Dathomir took him in without resistance.
The ship shuddered as it crossed the upper storm bands, scarlet cloud layers sliding past the cockpit in slow, grinding sheets. These were not clouds in the usual sense but dense atmospheric strata saturated with particulate matter—mineral ash, spore clouds, ionized dust pulled endlessly upward and dragged back down again by competing thermal currents. Electrical discharge crawled along the hull in branching veins, lightning arcing sideways rather than downward, bright enough to cast fleeting skeletal shadows across the cockpit controls.
Sensors reported turbulence.
Mineral interference.
Atmospheric instability.
Tein ignored them.
He guided the descent manually, hands steady on the yoke, bleeding speed a fraction at a time. Dathomir's gravity did not seize ships the way some worlds did. It welcomed them—constant, unhurried, pulling with the inevitability of something that had already decided where all mass would eventually rest.
Below the cloud cover, the planet revealed itself in broken layers.
Jagged ridgelines of blackened basalt cut through the haze like exposed bone. Vast fungal forests clung to cliff faces and canyon walls, their canopies uneven and asymmetrical, growth spiraling outward in grotesque geometries that ignored symmetry and light alike. Thick stalks and bulbous caps pulsed faintly, reacting to atmospheric pressure changes rather than sun or season. Between them, the ground split open in long, branching vents that exhaled green ichor-smoke in slow, irregular breaths.
Lightning stitched the sky together in silent flashes.
The world looked wounded.
Alive.
Awake.
The Force thickened as he descended.
Not violently.
Not like the flaring pressure of a Dark Side nexus announcing itself.
This was layered. Structured. Familiar.
Currents folded into one another with practiced ease, power flowing not chaotically but routed, guided by ritual pathways etched so deeply into the land that the planet itself had learned their shape. Tein felt it brush against his awareness and then subtly adjust, like water flowing around a stone already placed in its path.
It pressed against him—not as resistance, not as welcome.
Recognition.
Tein stilled, fingers resting lightly on the controls.
The sensation bypassed thought entirely. It slipped beneath training and discipline to something older and less defined. Not memory. Not instinct.
Resonance.
Dathomir did not feel foreign.
That unsettled him more than if it had.
He searched himself for explanation and found none. No images. No names. No fragment of a past he could grasp. Whatever connection existed lay buried deeper than recollection, deeper even than fear.
The planet simply knew him.
Tein exhaled slowly and resumed aligning his approach vector.
He selected a landing site at the edge of a fractured plateau—a natural shelf of stone overlooking a deep ravine choked with fungal growth and drifting ichor haze. Towering rock formations rose on three sides, their surfaces pitted and scarred by ancient erosion and ritual carving alike. The fourth side dropped away sharply, offering a long view across the lowlands where the land folded into itself again and again, broken by smoke plumes and jagged silhouettes.
The choice was tactical.
Limited sightlines.
Multiple exit vectors.
Atmospheric interference dense enough to scramble casual scans.
And yet, as the ship descended, he became aware of a subtle wrongness.
The site felt… permitted.
Not chosen by him.
Allowed.
As if the land had already made room.
The ship touched down with a muted thud. Stone dust and spores scattered beneath the landing struts, drifting outward in lazy spirals before settling again. Engines wound down. Systems fell silent one by one until only the ticking of cooling metal remained.
Tein did not move immediately.
He sat in the cockpit, senses open, letting the Force settle around him.
Somewhere far off—far deeper than distance alone could explain—something shifted.
Not a call.
Not a threat.
A presence.
Contained.
Cultivated.
After several long moments, he rose from the pilot's seat and sealed his gauntlets with a practiced twist of the wrists. The boarding ramp lowered with a muted hiss.
Heat rolled in immediately—wet, oppressive, layered with the iron-sweet tang of ichor and rot. The air clung to breath and skin alike, heavy enough that each inhale felt intentional rather than automatic.
Tein stepped onto the soil.
It was not dirt.
It was compacted mineral ash mixed with organic decay, springy in some places and brittle in others, textured by repeated saturation and drying. The ground answered—not with pressure, but with alignment, subtly shifting under his weight until his stance felt correct.
He closed the ramp behind him, powered the ship fully down, and faded from notice—not through invisibility, but by becoming irrelevant.
A Shadow did not impose silence.
He listened for it.
Then he began to move.
Tein did not search for the ritual site directly.
Direct paths invited mistakes.
