Infinite Sith Empire

That Sith civilisation begun over one hundred thousand years before the Battle of Yavin was a given, though known only to a few - it was information sequestered in the depths of the so-called Dark Holocron, and it took a millennium for a Jedi Master, arguably the first Jedi Grandmaster, to wrestle this simple fact from the maze of lies therein.

Old logic, based on erroneous knowledge of history, was that the Sith Empire was founded from the First Great Schism. This was not the case, and that much is apparent from all with a passing knowledge of Sith history. This threw into the air a great many Sith references that pre-dated the foundation of the Ancient Sith Empire by Ajunta Pall, Darth Andeddu, Tulak Hord, Xoxaan, Remulus Deypa and Sorzus Syn. Similarly, the details of which worlds that Adas and his Empire discovered with their Force based hyperdrives beyond the reaches of the Stygian Caldera, throws more such worlds into stark contrast - those being known by Adas being Arbra, Malachor, Arkania and Tund - and those not.

Then there is the fact that, in 100,000 BBY, the Celestials created their constructs. Centerpoint, the Maw, the Kathol Rift, the Transistory Mists, the Cron Cluster, the Cosmic Turbine, the Valtaullu Rift, the Stygian Caldera, and a long list of other impossible events.

These worlds paint a picture, of an Empire which spanned the galaxy, which ruled before the Celestials descended and crushed them. So too do the species, and the Sith spirits who can only be connected to them.

### **Rise**

To understand the seminal efforts of the first Sith principality, that prehistoric domain known to legend as the Infinite Empire, one must first understand the loathsome entities of deific power that forged and ruled that realm. The origins of the Dark Pantheon lie, of course, in the Sith people, who evolved from a charcoal-skinned species of arboreal simians on the lush world of Korriban and, by 130,000 years Before the Battle of Yavin, had established a primitive, tribal civilisation rich with Forceful arcana. Through malfeasant rite and the unabating consumption of life energy did the greatest of primordial Sith sorcerers achieve twisted apotheosis, shedding mortality to become apocalyptic deities eternally hungering for destruction. Yet whence did their mastery of the dark side, honed and systematised into the "Sith magic" that allowed such ascension, come? Much like the spirit ichor channelled by Dathomirian witches, made possible by the weakened fabric of reality that allegedly allowed communion with the Celestials' power, so might Sith wizardry, at least in those ancient days, be understood to be not necessarily a more pure or true expression of the dark side as Ood Bnar conceived, but rather a channelling of the spectral essence of the first and greatest of the immortal gods of the Sith.

### **Darth Nemesis**

First revered as the *Sith'ari* Typhojem, the Left-Handed God, and later known to the Rakata, and to history, as the Darth Nemesis, the Overlord of the Dark Pantheon predated the establishment of a technological civilisation on Korriban. It is believed that Typhojem was of an altogether greater order of being than the likes of Bilious Torment, Sakkra-kla or even Abeloth. While theologians of Attahox had identified Typhojem as a fallen Celestial, presumed more ancient than even the Sith species, this interpretation is likely a result of a misunderstanding of the term Celestial. Instead, fragmentary transcriptions of the Taurannik Codex suggest Typhojem arose from the dark side of the Force itself as an incarnation of pure destruction and entropy. Perhaps much like Sel-Makor, born of the bloodshed between Voss and Gormak millennia later, this ruinous power coalesced into being out of the miasma of dark side energy unwittingly fashioned through countless centuries of barbaric warfare between disparate Sith tribes. As Ood Bnar gleaned from the Dark Holocron, the Sith simultaneously empowered and drew strength from this dark will, which divested much of its native power to nourish the Sith's recondite knowledge. The result was Korriban wilting away to a dark husk of reddish sands, honeycombed with temples dedicated to the first aggrandised mortals that founded the cacodaemoniacal collective of the Pantheon, and the tombs of those sorcerers who failed in their efforts to realise such divine might.

