The Council's voice was still in Tein's ears when the ship dropped out of hyperspace.
Not the words.
The tone.
That careful gentleness the Order used when it wanted something to feel like mercy instead of direction — the sound of a hand resting on your shoulder while quietly measuring whether you would obey.
The stars steadied. The cockpit glass caught the pale wash of a tired moon hanging below them — thin atmosphere, bruised cloud bands, a faint glimmer where scattered settlements clung to valleys the way lichen clung to stone.
A humanitarian assignment.
A small thing.
A clean thing.
The kind of work the Council liked to believe would bring Tein back toward the Light simply by proximity.
Tein's hand rested on the yoke, knuckles relaxed, posture loose in that deliberate way he wore when he refused to show that anything touched him. Beside him, El-Je watched the curve of the moon slide into view with the quiet vigilance of someone who had learned there was always another angle to consider.
He didn't ask questions.
He had learned that Tein answered fewer of them the closer they came to anything that mattered.
"Local relay is active," the console murmured. "Distress traffic: moderate."
Tein didn't respond.
He listened.
Moderate meant thin fear — spread across too many small problems to gather into crisis. The kind of fear that never reached the Temple. The kind that did not trend. The kind that eroded instead of struck.
The kind the Council hoped would heal Tein through exposure.
The kind that never healed anyone.
El-Je glanced at Tein's belt without seeming to.
Not at the sabers.
At the small, black obelisk sealed in its wrap.
The artifact did not glow. It did not whisper. It did not pulse with red, cinematic menace.
It simply existed.
Like a truth no one was ready to say aloud.
Tein did not look at it.
He had learned that looking did nothing.
They slipped into atmosphere.
Wind buffeted the hull in uneven bands. Stabilizers murmured their corrections. The viewport fogged at the edges, then cleared again. Below, a settlement resolved out of haze — prefab structures arranged around a landing pad and a comm-spire that had clearly lost an argument with time and budget cycles.
Not a city.
A problem people lived inside.
Tein brought the ship down without flourish. The pad trembled beneath them like something startled awake. Engines wound down. Silence followed.
Too clean.
No traffic hum. No competing layers of life. Only wind worrying at loose cables and, beneath it, the steady, patient movement of water somewhere below the ridge.
El-Je stood.
His hands did not shake anymore.
Tein still remembered when they had.
"Cloak," Tein said.
El-Je was already pulling it tighter.
The ramp lowered.
Cold air entered with the quiet authority of weather. Wet stone. Mineral grit. Ozone from a storm that might arrive or might only threaten to.
People waited at the pad's edge.
Not welcoming.
Not hostile.
Simply braced.
A woman stepped forward — middle-aged, hair braided down tight for efficiency rather than pride. Cracked hands. Sealant stains that wouldn't come out anymore.
"You're the help?" she asked.
Tein did not announce Jedi.
He rarely did.
"Yes."
Her eyes flicked to El-Je. A calculation. A decision not to linger on it.
"We've got a water pump failing, a med-bay on reserve, and a transport crew that hasn't come back from the river in two days."
Tein nodded once.
The order of things formed in his head the way battle sequences did for other Jedi.
"Show me the pump."
"The crew—?" she began.
"If the pump fails," Tein said gently, "fear rises. Fear spreads. And fear makes more problems than you began with."
It was not kindness.
It was triage.
El-Je watched, learning what Tein valued by which fires he chose to put out first.
They walked.
Mud streets stitched with cables. Corrugated walls that juddered when the wind leaned on them. A broken holosign that blinked half a syllable like someone trying to remember hope.
Small details whispered louder than policy briefs:
A scuff too deep beside a doorway.
A handprint on a window.
A child's toy tucked behind a crate, hidden as if that could keep it safe.
Tein felt the fear here the way one feels humidity.
Present.
Ordinary.
Tangible only when it thickened enough to suffocate.
They reached the pump housing.
It was not a building so much as a plea.
Inside: heat. Stale, recycled air. Damp metal. A turbine whined in the uneven rhythm of a tooth grinding at night.
Tein knelt.
He worked without hurry.
Hurry was how things broke.
"What do you see?" he asked.
El-Je answered without trying to impress him.
