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 orders echoed with familiar restraint. Nightsisters. Ritualized Force use. Practices that persisted instead of flaring and collapsing under their own excess. Enough to warrant attention. Not enough—yet—to justify interference.
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 Jedi Orders that no longer existed, guarding relics whose dangers 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. Timings. Memorized chants without responding to them. Let atrocities finish when stopping them would expose deeper 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—but through understanding. The holocron showed them how to speak to prisoners as if they were helping them. How to apologize while doing harm. How to offer relief so convincingly that the subject thanked them when it was over.
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 all such things eventually 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, engines throttled low to minimize emissions.
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. Not wild. Not reckless.
Focused.
And beneath that focus—
Fear.
Contained. Pressurized. Held like breath before a plunge.
Something shifted in the storage 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 prey had become unpredictable.
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 without tearing their frame apart.
Two fighters overshot, shields flaring as they struggled to correct.
Tein fired once.
A precise burst.
The lead ship's deflectors flared, collapsed, and failed 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, helpless certainty.
The artifact pulsed.
Atmosphere and debris vented violently as the fighter spiraled away, screaming into a decaying orbit.
The remaining pilots reacted instantly.
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.
The others pressed in.
Fire raked across Tein's shields, alarms spiking as energy washed over the hull. 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 deep into muscle.
He welcomed it.
Pain anchored him.
Fear did not.
One attacker hesitated—correcting too late after overcommitting.
Tein rolled inverted, rerouted power to weapons, and fired through the debris field that hesitation created.
The fighter clipped drifting wreckage at full speed.
The pilot screamed through the Force an instant before the hull tore itself apart.
The artifact hummed—not audibly, but insistently.
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 reinforced frame groaning but holding under forces that would have sheared a lesser craft apart.
The maneuver should have torn the ship apart.
The Force disagreed.
He flattened out just above the gravity plane, rerouted power back into engines, and surged forward beneath their formation as bolts stitched empty space behind him.
Another ship's shields flared, collapsed, and went dark.
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 adjusted vector by instinct alone and fired once.
Hyperspace caught the ship wrong.
There was no scream this time—just absence, and the echo of terror cut short.
Three left.
Two attacked together, their Force-enhanced coordination nearly flawless. Fire came in overlapping patterns, forcing Tein into constant micro-corrections. Shields dipped dangerously low.
The ace circled.
Waiting.
Herding.
Tein let them believe it was working.
He cut thrust again and dropped—freefall toward Dathomir's upper gravity shear.
They followed.
Too confident.
Tein burned sideways across the gravity plane, dumped all remaining power into engines, and released a decoy charge.
One pilot corrected too late.
The bloom that followed briefly outshone the planet below.
Two left.
The ace surged forward.
Clean. Precise. Deadly.
Shots came in tight clusters, forcing Tein to react instead of dictate. Shields flared, flickered, and nearly failed.
Fear sharpened in the ace now—not panic, but the realization that control was slipping.
The artifact stirred.
Tein inverted, rerouted power entirely to engines, and climbed straight up through the ace's blind spot.
They reacted instantly.
Too instantly.
Tein fired.
The ace's ship detonated violently, fragments scattering into slow orbit like dying stars.
Silence reclaimed the void.
Tein steadied his breathing as power levels stabilized and systems cooled. His shields recharged unevenly, limping back into place.
Six attackers.
None answered.
None retreated.
That mattered.
Behind him, the artifact settled.
Satisfied.
Tein brought power back to balanced distribution and resumed descent.
Dathomir filled the viewport—storms churning closer, red cloud layers sliding into place like something preparing to receive him.
The ship shuddered as it crossed the upper storm bands.
Dathomir took him in without resistance.