After sending Leila—the delightfully bloodthirsty zealot I had so recently acquired—to permanently and enthusiastically remove any potential opposition to my renewed authority over the Cult of the Screaming Blade, I allowed myself exactly three seconds of satisfaction…
…and then turned my attention to matters that were considerably more important than the internal politics of a deluded Sith cult.
Namely, my long-term investment.
The plaza was still thick with lingering reverence. The faithful dispersed slowly, not all at once, but in hesitant waves—some drifting away alone, others clustering together, faces flushed and eyes unfocused, their simple minds utterly consumed by my brilliance, my return leaving them pleasantly pliable and devoted.
As the crowd thinned, I turned toward Speaker Kalsis—the one person in the settlement most likely to know about what I had set in motion millennia ago and, even if most likely not why.
The cult’s leader stood like a stone pillar among which the faithful converged, the middle-aged human observing the crowd with a quiet vigilance, his posture rigid and his hands clasped behind his back.
Even now, with his god returned in flesh, his Force presence remained remarkably composed. Devotion burned there, bright and unwavering, but it was tempered by years of patience, discipline, and responsibility. Not the frantic ecstasy of a reckless zealot, but the steady flame of a faithful custodian who had spent a lifetime ensuring that nothing went wrong with his master’s property.
When I approached, cultists nearby immediately made space, retreating with bowed heads and murmured prayers, their feverish reverence breaking against me like a tidal wave.
Kalsis himself inclined his head in a deep bow the moment I approached, his action simpler yet just as meaningful.
“How can I help you, Lord Imperius?” he asked simply, his voice not wavering in the slightest. There was no uncertainty, no trace of surprise—only readiness to fulfil my every desire. The man was simply awaiting the order to be given, simply so it could inevitably be obeyed.
It was, honestly, one of the reasons I had always loved the particular brand of deluded, fanatical zealots Sith cults had a habit of producing.
…That and homebrews.
Zealots were always able to produce the meanest drinks. For some reason, religious fanaticism, constant violence and heavy use of mind-altering substances really did wonders for brewing creativity.
“I wish to see my Heart,” I said calmly, using the suitably cryptic and ominous name I had given my deposit all those years ago.
For a fraction of a second, Speaker Kalsis froze, his entire body tensing. Then his gaze snapped fully to me, and for the first time since I had met him, something raw flared through his Force presence—a wave of gleeful vindication suddenly flooding his body only to be crushed under the renewed composure.
Without another word, Kalsis bowed deeply.
“Of course,” he said, voice low and reverent. “Of course, my lord.”
He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t hesitate. He simply accepted it as a command that had been waiting thousands of years to be spoken aloud and obeyed.
Upon witnessing the sight, I felt a faint swell of pride.
Clearly, I had done something right all those years ago if these delightful lunatics had followed my instructions with such religious fervour for millennia.
***
After Speaker Kalsis murmured a few quiet instructions to nearby faithful—soft words that sent them scattering with obedient efficiency—he turned and led me away from the plaza, down a narrower street at the settlement’s edge, where the atmosphere changed in a way I could only describe as… respectfully avoided.
The building waiting at the end of the lane was inconspicuous at first glance. Plain and three stories tall, built from the prefab that had been patched and repainted over the years. A simple entrance sat at its center: a heavy, well-fitted door of dark alloy, plain in design but neatly polished. Above the frame, carved into the metal, was a small symbol: the jagged blade of my cult.
Kalsis slowed, and his eyes flicked toward me with something almost conspiratorial—like a man letting his god in on a secret.
“It’s a burial home, my lord,” he declared softly. “Where all bodies are brought… so that faithful souls may return to your loving embrace.”
“Of course,” I replied, equally soft.
There was no such thing happening, naturally. The only souls I had ever ‘embraced’ were the ones I had personally bound to me…and even those were already long gone. Still, everyone was entitled to believe whatever nonsense I had manipulated them into believing, so long as it didn’t cause any trouble for me.
We passed two guards stationed outside, both of them bowing so deeply I thought their spines might break, their presences burning with reverence. Paying them no mind, we entered the building, the inside dim and quiet in comparison to the outside.
We walked through a short corridor and into what looked, at first glance, like an ordinary mortuary, one with clean floors and a long counter with neatly stacked cloths and tools. Kalsis crossed to the far end of the room, where a section of wall looked identical to the rest, and pressed his palm against it in a precise pattern.
With a soft hiss, the wall shifted aside, revealing a narrow stairwell descending into darkness.
My Speaker and I began our descent, travelling deep below the dwellings and the limit of knowledge of most of my cultists, to the place beneath the settlement that only a handful were permitted to know. Place not meant for worship, but to fulfil an ancient task their god (me) had given them thousands of years ago.
Kalsis walked beside me with quiet assurance, his steps measured. His Force presence was still calm, but there was a subtle pride in it now, the man clearly satisfied by being the one to finish the long task entrusted to him and his ancestors.
