In relation to: https://www.starwarsrp.net/threads/the-rubicon-sith-order.185417/
The elevator rasped open with a reluctant shudder, exhaling stale, ion-tinged air into the forgotten antechamber. Serina Calis stepped into the gloom without hesitation, her heels striking the cracked duracrete floor with a rhythm that echoed like a ticking clock against the towering, dust-choked shelves.
The archive of Jutrand's lower levels had once been a citadel of knowledge—back when the Sith Empire prided itself on more than conquest alone. Now, it was a mausoleum. Broken holocanisters lay scattered in forgotten alcoves; tomes of ancient law and philosophy sat buried beneath decades of negligence. A slow, perpetual drip somewhere in the shadows marked time, as if even the building itself was decaying toward silence.
She moved through it like a shadow given form, untouched by the filth, her cloak trailing a whisper behind her. No guards. No overseers. No curious witnesses. It suited her needs perfectly.
The Sith Order, as it always did, would survive the current Sundering Dawn catastrophe, fractured but clinging to its illusions of cohesion. And when it did, there would be questions about Saijo. About the blood. About the power she had seized in the name of order but which too many would call ambition. Serina had no illusions about her peers; they would wield whatever laws or traditions they could dig up to either punish her or extract tribute from her victory.
If they meant to brandish the ancient codes, she would meet them on the battlefield of words as mercilessly as she would on any field of battle.
Her gloved fingers brushed over the cold, cracked surface of a defunct terminal as she passed, the dead screen offering no resistance, no assistance. She did not need it. She had already committed to memory the location of the legal archives she sought. Not the sanitized repositories kept for public displays, but the true records—the ancient procedural frameworks buried when they became inconvenient, the ones Sith Lords had once used to justify wars, coups, and betrayals with a veneer of legitimacy.
It was deeper in, she knew. Past the annotated Holocrons of modern governance. Past the endless commentary of the lesser Lords who thought themselves statesmen. She was not interested in the newest legal codes that shifted with the tides of whoever most recently clawed their way to a Dark Council seat.
No—Serina sought the original bones of Sith law. The raw frameworks that had underpinned empires before civilization itself had learned to fear the word Sith.
She slowed as she neared a crumbling archway at the far end of the hall. A tarnished plaque above it, half-dislodged, still bore faint etchings: "Codices of Sovereignty and Subjugation."
Her eyes narrowed slightly, and a rare, small smile touched her lips. It was not pleasure, but something colder—anticipation sharpened to a razor's edge.
Without hesitation, she stepped under the ruined arch and into the deeper darkness.
Rows of cracked datafiches and mold-eaten tomes stretched ahead, some still humming faintly with ancient preservation fields, most utterly forgotten. Here, the air was thicker, heavier with the scent of old paper, scorched circuitry, and something else—something almost reverent.
It was not the section she had originally intended to spend her night in.
But something in her, some quiet, coiled instinct she had learned long ago to obey, told her that the real weapons she needed might be waiting not among statutes and codes of modern Sith dogma—but buried somewhere older, in the bones of forgotten legal history.
Serina paused at the junction of the first aisle, her hand drifting to the nearest shelf, trailing fingertips across the faded sigils of cases older than most stars.
The archive devoured her steps as she moved deeper. Dust sifted from overhead beams like the slow fall of forgotten memories. The deeper Serina walked, the older the air seemed to become, thickening around her like unseen cobwebs. Here, even the Dark Side felt muted—not absent, never that—but quiet, slumbering beneath layers of time and neglect.
She searched with deliberate patience, her gloved fingers moving along the broken spines of antique data codices and cracked plasteel casings. Names flickered past her gaze, all of them familiar in the way old landmarks were familiar—acknowledged, but irrelevant.
She was not looking for theory. She was not looking for arguments sanitized by a thousand years of revision. She sought records that bore the raw fingerprints of power wielded without apology—unmediated by commentary, unfiltered by later cowardice.
