Ned POV
The Sith mistook silence for damage.
That was reasonable. Men who strike from orbit often believe the ground afterward belongs to physics. They imagine broken communications mean broken will, that ruined structures mean ruined resistance, that a target which no longer speaks has been reduced to something waiting to be collected.
Nereth did not speak for more than a day.
But silence is not always absence.
Sometimes it is a throat closing around a scream so old it has not yet decided whether it wants to become language or law.
We spent the first hours carrying the living.
Omega moved through ash with frightening gentleness. She bound wounds, lifted children, killed one Sith scout-droid with a kitchen knife and went back to holding pressure on an Estras man's opened side as if the interruption had been rude weather. The locals began looking at her differently that day. Not worship. Not yet. Something simpler and more dangerous: the recognition that mercy can stand inside horror without asking permission from it.
Angel of White began there, perhaps.
Not as title.
As posture.
Renn returned near dusk with thirty-two living civilians from the south line and the child I had ordered kept beyond the outer ridge. He looked older than the morning had any right to make him. Soot had turned one side of his face gray. His hands shook only when no one was asking them to work.
"The outer path held," he said.
"Good."
"No," he answered. "It held for some."
I had no answer worthy of him.
He looked toward the tower, toward the broken upper line where smoke still moved out of rooms he had known as ordinary.
"What now?"
What now.
The question by which all ages are built poorly.
Order answered before I could.
"Incoming ground team. Ten signatures. High Force density. Descent vector from orbit. Capture pattern."
Capture.
Always capture.
As if a word written in a command file could make reality consent to the hand reaching for it.
Omega heard the change in my breathing and turned.
"Ned."
"Take the wounded below."
"No."
"Omega."
"Do not speak to me as if I am one of the doors you can close."
That almost broke me.
Not because she defied me. Because she knew exactly where the old instinct had moved: protect by isolation, preserve by distance, carry the impossible alone and call the loneliness responsibility.
"I need you alive," I said.
"Then do not become someone I cannot return to."
The ten landed beyond the shattered irrigation wall.
I felt them before I saw them. Old Sith power. Rank. Hunger. The confidence of men sent to secure a damaged miracle. They came with names, no doubt. Schools. Titles. Blood histories. Private cruelties inherited and improved. The sort of men other Sith lowered voices around and lesser worlds called nightmare because language becomes provincial in the face of trained power.
They found the first body at the wall.
One of their own, dead from the first wave's scouting pattern, cut in half by a tower defense that had fired after being told by physics it was no longer attached to a functioning grid.
That unsettled them.
Good.
I went to meet them without armor at first.
I wanted that remembered. Not because it makes me noble. Because even then some final piece of the man who had mended fences believed war should not be given ceremony too quickly.
The first Sith saw me crossing the ash and smiled.
"Subject alive."
Subject.
I killed him with the broken irrigation water.
Not dramatically. I pulled the suspended stream through his lungs before he finished lifting a hand. He folded around the failure of breath and struck the mud face-first.
The others understood then that the report had been inaccurate in category.
They attacked.
The second died against the wall he tried to use for cover.
The third lasted longest because fear made him honest.
The fourth tried persuasion.
The fifth tried lightning.
The sixth ran.
I let him reach the lower path before the Force took his legs from under him and returned him across the stones with enough violence to teach the others that distance had resigned its usefulness.
After that, counting became meaningless.
I remember fragments. Red blades in smoke. My hand closing. Stone moving. One woman whispering an old Sith prayer not to be spared, but to be seen dying properly. I gave her that much. One lord trying to speak Varis's name as leverage. I took his tongue first, which was petty.
Yes.
Petty.
Let the record remain honest.
Between them, foresight opened again.
Korriban under stormlight.
Armor striking stone as Sith knelt.
A train crossing desert before dawn.
A Night's head wrapped in oilcloth.
Varis carrying a wounded young man through red-gold sand.
Coruscant burning beneath moons large enough to become weather.
The Force gathering around Elliot like memory.
I did not know him yet.
Some part of me did.
"Your foresight is increasing," Order said.
Her voice came through three damaged channels at once.
"Because more data has collapsed into lived pattern."
"Do not make this sound clean."
"It is not clean."
"Good."
When the last Sith died, no victory call went upward.
No request for reinforcement.
No scream.
Only silence.
I stood among them until the ash settled on my shoulders. Then I went back into the broken tower and opened the chamber I had not wished to need.
The armor waited where I had left it years before.
Black.
Not ceremonial. Not royal. It had been built for survival under impossible load, for field control, for war I had told myself I would never choose unless every other answer died first.
Every other answer had not died.
That was the horror.
Only enough had died to make the armor reasonable.
I put it on.
Or perhaps I stopped pretending I had not been building it for this branch all along.
Above Nereth, the Sith waited for ten voices that never returned.
Below, the quiet deepened.
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