Sorry Im a wee bit late, but its out and ready for yalls enjoyment. The p@treon has been updated as well so give that a read.
Thanks again to the patrons
P@treon Hermit47
https://discord.gg/K8pFqFexb3
...
The chamber lay deep in the oldest spine of Star Base Zahanna, far below the barracks decks and repair gantries, below the med wards and command vaults, below the places clones walked and spoke and lived. The corridors leading to it were narrow, armored, and silent. No insignia marked the doors. No Republic seal stood over the entry. Only layers of old metal, coded locks, and the quiet hum of hidden systems protected what was inside.
The hover gurney swept through the final hatch with two medical droids gliding at its side.
Anakin Skywalker lay strapped to it, his body rigid with pain. Even through the armor and cloak he'd still worn when they had dragged him from the flagship, the suffering was obvious. His hands had curled so tightly into fists that the knuckle-spurs of his species had cut into his gloves. His breathing came in jagged bursts. The monitors floating above him pulsed in frantic colors, one shrill warning after another chasing the next in a rising chorus of panic.
Heart rhythm unstable. Pressure rising. Core temperature climbing. Neural activity irregular. Secondary systems unresponsive. Unknown organ variance. Unknown species markers. Unknown—
The room at the center of it all was large and round, dark stone and old metal fused together by workmanship no Republic engineer would ever have admitted to understanding. Low red lamps burned in recesses along the walls. Strange instruments were arranged on distant tables in deliberate rows—glass canisters, sealed steel cases, articulated surgical arms, shelves of black-bound texts, and data cylinders. At the center of the chamber stood a wide platform of polished obsidian etched with ancient Sith geometry. Above it, articulated rings of metal and crystal hung dormant, waiting.
And beside that platform, calm as if he had all the time in the world, stood Hego Damask.
Or rather, the being behind the name.
Plagueis stood in deep robes the color of dried ash, long fingers resting lightly on a narrow slate of notes. The Muun's eyes moved over diagrams and annotations with cool concentration while Anakin's body nearly tore itself apart three meters away.
One of the droids turned to him first.
"Magister Damask," it said, its voice crisp with programmed urgency. "The patient's condition has deteriorated beyond projected survivability. Immediate intervention is required. Please specify how we may assist."
The second droid's instruments clicked and unfolded. "Circulatory collapse is imminent. Nervous shock, catastrophic internal strain, toxic overload signatures, severe unidentified organ stress. We recommend sedation, multi-organ support, and—"
Plagueis didn't even look up at first.
Then, with the faintest turn of his head, he lifted one hand.
"That will not be necessary," he said.
The droids paused.
Anakin groaned and arched against the restraints, a low, savage sound dragged from somewhere deeper than his throat. The monitors screamed louder.
The first droid began again. "If action is not taken within moments, death is likely."
Plagueis turned fully then, and the droids fell silent at once.
"I am aware," he said, and there was something in his voice that shut down all further objection. "Leave us."
The droids hesitated only for the fraction of a second allowed by their highest caution subroutines.
Then they obeyed.
They backed away with visible reluctance, lifted the gurney into position over the center platform, transferred Anakin's body onto the obsidian table with careful mechanical precision, and withdrew. The final door sealed behind them with a heavy, airtight hiss.
Silence took the room.
Not true silence. The machines still shrieked. Anakin still gasped. But it was sealed silence, contained silence, the kind that made every sound inside the chamber feel trapped and sharper than it should have been.
Plagueis stepped forward at last.
He did not rush.
That was the worst part.
Anakin's body writhed against the table, pain moving through him in waves so violent the old stone beneath him seemed to answer. Sweat dripped through the armor and cloth. Every breath looked torn from him. Yet Plagueis approached with the serenity of a scholar nearing a difficult but fascinating text.
With a small gesture of his fingers, the clasps at Anakin's throat, shoulders, and chest released.
The mask lifted first.
It came away slowly, gently, suspended in the Force as if the Muun were handling a relic rather than a piece of armor. Then the chest plates, vambraces, belts, and layered battle gear followed. Each part unfastened itself and floated aside, crossing the room in measured silence to settle on a secondary table beyond the ritual ring. Sabers were placed beside them with equal care—purple, and black with its strange red edge sleeping in the hilt.
Anakin tried to rise.
Pain drove him back down.
His eyes, bright and wild with fever and fury, locked onto the Muun.
"What…" He had to grit his teeth through the next wave before the words came out. "What are you doing?"
