The road runs north out of Coronet City through the hill country.
Ferical takes it at a working pace. His boots are old. His robes smell of smoke and disinfectant and the particular sweet-iron of saber-cauterized blood from the gallery. His right arm is bad. The spike opened him from collarbone to mid-bicep, deep enough that he can feel the cold of air where it gets to the bone. Blood has soaked the field-binder he tied off on the run and is running down his elbow, dripping off his fingertips with each step. The arm still moves when he tells it to. And the lightside is soothing it as it flows through his body.
The girl. He thinks of the girl as he walks.
Olee Starstone. He had seen her at the Temple before everything, years ago, a Padawan running between Master Chatak's heels with a half-eaten ration bar in one hand. A bright child. One the Order had been raising right, before the war ground them all down to something it could use. He had known that she survived. Then he had run into the ceremony hall and found her on the stage with Chatak's saber lit in her hand, on the side of the monster who helped bring down the Jedi. The Force around her had felt wrong to him from the gallery — poison and loss and hate all mingling together. Whatever Vader had done to her over the months since he had captured her had remade her into a Sith's weapon, and she had been doing so willingly when the attack came.
It had been the right call, tactically. The fallen Padawan endorsing the Empire on Corellian soil was a more offensive target than the Sith who had broken her. The plan had called for him to remove her from the equation if he could reach her, and he had reached her, and he had done it.
His pommel went to her throat. He felt the cartilage give under it, a wet small collapse, and her eyes went wide and she had stopped being able to breathe.
What he had not planned for was the second before he struck. She had cried as her guard broke, and something flickered through her, recognition, the Padawan she had been almost surfacing in her eyes. Then his pommel had hit her throat. A heartbeat after that the air across the hall bent around something he could not see. The Force moved him sideways before his mind caught up to what was coming, his body going one way while his eyes were still tracking another, and the spike clipped his shoulder instead of taking him through the chest.
He should have died there.
He keeps walking.
The city is behind him now. Smoke from the hall smudges the afternoon when he glances back. The road ahead climbs into fog.
The road has clear light on it, shadows starting east as the sun drops. The fog is a Force-fog. It thickened when Vader's rage exploded across the hall and Ferical knew the monster would come looking for the one who got away. The future is a wall ten meters ahead of him. He can see the road. He cannot see what walks on it.
Mirah is gone. Sharp and bright through the Force and then nothing. Tevin gone slower, a long pull, a tearing. The two younger Knights gone in the same breath, snuffed.
He did not see them die. The Force told him.
The road climbs.
Stone walls run beside it. Old farms. Mended fences. Corellian country, the type that absorbs occupations and outlasts them. Sympathetic country. Country that remembers Green Jedi.
The fog thickens.
He walks faster.
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The farmhouse is in a fold of the hills, three kilometers from the village.
Old stone. Walls a meter thick at the base. Slate roof. The chimney smokes blue-grey against the sky. Cows in the lower pasture. Chickens in the yard. A cat asleep on a step.
He feels them before he sees the door open. Four Jedi in the kitchen. Six others through the rooms, three of them armed. The retired officer who owns the farm at the kitchen table, a presence Ferical has known for years through the back-channel without ever meeting him in person.
The door opens.
Vannor steps out. Mirialan, white-haired. The saber on his belt has been unlit for seventeen years. He had refused to join the attack, called it a fools errand.
Vannor's eyes roam his face and softens.
"How many?"
"Four. I am the only one who got out. The plan failed."
"Vader?"
"Not even injured."
Vannor's jaw sets. He turns and goes back inside. Ferical follows. The door closes behind them.
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The kitchen is full.
Four Jedi at the long pine table. Two Knights, a Master beside Vannor, a Padawan– though can he call them that since there is no more order? They stand. The retired officer at the head does not stand. His name is Tomik. Late fifties. Hands wrapped around a chipped cup of cold caf.
Ferical gives them the names. Mirah. Tevin. The two younger Knights. Then what he saw of Vader. The speed. The spike of compressed metal hurled faster than sound. The wave of pressure that took people off their feet. The saber-blow that came down on Mirah like a falling star.
Lessi closes her eyes. She trained under Tevin until last year. Her grief moves through her and he feels her let it fade into the force. Vannor's hand goes to her shoulder without his head turning. She nods once.
Ferical sits across from Tomik.
The chair is wood. Hard. The light through the window falls across the table in a long gold strip and lights Tomik's hands.
"He will come here," Tomik says.
"He will."
"How long?"
"Hours. Tonight. Tomorrow morning. The Force is clouded."
Tomik nods. He asks the next question knowing the answer. "What do you need from me?"
"Nothing you haven't already given."
"That's not an answer."
