Real space returned without warning.
The stars snapped into fixed positions as hyperspace peeled away, the transition abrupt enough to make Tein's ship shudder hard through its forward spars. Inertial dampeners lagged a fraction of a second behind reality before compensating, pressure briefly blooming in his chest as mass reasserted itself. The low hum of the engines deepened, shifting from hyperspace whine to the heavier register of real thrust.
Silence followed.
Not the absence of sound—space was never truly silent inside a cockpit—but a pause in motion. A moment where velocity finished becoming gravity, where intention finished becoming consequence.
Dathomir hung ahead.
Not centered.
Not framed.
It dominated the forward hemisphere of the viewport, a red-black sphere slow-spinning against the void, its clouded surface in constant upheaval. Storm systems the size of continents boiled beneath dense cloud layers, lightning crawling laterally through them like exposed nerve. No polar caps. No visible oceans. Just land and atmosphere locked in perpetual conflict.
Its gravity well reached farther than the instruments suggested.
Ionized dust, asteroid grit, and the wreckage of old orbital debris curved into long, distorted arcs around the planet—streams pulled thin and bent into invisible spirals that fed the mass below. Sensor returns blurred at the edges, readings smeared by interference and particulate drag.
The Force around it was dense.
Layered.
Intentional.
It pressed against him—not as resistance, not as welcome.
Recognition.
Tein stilled, fingers resting lightly on the controls. He did not reach outward. He did not probe.
He let the sensation exist.
Fear did not rise.
That, more than the presence itself, caught his attention.
On other worlds—dark ones, corrupted ones—fear announced itself immediately. A reflex. A warning. Here, there was none. Only weight. Familiarity without comfort, like standing in a place that remembered him even if he did not remember it.
He exhaled slowly and began aligning his approach vector.
This mission was not recovery.
Not engagement.
Not judgment.
Observe.
Catalog.
Withdraw.
The Council's instructions echoed with familiar restraint. Nightsisters. Ritualized Force use. Practices that endured rather than flared and collapsed under excess. Enough to warrant attention. Not enough—yet—to justify intervention.
Tein had been sent because he did not disturb systems simply by being present.
Other Jedi asked questions by existing. They bent probability around themselves without noticing.
Shadows learned how not to.
His work had taken him far beyond the margins of Jedi record—into forgotten temples where Sith holocrons whispered themselves hoarse into dead air; into vaults sealed by Orders that no longer existed, guarding dangers that had outlived their custodians; into cult gatherings where fear did more work than doctrine ever could.
Sometimes he intervened.
More often, he watched.
He recorded names. Patterns. Intervals. Memorized chants without responding to them. Let atrocities complete when stopping them would blind him to larger ones later.
That was the cost of being a Shadow.
Another world.
Outer Rim.
No name worth preserving.
A derelict listening post drifted above a gas giant whose storms erased signals faster than they could be archived. The station had once belonged to a Republic subcontractor—its hull scarred by micrometeor impacts, solar panels frozen half-deployed, sensors left running out of habit rather than purpose.
Something else had found it.
A fragment of a Sith holocron, incomplete and decaying, had embedded itself into the station's systems—not as an intelligence, not as a voice, but as a method.
It taught the technicians how to listen differently.
How to hear the places in a voice where fear hid.
How to draw it out slowly. Carefully.
Not through pain. Not through threat.
Through understanding.
Tein had observed from within the station's walls, his presence folded thin as static.
He watched interrogations conducted without restraints. Without raised voices. The technicians smiled. They spoke of efficiency. Of prevention. Of necessary evils that barely felt evil at all.
The victims broke anyway.
When the fragment's influence waned—as such things always did—the technicians did not stop.
They turned to one another.
They practiced.
They refined.
They convinced themselves this was survival. Better us than them. Better controlled fear than chaos.
Tein disabled the transmitter quietly.
He did not announce himself.
When the voices stopped, fear flooded the station all at once—raw, unshaped, uncontrolled. The technicians realized too late they had forgotten how to endure it themselves.
Tein watched the final hours through sealed bulkheads.
He did not intervene.
There was no lesson left to teach.
Cults were one expression.
Dathomir was another.
He adjusted his descent angle.
And the Force shifted.
Not sharply.
Not urgently.
Enough.
Sensors chimed.
Contacts—six.
Tein's gaze hardened.
They emerged from behind him, sliding out of sensor shadow like predators uncurling from sleep—hidden moments earlier by Dathomir's gravity well and the ionized debris dragged into irregular orbit. Starfighters—civilian frames gutted and reforged, hulls darkened to swallow starlight.
But the darkness wasn't uniform.
Shallow etchwork scored the hulls—curved, deliberate lines that were not decorative and not damage. Instruments hesitated when they tried to resolve them. Not jamming. Not interference.
Imposition.
A pattern laid over metal.
Their vectors were disciplined. Offset. Designed to box rather than rush.
They had been waiting.
