Not long after the fall of the Jedi, Darth Vader made a personal request to his master. He wanted a world of his own – a place where he could shape his power without interruption. Emperor Palpatine granted it, and Vader chose Mustafar, a volcanic planet soaked in dark side energy and tied to Vader’s most painful memories.
Along with the planet came something else: a strange, ancient Sith artifact known as the Mask of Lord Momin. Palpatine described it as a tool to guide Vader’s vision for a fortress on Mustafar. What he didn’t say was that the mask held the consciousness of Momin himself – a Sith Lord long dead, whose obsession with creation and destruction had made him both feared and forgotten.
Meeting a Ghost in the Mask
Inside a dark cave on Mustafar, Vader lifted the mask from the body of a dead officer. He felt the dark power inside it, swirling like smoke. With the Force, he levitated the mask and demanded answers.
“What are you?” Vader asked.
“I am Momin,”
the mask answered as two crimson lights flared in its eye sockets.
The entity began telling his story. Momin spoke of his past — a twisted artist who believed that true creation must make others feel pain and fear.
“If people feel nothing when encountering what you’ve made,” he said, “then you have created nothing.”
He described how the Jedi once stopped his greatest work — a plan to trap an entire city in frozen terror by halting time itself. The attempt ended in failure, and the unleashed dark energy consumed his body, leaving only his spirit sealed inside the mask. Yet even that, he said, was a lesson:
“Failure is an excellent teacher. The dark side is hungry. If you do not feed it… it will feed on you.”
The mask pulsed with power, and Vader felt the weight of Momin’s will pressing against his own.
Vader Wears the Mask
Intrigued and tempted, Vader brought the mask closer. He hesitated for a moment — even he could sense the danger of letting something like this into his mind. But he needed answers, and more importantly, he needed results. Brenne’s fortress plans had failed. Momin claimed he could build something worthy of the dark side itself.
So Vader did something he rarely did: he took a risk.
The mask slid over his helmet. Darkness swallowed his senses as the presence of Momin flooded in — cold, calculating, and eager. Through Vader’s own eyes, Momin continued his story, now whispering directly into his mind.
“The Force is my audience. The only one worth impressing,” Momin said. “If I can create something worthy of it, then I might become worthy myself.”
Images flashed in Vader’s vision — cities burning, people screaming, all transformed into a frozen monument to the dark side. Then the mask glowed with blinding red light and Vader staggered. He ripped it off and hurled it against the cave wall. The voice fell silent.
A Pact Forged in the Dark
Vader might have rejected the mask in that moment, but he wasn’t done with Momin. He soon forced the artifact onto a Mustafarian villager, giving the ancient Sith a new body to inhabit. The two spoke again, this time as uneasy partners.
“You created this design, in your last body. Tell me what it is.” Vader demanded.
“The door to the dark side is locked,” Momin replied. “Your beloved waits for you there, Vader. Beyond the door. My fortress will tune the energies of the locus. It is your first step toward using the power of the dark side to pierce the veil of time, between life and death. You will see her aga-”
“I have been lied to about the dark side’s ability to prevent death before. Do not offer me things you cannot provide.”
Vader stopped and Force-choked Momin right there.
“I do not lie,” Momin answered. “I only want another chance to create. This time, it could be perfect.”
Vader stared at the figure before him — part Sith Lord, part ghost — and gave his answer.
“Very well. But if you betray me, you will suffer.”
“Suffer. How could I suffer more than I already do?” Momin said quietly. “What purer agony for the artist than to be forgotten?”
The Beginning of a Masterpiece
With that, their dark collaboration began. Momin sketched out the designs for Fortress Vader, a structure meant to channel Mustafar’s chaotic energy into a single, focused purpose. For Momin, it was a chance to prove himself to the Force one last time. For Vader, it was a potential path to the impossible — the power to reach across the boundary of life and death and touch the memory of Padmé Amidala.
At the heart of it all was that mask — an artifact of madness and ambition, once worn by one of the most feared Sith of the ancient age, now placed over the face of another.
In that cave, surrounded by fire and shadow, Darth Vader and Darth Momin began shaping something together.
“You have given me a wondrous opportunity, Lord Vader,” Momin said, his voice echoing from within his new host. “I will not throw that away. This will be my masterpiece.”
