First Reply Circles

[Cora]

I’ve walked these streets more times than I can count, but they still don’t feel like mine. Nothing does.

I keep my head low, so sick of catching my reflection in every damn window. Sick of the scar that reminds me of every mistake I’ve made. So sick of pretending I’m something I’m not.

I thought leaving the Order would give me freedom. Instead it feels like I’m caught in the same spiral, spinning out and not learning a thing from it.

Running in circles. Even when I’m standing still.

The air tastes like metal and stormwater. This district is loud, yet somehow everything feels muted. Like the world’s happening a few inches above where I stand. Like I slipped beneath the surface without anyone noticing.

Maybe that’s why I walk at night. The dark doesn’t expect anything from me. It doesn’t care if I’m barely holding it together. If I’m coming undone.

The city murmurs around me. Somewhere a ship lifts off, and its engines send a vibration through my bones. Streetlights flicker like they’re mocking me. I keep walking anyway, because if I stop, the frustration might swallow me whole.

I tell myself I’m just clearing my mind. But I know the truth. I’m searching for something I can’t name.

Maybe someone will cross my path. Maybe no one will. The night leaves room for either.

 

[Sarah Vulke]

"On watchful eyes."

Tags - Cora ​

Travelling to a recruitment station within the newly swelling Galactic Empire had proven more troublesome than Sarah anticipated. Entire sectors were still half-digested by the bureaucracy, their worlds locked in the slow grind of occupation protocols and reorganized chain-of-command. Recruitment would come later—after the flags, the garrisons, the speeches. A pity. She would have preferred to finish the preliminary formalities tonight.

Instead, she walked unfamiliar streets in a suit of salvaged Imperial armour, battered and scraped from a dozen off-world engagements. It fit well enough, but she felt its flaws like grit beneath the skin. Her own armour—her real armour—was safe yet far from reach, and the absence gnawed at her. At least she had copied part of the internal systems with scavenged tech from the battlefield. Power, however, remained a lingering inconvenience.

So she drifted toward one of the city's low haunts—a collapsing block where smoke gathered in slow, greasy clouds and the sharp tang of burnt synthgrass clung to the air. Men and women slumped in doorframes, held upright only by habit or drink; the world had clearly abandoned them long before the Empire arrived. Sarah moved through it without pity or judgment. Misery was a constant in the galaxy, and she had long since ceased counting the forms it took. As Helix had said, the metaphoric pigs have not risen from the pen, but had started reciting poetry.

Too bad it was slurred.

All she required was a working socket, a forgotten conduit, anything that might lend her armour a little more life. Being a walking battery was hardly dignified, but practicality outweighed sentiment. In the dark, she scanned the rusting structure beside her, already calculating which part of its neglected infrastructure she might quietly siphon without attracting attention. The night, after all, asked nothing of her—only that she take what she needed and keep moving.

That was when she noticed a lone figure moving down the street—walking not through the world, but beside it, as though wrapped in her own private orbit. The city churned around her, loud and restless, yet she moved untouched by it, suspended in a muted pocket of her own making. Even without the Force, even with her presence hollowed to nothing, Sarah recognized the shape of someone drifting on the edge of themselves. It was a familiar gait. A vulnerable one. And vulnerability, to her, was simply another form of invitation.

Her severed connection made this all the easier. No luminous thread tethered her to the galaxy; no wayward flare of intent would betray her interest. She could observe without being observed, weave without being felt. Old instincts—old habits—stirred beneath her borrowed skin. A spider's web, after all, required constant tending, and she had let hers go slack for far too long. Now, watching the girl slip through the half-lit street like a thought she shouldn't be thinking, Sarah felt the first quiet pull of the game returning.

The Corruptor of the Light, silent behind the mask of a weary gunner, allowed herself a small, private smile.

At last, she could play again.

So, she slowly walked, pretending to feign disinterest until their paths crossed. She stopped only two steps away, a small smirk appearing on her face.

"Excuse me." She asked politely, turning to face the stranger with a soft, innocent smile on her face. "Have we met before? You look remarkably familiar."

 

[Cora]

The voice cut through Cora’s thoughts like a blade.

She froze mid-step, the fog in her mind scattering as every sense sharpened at once. One moment she’d been drifting, lost in the familiar spiral of resentment and self-loathing, and the next, she was aware.

