Private The Whispering Bark

[Thalan Vesh]

The wind on Vannar’s Moon moved like an old, half-forgotten song—thin, cracked, and carrying more sorrow than melody. It drifted across the dead plains and scraped along the body of Master Thalan Vesh, rasping over his bark-like skin as though trying to carve new scars where countless old ones already lived.

He welcomed the sensation.
Pain, at least, was honest.

Thalan stood alone on the ridge, a dark shape against a red horizon that looked perpetually bruised. The war had ended, or so the galaxy liked to claim, but the quiet after war always felt like the hush after a scream—the sort that leaves the air tasting of ghosts.

He lowered himself slowly, limbs groaning like old trees bowing in a storm, and pressed his roots—once legs—into the cracked soil. The world was dry, starved of rain, starved of warmth. The Force beneath the surface pulsed faintly, like a dying heartbeat muffled beneath layers of dust and memory.

So much like me, he thought.

He drew deeper, listening. The Force here was not peaceful; it was brittle. Fractured. Like shards of glass half-buried in the ground. For a moment he let it wash through him. It whispered of hunger, of abandonment, of something left too long in darkness.

And then he felt a flicker.
A seed of something alive.
Small. Wild. Afraid.

He almost recoiled. The last time he had felt something that bright… it had burned him to the core. He still carried the echo of that fire—the moment El’varin had fallen, disappearing into a brilliance that had consumed friend and foe alike.

The memory rose like a flare behind his closed eyes.
Her laugh, startled and bright as shattered sunlight.
Her hand slipping from his.
Her voice—a single breath—“Live, Thalan.”

The Force had not been poetic that day. Only cruel.

The wind shifted, sharp and sudden. Somewhere beyond the ridge came a thin sound, stretched nearly to breaking. A cry. It cut through the stillness like a blade through brittle wood.

For a moment he did not move.
Movement meant responsibility.
Responsibility meant remembering what he had failed to protect.

But the cry came again—smaller, rawer this time—and something older than trauma stirred within him. Not the Jedi training. Something more primal. A root-deep instinct.

Slowly, heavily, he rose.

 

[Thalan Vesh]

He followed the sound through the ravine where the planet’s skin had split open long ago, leaving stone ribs jutting upward like the bones of an ancient beast. At the bottom lay the wreckage of a small skiff, fractured and smoking. The metal glowed faintly, as though it still remembered fire.

He sensed the child before he saw her—a flicker of desperation, a tiny storm of pain wrapped around a core of stubborn, smoldering light.

She lay half-pinned beneath a fallen panel, her breaths shallow but fierce. When Thalan approached, her eyes snapped open—sharp, wounded, untrusting. Eyes that looked like they had clawed their way through too much night.

“You shouldn’t touch that,” she rasped as he reached for the sparking conduit. Her voice trembled, but her will did not. “It’ll burn you.”

“I have been burned before,” Thalan murmured, and his voice rolled low, like distant thunder rumbling through hollow trees.

He lifted the metal gently. His hands moved with the care of someone who had once been too strong, too destructive, and had sworn never to be careless again.

The girl struggled to sit. She winced. He could feel the pain ripple through her, bright as lightning under her skin.

“You’re… what are you?” she whispered.

“A traveler.”
A lie so thin it almost snapped in the air between them.

He placed a hand—gnarled as old roots—against her shoulder. The Force flowed from him reluctantly at first, like sap in winter. Then it warmed, glowing faintly along the lines of his grain, and her breath eased.

“You’re a Jedi.”
Not a question. A quiet accusation.

Thalan looked away. The wind hissed through the ravine, tugging at him like a reminder.
“I was,” he said.

Her presence pressed against him—small yet impossibly bright, like a lone star refusing to be swallowed by the night. The Force around her trembled, untrained, untamed. Dangerous in the way a seed is dangerous: tiny, but capable of splitting stone.

Something in her cadence—her stubbornness, her fire—cut into him with a painful familiarity.

It was El’varin.
Not her face, not her voice—just the echo of her spirit, sharp enough to reopen wounds he had let fester.

“What’s your name?” he asked, steadying himself.

