Private Granny Dearest

[Scherezade deWinter]

Scherezade stood at the edge of nothing. The air didn't move. There was no light, not even the soft sense of shadow. Just cold. Still. Dense. She didn't know why she was here. The call of the Force had demanded her presence, and she had simply followed. Not for any specific reason though; calls of the Force were more common than eyelash mites, but something about this one had stirred something into her.

So she had come. And now she waited.

It was slow at first. A small light that began to grow. Not of flame, but of presence. The unmistakable sensation of something ancient pressing against her skin from the inside out, like blood running backwards. Like nails curling behind her eyes. Like a name that wasn't hers rising to her lips.

"You took your time."

The voice didn't echo. It didn't need to. It wrapped around her like silk and iron, smooth and sharp. Familiar in the way old wounds are. Familiar in the way breath catches before a scream.

And then came the figure.

Not walking. Arriving. Stepping into being with the same confidence as a star knows how to burn. Shery deWinter . Tall. Poised. Unimpressed. Dressed in layers of shimmering white that caught the simulated light and bent it like icy blades. Her skin was pale, but not soft, like bone that had forgotten how to rot. Her eyes held galaxies behind them, not in wonder, but in conquest. And their glow, green, sharp, ancestral, matched Scherezade's.

She smiled.

It wasn't a kind smile.

"Granddaughter," she said, like the word had teeth. "Have you finally come to thank me? Or to kill me?"

Scherezade didn't answer at first.

Her jaw clenched, too tight for speech. Her fists had balled before she noticed. The cold hadn't gone away, it had just moved inward, tucking itself behind her ribs like a secret. Her heart beat slow. Measured. Like it was waiting for permission to feel.

This… this was the woman whose voice had slithered through her mind the moment the pebble cracked open. The one who had branded memories into her like hot iron, memories that weren't hers, but felt like they could've been. Should've been. The woman who had buried her in stone and silence, and then called it salvation.

"Thank you?" Scherezade said finally, voice low. Rough. She laughed, once, sharp and wrong. "You took my life. You took me away from my brother and my parents. My time. You hid me like an artifact and called it mercy."

Her boots scuffed against nothing as she took a step forward, even though there was no ground. No need for ground.

"I should kill you."

 

[Shery deWinter]

Shery regarded her granddaughter in silence. The seconds ticked by, but time did not matter to her. Now, a hundred years ago, or a week from now; it was all the same to her.

"Perhaps you should," she said at last, "It would be poetic, would it not? The granddaughter slays the grandmother, frees herself from a legacy she never asked for. I imagine it would feel like triumph. Like closure." Her gaze didn't flicker. Not even once. "But closure is a myth sold to fools who think blood is ever clean."

Another step. The void gave way to her weight not because it had to, but because it understood her place.

"You speak of your life as though it was a singular thread. Something you lost. Something you could have lived if I hadn't intervened. But child… you were born of a tangle. Made from curses. From ambition. From pain that predates your name by centuries."

She raised a hand, and with a curl of two fingers, the dark around them shifted. Shapes. Memories. Not clear, not kind. Just enough to feel the echo: a child's scream, the scent of rot, the whisper of old Sith dialects burned into skin.

"What I did was not mercy. Mercy implies softness. I am not soft. I preserved you. I anchored you, because without that, you would have been claimed by things you can't yet name, and worse still… you would have willingly gone."

Her voice dropped then, a hush beneath the weight of eternity.

"You don't have to thank me. And you certainly don't have to forgive me. But do not mistake survival for theft."

She let the last word settle.

Then added, almost gently, "I did not bury you. I sowed you."

Again her words did not echo. There is no need for that type of flare for dramatics.

Shery let the silence hold a moment longer to let it settle. Let it taste. Her eyes remained on Scherezade, not out of affection, but out of precision. She was reading posture, pulse, the muscle around the jawline. Her granddaughter had grown well in her absence. That much, at least, was pleasing.

"You want answers. Of course you do."

She turned then, just slightly. Not dismissively. As one who no longer needs to convince anyone of anything.

"You were created, Scherezade. Not conceived. Forged. Cultivated in a bloodline I spent centuries designing through alliance, sacrifice, betrayal. And when the time came for harvest, I gave you the only chance you would have to remain yourself."

