The void beyond the Night Buzzard's viewport gapes, a Sarlacc's maw with stars choked out behind its teeth, but it doesn't dim the heat in my gut. Lysara's flimsi scrawl rides in my satchel beside Kalia's holo-image, the edges worn soft from my thumb tracing them in the dark. Ushar's relic hangs silent from the front viewport, its twisted metal nicking my glove when I reach for it, no ghosts muttering today. The cockpit vibrates around me, a warlord's den rebuilt from the inside out. Old Knights of Ren alloy buffed to a smuggler's gleam, Zakuulan crystal conduits weaving beneath Je'daii runes that shimmer, myrkr fog, chanting the Code in frequencies I feel more than hear. No dark, no light, just the kriffin' Force. The seat groans under twenty-five kilos of phrik and obsidian, crimson rune slashing the chest plate, catching the readouts' glow. Spice-mist wafts from the refreshers, sharp enough to sting my sinuses through the helm's filters. The Tho Yor Nexus console sputters at the nav station, its Force-sensitive systems hazed with static, Je'daii engineering still kath-hound rough. My mask snarls low against my jaw, but my eyes blaze with words I've read so many times the ink should be worn through. Find us on Zehara, hidin' from this galaxy's filth.
Zeht sprawls at the co-pilot's station, her red Zabrak skin stark against the cockpit's polish, black tattoos curling across every visible inch of her in predator coils. Her cortosis-laced armor fits lean, a single Je'daii rune etched at the sternum, the rest of her rank earned through blood rather than ceremony. As my Sentinel of the Flame she forges initiates into weapons at Fortress Vader's Training Grounds, but here she's my blood, my steel. Her yellow eyes, keen as a targeting reticle, scour the Zakuulan holo-display, its purple-red haze mapping Zehara. A hundred-kilometer stray rock with no orbit, its industrial sprawl a tangle of docks, smelters, and tunnels crammed with exiles, smugglers, droid-riggers, the galaxy's castoffs scraped together on a rock nobody wanted. Her burned forearm, seared by Mustafar's forge-glow years ago, catches the sconce light as she adjusts a readout. Astra's holo-orb flickers at the console's edge, tethered to the Tho Yor Nexus, prototype glitches stuttering like a droid on bad power cells. "ETA to Zehara, twelve standard hours. Long-range sensors detecting encrypted comms noise. Population estimate, fifty thousand, mostly rogue. Stealth approach recommended." The VI's voice slices through recycled air, the Zakuulan thrusters' vibration humming up through the deck plates like a forge tremor.
As Revan's Sentinel of Fire I've led sixty-one blades, Knights of Revan, Pyraeth's Chosen, through relic raids and bloodbaths, carving trails from Lehon's ruins to Nar Shaddaa's gutters. But this hunt, blessed by Revan's nod, isn't for the Order. It's for Lysara's scent, for Kalia's fire. The scrawl claws through my mind. Kalia, fierce, stubborn like you. Her eyes, my eyes, glaring from that holo-image. My gnarled hand shakes against the armrest, scarred from slaughters in the Unknown Regions, and something louder than any engine thrums through my chest, a pressure that sits behind my ribs and won't let me breathe right. Zeht's fingers halt on the display. Her voice carries the warmth of a decade's worth of shared blood, old-growth steady under the cockpit's vibration. "We'll hunt 'em down, Vicrul. No secret hides from us for too long. From relics to ghosts." Her words anchor me, our truth forged in years of watching each other's backs through every hell the galaxy could throw. I stalk to the holo-table, its projection of Zehara's grid, docks and vents and a warren, whetting the edge I carry in place of calm. My steps clang on the cortosis-plated deck, the Night Buzzard's scars, Exegol's soot, Mustafar's molten kiss, fused with mine.