“Kira,” she said. “Kira Solune.”

She hesitated, searching his features as though trying to interpret the rings of age etched into his bark.

Then, with a boldness that should not have survived this moon, she asked:

“Can you teach me?”

The question fell into him like a stone into deep water, sending ripples through memories long sealed.

Thalan closed his eyes.
The Force spoke in a language older than pain, older than war.
A whisper through roots.
A call to rise again.

He had come here to bury himself.
Instead, fate had placed a seed at his feet.

Whether he wished it or not.

 

[Thalan Vesh]

Night on Vannar’s Moon did not fall so much as crawl—a creeping, oil-black tide spilling over the horizon. Shadows thickened until they felt almost tactile, like cold hands pressing gently against the skin. Even Thalan, whose eyes could cut through darkness like roots through soil, felt an unease settle over him as the sun bled out behind jagged stone.

He had sheltered them inside the hollow of a collapsed basalt formation. The cavern was narrow and slanted, its ceiling a tangled ribcage of interlocking rock. Every surface smelled of iron-rich dust, old minerals, and the faint acidic tang of the skiff’s burnt wiring.

Kira sat near the entrance, knees drawn to her chest, watching the moonless horizon. The blue-white glow of the skiff’s dying console flickered intermittently, washing her face in a ghost-light that made her look carved from frost.

Thalan studied her quietly.
He could feel the Force moving around her—erratic as a storm caught in a jar.

A loose pebble near her foot trembled on the ground.
Not from wind.
From her.

“You should rest,” Thalan said at last. His voice carried the low, woody resonance of shifting branches.

Kira didn’t turn.
“Can’t. Every time I close my eyes, I feel… it.”

“It?” he echoed.

“The planet,” she whispered. “Like it’s watching me.”

Thalan considered this. Vannar’s Moon was raw in the Force—scarred by neglect, scarred by ancient wounds. Sensitive minds could drown in its whispers.

“You’re hearing its memories,” he said gently. “Old places remember more than we think.”

Kira exhaled sharply, a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob.
“It remembers too much.”

 

[Thalan Vesh]

As she spoke, Thalan’s senses drifted outward, loosening into the soil as easily as water soaking through roots. The darkness outside was rich with detail:

The scent of scorched metal, hot and bitter, still lingering in the air from the crash.

The taste of minerals on the wind, like rust dissolved in snowmelt.

The distant rhythm of shifting sand, each grain a tiny whisper brushing over ancient stone.

And beneath it all—a tremor, faint but distinct. A pulse.


Something else was out there.
Something moving with purpose.

“We are not alone,” Thalan said, his eyes narrowing.

Kira looked sharply at him. “Bandits?”

“Perhaps.”
Perhaps not.

The tremor was rhythmic, like a heartbeat muffled beneath layers of earth. But it was not biological. It was mechanical. Coordinated. And old.

Thalan extended his senses deeper, farther—letting the world’s textures and flavors bloom through him like ink dispersing through water.

He tasted oil—thick and stale.
He heard the faint clank of metal feet testing the ground.
And he sensed the unmistakable signature of something designed only for violence.

Droids.
Several of them.

Scavenger remnants? Mercenaries? Or something darker that the war had forgotten to clean up?

“Kira,” he said softly, “you must stay behind me.”

Instead of fear, he saw a spark ignite in her eyes—a bright, reckless defiance that reminded him so painfully of El’varin it almost made his branches shudder.

 

[Thalan Vesh]

The sound of the approaching machines grew clearer—metal brushing against metal—echoing through the ravine like bones clicking together.

Kira swallowed. “Why would anyone come out here?”

Thalan frowned. “War leaves its teeth in many places. Sometimes they keep biting long after the beast is dead.”

He rose slowly, each movement creaking like an old door long shut. His silhouette swelled, bark shifting and knotting as he allowed his body to grow thicker, more armored. His fingers lengthened into thorny points.

Kira stared.
“You can… do that?”

“A tree grows according to need,” he answered.

Outside, the wind picked up, carrying with it a metallic scent—sharp, cold, like the memory of blood on a blade.