Shelf after shelf yielded little. There were treatises, endless in their droning. There were manifestos—proud declarations from Sith Lords who had been dust long before Serina was ever born, most of them more obsessed with vanity than with the machinery of rule.
And then, tucked almost haphazardly at the bottom of a crooked shelf half-swallowed by darkness, she saw it.
A book.
A real book.
Bound in scuffed black leather that had faded to a dull ash-gray over the centuries, the spine nearly cracked through in places, its surface etched only with a single line of simple Aurebesh text:
"Selected Transcripts of the Imperial Courts and Assemblies: Years 890–900 ABY."
Serina crouched slowly, letting the folds of her cloak pool silently around her like spilled ink. She reached out and brushed the cover with the back of her hand first, testing. The binding was brittle but intact. The Force thrummed faintly against her fingertips—a whisper, a recognition. This book had seen things. Not the grand, sweeping tragedies of collapsed star empires, but the colder, subtler wars—the ones waged with arguments and precedents, in courtrooms and council halls where words could damn more surely than blades.
It did not belong in this place of decaying things.
Gently, she lifted it from its prison of dust and ruin. It was heavier than it looked, dense not only with mass but with the weight of forgotten authority.
She carried it to a nearby alcove—a crumbling bench carved into the wall, shielded by sagging stacks that offered a semblance of privacy.
With a practiced gesture, she shrugged off her outer cloak and draped it across the bench before lowering herself to sit. Even here, in this tomb of lost knowledge, her movements remained unhurried, regal, as if the entire galaxy still orbited her by divine right.
She set the book down carefully before her, her gloved hand resting lightly atop its cover.
For a moment, she simply sat there, breathing in the silence, feeling the cold heartbeat of history pulse beneath her palm.
The Selected Transcripts were not philosophy, not declarations—they were moments. Conversations recorded without the filter of victory or defeat. Rulings delivered not because they were right, but because they were possible. Petitions, betrayals, judgments, and compromises, all laid bare without apology.
This would not be a history told by the victors.
This would be the tangled bloodlines of authority itself.
Serina smiled—slow, small, secretive. The kind of smile that said she was not here merely to study. She was here to inherit.
Her fingertips curled against the worn leather once more.
And with the predatory patience of a serpent poised to strike, she drew the book open.
The ancient leather gave a soft groan as Serina opened the tome, the scent of powdered dust and dry ink rising like incense from its pages. She turned carefully through the brittle vellum leaves, many handwritten, others transcribed in mechanical, official typesetting, until she found a marked record of Assembly proceedings.
Her eyes narrowed slightly, the corners of her mouth tilting not into a smile, but into something keener—a razor's anticipation.
And she began to read.
The words were blunt, stripped of ornament, yet they carried a weight that made the stale air around her feel suddenly electric:
"I have spent months fighting on your behalf, striking and killing where our enemies think us weakest. In this, I have brought money, power, and respect to our name. By my hand, a billion lie dead so that our Order will continue unmatched in its inexorable march to total conquest—and I have asked you one thing. Singular. Monumental."
"I have asked for unity, to correct our course at home so that when our forces meet with the Alliance, they are prepared to overcome the greatest military entity yet in the galaxy. And what have you done but spit in my face?"
"Sycophants and heretics, biting at the ankles of opportunism for their own selfish ideals. You fight amongst yourselves like children, using my Empire as a vehicle for power without respecting its rules. It disgusts me how short-sighted you have become."
"So now I give you opportunity to speak on these grievances, for today shall be the last. Plead your case, for tomorrow I call the end of open hostility. The Emperor's Peace shall become absolute, and those who break it will face me."
Serina's fingers hovered a moment longer over the page, the black ink seeming to thrum beneath her gaze.
She could hear it—feel it—the immense, brutal will wrapped around those words. The iron-handed scorn, the sovereign rage disguised beneath a veil of offered clemency. She had never met Darth Empyrean face-to-face; she knew of him only through ripples in the Force, echoes of slaughter and conquest told through blood-soaked reports and whispered fear. Reading his words now, untouched by interpretation or secondhand cowardice, she found herself... intrigued.
