Mistress of the Dark.

"Try not to fight over me, thanks."
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The drop ship shook as it entered Kamino's upper atmosphere—though shook was generous. It was more like a soundless shudder, a ripple across the hull felt more through instinct than motion. The clouds were a crushing grey wall, thunder-veined and endless, stretched in roiling tiers across a world that had not known sunlight in millennia. Lightning lanced across the blackened sky like nerves twitching in the corpse of a god.
And Serina Calis stood at the edge of it, waiting.
She did not move. Not as the vessel adjusted trajectory. Not as the engines dimmed into their whisper-quiet descent configuration. Not even as the temperature inside dropped to match the freezing ocean waiting below.
Her breathing was a metronome, slow and silent within the helmet of the Revenant-Class Adaptive Stealth Suit. All external light had long since vanished—the interior lights disabled, HUD set to thermal-occlusion and sonar-based navigation. Every movement of the suit was tracked not by visual overlay but by sensation alone, translated through the gel-layer's neuro-filaments directly into her spine, her nerves, her will. It was not armor. It was a second skin. A purpose worn like a secret.
She could hear them behind her—the others.
Quiet.
Efficient.
Predators, like herself, shaped by black doctrine and sharpened by necessity. She didn't look. Didn't need to. The silence that hung around them was not from uncertainty—it was from discipline. The kind that no longer questioned whether they would survive, only whether they would complete the objective.
Only whether they could serve Serina.
She liked it that way.
Lightning lit the cockpit one last time as the pilot gave a brief signal. Nonverbal. Coded. They were here.
Below them: the shattered skeleton of Tipoca City, once the heart of Kaminoan bio-genetic supremacy, now a drowned cathedral of forgotten ambition. The great spires were bent inward like dying fingers, their skin peeled back by Clone War bombardment and centuries of corrosive rainfall. The ocean had consumed it. But not erased it.
And somewhere in the dead bones of that place, beneath collapsed birthing chambers and flooded datavaults, lay the Cloning Template Synchronizer.
A device Serina had no intention of leaving to chance, to scavengers, to time—or to Sith interference.
"You're not just building an army," Garreth had said. "You're building a power base."
No.
She was building a lineage.
The thought flared in her like cold fire, and her gloved fingers flexed once as if sculpting something out of the dark. Not merely soldiers. Not pawns. Not even tools.
Herself.
She had spent years cultivating ideology. Power. Beauty. Fear. Every piece of her had been distilled, refined, forged into a force capable of outmaneuvering the Empire's endless bureaucracy and devouring the Force's false dichotomies. And now—finally—she would preserve it. Replicate it. Not just in data, or disciples, but in flesh.
A clone of Serina Calis. Perfected. Trained. Crafted from her DNA but evolved, honed, amplified. More than a shadow. A successor without dilution.
Not yet. But soon.
If this mission succeeded.
"You want a species, not a uniform."
And she would have it.
The drop ship banked, cutting into a wind channel just above the water. The sound was gone. No engines. No hum. Just the scream of the Kaminoan storm outside, muffled to a distant pressure by the reinforced hull. The insertion point was near—a half-submerged corridor shaft that once linked the cloning archives to the behavioral conditioning halls. It now jutted from the ocean at a ragged angle, barely visible, like a broken limb trying to claw its way back to the surface.
Perfect.
Serina activated her HUD with a mental impulse—rebreather nominal, magnetic sole calibration green, internal pressure locks engaged—and stepped forward into the drop bay. The ramp hissed open without light or sound, revealing the cold abyss.
Rain hammered the outer hull, whipping sideways like knives. The ocean below was ink-black, alive with current and static charge. But Serina did not see weather. She saw a test.
And she would not be found wanting.
She turned slightly—just enough to acknowledge the presence of those behind her.
A nod.
"Are we all ready to go?"
Tipoca City waited below, like a corpse guarding its secrets.
But Serina Calis was not here to plunder the dead.
She was here to resurrect something far worse. This time, she would not share it with anyone.
Not the Assembly.
Not the Dark Council.
Not the Emperor.
Not even the stars.