Her gaze returned.

"You think I stole time from you. That I sealed you away in a pebble because I feared what you might become, or perhaps wished to hurt your mother. But that is incorrect."

A pause. No drama. Just precision.

"I love Nessarose as I love all my children from Lorcan. Morgaine, Adam, Asteria, Cordelia. Each of them a bundle of perfection, the apple of my eye. I love my grandchildren too, though I have been absent from your lives. I sealed you away because the others your parents would have let you gone to waste. Would have let you think that growing up normal was a choice you were permitted to have. They spoke of you being the next Queen of Endelaan but tried to shield you from the galaxy."

A flick of her fingers again, and now the void around them moved. Flickering. Faint outlines of familiar faces, some blurred, some clear. Katrine. A warped memory of Madalena. Josh. Brayden. Hundreds of more faces that had crossed Scherezade's path. None of them stayed long. Just long enough to sting.

"The thing about love," Shery said, her voice dipping almost to reverence, "is that it makes people stupid. And desperate. And predictable. I loved my children. I love my grandchildren. But I do not owe any of you a painless truth."

She stepped closer. Not threatening. Not warm. Just present. With full gravity.

"You are the end of a thread I began weaving before your galaxy had a name. I gave you my memories to steady you. A gift I have never extended to another, not child, not consort, not heir.. You were supposed to be my legacy," she sighed, "Instead, you became something else. And I will not reclaim you now."

The silence that followed this time wasn't to let the words sink in.

It was mourning. Quiet. Cold. Unacknowledged.

"You'll leave this place when I'm done. You will go on your way. I expect I won't see you again. But I will answer what I choose. Ask, if you must."

 

[Scherezade deWinter]

Scherezade's breath caught, shallow and uneven beneath the crushing weight of silence. The void around them pressed close, but it was nothing compared to the storm roiling inside her chest. Every word Shery spoke carved deeper wounds that ached with the bitter sting of abandonment and the cold bite of truth.

She clenched her fists again, knuckles white, struggling to steady the chaos of betrayal, confusion, and the desperate hunger for answers that had haunted her ever since the pebble had cracked. The memories branded into her flesh and mind clawed like restless shadows, pulling her toward understanding yet threatening to drown her in pain.

And yet beneath it all, a fragile thread of something else… A whisper of reluctant hope, flickering like a dying star.

Her voice emerged, raw and trembling, cracking under the weight of emotions she barely dared acknowledge.

"Why me?!" she demanded, eyes blazing with a mixture of fury and heartbreak, "Why seal me away like a weapon, instead of letting me live, truly live, as yourself or my parents intended? Do you even have an idea of what I've gone through because of you?!"

She took a step forward, the emptiness beneath her feet irrelevant. Her gaze locked on Shery's, searching, demanding.

"What were the things you said would have claimed me? The ones I can't yet name, why was I the only one who had to be trapped in that pebble to survive?"

A shudder broke through her control, a fragile crack in her armor.

"If you loved Nessarose, if you loved all your children, then why did you turn away? Why were you absent when we needed you most? Why did you attack Asteria before the Gulag? And Adam?! Why dump me in a stranger's lap and not with one of the family?" Her voice trembled with sorrow that twisted into accusation.

"What legacy did you hope to leave behind? Was it worth all this pain?" Her tone sharpened. "Was I ever meant to be part of that legacy, or just the end of the thread?"

Her breath hitched again, fury burning hot beneath the surface.

"You gave me your memories to steady me… But why hide the truth behind riddles and silence? What did you expect me to do with such a burden?"

The questions hung heavy in the void, raw and unyielding, each one a shard of pain and longing aimed straight at the woman before her.

Scherezade waited, trembling, not with fear, but with the weight of all she needed to know.

 

[Shery deWinter]

Shery regarded her grandaughter steadily, the faintest crease of something like regret or exhaustion softening her otherwise unreadable expression. Millenia of silence pressed upon her, heavier than any blade, yet she spoke with the steady resolve of one who had long since accepted her burdens.

"Why you?" she began, each word deliberate and slow, like the fall of ancient stone. "Because the web I wove was never meant to be tidy. Neatness is a luxury reserved for the naive or the dead. You were never just a child to be sheltered or set free. You were the fulcrum, a hinge upon which destinies turned, unseen and unchosen."

