to failure."

"The very structure of Sith training and of House Horuset itself are killing the Sith Purebloods. Thus Teius died because he could not see the change had happened and even if he could have, he would not react to it."

A laugh once again.

"Goodness me, that is funny. If they want to rectify it then, they must do the unthinkable: Treat the Red Sith like the Aliens are treated. No more special privileges, no more secret meetings or family bonds to weaken them. Force every Sith to abandon their family name and dignity upon entry to the Academy. True Sith are born in the depths hardship so this false comfort has made the Pure weaker. Vayek learned that when we clashed as acolytes."

The screen cuts to black.

[VISUAL END – static flood]

[AUDIO TERMINATED – no further signal detected]
>> END FRAGMENT.
>> FILE STATUS: LOCKED]]> <![CDATA[[IC] Holo-Diary - Xulia Rajana Horuset]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1390 Sun, 03 Aug 2025 12:27:36 +0000 Xulia Horuset]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1390 >> STATUS: INTEGRITY 100%
>> SOURCE: PERSONAL DEVICE // Xulia HORUSET 
>> OPENING FILE...ENTRY I: The Sin of Modulation


The holorecorder activates with a soft chime. There is no movement. Xulia sits alone, straight-backed, hands folded, wrapped in the stillness of someone who no longer requires answers. Only decisions.
The air is still. The kind of silence that lingers after someone stops believing in what once held them steady.

"Two of them."
Her voice is low. Even. No anger. Just distaste, spoken like a verdict.

"Two aliens now sit among the Pentarchy of House Horuset."

A pause.

"One a Twi’lek. The other an Echani."

She does not say their names. They are not worthy of them.

"And no one stopped it."

Her eyes flick toward the camera now, distant, but not unfocused.

"There was a time when I would have believed that such a thing was impossible. Not because I thought the aliens wouldn’t try. Of course they would. Parasites always reach for the throat of the host."

"But because I believed our kind would not allow it."

"I believed in the instinct of preservation."

A breath. A shift of her shoulders. Perfect composure.

"Now I see the truth."

"They were not strong enough to resist."

"Or worse… they no longer cared to."

She stands slowly. Each motion precise. Controlled.

"I do not hate the Echani because he struck my father down. I hate him because he exists. Because he breathes the same air my ancestors bled for."

"I do not hate the Twi’lek because she speaks in the chambers of our power. I hate her because her blood was never meant to mingle with ours."

Her head tilts just slightly. The movement reads more as curiosity than scorn, though neither truly reach her face.

“There was a time when we knew what aliens were for.”

“They polished floors. They carried messages. They died in our wars.”

“They did not sit among us.”

A longer pause now. A breath, controlled.

“But it is not the aliens I find contemptible.”

“No.”

“It is the Sith who allow them.”

Her voice sharpens, just slightly. Less like a blade. More like glass under strain.

“Purebloods who smile at offworlders. Who kneel before false strength and pretend it is wisdom. Who pretend our House still holds to its traditions while elevating those it once rightly enslaved.”

“This is not failure.”

“This is surrender.”

She rises. Smooth. Like someone built on angles and ritual, not flesh and blood. She does not look directly into the recorder yet, only walks past it, gaze forward, steps quiet.

“The Echani male who slew my father was not a threat. He was a symptom.”

“I do not hate him because he was strong enough to strike down Lord Teius. I hate him because he was permitted to.”

“Because he stood in that chamber like an equal. Because the others let him.”

Now she turns. The camera catches her profile, expression blank, carved in polished stillness.

“My father did not die in battle. He was sacrificed. Thrown into a chamber where no one would defend him. Where those bound by blood and doctrine stood silent while the rot seated itself at the table.”

“He did not fight for his legacy.”

“He fought for ours.”

She stops. Fully facing the lens now. Still not close. But direct. As if passing sentence, not delivering a speech.

“This House was never meant to be a refuge for the alien. It was built to command them.”

“They are not Sith. They are property, painted in borrowed tradition and pretending at fire.”

“That the Pentarchy now holds two of them… is not a shock.”

“It is proof.”

A breath. Her tone lowers. She approaches the holorecorder now. Slowly. The screen narrows on her face, still blank, but the emptiness is precise. Intentional.

"It is weakness."

"And if left unchallenged, it will consume us."

"We do not fall to war. We fall to comfort."

She stops in front of the recorder. Close now. Still not angry. She doesn’t need to be.

"So let them speak their false virtues. Let them surround themselves with offworlders and mutants. Let them praise diversity while the bloodlines thin and the memory of power fades."

"I will not be among them."

"And when the time comes, I will remind them what it means to be Sith."

The screen cuts to black.

[VISUAL END – static flood]

[AUDIO TERMINATED – no further signal detected]
>> END FRAGMENT.
>> FILE STATUS: LOCKED]]> >> STATUS: INTEGRITY 100%
>> SOURCE: PERSONAL DEVICE // Xulia HORUSET 
>> OPENING FILE...ENTRY I: The Sin of Modulation


The holorecorder activates with a soft chime. There is no movement. Xulia sits alone, straight-backed, hands folded, wrapped in the stillness of someone who no longer requires answers. Only decisions.
The air is still. The kind of silence that lingers after someone stops believing in what once held them steady.

"Two of them."
Her voice is low. Even. No anger. Just distaste, spoken like a verdict.

"Two aliens now sit among the Pentarchy of House Horuset."

A pause.

"One a Twi’lek. The other an Echani."

She does not say their names. They are not worthy of them.

"And no one stopped it."

Her eyes flick toward the camera now, distant, but not unfocused.

"There was a time when I would have believed that such a thing was impossible. Not because I thought the aliens wouldn’t try. Of course they would. Parasites always reach for the throat of the host."

"But because I believed our kind would not allow it."

"I believed in the instinct of preservation."

A breath. A shift of her shoulders. Perfect composure.

"Now I see the truth."

"They were not strong enough to resist."

"Or worse… they no longer cared to."

She stands slowly. Each motion precise. Controlled.

"I do not hate the Echani because he struck my father down. I hate him because he exists. Because he breathes the same air my ancestors bled for."

"I do not hate the Twi’lek because she speaks in the chambers of our power. I hate her because her blood was never meant to mingle with ours."

Her head tilts just slightly. The movement reads more as curiosity than scorn, though neither truly reach her face.

“There was a time when we knew what aliens were for.”

“They polished floors. They carried messages. They died in our wars.”

“They did not sit among us.”

A longer pause now. A breath, controlled.