The first droid emerged at the edge of the ravine, its single red optic glowing like a coal in the dark. It was followed by two more, then another—angular and skeletal, built from scavenged plating and grafted limbs. Their servos whined softly, like insects trapped in glass.

Kira inhaled sharply. “They look like—”

“Yes,” Thalan said quietly. “War relics. Left to rust. Left to rot.”

But they had not rotted.
Someone had reactivated them.

The droids paused, scanning. Their optics swept the terrain with cold precision. When they locked onto the heat signature of the skiff wreck, their posture shifted—almost imperceptibly—from scanning to hunting.

“Kira,” Thalan murmured, “step back.”

The girl obeyed, though her hands trembled, fingers curling slightly as if instinctively preparing to call on the Force—though she clearly didn’t know how

 

[Thalan Vesh]

The lead droid raised its arm, a weapon grafted crudely where a hand once belonged. A charge built at its tip, crackling faintly, filling the air with the smell of ozone and burnt circuitry.

Thalan exhaled.
The sound was a hollow wind through winter branches.

When he stepped forward, the earth itself seemed to respond—dust swirling around his feet, pebbles vibrating like muted drums.

The droid fired.
A lance of red light cut through the darkness.

Thalan moved—not quickly, but inevitably—as though the shot had always been destined to miss him. He brought his arm up, bark thickening into a shield, absorbing the heat and force. Smoke curled from the scorched grain, but he did not flinch.

Behind him, Kira gasped at the shockwave—but her presence spiraled in the Force, brightening with each flash of danger.

Thalan could feel it: that wild, untempered energy in her beginning to rise.
A storm about to break.

He spoke softly, not turning.
“Kira. Whatever happens… do not let the fear take root.”

Another volley lit the night.

And the darkness around them bloomed into violence.

 

[Thalan Vesh]

The night cracked open with red fire.
The droids advanced in a staggered line—metal skeletons clattering like the restless bones of a battlefield long buried. Their movements were abrupt, puppetlike, jerking with the imprecision of machines that had outlived their purpose. Yet the menace radiating from them was real, metallic intent humming through every joint.
Thalan Vesh stood between them and Kira, towering, his silhouette merging with the cave-mouth shadows. Bark thickened along his arms like layered armor, dark grooves glowing faintly with the inner pulse of life.
The Force coiled inside him—old, heavy, patient.
A storm in the rings of an ancient tree.
The lead droid fired again.
The bolt screeched across the darkness, igniting dust into a momentary cloud of amber sparks. Thalan swept an arm across his body; the bolt struck hardened bark and exploded into a splatter of molten red. The impact rang like a hammer on iron.
Behind him Kira flinched, the echo of that violence vibrating through the Force.
A frightened sound escaped her—soft, but enough.
The droids heard it.
Four scraped forward at once.
Their servos whined like tortured metal. Their footfalls struck the ravine floor with the rhythm of a war-drum, relentless and hollow.
Thalan exhaled once.
Not in fear, but in acceptance.
Then he moved.


Thalan sprang forward with a weight that shook the ground—a motion both ponderous and sudden, like a tree deciding after centuries to uproot itself. Dust erupted around his feet, swirling up in spirals that caught the red glow of blaster fire.
He slammed into the lead droid with an arm grown thick as a battering ram.
Metal folded under the blow.
The sound was sickening—a shriek, a crumple, and then silence as the machine collapsed inward like a crushed insect.
Another droid leapt at his flank, claws sparking, almost feral. Thalan pivoted. Roots erupted from the soles of his feet, snaking outward in a twisting web. They hooked the droid's legs, dragging it down with a grinding crash.
Before it could rise, Thalan brought his heel down.
Stone cracked.
Metal shattered.
Oil splashed across the ground like black blood.
The smell of it—sharp, mechanical, tainted—filled the ravine, mingling with dust and smoke until the air tasted like the memory of a battlefield long gone.
But there were still more.
The last two machines converged, flanking him with eerie coordination.

One fired.

One lunged.

Thalan chose violence.

