Never Hide Your Heart
Blackmire Investigation - Issue # 1
The briefing room lights were too bright. They always were. Katarine Ryiah sat at the far end of the polished durasteel table, elbows resting just shy of its edge, fingers loosely interlaced as if holding herself together by habit alone. The hum of the overhead panels pressed against her temples, a low, constant reminder that she hadn't slept, not properly, in days. Maybe longer. Time had felt… different since the thaw.
Carbonite did that. It stole more than years. It left fragments behind.
Her reflection stared faintly back at her in the darkened surface of the table, eyes rimmed red, shadows pooled beneath them like bruises, her expression pulled thin with exhaustion. She looked older than she remembered being. Not in years… but in weight. In everything she carried now.
The Blackmire case had done that.
It had started clean. Contained. A series of disappearances on the lower levels, quiet, almost forgettable to anyone not paying attention. But Katarine had paid attention. She always did. And what she'd found buried beneath it… patterns, echoes, something that felt wrong in the Force in a way she couldn't quite name, it had unraveled fast.
Too fast.
Too complex.
Too big for one person to hold together.
Which is how she ended up here.
The headquarters of the High Republic Police Force was all glass, steel, and quiet suspicion. Order built on structure, not intuition. Logic over instinct. Jedi didn't fit comfortably into that equation, and she could feel it the moment she walked in. The glances. The hesitation. The subtle tightening of conversations when she passed.
They tolerated her.
Barely.
Even when she did her best to dress casually they still marked her as a Jedi the moment she walked in. Katarine exhaled slowly, her gaze drifting toward the closed door across the room. Somewhere beyond it, decisions had been made about her, about this case, without her in the room. That part hadn't changed. It never did.
Still, they'd agreed to help.
One agent.
That was all they were willing to give her.
Her fingers tightened slightly against each other.
One.
Not a team. Not a task force. Just one person, whoever had drawn the short straw badly enough to be assigned to a Jedi investigation. She couldn't decide if that meant they were incompetent, expendable… or dangerous in ways their superiors didn't want to deal with.
Or maybe just unlucky.
Katarine leaned back slightly in her chair, closing her eyes for a brief moment, letting the Force settle around her like a shallow breath. Beneath the fatigue, beneath the strain, she reached, quietly, carefully, for any sense of what was coming.
Nothing clear.
Just tension.
Fractured. Uneasy.
Not promising.
Her eyes opened again, fixing on the door just as footsteps approached from the other side.
So this was it.
Her partner.
A faint, tired edge of a smile touched her lips, more reflex than amusement.
Please don't make this harder than it already is.
Because the Blackmire case wasn't just complicated anymore.
It was spiraling.
And if she was right...if what she was feeling in the Force was real...
She and her new partner were going to be in over their heads.
Cedwyn Blaidd