Chapter Text
Beneath the Imperial Palace, Dromund Kaas
Year 853 of the Imperial Reign
---
The ritual chamber beneath Dromund Kaas screamed with power.
Darth Nox stood at the center of concentric circles inscribed in the blood of seventeen Force-sensitive species, his hands raised, consciousness expanded across dimensions most beings could not perceive even with Force-sight.
The air itself had become negotiable, reality bending under the weight of Dark Side energy he had been channeling for three consecutive days without pause.
Behind him, silent as death itself, Khem Val stood watch.
Eight feet of ancient predator, loyal beyond death, beyond reason. The only being in the galaxy Nox trusted at his back.
"Your hunger feeds the ritual." He could feel the Dashade's presence like a gravitational constant, massive and immutable. "Can you feel it, Khem? The Force itself bending to acknowledge what we're becoming?"
"I feel your power, Master." Khem's voice rumbled like grinding stone, edged with something that might have been satisfaction. "It tastes of conquest, of inevitability. Tulak Hord himself would recognize this working."
"Oh, Khem." Nox's eyes blazed as he wove threads of Force energy into patterns that would have driven lesser practitioners mad. "We are about to surpass anything he could ever imagine. Not mere immortality. Something far more elegant."
He paused, feeling the ritual pulse around him like a second heartbeat.
"Unlike Vitiate's pitiful attempt," he continued, scorn dripping from every word. "Consuming entire worlds simply to sustain his wretched existence. Pathetic."
Three years of preparation had led to this moment.
Ancient texts pried from dead languages, forbidden knowledge bought with the slaughter of systems, power seized through conquests that had rendered the Dark Council irrelevant.
He had dismantled every rival, absorbed their strength, and now stood alone at the apex, ready to shed the final limitation of flesh.
The ritual reached its crescendo. Power poured through him like a collapsing star.
His consciousness began to detach from the body, reality's rules becoming fluid, optional.
Khem Val's warning growl came a half-second too late.
The inscriptions he had spent weeks perfecting had been altered at the molecular level, changes so subtle only catastrophic activation would reveal them.
The power that should have flowed through precise channels instead began cascading into feedback loops, building toward critical mass.
"TREACHERY!"
His roar shook the chamber to its foundations. He understood at once.
The ritual had not been ruined. It had been turned into a weapon.
The doors exploded inward in a storm of smoke and molten durasteel. Through the breach came his apprentice, flanked by twelve figures in dark robes, the traitorous remnants of his Dark Council.
Their combined presence burned in the Force like a pyre.
The fools had turned his own ascension into a dimensional bomb.
"Master," his apprentice called, her voice cutting cleanly through the maelstrom. "Forgive the interruption, but your ascension ends here."
Nox laughed. The sound was terrible, layered with harmonics that cracked the stone and made the air shimmer.
"My grasping little apprentice." He smiled, cold and sharp. "Do you truly believe this changes anything? That your attempt at sabotage will stop me?"
"I do not need to stop you, Master," she replied, strangely calm. "I only need to kill you in a way that ensures you cannot return. Not even your precious rituals can piece together a consciousness scattered across realities that should not exist."
The gnats moved as one, months of preparation clear in their coordination. They rushed him, knowing he was the true threat.
They made it three meters.
Khem Val met them like a wall of death. The first fool died instantly, bisected clean through the torso before his lightsaber could fully clear its housing.
The second managed to ignite her blade before Khem's massive fist caved in her sternum with a sickening crunch of bone.
The third had the honor of facing his Emperor.
Nox's crimson blade ignited with a sound like reality tearing. He became a whirlwind of perfect violence, his most aggressive form refined through decades of war, stolen techniques from extinct civilizations, and a lifetime of merciless practice.
What he wielded was no longer mere combat. It was art. Inevitable death made manifest.
From his flank the fourth assassin lunged with Force-enhanced speed, little more than a blur to lesser eyes. Nox did not bother to block.
He gestured with his free hand and the man simply stopped, suspended mid-air by crushing invisible pressure. With a casual flick of his wrist, the assassin's spine folded backward with a wet crack.
The corpse was hurled like a rag doll into two of his companions, shattering bone on impact.
The fifth had the audacity to hurl a storm of lightning at him. Nox caught the crackling fury, absorbed it with one hand in a technique that should have required both, then redirected it back through the woman's body.
Her skeleton lit up from within like a circuit of fire before she exploded into charred meat and carbonized bone.
The sixth and seventh came at him from opposite sides, blades weaving in patterns meant to overwhelm. Nox reached into the Force and pushed.
The very air compressed into a solid wall of kinetic force that caught both assassins mid-strike and hurled them backward. One struck the chamber wall with enough force to leave a crater of shattered stone and pulverized organs.
The other arrested his momentum for one precious second, hanging in the air.
Nox gestured again. The man's throat simply sealed shut, tissues fused at the molecular level. He clawed desperately at his neck, eyes bulging, still trying to summon the Force as his brain slowly died from lack of air.