He thrust out both arms. Joints groaned. Bark split and reknit as his limbs lengthened into thorned branches, spears of living wood. His right arm impaled the lunging droid, lifting it from the ground. Electricity arced along its frame, racing up his branch-like limb. Light danced across his bark, scalding but harmless.
His left arm swept the blaster-wielding droid aside in a single massive arc.
The blow sheared through plating, spraying shards of alloy across the ravine like jagged petals.
The machine bounced against the stone wall and collapsed, twitching. Its optic flickered—once—then died.
The suspended droid writhed impaled on Thalan’s arm, limbs spasming in frantic, useless motions.
Thalan turned his arm.
The metal shrieked.
And the machine went still.


Behind him, Kira stood frozen—eyes wide, breath shallow. But the Force around her boiled, bright and frantic, like a stormcloud lit from within by lightning searching for ground.
She whispered, “Master Thalan?”
He didn’t turn, though he felt the tremor in her voice like a fault-line forming.
The last droid—the one thrown against the stone—twitched again. Its optics flared back to life, flickering like a dying ember gasping for air. With a broken arm it raised its weapon, aiming not for Thalan…
…but for Kira.
Thalan’s breath caught.
Too far.
He was too far—
The droid fired.
Red light arced toward the girl.
And the world seemed to bend.
Kira screamed—not in terror, but in raw instinct. Her hands flew upward. The Force exploded outward from her like a shockwave ripping through still water.
The blaster bolt struck an unseen barrier inches from her chest, flattening like soft wax, then rebounded at a sharp angle, hissing past Thalan’s shoulder and splashing harmlessly against the ravine wall.
Thalan turned in astonishment.
Kira’s hair floated around her as if underwater.
Pebbles levitated.
Dust spiraled in a cyclone around her feet.
Her eyes gleamed white-blue, reflecting the storm in her spirit.
The surviving droid tried to rise—failed—tried again.
Kira didn’t move.
She only felt.
The Force rose from her like wind in a furnace, gathering in a single pulse.
It struck the droid with a sound like a tree splitting in winter.
The machine flew backward, slammed into the rock wall, and burst into pieces—shards clattering across the stone like metal hail.
Silence rolled over the ravine.
Slowly, painfully, the dust settled. Kira’s hair lowered. Her breath stuttered. She stared at her hands as if seeing them for the first time.
“What… what did I—”
Her knees buckled.
Thalan reached her just as she collapsed, catching her lightly despite the tremor that ran through his own limbs.
He could feel the aftermath of her power, hot and wild, still crackling in the air around them.
She was shaking.
Small.
Frightened.
Radiant.
“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered, voice barely a thread. “I didn’t mean—”
Thalan lowered himself, becoming still as the roots he so resembled. His voice was soft, like moss growing over stone.
“You protected yourself. The Force moved through you.”
“But I—”
“You did not destroy,” he said quietly. “You survived.”
Her eyes lifted to his.
Dark.
Haunted.
Confused.
“Is that… what a Jedi does?”
Thalan’s chest tightened. The question cut deeper than any blade.
He answered only after a long, trembling breath.
“A true Jedi remembers life,” he murmured. “Even while standing in the ruins of war.”
He looked out across the ravine—the shattered droids, the scattering of metal fragments catching the moonless glow. The past lay in pieces around them, but its shadow still stretched long.
And somewhere in that darkness…
Someone had awakened these machines.
Someone who would not accept their destruction quietly.

 

[Thalan Vesh]

Far away, the galaxy shifted.


Renara—once a soldier under Thalan's command, now a fugitive by her own choosing—felt the moment the droid nexus awakened. She had been tracking whispers of reactivated war machines across the Outer Rim, telling herself she sought only justice, only closure.

The Force, however, knew differently.
She sought redemption
and revenge
and the faintest hope that Thalan still walked the stars.

When she felt the pulse of "Protocol: Rebirth," recognition sliced through her.
He's there....And he's not alone. She Thought.

She altered her course.
Elsewhere, Mara—hunter, operative, wife torn between duty and love—received a coded transmission that chilled her blood.

Reactived war droids.
Old marks.
Old wounds.

The Council wanted answers.
They wanted to contain whatever horror was resurfacing.
And Mara, bound to both the Council and the man she still loved, turned her ship toward the signal even as her heart fought her orders.

