First Reply Still Waters.

[Serina Calis]

"The calm before the storm."

Tags -

There were few places in the galaxy that offered true silence anymore. Not the sterile hush of Polis Massa's stone-wrapped vaults, nor the ominous quiet of a Sith war council waiting for blood to be spilled. Those were silences filled with expectation—coiled, waiting to strike.

But here, on Manaan, the silence came in with the tide.

Serina Calis stood barefoot at the edge of her platform's horizon deck, eyes half-lidded as the ocean swelled in slow, rhythmic pulses below her. The sky was an impossible blue, as if painted by something that didn't know what war looked like. Sunlight licked the surface of the water in broad strokes of silver, and the air—humid, salt-rich, alive—tasted faintly of something she hadn't felt in a long time: peace.

She didn't trust it.

She wore no armor here. No crimson cloak, no trembling cadre of intelligence officers trailing her shadow like insects on silk. Just a simple white wrap-dress, cinched at the waist, hair drawn back in a loose knot that had long since begun to fall apart. One hand clutched a crystalline glass of amber-colored tea, not that she liked tea, but it reminded her of Rayia Si and her words.

"Perhaps. Though I feel inclined to point out that just as many of the galaxy's woes throughout history came from individuals trying to exert more control than they should have."

Had she exerted more control then she truly had? Had she overstepped? Would this be the nail in a long awaited coffin? She aimed to shut away such thoughts, but yet felt an undeniable attraction to them. A moth to the flame. The other hand simply rested idly on the balcony railing—polished transparisteel warmed by the sun.

From a distance, she could've been mistaken for someone human. Someone normal.

But there was always something in the eyes. Even here.

Saijo is unraveling.

The reports hadn't said it outright. They never did. But Serina could hear it in the gaps between words: inquiries launched, witnesses traced, unspoken questions building like thunderheads on the rim of her carefully orchestrated sky. The massacre had served its purpose—Sith authority affirmed, the previous governor obliterated, the traitor's name made ash—but there were… inconsistencies. Loose ends.

Allyson Locke being the biggest of them all.

Too many people were beginning to wonder how the storm had arrived so quickly, so surgically.

That was the thing about engineered chaos: it always looked too clean after the fire.

She took a sip, the tea cooling her lips but not the knot in her stomach.

Serina had not come to Manaan for leisure. Not really. She'd come because she needed time—a brief, final pause before the game began anew. Before she became what the Empire required her to be: ruthless, eloquent, unyielding. She would step back into that role gladly, of course. It was hers. Earned in blood and brilliance alike.

But even war machines needed calibration. Even monsters needed stillness.

And last time—last time, she reminded herself with a grim tilt of her mouth—she had barely stepped off the transport before some ancient god-thing had slithered out of its grave and tried to whisper eternity into her mind.

She had bled that day, in ways no blade had ever managed. Bled and learned and changed.

Now, she hoped Manaan could give her something gentler. Just once. One quiet day before the storm hit.

Behind her, the low hum of the suite's security system pulsed in lazy rhythm. The platform was locked down, but not unwelcoming—open enough that if someone wanted to find her, they could. She had left it that way. Intentionally. A hand held out to fate, or some kind of morbid invitation.

Let them come, if they must. Friend, stranger, rival, ghost.

For now, she would listen to the tide.

And if she allowed herself to feel—just for a moment—that the ocean wasn't judging her, wasn't waiting to drown her in sins she no longer remembered how to name… well.

No one had to know.

 

[The Guide]

TAGS: Serina Calis

A resplendent comet split the sky, blazing with impossible color, streaks of violet, gold, and electric blue flaring from its core like shards of living starlight. Flecks of molten brilliance scattered from its surface as it descended, each fragment trailing a thread of fire before vanishing into the sea air. It carved a dazzling arc across the firmament, a celestial wound bleeding radiance, until—it struck!

The impact landed with an apocalyptic roar, slamming into platform. The shockwave hit seconds later, rattling the transparisteel beneath Serina's bare feet and sending tremors thundering through the structure's bones. The air twisted. Lights flickered. Above, the once-pristine sky blackened as if scorched, clouds boiling up in its wake, dark and heavy, edged in lightning. The wind shifted with sudden violence, tasting of ozone and chaos.

​

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[Serina Calis]

"The calm before the storm."

Tags - The Guide



She didn't scream.

Even as the sky split open like a dying eye and heaven came crashing down with fire in its throat—even as the platform beneath her fractured with a moan like the groan of some ancient leviathan—Serina did not scream.

She turned toward the light.

