nagpurpolice SW Gray Tale 130: The Secrets of The Temple
SW Gray Tale 130: The Secrets of The Temple
I sat in meditation for what felt like an hour but might have been less. Hard to keep time in a place with no windows, no sounds except dripping water and the occasional distant roar from above that reminded me the terentateks hadn't forgotten about me.
When I opened my eyes, the temple felt exactly the same. But I felt better. Not great—my reserves were still shallow—but functional. Like running on a phone battery at fifteen percent instead of three.
"Alright," I said, getting to my feet and stretching. My ribs held. Good. "Let's see what's down here."
Arachnae's photoreceptor flickered to life, casting a cone of pale white across the ancient stone. She'd been sitting quietly during my healing and her repairs, running self-diagnostics and clicking softly to herself. Now she rotated her sensor array toward the single corroded doorway at the far end of the shaft bottom.
"Yeah, that's our only option unless you've learned to fly."
Beep.
"Fair point. You did fall with style."
Arachnae suddenly raised her front two legs toward me.
I blinked at her. "Uh... you want a hug?"
Boop beep.
"The hell does that even mean?"
She wiggled her legs more insistently.
"...You want uppies."
Her photoreceptor brightened.
I stared at her for a second. Then at the corridor ahead. Then back at her.
"You are a spider droid. God-ahem-I mean, I literally designed you for walking."
Beep boop.
"Manipulative little shit."
I crouched and grabbed her chassis, lifting her against my side with a grunt. Gods, she was heavier than she looked.
"Alright, girl," I said as we started toward the doorway. "You're walking after this. My back can't take carrying you without the armor."
She beeped indignantly and extended her legs with a mechanical whir, rising in my grip to her full height. Which was about face-level on me. Her single photoreceptor swiveled up to glare accusingly.
"Don't give me that look. You weigh like twenty kilos. I'm twelve."
More beeping. Distinctly sarcastic beeping.
"I am not scrawny. My body is, in fact, very developed for my age."
Boop beep boop.
I narrowed my eyes.
"Hey. No jokes about my dick."
Beep.
"And didn't you say you deleted that shower recording!?"
Arachnae made a noise suspiciously close to a mechanical snort, then wriggled free from my grip and dropped to the ground with a metallic clack. She immediately skittered ahead into the corridor, her newly functional flashlight snapping on and cutting a clean white beam through the darkness.
"That's incredibly violating, by the way," I called after her.
Boop.
"You are absolutely getting memory-wiped someday."
I ignited the lightsaber and followed after her, the crimson glow painting everything in bloody shadows.
---
The corridor beyond was narrow enough that my shoulders nearly brushed both walls. The architecture shifted as we moved deeper. Older, somehow, despite being below. Stone blocks fit together with precision that spoke of Sith engineering at its peak, before their Empire rotted from the inside out. Geometric patterns covered every surface—angular spirals, interlocking triangles, symbols that made my skin prickle when I looked at them too long.
"Cheerful décor," I muttered.
Arachnae beeped agreement. Her legs clicked softly on the stone, keeping pace beside me. Too heavy to carry without the exo-suit, so she walked. Which meant I got to listen to her complain about the terrain every time she hit a crack.
The corridor branched after fifty meters. Left: collapsed, rubble floor to ceiling. Right: mostly intact, except for a chasm that had opened in the middle of the floor—jagged gap, maybe three meters wide, no visible bottom. My lightsaber glow just vanished into it.
"Cool. Love that for us."
I backed up, took a running start, and Force-leaped across. Arachnae extended her grappling line, caught my boot mid-arc, and I dragged her over while she beeped her displeasure the entire way.
"You have legs. Use them next time."
Beep beep beep.
"I don't care if you're 'not rated for jumping.' Neither am I. We all make sacrifices."
---
The corridor opened into a wider antechamber, and here I found the first signs of previous visitors.
Bones.
Scattered across the floor, half-buried in dust.
At least five skeletons in corroded armor I didn't recognize. Heavy angular plates layered over thick undersuits that had long since rotted away. The designs looked archaic even by Old Republic standards. Broad chest pieces. Oversized shoulder guards. The kind of armor built by people who thought subtlety was for cowards and cowards deserved to die.
Around them sat the remains of an expedition.
Collapsed tool cases. Dead power cells. Shattered datapads that looked like someone had smashed old radios with a hammer. Time hadn't been kind to any of it.
I crouched beside the nearest skeleton carefully, keeping my hands to myself for once.
No touching the cursed archaeology.
The last time I'd done a full psychometry dive on ancient Sith junk, I'd spent three days half-comatose with blood leaking out of my nose while my brain tried to reenact someone else's death in high definition.
Apparently touching objects soaked in centuries of trauma was "bad for neurological health." Jedi training manuals really buried the important stuff.
