[Vitiate's POV]
Vitiate had known the lower temple was dangerous long before the child fell into it.
That knowledge had not come from fear. Fear was for lesser minds that mistook unfamiliarity for threat. His understanding had come from observation, from fragments of old records, from the slow patience of a spirit trapped with nothing except stone, rot, and the decaying memories of the dead.
The ancient Sith who built this place had been ambitious in that special way only truly stupid geniuses managed.
They had taken a predator from Sophros.
An eater of the Force.
A creature whose natural instincts already made Jedi vulnerable, then decided nature had clearly lacked funding, cruelty, and proper laboratory oversight.
They bred it.
Cut it.
Changed it.
Forced generation upon generation through hosts and offspring until the original design had warped into something with enough cognition to suffer, enough hunger to obey no master, and enough proximity to the Living Force to empty a trained Force-user down to a grey shell.
Then it broke containment.
Naturally.
The records had survived in pieces even during Vitiate's living reign. He had read enough to understand the broad lesson and ignored most of the details. He had been building empires, consuming worlds, teaching civilizations to kneel. Some chained laboratory abomination from a dead age had seemed beneath sustained attention.
That had been a miscalculation.
A small one, perhaps.
Still irritating.
Centuries later, bound as he was to the temple's upper arteries, he learned what the records had failed to emphasize.
The creature had never died.
The Sith had not killed it. The Jedi had not purified it. The binding chamber below had simply held it in a state that mocked sleep, death, and hunger all at once. It had remained beneath the old stone, sustained by the same corrupted currents that sustained so many other failures in this place.
The lower levels had once housed remnants.
Sith spirits.
Broken acolytes.
Old alchemists whose names had been swallowed by dust.
Fragments of former lords who had clung to titles long after language stopped mattering to them.
Most had gone mad centuries ago. Some had dissolved into muttering patterns. Others had become territorial things, looping through old deaths and old grievances, unable to remember enough of themselves to even lie properly.
Vitiate had despised them.
They were useful company in the way vermin were useful company. Their movements told him which seals still held. Their agitation told him when something changed. Their screams had occasionally provided mild entertainment.
Then the alien disturbance rolled through the Force.
The temple woke.
The seals split.
The thing beneath the stone opened its eyes.
After that, the lower levels went quiet.
One remnant after another vanished from his awareness. They did not fade naturally. They were consumed. Their rage, their memory, their accumulated dark side residue, everything they had preserved through hatred and stubbornness, all of it went into that old beast's hunger.
Vitiate had remained above.
His tether protected him.
Distance protected him.
Pride did not demand suicide.
When the child fell through the broken floor, Vitiate followed only by the thinnest strands of attention. Even weakened, even frayed by his own severance, he could still trace movement through his temple if he did so carefully. He felt the boy heal himself with disgusting efficiency. Felt him repair the little machine at his side through an instinct that was almost artless in how cleanly it worked. Felt him move through chambers that should have broken the mind of a grown apprentice.
Then the creature found him.
Or perhaps they found each other.
That remained the interesting question.
Vitiate kept himself away from the binding hall while the fight unfolded. The Shrii-ka-rai distorted perception around itself, swallowing the usual currents of the Force and leaving behind regions of sensory absence. He could not watch cleanly. He felt only intervals.
The child's presence vanishing.
The child's presence returning in ragged flares.
The creature feeding.
The creature recoiling.
The red blade burning through flesh.
The spider-droid shrieking in machine language.
The boy cursing with admirable dedication.
Then, at last, the old predator died.
Vitiate drifted closer.
Cautiously.
The chamber below had been opened to the storm. Rain fell through the collapsed ceiling in silver sheets, pooling around the great binding platform. Broken chains lay across the stone, each link large enough to restrain a rancor. Old runes glimmered beneath mud, water, and black blood.
The boy lay pinned beneath the corpse.
His breathing came in broken pulls. One arm remained trapped under the beast's collapsed chest. His other hand still held the lightsaber hilt, though the blade had gone dark. The small droid crouched near his head, damaged, sparking, and making a series of frantic, ugly sounds that Vitiate did not bother translating.
The creature was ruined.
A saber wound ran from its underside through its spine. Burned tissue steamed in the rain. Its tendrils sagged across the boy's throat and face, slack at last. The dead eyes stared into nothing.
For a moment, Vitiate experienced something close to satisfaction.
The child had done it.
Barely.
Through skill, luck, stubbornness, and whatever obscene favor the Force had placed in his small hands, he had slain a predator bred to consume beings far older and better trained than himself.