Ferical looks at him. They have known each other for 30 years, they are most likely going to die togetherm he lets that grief be washed away in the light.
"Stay," Ferical says. "If you can. There will be people in this house at the end who are not Jedi and not Force-sensitive and not soldiers. They will be afraid. You will be worth more to them than a saber."
"That's all?"
"That's enough."
Tomik nods. He lifts the cup and sips the cold caf. He does not say what he is thinking. He does not need to. The day he expected to be afraid of has come, and what he has in him today is a still, quiet weight he did not know he was carrying.
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The next hour is the strangest hour of Ferical's life. Even stranger than when the order fell.
Vannor lights his saber for the first time in seventeen years. The green blade hums. The Force shifts around the lit weapon, a green that has not been here in years. Lessi sits in the corner with her own blade in her lap and does not light it. Her thumb runs along the activation stud absently.
Bren and Olwan go to the windows. They watch the road.
The CorSec men do their work. Two move the cows toward the woods. Two check the rifles in the cellar. One goes to the back bedroom where a child sleeps. The granddaughter, the only child here, an uncle beside her cot watching the small chest rise and fall and then they wake her and leave through the woods.
Tomik stays at the table.
Ferical sits with him a while, then gets up and walks the perimeter of the farmhouse. Through the kitchen garden. Along the eastern wall. Past the cold frames where Tomik grows tomatoes when there is time. The shadows are long. The air smells of cut hay and turned earth and something cooking on the stove inside.
A songbird sings from a fence post. Another answers from the orchard.
Ferical breathes.
He passes the kitchen window. Inside, Vannor has set the saber down and is sitting against the stone wall with his eyes closed. The old Master's face is empty. The Force around him moves easy and unhurried. He is sitting with what is. The four dead. The girl across the room. The man at the table. The darkness seeping closer through the fog.
Ferical watches him for a long moment. A breath he had been holding without knowing goes out of him.
He goes inside.
He sits at the table across from Tomik. Tomik refills the cup from the kettle. The caf is fresh now. Steam rises in the late light. Neither of them speaks. The window is to Ferical's left. Late sun on the rim of the cup.
The fog goes total.
He sets the cup down.
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It happens before the warning arrives in the force.
Glass shatters above the sink and the sonic grenade goes off in his skull.
Ferical's foresight blanks out. The future, the noise of it, every Force-thread he has been listening to for forty years — gone, blown to white. His ears scream. His vision fish-eyes. He tastes copper and does not know whether he has bitten through his cheek.
He is on his feet before he knows he has stood.
The Force comes back through the noise in fragments. Vannor clear. Lessi at the cellar door. Bren and Olwan turning at the windows, sabers thumbing alight. Tomik dropping flat. Then —
The eastern wall comes off.
Stone groans, beams tear free with a sound like trees splitting, and the wall folds outward and goes — a sheet of Corellian construction flying thirty meters into the orchard before it slams down. The roof drops with it. Dust hits Ferical in the face. The air pressure changes hard, his ears popping a second time, and the kitchen is suddenly open to the apple-smell of the orchard and the late sun.
The shooting starts in the dust.
A slugthrower cracks — wrong, wrong sound, propellant and not plasma — and the bolt comes through the haze flat and fast. Bren brings his blade up swiftly, beautiful, the way Ferical has watched him do it ten thousand times in the training salle.
The green blade meets the slug.
The green blade dies.
Bren stares at the dead hilt in his hand for a full half-second, his mouth open. The next round hits him in the throat. His head snaps back. Blood comes out of him in a sudden hard spray that catches the sun coming through the broken roof, and he is falling before his hands have let go of the dead hilt, and he hits the floor wrong, and his eyes are still open.
Ferical does not have time to look at him.
Ferical drops. His body goes before his mind does, the Force pulling him low a half-second before he understands why, and the round passes through where his throat was with a hard crack of displaced air. It punches into the orchard wall on the far side and stays there, smoking.
He comes up behind a fallen beam, dust in his teeth. The kitchen is gone. Olwan's cyan blade is moving in front of him, fast, faster than he has ever seen her move, deflecting bolts and slugs both. Vannor is across the wreckage in Soresu, the green blade catching what the storm sends and turning it aside.
Lessi is at the cellar door.
The door is open. Two CorSec men are shooting back. Lessi's violet blade is up between them and the wreckage, the light sharp on her face. Her face is blank and peaceful. Her boots are planted at the threshold and she is not moving off them.
Tomik is on the floor. Blood is in his eyes from a cut on his forehead. He is dragging himself toward the rifle rack on his elbows, leaving a wet smear behind him on the broken stone, reaching for the old slugthrower he kept under the floorboards since the war he was in.
Ferical sees all of it in the second between his dive and his rise.
He lights his blade.
