Private The Weight of Truth: "The Heretic" Pt.1

[Zori Galea]

Time softened Ragoon VI.

Days folded into weeks, and weeks into a quiet rhythm Zori no longer measured. She woke with the sun, worked with her hands, listened more than she spoke. She learned the Sisters' ways not through doctrine, but through presence. Through silence shared beside the springs. Through laughter that came without warning. Through tears that were never questioned.

The echoes of Azis did not vanish entirely. They never truly did. But they no longer ruled her. When the whispers stirred, she met them with stillness instead of fear. Breath instead of hunger. Choice instead of submission.

She was not healed. She was becoming.

And that, she learned, was enough.

Until the summons came.

It arrived without ceremony, carried not by threat but by inevitability. A sealed directive. No insignia. No names. Only coordinates and a time.

The council had found her.

The Sisters did not try to hide her. Nor did they urge her to flee. They gathered around her in quiet unity, pressing hands to her shoulders, her arms, her back. Not to restrain. To remind.

"You go as you are," one whispered.
"Not as they remember you," said another.

The Eldest was absent again, drawn away by obligations left deliberately unnamed. Zori felt that absence like a hollow place in her chest.

Still, she went.​

 

[Zori Galea]

The chamber was vast, sterile, carved from obsidian and light. The council sat elevated, their forms obscured by shadow and distance. They did not greet her. They did not invite her to speak.

They began with accusations.

Architect of false peace.
Manipulator of populations.
Wielder of forbidden tactics.
Author of a constructed utopia built on deception and fear.

Then came the sharpest blade.

"Your claims of an entity called Azis are unfounded," one voice declared, cold and precise. "No such being exists. There is no record. No corroboration. Only your delusion."

Another followed. "You do not speak of corruption. You speak of myth to absolve yourself of intent."

A third, unmoved. "You were not misled. You chose."

Zori stood alone at the center of the chamber, hands unbound, spine straight. She felt smaller than she had in years. Not powerless. Exposed.

When they pronounced the sentence, it came without drama.

"By unanimous accord, you are found guilty. Execution is to be carried out at dawn."

The word echoed. Execution.

For a moment, the old instinct surged. The part of her that knew how to bend minds, twist outcomes, burn paths through resistance. The echo of Azis stirred, faint but present, like a hand reaching for hers.

She did not take it.

Zori stepped forward.

"I won't deny what I did," she said, her voice steady but raw. "I won't dress it in poetry or excuses. I believed I was creating peace. I believed power was clarity."

She lifted her chin, eyes bright with unshed tears.

"I was wrong."

A murmur rippled through the chamber.

"I was misled not by a myth, but by myself. By fear. By the need to control suffering rather than sit with it. Whether Azis exists as you understand existence or not is irrelevant. What mattered was the state of mind I was in when I listened."

She pressed a hand to her chest.

"I am free of that influence now. Not because it vanished, but because I changed. I was reborn without chains, without worship, without hunger. I learned peace not by ruling it—but by serving it."

One of the council voices cut in sharply. "Redemption narratives do not absolve mass harm."

"No," Zori agreed quietly. "They don't. But they explain transformation."

She swallowed, breath trembling now.

"If you execute me, you kill the woman I was. But you also kill the proof that people can change. That even those who fell deepest can choose differently. I'm not asking for forgiveness."

Her voice broke.

"I'm asking you not to mistake rebirth for deception."

Silence followed. Heavy. Evaluating.

The council did not answer her that night.

She was taken away under guard, not in chains, but in certainty. As the doors sealed behind her, Zori closed her eyes and breathed the way the Sisters had taught her.

 

[Zori Galea]

The holding chamber smelled of cold metal and ozone, a scent that sat oddly against the softer memories crowding Zori's chest. Three council troopers stood like dark sentinels: helmets tucked under their arms, visors reflecting the pale light that bled through the slit of a barred window. Their presence was efficient, uncurious. Their silence pressed against her as surely as the walls.


Alone in that kind of quiet, memory turned sharp.