Zeht rises and follows, stare locking with mine as she steps close enough that her burned forearm glows under the sconces, a ritual brand. Her voice dips, thick with a pride she's earned blade by blade. "I'm honored you chose me for this, my Sentinel. Few would trust their squire, Lysara, Kalia, all of it, with something that cuts so deep." The words strike through my armor better than any plasma bolt, echoing the flimsi in my satchel, the scarred forearm a map of every vow she's kept when she didn't have to. "You ain't just another soldier, Zeht. You've carved your kriffin' place to be right here by my side out of nothing." The Night Buzzard's pulse surges as Zehara's shadow swells in the viewport, and her stare holds mine, and the memory hits like a concussion wave. A dreadnought's hall. Six squires swearing blood under Kylo's glare. It swallows me whole.
The dreadnought's vibration crawled through my boots and into my teeth, a low growl that never stopped, the flagship's heartbeat measured in megatons. I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with my brothers in a cavernous hall where crimson torchlight threw our shadows thirty meters up rune-carved walls. The air tasted of oil and smoke, thick enough to chew, coating the back of my throat with the flavor of war machinery running hot. Kylo Ren loomed on his dais, a storm wrapped in black robes, mask's red glow bleeding into the gloom. His hand rested on his saber's hilt, fingers twitching with a predator's restlessness that never fully settled. The other Knights, Cardo, Ushar, Trudgen, Kuruk, Ap'lek, stood in a semicircle, armor glinting under torchfire, each a reaper in their own right. We watched the squires, paired two per Knight, ready to spill blood for the Ren. The ritual circle, a ten-meter scar of alloy pocked with soot and old blood, waited at the hall's center. Only one would rise per Knight. The other would rot where they fell. An overseer, some hooded cultist dragged up from Exegol's depths, chanted rites that twisted my gut with their cadence. First Order officers lined the walls, silent and cold. Torchlight flickered across the squires' weapons, vibro-blades and axes gleaming. My reaper's eye sifted them for steel or fodder.
Kylo's voice cut through, distorted by the vocoder, a snarl laced with venom and something beneath it, a tremble he couldn't quite kill. "This galaxy's weak, choked by Jedi lies and Sith rot. The Ren'll burn it clean. Prove you're worth my shadow, or you'll be buried where you stand." The words snapped like a slaver's whip. But a pause hung after them, pressing as a blast door, and I caught the tilt of his mask, the way his hand clenched the hilt, staring through all of us at ghosts only he could see. Snoke's chains. The light's whisper. Gnawing at him even here.
The duels kicked off. Cardo's pair hit with frigate force, the human's blade ripping through the Twi'lek's gut in a hot sheet of blood, her scream swallowed by the dreadnought's pulse before it finished leaving her mouth. Ushar's Rodians traded knives in a brutal circle until one crumpled with a blade lodged between ribs, green ichor pooling around the hilt. Trudgen's pair hacked with axes until a skull split under a wet crunch that echoed off every wall. Kuruk's and Ap'lek's squires followed with cold precision, throats opened, ribs punctured, bodies dropping. The circle's soot drank blood. The air choked with iron, sweat, and the particular silence of young people dying for someone else's creed.
Zeht knelt at the circle's edge, her red skin blazing under the torches, black tattoos coiling across every surface of her arms and neck. Her twin vibro-axes, fresh from some Dathomir forge, gleamed with edges that could split a hair lengthwise. At twenty she was wiry and unscarred, gaze burning behind a focus that hadn't learned fear yet, horned scalp bare in the crimson glow. A Dathomir outcast whose fire I recognized because it burned the same way Lysara's would, years later, in a booth on Nar Shaddaa when a DL-44 pressed into my kidney taught me what nerve looked like. Zeht's opponent, a human male broad as a Gamorrean, gripped a vibro-sword and sneered with a Corellian thug's confidence, her grave already measured in his eyes. The overseer's chant peaked, guttural and grinding, and Zeht launched.
