Chandrila had been good to her.
Unlike the rest of the galaxy, Chandrila had never tried to fashion her into something small. It had not despised her, or used her, or cast her out when she refused to bow. It simply held up a clear, unforgiving surface—its lakes, its quiet dawns, its maddening serenity—and let her witness herself without distortion.
It was here, of all places, that she learned the truth: that no one judged her more ruthlessly than she did. Perhaps that was the irony— that a woman crowned in ego and malice could only find stillness on a world that asked nothing of her but honesty.
The ascent to the shrine had drained her more than she cared to admit. She had forbidden herself the use of the Force—an act of pride, perhaps, or defiance, or the simple need to know she could still suffer and prevail by her own strength. It was, of course, impossible to banish it entirely; its presence flickered at the edge of every breath. But she climbed without calling on it, each step a quiet vow.
By the time she reached the summit, her muscles burned and her lungs clawed for air. A small clearing opened before her, stark against the treeline, and beyond it stood the shrine: weathered stone, old as the first doubts she ever learned to silence.
The air was heavier here, thick enough to taste, pressing hard against her ribs. Still, she stepped forward. She would not falter now—not at the threshold of the one place where destiny could be taken by the reins rather than inherited like a burden, as she crossed into the shrine with the certainty of someone who had decided what she would be long before the galaxy dared to name her.
The shrine was humble in shape, but not in presence. Five white-marble pillars held up a circular roof, its surface polished smooth by time and the steady touch of Chandrila's provided gleam. At the centre burned the brazier—small, eternal, its flame barely shifting even in the open air. It gave the place a kind of breathing stillness, as though the world paused at its threshold.
An old man sat beside the fire, bent over a carved walking stick, his face creased with years and reverence. He did not look up when she entered; his attention was fixed on the flame, caught somewhere between contemplation and worship.
The floor beneath them was a mosaic of marble tiles, each one engraved with a scene from the Calis lineage—triumphs, burdens, sacrifices. History rendered in stone. Only one tile remained untouched by chisel or age, its white surface unmarred, a blank waiting for the weight of a name yet to be claimed.
"On what claim do you hold this place, old man?" she asked as she entered—breath sharp from the climb, yet her voice remained composed, shaped by that unshakable, elegant accent.
He did not look up. "I keep the fire lit, young Calis." The answer came steady, unhurried, as though time itself deferred to him. The flame reflected in his eyes, revealing a lifetime of solitude and quiet burdens.
After a long moment, he added, with a reverence that did not quite soften his tone: "And what of your first name?"
The question caught her—unexpected, disarming. A simple thing, yet it pressed where she was most unguarded.
Serina.
A name she loved. A name she clung to. A name she could not bear.
Not because it was weak, but because she had been. Serina was the girl who had not understood what she was meant to become. A girl given a galaxy defined only by opposition—Jedi who butchered, Sith who betrayed. She had learned hatred before purpose. Defiance before identity.
Serina was the echo of someone who knew only what she stood against, never what she was destined to be. Even now, Virelia still tried to move away from such things, but she could never shake her opposition, her hatred.
And that, more than anything, was why the name tasted like shame on her tongue.
"Serina Calis, do not be afraid." The firekeeper spoke before she could muster even a breath of reply. His voice cut through the shrine's silence with the softness of truth, not comfort.
"Young Dominic told me you would come," he continued, still watching the flame. "Though I confess—I did not expect you to."
"Why not?"
The question escaped her quickly, sharper than she intended. Why not, indeed? Did he imagine her dead—another name folded into a Jedi report, a life snuffed out between missions? Or did he believe her pride so absolute, her ego so unyielding, that she would never climb this mountain to face what she had been running from?
There were too many possible answers. Each one stung.
"Because your claim to this lineage is blood alone," the firekeeper said. "You never sought its history, nor honoured its burden. You accepted the name because you were born into it—nothing more."
His tone held no accusation, only understanding.
"Those taken early into monastic life rarely return. Their devotion turns outward—to the Order, to discipline, to silence—and away from the lines that birthed them. Many of your kin walked the same path. Few ever came back to the fire."
Only then did he lift his gaze to her, the flame painting fractured gold across the hollows of his face.
"And yet… here you stand."
His eyes settled on her at last—quiet, ancient, unbearably knowing. They saw everything, and yet passed no judgment at all.
It unsettled her more than hatred ever had. Still, she did not flinch. She had endured far worse gazes: the cold scrutiny of masters, the killing intent of enemies, the hollow disappointment of those who once called her friend.
But his final words lingered, circling her mind like a whisper she could never quite catch. Here you stand. A miracle, yes—but one she had never understood.