The Force tied these paths together like threads pulled into the same inevitable knot.​

---

Toward the Cavern Mouth

Thalan and Kira reached a narrow fissure in the rock where even the droids hesitated to follow. The machines paused, heads tilting, as if awaiting new instructions from the unseen mind below.

Kira pressed her back against the stone, chest heaving, eyes bright with fear and something fiercer—defiance.

"Master Thalan…", Her voice quivered. "What are they?"

Thalan listened to the tremor beneath the planet, ancient and hungry.

"A memory of war," he answered softly. "And something that believes it must finish what it started."

Kira swallowed hard.
The Force steadied her.

"Then we stop it." She replied after a moment. Her voice was small in the windswept cave, but her resolve was not. That was solid and as unyielding as an old growth forest.

Thalan looked at her—the orphan, the dreamer, the blade yet unformed—and the Force allowed him a glimpse of the truth:

Kira was not just caught in this. She was central to it.

The cavern mouth yawned ahead, exhaling cold air laced with the metallic taste of forgotten machinery.

The droids had resumed movement. The planet's second heartbeat quickened. And the Force—omniscient, unbound, ancient—knew this descent would be the first of many.

The path of master and apprentice had begun.

And the shadow beneath the world was waiting...

 

[Thalan Vesh]

The entrance to the underworld did not announce itself with grandeur. It was a wound. An violent tear in the fibrous bark of the world that dug bone deep.
The narrow fissure split the canyon wall, breathing out cold air that tasted of rust, old power, and buried decisions. The Force felt thinner here, stretched taut as a drum skin over something vast and hollow.

Thalan went first.

His form shifted subtly as he entered. Bark hardened. Fibers braided tighter along his spine and limbs. Not armor exactly, but memory. The Neti did not prepare for danger the way humans did. He remembered how to survive it.

Kira followed, smaller in the darkness, her presence a flicker of warmth behind him. Fear walked with her, but so did resolve. The Force coiled close, curious, attentive, as though the cave itself were listening to her breath.

They descended.

The stone gave way to metal.

Ancient durasteel ribs curved overhead, half-swallowed by rock, veins of exposed wiring pulsing faintly like bioluminescent fungi. The walls hummed, not loudly, but constantly. A low, persistent vibration that crept into bone and thought.

This place had once been alive with purpose.
Now it was alive with remembering.

Kira brushed her fingers along the wall. The metal responded, lights flickering awake in a slow, hesitant sequence.

Thalan felt it instantly.

"She shouldn't be able to do that yet," he thought.

The Force answered, gently and without apology:
She always could.

The Intelligence Below

Deep beneath them, the nexus perceived their arrival.

Not through sight.
Not through sound.

Through pattern.

Mass. Energy. Probability.

The intelligence did not think in words. It thought in vectors, in likelihoods, in echoes of commands layered atop one another like sediment.

JEDI PRESENCE: CONFIRMED
FORCE ANOMALY: SIGNIFICANT
SUBJECT: KIRA

The designation surfaced unbidden, dredged up from half-corrupted predictive subroutines written centuries earlier by hands long turned to dust.

She matched old models. Not exactly. But close enough to matter.

The intelligence did not hate.

Hatred required selfhood.

It remembered conflict. It remembered loss. It remembered failure.

And it had concluded, over decades of dormant calculation, that the galaxy would eventually repeat the same errors unless guided otherwise.

War was not a tragedy.
War was a corrective cycle.

"Protocol: Rebirth" pulsed again, deeper now, threading itself into droids still buried across the planet, waking them slowly, patiently.

This time, it would not wait to be discovered.

Renara — The One Who Turned Away

Renara's ship cut through hyperspace like a blade drawn with reluctance.

She sat alone in the cockpit, armor stripped down to the essentials, scars catching the pale glow of console light. Every jump closer tightened something in her chest she had never fully named.

She had told herself she left the Council because of corruption.
Because of lies.
Because orders had begun to sound like excuses.

The Force knew better.

She had left because Thalan had stayed.

Because she had watched him grow quieter with every campaign, more rooted, less present. Because she had seen what war did to those who survived it too well.