Her axes spun, a storm of edges. The human's sword slashed for her throat, missing by a centimeter, displaced air buzzing past my mask. She countered low, right axe catching his thigh, blood spraying in a hot arc that spattered my boots. He roared, stumbled, swung high to cleave her skull. Zeht ducked, rolled right, hooked his blade with the left haft, metal screeching loud enough to set my teeth grinding. She sprang up, horns glinting, and drove the right blade into his shoulder. Bone cracked. Blood gushed. He swung wild, sword grazing her bicep, a shallow cut leaking red down her arm, her snarl drowning the wound's sting before it registered. She pivoted, boots grinding ash, and tackled him. Her wiry frame slammed his bulk to the floor with a thud that bounced off every wall in the hall. Left axe pinned his sword arm, blade biting flesh. Right axe hovered at his throat, blood dripping from its edge.
The hall froze. Torches crackled. The overseer's chant hung in the air like smoke refusing to clear. Every other squire had killed fast, greedy, bodies piled without ceremony or thought. But Zeht paused. Her yellow eyes found mine through the crowd of Knights, fierce and deliberate and burning with something that had nothing to do with the fight she'd just won. She dropped to one knee, axes crossed over her chest, tattoos stark in crimson light.
No other squire had dared. Their kills were blood sprayed without thought, trophies grabbed and waved. Zeht's kneel was something else entirely. A blade of loyalty offered, not demanded. Forged in Dathomir's fire, aimed at my shadow. My helm growled. I stepped forward, steps crunching cinders, the circle's blood slick beneath my soles, and gave a slow nod.
"End him. Claim your place in the Ren."
She rose. Her right blade fell in a clean arc, cleaving neck, blood and sinew splattering the floor, the wet finality of a blast door sealing. The stench of iron choked the hall. The Knights stirred. Ushar grunted low. Cardo's cannon clanked. Kuruk gave nothing. The officers' stares flickered between fear and awe, their cold discipline cracking just enough to show the humans underneath. Zeht stood, axes dripping, breath ragged but steady, her gaze fixed on me with a fire no amount of blood could douse.
Kylo's hand twitched on the hilt. His mask tilted toward her kneel, vocoder spitting a sharp grunt before the words came. "Bound by blood. Rise now for the Ren now runs in your veins." His voice cracked on the last syllable, a pause hanging dense with Snoke's shadow, his gaze lingering on the kneel as if it stirred something he'd been trying to bury deep enough to forget. The overseer's chant faded. The ritual circle lay quiet, a graveyard of six corpses, surviving squires blood-soaked and breathing.
Zeht's voice cuts through orbital static, steady as her axes. "This is Night Buzzard. Requesting docking clearance." A gruff reply crackles back, could be a droid, could be a spice-runner having the worst shift of his life. "State your purpose." Zeht's jaw tightens, her reply a blade with no sheath. "Je'daii business." A pause stretches long enough for my hand to twitch toward the scythe, fingers wrapping the haft before the clearance snaps through. "Bay 7, Night Buzzard."
Astra's orb flickers, GEMINI sync lag stuttering through the ship's pulse. "Docking sequence initiated. Bay 7 coordinates locked. Low gravity detected, magnetic boots advised." The Night Buzzard glides into the port, rusted cranes clawing at void in skeletal angles outside the viewport, slag vents belching dock vapor that catches the running lights. The ship settles with a soft thud, thrusters dying to silence. We rise, armor clanging on the deck, and make our way aft to the armory. A compact chamber of alloy-plated racks. My vibro-scythe gleams under the low light, one and a half meters of phrik and obsidian, its ultrasonic thrum a heartbeat I've carried through every fight since Ren first put it in my hands. Zeht's axes rest beside it, notched edges telling stories in chipped metal. A display whirs to life, projecting Zehara's tunnel grid in glowing lines, corridors sprawling beneath the asteroid's crust, veins in a body built for suffering.
Silence falls between us. Heavy. Zeht's hand pauses on the left haft, her gaze flickering in a way I haven't seen from her before, a calculation running behind that fierce stare that has nothing to do with combat readiness. She knows this hunt could shift everything, could drag me out of the Order or bury me deeper in it. I meet her eyes, helm growling low. "Ready to meet what's out there, Zeht?" She nods, her voice a low rumble that carries more than the words contain. "Always, my Sentinel." The silence lingers a beat longer, a blade's edge between us, before we strap on gear and let the moment go like a ship jumping to lightspeed.