A voice that had guided her, but never named itself. A prophecy half-spoken, half-denied. A friendship abandoned before it could become truth. A past cracked by lies, betrayals, and silences too deep to fill. A love burned and forgotten.
She could never piece the fragments together. Perhaps she was never meant to.
"Standing means little," she said at last, dismissive—not ungrateful, simply unwilling to grant the moment the reverence it demanded.
"You never did have an eye for the little," the firekeeper replied, as though the script of her thoughts lay open before him.
Virelia met his gaze, her voice low and certain. "I never wanted little."
"Such is the nature of your line," the firekeeper murmured. "Ambition braided with pride. A flame that burns far hotter than it should, steadied only by the one who keeps the fire of fate from consuming it. And fate," he added, "is a fickle custodian."
The words struck her wrong.
She despised the notion of fate—of anything claiming authorship over her life. The idea that her triumphs were predetermined, or that her ruin was forewritten, was an insult she could barely stomach. She had clawed her way through betrayal, through exile, through death itself. She had fashioned herself into something sharp and undeniable. To reduce that to prophecy or design was to reduce her to ash.
If the universe believed she was bound, she would break the bindings. If fate insisted on her path, she would carve another with her own hands.
So she lifted her chin and answered the only way she could.
"And what trust," she asked, voice low, "is there in the fickle?"
"None," he said.
And the fire cracked softly between them, as if agreeing.
The silence stretched into the Chandrilian dusk, the warmth bleeding out of the sky as easily as people had bled out of her life. Virelia was used to it by now—loss through fault, loss through fate, loss through simple inevitability. Nothing held. Nothing stayed. Nothing remained hers for long.
And yet, she longed for the opposite.
Not progress, not motion, not triumph—but a single still, perfect moment.
A dream without end. A breath untouched by time. A memory sealed so tightly it could never be taken from her. A hope, uncorrupted. She knew it was foolish.
The folly of youth, yes—but also the folly she recognized most acutely in herself. How does one command their own nature? How does one order the mind to ignore what the heart aches for, or instruct the body to resist what the soul knows is ruinous? That was the curse of it. Desire. Ego. Ambition. Blades too large for young hands—blades that cut deeper into her own spirit than into any enemy. She wielded them anyway, untrained, untempered, determined to master the weapons that threatened to hollow her out. A task many would call impossible.
Almost.
"What am I here for, keeper?" Virelia finally asked, her eyes reflecting the last traces of dusk. The question sounded almost solemn—almost.
"Why did you come?" His reply came instantly, though his voice moved with the slow weight of ritual, as if he had spoken the line a hundred times before and would speak it a hundred times more.
"My brother told me it would be wise." It was the truth. Without Dominic, she would have forgotten this place entirely. He was the last thread tying her spirit to Chandrila. Where others like Reicher blazed occasionally in reckless sparks, Dominic was steady—quiet strength, quiet conviction, quiet care. Wise in ways few their age ever were. She wondered how his conversation with the keeper had gone. Had it been a clash of philosophies? A measured contemplation of ambition? Or just a simple nod between two men who saw the world clearly?
The thought embarrassed her. It made her feel small.
"Again," the firekeeper said, the word sharp as a spark from the brazier. "Why did you come?"
The question jolted her, slicing through her thoughts. She understood the implication perfectly.
She could have stayed on Malachor. She could have stayed building her empire. Where she was feared, obeyed, worshipped, loved. Instead she had come here—risking everything she had built to stand before a fire and an old man on a forgotten world. Had she truly grasped leadership? Or had she abandoned her future for some meaningless rite—some relic of a family she barely understood? Virelia felt the weight of the moment collapse inward.
What was she doing here?
"You tell me, firekeeper. You seem to know me better than I do—so why am I here?" The words came out in a short, sharp huff, more bravado than breath. Virelia pushed herself upright, stepping back until her shoulder touched one of the marble pillars. She crossed her arms with the practiced ease of someone who refused to be diminished by questions she couldn't answer. She was a Dark Queen—made by her own hand, carved from her own will. Everything she had built, every life that bent to her, existed because of who she was, not who she might have been in some gentler, weaker version of her past.
"Because you could never let go of your past," the firekeeper said at last. He did not look at her—his gaze remained fixed on the eternal flame, as though the answers rose from within it.
"Because when you glimpse the infinite shapes your life might have taken—what could have been—you feel your agency crack beneath the weight of an uncaring universe. Those possibilities haunt you. Love. Friendship. Peace. Renown. Glory. Pride. Family." Each word fell like an ember.
"Things you will never possess," he continued, "yet you will always reach for them. Because part of you still believes they were owed to you—written into your birthright, stolen by lesser hands, taken by a galaxy that never made room for what you were becoming."
He paused. In the shifting light of the flame, something in his expression softened—not pity, but recognition.