“Only a few know about the Heart, my lord,” he said as we descended, voice low. “We preserved it in secret, just as you commanded. Per tradition, only the Speakers and your flesh priests know of it. Your gifts are distributed carefully among the faithful… without them ever knowing their origin.”
I glanced at him, slightly confused.
“Flesh priests,” I repeated slowly. I had absolutely no idea what the kriff he was talking about, but the name certainly sounded like something I would choose.
“Yes,” Kalsis said simply, as though the term required no explanation at all. “Your flesh priests.”
I hummed thoughtfully.
“As expected of my children. They still carry the task I gave them, just as I desired.” I said, nodding my head with all the authority of a god who definitely understood his own cult’s current structure.
The air grew colder the deeper we went, the warmth of the settlement above fading until it felt like we were walking into the guts of a refrigeration unit. The lighting changed too, as bright, practical lamps gave way to dim crimson strips embedded into the walls, casting everything in a thin red glow. Even the hum beneath our feet changed pitch, growing slower and deeper, like the heartbeat of something enormous.
The walls grew older as well—they were less repaired and polished, less concerned with appearances. The metal plating here was stained with age and moisture, seams dark with old grime. There were symbols to be found there, some carved, others painted and yet others still burned into the surface. Some of those sigils were familiar, some were utterly foreign.
At last, we reached the burial home—though burial was not really something that would ever take place here.
The corridor leading to it narrowed until it felt less like a passageway and more like a throat, a long constriction of black durasteel that swallowed light. Every few meters, crimson light-strips embedded in the ceiling pulsed faintly, not bright enough to illuminate so much as to suggest shapes.
Kalsis paused at the threshold as if crossing it required a different posture of the soul. His shoulders straightened and his breathing steadied, the man clearly preparing himself to reveal the cult’s final secret. Then he raised his hand and pressed his palm against a symbol worked into the wall.
A hidden mechanism engaged with a deep, grinding groan of a lovingly maintained old machinery. The door slid open slowly, as though the building itself was hesitant to reveal what lay within.
The smell hit me first.
It was not rot or a sweet-sour decay of decomposing corpses, not even the chemical stink of a morgue. It was incense—thick and aggressive, layered with burnt oils and the faint, unmistakable tang of the Dark Side emitted by what was hidden behind the doors.
The chamber beyond was vast. Low-lit, cavernous, and ridiculously ceremonial, it was less a corpse-processing hall and more a temple dedicated to death. The ceiling was high enough that the ceiling above vanished into shadow. Support struts rose like pillars, and from them hung banners in stiff folds—cloth so old and saturated with soot that it had become leathery, each containing one of my cult’s sacred symbols.
And as I saw the figures moving within the chamber, I finally understood what Kalsis meant by flesh priests.
Ongree were everywhere.
Tall and hunched, their bodies narrow but wiry, they were moving with the strange precision of creatures who had turned ritual into muscle memory. Their elongated skulls were crowned with ceremonial hats—towering, layered constructions made from bone—while their robes were thick and dark, large enough to hide their frames completely.
They were all covered in blood spatter and bile stains, but they didn’t seem to mind, too focused on their task. They worked tirelessly, continuously processing the steady stream of corpses that arrived ever so often.
They came in on sleds, on stretchers, dragged by chains or carried by flesh priests. The dead arrived in every condition imaginable: whole and peacefully pale, or mangled, burned, broken, with missing parts, missing everything that made them recognizable as people and reduced instead to raw material.
The Ongree took them all, processing all the corpses with the same ritualized care.
First, as the deceased were brought to the chamber, they were brought through a series of stations where valuables were stripped with brisk efficiency: Weapons, credits, jewellery, datapads, anything useful was removed and placed into sorted bins.
Then came the sanctification—one of the flesh priests would murmur something softly, and another would mark the corpse with a smear of dark paste—blood mixed with incense oil, drawn in the shape of the jagged blade.
Then the body was moved forward, placed onto a conveyor belt and carried toward the far end of the chamber—toward a sealed archway leading into the next room, from where an enormous Force presence could be felt, ominous and ever-hungry.
Judging by the clothing, the species, and the causes of death, everyone who brushed against the cult eventually ended up here, be it the faithful who had died of age or illness, the apostates whose throats had been cut, or slavers, criminals and sinners of every stripe Nar Shaddaa produced in endless abundance—harvested during the cult’s “cleansings,” dragged here so that they could serve a better purpose in death than they did when alive.
No distinction was made. All were equal here, because all were offerings.
Kalsis walked beside me as we moved deeper into the chamber, his eyes flicking toward me again and again. He was watching me carefully, trying to gauge my reaction, most likely trying to see if I was pleased by their devotion.