“But it is not the aliens I find contemptible.”

“No.”

“It is the Sith who allow them.”

Her voice sharpens, just slightly. Less like a blade. More like glass under strain.

“Purebloods who smile at offworlders. Who kneel before false strength and pretend it is wisdom. Who pretend our House still holds to its traditions while elevating those it once rightly enslaved.”

“This is not failure.”

“This is surrender.”

She rises. Smooth. Like someone built on angles and ritual, not flesh and blood. She does not look directly into the recorder yet, only walks past it, gaze forward, steps quiet.

“The Echani male who slew my father was not a threat. He was a symptom.”

“I do not hate him because he was strong enough to strike down Lord Teius. I hate him because he was permitted to.”

“Because he stood in that chamber like an equal. Because the others let him.”

Now she turns. The camera catches her profile, expression blank, carved in polished stillness.

“My father did not die in battle. He was sacrificed. Thrown into a chamber where no one would defend him. Where those bound by blood and doctrine stood silent while the rot seated itself at the table.”

“He did not fight for his legacy.”

“He fought for ours.”

She stops. Fully facing the lens now. Still not close. But direct. As if passing sentence, not delivering a speech.

“This House was never meant to be a refuge for the alien. It was built to command them.”

“They are not Sith. They are property, painted in borrowed tradition and pretending at fire.”

“That the Pentarchy now holds two of them… is not a shock.”

“It is proof.”

A breath. Her tone lowers. She approaches the holorecorder now. Slowly. The screen narrows on her face, still blank, but the emptiness is precise. Intentional.

"It is weakness."

"And if left unchallenged, it will consume us."

"We do not fall to war. We fall to comfort."

She stops in front of the recorder. Close now. Still not angry. She doesn’t need to be.

"So let them speak their false virtues. Let them surround themselves with offworlders and mutants. Let them praise diversity while the bloodlines thin and the memory of power fades."

"I will not be among them."

"And when the time comes, I will remind them what it means to be Sith."

The screen cuts to black.

[VISUAL END – static flood]

[AUDIO TERMINATED – no further signal detected]
>> END FRAGMENT.
>> FILE STATUS: LOCKED]]> <![CDATA[A meeting on Horuz]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1368 Sat, 28 Jun 2025 18:23:41 +0000 Krassus Horuset]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1368
PART I: The Arrival 

The shuttle emerged from hyperspace with a ripple of azure light and a sigh of energy, bearing the distinct crest of the Nam’ta Confederacy; a once proud emblem of independence, stability and armed neutrality in a galaxy torn by war; now dulled by the shadow of its ever-clearer surrender of autonomy. The striking green and gold insignia shimmered faintly on the hull, framed by flaking paint and other such 'scars' of lacking maintenance in times of war.

Flanking the craft in tight formation were two Nam’tees fighter craft, painted in old planetary hues of emerald and ivory, symbols of a government and armed forces still clinging desperately to an illusion of independence. Correcting their heading and tightening their formation as they veered into the steel-choked orbit of Horuz, the sky above the jungle planet became a sea of dagger-like silhouettes.

Harrower-class dreadnoughts stretched like armored leviathans across the horizon, their keels glinting with turbolaser ports and their hangars trafficked by supply craft. A warfleet returning from the Nam'ta Gambit's invasions of Fest and Spefik, now being retrofitted for further battle.

Amid them was the unmistakable flagship of Imperial control in the sector: The ISS Bloodwyrm.

Its bow was adorned with a massive crimson serpent, coils winding from hull to bridge, its fanged maw frozen in eternal strike. By Imperial standards it was an old ship by now, in service since the Cold War, its hull scarred from battles past. But its reputation was no less dreadful. Darth Zudikas, the Dark Council’s emissary, oversaw the entire Atrivis campaign from within its armoured walls.

And all knew that to see its presence was to lay eyes upon the far-reaching gaze of Darth Xarion, head of the Pyramid of Galactic Influence, made manifest.

The Nam’ta shuttle’s instruments pinged with proximity alerts as a squadron of Mark VI Supremacy-class starfighters closed in like carrion birds.

“Nam’ta shuttle,” crackled a voice across the channel. Imperial diction. Precise. Cold.

“Your escort will disengage immediately. Fighters Two and Three are ordered to separate for Hangars Four-Seven-Niner and Four-Eight-Zero respectively. Final approach to be completed under Imperial guidance. Acknowledge.”

Inside the cockpit, the Nam'tees pilot tensed, glancing toward President Kemma Ralter for instruction. She gave the slightest nod.

“Understood, Control,” the pilot responded. “Shuttle Confederacy Dawn releasing escorts.”

The two Nam’tees fighters peeled off wordlessly, veering toward their assigned docking zones like children dismissed from an audience with their betters. Only two Imperial interceptors remained, slipping into position beside the shuttle with surgical elegance.

No words were spoken, but the message was clear.

Below, the planet seethed. Horuz was a world of verdant cruelty, its jungles thick with choking vines and barbed thorns. Steam curled up from swamp basins and black lakes, hazing the sky like breath on a mirror.

In three thousand years, it would be renamed Despayre, after the moaning millions who would perish building the first Death Star. But already it was a prison world in all but name; its surface carved up by labor camps, ore drills, and fortified Imperial city towers.

And at its blackened heart stood the fortress-palace of Moff Maximilian Graush.

One of its shuttle pads extended upon the shuttle's approach as the Supremacy Fighters veered off. A squad of Imperial soldiers stood by for the arrival of the Confederacy's delegates. Unmoving as statues, expressionless visors set upon the lowering shuttle ramp.

As President Ralter stepped down the shuttle ramps, the heat struck her like a blow. The Horuz air was thick with humidity and the scent of rotting flora, overlaid with chemical tang from nearby refineries.

No one greeted her. Not officially. Not beyond the Imperial squad leader with a cold:

"The Moff has been waiting for you, President Ralter. This way, please."

They turned, and moved. The Confederate President and her Ambassador following close behind into the Moff's palace of horrors.

The hallways of Graush's residence on Horuz stank of antiseptic and embalming fluid.

Light flickered through cold transparisteel windows, casting twitching reflections on the museum of horrors that made up the palace's inner sanctum. Glass cases stretched the length of the corridors, each displaying an exhibit more perverse than the last.

Duros infants in jars of yellowing preservative. Bothan craniums surgically flayed to reveal neural patterning. A Gungan posed mid-leap, frozen in death, its skin stretched unnaturally taut across a frame of carbon-alloy supports.