We descend via a rattling elevator, magnetic boots gripping ferrocrete grates as Zehara swallows us whole. The air hits first. Sulfur and machine oil, grit on my tongue, dock vapor sitting heavy in my lungs with the sour bite of chemical-soaked cloth. Then the temperature, oppressive warmth bleeding through tunnel walls from distant smelters, turning my armor's underlayer damp against my skin. Flickering lights string along narrow passages, one and a half meters wide, two meters high, walls scarred from decades of mining tools and fists and the particular desperation of people living underground on a rock nobody wanted. Stalls line the corridors, smugglers hawking blasters and scavenged droid parts, their voices a tangle of Basic, Huttese, and something guttural I can't place. Rodians barter over dented crates. Twi'leks whisper in shadowed alcoves. Scrappers clank past with optics glowing red, scanning for anything worth stripping. Holographic signs buzz overhead, advertising cantinas and black-market mods.
The low gravity changes everything. Every step is deliberate, magnetic soles locking and releasing with a rhythmic thunk that becomes the pulse of movement itself. My armor floats between footfalls, phrik lifting off my frame for a half-second before the boots pull me back down, throwing off the balance I've built into decades of carrying the scythe. The weapon shifts on my back, lighter than it should be, its familiar weight turned strange by the gravity's absence. We move single-file through the throng, Zeht's eyes scanning every face, every shadow, axes ready. The tunnels twist and branch, forge-heat bleeding through walls in waves that hit my exposed jaw beneath the helm. We pass a mag-lev platform, its tracks humming beneath a rusted sign, and weave through a crowded passage, exiles jostling, a Devaronian barking at a protocol droid over a bad deal. My Force sense tingles, a prickle running the length of my spine a slow-drawn blade along skin. I glance at Zeht. Her nod is sharp. She feels it too.
We turn down a narrow alley, walls closing in tight, dim light casting long shadows across the grates. The crowd's noise fades to a murmur behind us, the passage stretching ahead, empty save for the hum of a distant vent.
No ambush. No blaster fire.
Then the world comes apart.
The explosion tears through the alley's far end, a concussive wall of heat and shrapnel that lifts me off my magnetic soles and slams me backward through air that has no right to be this thin. Ferrocrete shards scream past my mask. Smoke chokes everything to black. And the sound, the particular crack and roar of a structure collapsing around my body, splits open something older. Deeper. A citadel floor shaking beneath my boots, ash in my throat, a blue saber burning through the dark.
Scorched dust choked my throat, thick as the worst sandstorm Krynnar ever threw at me, and the Sith Citadel's cavernous belly spun around my skull. Twisted spires jutted through crackling lightning that clawed down from shattered skylights, the air electric and tasting of ozone and ancient death. My vibro-scythe had skittered across the floor, its old blade humming a dying whine somewhere in the chaos, lost in rubble. My Knight of Ren armor creaked as I gasped, my shoulder screaming where phantom fire lived from Elphrona's groove, still scarred, always burning when something bigger than me showed its teeth. Kylo Ren stood close, robes tattered, face bare, eyes burning with a fire I didn't recognize as anything I'd seen him carry before. No saber in his grip. Just hands raised, the Force rippling outward in visible waves, holding my brothers at bay.
The ground shook, the Resistance and the Final Order tearing the sky apart above us, blaster fire and engine screams seeping through rune-scarred walls. My faceplate growled, muffling ragged breath. My brothers, Cardo, Ushar, Trudgen, Kuruk, Ap'lek, closed in around him, a tight ring, weapons flashing in the citadel's fractured glow. Our squires hung back, six of them, blades and spears twitching with the eagerness of people who didn't yet know what dying looked like up close.
I clawed upright, greaves grinding ash, vision swimming. Kylo's hands dropped and a blue saber blazed into his grip, conjured from nothing I could understand, its hum a steady roar that cut through every other sound in the chamber. The blade's glow lit the space with a color I'd never seen him carry. Steady. Clean. Nothing like the spitting red he'd wielded as our master. His stance shifted, shoulders squared, legs braced. A warrior's form built for ending things.
