The Jedi Medical Ward whispered in code and static. Soft beeps, muted alerts, the mechanical hum of nutrient pumps—overlapping languages spoken only by droids and machines. Every now and then, a voice—organic, fleeting—asked for a chart, gave an update, or simply sighed.
Raedon didn’t answer. He hadn't spoken in days.
He lay still on the biobed, wrapped in a sterile sheet, motionless except for the rise and fall of his chest. Transparent tubing snaked from his arm into a suspended canister of viscous fluid. Nutrient slurry—liquid sustenance keeping a dying man barely alive. His body had refused solid food, and so the medics had stopped trying. Not from malice, but mercy.
His skin no longer shimmered with the soft iridescence of Lovalla life. It had dulled to a patchy, darkened blue—like bruises stretched across his entire frame. The natural motting had grown erratic, sickly. His golden eyes, once so piercing, now remained closed more often than not, even when he was technically awake.
But inside—inside, it was endless fire and silence.
He dreamed, or remembered, or hallucinated. He wasn't sure anymore.
Sometimes he saw Kyria. Not the memory of her, but her pain. Her final breath. The moment their connection ruptured. Lovalla did not sever easily. They felt their bondmates’s suffering across distance and time, and what he had endured when her life ended... it was not grief. It was annihilation.
He had felt her death like a sword driven through his chest.
And now there was nothing.
Sometimes a healer spoke gently to him, encouraging him to wake, to eat, to respond.
He never did. Not truly.
On occasion, he stirred. Just enough to whisper her name, or cry out softly in a voice so ragged it barely sounded like his own. Then unconsciousness would reclaim him like a tide.
He awoke once to find a Jedi artisan fitting the cybernetic limbs to his legs. Sleek, functional, unadorned. There was reverence in the technician’s hands, but Raedon felt none of it. Just cold.
They brought him to standing. His arms were draped over the shoulders of two medical droids, his bare torso shaking with weakness. He hadn't taken a real breath in what felt like forever.
"Whenever you're ready," someone said.
He didn’t reply.
He took a step. Metal against stone. Another.
The room was silent, save for the soft mechanical whine of his new limbs. The Force stirred around him—a whisper that could not reach.
He didn’t cry. Not anymore. This wasn’t a beginning. It was the first step of his slow death.
