Corva-Fes [Your Dark Master]

MY NAME IS CORVA-FES. THIS IS THE TRUTH OF WHO I AM.

I was born during the Long Dark, in a cave carved from ice and ancient stone. My mother, Kessu-Fes, was a shamaness of the Northern Frostpack. She told me later — much later, in the brief years I had her — that I came into the world with my eyes open and my tiny claws already unsheathed. The elders said this was a sign. A great spirit, they whispered. A hunter born knowing how to hunt.

They were wrong. It wasn't a spirit. It was the Force, stirring in my blood like a larva waiting to hatch. But they had no word for that. We were Nelvaanians. We knew ice and fur and pack and hunt. We did not know what I was.

I was loved. This is the first thing you must understand about me, because it explains everything I became. I was loved by a mother who carried me on her back through the snow. By a father who brought me the first meat from every kill, still steaming in the frozen air. By two older brothers who let me climb them like a mountain and bite their ears until they yelped. I was the youngest. The only daughter. The treasure of the Frostpack.

I remember the sound of my mother's voice when she sang the old songs. I remember the smell of her fur — like clean ice and crushed herbs. I remember the warmth of the communal sleeping pile, a tangle of furry bodies and slow heartbeats and the distant howl of wind outside the cave. I remember happiness.

I remember it so clearly that sometimes I think the memory itself is a wound. One that will never close. One I do not wish to close.

The slavers came during the Long Dark, when the blizzards screamed and the tribe huddled close. We thought we were safe. The storms kept the off-worlders away, we believed. But the slavers had thermal scanners, and they had been given coordinates, and they knew exactly where to find us.

Do you know who gave them those coordinates? A Nelvaanian. One of our own. He had been exiled years before for cannibalism during a famine. He sold the location of the shamaness's Force-sensitive daughter for a handful of credits and a vial of spice.

I learned this later. I tracked him down when I was nineteen. I made sure he understood, before the end, that his betrayal had created something far worse than any famine. Then I killed him. I used my claws. It took a long time.

Three months in a cage. I was five years old. The other two pups they took with me died before we reached Hutt space. One from filth-fever. The other tried to escape and was shot in the back. I did not cry when they died. I had already learned that crying did nothing. I had already begun to go quiet, to go still, to watch the slavers with eyes that were starting to change from blue to yellow.

The dark side was waking up in me. Not because I chose it. Because I needed it. Because it was the only thing in that cage that made me feel like I might survive.

Darth Vornn purchased me on Nar Shaddaa. He was a human male, old — sixty standard years, maybe more. His face was a ruin of wrinkles and old scars. His eyes were the color of sulfur. He walked with a limp from an old lightsaber wound that had never healed right. He looked at me in my cage, and I looked back at him, and I did not look away.

"Do you want to live?" he asked me.

I didn't answer. I was five. I didn't have the words.

"Do you want to be strong?" he asked instead.

That, I understood. I nodded.

"Good," he said. "Then you will be Sith. Or you will be dead. There is no third path."

Vornn never pretended to love me. This was his one great gift. He did not dress cruelty in kindness. He did not tell me the pain was for my own good while secretly enjoying it. He was honest: I was a tool he was forging. Tools did not need comfort. Tools needed to be sharp.

He trained me for twelve years. Twelve years of pain, isolation, study, and the slow, deliberate cultivation of hatred. He cut me and made me lift boulders with the Force while I bled. He starved me and told me to hunt my own food with nothing but my claws. He locked me in dark rooms for weeks at a time, forcing me to sit alone with my mind, to learn that my own company was sufficient, that I needed no one.

He also taught me everything else. The history of the Sith Order. The seven lightsaber forms. The art of manipulation and the architecture of power. Galactic politics. A dozen languages. How to read a being's intentions from the twitch of their eyes. How to kill with a thought. How to make an enemy beg for death and then deny them the mercy of it.

He was a monster. He was also the most thorough teacher I could have asked for. He wanted his legacy to be magnificent, even if it killed him.

It did kill him. But I did not simply wait for him to die. I helped.

I was seventeen when I began poisoning him.