This was not the rhetoric of a schemer. This was the oratory of inevitability. Of domination distilled to its purest form. He had made no threats. He had simply stated the future.
And in the heavy silence between each declaration, Serina could sense the Assembly's terror, feel the cold sweat gathering in hidden palms, the barely leashed fury, the scrambling minds seeking some way to survive the moment without surrendering their ambitions.
She turned the page.
Another entry, written in a more rushed hand—clearly transcribed in the moment. The tone of the room had shifted.
Another voice had answered the Emperor's call.
One she knew.
One she remembered.
"'Your Empire'?"
"Lest you forget, this work is not yours to claim."
"Have we not all bled for this progress? Have we not all killed for it? Have we not clawed our place on the galactic stage back from the brink of nothingness? Have we not worked tirelessly to restore the Sith after the last Empire crumbled and was cast aside?"
"And pray tell, what have you done with those responsible for such a grievous failure and defeat?"
"The Kainate was granted the ancient worlds, the ones that they lost, as prizes for their treachery. And then they were so inept at defending them that you had to personally attend to their neighbors, burning worlds that could have served us well all because Carnifex and his ilk can't keep control of their own backyard!"
"Taeli Raaf and her company actively support and arm forces which hold no loyalty to the Sith, and you gave her a seat on the Dark Council! Not to mention her outrageous assaults against the Inquisition! Were it anyone else, anyone lesser, I'd have already had them strung up on live Holonet!"
"Not to mention the many others which have yet to rear their heads and place themselves against us, just waiting in the wings for their moment to steal power! How are we to march forward and bring the wrath of our Empire upon the Alliance and their horrid Jedi Order if we are being led by the same fools and traitors that dragged us to failure last time?!"
Serina sat back slightly, her hand resting lightly against the open spine of the book, her body utterly still except for the faint tap-tap of her thumb against the leather.
Darth Strosius .
In full form.
The words leapt from the page with the same brutal grace she remembered from their first meeting—cold, unrelenting, utterly sincere. There was no subtlety in his attack, no hedging. It was the verbal equivalent of drawing a sword and laying it across the Emperor's throat in full view of the court.
And yet—how carefully he had wielded his blade.
He had not challenged the Emperor directly. He had challenged the Emperor's choices. His alliances. His judgment. Clever. A way to stand apart without crossing the invisible line that would invite immediate obliteration.
It was a dance, yes—but a dance made of daggers, performed inches from death.
Serina's lips curled slightly, the ghost of a smirk. She felt the old thrum of fascination stirring in her again, stronger now.
Strosius understands.
He understands what the others still do not: that the Sith Empire is not a throne to be inherited, nor a council to be bargained with. It is a fire. One does not rule fire; one either feeds it, shapes it—or is consumed by it.
Her admiration was real. As was her caution.
She knew better than most how dangerous a mind like Strosius's could be. He was not driven by self-aggrandizement, not tempted by fleeting pleasures or petty vanities. His ambition was pure, honed to a single merciless principle: survival of the worthy.
It made him magnificent.
It made him lethal.
And it made him predictable.
A resource to cultivate... for now. A weapon to unleash against greater foes... until the day came when that blade had to be broken.
Serina let out a slow breath, savoring the sensation of pieces clicking into place. This transcript—this raw, unfiltered snapshot of imperial reckoning—was more valuable than she had dared hope.
It was a map. A map of ambitions. Of grudges. Of ancient betrayals given new life.
And if she studied it carefully enough, she could learn not only how to defend herself in the coming trials...
But how to reshape the future that would emerge from them.
Gently, reverently, she turned the page again—ready to continue her descent into the buried heart of Sith power.
The pages whispered against her fingertips as Serina turned to the next entry.
She knew before she read a word who it would be. She could feel it — like the faint scent of ozone before a storm. The structure of the language, the elegant unfolding of power without overt violence... it could only belong to one.
