Mistress of the Dark.
"Hard choices require hard minds."
Tags -
CT-312
,
Ellissanthia
,
Darth Morta
The moon was not there.
Not visibly.
High above the windswept dunes of the derelict system, where no known star gave its light freely and gravity fields folded in on themselves like mad whispers, Serina Calis stood alone at the obsidian altar of a world erased from starcharts. Around her, the air was still—not with silence, but anticipation. Reality itself seemed to wait. For the others. For the convergence. For the mask.
Serina did not wait. She merely was.
She stood beneath the open sky, veiled in the screaming hush of a dream about to be remembered. Her armor—Tyrant's Embrace—reflected no starlight, for there was none. Only the great black canopy of the void, stitched faintly with bleeding nebulae and the occasional dying flicker of blue-white fire. The armor was alive with presence, obsidian lines gleaming faintly in the ultraviolet spectrum, responding to her breath with soft pulses of low-frequency hums. She was a cathedral in motionless repose, unmoving yet vibrating with latent violence.
The smooth faceless helm turned ever so slightly, six slanted violet eyes glittering in a pattern unreadable to the uninitiated—each one scanning the dream-bled horizon for signs of approach. She had come before the others, as always. Time, for Serina Calis, had long since ceased to be linear. The others would arrive when they must—and not a moment before.
This was not a place found by hyperspace lanes or astronavigation charts. This moon—if it was a moon—revealed itself only in the eddies of the Force when tides surged unnaturally, like blood rushing back to a corpse's limbs in the last flicker of false life. A convergence, ancient and unrepeatable, had made it seen. For one night. For one purpose. And somewhere at the heart of it lay the dreaming pool—silent, depthless, reflective only to the dying—and within that pool: the Mask of the Force.
She did not know what it looked like. Not precisely. That was part of the game. Whispers said it could show the future, steal voices from the dead, let you rewrite the real—but at cost. A price that had no number.
Serina was here to pay it.
Not alone. But alone first. She preferred it that way.
The landscape was madness made static—broken monoliths like giant femurs jutting from the sand at impossible angles, constellations that rearranged themselves when blinked at, and black thorns that grew taller the more one tried to ignore them. All around her, dust blew without origin, fine as cremated memory, curling around her armored calves as though seeking warmth or confession.
Her internal systems displayed no known coordinates. That amused her.
She stepped forward slowly, cape trailing like the end of an executioner's curtain, toward the ridge where the pilgrimage would begin. The ritual was simple: descend into the dream. Walk through what came before. Survive it. Take the mask.
Her grip flexed within her clawed gauntlets. Not from anxiety—there was no space for that—but preparation. She did not fear death. She had killed versions of herself already in her rise to power. One more sacrifice would not unmake her.
A soft ping registered behind her helm. Atmospheric displacement. One drop ship. Light profile. Perhaps the DeathDrop detachment. Her lips curled faintly beneath the faceless helm—not in amusement, but analysis. She had requested them for muscle, not loyalty. They were interesting. Unknown variables. But sometimes, unknowns were exactly what was needed to twist fate into new shapes.
Another ping. A subtle ripple in the Force, as if a hand had been dipped into a still lake of memory. That would be Ellissanthia.
Serina could feel her dark acolyte's presence even before the girl would emerge—ambitious, beautiful, unsteady in ways she had not yet admitted to herself. Perfect. Unshaped ore. The Force burned brightly in her, but it was fire without a hearth. Serina would temper her. Or break her. Both outcomes were useful.
And somewhere behind that, another shape—cold, coiled, dense with intent: Darth Morta.
She was the wild card. Recently aligned with Serina, Morta carried within her a kind of lazy ambition. Good. It meant she was ready to build something new. Or destroy something old. Both were acceptable.
Above them, the sky flickered.
A line of false moonlight cut across the heavens—silver, impossibly thin. And just like that, the unseen became seen.
The moon was now there. Hanging in space where it had not been a moment before. Perfectly round. Pale, translucent, as if made from the memory of bone and sorrow. And on its face—etched in burning glyphs visible only to the Force-sensitives below—was the sign of convergence.
The path had opened.
Serina turned from the ridge and waited, her eyes glimmering in that smooth, inhuman mask. Her voice, when she spoke, was transmitted through a throat-modulator—toneless, melodic, and slow, like a hymn echoing through catacombs.
"Let them come. Let the dream begin."
The sands did not answer.
But in the distance, footfalls began to sound. First faint. Then nearer. Companions. Witnesses. Instruments.
And if they were lucky?
Survivors.