Wookiee warriors in “natural” poses shielding their displayed “young.” A Mon Calamari in full Republic military regalia, dissected and split from throat to waist, with numbered pins stuck through his organs. In the next case: a Jawa curled in fetal position, eyes open but glassy, limbs curled around a scrap of metal.

It was colder than a morgue. Each alien corpse a display of the Moff’s hunting trophies or scientific curiosity into xenobiology.

President Kemma Ralter’s boots clicked smartly along the polished obsidian floor, each step defiant, despite the bile rising in her throat. She kept her eyes forward, refusing to meet the gaze of a taxidermied Rodian crouched in a “natural hunting pose,” blaster still clutched in its mummified hands.

At her side strode Ambassador Valco Reina, silent as ever. A seasoned career politician, Reina had held numerous positions across the Confederacy over his tenure in local politics—having served as mayor of one of Nam'ta Prime's northern districts and as a representative on the Confederate Council.

He was briefly considered as a presidential candidate for the pro-Imperial party, but was outperformed by Ralter, whom he now served as official ambassador to the Empire.

His eyes glazed over in apathy. This was not his first visit to the Moff’s residence...
]]>
PART I: The Arrival 

The shuttle emerged from hyperspace with a ripple of azure light and a sigh of energy, bearing the distinct crest of the Nam’ta Confederacy; a once proud emblem of independence, stability and armed neutrality in a galaxy torn by war; now dulled by the shadow of its ever-clearer surrender of autonomy. The striking green and gold insignia shimmered faintly on the hull, framed by flaking paint and other such 'scars' of lacking maintenance in times of war.

Flanking the craft in tight formation were two Nam’tees fighter craft, painted in old planetary hues of emerald and ivory, symbols of a government and armed forces still clinging desperately to an illusion of independence. Correcting their heading and tightening their formation as they veered into the steel-choked orbit of Horuz, the sky above the jungle planet became a sea of dagger-like silhouettes.

Harrower-class dreadnoughts stretched like armored leviathans across the horizon, their keels glinting with turbolaser ports and their hangars trafficked by supply craft. A warfleet returning from the Nam'ta Gambit's invasions of Fest and Spefik, now being retrofitted for further battle.

Amid them was the unmistakable flagship of Imperial control in the sector: The ISS Bloodwyrm.

Its bow was adorned with a massive crimson serpent, coils winding from hull to bridge, its fanged maw frozen in eternal strike. By Imperial standards it was an old ship by now, in service since the Cold War, its hull scarred from battles past. But its reputation was no less dreadful. Darth Zudikas, the Dark Council’s emissary, oversaw the entire Atrivis campaign from within its armoured walls.

And all knew that to see its presence was to lay eyes upon the far-reaching gaze of Darth Xarion, head of the Pyramid of Galactic Influence, made manifest.

The Nam’ta shuttle’s instruments pinged with proximity alerts as a squadron of Mark VI Supremacy-class starfighters closed in like carrion birds.

“Nam’ta shuttle,” crackled a voice across the channel. Imperial diction. Precise. Cold.

“Your escort will disengage immediately. Fighters Two and Three are ordered to separate for Hangars Four-Seven-Niner and Four-Eight-Zero respectively. Final approach to be completed under Imperial guidance. Acknowledge.”

Inside the cockpit, the Nam'tees pilot tensed, glancing toward President Kemma Ralter for instruction. She gave the slightest nod.

“Understood, Control,” the pilot responded. “Shuttle Confederacy Dawn releasing escorts.”

The two Nam’tees fighters peeled off wordlessly, veering toward their assigned docking zones like children dismissed from an audience with their betters. Only two Imperial interceptors remained, slipping into position beside the shuttle with surgical elegance.

No words were spoken, but the message was clear.

Below, the planet seethed. Horuz was a world of verdant cruelty, its jungles thick with choking vines and barbed thorns. Steam curled up from swamp basins and black lakes, hazing the sky like breath on a mirror.

In three thousand years, it would be renamed Despayre, after the moaning millions who would perish building the first Death Star. But already it was a prison world in all but name; its surface carved up by labor camps, ore drills, and fortified Imperial city towers.

And at its blackened heart stood the fortress-palace of Moff Maximilian Graush.

One of its shuttle pads extended upon the shuttle's approach as the Supremacy Fighters veered off. A squad of Imperial soldiers stood by for the arrival of the Confederacy's delegates. Unmoving as statues, expressionless visors set upon the lowering shuttle ramp.

As President Ralter stepped down the shuttle ramps, the heat struck her like a blow. The Horuz air was thick with humidity and the scent of rotting flora, overlaid with chemical tang from nearby refineries.

No one greeted her. Not officially. Not beyond the Imperial squad leader with a cold:

"The Moff has been waiting for you, President Ralter. This way, please."

They turned, and moved. The Confederate President and her Ambassador following close behind into the Moff's palace of horrors.

The hallways of Graush's residence on Horuz stank of antiseptic and embalming fluid.

Light flickered through cold transparisteel windows, casting twitching reflections on the museum of horrors that made up the palace's inner sanctum. Glass cases stretched the length of the corridors, each displaying an exhibit more perverse than the last.

Duros infants in jars of yellowing preservative. Bothan craniums surgically flayed to reveal neural patterning. A Gungan posed mid-leap, frozen in death, its skin stretched unnaturally taut across a frame of carbon-alloy supports.

Wookiee warriors in “natural” poses shielding their displayed “young.” A Mon Calamari in full Republic military regalia, dissected and split from throat to waist, with numbered pins stuck through his organs. In the next case: a Jawa curled in fetal position, eyes open but glassy, limbs curled around a scrap of metal.

It was colder than a morgue. Each alien corpse a display of the Moff’s hunting trophies or scientific curiosity into xenobiology.

President Kemma Ralter’s boots clicked smartly along the polished obsidian floor, each step defiant, despite the bile rising in her throat. She kept her eyes forward, refusing to meet the gaze of a taxidermied Rodian crouched in a “natural hunting pose,” blaster still clutched in its mummified hands.

At her side strode Ambassador Valco Reina, silent as ever. A seasoned career politician, Reina had held numerous positions across the Confederacy over his tenure in local politics—having served as mayor of one of Nam'ta Prime's northern districts and as a representative on the Confederate Council.

He was briefly considered as a presidential candidate for the pro-Imperial party, but was outperformed by Ralter, whom he now served as official ambassador to the Empire.

