November, 4008 ABY
Dathomir
The crash should have killed me.
Instead, I lay half-buried in black sand, ribs cracked, throat dry, staring at a sky that bled red even at night. For days, I wandered, no food, no water, no direction. The escape pod was a ruin behind me. My mind was worse.
Dathomir didn't welcome me.It watched.
I kept hearing things. Whispers in the wind. Bones cracking in places there were no feet. Once, I thought I saw my mother's shadow in the mist.
Then came the Lesser Nydak.
It slammed into me like a landslide, claws raking across my chest, its breath hot and rancid in my face. I tried to run. It pinned me. I tried to scream. Blood filled my mouth.
And then
A voice cut the world in two.
"You scream like prey."
I blinked through blood and dust. She stood above me: robes of black and crimson, pale skin inked with spirals, eyes like frozen flame. A curved blade dripped red in one hand. In the other, fire, green and alive, danced like it knew my name.
"Who… are you?" I gasped.
She didn't wait for my answer. Her hand closed around my wrist, dragging me from the bloodstained sand. Every step burned. My vision flickered. The forest swallowed us whole.
I passed out before I saw where she took me.
I awoke inside stone.
The walls pulsed with faint red veins, breathing like a beast asleep. Bones hung from the ceiling on sinew cords. Incense smoke twisted in the air like ghost hands. My chest ached, ribs bound in cloth that smelled of earth and rot.
She sat beside me.
Watching.
Silent.
"You should be dead," she said, not unkindly. "But something in you refuses."
I tried to speak. My throat cracked.
"Drink." She handed me a bowl. The liquid inside glowed faint green. It tasted like ash and copper and dreams I couldn't remember.
"Where… is this?"
"The fortress," she said. "Cut into the spine of the world. Older than the Sith. Older than your Empire. This is where the Nightsisters remember what the galaxy forgot."
She stood.
"You will heal. Then you will train. Or you will die. This planet does not allow anything in between."
The days bled into each other.
She never told me how long I'd been there. Pain was my only calendar.
She taught me not with kindness, but with clarity.No lightsabers. No formal stances. Nothing polished or proud.She showed me how to kill with bone knives, poisoned whips, claws carved from stone.
"You are not Jedi," she told me once, her voice sharp as frost."You are not Sith. You are a scar the galaxy tried to hide. And scars must learn how to cut back."
I hated her at first.
She didn't comfort me.Didn't ask about my family.Didn't care about my nightmares.
But she stayed.
Every time I collapsed, she made me rise again.Every time I broke, she shaped the pieces into something harder.
At night, she'd sit beside the fire and whisper old chants — songs that pulled whispers from the trees and stirred ash into flame. The other Nightsisters never spoke to me. Not for months.
I wasn't one of them.Not yet.
But Dathomir didn't kill me.
And that meant something.
I began to move like shadow. Hunt in silence. Speak to the dark. I learned to read bones, to listen for omens in the blood of beasts, to taste the wind and know when death was close.
Still, I never forgot the way Kaelrah looked at me.
Like she was waiting for something.
Like she feared I'd become it.
Her people, the Nightsisters, didn't want me. I was offworld meat. Weak. Loud. Haunted. But Kaelrah said nothing. Just trained me. Broke me. Rebuilt me.
Her fortress was carved into the bones of the cliffs, a wound in the rock that never healed. The walls groaned with old magic. The halls whispered when no one spoke.
Pain was the language of this place. And I learned it well.
Kaelrah never taught with words. She taught with blood. Bone. Silence.
My first lesson wasn't how to fight. It was how to stand back up when your ribs are broken and your lungs are failing. How to walk when your legs no longer listen. How to endure.
"Your hate is raw," she told me one night, after I failed again. "But raw things rot unless they are shaped."
She taught me to shape it.
I trained with poisoned whips, daggers carved from the bones of ancient predators, chains that fed on fear. She made me fight blind. Made me fast without using the Force. Made me feel the rhythm of death in the ground before it rose to meet me.
Some days, I woke up screaming from dreams that weren't mine.
Other days, I didn't sleep at all.
But I stayed.
Because Kaelrah never lied to me. Never told me I was special. She said only this:
"You are not a Jedi. You are not Sith. You are the question the galaxy buried."
I didn't know what that meant.
Not yet.
But I was starting to understand that this planet wasn't just shaping me into something dangerous.
It was showing me what I'd already become.
And as the other Nightsisters began to accept me, not as one of them, but as something molded in their fire, I felt something I hadn't felt since Tatooine.
Not peace.
But purpose.