The script on the page was sharp, clinical, but beneath it Serina could sense the pulse of something far older and more refined: a mind that had not merely survived the chaos of Sith politics, but had shaped it without needing to shout.
Taeli Raaf .
Serina drew a slow, measured breath through her nose and began to read.
"The Lord Inquisitor is reminded that the Kainite were the forces that initially reclaimed the Holy Worlds as this empire was reforming while the forces of the Emperor consolidated control over our main holdings here. The Caldera worlds were not simply granted to them."
"The Lord Inquisitor is also reminded that there is a difference between soft power and hard power, although one would anticipate he does not need the lecture on the differences and why my operations in regions controlled by our enemies would be considered a quiet influence for the Sith instead of outright declaring their allegiances and being crushed."
"I would hope he had learned that lesson as a student of the late Darth Ophidia who understood that quiet power can be just as deadly and have as lasting an impact as other types of power."
"For my own part, I consider the matter closed. I did not desire this fight, but my grandchildren have been retrieved, and I had assumed a lesson taught to the Lord Inquisitor about overstepping his bounds and authority had been properly conveyed. If that is not the case, then by all means, Lord Strosius, you are welcome to continue this crusade against me and see what occurs when I choose to not be as lenient a second time."
"If your desire is to march upon the Alliance and the Jedi, then perhaps your energies would be better put to use against those enemies instead of kidnapping children and harassing Sith that have been loyal to the Order."
Serina leaned back slightly on the cracked bench, letting the words settle around her like a fine mist.
Masterful.
Taeli Raaf had not shouted. Had not threatened. Had not debased herself with open fury. Instead, she had wielded her words like scalpels, carving the conversation to pieces and leaving her opponent bleeding without ever raising her voice.
It was exactly what Serina had always admired about her.
Taeli moved through the treacherous landscape of Sith power like a scholar among barbarians, her hands unstained even as she rewrote the laws of survival around her. She didn't demand loyalty—she engineered it. She didn't argue—she corrected. Quietly, firmly, with the precision of someone who had long since won, and was simply waiting for everyone else to realize it.
Reading the transcript, Serina felt the old, familiar mixture churn inside her: admiration... envy... and a gnawing, bitter aspiration she could never fully admit.
They don't even realize they're already dancing to her music. I wonder if they even care.
That thought, once a quiet observation tucked into the shadowed corners of her mind, now rang louder, harsher, a drumbeat against her ribs.
There was something almost religious about how the Sith bent themselves around Taeli's presence.
Serina closed her eyes briefly, exhaling through her nose.
I want that.
Not just power. Not just victory. Not just survival.
Presence.
To step into a room and change the shape of it without speaking. To make the wolves pause mid-hunt. To turn ambition itself into a weapon sharpened by nothing more than her existence.
But the cost...
Serina let her gaze drift over the ancient archive around her—the corpses of civilizations piled high in forgotten data, in crumbling paper and shattered crystal storage banks. How many had risen believing themselves invincible, only to be ground down by time, hubris, and betrayal?
Is this what success in the Sith Empire requires?
To wear a face so perfect, so sculpted, that even she would one day forget what lay beneath?
She did not know.
And that uncertainty gnawed at her like an old wound that had never properly healed.
But one thing she did know: Taeli had survived. Where others had burned themselves out in flashes of glory or sunk into obscurity, Taeli Raaf endured—and flourished.
If survival demands masks, then I will learn to wear them better than anyone.
Serina's gaze dropped back to the page, drinking in the closing phrases of Taeli's rebuke.
The coldness of it. The restraint. The almost mathematical certainty with which she had measured her opponent, struck, and moved on.
It was not enough to be strong. Strength was obvious, brutal, vulgar. Any fool could wield a blade and call themselves a conqueror.
Real power—the kind that lasted—was the ability to bury your enemies in velvet, to offer them smiles as you tightened the noose.
Serina reached out and turned the page again, the thin parchment crackling softly.
Somewhere deep inside her, something hardened.
Let them think me a child. Let them think me an ambitious climber, untested and immature.
