There was no starlight where Serion travelled now.
Beyond the charts of ancient Jedi, beyond even Sith sorcery, lay a system that defied measurement. Stars bent around it. The Force rippled strangely, echoing like a scream underwater. Here, the fabric of reality shivered with every passing second.
At its heart was Mortis.
The fleet emerged in total silence twelve massive Oblivion-class dreadnoughts shifting out of folded space without any hyperspace signature. Gravity warped around them. Time seemed to skip. Escort cruisers, shadow-thin and bristling with forbidden weaponry, took up formation in eerie synchronicity.
On the command deck of the Eclipse Voidspire, Serion stood motionless, arms clasped behind his back, his silver-black armor gleaming with the light of a dead star caught in orbit. Around him, his lieutenants whispered data into neural links. They knew not to disturb his thoughts.
Ahead, the Gate loomed.
A ring of impossible scale, its arms stretched across the void like the skeleton of a fallen god. It hung above the shattered moon of Mortis its surface still bearing the ancient scars of a battle fought between entities not meant for memory. Jagged towers jutted from the ring's edge, each one carved in pre-language symbols, humming with frequencies no mortal could survive hearing.
Serion studied it, unblinking.
There were no gods here now.
Only silence… and potential.
He raised one hand.
"Activate the key."
At his signal, a relay chain of Specter Frigates unfurled ancient mechanisms recovered from forbidden vaults technology hybridized from lost Rakatan remnants, Celestial resonance nodes, and something even older, dug from the dark side of Exegol's core.
Crystalline data-pylons rotated, aligning with Mortis's orbital axis. Prismatic lattice arrays hummed into formation, powered by hyper-reactive quantum fuel mined from the abyssal moons of Zereth Prime.
And then… the Gate awoke.
A hum, soft at first. Then a deep, living vibration, as if the Gate itself were breathing. Lights coursed along the inner rim of the ring—impossible colors, refracting even in the vacuum of space. The very laws of physics began to distort. Gravitational fields inverted. Nearby asteroids folded into themselves and vanished.
Inside the Gate, a whirlpool of energy spun into being.
It did not resemble hyperspace. It was older. Angrier.
A tear between galaxies.
Serion watched as the ring stabilized, locking coordinates into a region the known galaxy had long deemed unreachable. A sector far beyond the Outer Rim. Beyond Wild Space. Beyond even the Unknown Regions.
Across that bridge… the Yuuzhan Vong awaited.
Serion spoke again, his voice calm and clear.
"Send the fleet."
Like wolves into a thunderstorm, the dreadnoughts plunged into the void.
On the far side of the breach, the Yuuzhan Vong flotilla drifted between galaxies, just beyond the galactic frontier. Their world ships swam through the void on biological currents, humming with living rage and sacred pain. Here, they prepared. Probing the galactic edges. Ready to strike once more.
They had faced the Republic before. They had faced Jedi and Sith, fleets and Force. But now they sensed nothing no presence of gods, no resistance. They believed the galaxy weak, blind, tired. Ripe.
On the deck of the great world ship Shedao Shai's Wrath, War master Qhu'laan knelt in sacred contemplation, surrounded by shapers singing the rituals of conquest. Blades of bone and flesh lined the altar. A vision of fire danced in the dovin basals.
Then a shaper screamed.
The void trembled. Space behind them ruptured not in light, but in absence. A tear in the blackness widened. Out of it came monsters.
The Shadow Fleet descended without warning, without signal, without mercy.
The first barrage came without light. Graviton-tipped lances speared forward from the lead dreadnoughts, shearing entire Vong formations in half. Void-crawlers, impossible to detect, slipped between sensor nodes and latched onto the coral-hulls of Vong cruisers, injecting virus-code and resonant tremors into their living systems.
World ships began to twist.
Bio-weapons screamed as they were devoured mid-flight by destabilizer fields. Magma cannons fired desperately, splashing harmlessly against pulse-reflective shielding.
And then came the second wave.
Specter Frigates uncloaked amid the Vong rear guard and launched black hole warheads miniature singularities stabilized just long enough to devour everything within a kilometer radius before collapsing. Vong ships folded like origami into the nothingness, entire escort wings gone in instants.
On the bridge of the Oblivion-class dreadnought Tenebris, Commander Yvex monitored the Vong's collapse with cold detachment.
"They are unshielded. Primitive defenses. This is not war. It is harvest."
Serion's voice came over the command channel, low and focused.
"Do not mock them. They are zealots. And zealots survive what logic cannot predict. Burn them fast. Leave none behind to adapt."
The Vong fought with maddening ferocity. Their pain-fed ships raged against impossible odds. One worldship turned and rammed a dreadnought, dissolving into plasmic fire. Another detonated its own reactor, taking six Shadow corvettes with it in a suicidal nova.
But it was not enough.
Within three hours, over seventy percent of the Yuuzhan Vong expeditionary fleet was annihilated. Their gods did not answer. The Force remained mute. The galaxy they thought unprotected had teeth hidden in its dark places.
Serion stood aboard a forward platform, watching the debris field stretch across parsecs. The shattered remains of world ships drifted, bodies frozen in prayer. He saw the pain they had carved into their ships. The scars of a culture that had forsaken the Force.
He understood them.
And he rejected them.
From behind him, one of his lieutenants approached.
"Shall we begin the extraction protocols, my lord?"
"No," Serion said. "We leave nothing."
"But the biological cores "
"Corrupted. Worthless. Their flesh offends physics."
The lieutenant nodded and stepped back.
Serion continued to watch. A single Yuuzhan Vong command barge tried to flee toward the edge of the sector. Serion activated a mental link.
The Spiral Engine, stationed just beyond the Gate, activated its lens array.
A ribbon of red-white energy curved silently through space and touched the fleeing barge.
It vanished. Not in fire. Not in explosion. Just gone like a mistake corrected from a page.
Serion turned his gaze back toward the still-active Gate. His mind touched the currents of probability flowing outward from this act. Jedi would feel it. Sith would twist it. The Republic would tremble. Vader…
Vader would rage.
Good.
He stepped away from the viewport and entered the dark sanctum aboard the Voidspire. Inside, surrounded by data arrays and living star-maps, his architects knelt around a central spire, inputting changes to the intergalactic route now anchored through the Gate.
It had begun.
Elsewhere, far from the Mortis corridor, Jedi Master Ezra Bridger stood in quiet horror at the edge of a dead system in the Unknown Regions. For weeks, the Force had screamed in his dreams. Now… it had gone quiet.
Too quiet.
Something had passed through the veil something beyond comprehension.
The old holocrons he'd locked in stasis flickered back to life. One, an echo of Jedi wisdom. The other, pure Sith cruelty. Both displayed the same glyph, shimmering and burning in tandem:
MORTIS.