The web… Each of them had their own special gift, and the Force had less to do with that than what some had expected. She knew her granddaughter was a Blood Hound. That Madalena could rip apart portals between dimensions. Morgaine… Was better not considered at this time. Asteria had the icy grip of cold. And Shery… She had the control over the Web. She had spent entire lifetimes studying it and learning to weave it. Learning to control it, to manipulate it, something directly and sometimes through actions against or for others.

Her voice deepened, resonant with the weight of countless lifetimes. "Sealing you away was not cruelty, but brutal necessity. The forces that hunted you… merciless. Ancient beyond reckoning. They would have consumed more than your flesh. More than your spirit. They would have swallowed your very essence."

Beneath the cold precision of her words, a storm of loneliness and resignation stirred. Layers she would never voice. She had chosen this path long ago, sacrificing closeness for protection, presence for survival. The cost was hers alone to bear.

"The shadows I spoke of… they stretched long before either of us drew breath. Entities born in the void between stars, remnants of bloodlines so old and dark that even your memories cannot touch their edges. You know well that the deWinters are but a small pocket within the Family of Darkness. For us, the light is a forgotten myth. To face such things unprepared is to invite oblivion. Death, we can, and have survived, many times over. Erasure is another thing entirely."

Her eyes flickered briefly to visions only she could see, of ghosts of wars and sacrifices past.

"As for my absence… Love is not always loud or warm. It often wears the guise of cold pragmatism, distance, and sacrifice. I loved Nessarose, I loved all my children with a fierceness that would burn worlds down, but the paths I walked demanded payment, and a price that included never being near them."

A shadow crossed her features. "And yet, it was not I who struck Asteria. My body, yes. But the spirit within it then was Illyandra. The same fate befell Adam. My children, my blood, my heart… Killing for them had always been simple. But dying for them… that was the true testament."

She stepped closer, her voice lowering to an almost intimate whisper, heavy with unspoken histories.

"You were given my memories because you were meant to stand where I could not, where none else could. Have you never wondered why, among all the DeWinter women, you alone are a Warrior? Why the weight of both shield and sword fell to you?"

Her eyes searched Scherezade's, sharp and unyielding.

"You are both armor and chain. A fortress and a burden. I offered you strength wrapped in sacrifice. To wield such gifts, you must learn what to carry and what to cast aside, lest they drown you."

She paused, letting the silence stretch like a wound.

"Legacy is no blessing. It is a curse masquerading in the light of hope. I spun the thread that I hoped would endure beyond my unravelling. Time measures me in millennia, yet even I am not immune to the end. You were meant to be that thread, the last trace of what I built. But fate, as it often does, twisted the tapestry. You became something else entirely."

Her gaze hardened, cold and absolute. Unforgiving.

"I will answer only what I choose to answer. Some truths are too heavy for the living to bear. When you leave this place, you will carry only what you can endure. And I… will no longer be your tether."

In the quiet between her words, Shery's mind turned over what must remain unspoken. Her choices had shaped centuries, forged legacies, and fractured families. The weight of those decisions pressed upon her soul like the void itself; unyielding and eternal. There was no space left for regret, only the endless solitude of command.

 

[Scherezade deWinter]

The silence between them stretched, not a crack but a chasm, wide enough to swallow stars and still echo, and becoming wider still.

Scherezade stood frozen. Not from fear. Not even from rage. Just the raw, sudden stillness of someone watching the sky collapse in unfamiliar constellations. For the first time in too long, she didn't feel like the protagonist in her own storm. She felt like debris.

Her voice, when it finally came, was low. Controlled. Each word sharpened on the inside of her teeth.

"You know I hated you."

She said it the way people said things like I was hungry or the stars were out tonight. A fact. A constant. An inheritance.

"You caged me. You lied to me. You carved things into the walls of my life and told me they'd always been there. And now you tell me…" her fingers twitched, like they wanted to grab something but couldn't decide what, "you were always going to send me away. You never wanted me to stay. You just wanted me to… function?"

Her head tilted. Not quite a question. Not quite an accusation. Something hanging between.

"And yet. I know you loved me."

She didn't flinch when she said it. Didn't soften. But the words bled truth, painful and ugly.