Plagueis folded his hands behind his back and looked down at him.
"Saving you."
Anakin bared his sharper teeth in something that wanted to be a snarl. "No."
His voice broke with pain, then hardened again.
"No. This isn't right. I know my body. I know what this should feel like. I know what that explosion did and didn't do."
He sucked in a ragged breath.
"This is you."
Plagueis' mouth curved very slightly.
"Always the perceptive one."
Anakin lay stunned for a moment.
The Muun continued in that same maddeningly calm tone.
"You were wounded, certainly. But not mortally. Your species is resilient, and the damage would have healed in time with proper care. It would, however, have healed into the body you already possessed."
Anakin's jaw tightened. Another surge of agony bent him half off the table before he forced himself flat again.
"You poisoned me," he said.
"I introduced a catalyst," Plagueis corrected. "A viral alchemical vector designed to mimic systemic collapse while attacking selected biological thresholds. Painful, yes. Convincing, certainly. Temporary, if left alone. Transformative, if guided."
Anakin stared at him in disbelief.
Then the anger found voice.
"You did this without asking me?"
Plagueis' eyes did not leave his.
"If I had asked, you would have refused."
"Then you should have asked anyway."
The Muun inclined his head, almost granting the point, but not enough to matter.
"One day," he said softly, "you will thank me for not giving you the chance."
Anakin tried to lunge again, tried to drag himself off the table and put his hands around the Muun's throat, but whatever the catalyst was doing to him had already gone too deep. His limbs shook. His vision blurred. His chest felt wrong—too tight, too empty, too hot.
Plagueis moved to one of the ancient stands at the edge of the circle and opened a great black-bound text, its pages made not of paper but some older material that drank in the red light. Sith script crawled across it in lines like wounds.
The Muun's long fingers brushed the glyphs with reverence.
Then he spoke in the old tongue.
The first words rolled through the room like iron dragged over stone.
The effect was immediate.
The symbols etched into the obsidian platform ignited one by one, not with flame but with a deep crimson luminescence that seemed to rise from within the stone itself. The suspended rings above the table began to turn. Slowly at first. Then faster.
Anakin hissed through his teeth.
The air changed.
The room itself seemed to draw in, as though the walls had inhaled and decided not to breathe back out.
Plagueis spoke again.
This time, the ancient words came harsher, lower, layered with power that did not belong in any voice. The temperature in the chamber surged. Then dropped. Then surged again hard enough to blur the air above the table.
Anakin's back arched violently.
Red lightning burst from his body.
Not from his hands. Not shaped by intent. It bled out of him in ragged lashes, snapping from the metal restraints, the rings, the edges of the obsidian platform, striking the floor and recoiling upward. The room filled with the scent of ash and blood and old things waking.
Plagueis answered it with his own power.
Not blue. Not simple. His lightning crawled pale and vicious through the chamber, feeding the runes, linking the rings above the table to the geometry beneath it.
Anakin screamed.
It was not the scream of a man being burned.
It was the scream of a body being rewritten while still inhabited.
The ritual reached into him with invisible hands and found everything. Bone. Organ. Nerve. Blood. The dark side went down into his flesh like hooks.
Plagueis chanted in the Sith dialect without pause, voice rising and falling in terrible cadence as he moved from station to station around the table. He drew a blade from a sealed case—thin, old, ceremonial—and opened his own palm without hesitation, letting black-red Muun blood drip into carved channels around the platform's edge. It hissed as it touched the runes.
He took samples from canisters around the room and emptied them one by one into the geometry of the rite.
Zabrak marrow concentrate.
Refined Arkanian neural suspension.
Chiss metabolic catalyst.
Pantoran cold-resistance proteins, stabilized through Sith denaturing.
Zeltron hepatic tissue cultures suspended in alchemical serum.
Each one struck the ritual circle and vanished not as liquid but as essence, torn apart and carried into the pattern.
Anakin convulsed.
The table cracked beneath one hand when his claws punched through the stone.
Plagueis did not stop.
The chamber shook.
Far above them, deep in the body of Star Base Zahanna, the first tremor rolled through the decks.
In the sealed room, Anakin's chest seized and then lurched.
One heartbeat became two.
Not metaphorically.
Not symbolically.
The second heart forced itself into being under a storm of blood and power and impossible pain. Monitors burst into sparks, trying to interpret what they were reading. One by one, the Republic machines failed, their alarms devolving into static as Anakin's biology moved fully beyond what they had ever been built to understand.
