Tyrant Queen of Darkness
"One spark is all it takes."
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Kinley Pryse
The hideout was not so much built as excavated—scraped from the bone marrow of Nar Shaddaa's rotting underlayers like a cyst left to fester and thrive. Old access tunnels, decommissioned droid warrens, forgotten smuggler chutes—they all converged here in a kind of architectural confession, a place where the world above denied knowledge of what dwelled below. Fungal lichen clung to broken masonry like frostbite, faintly bioluminescent in hues of sickly green and starved blue. Condensation dripped in erratic rhythms from exposed coolant pipes overhead. Somewhere far off, something metal screamed in protest. It was not a place that welcomed comfort. It devoured it.
Which was precisely why Serina Calis chose it.
She did not sit. There was no chair, no throne. Only a sloped segment of ferrocrete wall behind her, stained by smoke and age, and a wide stretch of open space before her—lit faintly by a single violet glowrod recessed into the rusting ceiling. It bathed her figure in a moody chiaroscuro, casting a long, hungry silhouette behind her like some pagan statue awaiting its next sacrifice.
Tyrant's Embrace devoured what little light remained.
She stood unmoving in its obsidian grip, a figure of feminine cruelty forged in elegance and entropy. The six insectile eyes of her helm flickered in minute calibrations, watching, scanning, parsing movement that hadn't yet arrived. The violet heart at her sternum beat faintly, the runes etched across her ribcage glowing in time with her slow, measured breaths. Somewhere within that frame, a woman still existed—but she was buried beneath layered dominion, reshaped into a blade of purpose.
And she was waiting.
Kinley Pryse.
Serina spoke the name in her mind like an invocation—each syllable tasting of lower-hive filth and ambition. Not Force-sensitive. Not powerful. But still dangerous, in the way that parasites were dangerous. In the way that rats brought plague.
A spice-runner. A smuggler. A petty queen in a criminal hive that swarmed with ten thousand others. But unlike most of them, Kin had caught Serina's eye. She had a reputation for keeping deals. For surviving betrayals. For slithering through every grasping hand that reached to crush her. That alone made her useful. But Serina wasn't here for a partner. She was here for a lever. Kin was the kind of woman who made a mistake just once—because she didn't survive it a second time. And Serina had every intention of making herself Kin's first mistake.
Still, she'd paid well.
A small fortune of credits, hardwired into the Black Sun's own shadow-accounting networks and laundered twice through shell companies that didn't know they were hers. A love letter wrapped in zeros. And Kin had answered—of course she had. Greed was a siren song no criminal could ignore.
The letter Serina had sent had been written on synthpaper laced with mild pheromonal triggers—nothing overt, just enough to make the reader feel curious, compliant, compelled. The ink had been alchemically treated to resist scanners and burst into flame if tampered with. Her coordinates encoded in poetry. The signature was a violet wax seal pressed with a ring that didn't exist in any Sith archive but which meant death if copied.
She hadn't signed it with her name. She hadn't needed to.
A sound.
A rustle of gravel.
The faintest echo of footfalls.
Serina's head turned slowly, the six violet eyes tracking the entrance to the hideout. Her cape shifted behind her, durafiber tendrils whispering faintly as they unfurled an inch—like serpents disturbed in their nest.
The shadows yawned.
And then—
There.
A silhouette. Human. Slender. Hooded.
Kinley Pryse.