Mistress of the Dark.
"Come, come and see..."
Tag -
Enid Gwyther
The jungle had been dead for centuries.
Its trees stood petrified, ossified by ancient atmospheric trauma. Their trunks were blackened glass columns, brittle to the touch and crowned by crowns of fossilized leaves. A thin mist clung to the ground like guilt, seeping through cracks in stone that should have forgotten names long ago. The ruin was a place the galaxy had simply ceased to remember. No datapad carried its coordinates. No map acknowledged its outline.
Yet someone had come back.
Deep beneath the crust, below the reach of light or common thought, was a chamber sculpted in violence. A vault with no door. Only jagged holes remained where once the Jedi had sealed away a relic too dangerous to destroy—and far too seductive to leave in open reach.
The Black Vault, they had called it. Not for its darkness. But for its truth.
And Serina Calis stood at its center.
She moved with the slow, deliberate grace of someone who knew every motion of her body could be weaponized. Her robes were thin for the cold—she preferred it that way. A sleeveless wrap of crimson and sable that revealed more than it concealed, draped loosely from her shoulders and bound at the waist with leather cords wrapped in rings of bone. Her skin, pale as bleached ivory, was lit faintly by the flickering light of a single overhead emitter she'd jury-rigged from scavenged circuitry. It bathed her in amber shadow, casting half her face into dreamlike darkness.
She hadn't bothered bringing guards. Or droids. Or even her ship's pilot.
She'd come alone.
She preferred it that way.
The stone beneath her feet had been carved with concentric spirals, radiating outward from a jagged pedestal where the relic had once rested. It was long gone—perhaps destroyed, perhaps stolen. Serina had not come for it. She had come for the echo it left behind. The weight of so many minds, so many hands, pressed into stone. Fear. Austerity. Denial. All the stinking virtues the Jedi clung to, fossilized in a chamber that had refused to be cleansed.
She could still feel the presence of the Council here. Not their ghosts, but their judgments. Cold and unyielding as steel.
It made her smile.
Her boots whispered as she paced slowly along the outer ring, each step measured like a dancer circling a victim. She traced her fingertips across the wall—ash stone, warm from some geothermal breath below—and murmured almost to herself.
"You buried your sins in circles, didn't you?"
"As if spirals could lock away the truth."
"But all you ever did was make a mirror."
She paused. Her voice echoed oddly, as though the walls twisted sound in protest.
Serina turned her gaze inward. Not in meditation. She hated that word. She listened—to the Force, to the skin of the air, to the ache in the stones.
Something had shifted.
Someone else was here.
She didn't whirl or reach for her weapon. She didn't cloak herself in a defensive shroud of power. That was what the fearful did. And Serina Calis was never afraid. She simply adjusted—posture relaxing, shoulders softening, the hint of a sly curl forming at the edge of her lips. Like a courtesan preparing for a patron she hadn't yet chosen to seduce.
She moved to the center of the chamber again, and with one swift, theatrical motion, seated herself atop the broken pedestal. Her arms rested on her knees, her back curved in a lazy arch, one bare leg crossing over the other with an elegance that defied the ruin around her. Dust clung to her calf and she didn't care.
She wanted to be seen.
The weak would mistake it for vulnerability. The dangerous would see the trap. The clever might think twice.
But whoever approached wasn't either of those things. Not yet.
She could feel her now.
Untrained, ragged, burned in all the right places. A fire that had never been taught how to breathe. The Force rolled from her in uneven waves—bruised and raw, like an animal lashing against a cage it didn't even know was there.
Serina licked her lips. Not out of hunger. Out of anticipation.
