Hyperspace was never meant to be comfortable.
It pressed in on the ship from every direction—not violently, but persistently—like pressure equalizing through bone. The engines' hum drifted below hearing and into structure, a vibration that traveled through deck plating and seat frame, settling into Tein's spine. Outside the viewport there was no sky, no motion, no horizon.
Only a smeared, lightless pallor that refused to resolve into distance.
Direction without landmarks.
Movement without travel.
Tein preferred it this way.
He remained seated in the cockpit, posture unchanged, hands resting lightly on the controls more out of habit than necessity. The ship flew itself through hyperspace corridors calculated down to fractions of a degree, but he stayed present anyway.
Attentive.
Grounded.
Tein let his focus loosen—not drifting, not lost, but turning inward the way it always did when motion left him alone with time. Hyperspace stripped away distraction, and memory rose to fill the silence.
The Jedi Temple already felt distant.
Not physically—hyperspace made distance meaningless—but philosophically. Doctrine thinned quickly once removed from ritual halls and consensus voices. Out here, certainty felt smaller. More fragile.
More honest.
The Force felt different in hyperspace. Not weaker—just constrained. Stretched thin like a current forced through a narrowing channel, stripped of texture and nuance until only pressure remained.
It reminded him of Rhen Var.
Ice-bound. Silent.
A world frozen so completely that even memory felt buried beneath its surface.
The tomb rose in his thoughts whole and uninterrupted—not because it had been imposing, but because it had been intentional. Its corridors had not guided the visitor; they had misled them. Narrow passages sloped at uneven angles, subtly undermining balance. No symmetry. No reverence. Sith tombs usually declared themselves.
This one concealed itself.
The walls had not been defaced by time or violence. They had been broken deliberately. Inscriptions shattered mid-phrase. Sigils interrupted before completion. Meaning removed rather than erased, as if whoever sealed the place understood that knowledge could survive vandalism, but not incompletion.
Someone had not wanted it remembered.
Tein had felt the artifact before he saw it.
Not as a pull.
As a distortion.
A place where the Force folded inward on itself, sliding past awareness the way cold slipped through armor seams. He had followed that distortion through collapsed chambers and pressure-sealed vaults until he reached a room so plain it bordered on contempt.
No ornamentation.
No guardians.
No warning.
Just a stone plinth.
And resting atop it, the crystal.
Black—not reflective, not absorptive—simply… unacknowledged. Light did not bend around it or vanish into it. It behaved as though it were not there at all. The air in the chamber had been unnaturally still, dense enough that even breath felt like intrusion.
There had been no traps.
That, more than anything, had unsettled him.
The tomb had already done what it was meant to do.
Tein had stood there longer than necessary, boots planted in frost-dusted stone, the Force moving strangely around the object without ever touching it. He had considered the simplest solution.
A single, controlled release of Force energy.
No spectacle.
No residue.
The crystal would fracture. Its fragments would sink back into ice and silence, indistinguishable from the world that had hidden it.
Forgotten.
It would have been easy.
Easier than carrying it.
Easier than explaining it.
Easier than living with the unanswered question it represented.
He had not done it.
Nor had he left it behind.
If I don't understand this, he had thought, someone worse will.
The conclusion had arrived without emotion. Without justification.
He had accepted it the way he accepted gravity—not as permission, but as weight.
Now, light-years away, that same absence lingered.
Tein let his awareness widen—not probing, not testing—simply settling into the disciplined stillness cultivated over years of solitary missions. The ship responded first: mass contained, systems aligned, trajectory unbroken. Hyperspace pressed in around them, featureless and indifferent.
Beyond that—
Nothing.
Except one place where the Force refused to behave as expected.
The artifact.
His perception slid past it again, skidding like water off polished stone. No resistance. No invitation. No echo.
Just a gap.
And that gap moved with him.
He had told the Council the truth. Or the version that fit their language. The artifact did not tempt. It did not burn. It did not radiate corruption.
What he had not told them—what he could not yet give shape to—was how deliberate the silence felt.
Sith relics announced themselves.
This one withheld.
Hyperspace pressure adjusted—a minor compression the instruments ignored but the Force did not. The sensation passed through him like a held breath.
Then released.
The ship continued on course.
Tein did not.
For a single heartbeat, alignment occurred.
Not around him.
Through him.
As if something unimaginably distant had adjusted its awareness—not reaching, not calling, not acting—and discovered that he was already standing where it expected him to be.
Nothing touched him.
Nothing spoke.
Nothing needed to.
The danger was not intrusion.
The danger was that alignment required no effort at all.
Tein remained still.
Fear did not rise.
That absence—that refusal to provoke—unsettled him more than any whisper ever had.
He knew fear. He had studied it. Endured it. Learned how it sharpened resolve and fractured judgment.
Whatever this was, it did not challenge him.
It did not need to.
It fed on fear—
—and found none worth taking.
Dathomir lay ahead—distant, inevitable. A world where the Force was not divided into doctrine and denial, but shaped through ritual and belief. Where fear was not hidden, but harnessed.
If something ancient was stirring, it made sense it would surface there.
Tein made no adjustments.
Course remained locked.
Speed unchanged.
Behind him, sealed within layered containment, the artifact remained inert.
Yet the emptiness around it felt narrower now.
As if the space it occupied had become aware it was no longer alone.
Tein exhaled slowly.
This was not a warning.
Not an omen.
It was confirmation.
For the first time since leaving Coruscant, he did not feel watched.
He felt—
Recognized.
And that, more than any scream or shadow, told him the truth:
The mission had not begun when the Council spoke.
It had begun when he chose not to destroy what should never have been found.
There would be no clean ending now.
Only consequence.