By the time they realize what I am becoming... it will already be too late.
She lowered her hand slowly, resting it on the open book, the words still vibrating faintly against her fingertips.
The past was not dead.
It was here—coiled in ink and memory—waiting to teach her how to kill a future with the elegance of a whisper.
The brittle pages turned once again beneath Serina's gloved hand, and the next recorded voice emerged from the dust of history.
Unlike the towering presences of Empyrean, Strosius, and Raaf, this voice was not one she immediately recognized. The name attached was simple: Lina (Lina Ovmar )—no grandiose title, no ancient lineage trailing behind her words like heavy chains.
Yet there was no weakness in what followed.
She read:
"Once upon a time, the Inquisition held the power to eliminate internal threats as it saw fit, regardless of their standing within an Empire. Now they are little more than a pack of poorly controlled hounds that bay at those the Lord Inquisitor has biased views against, whether those views are justified or not. The Inquisition is no longer fit for its purpose. However, there is still clearly a need for something of that ilk."
"We are as a nation, creatures of conflict. Usurping those in seats of power is how the lesser of us come to rise into it, a tradition that has survived for thousands of years. But when that infighting reaches the levels it has done today, it should be stopped, if only to save the wasted resources such conflicts consume."
"If the Dark Council cannot be trusted to stop it, let alone not be involved in it, and you yourself cannot be expected to police such ineptitude, then perhaps another approach is required."
"I might suggest another Inquisition, one with actual power. But no matter who you seat at its head, it will always wind up being for personal gain and not for the success and security of the Order. So perhaps a new law. One that forces conflicts of such magnitude to be settled with a kaggath."
Serina's brows arched slightly at that last word.
Kaggath.
Ancient, brutal, and terribly clean. A sanctioned duel, trial by supremacy where no appeal could be made once the challenge was accepted. Sith tradition of the oldest kind—older than the Empire itself, older than many of the Force philosophies that infested the galaxy like weeds.
She closed her eyes briefly, letting the thought roll through her.
Fascinating.
Whoever this Lina was, she had understood a crucial truth: the Sith thrived on conflict—but only when that conflict served to strengthen the Order, not cannibalize it. Left unchecked, internal wars did not purify. They devoured.
And yet...
Codifying the conflict into sanctioned duels... enforcing resolution through ritual rather than endless shadow wars...
It was an idea that carried both promise and risk.
In some ways, Serina mused, it was an admission that the Sith were incapable of true unity. That the only path to order was through managed violence—a series of personal apocalypses that allowed the strong to emerge without dragging the whole Empire into ruin.
A smile, cold and razor-thin, touched her lips.
Perhaps that's all unity has ever meant in the Sith tongue. The agreement to kill cleanly.
She filed the thought away. It was not immediately useful. But she could see how it might be. If the Assembly tried to turn on her after Saijo—if they attempted to drown her in politics and accusations—then perhaps a formal challenge would be preferable to a slow death by a thousand cuts.
A kaggath was dangerous. But it was honest danger.
And Serina Calis had never feared honest danger.
She turned the page again, her mind a forge sparking with new possibilities.
The next entry, however, brought a shift so abrupt it was almost a physical blow.
The Emperor spoke again.
"Thank you, Darth Arcanix."
"As I recall, Darth Strosius, you had more to do with the fall of the last Empire than I did. Was it not you who failed to stop the Imperials, time and time again? World after world? You and a thousand others."
"So now, after failing to keep another Empire alive, you'd tell me how to keep my Empire alive? On what grounds? You can't even deal with a single Dark Councilor, but I am to what..."
"... Accept you have the answers to our problems? Perhaps our Empire shouldn't be ruled by those who failed it before, but it is better than to watch it fall to the inept. The Inquisition rides on the momentum of Darth Ophidia's greatness, but it slows and falters by the day. You have wasted its strength, and with your failings, a greater rift has opened in our Empire than anyone else could create."
"Even now, Jedi have helped foster rebellions on our worlds that you have failed to deal with, because you're too busy trying to kill another Sith."