She let the past unspool itself without invitation, fingers curled in the wool of the bench. Korriban rose like a vision—dust-scented corridors, stone that remembered footfalls, the low hum of temple lamps. She could hear it again: the scrape of ritual, the murmur of incantations, the first time the voice arrived in her head—cool, like wind through a ruined shrine.


Azis, it had said, and she had been so hungry for meaning that she mistook echo for command. Power, it whispered. Order. She had answered in the language she knew—laws, decrees, iron lines drawn in sand. When the voice came, it did not come as a god to be worshipped but as a presence that reflected what she already had inside: fear turned to ruthlessness, grief sharpened into strategy. She learned to listen to it like armor. She made bargains. She bent the Force into a shape that fit her pain.


Now the memory coiled bitterly. She watched herself younger—crowned, severe, convinced she was the instrument of a clarity that would save the world. She had commanded. She had punished. She had believed the ends justified everything the voice suggested. Where had she failed? Which moment had she misread? She sifted through those scenes as if looking for a missed detail, a hinge she could have turned to another direction.


Her thoughts splintered. Doubt became a litany.


You were delusional, she told herself, the thought hard as flint. You made yourself king of a ruin. You worshipped a shadow.


The chamber seemed to tilt. The timbre of old whispers threaded the edge of her ear—half-memory, half-echo of something she had fed. Her fingers tightened until the cords around her wrist bit into skin. The mind, that traitorous cartographer, offered up phantoms: faces she'd hurt, treaties shredded, the men whose lives she'd mediated into rubble. Shame uncloaked itself in full.


Then, like warmth returning to frozen bone, one name floated up through the tangle: Elian Mareth .


He was the one who had once crossed the thresholds of her court not as conqueror nor as supplicant but as judge and curiosity. A Jedi sent to investigate the Annihilation—the woman who called herself Queen of Korriban. He had come restrained by duty, but not without compassion in his eyes. She remembered the first time their hands met—no ceremony, no blade—just a shared belief that some things should not be broken. He had argued history, had read her like a book whose margins were inked with regret. He had not flattered power. He had named it.


And love—surprising, slow, dangerous—had grown between them in small, secret ways. He had taught her how to feel without commanding the world, how to listen to silence for its own sake. She remembered a night on a ruined terrace, wind rough against their cloaks, when he had pressed his forehead to hers and said, "You do not have to carry it alone." She had believed him then, and because she had believed, she fell—first into devotion, then into the soft place where devotion can be weaponized.

 

[Zori Galea]

She looked up, voice barely a thread. "Elian Mareth," she said aloud. Saying his name felt like opening a long-sealed window. "He was sent to Korriban. He—he knows what I was. He knows what I became. He also knows who I am now."

One of the troopers, a woman with a scar that ran from temple to jaw, shifted. "You want us to contact the council?" she asked, tone flat, procedural. The other two exchanged the kind of look that meant the machinery of authority had little use for longing.

"Yes." Zori's hands trembled. "Tell them to summon Elian. He can speak for the change. He can tell them I am not the same."

The trooper's jaw tightened. "Council summons are handled through protocol. We can file a petition to the council clerk. They decide who they call. We can't contact Jedi directly without orders. That's not our clearance."

Panic fluttered—small and animal—at Zori's ribs. "Then send it. Send it now. Tell them—tell them he walked into a throne room and saw the woman behind the crown. Tell them he loved me, once. Tell them he can testify to the person I am trying to be."

The scarred trooper hesitated only a breath. The corridor outside the holding room hummed as one of them reached for a comm-unit, the device clicking cold in their palm. Fingers moved through the prescribed menu: identification, petition, urgency code. The protocol did not care for love; it only accepted fact. Still, Zori found herself cataloguing evidence with the compulsive precision she'd once used to marshal armies—moments of tenderness, small acts of mercy, the weeks she had spent in the springs rebuilding what had been burned.

"Name, rank, message," the trooper intoned as if reading her a list.

"Tell the council: 'Summon Elian Mareth. He is the Jedi dispatched to Korriban when Zori Galea reigned. He knows her past and may substantiate her transformation. This is a request under Article—'" She stopped, embarrassed by the old reflex to cite law. "—under whatever avenue the council uses. Mark it urgent. I will sign it."