For just a second, she stood rooted in place, paralyzed not by fear, but by a hollow, incredulous grief. A streak of burning color tore across the horizon, a comet crowned in gold and violet, too bright to be natural, too cruel to be coincidence.

And in that moment—that one goddamn moment—Serina Calis saw everything she had tried to bury rise again.

No. Not here. Not again.

The blast hit.

The shockwave hurled her like a doll, her spine slamming into a support pillar before her body crumpled to the deck. Glass shattered. Metal screamed. Then the ceiling came down.

A section of the deck above caved with a grinding roar, and the next thing she felt was weight—crushing, suffocating, jagged slabs of debris pinning her left side. A beam collapsed onto her leg. A support girder sheared through the outer edge of the suite, plunging half the balcony into the sea. The world folded inward.

For several seconds, there was nothing but silence. Real silence. The kind that makes the heart doubt its own rhythm.

Then she moved—barely. A gasp, sharp and ugly, dragged through clenched teeth. Something tasted like copper. She couldn't see out of her right eye. Her hand trembled against the shattered flooring, fingers twitching reflexively through powdered stone and blood.

Not again. Not again. Not again.

Her heart thudded like it didn't want to wake up.

A small, strangled sound escaped her throat—not a scream. A breathless whimper. She choked it off, fury rising behind it like bile. One hand clawed at the rubble above her, nails tearing, wrist trembling. She could feel the tremor in her bones, the betrayal of muscles trained to never fail.

Her leg was trapped beneath twisted durasteel. Blood was running down her arm. Her beautiful, quiet sanctuary had been obliterated in an instant. And all she could think, with something between despair and madness, was—

Can I not have one—just one—fucking day?

She dragged herself up with a scream of effort, prying loose a panel of broken flooring from her chest. The searing pain in her side made her vision go white. She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood, forcing herself upright as she braced against a jagged outcropping of what used to be the suite's entrance arch.

A tremor ran through her frame—not from weakness, but from the volcanic rage beginning to boil to the surface.

"WHY?!" she bellowed into the smoke, the shattered sky. Her voice cracked and echoed off the sundered metal, raw and aching and livid. "Why can't I just breathe?!"

Her words were nearly drowned out by the wind, which screamed back at her in cruel chorus, whipping her hair loose from its bindings as lightning rolled across the sky in mocking applause.

Serina staggered a few steps forward, the weight on her leg barely bearable. She collapsed to one knee, gripping the ruined railing as she half-sobbed, half-laughed into the storm.

"Was it too much?" she rasped. "Too much to ask for a moment of quiet? For a sunrise without fire behind it? For water that doesn't boil when I touch it?"

Her nails bit into the transparisteel, cracked and scorched beneath her grip.

"I built this," she whispered, lower now, her voice shaking with something she rarely allowed herself to feel aloud. "I earned this. All of it. Every scar. Every victory. I climbed out of the gutter, I bled for my seat, I tore my soul in half just to be something more than what they said I was—and you won't even let me rest."

She bowed her head. A long, shaking breath left her lips. The storm howled. The platform creaked, half of it already lost to the ocean. She didn't move.

Then, softly—too softly—she said:
"…I don't know how many more times I can get up."

There was no one there to hear it.

She stayed like that for a long time—head bowed, breath unsteady, blood dripping from her elbow into the wreckage below. The exhaustion wasn't just physical. It was spiritual. Something frayed at the center of her.

For all her power, her intellect, her cruelty—Serina Calis was tired. Not defeated. But tired. Of the tests. Of the gods. Of the endless need to prove that she deserved the weight she carried.

But then—eventually—she did what she always did.

She forced herself to her feet.

Even if she limped. Even if her bones screamed. Even if she wanted to collapse again and scream into the sea.

She rose. Because she had to.

And because someone—someone—was going to pay for this.

 

[Allyson Locke]

//: Serina Calis //:
//: Attire //:

This wasn't the plan. But it made her job easier?

Allyson had bunkered up after catching wind that Serina Calis would be visiting her home away from home on Manaan. Reports stated that she didn't have a good time the last time she was here. And it seemed that she wouldn't have a good time this time.

The galaxy might have had it out for the girl. When the blinding light appeared, Allyson dropped her binoculars as she hissed curses in old Corellian, hands covering her eyes quickly.

Now Allyson wasn't having a good time.

Had permission from OP

 

[The Guide]

TAGS: Serina Calis Allyson Locke
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Those that walk the path of darkness do so by choice.

To live alone.
To find no peace.

Serina invited that life upon herself.