Nox held him there, suspended and suffocating, while his lightsaber carved through the eighth assassin's guard as though it were wet paper.
All the while the ritual destabilized further. Power hemorrhaged wildly through the chamber, building toward catastrophic release.
The stone walls cracked wider and wider. Through the fissures something unnatural bled through. Reality itself had begun to scream.
Khem Val crushed another assassin's skull with his bare hands while simultaneously deflecting two lightsaber strikes. "The ritual, Master!" he roared. "It approaches critical—"
"I KNOW!"
Nox's voice carried the full weight of the failing ritual, resonating across multiple frequencies as raw power bled into every syllable.
He seized the ninth assassin with the Force. The woman's body began to wither instantly, her life force ripped away to feed his endless hunger.
She aged decades in heartbeats. Skin pulled tight over bone, eyes sank deep into their sockets, and she screamed until her vocal cords turned to dust in her throat.
The stolen energy surged into Nox's blade. He engaged the tenth assassin with renewed savagery, strikes coming faster and harder than any human body should allow.
He feinted high, struck low, seized the man's weapon hand with telekinetic precision and twisted. The wrist rotated a full three hundred and sixty degrees with a sickening crunch of splintering bone before Nox's crimson blade found his heart.
The eleventh tried to flee.
How quaint.
Nox reached out with the Force and the man's legs simply gave out, muscles and nerves seized by invisible command. He collapsed, paralyzed, mouth opening and closing soundlessly as Nox walked past without sparing him a glance.
The wretch would feel everything that was coming.
The twelfth and final assassin, the last still standing besides those fighting Khem, faced Nox directly. His lightsaber raised in a proper guard stance.
"Admirable," Nox observed, almost amused. "But futile."
With a casual gesture the man's lightsaber tore itself from his grip, flew across the chamber, and buried itself in the paralyzed eleventh's chest.
Then Nox reached deeper, seizing not flesh but the very essence of the man. He tore the Force from him, severing the gift the assassin had spent decades cultivating as easily as cutting away dead flesh.
When Nox's blade finally ended him, the man could not even sense the killing stroke coming.
Through it all, his apprentice stood back, watching.
Her body trembled with rancid fear. Her already pale face had gone the color of old bone beneath the chamber's crimson light.
Her eyes grew wider with every passing second as she watched her carefully chosen allies cut down with the casual efficiency of a gardener pruning dead branches.
She had known he was powerful.
She had never truly understood what that power meant until this moment.
She had brought twelve of the most powerful Sith in the Empire, and he was slaughtering them like academy novices.
Blade to blade or power to power, she knew she would die just as quickly. But she did not need to match him. The ritual was doing the work for her.
Nox felt it building, a terrible pressure at the edge of perception. He had minutes left, perhaps less, before the ritual reached the point where reality simply ceased.
Everything within a hemisphere would be erased. He could already feel the edges of that oblivion reaching toward them like invisible teeth.
"Khem!"
The Dashade seized the three remaining traitors, now wild with panic, and hurled them bodily at the apprentice. The impact broke her concentration and forced her attention away from her Master for one precious moment.
That was all Nox needed.
He released his lightsaber. It clattered to the stone floor, still ignited and humming.
With a final, savage effort he poured everything he had into the failing ritual. It was too late to stop the catastrophe, but he could still redirect it.
He had built failure states and contingencies into the working long ago. Most led only to annihilation. But one narrow, desperate path offered something else.
"My foolish little apprentice." His voice cut through the shrieking dimensional collapse. "You learned patience. You learned timing. You waited for the perfect moment."
Her expression shifted from confusion to dawning horror as she realized what he intended.
"And yet you forgot the first lesson I ever taught you." Power blazed around him like a visible corona, the air itself beginning to burn. "The strong do not reveal their strength until—"
"—the moment of execution," she finished in a broken whisper.
"Exactly."
Nox smiled.
He let go.
The sabotaged ritual completed its catastrophic course, but with one final, deliberate modification: he had bound his consciousness to the breach itself.
The Force exploded.
Reality shrieked.
The chamber, the palace, and the city above simply ceased to exist. Everything within a hundred kilometers folded in on itself as dimensions collapsed and the barriers between what was possible and what should never be dissolved beneath the weight of uncontrolled Dark Side apotheosis.
The treacherous council died instantly, their bodies converted to scattered atoms in a single heartbeat.
His apprentice lasted a moment longer. Just long enough for horror to twist her face into a mask of screaming terror as she realized the breach had grown beyond her control. It would devour her along with everything else.
Then she was gone too. Erased.
But in those final microseconds, as his physical form came apart, something impossible happened.
Khem Val surged forward, his ancient presence slamming into Nox's fragmenting essence. The Dashade's innate resistance to the Force carved a tiny pocket of stability within the chaos.
Loyal beyond death, the old predator willingly merged his consciousness with that of his Master.