Then the corpse began to sink.
Ezra's eyes opened.
"What the fuck?"
Vitiate's attention sharpened.
The boy tried to shove the body away. His palm pressed into the Shrii-ka-rai's chest.
The flesh collapsed around his hand.
There was no tearing. No splatter. No proper decay. The creature's body folded inward like wet ash under pressure, losing structure the instant the boy touched it. Skin, muscle, bone, grafted metal, and the old black tendrils all softened into a fine grey-black residue that slid over the child rather than falling away.
Ezra's face twisted.
"Get off," he rasped. "Get off, you corpse-flavored bastard."
He pushed harder.
e pushed harder.
The corpse folded around his hand.
Vitiate watched the boy's fingers sink through the dead creature's chest as if the flesh had lost the memory of being flesh. Skin crumpled first, then muscle, then the old alchemical lattice threaded through the ribs. The body did not tear. It did not bleed properly. It came apart in soft, grey-black layers that clung to the boy's wrist and began crawling under his skin.
The child tried to rip his arm free.
That only dragged more of the thing with him.
A rasping sound tore out of his throat. His back arched under the half-collapsed carcass, heels scraping against wet stone, fingers spasming around nothing as the dead Shrii-ka-rai poured over him in strands of ash and rotten marrow.
The small machine beside him shrieked in its crude electronic language and stabbed both manipulators into the dissolving corpse.
Electricity discharged.
The grey mass swallowed it.
Arachnae recoiled so sharply one of her damaged legs buckled beneath her.
The boy's eyes went wide.
His lips moved around a curse that had no breath behind it.
Vitiate drifted a little closer.
Only a little.
He had expected aftermath. Perhaps contamination. Perhaps the lingering hunger of the creature trying to anchor itself in the body that had killed it.
This was stranger.
The dead thing was entering the child too cleanly. No resistance from the corpse. No deliberate working from the boy. No crafted method, no glyph, no invocation, no binding phrase. Even instinctive absorption had patterns. Hunger reached. Power answered. The devoured essence broke, scattered, and was gathered by force of will.
Here, the body itself behaved as the ritual.
The boy shoved at the creature's ruined shoulder with his free hand.
The shoulder collapsed.
His palm punched through bone softened into paste, and the entire forelimb sloughed apart in a thick wave that rolled across his chest. The material sank into the torn undersuit and bare skin beneath. It vanished through pores, wounds, and places where no opening should have existed.
The child's body rejected the process and accepted it at the same time.
That contradiction made Vitiate pause.
Ezra thrashed hard enough to crack the old platform under his hips. His muscles strained, then locked. The veins in his throat darkened beneath the skin. Black lines crawled outward from the places where the creature entered him, following nerves rather than blood vessels.
His mouth opened.
A thin sound escaped.
The noise carried a dozen swallowed voices buried under the boy's own.
Arachnae scrambled onto his chest and tried to scrape the residue away. Her little claws tore through the dissolving matter and came away empty. The grey-black ash passed through her metal limbs as if the droid had become irrelevant to the rules of the event.
The boy jerked sideways, trying to roll out from under the corpse.
The remaining weight followed.
The Shrii-ka-rai collapsed in on him like rotted snow under a boot, though the image was too clean for what actually happened. Its bones softened into strings. Its organs liquefied into vaporous sludge. Its tendrils melted against the boy's face and throat, leaving trails that sank into the flesh and made his skin ripple from beneath.
The child clawed at his own neck.
His fingernails tore skin.
The wounds closed around threads of grey residue as those threads slid inward.
Vitiate felt the last remnants of the creature's Living Force detach from dead matter.
They should have dispersed.
They did not.
They bent toward the child with the obedience of iron filings near a lodestone, yet there was no conscious call from the boy. His mind was occupied by agony. His mental guard still stood, though ragged, clenched around itself with the desperate discipline of someone gripping a blade barehanded because letting go meant death.
The body beneath that mind did not care.
Vitiate's attention sharpened until nothing else in the chamber mattered.
The Shrii-ka-rai had been a thing shaped to eat Force-sensitives. Its organs had been tuned toward the Living Force. Its hunger had been refined by Sith cruelty over generations, then stretched across centuries of imprisonment until the creature had become a walking absence.
Yet it was being consumed? How?
Countless Sith have died in pursuit of its secret, yet it was unraveling before his very eyes and alike the ones before, it remained a secret.
The boy screamed in anguish ashis skin began peeling at the edges of the black lines.
