A Tale from the Dark Side

George Strayton A Tale from the Dark Side

4000 лет до Явинской Битвы

Нумерация в серии «Звездные войны» по Вукипедии http://ru.starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Список_литературы_в_хронологическом_порядке

The black obelisk seemed to absorb even the meager illumination shed by Krayiss Two's twin moons. A hooded figure took slow, perfectly measured steps toward t he massive structure, keeping her hands hidden within the folds of her oversized robe.

"Taka zeech ma toka duuwaj," she muttered for the fourth time, precisely six heartbeats after her third intonation. Sith rites had to be followed with exacting care, for to abandon even one element of the prescribed procedure could spell doom for the uninitiated. And Vara Nreem did not wish to tempt the dark side by offering it an opening to exploit.

She took two more strides toward the obelisk, daring for a moment to glance at the perfect symmetry of its smooth face and the precise lines that marked its edges. Such wicked beauty.

"Taka zeech ma toka duuwaj," she chanted for the fifth time - or was it the fourth time? Her heart suddenly pumped, further distracting her. Calm down.

She measured the distance to the obelisk with her eye. About a dozen meters - that had to make this the fifth time.

Having deduced the number of recitations, she held still and quiet for a moment, waiting to see if her stumble was enough to bring down the wrath of the dark side.

When nothing happened, she took the last two steps toward the Sith structure and issued the chant one final time. The obelisk continued to remain silent before her, as if ignoring her insignificant presence.

Entering the last section of the rite, she eased herself to her knees and pulled back the hood of her robe, allowing her light brown hair to spill across her shoulders and down her back. She clenched her hands into fists and placed them against her forehead, the base of her palms pressed together.

She remained in that position for what she guessed to be just over an hour when something happened - something she sensed from both within and without.

A low rumble issued from deep within the hard ground, growing from a bare whisper to a deafening cacophony over the space of a dozen heartbeats. The land beneath her quivered, and then shook. Though her muscles ached from sitting for so long, she managed to maintain the position even as the ground tried to knock her down.

She glanced toward the obelisk, and though her vision jumped with each tremor, she thought she saw the massive stone moving, sliding upward, its base growing ever wider. The ground groaned and then cracked in a series of sharp fracturings. Violent quakes erupted at the same time, the most powerful heave tossing Vara several meters to her right. She crashed on her side, and thought she felt a bone in her shoulder crack, but she ignored the pain and forced her head up so that she could watch the spectacle unfolding before her.

The obelisk itself had become nothing more than a spire atop a monstrous structure of angled walls and pyramidal towers. Vara recognized it from the ancient Sith writings as a library-temple, a place where sorcerers of pure Sith blood would come to meditate and to set down the knowledge they had gained from their experiments. A shiver gripped her body for a moment as she realized that she was standing at the foot of such a powerful place, an edifice that had witnessed the evolution of Sith techniques for accessing great dark side energies over dozens of millennia. How long had it been buried, its halls lifeless?

The ground quieted, and the silence of Krayiss Two's night cycle fell upon the land once more. Vara staggered to her feel, her right arm limp from the shoulder down, and stood before the Sith structure, staring at its beauty and sensing the black power that radiated from its every centimeter. She suddenly wondered whether she was hallucinating, but she dismissed the stray thought immediately. She could never have imagined what now lay before her. and her mind could therefore not have summoned it from the depths of her consciousness to fool her.

No. the temple was real. She could feel its imposing presence leering at her, measuring her. The chill of dark side power caressed her, and she knew that the spirits trapped inside the temple were deciding her worth.

She realized then that she had to prove herself to them, to demonstrate that she had the right to access the Sith powers lying in wait.

She stepped forward, and the gentle spirits' caress broke into a frenzy of energy motes, as if shocked by the unexpected move. Barely before she had time to notice the sudden change, the energy re-coalesced, wrapping itself about her once more.