The trooper's finger hovered over the send key. For a small beat, time tightened between them—the Commission's machine on one side and the fragile shard of hope on the other. Then the message transmitted into the opaque apparatus of governance, a soft ping swallowed by the system.

"We'll log it," the trooper said at last, returning the comm. "We'll forward to the clerk. They will filter. We cannot promise the council will act, or that the Jedi will be reachable."

Zori closed her eyes. The room blurred then came into focus; the old voices in her head fluctuated between ridicule and possibility. For the first time since the sentence fell, there was a hinge she could test—an outside witness who had been there when she was both monstrous and mortal.

"Elian," she whispered, as if the name might travel faster on breath than on bureaucracy. "If anyone can remember who I was before the crown hardened me… he can remember who I might be now."

One trooper nodded because that was what she did—observe, record, return to duty. The comm's indicator blinked into the quiet. Zori wrapped both hands around the stone tied to her wrist, feeling its warmth like a promise.

 

[Zori Galea]

The chamber answered her questions with silence.

Stone curved upward like a hollowed ribcage, pale and ceremonial, designed to make even breathing feel like a borrowed privilege. The three council troopers stood at measured distances, armor matte, faces hidden. Not cruel. Not kind. Instruments waiting for a hand to choose a note.

Zori closed her eyes.

The Force answered without fanfare.

It came the way it always had when she stopped demanding and started listening. A pressure behind the sternum. A widening. As if a door she had boarded shut long ago had quietly been opened from the other side. She reached, not with hunger, not with command, but with a simple directive formed from need.

Carry this.

One trooper stiffened. Not abruptly. Just enough to notice if one were watching closely. His posture shifted, weight redistributing as if a thought had arrived and politely asked to be seated. Zori felt the connection slip away as soon as it had formed, like a hand released before warmth could linger.

Had she done that?

Or had something else leaned in.

It did not matter. The message would move or it would not. Elian Mareth might come. He might never hear her name spoken aloud. He might hear it and choose distance, safety, duty.

Hope was not a strategy.

So she began to build one.

She opened her eyes and studied the chamber anew, not as a prisoner, but as a woman who had once ruled stone and fear and belief itself. The council thought her power theatrical, a delusion given teeth by circumstance. They did not understand that her greatest weapon had never been sorcery.

It had been perception.

The Sisters of Peace had taught her that by accident. In service, in shared silence, in tending wounds that were not hers, she had learned to see the currents beneath behavior. Guilt masked as righteousness. Fear dressed in procedure. Councils were no different from cults, only better lit.

She breathed slowly and let her presence soften.

Not submission. Invitation.

The troopers began to feel it without knowing why. A subtle easing. The sensation of standing near a calm fire. One shifted his stance again. Another adjusted his grip on the rifle, not tighter, but looser, as if his body had decided there was no immediate threat.

Zori catalogued it all.

Plan B did not involve escape. Not yet. Ragoon VI was a sanctuary wrapped in ritual. Any attempt to flee would fracture everything the Sisters stood for, and she would not poison that well, not again.

Plan B was truth shaped carefully.

If Elian did not come, then she would not deny Azis. She would redefine it.

Not as a god. Not as a demon. Not as a myth to be debunked by scholars who had never listened to the dark long enough to hear its structure. She would speak of Azis as a mirror, as a harmonic, as an amplification of what already lived inside her. She would place responsibility exactly where it belonged.

On herself.

And if they still chose death, then she would meet it without spectacle. No throne. No prophecy. No final curse whispered into the Force like a tantrum.

Just clarity.

Her fingers brushed the cool floor, and she remembered the hot springs. The weightless buoyancy of bodies held by water instead of fear. Tears that were not interrogated. Touch that asked nothing in return.

She anchored herself there.

Somewhere beyond the chamber, a message moved through corridors of stone and ideology. Somewhere else entirely, a Jedi might feel a familiar presence tug at his awareness like a thread he never cut.

Zori straightened her spine.

Whether salvation arrived on borrowed hope or not at all, she would not fracture again.

Not for Azis.
Not for the council.
Not even for love.

She had already been reborn twice.

If there was to be a third time, it would be on her own terms.