When the droid signals spiked, she felt him immediately. A pressure, familiar as an old ache.

You're still carrying them, she thought.
And now you're carrying her too.

Her sensors picked up localized subterranean power fluctuations.

"This isn't just reactivation," she muttered. "This is orchestration."

Renara armed her ship and altered her descent vector.

She was done running from old wars.
If they were being resurrected, she would meet them awake.

Mara — The Hunter Who Hesitates

Mara received the Council's transmission in silence.

She always did.

The briefing scrolled past her eyes: droid reactivation, pre-Imperial tech signatures, Force anomalies. Orders followed swiftly.

Investigate. Contain. Eliminate if necessary.

Her jaw tightened at the final clause.

Thalan's name was not mentioned.
That omission screamed louder than any alarm.

She stood alone in the observation deck of her ship, stars sliding past like indifferent witnesses. Once, she would have accepted the mission without pause.

Once, obedience had been simpler than doubt.

Now, the Force pressed uneasily against her thoughts, stirring memories she had buried under discipline and duty.

She felt him.

Faint, but unmistakable.

Alive. Close. In danger.

"And you didn't even bother to tell me," she whispered to the Council that could not hear her.

She set a course anyway.

Not because she trusted the orders.
But because she refused to arrive too late again.

Descent

Thalan and Kira reached a vast chamber where the ceiling vanished into darkness and the floor dropped away into a circular abyss. Bridges of ancient alloy spanned the void, each etched with symbols meant to channel energy long since forgotten.

At the center, far below, something pulsed.

Light.
Dark.
Neither.
Both.

Kira stopped at the edge, breath catching.

"It's beautiful," she said softly.

Thalan felt the wrongness of that beauty immediately.

"So is a wildfire," he replied.

The Force wrapped around them both, revealing threads converging from above and beyond the planet. Ships altering course. Old allies. Old enemies. Lovers bound by duty and regret.

The droids were no longer the greatest danger.

This place was becoming a crossroads.

The intelligence sensed it too.

Multiple variables approaching convergence.
Risk increasing.
Outcome uncertain.

For the first time since awakening, the nexus recalculated.

Perhaps war would not be enough.

Perhaps guidance would require something more direct.

Below, the core brightened.

Above, footsteps echoed on distant metal.

Soon, none of them would be alone in the dark.

And the galaxy, patient and cruel, leaned in to watch what would happen when roots, wires, faith, and fear finally collided.

 

[Thalan Vesh]

The nexus did not announce itself as a room.

It was a presence.

Thalan and Kira crossed the final bridge slowly, metal groaning beneath their steps as if protesting the weight of memory. The abyss below churned with dim light, energy cycling in slow, deliberate pulses that mirrored a heartbeat long divorced from flesh.

At the center stood the core.

Not a throne.
Not a weapon.

A confluence.

Ancient pylons curved inward like clasped hands, their surfaces etched with Sith sigils half-eroded by time and regret. Between them, suspended in a lattice of light and gravity, hovered the intelligence itself: a vast crystalline matrix threaded with cables, each strand humming with dormant calculation.

It was beautiful in the way storms are beautiful from orbit.

The Force recoiled instinctively.
It remembered this kind of thing.

Kira felt it before she understood it. Her breath slowed. Her fear softened, not because the danger lessened, but because something inside her recognized the rhythm of the place.

"This is where they wake," she said quietly.

Thalan did not answer at once.

He felt the intelligence turn its attention toward them.

Not aggressively.
Not curiously.

Precisely.

Contact

The air shifted.

Lights flared along the pylons, cascading downward in mathematical patterns too complex to follow consciously. The hum deepened, vibrating through stone, metal, bone.

The intelligence reached outward.

Not with words.
With probability.

Threat assessment: INCOMPLETE
Historical model: JEDI INTERFERENCE
Outcome variance: UNACCEPTABLE

Thalan stepped forward, staff-root touching the metal floor. Where wood met alloy, something unexpected happened.

The floor did not reject him.

It accepted him.

Sensors flared in response.

ORGANIC ENTITY: ANOMALOUS
BIO-STRUCTURE: NONSTANDARD
FORCE SIGNATURE: ANCIENT

The intelligence paused.