Tein opened a narrow-band channel.
"Unidentified vessels," he said calmly. "You are on an intercept course. State your intent."
Silence.
Then the Force answered.
Six presences flared into clarity—tight, aggressive, threaded with Dark Side resonance.
But not the kind he expected.
Not the roaring hunger of Sith.
Not the feral pull of corrupted scavengers.
This was contained. Pressurized. Held.
Obedience shaped into a weapon.
Something shifted in the sealed compartment behind him.
Not movement.
Attention.
The artifact did not awaken.
It listened.
The first volley came without warning.
Red fire tore across space, ripping through the void where Tein's ship had been a breath earlier. He rolled hard, dumping lateral thrust as inertial dampeners shrieked in protest. Stars smeared sideways across the canopy as he cut engines and let momentum carry him across the firing lane.
Bolts screamed past the cockpit, close enough to flash crimson across the transparisteel.
"So," he murmured. "No conversation."
Tein killed engines entirely.
The ship went cold.
For half a second, it was nothing but mass and velocity.
In that half-second, fear spiked.
One of the attackers flinched through the Force—not panic, not yet—but the sudden realization that the prey was no longer behaving correctly.
The artifact drank that moment like heat through stone.
The attackers surged forward, targeting solutions tightening—
—and Tein rerouted power from shields to engines and reignited thrust at full burn.
The sudden acceleration crushed him into his seat as he snapped downward into Dathomir's gravity well. The planet seized his trajectory and bent it into a savage arc no conventional pilot would dare attempt.
Two fighters overshot, shields flaring as they struggled to correct.
Tein fired once.
Precise.
Economical.
The lead ship's deflectors collapsed in a cascade of blue-white light. The follow-up shot punched through hull plating.
The pilot inside felt it—the instant before decompression, the sharp certainty.
The artifact pulsed.
The remaining pilots reacted instantly.
They did not break.
They adapted.
They split—three high, two low, one holding back.
That one did not rush.
That one watched.
Tein felt it immediately. Controlled. Disciplined. Measuring distance instead of closing it.
The Dark Side around that pilot wasn't a storm.
It was a blade held in reserve.
The others pressed in.
Fire raked across Tein's shields. Alarms spiked. He diverted power to forward deflectors, letting aft shielding weaken as he threaded between converging fire lanes. Engines flared in short, irregular bursts—never sustained, never predictable.
Pain flared through his shoulder as a restraint dug into muscle.
He welcomed it.
Pain anchored him.
Fear did not.
One attacker hesitated—correcting too late after overcommitting.
Tein rolled inverted, rerouted power, and fired through the debris field that hesitation created.
The fighter clipped drifting wreckage at speed.
The pilot screamed through the Force an instant before the hull tore itself apart.
The artifact hummed—quiet, intent.
Four remaining.
They tightened formation.
Too tight.
Tein dumped power from shields and let gravity take him, allowing the planet's pull to drag his ship into a brutal downward vector. Warning tones screamed as stress climbed past safe tolerances.
The maneuver should have torn the ship apart.
The Force disagreed.
He flattened out just above the gravity plane and surged beneath their formation.
Another ship's shields failed.
The pilot tried to flee.
Fear broke containment.
The artifact drank deeply.
The fighter vanished into the storm layers below.
The fourth pilot panicked.
Jump engines flared mid-turn.
Tein fired once.
Hyperspace caught the ship wrong.
No scream—just absence.
Three left.
Two attacked together, their coordination nearly flawless. Fire overlapped. Shields dipped dangerously low.
The ace circled.
Waiting.
Herding.
Tein let them believe it was working.
He cut thrust and dropped—freefall toward Dathomir's upper gravity shear.
They followed.
Too confident.
Tein burned sideways across the gravity plane, dumped remaining power into engines, and released a decoy charge.
One pilot corrected too late.
The bloom briefly outshone the planet below.
Two left.
The ace surged forward.
Clean. Precise. Deadly.
Shots came in tight clusters, forcing reaction instead of control.
Fear sharpened—not panic, but calculation failing.
The artifact stirred.
Tein inverted, climbed through the ace's blind spot—
—and fired.
The ship detonated, fragments scattering into slow orbit like dying stars.
Silence reclaimed the void.
Tein steadied his breathing as systems cooled and shields crawled back into place.
As the ship cut deeper into atmosphere, he let his awareness turn inward at last.
The attack had not been random.
Six ships. Disciplined approach. A controlled reserve. Withdrawal only after sufficient data was gathered.
This had been a gate.
Not to stop him.
To see what would happen if he were forced to pass alone.
Tein's gaze flicked, unbidden, toward the sealed compartment behind him.
The artifact remained silent.
But silence was no longer absence.
It was intention.
Whatever waited on Dathomir, something else had already decided he was worth measuring—and had been willing to spend lives to do it.
Tein set his course and did not deviate.
If something was trying to keep him from the red world, then the reason was already waiting below.
And he would meet it.