Where light had hit, the sea had been ripped open... an enormous crater carved deep into the oceanic platform and surrounding water. Jagged, scorched metal peeled outward from the epicenter like twisted flower petals, petals blackened and curled by impossible heat. Steam hissed from fractured durasteel as seawater rushed to fill the wound.

The crater itself glowed faintly at the edges, with residual energy, veins of violet, gold, and cobalt threading through shattered stone and fractured structure, still pulsing like a dying star's heartbeat.

Debris rained outward in a spiral pattern, as if the sky itself had screamed and flung its bones across the sea. Half-submerged pillars leaned like toppled gravestones. Cracked transparisteel glinted in jagged sheets across the wreckage.

And silence.... Not the peaceful kind. The stunned, hollow kind that follows something too big to understand...

At the center of the glowing wound, something shifted.

Something alive.

It gasped a raw, wet sound swallowed by the ocean spray, as it clawed its way from the molten center. Fingers, long and trembling, found the cracked edge of the impact ring, gripping scorched durasteel slick with salt and ash. Each movement was agonizing, ungraceful and desperate. This was no divine descent. This was survival.

The figure hauled itself up, dragging a battered, gleaming form across the fractured rim, shoulders trembling, skin slick with glistening blood and bioluminescence. Feathers stuck wet and broken to its back. One wing hung at an unnatural angle, sparking faintly with pale light. Horns glinted from beneath tangled, sea-drenched hair as it collapsed onto firmer ground, chest heaving against the platform's scorched plating.

 

[Serina Calis]

"The calm before the storm."

Tags - The Guide



She heard it before she saw it.

A sound—raw, gurgling, alive—broke the silence like a wound tearing open. Serina's head snapped toward the epicenter, her breath hitching, her expression hollow and sharp, a blade honed by sheer disbelief. Salt-stained blood crusted on her brow. Her leg throbbed where rubble had crushed bone and tissue. Her dress was torn, skin scraped, her fingers still trembling from the effort of clawing her way out from under what was supposed to be her sanctuary.

And now this.

The light.

The crater.

The thing crawling from it.

Her eyes narrowed, hard and slow. The Force bent around her in a coil—tight, suffocating, unnatural. The kind of stillness that came before execution. Her lip curled.

"You," she spat, her voice cracking from overuse and dust, "had better be a hallucination."

She rose, limping. Every movement cost her, but her posture didn't falter. She stood like a storm made flesh—backlit by the hellish light of a shattered sea, framed by broken architecture and salt-ridden wind, her pale form draped in ruin. Hair clung to her cheek, stained with soot. The dress, once elegant, now hung from her like a banner from a battlefield—torn, dirtied, triumphant in its own desecration.

Across the smoking breach, she saw it.

The creature—humanoid, winged, bloodied, crawling like a broken god trying to remember how to beg. Bioluminescence pulsed like a death rattle across its skin. One wing sparked pitifully, feathers clinging like torn silk. Its hands gripped her ruined platform as if it belonged here.

And that—that was the final insult.

"You come from the sky like some half-birthed myth," she snarled, voice thick with gravel and venom. "You ruin my last place of silence. You burn my rest, tear my skin, shatter my bones—and for what?"

She stepped forward, dragging her leg with a controlled snarl of pain, eyes burning with something deeper than wrath—betrayal.

"I have given everything," she said through clenched teeth. "Peace, trust, youth, love—all of it—to walk the path of command. Of domination. I do not ask for mercy. I do not ask for rescue. I ask for one—" Her voice cracked. She didn't stop. "—single—day where the galaxy does not bleed through my walls to remind me that I am its hostage."

The Force screamed around her, dark tendrils coiling like serpents in the air. Her hand lifted—slowly, with the elegance of death made art. She wasn't just calling on the Dark Side. She was the storm, now. It clung to her like second skin.

"Get. Off. My. Platform."

The final word struck like a hammer.

Wind ripped sideways. Lightning bloomed behind her like a divine verdict. Somewhere beneath her calm, she was unraveling—not from fear, not from doubt, but from the unbearable weight of endurance. Serina Calis had broken galaxies with a whisper. She had seduced planets into obedience. She had killed Jedi without drawing her saber.

And now the sky dared to fall on her again.

"I will tear you from the bones of this world if you speak. I will end your existence here, now, before your name ever touches breath—before you ruin one more second of what was supposed to be mine."

There was no theatre in her voice. No grandstanding. No cruelty. Just pure, exhausted, righteous fury.

For once, Serina wasn't trying to win.

She was just trying to be left alone.

And the galaxy, as always, refused.