His eyes glazed over in apathy. This was not his first visit to the Moff’s residence...
]]> <![CDATA[A Traitor's Manifesto]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1366 Wed, 25 Jun 2025 18:00:58 +0000 Krassus Horuset]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1366 >> [ACCESSING LOCAL DATASTORE...] 
>> [ENTRY IDENTIFIER: X7-LAMBENT//PERSONAL_DEVICE-LOCKED] 
>> [ENCRYPTION LEVEL: MAXIMUM — PHYSICAL DECRYPTION REQUIRED] 
>> [AUTHOR: UNKNOWN] 
>> [FILE STATUS: UNSHARED — PRIVATE STORAGE ONLY] 
>> [BEGIN PERSONAL ENTRY // EST. DATE: CLASSIFIED]

If you are reading this... I am likely dead.

"High Treason" — that will have been the charge read aloud as I was marched before the firing squad. Which makes you either a fellow True Imperial Patriot... or a witless pawn of the Sith, trying to answer the same question I could never silence:

Why? 
Why betray the Empire?

I will tell you why.

For the people of the Empire. 
For the people of the Republic. 
For the continuation of life in a galaxy that has lost its mind.

My name is [REDACTED://ERROR_404]. Ziost-born. [REDACTED://ERROR_404] in the Imperial Military. 
This is my story.

When I was born, the Empire stood at the height of its power. Its war machine cut a path of destruction across the galaxy. Worlds razed, fleets shattered, rivers of blood left in its thread. All of it feeding the ambitions of the Dark Council and our illusive Emperor. I remember watching the Sacking of Coruscant unfold live on my father’s holofeed at our Ziost estate.

I remember being *angry* when Darth Angral plunged his blade into Chancellor Berooken. Not for the Mon Calamari’s death… but because I feared the Republic would fall before I could enlist.

That was my dream.

My father; decorated, brilliant. Has always been a master of logistics, battlefield calculus and military command. I wanted to follow in his footsteps. To serve. To earn my name beneath the legacy of Odile Vaiken. So when the time came, I didn’t wait for the draft. I volunteered. Ziost Officer Academy. 
Back when I believed the Empire stood for something. 
Order. Power. Strength. Unity.
  
Vengeance.

But it was a lie. All of it.

My father’s political ascent saw him posted to Dromund Kaas. As his eldest son, I was transferred with him; reassigned to the Kaas City Officer Academy. A prestigious position. My mother remained behind at the Ziost estate to care for my baby sister. My father believed hyperspace might impact her fragile health.

And so, from far away, I bore witness to the death of my homeworld. The beginning of the End.

At first, just rumors. Then brief, heavily censored broadcasts. And then silence. Ziost had gone dark.

Months passed before I returned. My father brought me with him to the dead world, to see what had transpired, if anything could be salvaged from our estate. Myself with the faint hope of finding my mother and sister.
But I felt it as soon as we landed in that... That Grave.

I am no Force-sensitive by any stretch of the imagination, but it was as clear to me as anything. It felt.. *Wrong.* 
Not in the way warzones are wrong. But fundamentally. Existentially. The air was still, sterile, hollow. Like walking into a medical facility. As if the Emperor's sundering had rendered it devoid of all life and microbes.
The ground, the very soil dark and ashen, stripped bare robbed of its nutrients.
The winds howled like mourners across the broken cities. Everything was dust. Ash. The wind blowing clouds of this ashy gray substance about in waves. Layers of it everywhere
Even the akk dog cages at our estate were filled with it. A fine, flakey coat... the texture of dead skin. 

That’s all that remained.

We accessed the estate’s holologs. My father silent. Stone-faced.

We watched it unfold.

It began with distant blaster fire. Then a triggered motion sensor in my sister’s room. Then... *her*. My mother. Shrouded in that crimson miasma of the Emperor’s will. She moved like a marionett. Slow, stiff, entranced. A puppet on strings.

I watched, helpless, as she picked up my sister from her crib. Looked at her.. Head tilted, like an animal studying something it couldn’t understand.

Then she swung her.

Her tiny body struck the nursery wall. Blood everywhere. My mother just... stood there. Watching. And then she walked, slow and deliberate, down the estate halls.
She turned. Walked the halls toward the barracks.

There... Hagran. Kreeg. Loyal soldiers. Loyal to the Empire, to my Father. Men I had known since I was a child, men I had looked up to since I could walk. They gunned her down without hesitation. Cold. Empty.  My mother's life cut short by the same blasters  they'd once trained me to use as a child. They stepped over her corpse and marched into the chaos. Mindless. Enslaved by that same dark will. I never saw them again. Only the ash remained.

They were likely unmade hours later when the Emperor’s hunger reached them.

The holofeed caught the wave; that monstrous tide of energy that rolled across Ziost, consuming everything. My mother. My sister. Hagran and Kreeg. Life itself. All reduced to dust. 

My father said nothing. He stared into the screen, unmoving. A man with an iron heart indeed.

But I? I only had one question... Why?
Why would the Emperor do this? To his own people? *Loyal* people? Loyal citizens that had *Bled* For him.

He built this Empire. Forged it in his vision for over a millenium, countless Imperial recruits, myself included, swearing oaths of undying loyalty to him and his caus.

So why?

How I wished I had the answer then... 
Now, I wish I had never found it.

The truth? The Empire was never a righteous war machine. Never the avenging storm it claimed to be. It was a ritual. A weapon. A suicide pact. A galaxy-wide bloodletting meant to feed a mad god. A suicide scatter-gun held in the mouth of the galaxy, finger on the trigger, held by a maniac.
We were never meant to win. We were meant to die. Ziost was never an exception. It was the template.

This 'Great' Galactic War we have persued for a millenium? Ritualistic slaughter to prime the galaxy for annihilation.

But what did the Sith do when they learned this? When they realized the truth? That everything the Empire was, that everything we had built towards over the long millennia since the fall of Naga Sadow was a lie? A ritualistic suicide pact with a madman?

*Nothing.*

No, worse than nothing.

Like the child of abusive parents, they continued the abuse, even in the Emperor's absence. They continue to wage the War, they continue its meaningless bloodshed. Dragging civilization further into the abyss. They gleefully continue to drag the scalpel of death across the wrist of galactic civilization, and laugh as the lifeblood of trillions of beings continues to be spille across the stars.
And for what? All in the name of vengeance over the Jedi? Hatred of the Republic? Blood purity of the Sith?

Madness! Even without the Emperor, they *Persist*! And for what?

It does not take a military genius to see that the War is lost. The Empire was never meant to win this war... It can't. Only the delusional can still believe in an ultimate Imperial victory to this conflict.

