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Korriban waited beneath a sky the color of old bruises.
The world was barren in a way that felt deliberate, as though life itself had recoiled from it ages ago and never found the courage to return. Red sand stretched in wind carved sheets across blackened stone, and every gust that crossed the desert seemed to carry the memory of something dead. The Valley of the Dark Lords loomed ahead like a scar cut into the skin of the planet, lined with ancient tombs that rose in cruel angles from the earth. Their silhouettes broke the horizon in jagged teeth, half buried by time, yet still imposing, still hungry. Nothing about the place felt abandoned. It felt watchful.
The wind moved through the valley with a hollow voice, slipping between ruined facades and crumbling statues as though the dead still whispered to one another in the dark. Dust curled over the ground in slow spirals, gathering at the mouths of tombs and winding around broken obelisks etched with symbols worn thin by centuries of hate. The air itself seemed heavy, burdened by the weight of all that had happened there. War. Betrayal. Sacrifice. Desecration. Korriban did not simply remember darkness. It preserved it.
Then, against that ancient stillness, a single shuttle descended.
Its engines cut through the silence with a mechanical roar that sounded strangely fragile in such a place. For a brief moment, reflected light from the vessel flashed across the weathered stone and crimson sand, a bright intrusion into a land that had long ago surrendered itself to shadow. The shuttle settled near the edge of the valley in a hiss of displaced dust, and the red earth rose around it in thick clouds before slowly drifting away again.
When the ramp lowered, the figure who emerged seemed almost unreal against the backdrop of Korriban's ruin.
He stood alone.
There was something visibly out of place about him, and not merely because he was a Jedi on a world built to break them. It was the contrast. The way the faint impression of light seemed to cling to him, subtle but undeniable, as though hope itself had taken shape and stepped willingly into the graveyard of the Sith. Yet that light was not untouched. Even at a distance, there was the sense of something marred beneath it, a thin fracture in the radiance, a scar that shadow had once managed to leave behind. It did not consume the light. It only made its presence more haunting, more human, more hard won.
Beyond him, the Valley of the Dark Lords stood silent, patient, and immense.
This was no place for invitations. Korriban did not welcome. It lured. It threatened. It devoured. And yet someone had called him here. Someone hidden deeper in the folds of the valley, among the tombs and secrets and death, had reached out from the darkness and drawn a lone Jedi to their doorstep. They were the same unseen hands that had once moved against his daughter, the same unseen malice that had sought to cage her or kill her for reasons still buried beneath layers of shadow. Whatever purpose lay behind this summons remained concealed, swallowed by the planet as completely as the light.
The valley seemed to hold its breath.
The tombs stood like witnesses. The wind quieted for a fleeting instant. Even the dust, still settling from the shuttle's arrival, seemed reluctant to move. Korriban had seen countless warriors come and die beneath its skies. Sith Lords. Acolytes. Slaves. Rivals. Pretenders. But this felt different. Not because darkness had called, but because something bright had answered.
And far within the ancient red silence, the shadows waited to see what would happen next.
