The room—her room—was silent but not still.
No hum of servants. No footsteps in adjacent corridors. No echo of distant voices. PAD-1's subterranean vaults were shielded to such an obscene degree that even sound felt unwelcome. It was not a palace. It was a tomb made regal. And within its coldest, most sacred chamber, Serina Calis turned twenty-one.
The bed stood like a monument at the far end, its sheets an imperial weave of deep violet, rippling softly where she hadn't bothered to make it that morning. Obsidian carvings framed the headboard—depictions of ruined temples, of dying stars, of masked warriors kneeling. A private pantheon. She had designed every contour herself. Like everything here, it obeyed her aesthetic, her loneliness, her need for control.
She sat not on the bed, but at the wargaming table. A vast circle of shimmering terrain, scaled-down battlefields in impossible detail—complete with weather, trooper morale simulations, civilian reaction overlays. She was locked in a campaign against herself. She always won. She always lost. There was no one else to play. There never had been.
A slow flick of her hand moved tiny legions across a mountain range. Another gesture deployed a feint on the flank. She watched it play out in flawless silence. No one gasped at the cunning maneuver. No advisor offered praise. No rival rose to counter her brilliance.
The illusion collapsed, and the figures froze mid-attack. She leaned back. Not smug. Not amused. Just… tired.
Across the room, tucked on a little side-table like a whisper in a cathedral, was the plush. Darth Malak, rendered in chibi form, half-smiling with oversized teeth. A gift. The first gift in a long, long time.
Beside it sat a single rose in a black glass vase.
The drawer beneath held relics of a life so distant it could have belonged to another woman. Her Padawan robes—torn, scorched, still smelling faintly of burned wool and temple incense. Her old lightsaber, its silver casing pitted with age, and within it, still, impossibly… a blue crystal. Untainted. Unchanged.
She'd thought of bleeding it once. On Rakata Prime, when the ghosts screamed loudest. But she hadn't. She couldn't.
She pressed her fingers to the casing now. Just once. As if expecting a heartbeat.
There was none.
The couch was luxurious, unused. She sat there sometimes to watch holovids no one else enjoyed—documentaries on extinct species, old black-and-white romances where people loved each other and meant it. Tonight, the holoscreen glowed with an ancient musical about rain and umbrellas. She mouthed along to every line. She didn't cry. Not because she couldn't. But because no one would see it.
Her kitchen sat immaculate. Unused. A cake waited on the counter—baked by a droid, assembled precisely to the recipe she remembered from the Jedi Temple kitchens. She had cut a slice. Eaten two bites.
Then thrown it out.
Not in rage. Not in sadness.
Just... disinterest.
At the very center of this fortress of solitude, this sanctum no being alive had ever entered but her… she whispered to the room.
"Happy birthday, Serina."
The walls said nothing.
She sat in the silence a long time, Darth Malak plush in one hand, the rose in the other. Her head tilted back, resting against the couch. Her eyes half-lidded. Her lips barely parted.
She could conquer a star system. She could topple an empire. She could break anyone.
But not this.
The lights dimmed on their own. She didn't move to stop them.
PAD-1 understood her rhythms by now. It knew when her silence meant mourning, and when it meant calculation. Tonight, it was mourning. Or something older. Something less articulate. The kind of ache that didn't come with a wound. The kind that grew roots in the soul.
Serina's fingers idly curled the plush's soft limb between them. Malak's little cape had been stitched with care—crooked, imperfect. She'd traced it a thousand times since claiming it, pretending not to notice that she kept it closer than her weapons these days. Not for sentiment. No, never that. Just... because it was there.
The blue crystal inside her old saber flickered faintly when she passed it. Not with the Force. Just a refracted glint from the holoscreen as it looped the ending of the film again. The lovers parted. The rain kept falling. The credits rolled in a language no one used anymore. She'd watched this one so many times that even the glitches felt familiar—like scars.
Her voice, when it came, barely crossed the room. "It's still blue."
No answer.
She stood up, and her body moved like it belonged to someone else. Tired. Elegant. Unshakeable. But slow. She crossed to the drawer again, opened it with reverent care. Fingers swept across broken things. A snapped medal. A nameplate from a starfighter long since vaporized. A half-melted pendant she'd once been given after saving a man's life. She couldn't remember his name.
It had once been a sanctuary, this room. Now it was a mausoleum of what might have been. Every object meticulously placed, every luxury accounted for, and none of it—none of it—enough to fill the gravity of her solitude.
The security systems outside were impenetrable. Hundreds of droids. Auto-targeting defense turrets. A dozen biometric locks. Even the Force itself found it difficult to penetrate PAD-1's shielding this deep underground. A fortress of her own making. A coffin, lined in velvet.
She returned to the bed, lay down across it sideways. The sheets whispered beneath her as she stared at the ceiling, which was sculpted like a starmap. Real constellations. Some she'd visited. Some she planned to.
One star pulsed red—her custom marker for Chandrila.
Home.
She reached out, touched it. The metal cooled instantly beneath her fingertip, as if recoiling from the gesture.
It didn't matter.
None of it did.
She'd may win every war but the one she couldn't name. She could have anyone killed. She could have anyone corrupted, blackmailed, manipulated, made loyal to the grave.
But no one came to her birthday.
No one even asked.
No one knew.
That was the part that hurt the most. Not the silence. Not the solitude.
The forgetting.
She had never forgotten. Not a name. Not a face. Not a betrayal. And yet, in the vast machinery of the galaxy she now controlled piece by piece, her own name would never echo through the halls of someone else's heart the way theirs did in hers.
Serina Calis, Corruptor of the Light, Mistress of the Dark, Heir of Malak… curled her fingers around a plush toy in the dark and tried to remember the last time someone had hugged her.
There was no memory.
Just the dark.
And her.
