Location: D'Qar
Tic sat perched on the edge of Ace's workbench, one leg extended while Ace worked carefully at the exposed joint.
"Hold still."
The BD-unit chirped indignantly and Ace reached for another tool when the room suddenly disappeared. Red flesh landed in his palm and Ace froze.
Black smoke swallowed the sky above him, thick enough to turn daylight sickly and dim. Turbolaser fire thundered somewhere nearby, each blast punching through his chest while Sith troopers and Mandalorians tore into one another below. TIEs shrieked overhead, their engines cutting through screams Ace couldn't tell were human anymore.
Then something wet struck his shoulder, another piece landed against his arm. Ace looked up. Red was falling from the sky. It wasn't rain or snow... it was flesh. Ace's stomach lurched.
He'd seen war. He'd watched Tapani burn. He'd fought through the slaughter on Coruscant and seen what the Covenant had reduced Humbraine to. He'd smelled charred bodies, stepped through blood, watched people die close enough that their last breaths still visited him in his sleep.
But this was worse. So much worse. There was something fundamentally wrong about what surrounded him. The air itself felt diseased. Clumps of meat collected across a gauntlet that wasn't his, warm and slick against his palm, clotting together beneath a sky that seemed to be coming apart. Ace couldn't breathe.
What the fuck is this?
Horror crawled beneath his skin as the answer reached him through Calyx Sundrift . This wasn't collateral damage. It wasn't a city caught between armies or another atrocity committed in the frenzy of battle.
Someone was doing this on purpose. His eyes then found three prominent faces with memories stirring behind them. A stern-faced man. A woman whose features carried themselves with familiar severity. Another man gleaming with pride as he spoke about his baby daughter.
Ace had never seen any of them before. Yet the thought of that daughter growing up without her father suddenly hurt.
He didn't know them, but they had meant something to Calyx. And through him, Ace felt their weight. They weren't soldiers on a casualty report, or bodies scattered across another battlefield.
They were people.
He could hear Calyx's voice.
"Do you see this, Moonbound?"
Ace couldn't answer.
"Could I have stopped it?"
The world screamed around him.
"Could we have?"
And then another voice entered his head. One he recognized.
"We are the end of this planet… and the next one. And the next…"
Mercy
"NO!"
Ace tore himself free. His quarters slammed back into existence, burying his face in his hands. The workbench was still here, as were the scattered tools. Tic recoiled from his sudden outburst. Ace's breathing came hard and fast. He could still feel it. Calyx's horror. His guilt. His grief.
And beneath it, something belonging entirely to Ace. Rage. Hatred. That old familiar fire stirred in his chest. Somehow, the Covenant had found somewhere lower to sink.
"How..." Ace whispered into his palms. "How could Arris Windrun let this happen...?"
Tic gave a worried trill and stepped closer, nudging his arm, but Ace said nothing. Slowly and deliberately, he forced his breathing under control and the rage began to cool. Hatred became thought, and thought became something colder. Ace lifted his face from his hands.
Mercy. He'd spent too long thinking of the Covenant as a collection of monsters pulling in different directions. Arris. Varin. The others. He wasn't wrong there, but Mercy... she was the orchestrator. Behind its rise, its worst impulses, and everything rotten at its core.
And she wasn't going to stop.
Ace bit the inside of his cheeks. Mercy was the mastermind behind everything wrong with the Sith Covenant. She had to die.
But Calyx... he felt something in him that could still be reached. Something worth nurturing.