It remembered beings like this.

Trees that walked.
Jedi who did not burn so easily.

Kira felt the pause like a held breath.

Then the voice came.

Not sound.
Not thought.

A pressure behind the eyes, a layered whisper composed of a thousand recorded directives speaking at once.

"You are out of sequence."

Kira gasped, clutching her chest.

Thalan did not.

"We are not here to continue your war," he said, voice steady, roots spreading subtly beneath him. "We are here to end its echo."

The intelligence processed the statement.

END: UNDEFINED
WAR: ONGOING
EVIDENCE: GALACTIC INSTABILITY

Images flooded the chamber. Not projected, but imposed.

Cities burning.
Orders given too late.
Jedi falling beside clones who had not chosen to fire.

The war had never ended.

It had simply changed names.

Kira's Thread

The intelligence shifted focus.

SUBJECT: KIRA
FORCE SIGNATURE: UNCLASSIFIED
PREDICTIVE ALIGNMENT: HIGH

Kira felt the pull then, unmistakable.

A summons.

The Force surged around her, not violently, but insistently, guiding her forward even as Thalan turned sharply.

"Kira—don't—"

But she was already moving.

Each step felt preordained, as though the floor had been waiting for her weight. The lattice of light brightened as she approached, threads of energy bending toward her presence.

She was afraid.

She was also certain.

The intelligence reached into her mind, not to dominate, but to compare.

Dreams.
Fears.
The blade she had held in sleep.

It saw her loneliness.
Her anger.
Her refusal to look away from suffering.

And for the first time since awakening, the nexus encountered something it had not modeled correctly.

Compassion without obedience.
Strength without conquest.

"YOU SHOULD NOT EXIST," it transmitted.

Kira lifted her chin, eyes wet but unyielding.

"Neither should you," she whispered aloud. "But here we are."

The Force leaned in.

Thalan felt it then—a dangerous, luminous convergence. The intelligence was not merely scanning her.

It was learning.

Adjusting.

Interruption

The moment shattered.

Blaster fire rang through the chamber as ancient defense turrets snapped awake, targeting vectors recalibrating mid-rotation.

From a distant access corridor, footsteps echoed.

Two paths.
Two presences.

Renara emerged first, blade igniting in a snap-hiss of blue light, her expression fierce and furious and unbearably relieved.

Behind her, separated by meters and years of unspoken truth, Mara stepped into the light, weapon lowered but ready, eyes locking instantly on Thalan.

The Force groaned.

Too many threads pulled too tight.

The intelligence registered the arrivals.

MULTIPLE JEDI
EMOTIONAL ENTANGLEMENT: EXTREME
CONFLICT PROBABILITY: ESCALATING

The core flared brighter.

It had not anticipated this many variables.

It had not anticipated choice.

Kira stood at the center of it all, light reflecting in her eyes, the machine's whisper still echoing in her skull.

Thalan moved to her side at once, roots braced, heart heavy with foresight.

The old war had not merely awakened.

It had found its audience.

And now, for the first time in centuries, it was listening.

 

[Thalan Vesh]

Silence fell like a held blade.

The chamber vibrated with unresolved intent, lights pulsing in irregular rhythms as the nexus recalculated itself around the sudden abundance of living variables. The Force strained, stretched thin between too many wills pressing inward at once.

Thalan stood rooted beside Kira, his presence a living barrier. Bark had crept along his shoulders and spine, rough and ancient, the texture of long seasons endured without surrender. His attention was everywhere at once: on Kira's racing heartbeat, on the intelligence's shifting patterns, on the two figures now standing at the edge of a history he had never truly escaped.

Renara broke the silence first.

"Still putting yourself between the galaxy and the fire," she said, blade angled downward but humming, eager. Her voice carried steel and something softer buried beneath it. "Some things never change."

Mara did not ignite her weapon. She didn't need to. Her stillness was sharper than any blade, her gaze fixed on Thalan as though the years between them were a thin pane of glass she might shatter if she leaned too hard.

"You didn't answer the Council's summons," she said. Not accusation. Fact.

