She left its doors open behind her. Perfumed heat drifted into the corridor, carrying the mingled scents of incense, sweat and freshly spilled blood. Somewhere within, someone laughed too loudly before dissolving into breathless sobs. Amirex paid it no heed. Whatever pleasures continued in her absence had already ceased to interest her.
Her beautiful crimson skin gleamed beneath the dim amber lights. Sweat traced the delicate ridges of her cheeks and gathered in the hollow of her throat, while blood, some of it hers, most of it not, streaked her lips and lay in drying smears across her torso. She looked less like a warrior than some exquisite idol lifted from an ancient shrine: short, slender and almost doll-like in the perfection of her proportions. Nothing about her suggested the strength required to break bone or the appetite necessary to enjoy doing so.
A servant waited nearby with her robe held deferentially between outstretched hands. Amirex snatched it without slowing, drawing the thin black silk around herself as she hurried through the halls. The fabric clung damply to her body and did little to conceal it, but modesty was a concern for creatures ashamed of their flesh. She had never suffered from that particular defect.
She had been summoned.
That knowledge drove every lingering indulgence from her thoughts. The corridors seemed to lengthen before her as she passed beneath arches of black stone and through chambers lit by the dull glow of alchemical vessels. Things floated within them: malformed limbs, unfinished faces and pale organs twitching in luminous fluid. One of the faces stirred as she passed, its lidless eyes following its creator with helpless adoration.
Amirex smiled at it.
“Later,” she promised.
The hololithic chamber lay at the heart of her sanctum. Its doors opened before her, admitting her into a cavernous room of polished obsidian. There were no attendants here, no lamps and no living specimens. Only the cold blue glow of the projector disturbed the darkness.
He was already waiting.
His vast image towered over the chamber, magnified until his head nearly brushed its vaulted ceiling. Even rendered in wavering light, his presence overwhelmed the room. He possessed the shape of a Sith Pureblood, yet there was something disquietingly alien in the flawless symmetry of his features, something too ancient and too complete to belong to mortal flesh. The months of white-hot fury had passed. The slaughter of the Ninth Scar no longer burned openly in his eyes. He appeared calm now, composed and terrible, his anger compressed into something infinitely colder.
Amirex stopped at the foot of the projection.
For all her private vanities, she felt very small beneath him.
She sank gracefully to both knees, arranging the silk around herself as she bowed until her brow almost touched the floor. A dark droplet fell from her hair and burst against the polished stone.
“My husband.”
His gaze settled upon her. Distance and machinery ought to have diminished its weight, yet she felt it pressing against her skin as surely as a lover’s hand, or an executioner’s blade. Awe tightened pleasantly in her chest. She had cut open living creatures merely to understand what terror did to their hearts, but before him she understood the sensation without need of instruments.
“How does the project proceed?”
His voice filled the chamber. It was deep without effort, seductive without warmth, each syllable carrying the quiet certainty of something accustomed to obedience.
Amirex lifted her head. “It is a small and trifling matter, my husband. The final refinements are already under way. It will be completed soon.”
“How soon?”
There was no accusation in the question. That made it infinitely more dangerous.
“Days, my husband. Mere days.” A hint of pride entered her voice, though she was careful not to let it become presumption.
The Patron regarded her in silence. His expression revealed nothing, but Amirex felt her pulse quicken beneath his scrutiny.
At last, he spoke.
“Good.”
The single word warmed her more deeply than anything she had left behind in the other chamber.
“You will finish this project,” he continued, “and then you will sweep aside my enemies. I will not be distracted by lesser matters. Not now, when I am drawing ever closer to perfection.”
Amirex bowed again, lower than before.
“I will not fail you, my husband.”
She allowed herself a breath before continuing.
“Ceryndra was crude. Brutish. She mistook force for mastery and slaughter for art.” Her voice remained soft and reverent, but pleasure curled beneath the words. “I am not Ceryndra.”
For the briefest instant, the Patron changed.
Anger flashed across his godlike features, sudden and incandescent. The air itself seemed to recoil from it. Amirex froze with her head bowed, every instinct warning her that she had pressed too hard against a wound not yet healed. She could almost imagine those enormous translucent hands reaching through the projection, closing around her delicate throat and squeezing until even her carefully fashioned perfection broke.
The thought sent a small, shameful thrill through her.
Then the moment passed.
The fury vanished behind that strange, alien smirk of his, a curve of the lips that suggested amusement without revealing what he found amusing. When he spoke again, his voice was perfectly calm.
“Do not fail me.”
The holoprojector went dark.
Silence rushed into the chamber. One moment Amirex knelt beneath the image of a living god; the next she was alone, surrounded by cold stone and the faint odour of blood drying upon her skin.
She remained where she was for several seconds, head lowered in the darkness. Then, slowly, her lips curved into a smile.
Ceryndra had been given armies to command and worlds to burn. She had battered herself against their husband’s enemies until at last they broke her. There had been little imagination in it and even less beauty.
Amirex would show them something finer.
She rose and drew the thin robe more closely around herself. Beyond the sealed doors waited her laboratories, her unfinished creations and the first trembling subjects of the project her husband had now entrusted to her. Soon there would be others. Sith and soldiers, lovers and liars, the proud and the innocent, all of them convinced that their desires belonged to them.
At last, she had been permitted to play.
And she would have so many lovely new toys.