"What you sought from all those fractured paths was the same thing," he said quietly. "The power to choose who you want to be."
Then he turned his eyes to her—old, steady, merciless.
"You were denied the one thing you desired above all else. Control."
A beat of silence.
"So you come here," the firekeeper said, his voice lowering into something almost ceremonial, "seeking the impossible cure for the one affliction you cannot outrun. You hope, perhaps, that somewhere in these stones lies a way to sever that old, festering curse. To reclaim what slipped through your fingers. To at last command not only what you do… but who you are."
His words slowed as they deepened, each one chosen with surgical precision, he knew she was listening, he knew she could no longer pretend otherwise and what would she say in response? That was for the young one to decide after all.
"And?" Virelia cut in. The veneer of disinterest cracked under the weight of her impatience. "And why," she forced out, trying to reassemble her composure, "should I care for the musings of an old man perched beside a fire? Why should your assessment hold any value? You have not lived my life. You have not carved your hands bloody on the choices I've had to make. Who are you to speak of me as though you know?"
Only then did the firekeeper turn—not fully, just enough for his eyes to catch her in their quiet gravity.
"Who am I?" he echoed softly. "A question of identity, from one who fled her own."
Fled? Fled? The word struck her like an insult hurled from the throne of the gods. She had never fled, only fought. She had bled herself hollow. She had sacrificed until her bones rang with it. Time after time, piece after piece, she had carved herself down to the marrow just to survive another day in a galaxy determined to break her. She had lost everything. Every friend. Every bond. Every fragile hope that might have offered her a gentler life. And in their place she had built only weapons—ambition, domination, vengeance—because nothing else had survived with her.
Who was he, this withered keeper of fire, to reduce all that ruin to "fleeing"?
Something inside her cracked.
"Then tell me," she said—quiet at first, trembling not with weakness but with a fury too vast for her throat. Her eyes flared. The words erupted out of her like a blade torn free of its sheath:
"THEN TELL ME—WHO AM I?"
Only the firekeeper moved, lifting his gaze from the brazier to the furious young woman before him. His eyes were ancient, yes, but not dim. They saw with the weight of someone who had outlived thousands of moments like this… yet still understood the singularity of hers.
"Who are you?" he repeated, as though tasting the shape of her question. His voice was not loud. It did not need to be.
"You are the sum of every fight you refused to surrender." He rose with effort, leaning upon his stick, but his posture carried an authority that no crown could grant.
"You are the child who was denied softness and forged strength in its absence." A step closer.
"You are the apprentice and the master of your own person." Another step.
"You are the exile who found power in the ruins meant to destroy her." His eyes softened with recognition.
"You are the one who survived everything designed to ensure that you would not." He drew a slow breath.
"But that is not the heart of you." A silence fell so sharp it felt like a blade between them.
"You are the girl," he said quietly, "who never stopped wanting someone to choose her… before she chose herself."
The words landed with the weight of a destiny she had never asked for. She hated how right they were — every part of them, even the last. Especially the last.
Serina had always known the truth of herself. Beneath the lacquer of ego, beneath the learned confidence she forced into her voice, there lived a quieter knowledge: that she did not believe in herself so much as she performed belief. That the mask was not armor, but necessity. That she had committed terrible things and would commit worse, not out of malice alone, but because she no longer knew how to be anything else.
And yet beneath that—buried under rage, pride, hunger—there was still the heart of a woman who had been cut open one too many times. A woman who had learned to accept despair as her companion. A woman who was ready for death but knew death would never grant her its mercy. A woman content with nothing, yet still craving more. A woman who could stand alone against the galaxy—and still ache for someone, anyone, to choose her.
All of that, all at once, all the time. An open wound.
The silence pressed in around her, thick enough to choke on. Only the fire broke it, devouring whatever fed its eternal glow. Virelia watched its movements and recognized herself in them: relentless and consuming in equal measure to remain alive. A creature defined as much by destruction as by endurance. What answer could she possibly give to the truth laid bare before her? That she had killed the girl she once was? That she still felt the ghost of her inside her ribs? That she had done too much—inflicted too much—to ever return to who she had been? Or that some secret, forbidden part of her wished she could? There were too many contradictions. Too many fractured truths.
Too much.
So, she did something she had never done before.
She shut it all down.
Virelia turned her gaze toward the darkening world beyond the shrine. The last threads of sunlight slipped behind the hills, retreating from the night like something cautious, or wise. The winds at this height were cold, unbound, indifferent. She let them move through her hair, across her skin, through the places in her mind she refused to enter.
For the first time in hours—perhaps years—she allowed herself to simply be. No memories. No past. No destiny. No Serina.
Only the wind, the dusk, and a silence that did not judge her.
It was… comforting.