Spreading from their homeworld as a scourge, the Sith subjugated many worlds and races, reaching their first apex with an Empire that dominated the galaxy by 100,000 BBY - the first instance of the Infinite Empire. Relying on sleeper ships and their own brand of hypergate technology, devices born of the prodigious intellect of the fledgling Sith pantheon, the Infinite Empire grew slowly to eclipse all lesser spacefaring civilisations. At this time occurred the first instance of significant phenotypic change due to natural genetic drift, alchemical modification and interbreeding with other species, with increasingly lighter, crimson tones prevailing among Sith who remained on Korriban, and native tridactylism giving way to four or five digits in select populations (such as the Sek and Rath clans). Accompanying this evolution was the broadening in definition of 'Sith' to apply to those who adhered to the race's ideology and bizarrely selfless devotion to evil rather than the species alone. Among these were Zhell and Taung; the former had adopted Sith culture upon the Infinite Empire ensnaring Coruscant, and triumphed against their ancient Taung enemies only through the osmosis of dark teachings through the Battalions. Yet the Sith had repurposed the Taung as vassals also, dominating two peoples through the manipulation of a single war's outcome, bringing the newfound Warriors of Shadow to their conquest of Roon. Yet most powerful and steadfast of the Sith's servitor races were the Columi and Sharu, whose corruption magnified their pride and gave rise to the shared tradition of pyramid building.

### **Looking elsewhere**

The Infinite Sith Empire had reached the point whereby it was turning the galaxy it wanted into a playground. This was, inevitably, deeply boring for these deities, and they set upon the conquest of other galaxies. This saw the Infinite Sith encounter a ripple of discontent within their pantheon; who should lead such an endeavour? And, how could such a thing be managed? While it would be relatively painless to invade the satellite galaxies, that was not the challenge the Infinite Sith sought; they wanted more beyond their stellar halo. But the essential issue of Sith cooperation was unavoidable - no one Sith invasion force would retain cohesion and would be a weakened and spent force before they reached the frontier of another galaxy. This did not stop them attacking the problem with atypical Sith ingenuity; and a solution was found. Turning to their almost limitless resources, they forged a force of automatons, that could be easily programmed (or, through the method of sprit transferrence, enteched) to ensure that they would not decimate their own numbers, but sufficiently chaotic to lay the foundations before a smaller elite group of Sith could head to the galaxy to oversee the reorganisation of the galaxy. These destructive and incredible machines were known as the Abominor and the invasion was launched with much fanfare. For such an incredible endeavour, a feat not repeated for nearly another hundred thousand years - an intergalactic invasion - it fell on dead ears with what followed.

### **Abeloth**

Born on the planet Vitae, Abeloth - her birth name having been long forgotten by the annals of history - was an Infinite Sith that was different; she believed in higher powers than even the deities she worshipped. Recognising that, by and large, the Infinite Sith had started as mere mortals and broken beyond that coil, she believed fervently that reality had been shaped before they crawled out of the primordial ooze, and as such it was whomever had done such a thing were the true deities. Considering the Infinite Sith nothing more than false deities, she nonetheless recognised their path as a route to Ascension to Goddess and accrued all the powers that she could on by studying the Taurannik Codex and by worshipping at the feet of the Pantheon. But she did not consider herself a Sith, and thought of herself as so much more than the Sith. It was with this singular goal that she pursued her aim of joining the realm of what she had dubbed Celestials, and while the Infinite Sith were congratulating themselves on the launching of the Abominor, she was instead piercing this realm into that of the Ones, appearing in the Courtyard of their home.

But Abeloth was not content with simply finding the Celestials; she wanted to become one. And so, when she found a family of three, a father, son and daughter, she ingratiated herself with them as a servant, and, eventually, a mother. But a creature of the mortal realm she remained, and Abeloth continued to age in-spite of the fact that her ascension was such that she should not have - but over time she found both the secret and curse of the Celestials; the former, being that, by bathing in the Pool of Knowledge and drinking from the Font of power, she could ascend even further to the position of Celestial, and become the Mother in name, not just in role. The second was that she fell for the oldest issue of the dark side; attachment. And although her attachment to her adopted children drove her rage, it did not stop them from banishing the Vain Goddess from their realm and then, following her tumbling descent, to the source of this Chaos; the Infinite Sith Empire.

### **The True Gods Descend**

The first reign of the Infinite Empire was relatively brief. Its efforts to dominate non-Sith life were merely symptomatic of the Dark Pantheon's own efforts to satiate their eternal hunger, and no doubt the galaxy would have been rendered lifeless if it were not for the Celestials' intervention. The Celestials were originally a starfish-shaped species adhering to a philosophy of order and balance between the light and dark sides, and over the course of their development they passed through a stage of entechment into vast machine bodies before many of their number abandoned the physical realm, and their echinodermic forms, to ascend into the Force itself. By 100,000 BBY, the Celestials were vast, numerous and inscrutable powers contending with the Sith for sway over the lesser developed races of the galaxy. After three of their number raised the Centerpoint and Sinkhole Stations and the Maw to imprison Abeloth on Vitae, the Celestials turned their attention to the Sith proper.