Yellow-green. He leaps forward.
The first hunter is turning, DC-15 swinging up. Ferical drops his weight and the saber comes up underhand for the gap under the chin. The shield flashes blue. Holds. Holds. Fails. The blade goes through. The hunter drops with a sizzle of burnt flesh.
Second hunter, rifle already up. Bolts come. Ferical reads them in the Force and the saber is moving before he is — first bolt into wreckage, second into open sky — and he is inside the man's reach. The hunter drops the rifle and the blade clears the hip and Ferical's strike comes down—
Steel meets the yellow-green. Holds.
Phrik.
A breath. The man is good.
Ferical breaks the bind by stepping past instead of through, comes around behind the shoulder. Saber at the back of the knee. Shield catches it. Blue flare. He leans his weight in and the shield gives and the saber bites tendon. The leg drops. He turns the blade up the spine. Out at the base of the skull.
Two. Arm shaking. Wound bleeding into the wrap.
Third hunter through the broken wall, rifle leveling.
His off-hand comes up before he thinks. The push goes out of him. The hunter takes the wave full in the chest, goes airborne, hits the far wall. Something in the armor cracks. He does not get up.
Fourth from the left. Rifle and phrik already drawn.
Ferical moves to block.
The blaster does not fire.
A dull thump from underneath the rifle — wrong sound, wrong rhythm — and a slug fires, the force warns him. He twists. The slug goes past his shoulder. Stone behind him sprays.
He moves. The saber comes around. The phrik meets it. Three exchanges. Hard. The man's stance is wrong — left foot — and Ferical takes the foot. The hunter goes to one knee. The blade takes the head.
Three killed. One down. He is breathing hard through his teeth. Across the wreckage Olwan flares and falls. Three on her, the cyan blade goes out, and one of them gets a flame burst on her at close range. The Force tastes like char in his mouth from across the wreckage. Cyan snaps out. She is gone.
Then —
Then the storm comes.
He feels it before he sees it. Not a presence. The absence of every other presence. The Force bends around the figure walking through the eastern wreckage. Pain, and rage, and a cold hunger underneath both of them, all of it pressing in on him with a weight he has to brace against to keep standing. The air bends toward the figure the way water bends toward a sinkhole.
In-hiss. Out-rasp.
Ferical has felt the dark side.
He has never felt it like this. Not even in the hall when they attacked.
The figure walks through the kitchen-pile and stone tumbles aside as he passes. He does not touch it. The dark side around him moves anything in his path out of it. Ferical feels what the others must have felt at the end. The thing that flared so wide in Mirah's presence before it dimmed was not surrender, it was seeing what she was actually fighting — the moment it stopped being a Sith Lord in front of her.
She was fighting the dark itself.
Vannor moves to engage.
Ferical opens his mouth to say no. But he is to late.
Vannor moves into a Soresu pattern, the green blade weaving the patterns he has practiced for sixty years. Vader walks directly into the saber. The garnet comes down. Vannor catches it on the green. The parry is clean and beautiful, sixty years of training and Force moastery, and Ferical feels Vannor's presence solid and certain in the Force.
The bloodshine blows through. Ferical feels Vannor's certainty break — not fear, but the knowledge of a man who knows he will not win.
The old Master gives ground. He spins the green into the next form, lower, faster, looking for an angle that does not exist. The bloodshine blade answers each strike with brute weight. Once. Twice. On the third Vader's gauntlet comes up as he pushes in and closes around Vannor's blade-arm just below the elbow.
The fingers tighten.
The bone breaks with a wet snap. The sound is small under the respirator. Vannor's hand opens because there is nothing left in it to hold the saber with. The green blade dies as the hilt hits stone. Vader drives the bloodshine through Vannor's sternum and out his back. The old Master makes a sound — not a word, the air going out of him — and stays standing for a moment on the blade with his good hand still up in a guard that is no longer holding anything. Then his knees go.
Vannor's saber rises from where it fell. It crosses the wreckage and clips to Vader's belt with a small click.
Vader keeps walking.
Ferical feels Vannor go. The presence releases like a thread reaching the end of its length. Something settles into Ferical's chest where Vannor used to be in the Force, a weight he will carry now until he goes himself. His blade does not waver.
Lessi flares at the cellar door. Two hunters on her. He feels her fight — twenty-three and excellent and still not enough — feels her take a hit and keep her feet, feels her take another and falls. Her violet blade dies. She’s gone.
A blaster fires from the floor. Tomik. Ferical feels the steady core of him, the old constable steady as always. The blaster fires again. Then a heavy round comes back the other way and Tomik's presence stretches and snaps. The man is gone.
Ferical does not feel a fourth death.
