Mistress of the Dark.
"It's time to take you to the next level"
Tag -
Kali'ka
Serina waited.
Not impatiently.
No, Serina Calis did not wait in the conventional sense—she curated anticipation. She designed stillness like a blade drawn slowly, edge-first, across the skin of time. The chamber around her was utterly silent, save for the soft thrumming of calibrated harmonic fields pulsing through the crystalline ceiling above her—veins of black kyberite tracing their way like buried truths through a spiderweb of cut rock. The vibrations were almost imperceptible. Almost.
The air was heavy with intentional atmosphere—lightly ionized, faintly spiced with pheromone-reactive compounds designed to stimulate mild focus and mild arousal. She had tailored the environment as she always did: perfectly. Deliberately. For her.
Kali'Ka would enter soon. And when she did, every nerve in her body would know that this space had been waiting for her. That it had been crafted around her silhouette.
Serina sat with one leg crossed over the other, spine straight, gaze focused on the invisible lattice of the Force around her. Not meditating—surveying. Not with reverence, but with clinical hunger. The Force was not a thing to be worshipped, but a system to be decoded. And Kali… Kali was about to learn how to rewrite the syntax.
A single red crystal pulsed above her, illuminating the scene with blooded shadows and deep, carnal warmth. Her cloak was gone. She wore no armor. Only a high-slit robe of layered black and plum, open at the collar, form-fitting where it mattered, loose where it pleased her. The glow of runes traced down her neck, subtle and pulsing beneath the skin like living circuitry—alchemical foci she had etched there herself in months of unspoken agony, though they would fade away after this session.
At her side, resting against the plinth she leaned upon, was a small durasteel tablet. On it, arranged in perfect black lettering, were the tenets of the Serinite Doctrine. They were not for her to read.
They were for Kali to recite.
And across from her—opposite the soft curve of the room's center—waited something else. A man, perhaps thirty-five standard years of age, shackled at the wrists and ankles, kneeling atop a pressure-sensitive ritual plate. His head hung low, breath shallow. He was gagged, like the last. And like the last, he had not been told why he had been spared. Not until Serina would let Kali discover it for herself.
The room was more intimate than the one before. No observation slits. No sentries. No doors save one: a single arched passage behind a veil of liquid light, into which Serina had keyed only one signature.
Kali's.
She had ordered the girl to bathe before coming. Not as a formality—but to wash away the filth of morality, the debris of identity. She was not entering this sanctum as a former Jedi. Nor as an apprentice. Not even as a killer.
Tonight, Kali'Ka was entering as a vessel.
Serina uncrossed her legs. Slowly. The movement was indulgent. Silent. Perfectly symmetrical.
She pressed a hand to her own collarbone, feeling the low burn of the rune etched there—Will Made Flesh—and exhaled slowly through her nose, relishing the way it resonated against the Force. She didn't close her eyes.
Serina never blinked in moments like this.
She wanted to be watching when Kali stepped through.
She could feel her now, through the stone and steel—like a tide of ash swirling toward the nexus she had become. The girl's presence in the Force was no longer a ripple. It was a slow bloom of shadow, deliberate and sensuous. Not yet disciplined, but hungering.
Serina allowed herself a small, knowing smirk.
There would be no blade tonight. No sparring. No sweating, panting physicality. This lesson would be deeper. Slower. It would reach into the parts of Kali that still thought her mind was her own.
And when she left this chamber… it wouldn't be.
A soft chime sounded as the field at the far end of the sanctum flickered.
Kali had arrived.
Serina did not rise to greet her.
She didn't need to.
She only tilted her head slightly—just enough to let her hair fall like coiled silk over her shoulder—and spoke, voice low and coated in syrupy expectation.
"Come to me, little shadow."
A pause.
"I've written new truths for you."
She smiled again.
"Tonight, you prove to me if your worthy of a challange."
And in the stillness of the chamber, the air trembled in anticipation.