His bones lengthened.
Not gradually. Not gently.
There was a wet cracking sound as the dark side pulled him larger. His frame stretched under the weight of the rite, every ligament and tendon dragged screaming into new proportions. Muscle densified without bloat. Shoulders broadened. Spine lengthened. His hands became heavier, deadlier, claws sharpening further as the keratin and bone beneath them were driven to new points.
Plagueis' chanting never broke.
Ancient formulae filled the chamber, not all of them language anymore, some of them pure intent hammered into sound. A science older than medicine and crueler than surgery unfolded around the table.
Anakin's teeth lengthened. His canines sharpened. Bone spurs under the skin of his elbows, knees, and knuckles thickened and pushed harder outward. His ribcage changed shape to protect the second heart now beating beside the first. Both livers reformed, the old toxin-resistant metabolism of his species enhanced and hardened into something almost impossible to poison. His nerves fired faster and brighter, the Chiss and Arkanian matrices woven into his own Sith physiology until thought and instinct moved with terrifying new speed.
He could not hold onto any one sensation because all of them were happening at once.
Heat.
Cold.
Pressure.
Hunger.
Rage.
Attraction.
Fear.
Pain so complete it stopped being a single thing and became the world itself.
He screamed until his throat tore.
Plagueis laid one hand over Anakin's chest and spoke directly into his face now, the Sith tongue no longer scholarly but commanding.
"Take it."
Anakin's eyes were wide and bright enough to look molten.
"Take it," Plagueis repeated. "Do not endure it. Claim it."
For one instant—one terrible, shuddering instant—the dark side in the room seemed to stop belonging to the ritual and start belonging to Anakin.
The station buckled under the force of it.
Another tremor ran through Star Base Zahanna, then another, then a longer quaking groan as the dark side surged up through the deepest structural bones of the installation and rattled them like a living thing trying to wake.
Still, outside that room, nothing bled outward clearly enough for ordinary Jedi senses to identify. The chamber was sealed too well, the rite too old, the geometry too exact. They felt the shaking. They heard the alarms. But the darkness itself remained trapped in the circle like a star collapsing inward instead of exploding out.
Hours passed.
They passed strangely, broken into cycles of chant and lightning and blood and silence and renewed torment. At some point Anakin stopped screaming because his voice failed. At another, he began again because the body Plagueis was building inside him had new depths of pain to discover.
The Muun exhausted reagents. Opened more. Read from memory when the book no longer needed his eyes. His own face grew drawn with effort. Sweat touched his temples. His hands trembled once and only once before he forced them still.
The ritual did not allow weakness.
Near the end, when the suspended rings above the table were spinning so fast they were little more than screaming circles of red metal and light, Plagueis cut his own wrist again and drew a final sigil across Anakin's sternum in blood and lightning both.
The last chant came out almost as a whisper.
The chamber answered with one final violent shudder.
Then everything stopped.
The rings slowed.
The runes dimmed.
The lightning vanished.
Silence fell so suddenly it rang.
Anakin lay unmoving on the obsidian platform.
Smoke rose faintly from the air around him. The last dead Republic monitors dripped sparks from their cracked housings. Blood—his, Plagueis', and things no medical droid would ever have been able to classify—streaked the old stone.
For a long moment, Plagueis did not move.
Then, slowly, he stepped closer.
Anakin was bigger now, even at a glance. Longer of limb, broader through the shoulder and chest, lean still but with the terrible compact density of something made for violence rather than grace. The lines of his face had sharpened. The ridges of his species seemed slightly more severe, more regal, and predatory all at once. His claws were longer. His teeth showed more clearly, even with his mouth slack in unconsciousness. His body radiated dangerous heat, and when Plagueis laid long fingers against his throat, he could feel two distinct pulses beating beneath the skin.
One.
Then the other.
Alive.
Changed.
The Muun let out a slow breath, exhaustion finally claiming his posture for the first time. He looked older in that moment, not in years but in wear. Yet as he stared down at what lay on the table, a smile touched his face.
Not a wide one.
Not triumphant in any childish way.
But deeply, terribly satisfied.
Anakin Skywalker—last of the Sith Purebloods, heir to buried empires, creature of prophecy and war and blood—lay unconscious before him, remade in agony into something closer to what the old Sith had once dreamed an emperor should be.
Outside the chamber, the station had gone still.
Inside it, Darth Plagueis stood over the wreckage of an ancient rite and knew that the galaxy had just changed shape in a way it did not yet understand