The scout ship claws its way into the burning world's atmosphere, its corroded hull groaning under the assault of volcanic winds that roar like a world refusing to die quietly. I grip the co-pilot's seat, the Force surging through me, alive with this planet's dark heartbeat, a deep well of rage and torment woven into every fissure and flow beneath us.
Shepard hunches over the controls, wrestling levers he's damned since we claimed this craft.
"Come on, don't fail me now."
His omni-tool flares orange against the ship's crude dash, but the thrusters sputter, choking on the sulfuric murk that scrapes my lungs through the hull's breaches. The landing gear whines a pitiful protest and refuses to budge.
"She's fighting us."
His fist slams the console. A shrill beep taunts back, sharp and defiant.
"Where's EDI when you need her?"
His frustration was forged in a galaxy of sleek machines that obey his will, not this stubborn beast demanding sweat and curses. I reach out with the Force, threading my will through the chaos to steady our descent. This world's dark nexus swells around me, a fierce hungry pressure I respect yet bend, its power feeding my own as it has fed lesser wills before me and broken them. The ship steadies for a fleeting moment before its age betrays us.
"This craft heeds none of your flattery."
He shoots me a glare through the sweat streaking his face, a warrior's fire unbroken.
"I'd trade this junker for the Mako any day!"
The omni-tool dims as the ship bucks hard, spiraling toward the scorched plateau below a towering dark citadel.
"Brace yourself, this is gonna hit like a pissed-off krogan!"
The ground surges upward, an expanse of black stone glowing with crimson veins of liquid fire. I tighten my grip, the Force flowing steady, the balance of light and dark I fought my whole life to hold, and this planet's molten fury only sharpens it. The ship crashes with a grinding roar, skidding across volcanic rock. Sparks spray past the viewport, the hull shrieking until it slams into a basalt outcrop with a jolt that cracks my teeth together. The engines cough their last, a death rattle lost to the planet's restless growl.
Shepard unstraps himself, exhaling a bitter laugh.
"Two for two on old war ships trying to kill us."
I close my eyes and let the Force unfurl across the plateau, reaching into the citadel's bones. Seven presences stir within, their auras steeped in hunger. Unrefined, a bitter taste on my tongue, ambition without discipline, power without purpose.
"They are inside. Seven of them, strong in the dark side."
Shepard pulls a weapon from his side, a compact alien device that clicks and shifts, its barrel glowing low before snapping to his armor's hold.
"Seven on two. Let's make this quick."
The ramp hisses open, and the planet's wrath slams into us. A blistering wall of heat scalds my throat through the breath mask, cinder crunching beneath my boots, the ground trembling with distant flows that carve the crust somewhere below. My robes, frayed by millennia, snap in the sulfur-laden wind, the twin sabers at my hips steady against my belt. The violet kyber crystal holds its steady note. The red lies dormant, an ember I hold in check. Shepard's N7 armor gleams crimson and black, his helmet sealing with a hiss against the toxic air, scars across the plating whispering of battles beyond my stars. The dark citadel looms ahead, its jagged spire piercing the pall, a monument to fury I once echoed and transcended. This world's buried rage pours into me, a strength I've wielded on countless battlefields lost to time and memory. Whatever waits within, those seven souls clutching my mask, I'll face them in balance.
We press across the cinder-strewn plateau, boots scraping glassy volcanic stone, heat shimmering in waves that sting my eyes. My senses sharpen, the Force amplifying every detail. The sulfur bites into the folds of my robes, sharp enough to taste. The deep rumble of magma carving channels beneath the crust, patient and indifferent. The resonance of kyber buried somewhere in the citadel's foundation, ancient crystals answering the planet's fury. I feel a fierce defiance ahead, my mask's legacy, the silver-gray visor claimed on Cathar's blood-soaked fields, cracked yet alive with my path through light and dark. This is a crucible of wills, a clash to reclaim what is mine.