And yet the Sith continue to lead us all to the slaughter. Blinded by their hatred, their lust for revenge, their xenophobia, their traditions. Willingly sacrificing us all on the altar of their ambitions in their names. Unwilling to see the truth... Or perhaps they do see it and simply do not care.

Maybe the Emperor wasn't an outlier. Maybe he was what all Sith truly are.  Uncaring. Self-obsessed. Insane.

Monsters.

They would drown the entire galaxy in a sea of blood for their ambitions. Burn it all to cinders to hide from their crippling fear of Death, Defeat, the Loss of their *Power.* And we would be the kindling.
I have heard that the Emperor is truly gone now. Finally defeated.

But I swear this: if even a shadow of his presence still drifts in the void, he is laughing. Laughing at us. At the Sith. At his pawns as they continue to bring death t o the galaxy even in his absence, gleefully spreading the disease of war across the stars. Spreading the rot. The end of all things.

The Empire will fall. Of that I am certain.

It cannot be saved, for the Sith will not let it be saved. They will wage this war for ever if we let them. They would sooner see Dromund Kaas burn as Ziost did rather than surrender their suicidal, destructive quest to destroy the Jedi.
And they would all drag us down with them. They would put every man, woman and child of the Empire between the advancing armies of the Republic and themselves before this war is over. If they have their way our people will cease to exist.

Because in the end they see no difference between us, the enemy or their slaves. We are all meaningless to them. Fuel for their ambitions... Our lives insignificant, our deaths more so.

But we do not have to be their pawns. We do not have to sign another suicide pact with the Sith order after we just barely escaped the one with Emperor Vitiate. We can choose,

Choose peace.

Imperial and Republic forces fought side by side to stop to the Emperor, to stop Zakuul. I saw it. We can live together. But not while the Sith Rule.
They must be cast down. Their temples razed. Their institutions dismantled. Their Empire broken.

Because make no mistake:

This is their Empire. Not ours.
We are naught but Serfs to them. Fodder.
Meat.

The military, our civil structures. They only serve those who bow. Those who align with Sith interests. The interests of another Apathetic Monarch and his Dark Council of maniacs. The interests of madness.

The Empire stands for nothing now but blood. Death. The end of all things. And the Imperial Military? It has become the willing blade of the Sith. A blade at the throat of not only the peoples of the Republic, but those of the Empire. The throat of life itself.

I will do what I must to see our people freed from this terror. The terror of the Sith. And it pains me that the Military must come down with them. For there are good people in Uniform. I know that. I know them. I fought with them. But I know that the will of good people will not be enough to stop this terrible thing we have set in motion.

I know what must be done. Even if it damns me.

Contact has been made. With the Convor. With the Republic SIS.

The die is cast.

If the Force offers an afterlife, I will answer for what comes next.

But the war must end.

[ENTRY TERMINATED — SIGNAL CLOSED]
[LAST ACCESS DATE: UNKNOWN]]]> >> [ACCESSING LOCAL DATASTORE...] 
>> [ENTRY IDENTIFIER: X7-LAMBENT//PERSONAL_DEVICE-LOCKED] 
>> [ENCRYPTION LEVEL: MAXIMUM — PHYSICAL DECRYPTION REQUIRED] 
>> [AUTHOR: UNKNOWN] 
>> [FILE STATUS: UNSHARED — PRIVATE STORAGE ONLY] 
>> [BEGIN PERSONAL ENTRY // EST. DATE: CLASSIFIED]

If you are reading this... I am likely dead.

"High Treason" — that will have been the charge read aloud as I was marched before the firing squad. Which makes you either a fellow True Imperial Patriot... or a witless pawn of the Sith, trying to answer the same question I could never silence:

Why? 
Why betray the Empire?

I will tell you why.

For the people of the Empire. 
For the people of the Republic. 
For the continuation of life in a galaxy that has lost its mind.

My name is [REDACTED://ERROR_404]. Ziost-born. [REDACTED://ERROR_404] in the Imperial Military. 
This is my story.

When I was born, the Empire stood at the height of its power. Its war machine cut a path of destruction across the galaxy. Worlds razed, fleets shattered, rivers of blood left in its thread. All of it feeding the ambitions of the Dark Council and our illusive Emperor. I remember watching the Sacking of Coruscant unfold live on my father’s holofeed at our Ziost estate.

I remember being *angry* when Darth Angral plunged his blade into Chancellor Berooken. Not for the Mon Calamari’s death… but because I feared the Republic would fall before I could enlist.

That was my dream.

My father; decorated, brilliant. Has always been a master of logistics, battlefield calculus and military command. I wanted to follow in his footsteps. To serve. To earn my name beneath the legacy of Odile Vaiken. So when the time came, I didn’t wait for the draft. I volunteered. Ziost Officer Academy. 
Back when I believed the Empire stood for something. 
Order. Power. Strength. Unity.
  
Vengeance.

But it was a lie. All of it.

My father’s political ascent saw him posted to Dromund Kaas. As his eldest son, I was transferred with him; reassigned to the Kaas City Officer Academy. A prestigious position. My mother remained behind at the Ziost estate to care for my baby sister. My father believed hyperspace might impact her fragile health.

And so, from far away, I bore witness to the death of my homeworld. The beginning of the End.

At first, just rumors. Then brief, heavily censored broadcasts. And then silence. Ziost had gone dark.

Months passed before I returned. My father brought me with him to the dead world, to see what had transpired, if anything could be salvaged from our estate. Myself with the faint hope of finding my mother and sister.
But I felt it as soon as we landed in that... That Grave.

I am no Force-sensitive by any stretch of the imagination, but it was as clear to me as anything. It felt.. *Wrong.* 
Not in the way warzones are wrong. But fundamentally. Existentially. The air was still, sterile, hollow. Like walking into a medical facility. As if the Emperor's sundering had rendered it devoid of all life and microbes.
The ground, the very soil dark and ashen, stripped bare robbed of its nutrients.
The winds howled like mourners across the broken cities. Everything was dust. Ash. The wind blowing clouds of this ashy gray substance about in waves. Layers of it everywhere
Even the akk dog cages at our estate were filled with it. A fine, flakey coat... the texture of dead skin. 

That’s all that remained.

We accessed the estate’s holologs. My father silent. Stone-faced.

We watched it unfold.

It began with distant blaster fire. Then a triggered motion sensor in my sister’s room. Then... *her*. My mother. Shrouded in that crimson miasma of the Emperor’s will. She moved like a marionett. Slow, stiff, entranced. A puppet on strings.