"I stand with you, Master," Khem's voice echoed across impossible distances, heavy with the weight of millennia. "As I stood with Tulak Hord. As I have stood through empires and eternities. This is not your end. I vow it."
Sith Lord and ancient monster, master and servant, two beings who had fought and bled together for decades, were dragged into the dimensional breach like debris into a hungry singularity.
Khem's presence became a lifeline, an anchor that kept Nox's identity from scattering into nothingness as they fell through dimensions that burned with impossible colors.
Space stretched and contracted, infinite and instantaneous all at once.
Khem's consciousness began to fade.
"You are worthy, Master," he said, pride resonating even in dissolution. "Worthy of the ancient legacy. Worthy of the power you wield. I have served the greatest of the Sith Lords… and I declare you their equal. It is my honor to fall at your side."
The universe folded. Bent. Broke.
And Darth Nox, carrying within him the fading echo of his most faithful companion, fell screaming into the void between worlds.
Behind them remained only a vast crater where an empire's beating heart had once stood, and a raw dimensional wound that would scar reality for generations to come.
---
Awareness returned like drowning in reverse.
The Force was wrong. Thin, starved, wrong. Like sucking air through a straw at the roof of the world.
Panic, raw, animal panic, tore through the remnants of Nox's mind. A god reduced to this. A being who had commanded galaxies now gasping for power like a dying fish.
Where—
"Peace, Master."
Khem Val's voice. Distant. Cracked. Yet it anchored him.
"We endure," the Dashade whispered. "As Tulak Hord endured. As all true Sith endure."
"Khem?" The name cracked with desperate fury.
Nox reached for him and found only broken shards. Fragments of the only creature he had ever trusted, clinging desperately to his own shattered soul.
"I remain," Khem said, grim pride bleeding through exhaustion. "Diminished… but still your blade in the darkness."
A heavy pause.
"You anchored me when reality tried to tear us apart. You refused to let go when lesser beings would have surrendered. This is why I followed you. This is why I named you heir to Tulak Hord's legacy."
Before Nox could answer, sensation slammed into him like a collapsing star.
He tried to move. Nothing. His body refused him completely.
Rage exploded through him, incandescent, blinding, murderous. Not again. Not this helplessness. Not this humiliation—
"You are an infant, Master. We have been reborn. The ritual flung us farther than I have ever gone."
No. The denial was a scream inside his skull. NO!
The horror deepened as rough, callused hands lifted him. A woman screamed in the background, guttural, exhausted, animal. The wet sounds of birth surrounded him. He was still connected to her. Still slick with her blood.
Force, no—
"The strong adapt," Khem whispered, voice growing fainter. "As you adapted when they threw you into the pits of Korriban. As you adapted when the traitors tried to erase you. You will adapt to this."
He was passed to softer hands. Trembling ones.
A young woman's face filled his blurry vision, dark hair matted with sweat, grey eyes shining with tears and overwhelming, suffocating love. She looked at him like he was the center of the universe.
The disgust that surged through Nox was so violent his tiny body jerked.
I do not want this. I do not want your love, your weakness, your filthy mortal affection—
"Want is irrelevant," Khem murmured, barely audible now. "You taught me that long ago. The strong survive by any means necessary. The weak perish clutching their excuses."
The woman brought him to her breast. His infant body betrayed him instantly, latching on with desperate hunger while his mind howled in revulsion and fury.
Tears, his tears, spilled down his cheeks as he fed like a pathetic animal.
He forced the scream down through decades of merciless discipline, but the shame burned like acid.
Even as his newborn body nursed, his mind sharpened. Silver-gold hair. Soon, violet eyes. The man they called "Your Grace" shared the same features. A powerful bloodline. That would be useful.
The Force was here too, thin, alien, but alive. Enough. Barely enough.
"My essence fades," Khem said, and for the first time real sorrow colored the ancient voice. "I do not have long, Master."
"No." Nox reached desperately inward, clutching the broken shards of his oldest companion. "You do not have my leave to die, Khem."
"You cannot save me, Master. My form is scattered across dimensions. Only echoes remain bound to your essence."
"Then I will forge you a new body," Nox vowed, the promise burning with absolute, terrifying conviction. "And I shall bind your soul to it with blood, ritual and power. You stood with Tulak Hord for millennia. You will stand with me again. This I swear."
Silence stretched.
Then, with something close to wonder: "You would do this… for me?"
"You are Khem Val." The thought came raw and fierce. "You fought at my back when the galaxy turned against me. You gave everything to save me. I do not abandon those who prove their worth."
Khem's fading presence trembled with emotion he had rarely shown in life.
"You truly are his heir… Very well, Master. I will sleep. Conserve what little remains. And when you call… I will answer."
The ancient Dashade's voice grew distant, sinking deep into Nox's soul.
"It has been my greatest honor… to serve you."
"Wait for me," Nox commanded, pouring every ounce of will into the words. "That is an order, Khem Val. Live."
"…Yes… Master…"
And then he was gone. Reduced to the faintest whisper buried in the depths of Nox's newborn soul.