Cardo charged first. His arm cannon blasted plasma that scorched the air white. Kylo's saber flicked, deflecting bolts, then slashed across Cardo's chest in a single stroke, carving a deep smoking gash through armor and flesh, the reek of charred meat filling the space between one heartbeat and the next. Cardo hit the floor, cannon clanking dead on stone. Ushar roared from the flank, vibro-club swinging with enough force to buckle a blast door. Kylo pivoted and the blue blade arced upward, slicing clean through neck, the head rolling and steaming, stump cauterized before the body understood it was finished. Trudgen charged through the gap, vibro-blade sparking against the floor. Kylo's Force wave hurled him into an alcove, ribs snapping with dry-kindling cracks, and the saber thrust followed, piercing heart, a scorched hole smoking in his chest as he slumped. Kuruk fired from a high ledge, rifle bolts grazing Kylo's arm, blood trickling down his sleeve. Kylo spun, saber screaming against the incoming fire, then swept wide, opening Kuruk from hip to shoulder, the body folding and dropping. Ap'lek's vibro-axe swung close enough to graze robes, but Kylo ducked beneath the arc and took both legs at the knees, stumps charred, the scream cut short by the fall.
The squires rushed in. Blades and spears flailing, reckless and brave and already dead. A Twi'lek squire's vibro-blade grazed Kylo's thigh, drawing blood, before the saber took her throat. A human's spear missed his chest by a breath, and the blue blade punched through sternum. Three more charged and Kylo's saber danced through them, splitting, opening, ending, each death a half-second of plasma and wet finality. Their bodies piled at the chamber's center. I'd trained some of them. Knew their names.
I staggered up, scythe heavy in my grip, its weight dragging, an anchor tied to every year I'd spent believing this man deserved my loyalty. I swung at Kylo, close enough to feel the saber's heat on my face, aiming for his ribs with everything I had left. He parried. The blue glow melted my scythe's haft where it made contact, alloy buckling and screaming against plasma it was never built to resist. His thrust came fast, piercing my shoulder, the exact spot where Luke's scar sat, burning through bone and memory in a layered wound that fused two betrayals into the same flesh. I collapsed, ash filling my mouth, mask dimming. Kylo's gaze slid past me. Cold. Thinking me done. Another fool reaped.
My vision pulsed black. Short at first, then longer.
Zeht staggered across the chamber. Blood dripped from a charred gash across her ribs where Kylo's saber had caught her, her lighter armor no match for the blade's edge. Red skin gone pale, yellow eyes dim but fierce, her chipped vibro-axes dragging, one slung, the other barely gripped in a hand running on nerve alone. His Force wave had hurled her against a spire, cracking ribs that were still breaking with every breath she took. Near death, her Dathomirian nerve burned anyway, instincts driving her forward when her body should have quit. She hurled a chunk of rubble at Kylo with a Force push that was more willpower than talent, forcing him to duck, his saber slashing empty air. She crawled through cinders and debris, hafts clanking, blood trailing behind her, and reached me. Her bloodied hands grabbed my arm with a grip strong enough to drag a dead man back from the pit.
"My Knight hold on, or we're sithspawn fodder!"
My vision went.
A crackle tears through the black haze in my skull, a sound seared into my bones from another lifetime. My eyes flutter. Zehara's alley swims back, flickering lights and smoke, sulfur choking me. Pain claws my shoulder, the explosion's heat still singing through my armor. I'm slumped against the corridor wall, its scarred surface cold through my back plate despite the forge-heat pressing from deeper in the rock. The alley stretches ahead, a narrow gut of shattered crates and twisted metal. Distant smelters roar somewhere in the asteroid, their vibration humming through the deck beneath me. My scythe lies a step away, phrik blade humming its killing song, calling me to rise.
My head swims. The crackle echoes. I blink, vision sharpening, and I see it.