I watched, helpless, as she picked up my sister from her crib. Looked at her.. Head tilted, like an animal studying something it couldn’t understand.

Then she swung her.

Her tiny body struck the nursery wall. Blood everywhere. My mother just... stood there. Watching. And then she walked, slow and deliberate, down the estate halls.
She turned. Walked the halls toward the barracks.

There... Hagran. Kreeg. Loyal soldiers. Loyal to the Empire, to my Father. Men I had known since I was a child, men I had looked up to since I could walk. They gunned her down without hesitation. Cold. Empty.  My mother's life cut short by the same blasters  they'd once trained me to use as a child. They stepped over her corpse and marched into the chaos. Mindless. Enslaved by that same dark will. I never saw them again. Only the ash remained.

They were likely unmade hours later when the Emperor’s hunger reached them.

The holofeed caught the wave; that monstrous tide of energy that rolled across Ziost, consuming everything. My mother. My sister. Hagran and Kreeg. Life itself. All reduced to dust. 

My father said nothing. He stared into the screen, unmoving. A man with an iron heart indeed.

But I? I only had one question... Why?
Why would the Emperor do this? To his own people? *Loyal* people? Loyal citizens that had *Bled* For him.

He built this Empire. Forged it in his vision for over a millenium, countless Imperial recruits, myself included, swearing oaths of undying loyalty to him and his caus.

So why?

How I wished I had the answer then... 
Now, I wish I had never found it.

The truth? The Empire was never a righteous war machine. Never the avenging storm it claimed to be. It was a ritual. A weapon. A suicide pact. A galaxy-wide bloodletting meant to feed a mad god. A suicide scatter-gun held in the mouth of the galaxy, finger on the trigger, held by a maniac.
We were never meant to win. We were meant to die. Ziost was never an exception. It was the template.

This 'Great' Galactic War we have persued for a millenium? Ritualistic slaughter to prime the galaxy for annihilation.

But what did the Sith do when they learned this? When they realized the truth? That everything the Empire was, that everything we had built towards over the long millennia since the fall of Naga Sadow was a lie? A ritualistic suicide pact with a madman?

*Nothing.*

No, worse than nothing.

Like the child of abusive parents, they continued the abuse, even in the Emperor's absence. They continue to wage the War, they continue its meaningless bloodshed. Dragging civilization further into the abyss. They gleefully continue to drag the scalpel of death across the wrist of galactic civilization, and laugh as the lifeblood of trillions of beings continues to be spille across the stars.
And for what? All in the name of vengeance over the Jedi? Hatred of the Republic? Blood purity of the Sith?

Madness! Even without the Emperor, they *Persist*! And for what?

It does not take a military genius to see that the War is lost. The Empire was never meant to win this war... It can't. Only the delusional can still believe in an ultimate Imperial victory to this conflict.

And yet the Sith continue to lead us all to the slaughter. Blinded by their hatred, their lust for revenge, their xenophobia, their traditions. Willingly sacrificing us all on the altar of their ambitions in their names. Unwilling to see the truth... Or perhaps they do see it and simply do not care.

Maybe the Emperor wasn't an outlier. Maybe he was what all Sith truly are.  Uncaring. Self-obsessed. Insane.

Monsters.

They would drown the entire galaxy in a sea of blood for their ambitions. Burn it all to cinders to hide from their crippling fear of Death, Defeat, the Loss of their *Power.* And we would be the kindling.
I have heard that the Emperor is truly gone now. Finally defeated.

But I swear this: if even a shadow of his presence still drifts in the void, he is laughing. Laughing at us. At the Sith. At his pawns as they continue to bring death t o the galaxy even in his absence, gleefully spreading the disease of war across the stars. Spreading the rot. The end of all things.

The Empire will fall. Of that I am certain.

It cannot be saved, for the Sith will not let it be saved. They will wage this war for ever if we let them. They would sooner see Dromund Kaas burn as Ziost did rather than surrender their suicidal, destructive quest to destroy the Jedi.
And they would all drag us down with them. They would put every man, woman and child of the Empire between the advancing armies of the Republic and themselves before this war is over. If they have their way our people will cease to exist.

Because in the end they see no difference between us, the enemy or their slaves. We are all meaningless to them. Fuel for their ambitions... Our lives insignificant, our deaths more so.

But we do not have to be their pawns. We do not have to sign another suicide pact with the Sith order after we just barely escaped the one with Emperor Vitiate. We can choose,

Choose peace.

Imperial and Republic forces fought side by side to stop to the Emperor, to stop Zakuul. I saw it. We can live together. But not while the Sith Rule.
They must be cast down. Their temples razed. Their institutions dismantled. Their Empire broken.

Because make no mistake:

This is their Empire. Not ours.
We are naught but Serfs to them. Fodder.
Meat.

The military, our civil structures. They only serve those who bow. Those who align with Sith interests. The interests of another Apathetic Monarch and his Dark Council of maniacs. The interests of madness.

The Empire stands for nothing now but blood. Death. The end of all things. And the Imperial Military? It has become the willing blade of the Sith. A blade at the throat of not only the peoples of the Republic, but those of the Empire. The throat of life itself.

I will do what I must to see our people freed from this terror. The terror of the Sith. And it pains me that the Military must come down with them. For there are good people in Uniform. I know that. I know them. I fought with them. But I know that the will of good people will not be enough to stop this terrible thing we have set in motion.

I know what must be done. Even if it damns me.

Contact has been made. With the Convor. With the Republic SIS.

The die is cast.

If the Force offers an afterlife, I will answer for what comes next.

But the war must end.

[ENTRY TERMINATED — SIGNAL CLOSED]
[LAST ACCESS DATE: UNKNOWN]]]> <![CDATA[[IC] Holo-Diary - Krassus Yarius Horuset]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1364 Tue, 17 Jun 2025 17:52:29 +0000 Krassus Horuset]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1364 >> BEGIN ARCHIVAL RETRIEVAL: HORUSET.PRIV.LOG_0397-A (DATE UNAVAILABLE)

>> STATUS: CORRUPTED – PARTIAL AUDIO/VISUAL INTEGRITY

>> SOURCE: PERSONAL DEVICE // KRASSUS HORUSET 

>> OPENING FILE...ENTRY I: Farewell Brother

[HOLO IMAGE GLITCHING...]
The figure flickers violently. A halo of static curls around his silhouette, refracting the evening light of Dromund Kaas. It is unmistakably Krassus, yet younger, thinner, untouched by the Dark side and without his cybernetic replacements. 
His face is pale, drawn, lips moving slowly beneath the distortion.
He is seated upon a moss-covered stone beside the icey watered river running through the lower levels of the Horuset estate. He lowers the hood of his Acolyte robe as he was sure no one saw him wander away from the Acolyte camps. Resting his training blade besides him in the grass. The movements of the hologram, glitching, looping, freezing. 
His voice crackles into focus, barely audible. 