"So, Darth Strosius, tell me what it is you think should be done? Do you have the strength to correct our course, or will you beg and plead with me to change my course out of sympathy? I will give you this single moment to declare yourself for what you are—a coward, or a Dark Lord. Make it quick."
Serina froze.
Not in fear—but in an almost painful surge of focus.
Here it was.
The crux.
The Emperor did not merely rebuke Strosius. He cornered him.
This was no lecture. No paternal scolding.
It was an execution by slow, deliberate provocation.
Empyrean had stripped away every fig leaf of justification, every excuse Strosius might have clung to, and hurled them aside like broken weapons. He had laid bare the failures—the ancient ones, the ones buried deep beneath Strosius' iron facade—and demanded a reckoning.
Coward... or Dark Lord.
Serina's heart thudded once, slow and heavy.
She understood, now, why this transcript had survived. Why it was buried, not displayed. These were not just words. They were battle lines drawn not with armies, but with raw, naked truth.
Empyrean had not merely ruled through terror. He had ruled through absolute dominance—forcing his enemies to declare themselves or die by their own unspoken shame.
And Strosius... she realized with a strange, shivering clarity... maybe never truly forgiven him for it.
No matter their uneasy truces. No matter their mutual understanding of necessity.
Beneath it all, that moment had lingered.
Like a poisoned blade broken off in the bone.
Serina leaned forward slightly, her eyes gleaming in the low, flickering light of the forgotten archive.
This was more than history.
This was strategy.
She could feel it pulsing beneath the surface: how power was truly won. Not by shouting. Not by scheming. Not by bribes or blood sacrifices.
Power was seized by the merciless application of undeniable, inescapable truth.
Strip away all their excuses. All their masks.
Force them to stand naked before the storm.
And when they faltered—because they always faltered—you stepped forward into the silence they left behind.
Coward or Dark Lord.
Worm or God.
No middle ground.
Serina's eyes lingered on the final, brutal words of the Emperor, tracing them slowly, deliberately, as though memorizing not just the letters, but the weight they carried.
Her fingers did not move to close the book.
No—she was not finished here.
The pulse of history still beat beneath these pages, and she intended to draw every last lesson from its fading heart.
She remained perfectly still, save for the slow, almost predatory tapping of one finger against the worn leather binding.
Coward or Dark Lord.
Survive or be unmade.
The principle was so pure it was almost beautiful. And in its purity, Serina found not satisfaction, not comfort—but a colder kind of hunger.
The hunger for clarity.
For inevitability.
She had expected the Assembly to be a theatre of politics when her time came—a battlefield of accusations and maneuvering, where survival would depend on cunning alone.
Now she saw the deeper truth, spelled out in these pages by hands who had lived and died by its decree:
There would be no middle ground. No arguments clever enough to deflect the judgment when it came.
There would only be strength—and the refusal to break under the weight of demand.
Serina inhaled slowly, the taste of dust and ancient ink heavy in her mouth.
I must read more.
There were still more records ahead, she could tell—other voices yet to rise from the past, other currents of betrayal, loyalty, failure, and triumph woven into the slow-burning tapestry of this Empire's soul.
Each voice a lesson.
Each fall a warning.
Each triumph a blueprint.
With a slow, deliberate motion, she turned the next page.
The page turned with a sound like cracking bone.
Serina leaned forward slightly, her pupils narrowing in the low light, as the next speaker rose from the dead pages to meet her.
Darth Strosius.
Again.
But not the cold, incisive blade she had seen before—not the careful tactician weaving venom into formal protest. This was something rawer. Angrier. The edge of control honed so thin that it quivered, a storm barely held in check.
The transcript preserved only the words, but Serina could feel the entire scene pulling itself together in her mind: the weight of the Emperor's gaze, the pressure of dozens of Sith watching, and the moment—the heartbeat—where pride overcame calculation.
She read:
"I need not declare anything, Empyrean, I need only remind you."