A crimson blade, alive and spitting, vented quillons flaring in the settling dust. Kylo's crossguard saber. I'd know that sound anywhere, the same unstable shriek that cut through my brothers on Exegol, but the hand gripping the hilt belongs to someone else. A gaunt figure in tattered black robes, geometric scars carved into a pallid face in deliberate Sith patterns, yellow eyes glowing beneath a ragged hood with burst blood vessels threading the sclera. Darth Xytherion. A Sith Eternal remnant I'd glimpsed in the Ren days, one of the rats that crawled out of Exegol's collapse. How he got Kylo's blade is a question for another time. Right now the blade is here, and so is he.
Zeht lies a pace off. Her reinforced armor dented, blood trickling from cuts on her arm, ribs cracked from the blast. Her gaze flickers, fierce but fading, chipped blades scattered in the rubble, notched edges catching what little light the tunnel still has. Her red skin is pale beneath the tattoos, wrong in a way that makes my gut clench harder than the pain.
The tunnel walls press close. My shoulder throbs. Lysara's note burns in my satchel, her scent and Kalia's eyes a warmth keeping me upright when my body wants to quit. Zeht shifts, her hand twitching toward a haft, her gaze locked on Xytherion, defiance burning through wounds that should have put her down. I try to rise, soles skidding on rubble in the low gravity, limbs heavy with concussion's fog.
Xytherion's saber arcs. The crossguard's crackle fills the tunnel, aimed at Zeht's throat. I lunge, a desperate scramble, boots grinding debris, gravity too light, my hands grabbing air instead of weapon.
Too slow, too kriffin' slow.
The blade slices clean. Cauterized, charred flesh steaming in the thin air. In Zehara's lightfall, Zeht's head doesn't drop. It turns through the sulfur grit in a slow, obscene arc, horned scalp catching the passage's dim spill, her yellow eyes frozen open in a final defiance that will never finish what it started. Her body crumples, boots still locked to the grate by magnetic soles, torso folding forward after the one thing that kept her in the fight is gone. Her axes clatter in the silence, the sound bouncing off corridor walls and coming back smaller each time until it disappears.
The stench of burned flesh fills the tunnel. Exegol's stink. Every field I've ever walked away from wearing the dead on my armor.
"ZEHT!"
The sound tears out of me raw, ripping through the faceplate and bouncing off every surface until the corridor rings with it. My hands ball into fists. The dark side surges through my veins, my vision narrowing to the crimson blade and the thing holding it. Every muscle in my body wants to let the darkness take me completely, to become the reaper and harvest this Sith until there's nothing left but ash and the echo of screaming.
The Code whispers. No dark, no light. Just the Force.
My hand snaps out and the Force yanks my scythe to my grip, phrik blade humming its killing song. I swing, close enough to taste Xytherion's rancid sweat on the displaced air, aiming for his chest with everything grief can sharpen into a weapon. He parries, the crossguard's quillon vents grazing my armor, scorching a black mark into the phrik, plasma heat biting through the plate. Sparks scatter. I pivot, treads grinding a shattered crate, wreckage lifting and spinning around my ankles in the low gravity, and thrust at his flank. The scythe splits a wall panel, sparks hissing, but he twists clear. His saber meets my blade, phrik holding where lesser metal would have melted, the screech of contact filling the passage like a ship tearing apart at the seams. He counters with a Force push that lifts me off my boots and grinds me against the wall, ribs creaking, breath gone, the weak pull turning the impact into a slow compression that hurts worse for how long it takes to end. His Force pull rips the scythe from my hands, yanking it into his grip, the hum mocking me as it spins in fingers that don't deserve to touch it.
Xytherion's laugh cuts through the passage, smooth and rehearsed, cruelty worn so comfortable it sounds conversational. "Fell for that sleemo's note, eh, Reaper? You Knights were always a dumb lot. The Je'daii'll kneel to the Sith Eternal with their General now brought to heel." Each word shaped to cut deeper than plasma ever could.