He let the day unfold around him, moving in slow arcs rather than lines. Across fungal plains where the ground exhaled green ichor in irregular breaths, vents opening and closing like lungs. Through ridges slick with mineral residue that dulled sound without masking disturbance. Into ravines where the Force pooled thickly, then thinned again without pattern, as if the land itself were testing perception.
The ichor's coloration registered without conscious thought—hue shifts indicating age, saturation, and ritual residue. Old Shadow briefings surfaced in memory—bare of commentary, meant only to be remembered when it mattered.
Each location told a story.
None were the one he wanted.
By midday, he had dismissed three promising sites.
By late afternoon, he understood why.
The ritual did not belong to a place.
It belonged to timing.
Intervals.
Dathomir remembered repetition. Growth pressed flat and rising again. Smoke vented and resettled. Stone worn smooth not by erosion, but by use.
Tein read the signs the way other Jedi read archives.
Force-users were careless in ways ordinary beings were not. They trusted power to cover discipline. Even those who practiced secrecy bent probability around themselves without noticing.
Tein followed those bends.
As dusk approached, he withdrew—not retreating, but repositioning. He selected a narrow shelf of stone beneath overhanging fungal growth, shielded from wind and observation. Above him, massive caps dripped viscous fluid that evaporated before touching ground. Below, the ravine breathed green fog upward in slow pulses.
No fire.
No beacon.
No Force barrier.
He left nothing behind.
Night fell hard on Dathomir.
The sounds changed first. Insects vanished. Larger things moved. The ichor haze thickened, smoke drifting low across the ground like searching fingers. Distant shapes shifted just beyond visibility—not approaching, not fleeing.
Existing.
Tein slept.
Not lightly.
Not in fragments.
Deep, measured sleep claimed him within minutes, breath slowing until it matched the planet's rhythm rather than resisting it. The Dark Side flowed freely around him, but it did not intrude.
Dathomir did not enter his dreams.
At first light, he rose and resumed his movement.
Morning on Dathomir did not arrive so much as withdraw.
The fog thinned by degrees, retreating into low hollows and fissures as the planet exhaled again. What light there was filtered down through a bruised sky, pale and indirect, catching on stone edges and fungal growth without ever fully illuminating them.
Tein moved with renewed patience.
The second day was not for searching broadly.
It was for narrowing.
The land had already offered its first answers.
Now he tested them.
He traced the margins of yesterday's false paths—not to confirm their emptiness, but to understand why they had failed. He knelt where ichor smoke vented and dissipated too quickly, where the Force pooled but did not circulate. He paused at rock faces scarred by old sigils that had been deliberately abandoned, their geometry warped just enough to render them inert.
Discarded attempts.
Learning points.
This coven did not waste effort. When something failed, it was not repeated.
It was refined elsewhere.
Tein followed that logic rather than terrain.
He adjusted his route by instinct sharpened through years of Shadow work—tracking not bodies, but intent. The subtle distortions left behind when Force-users moved with purpose. A compression here. A thinning there. Places where probability bent just slightly too often in the same direction.
By midmorning, he felt it.
Not the ritual itself.
Its wake.
The Force ahead bore the signature of preparation rather than execution. Power moved there in measured intervals, not bursts. The land showed signs of careful approach: growth pressed down and allowed to rise again, stone cleared and re-marked, pathways chosen for silence rather than speed.
This was a place used repeatedly—but never casually.
Tein slowed further, every step chosen not only to avoid notice, but to avoid correction. Some locations resisted intrusion. Others adapted to it.
This one expected witnesses.
He shifted his approach accordingly, climbing rather than advancing directly. The high ground offered not safety, but context. From above, patterns resolved that the forest floor concealed.
Only when the geometry made sense did he stop.
And wait.
The chant reached him moments later.
The standing stones emerged from the fog without ceremony.
Half-buried.
Slick with residue.
Arranged wrong for worship.
Wrong for defense.
Right for focus.
Tein adjusted his path and took the high ground overlooking the site.
The ritual was just beginning.
The first note entered the air without warning.
Not loud.
Not sharp.
Placed.
One voice, low and measured, cut through the ambient hush like a tool testing resistance. Another joined it a heartbeat later, then another, each tone sliding into the next with practiced precision. The chant did not rise so much as lock—interlocking cadences forming a structure rather than a melody.
The ichor vents responded.
Green smoke thickened at the base of the stones, its pulses tightening until the irregular became rhythmic. The substance folded inward on itself as it rose, drawn not upward but toward the center, as though the ground itself had begun to exhale with intent.
The Force followed.