Millennia of divine warfare, unparalleled in scale, ravaged the galaxy. The Celestial Empire rallied its vassals, the Kwa Holdings, the Gree Enclave, and the servile Killik race of builders, driving the Sith from Coruscant, where malign legacy lingered in the Ice Crypts and a Sith shrine, and seeing the north split between the Kwa and Gree. The Infinite Sith rallied, dispatching forces from Columni to Duro and from Tund to Aargau, but their vassals were repulsed and the Celestials promptly began churning out superweapons and gathering worlds to them, essentially seizing control of humanity, and much of the galaxy, from the Infinite Sith.

The Infinite Sith Empire was shattered into nearly two dozen islands, a briar-patch of anomalies stitching across the galaxy as Throneworlds on Rhand, Valtaullu, Gunninga, Muspilli, Prakith, Millinar, Korriban, Tascollan and Roon were ring-fenced by incredible gravitational disturbances. The Celestials directed a single minded effort to locking many of the Infinite Sith's greatest Shadow Lords in a Monolith and then surrounding said monolith in an impossible hyperspace distortion known as the Chiloon Rift.

### **The War Beyond the Empire**

The Celestial War, however, had the added dimension caused by the launch of the Abominor; another galaxy to fight over. The Celestials, having given form to the Silentium, a machine race dedicated to symmetry and order, dispatched them to follow the vector of the Abominor, to defeat them before they could return as a danger to the Celestials.

But the void was not the exclusive provenance of automata. Expecting a more protracted war, and the need to have a mobile asset, the Sith deity known as Yuuzhan'tar anchored his magnificence to a world and, with use of incredible Force powers, moved a planet, complete with the remaining thrall within the Infinite Sith's control, originally native to Janguine, into the Intergalactic Void. The Celestials knew of this, and so, after the Silentium armada was dispatched, promptly made use of their incredible technology to erect a hyperspace barrier around the galaxy to prevent an invasion. And so Yuuzhan'tar turned his prodigious energies to crafting his Sith and human thralls with alchemy and forging biological technology which could undo the gravitic traps that the Celestials could fashion; dovin basils to warp gravity wells; biotech to surpass traditional weapons; plagues to strike against the enemy in a manner which no superweapon could defeat; the perfect tool to counter the Celestial invasion, a humanoid species that, in its long travels, lost track of its mixed roots and descended into primitivism and then, via the genetic manipulations of Yuuzhan'tar, into the species known dozens of millennia later as the Yuuzhan Vong.

But, similarly, it was not enough to field one planet, no matter how well equipped, to reconquer a galaxy. And so Yuuzhan'tar chose, isolated from his kin, to retreat to the galaxy that the Abominor would even now be conquering. By the time Yuuzhan'tar arrived, however, the war between the Silentium and Abominor was in full swing; the Abominor had been designed to sow chaos, not dig in for a war, and so were caught flat-footed by the Silentium. Unable to see the need to unveil the true might of the Infinite Sith, Yuuzhan'tar settled in to wait for the conflict to end.

Long would its wait be.

### **The Long Revenge**

The Celestial War dwindled, the Sith largely ceding control of the galaxy to the Celestials. They knew the Celestials and their kin would, eventually, make the same mistake that they did; that they would uplift a species, or an individual, and shatter a neat and tidy galaxy. The Infinite Sith withdrew far into the recesses of the galaxy, primitivism swallowing their vassals to keep their kin safe. The Columi sequestered themselves on their homeworld, and the Sharu forcibly emptied their intellects. The Dark Pantheon itself, bereft of worship and the untold billions of sapients they fed upon for sustenance, withdrew from influencing the physical realm, with the destruction of Muurshantre by an Infinity Wave annihilating the Taurannik Codex that was necessary for the immortal gods' Kissai priests, the Knell sect (namesake of the New Sith world Darkknell) of nearby Muspilli, from awakening and summoning them.

The Sith continued to intermittently wage war against the Celestials over the following tens of millennia, but lacking a Sith Order to draw upon, new Infinite Sith ascending to the Dark Pantheon were rare, and with their armies and servitor races vanquished, the only war possible was a shadowy conflict fought through the subtle ebb and flow of the Force. Opportunity presented itself when the Kwa, meddling with the forbidden secrets of the Celestial-derived technology of the Infinite Gates, tore open a wound in the Force and spacetime that allowed for Abeloth to break free from imprisonment in the Maw. Abeloth fanned the flames of conflict across the galaxy, inciting war between the Gree and Kwa, corrupting the Gree to Sith worship, their sacrificing of captured Kwa on Vitae nourishing the dormant Sith deities and allowing their influence to seep into the galaxy once more. While successive escapes by Abeloth yielded little progress, perhaps due to Abeloth's goals increasingly drifting from the Dark Pantheon's as she became embedded in the Celestials' cosmic cycle, the seeds were already planted for the division and subsequent toppling of the Celestial dominion.