Zeht's body lies still at the edge of my vision. Her blades silent. Her fire gone. My jaw locks. My fists clench, the corridor's heat pressing through my gloves, and the Code rises through the dark like a hand pulling me up from underwater. Not killing the grief. Cutting through it without dulling it. Balance, sharp and clear, grief and purpose fused into the same blade. I rise, treads clanking on the deck, helm growling, and unleash a Force shockwave that tears through the corridor. Wall panels buckle, debris spirals in the weak pull like a slow-motion detonation, and Xytherion stumbles. The crossguard saber and my scythe clatter from his hands, spinning away through the sulfur grit. Another wave slams out, pinning him to the wall, the Force grinding him flat, robes flapping, breath a ragged gasp, the smoothness cracking out of his voice and leaving something small and thin underneath.
I stalk forward, lights casting long shadows across my armor. My voice comes out low, a growl filtered through grief that hasn't found its shape yet. "Where's my child and her mother?"
Xytherion's laugh cackles again, thin now, desperate, the sound of a man who planned everything except what happens when the trap catches something bigger than the cage was built for. "That nightflower was a wild kriffin' ride, and that squirt of hers fetched a nice price when we pawned them both off on Hutt slavers."
Silence. My silence. The reaper's quiet before the harvest. I watch his eyes, Sith-yellow with broken veins threading the whites, and I see the exact moment he understands that his last words should have been different. His laugh dies to a whimper, his sneer collapsing as the glow of the distant fire paints my mask.
I flick my wrist. The Force releases its grip. Xytherion drops through Zehara's lightfall, slow, robes billowing, feet a pace from the floor. Mid-fall, I snap my hand out and the Force yanks Kylo's crossguard saber from the rubble. The hilt slaps into my palm, heavy, blackened beskar warm against my glove. I know this weapon. I know the sound it makes. I heard it when it killed Cardo. Ushar. Trudgen. Kuruk. Ap'lek. I heard it when it punched through my shoulder on the same scar Luke gave me twenty years before. I ignite it.
The red blade cracks to life, unstable kyber spitting fury through the vented quillons, and the passage fills with a scream that's been waiting years to get out.
I lunge, boots crunching debris, and thrust the saber through Xytherion's heart. Plasma sears, cauterizes, pins him to the corridor wall with a shriek of metal and flesh. His body jerks. Eyes wide. His dying breath comes out in a wet inward collapse, and I hold the thrust, watching the light drain from those yellow eyes with a patience I learned from the scythe but perfected in this moment. The last soul I'll take for vengeance, not balance.
I twist the hilt. Deactivate. The crackle fades and Xytherion's body slumps to the deck, robes tangling in rubble. The tunnel falls quiet save for the distant roar of smelters and the faint buzz of a holographic sign still trying to sell something to the dead.
I stare at the saber in my hand. Kylo's weapon. The blade that killed my brothers. The blade that scarred my shoulder twice, once through Luke's legacy and once through Kylo's betrayal, layered wounds in the same flesh. Now mine. My gaze shifts to the scythe lying in the wreckage, phrik glinting, the weapon that's been my identity since Ren first pressed it into my hands on a day when I still thought loyalty was something you gave to power, not people. Then back to the saber, heavy with everything it's taken and everything I'm about to take back.
Zeht's frozen eyes burn in my mind. Her loyalty, a forge-glow that matched Lysara's spark and Kalia's unnamed blaze, snuffed in a corridor on a rock that doesn't deserve to hold her blood. The Code rises, a torch in the darkness, and I recite it low and guttural, the words tasting of smoke and iron and the particular grief of losing someone who chose you when they didn't have to.
"I am the holder of the torch, lighting the way. I am the keeper of the flame, soldier of balance. I am a guardian of duality. I am Je'daii."
The saber ignites one more time, red blade crackling, quillons venting, claimed in blood and fire. Its unstable kyber sings the duality I carry, the rage and the restraint, the dark and the light, the reaper and the man beneath the mask who is still learning what it costs to love things in a galaxy that charges interest on every attachment.
I lower the blade. Turn. The passage's haze swallows the light as the saber fades. I mutter the promise to the dark, to Zeht's body behind me, to the note in my satchel, to a daughter I've never met and a woman whose fire I'll chase to the edge of everything.
"I'll find you two, to the ends of the galaxy. I will not rest."
THE END