"The mount vibrates wrong. The casing's loose. Current spikes."
"And why?"
"The intake's clogged. It's pulling too hard."
A small acknowledgment flickered across Tein's face.
"Fix it."
"Me?"
"You."
El-Je swallowed the feeling that was not pride and not fear but something made from both.
He worked.
He did not reach for the Force like a lever.
He let it exist beside him.
Awareness sharpened alignment. Fingers found resistant bolts. Hands learned to apply pressure where metal wanted to yield.
Not power.
Craft.
The turbine softened into steadiness.
Outside the housing, a woman exhaled like a lung unclenching.
"Med-bay," Tein said.
They moved.
Inside the prefab infirmary, a man lay too pale for the temperature while a child anchored him to the world by holding his hand with both of hers.
El-Je felt something twist inside him.
Tein felt the same thing.
"Breathe," he said quietly.
El-Je did.
The emotion didn't vanish.
It became usable.
Tein stabilized the generator with micro-adjustments, not miracle gestures. He did not fix the future.
He bought time.
He always had.
"The crew," the landing-pad woman said later, relief making her urgent.
Tein stopped walking.
"I'm not done," he said softly. "Show me the river route."
The trail wasn't wilderness.
It wasn't a road.
It was decision worn into land.
Wind came up the ravine in cold pulses. Scrub bent permanently in the direction of fear.
El-Je slipped once, corrected without thought.
Tein noticed.
Praise never required sound.
The river lay below, dark and patient — a blade cutting the land open one slow inch at a time. A bridge of scavenged plating stitched across it like scar tissue. It creaked even when empty.
Halfway across, the air changed.
Not louder.
Tighter.
Tein felt it before sound.
El-Je did too.
They continued anyway.
The storage shed on the far side sagged open. Boot marks scuffed the mud in frantic geometry.
Tein read panic the way others read text.
A burst.
Then nothing.
Not calm.
Absence.
Inside lay a dropped toolkit and rope snapped clean.
No blood.
No bodies.
Just absence arranged like punctuation.
El-Je's stomach tightened. Fear approached the door of his chest and waited to be invited in.
He didn't open it.
Tein's hand brushed his belt.
Not the saber.
The artifact.
He waited for the familiar cold.
The way fear echoed back from it, like tapping a cavern wall.
Nothing happened.
Tein froze internally.
For months, the artifact had been a predator pretending to sleep.
Now it felt like a room after someone leaves.
Wrong.
Utterly wrong.
"Stay close," he said.
"Because of the crew?" El-Je asked.
"Yes," Tein lied.
And because for the first time since Rhen Var, the chain had gone slack and he did not know why.
They walked back across the bridge.
The settlement lights flickered like small, stubborn hopes.
At the midpoint, Tein looked down.
His reflection rippled.
And did not return as himself.
A suggestion of a smile without a face.
He inhaled once.
El-Je didn't see it.
He only saw Tein's hand clench around something that should not bruise.
Far away — farther than ships traveled — something ancient moved without a body.
Not triumph.
Inevitability.
Rain arrived.
Needling. Cold. Committed.
Somewhere in the settlement, a scream was already forming inside the Force before lungs ever breathed it.
This mission had been meant to anchor Tein to the Light.
Instead, it had loosened the last knot.
They worked through the remaining tasks.
They accepted quiet thanks.
They returned to the ship.
Life continued.
As it always did
before it didn't.
Tein paused at the ramp.
Hand on the wrapped stone.
Silence.
Perfect silence.
"Something's wrong," El-Je said gently.
"Yes," Tein replied.
They went inside.
Tein unwrapped the artifact.
It swallowed light.
And offered nothing back.
No hunger.
No reaction.
No attention.
Just absence.
El-Je asked the question anyway:
"Is it contained?"
Tein answered as honestly as he could.
"Once," he said, "I would have said yes."
The console chimed with quiet distress calls.
Tein didn't open them.
He didn't need to.
The Force already held the first tremor of a scream that had not yet reached air.
Rain struck the pad.
Two Jedi sat in a dim cockpit.
One learning who he might become.
One who already knew the price of pretending he wouldn't.
And beneath the skin of the world,
something began to feed —
quietly,
patiently,
as if it had always belonged here.