The Celestials launched several monolith spaceships, dubbed the Tho Yor, across the galaxy, with a view to summoning them when needed to assemble a counterweight to the Sith in the eventual likelihood that they bring down the Celestial domain permanently. Even with this foreknowledge, this did not stop the Kwa, driven to desperation due to Sith-orchestrated Gree advances, from committing the mistake the Infinite Sith required to end Celestial reign; elevating the Rakata.

### **The Second Coming**

The Rakata were a bipedal species of Force users with an innate aggressiveness harnessed by the Infinite Sith. Made apart of the Celestial design, the Rakata were corrupted by the Infinite Sith, worshipping the awakened Dark Pantheon as the Darths, or immortal god-emperors. And although the Rakata did not manage to seize the Infinity Gates as the Sith devised, they did create Force based hyperdrives (due to imparted Sith or stolen Celestial knowledge is unclear), and start war against the Celestials' increasingly divided vassals. With the Rakata as the Builders, the Sith's answer to the Celestials' Killiks, the Infinite Empire was reforged, greater than even its first incarnation, reclaiming control over humanity's destiny with the subjugation of Core Worlds such as Coruscant, and most significantly, the heart of Celestial power, Corellia. The Celestial War begun anew, lasting this time a staggering five thousand years.

The Sith deity Darth Apollyon, formerly Zelashiel, and her consort, Hershoon, now dubbed by the Rakata Darth Trayus, pioneered Force drain on interstellar scales, and after purging the original Drall and Selonian homeworlds of life, turned their maleficent will to Arbra, and bade the native Arbrans give form to a zygote deity that might replenish the ranks of the diminished Pantheon, creating a being known only as The Darker. Bringing the wrath of the Celestials upon them for their blasphemy, the Arbrans were forced to follow the example of the Sharu, devolving into the Hoojibs to escape notice.

Similarly, the anger of the Celestials was visited upon the Kwa, for their folly that had allowed Abeloth and the Infinite Sith to return, and for their elevation of the Rakata that had then allowed the newly revived Sith gods to become the Darths of the Rakata and assume lordship over the galaxy once more. The Darker was abandoned on Arbra by the Sith deities, who nonetheless continued with their efforts to elevate mortals to the Pantheon through the construction of the Trayus Academy on Malachor V. Their efforts met with some success, with the ascent of the Sith pureblood Pomojema, distinguished by his three tentacular flesh beard, ruling from Mimban. But the mastery of the techniques of pain and hunger this minor deity displayed was deemed insufficient, and so the Pantheon attempted to recreate the circumstances that gave birth to their greatest and most powerful deity - internecine conflict on Korriban. Two powerful Sith sorcerers and their followers were leveraged against one another, both strengthening the Pantheon with blood sacrifice in preparation for the Celestial War's climax, and engorging the sorcerers in question, who feasted themselves upon the essence of their enemies until they surpassed the power of even Apollyon and Trayus. The one, Darth Gorog, once known as Golg (namesake of the burial Valley), now Night Herald of the Pantheon, the other, Darth Venomis, formerly Mnggal-mnggal, the Shadow Hand of Darth Nemesis.

By 30,000 BBY, the Infinite Empire numbered over five hundred worlds, the free peoples of the galaxy enslaved, only the Celestials, bereft of servitor races bar the Killiks, remaining to match the ravenous Pantheon's plans for galactic destruction, resistance of lesser races having fallen before the might of the Rakatan Star Forges. The stage was set. Upon Abeloth escaping imprisonment once more, the Celestials set their Killik armies upon Korriban, hoping to permanently cripple the Infinite Sith at last. Yet they had underestimated the cunning and raw might of the new Darth Gorog, who Joined the attacking nests. Infecting the Killiks with his mind, he wrestled control of the majority of the species from the Celestials, thus appropriating the Celestials' workforce and bolstering the Infinite Sith's mundane might to the degree that victory seemed inevitable. Making Alsakan his Throneworld, Gorog directed the Killik hivemind against the Celestials, while Venomis raised an anti-Mother in the Unknown Regions to counter Abeloth on Dathomir, whose goals were orthogonal to Nemesis' own.