"You didn't build me to be your granddaughter. You built me to be your dagger. And maybe you loved the edge of it more than the hand that held it. But I know love when it's mine."

A breath. Shallow. Not steady. And a heart that shattered, yet again, in her too short existence.

"And that makes it worse."

 

[Shery deWinter]

Her gaze did not waver. The weight of centuries pressed behind her eyes, but her voice was calm, cutting through the silence like a sharpened blade.

"You ask why you. Because you were never meant for comfort. You are the consequence of choices older than your name."

She paused, considering something beyond the moment.

"Your mother's life was spared by chance, not mercy. You and your brother arrived bound. Your parents told you it was with love. You told yourself it was with love. It was not. It was necessity. I separated you to protect the thread I could not yet see."

Her voice lowered, colder now.

"You carry my memories not as a gift, but a burden. To hold them is to stand where I could not."

A flicker of something almost like exhaustion flickered in her eyes.

"How would you fare if I took them back?" she mused aloud, voice sharp and biting. "Severed them from your mind, leaving only the gaping holes you've carved yourself? Would you even be able to speak? Or would you drool into the silence?"

She paused. There were lines even she would not cross.

"Worry not," she resumed, cutting off any reply, "I will not do that to you. You are no longer part of me. Your legacy is fractured. You connect to the web I wove, but you are no longer its thread."

Millennia pressed on the Dark Lady's shoulders like the endless night, each decision etched into her soul as indelibly as scars on ancient stone. She had long since learned that power was not given. It was taken, shaped, and often paid for in solitude and sacrifice. Her actions towards her family were not born of cruelty, but calculation. Every choice made in the dark was a stitch in a web designed to endure beyond her own fragile existence. To bend fate, to outmanoeuvre gods and monsters lurking beyond the stars, she had become something less than human, or perhaps more, in the way only those who walk in shadows can be.

She remembered the first time she tasted power beyond death, the hunger that followed, relentless and cold. It had shaped her, carved her into the Empress who commanded legions and devoured legacies. To love was to control, to protect through iron will and merciless precision. And yet, in the quiet moments, rare and unwelcome, a whisper of something else stirred. A faint ache for what she had lost. The children she had shaped, the family she had fractured. The threads she had pulled so tightly they threatened to snap.

Her granddaughter was the most unpredictable knot in the tapestry. Not merely a product of her design but a divergence, a ripple in a sea she could not fully command. The memories she had given, heavy with her own triumphs and horrors, were a gift and a burden beyond measure. She had never allowed herself to hope for softness, nor for forgiveness. Yet, beneath the layers of resolve, a silent question lingered: was this fractured legacy enough? Was survival, in its starkest form, all she could offer?

For all her dominion, she was still bound by the limits of what even millennia could not conquer, time, change, and the unknowable future.

And now, as the echo of her words hung heavy in the void, Shery knew the moment had come to let go. To release control and watch what would grow from the seeds she had sown, or what would wither in the cold. For all her iron will and ruthless calculation, the deWinter matriarch harboured a guarded hope, buried deep beneath layers of cynicism, that Scherezade might become something beyond the fractured legacy she'd inherited. Something new. She had forged weapons, queens, and shadows from bloodlines old as stars. But Scherezade was a wild thread, unpredictable, unyielding, raw.

The answer was not hers to command anymore.

Her eyes lingered on her granddaughter, sharp, searching, weighing every breath and movement. The same eyes that had once ruled empires now measured the fragile line between destruction and rebirth.

"You carry my past," she said softly, almost to herself, "but your path will be yours alone. I have no claim to it anymore."

The faintest trace of something almost like longing flickered before her features hardened once more.

"I will give you no more chains. Only the truth I choose to share, and the silence you must fill with your own voice."

In that silence between them, the ancient Empress and the Warrior granddaughter, the future hung suspended, uncertain, dangerous, and full of possibility.

"I will give you a parting gift," she said, her voice surprising soft as she took Scherezade's arm. The skin beneath her dark finger parted, a thin line opening to let blood seep forth. Three drops fell deliberately onto her granddaughter's skin.

"Three boons," she explained, knowing Scherezade understood their weight, "between now and the end of times."

Satisfied, she stepped back, releasing the arm.

"One final question, granddaughter," she said, "and then we will part ways."