"V—...Valeus..." 

[HOLO IMAGE GLITCHING...]

"... When ...Kromus... sneaked out... for your wed—"

"...I did not go..."

"... Father.... Forbade... So I... Evening training...  as ordered.... My Duty."
A long pause. The image skips. For a brief second, his face contorts—pain, or shame, or perhaps both.

[HOLO IMAGE GLITCHING...]

"...When... K-kromus returned..."

[GLITCHING. CONTINUES..]
"...He was... beaten."

"I-I.... Not Regret it... Then."

[ANOTHER GLITCH... THE SENTENCE LOOPS TWICE]


"But no-now... Last opportunity.... See you."

His words glitch, degrade. Only fragments survive, skipping like a damaged disc.

"Now I...regret... upstart slave..."

"You... older... remote..."

"...studying... never spoke..."

The holo distorts violently. His form vanishes, then reappears. His face blurred, audio warped. When it stabilizes, he's looking directly into the recorder. His voice is low now, hoarse.

"....never will again..."

A beat of silence, Young Krassus' face hardens, in anger, determination. Dealing with sadness in perhaps the one way he was taught to by his father.

"...you dine with Typhojem now..."

"...rest well."

"...I will do you proud..."

[VISUAL END – static flood]

[AUDIO TERMINATED – no further signal detected]

>> END FRAGMENT.

>> FILE STATUS: LOCKED / REPAIR IMPOSSIBLE.

>> NOTE: Hidden under six layers of encryption. Marked for deletion but never executed.]]> >> BEGIN ARCHIVAL RETRIEVAL: HORUSET.PRIV.LOG_0397-A (DATE UNAVAILABLE)

>> STATUS: CORRUPTED – PARTIAL AUDIO/VISUAL INTEGRITY

>> SOURCE: PERSONAL DEVICE // KRASSUS HORUSET 

>> OPENING FILE...ENTRY I: Farewell Brother

[HOLO IMAGE GLITCHING...]
The figure flickers violently. A halo of static curls around his silhouette, refracting the evening light of Dromund Kaas. It is unmistakably Krassus, yet younger, thinner, untouched by the Dark side and without his cybernetic replacements. 
His face is pale, drawn, lips moving slowly beneath the distortion.
He is seated upon a moss-covered stone beside the icey watered river running through the lower levels of the Horuset estate. He lowers the hood of his Acolyte robe as he was sure no one saw him wander away from the Acolyte camps. Resting his training blade besides him in the grass. The movements of the hologram, glitching, looping, freezing. 
His voice crackles into focus, barely audible. 

"V—...Valeus..." 

[HOLO IMAGE GLITCHING...]

"... When ...Kromus... sneaked out... for your wed—"

"...I did not go..."

"... Father.... Forbade... So I... Evening training...  as ordered.... My Duty."
A long pause. The image skips. For a brief second, his face contorts—pain, or shame, or perhaps both.

[HOLO IMAGE GLITCHING...]

"...When... K-kromus returned..."

[GLITCHING. CONTINUES..]
"...He was... beaten."

"I-I.... Not Regret it... Then."

[ANOTHER GLITCH... THE SENTENCE LOOPS TWICE]


"But no-now... Last opportunity.... See you."

His words glitch, degrade. Only fragments survive, skipping like a damaged disc.

"Now I...regret... upstart slave..."

"You... older... remote..."

"...studying... never spoke..."

The holo distorts violently. His form vanishes, then reappears. His face blurred, audio warped. When it stabilizes, he's looking directly into the recorder. His voice is low now, hoarse.

"....never will again..."

A beat of silence, Young Krassus' face hardens, in anger, determination. Dealing with sadness in perhaps the one way he was taught to by his father.

"...you dine with Typhojem now..."

"...rest well."

"...I will do you proud..."

[VISUAL END – static flood]

[AUDIO TERMINATED – no further signal detected]

>> END FRAGMENT.

>> FILE STATUS: LOCKED / REPAIR IMPOSSIBLE.

>> NOTE: Hidden under six layers of encryption. Marked for deletion but never executed.]]> <![CDATA[End of the Week]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1360 Sun, 01 Jun 2025 18:05:05 +0000 Meatslopper]]> https://www.horuset.com/showthread.php?tid=1360 End of the Week
((This is a POV story))
((This is a POV story))

Tradition is dead.

The fire has gone out.

And now I lament.

The Dark Lords retreat from the fire, the blaze of the Horuset blood and soul left to those who have never known real passion, whores like Xulia, and fools like Seranaus who bowed and groveled before alien feet, whose death I held my palm and left to a Master that should have swung that sword. They don’t care anymore. Those that I once served with everything I could possibly give, just don’t care anymore. They sit atop their throne and look down at those beneath them and expect them to fix it, as if it wasn’t ever their duty to do the same.  Well, why should I? Why do I need to be the one upholding your vigil, your values, your legacy? If the answer is Tarimra, when has anyone but me invoked his name, his cause? I can’t fight this rot alone, I can only lose and lose again, and again, and maybe that’s what I should do, maybe I should stand the lone Warrior, maybe I should cry to the heavens and battle in hope that something, anything will change here. 

But when given the choice between fighting for your House’s heart or mine, I think I have to choose mine, my home, my place, my part of the Empire and ours are not the same anymore. I’m left with that undeniable conclusion.

You let it die. 

All of you. 

And I am alone. Those that were once the kindling of our fire have been burnt away. Faelice was one of my greatest friends, and she left, I don’t know where, I don’t know why, but perhaps she saw the future, she saw the desolation of everything we had worked to create. The Lord Hazlem was a terrible monster, who despite my platitudes and respect, was someone I could not ever come to like, but all the same, she was the demon in front of our most sacred fire. When she fell, the Empire suffered a terrible loss. Vayek who ascended to the throne in her place, was nothing but a shadow, a shadow with a sharp edge but too afraid of losing battles to fight them without every perfect little piece, they do not need a shadow, they needed a ward, an arbiter, someone who did not bandy with scum for political favours, but someone who put them down. Emlar was my closest ally and friend, but she knew the tide more than any of us ever did, and I have no doubt that when she retreated into her research, she saw what awaited us, and still, her abandonment of her post stings me. But I understand, I understand now more than ever that preservation cannot come from the war we waged together anymore. The last stand, if ever there was one, is not within Horuset. 