Not surging.
Not flaring.
Aligning.
Tein felt it before he saw the shift—an internal recalibration, the same sensation he'd felt during controlled detonations of power elsewhere in the galaxy. Energy did not expand.
It condensed.
Then the figure at the center moved.
The male Zabrak stepped forward into the geometry, bare feet finding their marks without hesitation. His presence hit the Force like mass added too quickly—dense, heavy, already straining the pattern meant to hold him. Ash and ichor streaked his horns and shoulders, symbols cut shallow but deliberate, each incision placed to redirect rather than restrain.
The chant deepened.
Staffs struck stone in unison—once.
The ichor surged.
Green smoke poured upward in thicker columns now, folding back toward the Zabrak's body, threading through sigils and skin without ever touching directly. The symbols glimmered brighter, correcting the flow, guiding it inward.
His chest expanded.
Not breathing—forcing space.
Muscle bunched beneath his skin, fibers knotting and thickening as the Force pressed through him in uneven waves. His spine bowed, vertebrae shifting with wet, grinding sounds that carried even to Tein's position.
Power entered faster than it could be organized.
The Zabrak snarled, a sound dragged out of him by pressure rather than rage. His hands clenched, fingers digging into stone hard enough to crack it.
The witches did not react.
They adjusted.
The chant shifted key—subtle, corrective—voices narrowing the flow, tightening the channel. For a heartbeat, the geometry held. The ichor stabilized. The Force snapped into something close to coherence.
Too close.
The Zabrak screamed.
Not in pain.
In excess.
The sound tore out of him as the geometry failed, raw power surging faster than the symbols could redirect it. His horns scraped stone as he lurched forward, one foot tearing free of its mark. The standing stones vibrated in protest, hairline fractures racing along their surfaces.
One of the witches shouted a correction—
Too late.
The Zabrak ripped himself out of the circle with brute strength, ichor-slick skin tearing against sigil lines as the force meant to shape him spilled outward instead. The backlash struck the nearest witch with a physical blow, snapping her staff mid-syllable and hurling her across the stone.
She hit hard.
Rolled once.
Did not rise.
The Zabrak turned on her immediately.
Tein felt the moment the augmentation tipped fully into instability—power without coherence, rage without direction. The Zabrak moved with terrifying speed, crossing the distance in a blur of motion. His foot came down on the fallen witch's chest, crushing breath and bone alike.
She screamed once.
He bent, seized her by the throat, and lifted.
Green ichor smoke wrapped around his arms as he slammed her back against the stone, once, twice—until the sound changed from impact to collapse. Her head struck at the wrong angle.
It ended there.
The coven did not cry out.
They acted.
Three staffs came down in unison, arcs of stored magick cracking through the air and slamming into the Zabrak's side. Flesh split where power struck, but he barely staggered. He roared and swung blindly, catching another witch across the shoulder and sending her skidding across the ritual ground.
Too strong.
Too unfocused.
The witches adjusted instantly.
Angles shifted.
Distance collapsed.
One staff pinned his leg to the stone with a surge of binding magick. Another struck his spine, discharging force directly into his nervous system. The third came down across his skull, green light detonating on impact.
The Zabrak convulsed.
For a heartbeat, he tried to rise again—muscle spasming, fingers clawing into the earth.
Then a final strike took him through the chest.
He fell forward, body hitting the ground with a weight that felt final even through the Force.
The ichor vents exhaled once more—erratic, uncontrolled—
Then thinned.
The chant collapsed inward, voices cutting off together, as though pulled from the air.
Silence returned.
The witches did not mourn.
They stepped back, staffs grounded, breathing steady as the residual power bled harmlessly into the soil. The ritual geometry dimmed, symbols fading as the land reclaimed what had been forced through it.
Only then did Tein widen his awareness.
And only then did he see what had been deliberately kept outside the ritual's focus.
Off to the side of the circle—partially obscured by standing stone and shadow—
A boy.
Chained.
Young. Still. Watching.
Beside him stood a woman who had not moved throughout the entire ritual.
She had not chanted.
Had not lifted a staff.
Yet the space around her felt anchored, as though the ritual had revolved around her presence without acknowledging it.
Her posture was relaxed. Her attention fixed not on the dead Zabrak, but on the outcome itself—as if failure had always been one of the acceptable results.
Tein did not know her.
But the Force around her carried weight.
Authority without display.
He held his breath, waiting to observe the next moments quietly and without disturbance.
And Dathomir, beneath them all, listened.