Thin strips lifted along his ribs, shoulders, and neck, curling away as if heat bloomed under the surface. Beneath the peeling skin, it tissue writhed and pulsed in ways that bodies never did.
The child slammed his head back against the platform.
Once.
Twice.
The third time, Arachnae wedged herself under his skull, taking the impact with a metallic crunch and a furious burst of beeping.
The boy's body convulsed.
The old creature had vanished completely by now.
Only black rainwater, grey dust, and the boy remained.
Then as if the previous happening were merely the start, changes began again.
The boy's spine arched so high only his heels and shoulders touched the stone. His hands curled into claws. Every old wound across his body reopened at once. The scratches from the swamp. The bruising from the crash. The cuts left by stone, chain, and claw. Even older damage surfaced in faint marks beneath his skin, ghost-injuries from battles Vitiate had never seen.
The boy's ribs pressed outward beneath the skin before settling back into place. His shoulder twisted against the joint, dislocated for half a breath, then snapped into alignment. The tendons in his wrist stood out like wires under too much tension. His jaw clenched until blood leaked from the corner of his mouth.
No scream came out of the mouth, but Vitiate could feel it in it the Force.
Perhaps the pain had passed beyond sound.
Perhaps the throat had simply forgotten how to work.
Vitiate floated above the platform and felt the chamber change.
The living moss around the binding hall died in a widening circle. Roots shriveled into dry cords. The rainwater nearest the boy lost the faint organic residue it had carried down from the forest canopy. Insects hidden in the cracked stone curled in place, their small lives drawn out through the damp air.
The boy's body drank that too.
Is this the secret you are hiding? Wonderful...
The corpse, Vitiate theorized, had merely been the key. The rest was his body itself, or what hid in it at least. He could feel it, the hunger, the gluoonty toward the Force itself. Growing stronger by every passing second.
A phrase from old rumors returned to Vitiate.
Wound in the Force.
He had heard such things. Sith whispers. Jedi laments. Reports from distant wars and broken battlefields. A person made hollow by catastrophe. A presence that devoured connection by existing near it.
He had treated those accounts as imprecise language from frightened minds.
Now, as the child writhed on the platform and the Force twisted around him in ruptured spirals, Vitiate found the phrase irritatingly insufficient.
This was not merely damage.
This was development.
A larval principle. A wound still learning the shape of teeth.
The boy's mental guard flickered and cracked.
Vitiate noticed at once, for he was waiting for that very moment.
Even through the storm of transformation, even through the pain, even with his body turning traitor under him, the child had kept the walls around his mind clamped shut. Clumsy in places. Improvised. Too recently learned. Still impressive enough that Vitiate had respected the effort.
Now those walls shook.
A thin crack opened through the outer layer.
Behind it, confusion. Pain. Fragmented memory. A human will trying to remain itself while the body below it became something far less polite.
Vitiate's interest shifted.
The body could wait.
A body revealed its secrets slowly. Flesh had to be studied through observation, through controlled pressure, through repeated testing. This transformation would continue whether he watched from outside or not, and he did not possess the luxury of endless time.
The mind was different.
A mind could be entered. Mapped. Broken. Occupied.
He had done so across empires.
Children, kings, Jedi, Sith, prophets, soldiers, mothers clutching infants, lords who believed their wills were forged in iron, creatures who thought themselves gods because they had never met an older appetite. Minds varied in decoration. Their defenses changed according to training, trauma, arrogance, and fear.
The principles did not.
Vitiate descended.
The droid's photoreceptor snapped toward him.
The machine saw nothing, of course, but some crude instinct in its systems recognized the shift in the chamber. It dragged itself over the boy's shoulder and spread its damaged limbs as if it could shield him from a spirit.
Vitiate almost smiled.
"Faithful little tool," he murmured.
The boy's eyes fluttered.
For the first time since the transformation began, awareness returned to them.
Barely.
The gaze found Vitiate.
Recognition surfaced through pain.
His lips moved.
"Damned... Vitiate..."
It came out as a broken scrape.
Vitiate lowered himself until his spectral face hovered above the child's.
"You should have killed me when you had the chance."
--
Things getting ugly and painful for Ezra hehe. Been waiting for quite a long time for this tbh.
Next chapter is last one of Eater of God segment. If we reach 400 stones by tuesday, I will post it then otherwise on Wednesday.
Quite excited for the next arc as an very beloved character is gonna be making appearance in that. (to spoil you a bit, some chapters are going to be in her POV)
That aside, its a new week, so don't forget to vote.
Also next chapter is live on patreon right now, so you can read it in advance.
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