December 4012 ABY
Executor-class Super Star Destroyer
I stood alone in my quarters. Moments after what I had done.
The room is silent, but not still. The metal walls seem to breathe, pulsing faint red with each flicker of the overhead lights.
It's always red here. Like the ship itself is bleeding. Or waiting to.
My hands are stained. With the blood of Dathomir. It clings beneath the skin.
No one comes alarms sound. There is no judgment here.
Not from the Pale Father. Not from the ship.Not even from the Force.
Just the echo of a choice I can't take back.
I fall to my knees in the center of the room. Metal groans beneath me.
My saberstaff rests against the wall, silent. Watching.
I close my eyes. And open them
Back on Dathomir.
The ship is gone. The hum of the Star Destroyer fades.
Now there is only ash. Black sand beneath my feet. The sky above, cracked and bleeding red.
I stand in the ruins. Of where the temple used to be.Where I was reborn.Where she died.
Kaelrah.
I see her. Not as a vision.Not as a ghost.But something more cruel.
She stands at the edge of the crater, cloaked in smoke. Eyes like distant stars.A presence that feels like warmth and grief braided together.
I want to run to her. Fall into her arms like I'm still a boy. Beg her to forgive me.
But I don't move.
She watches me. Not with anger.Not with pity.But with the kind of silence that knows everything.
"I'm sorry," I sob, crumpled on the ground."I never had a choice."
The wind picks up. Ash swirls.
Her voice cuts through it. Soft. Sharp. Unrelenting.
"You always had a choice, Lorenzo," she says."You just never saw it. You never took it."
I look down at my hands. Still stained. Still trembling.
"Please, Kaelrah…Forgive me. I tried to stop."
"You did try," she says."But there's a difference between trying and doing. And you still did what you did. You'll have to live with that."
Silence again.Not harsh. Not final.Just true.
Her hand reaches out.
"But I can help you."There is a part of you that is not dead."
"I know you're still that boy from Dathomir...Lost in the darkness.But not gone."
I replied in a trembling voice,
"How?"
Kaelrah didn't hesitate.
"Go home, Lorenzo. There, you will find your answers."
Her form began to dissolve, the wind stealing her away, strand by strand. The crater darkened. The sky cracked wider. And then
Blackness.
I wake on the cold floor. My back aches. My breath is shallow. My eyes stare into the ceiling of hell, the endless durasteel above, lit in dull red, alive with nothing.
The room is exactly as I left it.Dead.Silent.
But something lingers.
"Go home," I mumble, barely louder than a breath.
I blink. Swallow.
"Does she mean… Tatooine?"
The word feels like fire in my mouth. A place I buried long ago.A name I haven't spoken in years.But now
It calls me.
And somewhere deep beneath the pain, beneath the blood and the ash and the voice of the Pale Father, a spark moves.