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"The butterfly has only just emerged from its cocoon," Darth Keres said softly, almost tenderly, "and already it rushes headlong into another, one that rots instead of birthing beauty." Her smile was thin and knowing, a quiet lament wrapped in cruelty, as if decay itself were a lesson she delighted in teaching.
Darth Keres did not move as the Sith girl came screaming across the broken streets, her ignited blade shrieking with unstable hunger and casting violent light across the fog-choked ravine. She watched instead, observing the girl's footwork fracture under impatience, the predetermined overextended strikes, the way raw fury tried to masquerade as mastery.
Each motion betrayed fear poorly disguised as devotion, ambition strangled by the need to be seen. In the Force, the girl blazed bright and erratic, a spark flaring wildly against a night too vast for it to matter.
Only when the distance closed did Darth Keres finally lift her gaze, cold and precise, her expression untouched by threat or urgency. She tilted her head slightly, as one might regard a flawed specimen, and allowed the girl's fate to settle long before their blades met. "Another failed Sith prodigy," Darth Keres said quietly, the words heavy with disdain and weary inevitability, as though she had spoken the same epitaph a thousand times before; and would speak it a thousand times again.
Extending her hand, and without haste or reverence the Force answered her call, wrenching ignition from the hilt at her side. Her lightsaber bloomed into the night in a burst of ghostly white plasma, its radiance cold and funereal, spilling across the street like moonlight filtered through bone.
Within the blade, faint shapes writhed; impressions of the bound and the broken, while whispers rose into a chorus of muffled wails, as though the dead themselves were pressed against the glass of eternity, begging to be forgotten. The air thickened as the darkest currents of the Dark Side streamed toward her, folding around her presence with dreadful intimacy.
She welcomed that darkness as a mother cradles her dying child, neither hurried nor cruel, but possessed of a terrible, possessive tenderness. Darth Keres did not assume a guard; she merely waited, allowing the Sith girl the illusion of initiative, the courtesy of striking first. A soft chuckle slipped from her lips, barely audible beneath the blade's haunted song, savoring the pageantry of it all; the fear, the inevitability, the way every failed disciple believed this moment might end differently.
Tonight's performance, she decided, was already delightfully theatrical.
