The chamber was too large for one person. Its vaulted stone arches, ribbed in shadows that never seemed to yield to flame or artificial light, carried a hollow echo that made every movement sound as though it belonged to someone else. A footstep, a breath, the slow swirl of wine in a cup—everything was magnified and yet emptied, each sound swallowed whole by Malachor's ancient void. Darth Virelia sat on the throne she had claimed months ago, perhaps longer, though time had become an abstraction she no longer trusted. Malachor had a way of dissolving it, stripping away the markers of days and weeks until life became little more than a series of indistinct nights.
She leaned back in the blackened seat, its jagged design more suited for intimidation than comfort, and stared into the abyss of her own thoughts. Exile, she had once believed, was liberation. When she was cast from the Sith Order—banished not because she lacked power, but because she would not bow to their decayed whims—she told herself she had won. She had laughed in the face of their mock power, spat on their promises of unity, turned her back with the haughty pride of one convinced the galaxy itself would bend in time to her will. Yet here, now, on the forsaken world of Malachor, the truth had carved itself into her like a wound that never closed.
She had accomplished nothing.
The thought was not dramatic, nor even sharp. It was simply heavy. A plain, unadorned statement that crushed her ribs inward each time it rose. How many nights had she lingered here, drifting from chamber to chamber of the ruined fortress, drinking until her mind could no longer hold onto its own bitterness? How many days had been spent staring at the obsidian landscape beyond her windows, searching for visions in the storm that never came? Virelia, Lady of Nothing. A sovereign of dust and shadows, with no court to hear her decrees, no armies to summon, no empire to mold in her hands.
The throne beneath her was supposed to mean something. When she first claimed it, dragging it from the collapsed temple halls into this chamber, she thought it would be a symbol—a reminder of her inevitability, a declaration to the galaxy that exile did not mean defeat. But as the weeks bled into months, and the months into a haze without distinction, the throne had become something else entirely. A mirror. A cruel reflection of the young woman she had once been, seated on another throne of stone and ruin far from here, on Rakata Prime.
The memory was sharp in places, blurred in others. She remembered the jungle air, the sound of insects swarming in the endless heat, the ancient machines humming beneath the earth. She remembered the silence of being believed dead—her name stricken from the rolls of both Jedi and Sith. The galaxy had moved on without her, and she was left to haunt the ruins like a ghost. She remembered how it ended, too. How Valery Noble, Grandmaster of the Jedi Order, had stood before her in the Archives on Coruscant, lightsaber piercing cleanly through her heart. She remembered the heat, the smell, the world dimming to nothing. And yet she had survived, though she never truly understood how. Survival had felt like a punishment then, not a gift. She was eighteen, maybe nineteen, when she staggered out of that grave. Now she was twenty-one, and it seemed nothing had changed.
She lifted the chalice again, fingers trembling slightly with the weight of it. The wine was bitter, far too old, but she drank anyway. It burned her throat, warming her for an instant before collapsing into the same hollow cold. She could not remember when drinking had become routine again. At first it had been indulgence, something licentious to pass the time in her exile, to remind her of her youth. Then it had been ritual, the kind of rite that made the hours blur. Now it was necessity. She drank not for pleasure, not even for escape, but simply because the silence was unbearable without the fog.
There was nothing left to distract her from the litany of her failures. Once she had been called prodigy, her name whispered with promise. Once she had been feared, derided, spat upon in the same breath by those who envied her defiance. Once she had been told she would change everything. And yet, what had she changed? What had she shaped, save for her own ruin?
Malachor was supposed to be different. When she came here, she told herself this would be her crucible. She would build something from the ashes, carve an empire where no one else dared to stand. The shadows of the past would be her allies; the echoes of the dead would whisper her name. Instead, all Malachor had given her was silence. The ghosts here did not speak. They only watched. And the longer she remained, the more she began to feel as though she were one of them—another specter in the endless dark, pacing halls that remembered better days.
The storm outside howled, slamming against the chamber walls like waves of ash and stone. She wondered if this was all she would ever know now. A throne without a kingdom. A name without weight. A life without consequence. She had fled the Order's decay, survived the Jedi's blade, endured exile, outlived betrayal—and yet she was back where she started. Alone. Wandering through the ruins of a life that had never taken shape.
Virelia's hand dropped to her lap, the chalice slipping from her grasp. Wine spilled across the black marble floor, spreading in a slow, crimson pool that shimmered in the faint torchlight. She did not move to stop it. She simply stared at the spreading stain, as though it were the measure of her legacy: a spill, a ruin, something that vanished as quickly as it came.
She leaned her head back against the cold stone of the throne, eyes unfocused, lips parting to whisper words no one would hear. Words of confession, not regret. She did not regret her exile. That had been freedom. She did not regret her defiance, her survival, even her defilement. What she regretted was simpler, harsher. That she had nothing to show for it. That she had wasted years meant to blaze like fire, and instead smothered them in silence.
The silence was broken not by her will, but by the harsh chime of a communicator across the chamber. At first she ignored it, half-convinced it was another of Malachor's tricks—echoes in the stone, illusions born of exhaustion. Yet the sound persisted, insistent, until she forced herself to rise from the throne. Her steps dragged, heavy with the fog of drink, until she reached the pedestal where the device pulsed faintly.
The name on the display cut through the haze more effectively than the wine ever could. Dominic Calis.
Her brother.
For a moment she simply stared at it, almost unwilling to believe he had found her. Dominic had always been the pragmatic one, the careful heir to the Calis line, the one who understood how to survive in a galaxy where dynasties lived and died by their cunning. She had not spoken to him in years. He had been silent through her exile, absent in her downfall. To see his name now, glowing against the shadows of Malachor, was like watching a ghost crawl out of the grave.
With a slow exhale, she accepted the transmission.
"Serina," Dominic's voice crackled through, using the name she had shed but never truly buried. His tone was brisk, but beneath it she could hear the old gravity, the cadence of someone who never wasted words. "The galaxy is shifting. The new Empire rises, the Alliance resists, and war is tightening its noose. Chandrila is no longer safe from what comes, but it is where the decisions are being made. I need you here. There are things… we must discuss."
The message was short, cut clean at the end, as if he expected no debate.
She stood in silence long after the transmission faded. The air in the chamber seemed different now—less suffocating, yet heavier in ways she could not name. For months she had drowned herself in solitude, resigned to ruin, convinced that Malachor would be both her punishment and her grave. And yet, here was Dominic, dragging her name back into the current of the galaxy with a single summons.
Chandrila. The word itself carried a weight of memory: the green of its fields, the clear rivers, the Calis estates standing like monuments of a life she had long since abandoned. To return would not only mean leaving Malachor—it would mean stepping back into a world that had moved on without her. Into politics, into war, into family. Into relevance.
Her hand tightened against the edge of the pedestal.
She did not regret her exile. But the ache of wasted years had hollowed her. And now, for the first time, something beyond Malachor was calling her back.