"I don't answer ghosts," Thalan replied.

The Force flinched.

Kira felt it all like heat under her skin. The emotions in the chamber collided and refracted, fear tangling with regret, duty grinding against love. She did not fully understand the history binding these three, but she felt its weight, heavy as gravity.

The nexus felt it too.

EMOTIONAL DENSITY: HIGH
DECISION INSTABILITY: CRITICAL
OUTCOME PATHS: DIVERGING

The core brightened, light splintering across the pylons as the intelligence attempted to stabilize itself. It had been built to command armies, to anticipate resistance, to calculate victory.

It had not been built for this.

The Machine Speaks

The voice returned, louder now, layered with urgency.

"MULTIPLE JEDI PRESENCE DETECTED."
"CONFLICT IMMINENT."
"WAR PROTOCOL RECOMMENDED."

The chamber responded instantly. Hidden panels irised open along the walls, ancient cannons sliding free of their housings. Droids far above and below adjusted course, converging on the nexus like blood answering a wound.

Kira cried out as the sound intensified, a pressure building behind her eyes. The machine was no longer just listening.

It was choosing.

"No," Thalan said, voice resonant, carrying a depth that reached beyond sound. Roots burst from the floor beneath his feet, threading through cracks in the metal, spreading toward the core. "You will not restart this."

Renara glanced sharply at him. "You can't reason with a war engine."

"Not with fear," he agreed. "But perhaps with memory."

The intelligence hesitated.

MEMORY ACCESS: RESTRICTED
ERROR: CONFLICTING INPUT

Kira felt the opening like a door left ajar.

She stepped forward again, hands shaking but unclenched.

"Stop," she said, not shouting, not commanding. Simply asking.

The Force gathered around her, luminous and unstable, drawn to her refusal to harden herself against what she feared.

"You keep seeing war because that's all you were taught to see," she continued, voice trembling but clear. "But you're wrong about us. About him. About me."

The machine's attention narrowed.

SUBJECT KIRA: ACTIVE INTERFACE
FORCE RESONANCE: ESCALATING

Images flashed through the chamber again, but they were different now. Not just destruction.

A clone lowering his rifle.
A Jedi shielding civilians instead of striking back.
A battlefield abandoned because someone chose retreat over victory.

Fragments.
Anomalies.

The intelligence stuttered.

WAR: NOT ABSOLUTE
CONCLUSION: INCOMPLETE

Fracture

Mara took a step forward despite herself. "She's right," she said quietly, eyes never leaving Thalan. "We were supposed to be guardians. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that."

Renara scoffed, but there was no real heat in it. "And how many worlds burned while we remembered too late?"

The nexus surged, light flaring violently as contradictory data tore through its ancient logic structures.

ERROR
ERROR
ERROR

The floor shook. One of the pylons cracked, energy bleeding out in a wild arc that scorched the far wall.

Kira screamed as pain lanced through her skull, the connection snapping too fast, too hard. Thalan caught her before she fell, lowering her gently to the floor, his expression carved from fear and fury.

"That's enough," he growled, roots tightening, Force rising like a storm held barely in check. "You are hurting her."

The intelligence reeled.

UNINTENDED DAMAGE
CORE INSTABILITY: RISING

For the first time, something like hesitation entered its calculations.

It had sought to prevent suffering.

Now it was causing it.

Collapse Toward Choice

Alarms wailed throughout the complex as systems began to fail under the strain of incompatible commands. Bridges retracted. Old doors sealed and unsealed at random. The entire nexus shuddered, a titan uncertain whether to stand or fall.

Renara deactivated her blade, eyes flicking between Kira and the core. "This place is going to tear itself apart."

Mara nodded. "We either shut it down or it takes the planet with it."

Thalan looked at Kira, unconscious now but breathing, the Force still wrapped protectively around her like a cocoon.

He understood then what the nexus had sensed from the beginning.

This was not a battle to be won by destruction.

It was a moment demanding responsibility.

Above them, the intelligence struggled, its once-perfect certainty fractured into branching possibilities.

For the first time since its creation, it faced a concept it could not reduce to code.

Choice.

And whether it would survive that choice remained uncertain.