Horuset’s defenders, its Masters of Doctrine. Are those who abandoned their post too? One, Tutki to a wretched alien who should be long dead if ever we were allowed to swing our swords, all the while, as he claimed, tradition was his motive. Where once I might have respected you and treated you with dignity, you burnt it down, and in what reality do you think you can build that up, that you should lead tradition into the future after you already abandoned it? Oh, and the other fostered a traitor beneath his watch to both blood and faction, all the while preaching his sight from the Sith Gods. You couldn’t predict that, could you, Luvane? You can’t even predict what your wife has done in your absence, and you certainly won’t enforce your wrath upon her, despite being etched into law if I tell you.

That leaves the rest. It leaves Rekhen, a traitor to his blood, to me. It leaves Sarias, a passive wretch of a Lord who has never made a single action in her life and coasted by on placidity, rewarded for a defence that I and my Warriors planned, a whore of a Twi’lek, Leive who’s blundered more intelligence than she’s ever known, allowed Apprentice after Apprentice to betray us, to betray the Empire? Then it leaves nigh the worst of Alienkind, Nivalis, who long has earned their execution.

And at that point, who is left? 

Who am I fighting for? 

If there’s a reason I should hold my vigil over a rotten tower of fetid wood, fungi crawling in every crack and seam. Who is it? 

The Lord I serve has never cared. Not for training me, not for legacy or tradition, just the enemy out there, who, for most of the time I’ve known her, has been the voice to tell me no, to tell me to wait, to tell me that an alien ought to stand in my way, to restrict me from making a difference. The one that scarcely has passion or emotion, who has driven it from their soul and with it the essence of the code.  No. I see an opportunity to place myself where I can still matter. My Orsus. There it is, still alive, its soul still burning. I can’t change this house, it’s already rotten, but I can build a new one, one I can call home, one that I can bring into into the true grace of the Empire and carve out a reality I can be proud of, I can hold the Republic back and hope in centuries that there will be a place for me again. 

Another heart of tradition.

Another soul.

Not this house of charcoal that I once called a home.

]]> End of the Week
((This is a POV story))
((This is a POV story))

Tradition is dead.

The fire has gone out.

And now I lament.

The Dark Lords retreat from the fire, the blaze of the Horuset blood and soul left to those who have never known real passion, whores like Xulia, and fools like Seranaus who bowed and groveled before alien feet, whose death I held my palm and left to a Master that should have swung that sword. They don’t care anymore. Those that I once served with everything I could possibly give, just don’t care anymore. They sit atop their throne and look down at those beneath them and expect them to fix it, as if it wasn’t ever their duty to do the same.  Well, why should I? Why do I need to be the one upholding your vigil, your values, your legacy? If the answer is Tarimra, when has anyone but me invoked his name, his cause? I can’t fight this rot alone, I can only lose and lose again, and again, and maybe that’s what I should do, maybe I should stand the lone Warrior, maybe I should cry to the heavens and battle in hope that something, anything will change here. 

But when given the choice between fighting for your House’s heart or mine, I think I have to choose mine, my home, my place, my part of the Empire and ours are not the same anymore. I’m left with that undeniable conclusion.

You let it die. 

All of you. 

And I am alone. Those that were once the kindling of our fire have been burnt away. Faelice was one of my greatest friends, and she left, I don’t know where, I don’t know why, but perhaps she saw the future, she saw the desolation of everything we had worked to create. The Lord Hazlem was a terrible monster, who despite my platitudes and respect, was someone I could not ever come to like, but all the same, she was the demon in front of our most sacred fire. When she fell, the Empire suffered a terrible loss. Vayek who ascended to the throne in her place, was nothing but a shadow, a shadow with a sharp edge but too afraid of losing battles to fight them without every perfect little piece, they do not need a shadow, they needed a ward, an arbiter, someone who did not bandy with scum for political favours, but someone who put them down. Emlar was my closest ally and friend, but she knew the tide more than any of us ever did, and I have no doubt that when she retreated into her research, she saw what awaited us, and still, her abandonment of her post stings me. But I understand, I understand now more than ever that preservation cannot come from the war we waged together anymore. The last stand, if ever there was one, is not within Horuset. 

Horuset’s defenders, its Masters of Doctrine. Are those who abandoned their post too? One, Tutki to a wretched alien who should be long dead if ever we were allowed to swing our swords, all the while, as he claimed, tradition was his motive. Where once I might have respected you and treated you with dignity, you burnt it down, and in what reality do you think you can build that up, that you should lead tradition into the future after you already abandoned it? Oh, and the other fostered a traitor beneath his watch to both blood and faction, all the while preaching his sight from the Sith Gods. You couldn’t predict that, could you, Luvane? You can’t even predict what your wife has done in your absence, and you certainly won’t enforce your wrath upon her, despite being etched into law if I tell you.

That leaves the rest. It leaves Rekhen, a traitor to his blood, to me. It leaves Sarias, a passive wretch of a Lord who has never made a single action in her life and coasted by on placidity, rewarded for a defence that I and my Warriors planned, a whore of a Twi’lek, Leive who’s blundered more intelligence than she’s ever known, allowed Apprentice after Apprentice to betray us, to betray the Empire? Then it leaves nigh the worst of Alienkind, Nivalis, who long has earned their execution.

And at that point, who is left? 

Who am I fighting for? 

If there’s a reason I should hold my vigil over a rotten tower of fetid wood, fungi crawling in every crack and seam. Who is it? 

The Lord I serve has never cared. Not for training me, not for legacy or tradition, just the enemy out there, who, for most of the time I’ve known her, has been the voice to tell me no, to tell me to wait, to tell me that an alien ought to stand in my way, to restrict me from making a difference. The one that scarcely has passion or emotion, who has driven it from their soul and with it the essence of the code.  No. I see an opportunity to place myself where I can still matter. My Orsus. There it is, still alive, its soul still burning. I can’t change this house, it’s already rotten, but I can build a new one, one I can call home, one that I can bring into into the true grace of the Empire and carve out a reality I can be proud of, I can hold the Republic back and hope in centuries that there will be a place for me again. 

Another heart of tradition.

Another soul.

Not this house of charcoal that I once called a home.

]]>