Instead, I let my senses skim the surface.
Just enough to feel the age.
Old. Very old. A dull pressure at the edge of perception, like standing near deep water at night. No sharp emotional residue. No screaming ghosts trying to hijack my nervous system. Good.
I studied the skeleton itself.
Humanoid. Probably human... maybe near-human. Hard to tell when time had stripped everything down to yellowed bone and cracked armor. One of the others looked bulkier through the ribcage. Different species, maybe. The skull had short horn nubs over the brow ridge.
Zabrak?
Couldn't tell for sure.
Arachnae skittered between the bodies, flashlight sweeping slowly across the chamber.
Boop... beep?
"Yeah, I know. Creepy."
What bothered me wasn't the skeletons themselves. Ancient ruins were full of bones. Occupational hazard of living in a galaxy where everyone kept building murder temples.
It was the lack of answers.
No collapsed ceiling. No obvious blast marks. No predator remains. No weapons scattered around like they'd died fighting something.
Just bodies.
Like they had all... stopped.
I leaned closer to one skeleton, eyeing the corroded chest plate.
"No visible damage," I muttered. "Either whatever killed them left no marks or time erased them."
Arachnae rolled over to a nearby tool case and poked it experimentally with one manipulator arm.
The entire thing collapsed into reddish-brown flakes.
Beeeeeeep.
"Yeah, that's about the structural integrity I expected."
I glanced back at the nearest skeleton.
Then, against my better judgment, reached out carefully and touched the forearm bone.
The entire arm crumbled instantly.
Bone disintegrated into pale dust that poured across the floor and over my glove.
I stared at it for a second.
"...Well. What exactly was I expecting from centuries-old skeletons?"
"Yeah, everything's going to be like that. Let's see what survived."
Beep.
---
I spent the next twenty minutes sorting through the wreckage with technopathy—feeling for structural integrity, separating intact components from powder. Most of it was useless. But I found a handful of durasteel fasteners thick enough to have survived the centuries, some copper wiring in a sealed container, and a few structural components that might be compatible with my tools.
Not much. But in a Sith temple with no supply drops, beggars can't be choosers. Who knows, I might encounter a super-weapon that needs just this to repair?
A man can dream....
The antechamber fed into a long corridor that was clearly designed to impress. Walls rose higher, ceiling lost in shadow. And every inch of stone was covered in text.
Floor to ceiling. Dense, layered. Some sections carved with obvious care, others scratched hastily—like someone was racing to get words down before they forgot them entirely.
Galactic Basic. Or close enough. The alphabet was recognizable but the grammar was archaic, peppered with Sith-specific glyphs that didn't translate. Like trying to read Middle English after a concussion.
I walked slowly, lightsaber held high, while Arachnae lit the lower walls with her headlamp. Occasionally she'd stop, beep urgently, and point her manipulator at something she found interesting.
Most of the time it was just political text. Dense, boring accounts of Sith power struggles. But once, she pointed to a carved relief showing two robed figures locked in a saber duel while a third watched from a throne above.
BEEP beep beep!
"Yes, very dramatic. Sith Jerry Springer."
She beeped again, insistently, tapping the panel.
"You want me to record it? Fine."
After scanning the murals with her eyes, Arachnae seemed satisfied, her photoreceptor brightening.
Isn't she a curious one.
I kept reading as I walked. The inscriptions told a fragmented story: a Sith Lord named Pharshol built this temple. A rival named Vacuus tried to usurp him. Something about a cult called the "Dark Path." An apprentice named Anyarah who betrayed her master. Everyone killed everyone. The temple was abandoned.
One phrase kept recurring near the end of the narrative—"the dark consuming its own." Whether metaphorical or literal, I couldn't tell. The surrounding glyphs were Sith-specific, and the semantic echo was too vague.
"Sith politics," I muttered, stepping over a crack. "Everyone stabs everyone and the last one standing gets a damp jungle planet as a participation trophy."
---
The next chamber was tucked off the main corridor behind a half-collapsed archway. I had to Force-shove a block of masonry to squeeze through.
A shrine.
The ceiling had partially collapsed here, leaving rubble scattered across the floor. In the center stood a stone altar, cracked but intact, with a relief carved into its front face.
I approached slowly, lightsaber raised.
The carving depicted a robed figure surrounded by kneeling supplicants. But the imagery was wrong. The kneeling figures were withering—skin pulling tight over bones, mouths open in silent screams. Whatever was being drawn out of them flowed upward into the central figure in carved lines that looked disturbingly like veins.
A name at the base of the altar read ERGAST. Below that, a title fragment: "Architect of... [crumbled away]."
Below it, smaller text. I leaned closer, squinting.
"Through the living and the dead, vitality flows to those with the will to claim it."
