**Chapter 809: Echoes of the Dragon**
**Scene 1: The Grassy Dreamscape**
Ahsoka Tano stirred in the haze of sleep, the soft sheets of the high-end Kuat apartment twisting around her legs. One moment she was nestled against Dagon's side, the warmth of the harem's shared bed a comforting anchor. The next—
*Huh? A grassy world?* She blinked, floating in a vast meadow under a sky streaked with unfamiliar stars. The air smelled of wildflowers and distant rain. *I thought I was sleeping. Where—*
A sharp *click* echoed through her mind, like a holorecorder skipping frames. The grass withered at the edges. Shadows lengthened unnaturally.
A dark voice slithered into her thoughts—corrupted, glitching like damaged text scrolling across her vision.
**"Do you seek power?"**
Ahsoka spun, lightsabers instinctively forming in her hands, though they felt distant, unreal. "What? Who's there?"
**"Do you hate everything?"**
"No!" She backed up, heart pounding. "What is this? Show yourself!"
**"Do you seek power?"**
The voice repeated, insistent, hungry. Another *click*. The meadow shattered into fragments.
**Scene 2: Fractured Memories**
Distortions rippled outward. Battlefields bled into view—smoke-choked skies, the whine of blasters, the clash of lightsabers. Ahsoka gasped as figures resolved. *Me? No… this is Dagon. I'm seeing his memories. The Force bond—how deep does it go?*
She watched helplessly as a version of Dagon—older, scarred, wielding unfamiliar weapons—fought a towering machine in some ruined industrial hellscape. John Connor. The name surfaced unbidden from the memory. Dagon's final stand. The T-5000 phasing through him. The desperate activation of the time displacement device. A flash of light. Death.
Then the shift. The girls—*us*—captured on Geonosis. The horror of the mind prison. Dagon's blood sacrifice. The miracle of resurrection pulling them back from the brink.
Ahsoka's breath hitched. *He died for us. Again and again.*
"Kill," a guttural voice snarled from the void.
Black fire erupted across the dreamscape. Souls—twisted, screaming things—coalesced into a monstrous form: an undead dragon fused with a snarling wolf, eyes burning with endless hatred. Scales of shadow and fur matted with blood.
"May we run rampant with hatred and wild joy just to crush with these fangs the true light that burns us," the beast intoned, its voice a chorus of the damned.
**"The blood must flow."**
Ahsoka recoiled. "What? Why? What is this thing?"
A deeper shadow loomed behind the beast, formless yet suffocating. "Then the beast will consume you, and I will take this place. You will feel nothing but hatred and become a beast in the form of a man."
"No! Master, don't listen!" Ahsoka shouted, reaching futilely into the memory. She knew it was pointless—this had already happened—but the terror felt immediate.
A final voice boomed from the abyss, cold and weary: "A world like this could burn for all I care."
The dream fractured completely. Ahsoka fell through darkness, the beast's roar chasing her.
**Scene 3: Kuat High Apartments – Awakening**
"**DAGON!**"
Ahsoka bolted upright with a scream that tore through the lavish bedroom. The force of it sent her tumbling half out of the massive bed, sheets tangling around her montrals. Heart hammering, she clutched at her chest, sweat beading on her orange skin.
The room erupted into chaos. Zule, who had been curled against Dagon's empty side of the bed, yelped as she rolled right off the edge with a thud. "Damn it, Ahsoka! What is your damage?!" The Falleen-Zeltron hybrid rubbed her hip, glaring up from the floor, her colorful skin flushing with irritation and lingering sleep.
Miaria's tail lashed in alarm, knocking over a decorative lamp that shattered with a crash. "By the stars, Snips—what happened?" The Felacatian queen sat up, ears twitching, her beast-form instincts making her scan the room for threats that weren't there.
Aayla Secura ignited a low-glow training saber out of reflex, blue light casting shadows across her lekku. "Another prophetic dream? The last one got us captured on Geonosis until Dagon pulled off that insane rescue. Please tell me it's not that again."
Talon and Atroxa stirred beside her, the red Lethan Twi'leks exchanging uneasy glances. "Talk to us, Ahsoka," Atroxa said softly, her voice still husky from sleep. "You look like you saw a Sith Lord in the flesh."
Ahsoka took a shaky breath, pulling her knees to her chest. The other girls—Sakura, Erictia, Stella, Kayla, Grace, Visenya, Shin, Flare, and Aubrie—gathered closer, forming a protective circle on the oversized bed. The absence of Dagon (still on campaign near Kartao) only heightened the tension.
"It wasn't exactly a prophecy," Ahsoka said, voice trembling. "It felt… deeper. Like I was inside his memories. The Force bond pulled me in. I saw everything."
She described the grassy world turning nightmarish. The corrupted voice taunting with questions of power and hate. The battlefield fragments—Dagon's death against the machine, their capture and resurrection on Geonosis. The black fire birthing the dragon-wolf abomination. The shadow's threats. The final chilling declaration that a world could burn.
Zule's expression darkened, guilt flickering in her eyes as Geonosis was mentioned again. "He carries all that alone? The bloodlust in that armor… we've felt echoes of it, but this…"
"He's fighting something inside himself," Aayla murmured, deactivating her saber and squeezing Ahsoka's shoulder. "The Wrath Shield gives him power, but it feeds on emotion. If the bond let you see this…"
"We need to talk to him when he returns," Sakura said firmly, her analytical mind already turning. "No more hiding the toll. We're his strength, not just his loves."
Miaria's tail wrapped around Ahsoka comfortingly. "You shouted for him in the dream. Even there, you were trying to reach him. That's our Ahsoka—always charging in."
Ahsoka managed a weak smile, though the beast's roar still echoed in her mind. "It felt so real. Like if he gives in even once… that thing takes over. We can't let that happen. Not after everything he's done for us."
The girls nodded, pulling her back into the center of the bed. Whispers of reassurance filled the room—promises to support him, to share the burden, to confront the darkness together. Yet beneath the comfort, a shared unease lingered. Dagon was winning the war in the stars, but the battle within his soul was far from over.
As dawn crept over Kuat's orbital ring, the harem held vigil in their shared bed, waiting for their Dragon to return from the front.