Disturbance [DL (Darkside) / Open]

It defied all logical explanation.

First his inexplicable appearance in this....bizarre place, and then a meeting with someone who claimed to be Nox, a name that was familiar to anyone who had intently studied Sith archives. For his part, Vader had only done passing studies into such things, but the name was still familiar. That had been thousands of years past. Only as a ghost in the Force could Nox have been present in any capacity in this age.

....or at least that had held true in his own understanding of things, in his home world.

But now his thoughts and understanding were jumbled. Horrific glimpses and half-formed memories continued to plague him, stabbing at him incessantly. Of a confrontation with his son, Luke, and of betraying the Emperor...of finally redeeming himself for the atrocities he had committed, and suffering through a few final moments of peace...and then darkness.

It was torturous, even in the shattered, broken fragments that he could make sense of. It couldn't be real; even the Emperor would not be so proud and arrogant as to believe his hold over Vader was so infallible. He would never have let Vader betray him, not in that fashion.

It had to be the work of the Emperor himself, then. Tormenting his loyal subject with what he could never have, making his pain and anger all the more palpable, all the closer to finally pushing him off that final ledge.

And it did indeed make his anger grow to all new heights. The ground around him actually splintered as he stared over the quaint little town before him, late afternoon sunlight glinting cheerily off the sleek, imposing lines of his Sith armor. Though the day was cool, even in the sunlight, around Vader the air was torturously hot; his Rage spilling out in swirling currents and torrents, tinting the air red and turning it into an oven.

Only his mechanically-regulated breathing kept his anger from being visibly apparent. But even those not sensitive in the ways of the Force could feel it. He had already sensed more than one person, making their way past on lower streets, flinch and shudder away from him, looking around wildly in uneasiness.

But the swirling cloud of negativity and dark rage boiling in his heart was not to simply wear itself out. It had drawn an altogether far more nasty thing forth. Accompanied by a swarm of tiny, twitching things of darkness, yellow eyes glinting beadily from out of the shadows, its titanic shadow slowly crept over the buildings and street, its own massive eyes glaring dumbly, hungrily, at nothing and everything from within the darkness, its physical body not yet risen to do battle.

The Sith Lord merely turned on one heel, and without even a motion to call it to his hand, his lightsaber unclipped itself from his belt and flew into his waiting hand. The familiar snarling hiss of activation faded to its haunting hum of life as the red blade flared into existence, its flat point held out warningly at the Heartless.

"Where there is Darkness...the Dark Side only grows in power. Leave now if you do not wish your desctruction." He knew his warning would fall on deaf ears; these were creatures of instinct and predation. But not only his words went forth, but a mass suggestion through the Force. A wave of whispered rage and fear, its purpose to incite terror and revulsion, drive the pests back.

It didn't work.

Stars above, it was impossible to do any thinking under these conditions.

Nox had not given up on his search through the castle library. If the Heartless were truly so ubiquitous, such a far-reaching threat, there must be some recorded information to be had about them. It simply stood to reason. Yet with each book that went skimmed cover to cover and discarded, yielding nothing of any consequence, the Inquisitor's frustration at his increasingly nonsensical situation only built up.

It didn't make matters easier in the slightest that he was raging just outside. Of course, Nox was more than accustomed to shrugging off surrounding presences in the Force that had let their emotions get the best of them; it was an occupational hazard for any of his contemporaries who wanted to do any intensive work free of distractions. But Vader's barely-contained fury was... something else. Nox could only guess at what tragedies, what scale of horror, had twisted that man into the grim specter in the Force that he had become.

Right at the moment, though, he was naught but an insufferable distraction from important work. So it was that Nox had neatly kept his place in his current book and exited the library, meaning to strike out across the town and find out exactly what had so infuriated his anachronistic colleague. Where others shied away from what felt to them as an unnatural wave of cold, an unshakeable feeling in the forefront of their minds that something was just wrong, Nox marched headlong in its direction, cloak concealing his armoured figure.

What he found when he at last reached the site was... not what he had been expecting. The sudden spike of pervasive dread that had washed over him on his way here was not some reactionary expression of anger at all, but rather a deliberate exertion on Vader's part to fend off a Heartless of simply gargantuan proportions. What an interesting surprise.

Perched upon a nearby rooftop, Nox folded his arms and contented to watch the situation unfold, interested to see how the Heartless, supposedly mindless beasts hungering for those steeped in darkness, would deign to attack one who had made his danger so pointedly clear. Perhaps they'd notice him too. However it unfolded, this would surely be fascinating.