 

[Scherezade deWinter]

The silence did not break when her grandmother stepped back. This time, it actually echoed.

The blood burned where it touched her skin, not in a painful way, but like a brand being forged through memory. It soaked into her and vanished like old fire given new breath, and she knew without needing to ask that those boons were not ceremonial. They were real. They would answer if she called. And they would cost her, as all things worth anything ever did.

Scherezade stared at her arm a moment longer, then dropped it back to her side.

This was not what she had expected. Not by half. Not the admission of regret. Not the restraint. Not the gift.

And yet…

"I thought," she began slowly, "that if I ever saw you again, I would rip open the galaxy just to make you bleed."

There was no venom in her voice. Not anymore. Just the jagged remnants of fury that had lost its edge. What was left was raw, confused, alive.

"You made a cage, and put my mother in it. You made another, and put me in it too. I don't care if you say you didn't mean to. You did it. We bled in them. We broke in them."

She took a single step forward.

"But I remember the stories you used to tell through some of the memories. I remember the voice that always said 'not yet' when I almost gave in. I remember thinking… maybe that was you."

Her eyes shimmered, not with tears, but with something brighter. Stranger. Older.

"I don't forgive you. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But I see you now."

A pause. Then a thin, sharp smile curled her lips.

"Three boons, huh?" she said, rolling her shoulder. "I better make them count."

She turned, slowly, partly to go, partly to see if her grandmother would stop her. When she didn't, Scherezade gave a short nod.

"We'll meet again," she said simply.

Because they would. Because how could they not?

And Scherezade now knew what had to happen. It would take her decades, perhaps centuries. But she would dethrone her own grandmother.

And then take her place.

But get it right.

Somehow.

 

[Madalena deWinter]

Somewhere in the Outer Rim

She had no reason to come here. No mission. No trail. No unfinished business, not even a whisper of a bounty that required her attention. And yet, here she was.

The station was barely more than welded scrap and pirate pride. Air scrubbers hissed too loud. The lighting blinked in slow, sullen gasps, and the locals moved with the hunched tension of those who'd been disappointed by the galaxy too many times.

But Madalena didn't care. She was following something older than logic. A feeling. A ripple that hummed beneath her ribs and refused to let her go. It had started days ago, faint but annoying. Then stronger. Then urgent.

By the time she docked at the pirate station, it was practically screaming. And when she felt it again, that familiar signature in the Force, her heart nearly stopped.

Her boots made almost no sound as she stepped onto the upper ring of the docking bay. The place stank of ion exhaust and rot, but it didn't matter.

There she was. Scherezade.

She looked different. Same face, same glow in her eyes, but her edges had changed. They were somehow sharpened, fractured, hardened in places that used to be soft. She was leaning against a freighter hull like she owned the galaxy, a half-eaten tin of cream in her hand, dressed in chaos and glitter and something heavier.

Madalena stopped, letting the moment settle. She'd imagined this reunion more times than she could count. In her imagination the sisters would be racing into each other's arms, screaming and laughing, yelling and punching, maybe even crying.

But now? She couldn't move. Not yet.

The silence between them was heavy. Electric. Holy.

Scherezade turned, already knowing.

Of course she did.

"You're late," she said, no bite behind the words.

Madalena tilted her head, eyes searching every detail, checking for damage, for scars, for proof that this was real. "You've changed."

"So have you."

Neither moved.

They didn't have to. The Force between them was alive, pulsing like a second heartbeat. Madalena took a slow breath. Her fingers twitched at her sides, aching to reach out but still unsure of how this worked now.

They'd spent years as ghosts. Decades to the galaxy. Lifetimes in their heads.

"I'm not here for answers," she said at last. "Not all of them."

"But you want some."

"I want you, sister."

A pause. Then, slowly, Scherezade nodded, just once.

Madalena stepped forward. Not close enough to embrace. Just enough to be felt.

"What happened?" she asked. "All of it."

Scherezade looked at her then, not just a glance, but a look that cracked time open. The kind that pulled every memory they'd ever shared into the air between them.

"I'll tell you," her sister said, voice like shattered stars. "But I don't know where to start."

"We'll find it," Madalena whispered. "Together."

And this time, when she held out her hand, Scherezade didn't hesitate.

Fingers laced.

The galaxy could wait.