Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to KOTOR or KOTOR II.

Denial of Nothingness

A cloaked Figure sat at the base of the broken mountain, an oasis of calm in the raging storm that ravaged the world of Malachor V. The great Storm Beasts that plodded around below, searching for any prey, ignored Him, as though It weren't there. To anything living, He would seem more of a presence than a thinking being. Though the storm whipped Its tattered cloak around sharply, the Figure did not react in the slightest, intently staring at the object in front of Him.

Once He was but a man, filled with grief and anger. That man fought across the surface of many worlds, from the beginning of the war to the end. It had lost everything, and the pain of that loss drove Him on a bloody path. But even Its anger had its limits, but His pain did not. Several times before the war's end, It had thought of ending it all, but stopped Himself at the last second.

And then it had all ended. Like the ground It sat upon, He had died when the Mass Shadow Generator activated. Unlike the planet though, It only bent, but did not break.

The Being paused as He perused Its fragmented memories. No, He only thought It had died. Felt it, certainly. But it did not actually happen.

Still, regardless of its validity, His "death" had taken much from It. Among the first things He had tried to remember was Its name, but the endless darkness had already claimed that by the time He had regained consciousness. In exchange, the shadows infused the Being with it.

Where once It had felt nothing, he could hear the Force sing a screeching crescendo around It, accompanied by a gnawing sensation that wouldn't abate. The tortured screams of the Force haunted His nightmares when It slept and drove Him to near-madness while awake. The sounds of the dead surrounded It, yelling damnations like thunder at Him for Its survival and whispering winds of encouragement in His darkest moments. The faces of friends old and those never made appeared in flashes before Its eyes, vanishing with each lightning strike.

But always, one remained. He had never known the other, a glowing furry man, dressed in brown robes. A Bothan, if It remembered correctly. Out of all the spirits, this one was always calm, serene. The howls of the damned sluiced off of the being like water.

The Figure wanted to be like that. To quiet the storms and the dead, to shut out the noise that threatened to drive Him mad. And so, It emulated the Bothan, sitting quietly even among the beasts and the shadows. At first, it was difficult. The Figure couldn't bring Himself to sit still for too long before feeling the need to at least move around. But every day, It lasted longer.

The Hunger tried to push into His mind every time the spirits appeared. Each time, it was rebuffed as Its mind grew stronger every day. It was still a struggle. As His powers grew, so too would the Hunger. But the Being was growing craftier, too. He had learned to divert the Hunger, direct it.

The Hunger was a mindless thing. It suspected that should He ever let it take over, It would become as the Hunger, driven only by a desire to satiate Itself for a time. He steeled Its will and fought back with everything He had. The Hunger persisted.

Hours turned to days, days to weeks, weeks to months, and months to years. Its body did not sustain itself on physical food or water and rarely drew breath. His mind stayed in a semi-conscious state for what seemed like an eternity, only awakening every so often for a brief respite.

Now, the Figure was awake, looking at the object His hands had unconsciously carved from the skull of one of the roaming Storm Beasts that had gotten too close. It was a ghoulish thing, a bleached white mask with a pair of red marks ascending from the eye-holes. A finger briefly touched the crimson markings that adorned Its own flesh and blood face in the same place. The mask was a cruel facsimile of the real thing, inspired by terrible visions of possible futures.

His black eyes stared into the mask's equivalent as It pondered what it had seen. Words were of little use, save to give a name to that future.

Nihilus.

He lifted Its gaze to seek out the omnipresent Bothan spirit, only to find him looking back at Him with a raised eyebrow. The Presence paused for the second time since His awakening. This was the first interaction of any kind that had occurred between them since the alien's first appearance. Its eyes dropped back down to the mask.

It was tempting, in a way. To embrace the Hunger, to drown out the pain with desire and the need to feed. To lose Himself. To become Nothing.

It frowned, showing one of the few displays of his muted emotions that It was still capable of. Again, His eyes sought out the Bothan. This time, It met a knowing smile, as though the other knew what He would choose.

The Figure drew in a long breath, the first in a long time, and let it out in a sigh. The object rose into the air until it reached eye-level, enabling Him to look through it as though It were wearing it. He bunched Its hands, and the mask shattered into a thousand pieces under the power of the Force, which were then tossed to the side.

He never saw the Bothan's smile turn to one of approval and pride, before the alien faded away. The Presence would never suspect that it would be the last time He saw the spirit. Unconcerned for the moment, He fell back into meditation and his endless battle with the Hunger.

He never noticed that the mask fragments sank into the ground, only to be replaced with several blades of grass.

Darth Traya, once the Jedi Master and Historian Arren Kae, stepped onto the broken world of Malachor V, seeking the wound in the Force she had discovered only recently. She had tracked it to the graveyard world, which was coincidentally the location of a hidden Sith Academy. However, the Sith Lord was shocked to find that the presence of the Dark Side on the war-ravaged planet was almost non-existent. She, like every Force Sensitive in the galaxy, had felt the countless deaths that heralded the end of the Mandalorian Wars. The planet itself had become a never-ending font of the Dark Side, mutating anything on its surface into a horrifying parody of its past self.

At least, that was the status quo five years prior. Now, it was almost…purified. Traya could still sense it, but it all seemed to be flowing in one direction: towards the base of one of the eroded mountains. And so, she followed the current to its destination.

Carefully navigating the twisted paths, she was even more surprised to find grass growing along the trail. As the Sith got closer, the plant life grew thicker as trees and bushes appeared, until she came to a clearing. There, atop a weathered rock, sat an enormous figure, garbed in a beaten and tattered brown robe that seemed several sizes too small for Him. However, to her Force Sight, He was both a blinding light and a gaping void. The darkness flowed towards Him before disappearing into the black hole that was His existence.

Suddenly, Traya noticed that something had started flowing out of her as soon as she had entered His presence. Her first assumption was that He was draining her power, but corrected herself when she watched the color return to her ashen skin. He was draining the Dark Side corruption from her!

Her now milky-white eyes stared at Him until He stirred. When His black eyes opened to look at her, Arren only asked one thing.

"What are you?"

In a voice that had gone without use for half of a decade, He replied with a single word:

"Essentus."

A/N: This was a little thought I got in my head when I was browsing through some pictures of Darth Nihilus on Deviantart: What if Nihilus didn't give into despair while trapped on Malachor V and let the hunger consume him? What if he had an inspiration to resist? Well, here was my answer. Sorry if it's not quite up to your standards, I actually wrote this little blurb in about an hour, so I only had the bare minimum of thought put into it. Anyway, let me know what you think. I might consider making this into a full-length story, but I would have no idea where to go with this, considering that Nihilus wipes out most of the Jedi Order by himself in KOTOR II canon. Thus it would kind of leave me without a storyline.

If you noticed that I capitalized every mention of a pronoun that related to Nihilus, that was not my keyboard spazzing out, it was intentional. As was switching between using "He" and "It" until the end. And no, I am not referencing him as big G God. The capital letters are just for emphasis. Also, if a word is capitalized in the middle of the sentence (Being, Figure, etc), it's probably referring to Nihilus.

Also, if you're curious about the meaning of the only word he said in this one-shot:

Essentus- Derived from the Latin word essentia, which translates to essence, existence, or being.