Private Litany of the Bloomed Path

[Lady Mireliathe]

There was no birdsong here. No trees. No insects. Only dust, wind, and the eternal hush of the void.

The moon, whose name had long since slipped from memory, had once been considered a place of silent pilgrimage. Ancient ones believed it to be a point of convergence, where stars and memory tangled, and where forgotten truths drifted down like ash. That time was long past. All that remained was ruin. Wind-choked stone. Cracked sky.

A Diathim stood alone amid the wreckage.

Everything about her seemed wrong. Her bare feet rested on timeworn stone, cold as death and smooth with age. The wind caught at her layered veils, whispering around her like a lover mourning her absence. Her wings — once beautiful and opalescent, now stained black from corruption — arched gently behind her, consuming all fragments of starlight.

Eyes closed, she tilted her face toward the sky.

The Force here was thick, sludgy. It clung to her skin like oil, burdened with secrets, unmoved for centuries. A stillness that would choke lesser minds. But Mireliathe breathed it in, let it fill her. Each breath a note. Each exhale a verse.

She felt him before she heard him.

Auron Song. The Purgatory Prince.

Mireliathe did not turn to look.

"Do you feel it, Warden?" she asked, her voice low, melodic, yet eerie and uncomfortable, like a song remembered from a dream, a nightmare. "The breath between the stars. The pause. The forgetting."

 

[Auron Song]

Auron moved through the shattered threshold of the temple ruin like a shadow cast backward through time. His boots stirred the ash, but made no sound. He passed beneath the collapsed archway, between two leaning columns that once bore the names of stars now lost to drift. Once, this place had been believed to be a sanctuary to a long-vanished sect; cartographers of the Force who believed the stars themselves were living memories, each constellation a verse in a divine and unending psalm. Now those names, those beliefs, lay broken beneath his tread.

His coat, torn but regal, whispered behind him like old scripture read aloud in a dead tongue. The air grew colder with every step, the temperature falling as though the moon itself recognised his presence and recoiled.

He was not living, not truly. Not since the Nexus had claimed him. The Force twisted around him in strange ways, rippling like a thread snagged on the past. And yet, he was not empty. There was still a soul in him, bound not by time, but by memory.

His eyes, luminous with unnatural fire, locked onto the witch's figure; his saviour, his equal.

Auron halted beside her at the edge of the etched circle. His gaze dropped to the sigils beneath them; intricate patterns of ash and glass and bone, etched into the floor in a language that predated the Jedi, the Sith, perhaps even the Force as it was known now. He had seen these runes before, long ago, etched in deep libraries, scribbled in the margins of a book no Jedi dared to open.

He spoke quietly, with a voice lined in frost.

"It remembers us. That is enough."

 

[Lady Mireliathe]

Mireliathe finally turned her head to him, her eyes a black and gold that caught no warmth; eyes that had seen empires rise and fall, and wept for none of them.

"But remembrance," she said, brushing a hand across a glyph whose lines pulsed faintly beneath her fingers. "Is not obedience. Not yet."

Her touch left behind a faint luminescence, as though her presence alone coaxed old power to stir. She moved with deliberate elegance, every gesture purposeful, every glance layered with knowing. In her, belief and command were one and the same.

The earth beneath them trembled, barely perceptible, like a breath drawn in the deep belly of the moon. It was a soundless groan, ancient tectonics stirred not by nature, but by ritual, by will. Something beneath the stone remembered what it once was.

Mireliathe stepped into the circle, her bare foot landing upon a glyph of interwoven spirals. Light rippled outward, violet, indigo, and deeper hues unnamed by language, threading through the carvings like blood returning to a corpse. She walked with reverence, her presence awakening the ground itself. Sigils flared to life around her in slow succession, as if bowing to her passage.

"The roots are still listening," she whispered, almost lovingly. "They have only slumbered."

Her wings gave a soft, ghostlike rustle. Above, the stars seemed to dim ever so slightly, as if something greater were drawing breath.

"Will they resist us?" she asked suddenly, glancing over her shoulder, her tone laced with something between mischief and prophecy.

 

[Auron Song]

Auron's expression did not shift. But the wind around him did, tightening, narrowing, as if the world itself braced against something unspoken. His fingers flexed slightly at his side, not in threat, but in memory.

He had stood in circles like this before. As a Jedi. In another lifetime. And now... as something else entirely. He circled her slowly, eyes scanning the carvings, the half-fallen monoliths, the looming sky. The stars overhead remained motionless. Watching.

Then, he paused.

"They must," he replied, his voice sharp, low, cutting through the void. "It is necessary."

 

[Lady Mireliathe]

Mireliathe gave a soft, amused sound.

"Such conviction, Warden. One might think you remember what hope tasted like." She noted his lack of response.

The circle was alive now. Light pulsed outward like veins beneath skin, connecting sigils older than language. Invisible currents twisted around them, drawn not from the air but from belief; from the sheer certainty of what was to come.

Mireliathe lifted her hands slowly, fingers splayed like a conductor preparing the final movement of a forgotten symphony. Her movements were fluid, delicate, and terrifying in their precision, each a deliberate cut across the veil.

"All things are forgotten, and all things forget," she said, each word brushing against the Force like a ripple. "But not us. Not the Bloom."

And then, a silence settled over the plateau. It was not peace. It was not rest. It was anticipation. The circle flared. Far below, something in the moon stirred, bones shifting in forgotten crypts, roots twitching in dark soil. On the other side of the moon, a hidden satellite flickered to life, its instruments beginning a low, constant hum.

On distant worlds, the first sleepers began to dream. And from the planet that loomed ahead of them, a scream rippled through the Force; a sharp, broken note that echoed with the agony of creation, as something unholy clawed its way into existence.

Mireliathe lifted her arms to the sky, eyes closed.

"Let the memory of light scream," she whispered, voice reverent.

"...before it is swallowed."

Somewhere in the darkness, something ancient turned its face toward them... and listened.