He feels them at once, Vannor and Olwan and Lessi and Tomik, and the Force fills with their deaths and sweeps them away into it’s embrace.
Vader is close enough now that the air around him pushes against Ferical's face, walking through the place where Vannor fell. Bloodshine still lit. The green saber on the suit's belt. In-hiss. Out-rasp. The mechanical rhythm of a thing that should not be alive and is.
Ferical raises his blade.
The hilt is warm in his good hand. The yellow-green hums against his face, near enough to his cheek that he can feel it.
He has known this moment was coming. The shadow has been gathering since Vader landed, sharpening every day since. He came here to deliver word and to be present when the others fell. He is present. The end is here.
He moves to meet the storm.
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The first exchange tells him everything.
He catches the win-purple blade in a high guard, reads the strike, redirects the cleave into the beam beside him so the red blade takes the wood and not his shoulder. Technically perfect. Anyone with a trained eye would see he is the better duelist.
It does not matter.
Vader is fighting on different terms. Mass and speed and rage are pouring through every strike, the rage suffocating and the strike just delivering it. The bloodshine comes back faster than he could ever match, the dark side carrying the body across the gap where flesh would tire. Ferical reads it and redirects it and it costs him a step.
He gives the step. He keeps his center.
Second exchange. Faster.
He reads three strikes ahead. Blocks one, redirects two, and the bloodshine catches him along the ribs on the fourth strike. The strike was so fast the Force cannot warn him of it. The cut is hot and deep and his side is wet under the robe before he has time to register what happened. He keeps moving.
Third exchange.
He reads the pattern. He knows what is coming. The Force shows him three strikes ahead, the shape of the assault, the angle Vader will throw the weight from. He shifts his weight to the back foot. He brings the yellow-green into the form that should turn the storm against itself, that should, by every principle his body knows, open Vader's guard for the killing strike.
The strike comes. Ferical executes the counter perfectly.
Vader punches through it.
The counter is right. Ferical's body knows it is right. The bloodshine drives through it anyway, through the redirection that should have turned it, and the moment between expecting the strike to stop and it not doing so is the moment Ferical understands he has been fighting a different war than the one he was trained for. The bloodshine comes back and takes him at the left thigh. The blade does not cauterize cleanly, the dark side lances in keeping the wound open, the pain feeding the storm of blood radiating off of Vader, and Ferical drops to one knee.
He rises. Vader has paused to let him, arrogant bastard is savoring this.
The leg is wrong. The Force pours into it anyway, holding the muscle together long enough to bear weight, and he is back on his feet with the blade up.
Bloodshine drips. In-hiss. Out-rasp. Ferical looks at the figure and understands what he is dying to. The galaxy has been a long time without this. A dark-side master in his prime, in a body built for war, they had grown complacent.
A weight settles into him, low in the chest, behind his breastbone. He recognizes it without knowing why.
The fog ahead of him on the road clears.
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A planet where the rain does not stop.
Cratered metal platform, slick with water. Storm overhead, lightning in continuous sequence, the sky permanently torn. A figure kneeling on the platform.
Black armor, different from the suit walking toward him through the wreckage. Heavier in places. Damaged in others. The right arm is gone at the shoulder, the empty pauldron sparking, severed cables still arcing into the rain. The chest plate is split along one seam, exposing the breathing apparatus beneath. The top of the helmet is sheared off above the brow. The skull beneath is bare. Burn scars, white and ridged, run across the scalp and down what is visible of the back of the neck.
The respirator works under the rain, slower than it should.
In-hiss. Out-rasp..
Lightning.
The flash shows the figure standing in front of the kneeling one.
Anakin Skywalker.
A face from the holos, the chosen one. He looks down at the kneeling monster. Rain runs down his face and sticks his hair to his neck and shoulders. His expression is calm. His blade is at Vader's throat.
Ferical understands. There is more story than the monster taking him. Skywalker is alive somewhere. The Force is keeping him in reserve, hidden, held, until the light can push back the darkness.
The vision lasts one heartbeat.
The rain and the platform and Skywalker dissolve. The kneeling figure is Ferical himself, leg gone out, blade lowered because the arm cannot hold it.
Vader is two paces away.
Ferical smiles.
The Iktotchi face does not show much by human standards. But he feels his jaw unset, the tightness of the last day going out of his face. He carries what the Force showed him into what comes next. Skywalker is alive somewhere. The galaxy still has a chance.
The shifting blade comes down.
His arm drops. His grip opens on the saber-hilt. The breath he is holding goes out and does not come back in.
The Force is the last thing he feels, wider than himself, and he goes into it.
His last awareness is the rain on the platform. The kneeling figure sparking in the storm. The bare scarred head bowed.
And above him, the storm laughs.
The dark side floods the universe and drinks the pleasure of his death.