“As you commanded, my lord,” he said, his voice dropping into something reverent. “Every body—those who served you and those who slighted you—is brought here upon death. The faithful do not rot in the streets and the unworthy do not escape judgment. All are delivered to feed the Heart… so that it may bless us in response.”
I could hear pride in his voice, something that made me smile under the helmet.
Eventually, after I was satisfied with what I’d seen so far, we moved deeper—past the conveyor belts, past the flesh priests and their rituals. We moved where the air grew warmer, thicker and faintly electric—to where the consumption happened.
The central chamber opened before us, allowing me to gaze upon what was hidden within.
And there it was—the Heart.
It dominated the space completely. It was massive—easily the size of a two-story building, perhaps larger—and its appearance was a fusion of brutal industrial design and something disturbingly organic. Vast plates of dark metal overlapped like ribs, each one layered over the next. They contracted and expanded in a slow, steady rhythm, as if the construct were breathing.
It pulsed with a deep mechanical thrum that vibrated through the floor, the sound low and constant like the heartbeat. Veins of dim crimson light ran across its surface in branching channels etched deep into the frame. The glow waxed and waned with each pulse, bathing the chamber in a slow, sickly rhythm.
Tubes and conduits fed into it from every direction, thick hoses and reinforced pipes carrying a viscous slurry that had once been flesh, the final product of the grinders and renderers far above, where corpses were reduced into something the Heart could easily digest.
Matter broke down into luminous energy as soon as it entered the engine’s maw, flesh collapsing into shimmering motes that were pulled inward. The Heart drank it all greedily, without pause or mercy.
And with each offering, it throbbed brighter, the pulse growing just a fraction stronger.
And in exchange…
The Heart gave. A hatch opened with a wet noise as the construct spat back matter—raw food, simple tools and weapons, medical supplies and spare parts, anything the cult required to keep functioning was produced without question, the offered dead serving as the currency.
It was a grotesque, obscene, and remarkably efficient economy, one I couldn’t help but find beautiful in its simplicity.
Of course, I was not surprised by the sight before me. After all, I knew exactly what I was looking at and knew very well what it was capable of becoming.
I let out a slow breath, feeling satisfaction coil in my chest .
“Well,” I murmured softly beneath my helmet, voice warm. “It grew quite a bit.”
During my first visit to Nar Shaddaa—around the same time I had taken over the Cult of the Screaming Blade—I had stumbled upon an isolated tribe of Ongree while handling some tedious Imperial business that, at the time, had felt important and, in hindsight, was not.
The Ongree lived tucked away in a forgotten pocket of the moon-city, existing in isolation from the events outside. They were not truly primitive—Nar Shaddaa was too advanced for that even at its lowest—but they were… insular and ritualistic, venerating a machine that had been gifted to them long ago by Revan: a fragment of a greater design, something they did not understand and were never meant to.
They did not know the nature of the gift. They did not know the principles behind its function. They did not even know why it answered.
They only knew one truth: Feed it, and it rewards you.
Their dead were exchanged for necessities, their corpses becoming currency and their grief becoming opportunity. The Ongree treated it like a god, one that demanded sacrifice, but rewarded them tenfold.
At the time, I had been tasked with investigating the secret they guarded, and—being the dutiful, ambitious Sith I was—I had done what any loyal servant of the Empire would do.
I took a small component from the larger device and handed it over to the Imperial Reclamation Service for study, all while keeping quiet about the machine itself for my own benefit.
Predictably, the Empire’s bureaucrats had drooled over it, argued over it and then promptly lost it, as it was destroyed by the Republic’s Havoc Squad, like so many promising Imperial projects were.
But the main body? That, I had kept secret.
After all, I had recognized how valuable my discovery was and how wasteful it would be to simply give it to the Empire. As such, I did what I always did when I saw something valuable.
I claimed it for myself.
Later, when I returned to Nar Shaddaa, I folded the Ongree into my cult—giving them protection, purpose, and camouflage. The Cult of the Screaming Blade gained a caste of “flesh priests” (though they were not called so during my time) and in return I gained what they guarded.
From then on, the Cult of the Screaming Blade and the Ongree worked together patiently, feeding the machine in my name. Not as a desperate tribe anymore, but as an organized system: the dead went in and miracles came out.
In the end, I had not lived long enough to see it reach maturity.
But now…
I stepped closer.
The glow reflected in my helmet, painting the skull-mask in pulsing crimson. The Heart’s rhythm seemed to answer my presence, the Force presence shifting subtly—as if the machine recognized me, even after all this time.
And I allowed myself a smile.
Because I was looking at the Infinite Engine— a part of a Rakatan device capable of birthing entire fleets from nothing—one once used by Revan to wage (and win) a war against the entire Republic.
And the best part?
It was mine.
***
It’s a rather short chapter, but I am currently having quite a busy time at work and didn’t really want to break my upload schedule so soon. It probably could have been a part of the previous chapter (and initially, it was supposed to be one), but…oh, well.
In any case, here you go.