"Unlike most of your mindless puppets I was in no position of authority in the old Empire, I simply had to watch as all of my efforts were ruined due to their ineptitude and selfishness. I failed nothing and no one, I was the one that was failed!"
"And unlike the rest of the Order I have not forgotten your part in our downfall! When you clambered to the wretched Worm for power and betrayed us all when we were at our most desperate. Maliphant."
"But I am no coward! I do not beg and whimper at the feet of those that claim to be my betters just to get ahead in this great game of the galaxy!"
"Before you stands the Sith that led the assault on the Malsheem, that led the strike into the very heart of the Kainate when Carnifex and his ilk revealed their true colors once more!"
"Before you stands the only Sith that was not content to let the Kainate corrupt and taint the Holy Worlds without a fight, for I too led efforts to reclaim Korriban and Dromund Kaas so that they were not solely left in the grasp of proven traitors and degenerates!"
"Before you stands the Sith that felled Darth Ophidia when her vile weakness was revealed! While all others cowered and hid from her reach, I drew her last breaths with my own strength and claimed her former powerbase for my own! To use it as it was meant to be, to secure and strengthen the Sith!"
"Before you stands Darth Strosius! Lord Inquisitor of the Sith Order, Last Sith of the Tenth Sith Empire, and once I tear out the beating heart of the Jedi and the Core Worlds for the Sith, you will bow before me."
The words flared across the page, each line bleeding defiance, wounded pride, and something darker still: a desperate, searing need to be seen.
Serina let the silence stretch in her mind, letting the full shape of Strosius's declaration form before her.
He had chosen defiance.
He had chosen to double down, to carve his name into the moment with blood and fury rather than bow under the Emperor's crushing disdain.
It was a powerful play.
And it was a dangerous one.
Her fingers traced the margin of the page thoughtfully, brushing away a thin veil of dust.
Strosius had thrown down a gauntlet not just to Empyrean, but to the entire Sith Order assembled before him. He had reminded them, in brutal, uncompromising terms, of his victories, his survival, his right to stand among them not as a supplicant, but as a conquering spirit.
There is something magnificent in it, Serina admitted to herself.
The sheer force of will. The refusal to accept narrative defeat. Even when cornered, even when the trap had already begun to close around him, he fought not to survive—but to define himself.
And yet...
She felt the sharp bite of risk hanging beneath every word he had spoken. Pride was a blade that could cleave empires—or its wielder. By refusing to acknowledge any fault, by casting his defiance so openly, Strosius had made himself a fixed point, a banner that could not bend.
And what could not bend could only break.
He did not adapt.
He declared.
Serina folded one leg neatly over the other, considering.
There would be a time when she, too, would face the judgment of the Assembly—or worse, a sovereign who demanded her submission with the weight of empire behind him.
When that day came, she would remember this moment.
The importance not only of standing tall—but of standing smart.
Pride had its place.
But survival demanded more than pride.
It demanded the illusion of pride, carefully modulated, deployed not in open defiance but in surgical, devastating strikes.
A ruler could not afford to be ruled by their own emotions.
A true sovereign crafted the emotions of others like a symphony, guiding them to the moment of their own surrender without ever needing to shout.
Still, she could not deny the impact.
Even in failure—if this was failure—Strosius had seared his identity into the stone of the Sith Empire.
His name would be remembered long after safer, quieter Sith were forgotten.
Serina's eyes narrowed slightly as one detail surfaced from the torrent of rhetoric:
Maliphant.
The name had slipped from Strosius's lips like poison, hurled at the Emperor with all the contempt a soul could muster.
Maliphant...
That was not a name Serina had expected to hear.
The revelation sent quiet tremors of possibility through her mind.
Another thread. Another secret. Another piece of leverage for a future she had not yet crafted, but would certainly require.
She made no note of it. She needed none.
It is already written where it matters most, she thought, tapping her temple once with a bare fingertip.
Carefully, almost reverently, Serina turned the next page—hungry for more.
There was still so much to learn before the night was through.