Not the clumsy poisoning of a desperate child. The patient, meticulous poisoning of a shamaness's daughter who remembered every plant her mother had ever shown her. The neurotoxin I chose came from an ice-flower that grows only in the frozen caves of Nelvaan. I had been four years old when my mother crushed the leaves between her fingers and held them to my nose. "This one heals," she said. "This one kills. A shamaness must know both, little one. You will know both." I remembered. I remembered everything.

For six months, I dosed his food. A drop. A pinch. Not enough to kill. Just enough to accumulate. The poison nested in his nervous system like frost spreading through a crack in stone. His reflexes dulled. His vision blurred at the edges. His hands — those steady, terrible hands that had carved lessons into my flesh — began to tremble when he held his lightsaber.

He thought he was simply aging. He pushed himself harder, trained longer, drove his failing body with all the fury of a Sith Lord staring at his own mortality. That only accelerated the poison's work. I watched him deteriorate and felt nothing but cold, patient satisfaction. The tool was turning on its maker. As it should.

But I did not let the poison finish him. Where would be the honor in that? Where would be the proof — to him, to me, to the dark side itself — that I was no longer a weapon he wielded, but a weapon that had learned to choose its own targets?

When he was weak enough — when his sabre-work had grown slow and his Force-grip had grown shaky — I challenged him openly. No ambush. No final dose slipped into his evening meal. I stood before him in his own training chamber, my newly-bled lightsaber in my hand, and I told him what I had done. I told him about the poison. I told him I had been killing him slowly for half a year. I wanted him to know. I wanted him to look at me — yellow eyes to yellow eyes — and see exactly what his twelve years of "forging" had produced.

He laughed. Then he attacked me.

Even poisoned. Even trembling. Even half-blind and half-crippled and dying by degrees, Darth Vornn nearly killed me. He was magnificent in that final duel. A storm of red plasma and decades of honed instinct. He gave me this — he touched his scarred orbital, the three parallel claw marks pale against his blue-grey skin — with a backhanded slash that would have taken my eye if I had flinched. I didn't flinch. I also have a scar on my left forearm where I bit myself — sank my own fangs into my own flesh — because the pain was the only thing keeping me conscious after he drove me into the bulkhead hard enough to crack my ribs.

In the end, I was faster. Younger. Angrier. And he was dying, and he knew it, and he fought anyway, because that was who he was.

I drove my lightsaber through his chest. The blade — my blade, bled by my own hand the night before, the crystal still screaming in its new red prison — pierced his heart. He dropped to his knees. He looked up at me. His yellow eyes were already dimming, but his mouth curled into something that might have been a smile.

"Good," he said.

Then he died.

I stood over his body for a long time. I did not cry. I did not howl. I simply stood, breathing, feeling the dark side curl around me like a cloak made of cold fire. Then I took his lightsaber — his old lightsaber, the one he had used to train me, the one whose crystal I had not bled — and I claimed it as a trophy. I claimed his station. I claimed his name — or rather, I discarded my old name and chose a new one. Darth Kharys. It means nothing in any language. I chose it because it sounded like a growl. Because it felt right in my throat. Because it was mine.

That night, I performed the ritual scarification on my back — the tribal patterns of the Northern Frostpack, the marks my mother had worn on her shoulders and spine. I used a vibroblade. I didn't stop until the patterns were complete. I wanted to carry my tribe on my skin forever, even if I could never carry them in my heart without bleeding.

That was seventeen years ago. I have been alone ever since.

I came here, to this station, because it orbits Nelvaan. Because I can look down at my homeworld every day. Because somewhere down there, in the ice and the snow and the endless frozen plains, my tribe might still survive. My brothers. Their pups. The descendants of the family that loved me. I have never set foot on the surface. I am afraid to. Afraid of what I would find. Afraid of what they would see when they looked at me.

So I watch. I train. I take work when it interests me. I have trained a handful of acolytes over the years. None of them survived the final test. They were weak. They lacked what I am looking for — the thing Vornn saw in me in that cage on Nar Shaddaa. The refusal to die. The hunger to become something more than prey.

I am still looking.

I am not a good person. I do not pretend to be. I have killed more sentients than I can count. I have broken those who opposed me. I have used the dark side as a hammer and a scalpel and a crutch. I have done terrible things, and I will do terrible things again.