Her muscles tightened before she turned. The Force stirred within her.

The stranger was close. Too close. Too deliberate.

Cora pivoted slowly, her silver eye locked onto the stranger. She was a sharp young woman, posture disciplined, smile far too gentle for this hour, this district, this world. A predator pretending to be harmless.

I should’ve sensed her sooner. You’re slipping, Cora.

“No, we haven’t,” she stated, her tone flat and her expression unreadable.

She shifted her stance to pull away from the stranger and prepare for action should that be necessary. Her hand stayed near her belt, hovering over the golden hilt of her saber. A gesture she never bothered hiding.

Cora’s gaze flicked over the stranger's armour, observing the way she stood with quiet assurance, as if she’d already measured Cora’s weaknesses.

She thinks I’m vulnerable.
The thought sent a cold spark through her chest.

“You’ve mistaken me for someone else,” she added, voice low and controlled. “And you’re standing closer than you ought to be.”

Then Cora’s eye narrowed, her suspicion sharpening into something harder, more precise.

“Try again,” she said quietly, each word deliberate. “Tell me what you really want.”

Because nothing about this felt accidental.
And nothing about that woman felt safe.

Sarah Vulke

 

[Sarah Vulke]

"On watchful eyes."

Tags - Cora ​

She had begun to savor the advantages of being severed from the Force. To the untrained, it was a disadvantage; to Sarah, it was an exquisite veil. Without the luminous tell-tale of her presence, she drifted beneath the notice of sensitives who relied too heavily on instinct. They expected the galaxy to whisper warnings on their behalf. Tonight, it did not. She could move like a shadow in a system of lights—an old trick reborn, sharper for the silence wrapped around her.

The woman before her was Echani, or close enough to it. Pale hair, pale skin, movements shaped by a culture that built identity out of violence and precision. Sarah marked the details with quiet interest. No sentimental ache of memory—those attachments had been excised long ago—but the intellectual curiosity of a predator noting the contours of new prey. This one carried herself like someone accustomed to conflict, accustomed to surviving it. A pleasing complication.

The stranger's stance shifted, muscles coiling in preparation, arrogance threading through the poised grip near her saber. Sarah recognized the rhythm immediately: the misplaced certainty of someone who believed readiness equaled dominance. It was a familiar mistake. She had seen it from Jedi Masters, Sith Lords, revolutionaries, warlords—men and women who stepped into the ring believing themselves unassailable, right up until they weren't. Even now, cut off from the Force and lacking her proper armor, she felt no tremor of concern. She had fought titans with nothing but will and an idea of victory.

The stranger's warnings came sharp and clean, intended to carve distance between them. Sarah did not shift an inch. The younger woman spoke of boundaries, of proximity, of what the stranger ought to be doing—as though naming rules made them real. It was almost endearing. Being caught in a spider's web didn't make you the owner of it. It simply meant you had yet to realize where the threads were anchored… and how tightly they held.

Restraints had always been one of the Tyrant's quiet pleasures—the exquisite act of shaping another's potential, bending it, refining it, deciding how much of their strength they were permitted to wield. Control was an art form. And this young woman, bristling with tension and defiance, was precisely the kind of raw material she excelled at sculpting.

The stranger's final words faded, stiff with suspicion, and Sarah decided the moment had ripened. Spinning a web was its own delight… but inviting the prey to admire it while they stepped inside was an indulgence she seldom denied herself. This one would resist, of course—she had the posture of someone built from iron and fractures both. But every lock had a tolerance, and every shape could be coaxed into the keyhole with enough patience.

"I assure you," Sarah murmured, the tone gentle, almost apologetic, "if I wished harm upon you, we would not be standing here exchanging pleasantries, old friend." Her voice slid into the space between them like silk being drawn across a blade. She stepped forward with the kind of quiet certainty that suggested she already owned the distance. She watched for the reaction, cataloguing every flicker.

"The galaxy has a way of stitching old threads together at the most miserable of hours," she continued, her smile subtle, knowing. "A dreary night on a dreary world… and yet here you are." Her head tilted just enough to feign curiosity while her eyes betrayed nothing. "What draws you into the Imperial Core, I wonder? Perhaps—whether you remember or not—you were looking for me."

The web tightened by a single, invisible strand.