Arachnae climbed onto the altar, her light illuminating the full carving.
And I couldn't look away from the mural.
Because the technique shown here—draining life force from victims—was eerily similar to what had had happened with Reva. Not exactly the same thing, but the result had been same. Even worst in the sense that not even her husk was left.
Am I just reinventing ancient Sith methods without realizing it...
Or creating even something even worse?
My mine attempt has stolen not just her vitality but even her living force, memories, psyche and midichloreans...Everything that she was, now was left inside me.
The only fortune or misfortune was that the Fragment of the Mother was used up in it...
BEEP beep beep beep!
"What do you mean, 'that looks useful'? It's a mural about draining people's life force."
Beep.
"No, I am not going to 'try it on the terentateks.' What is wrong with you?"
She beeped defensively.
"...Record it. We will study it later"
Better to have it and not use it than need it and not have it. And who knows—maybe I can use this on Palpatine one day. See how the old bastard likes getting his life force slurped out.
--
Behind the altar, a small alcove hidden by the relief carving. Inside: a corroded metal box. The seal crumbled at my touch. Three crystals sat inside on a bed of ancient padding—raw, uncut, thumbnail-sized. Each one radiated dark side energy dense enough that my Hyper Perception recoiled the moment I focused on them.
Not kyber. Different internal structure. More chaotic, more coiled. Like the difference between a clean sine wave and a sawtooth pattern.
I didn't know what they were. Just that they were potent, old, and saturated with enough dark side energy to make my teeth itch.
"Might be useful. Might be cursed."
Beep.
"Probably both."
I wrapped them in scrap cloth and tucked them deep into my pack.
Past the shrine, the corridor continued until it ended at what had once been a sealed stone door. Time had cracked the frame and killed whatever mechanism originally moved it. I wedged my fingers into the gap and pulled until stone scraped against stone with a long, grinding groan.
The chamber beyond looked almost monastic.
A single stone bench sat against the far wall, and for a second I thought the room was empty. Then Arachnae's flashlight swept across the walls and the inscriptions became visible.
Lines and lines of cramped writing had been scratched directly into the stone with something sharp. Some sections were neat. Others looked rushed, jagged, uneven, like the writer's hand had started failing near the end. Stone tablets littered the corner of the room beside what might once have been shelves.
I crouched beside the nearest one carefully.
The surface was rough with mineral buildup and age, but enough remained legible for fragments to survive.
"...the dark consumes its vessel as fire consumes fuel. To pursue it without limit is to ensure only..."
"...balance is not weakness but the recognition that passion without..."
"...the Sith devour themselves because they cannot conceive of..."
I read through several more sections while Arachnae wandered the room, her light drifting over the walls.
Dense philosophy. The kind written by someone with too much time, too much intelligence, and absolutely nobody left willing to listen to them. The core idea showed up again and again though: the Sith destroyed themselves chasing power without restraint, and real mastery required some form of balance instead of endless escalation.
Honestly? For Sith philosophy, it was surprisingly sane.
Near the edge of the last intact tablet, a name had been carved in smaller lettering.
KELETH UR.
I found what looked like a bound stack of thinner slate pages near the bench. The moment I tried lifting it, the ancient binding gave out and the whole thing collapsed apart in my hands. Several pages cracked when they hit the floor.
"...Well, shit."
I managed to salvage three mostly intact slates before the rest crumbled into useless fragments.
A Sith arguing for moderation. Yeah, that definitely got him murdered.
Once I looked properly, the room stopped feeling like a meditation chamber and started feeling like a prison cell. There was no opening mechanism on the inside of the door. No supplies. No storage. Just walls covered in philosophy scratched into stone by someone who'd clearly run out of anything else to do long before they died.
"Executed for suggesting moderation," I muttered while packing the surviving slates into my bag. "Very on-brand for Sith."
The stone carried a faint Force resonance when I touched it. Subtle, but still there. Maybe from Keleth himself. Maybe from years spent in this place soaking in dark side energy. Either way, it felt worth keeping.
Beyond the chamber, the corridor descended into a narrow staircase that had partially collapsed into open darkness. Half the steps were missing, forcing me to jump the gap with the Force before hauling Arachnae across with her grappling line while she beeped complaints the entire time.
Beep beep boop BEEP.
"You literally have six legs. Stop acting like I'm dragging you through a war zone."
Beep beep BEEP beep.
"Yeah, well, if you lost a few pounds maybe I wouldn't have to—"
BEEP.
"—okay, that was uncalled for."
[TBD]
[Image]
Resources:Nice Map of SWTOR Era Dromund Kaas I found
A/N: Sorry guys, couldn't updated on Friday. had been a bit too busy past few days due to master's thesis workload, and had caught heatwave too (45 degree temp here).
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