A rift splits the earth ahead, and lava fleas erupt from it, armored shells flashing in the firelight, mandibles snapping with a shrill menace that grates on my nerves. I thrust my hand out and the Force surges, sharper than ever on this world, an invisible wave smashing three into the rock face. Their shells burst with a wet crack, vaporized ichor hissing into steam, the stench of charred sulfur biting my senses. Shepard lunges beside me, his biotic field flaring blue, then faltering. A visible lurch runs through his barrier, the energy guttering.
"What the hell?"
The confusion in it carries something I haven't heard from him before. Genuine alarm. His shotgun barks instead, slugs shredding the creatures' carapaces into steaming husks. He crushes one on his forearm, its mandibles screeching against his armor's plating before a wild biotic surge, ragged and uneven, smashes it flat. The field answers him, but late, reluctant, as though this world's currents interfere with whatever is fueling his power.
A geyser roars behind us, crimson magma arcing upward. I raise a Force barrier, the molten spray sizzling against unseen walls, steam swirling in thick coils.
"That was close."
His reload clicks practiced and quick, the shotgun tearing the last flea into pulp.
"Keeps the pests off."
The wry edge holds, unbroken by the fight, but I catch the way his eyes drop to his fist, the faint blue shimmer already fading.
The citadel's shadow deepens as we approach, its spires clawing the murk overhead. A dust storm howls up from the wastes, a gray veil stinging my face with embers. We reach the threshold, cracked gates of volcanic glass framing a scarred courtyard beyond. Traps flare. Kyber shards embedded in the stone glow crimson, their blast a deafening shock that shakes the ground beneath our boots and sends fractures racing through the rock. My foresight sings, the violet crystal warning me a half-second before the blast forms, and I pull Shepard back, his boots skidding on the scorched surface.
"Kyber crystals."
I nod to the shards where they smolder in their settings, angry and red.
"One misstep, and they will rend us asunder."
His omni-tool flickers to life as he scans the entrance, frustration carving his features as his tech strains against mechanisms it was never built to understand.
"This worthless tech, it'll take a minute."
Time bleeds away. The shadows shift in the murk beyond the gate.
The courtyard opens before us, a scarred arena of dark spires and glowing fissures, its air gone sharp with the reek of superheated metal. Silence hangs heavy, a stillness too deep for this restless world.
"Seven souls, and not a sound."
The Force prickles my senses, every nerve alive with warning.
"They know we're here."
Shepard's shotgun rises, his helmet's visor glinting as he scans the gloom.
Six warriors burst from the shadows, vibro-weapons gleaming with desperate ferocity, their ragged war cry echoing off the courtyard walls. A wiry figure darts at me, vibro-dagger flashing silver in the firelight. My violet saber ignites with a snap-hiss, its hum steady and low, and I meet his rush with Makashi's grace, the blade angling precisely into his overextended lunge. It shears through his weapon first, the metal parting with a shriek, and then through his chest beneath it. The wound seals itself as it opens, a hiss of cooked meat, the smell hitting me before his body does, and he crumples to the stone, the dagger's hilt clattering beside him. I don't watch him fall. The next is already moving.
Another fires from a spire above, blaster bolts cutting bright lines through the falling cinder. Shepard ducks behind cover, his pistol barking twice, the slugs hammering into the spire's base. The column buckles and gives all at once, and the sniper goes down with it, swallowed in an avalanche of fractured stone that cuts his scream short. When the dust drifts clear, nothing stirs in the rubble. One less shadow on this plateau, and I turn back to the fight.
A hulking warrior roars forward from my left, vibro-hammer pounding the earth with each step, the ground cracking beneath the impacts. I sidestep his overhead swing, feel the displaced air rake my robes, and thrust my palm forward. The Force catches him square in the chest, lifting his bulk off the stone and hurling him backward into the moat of liquid fire that borders the courtyard. His bellow drowns as the planet swallows him, the glow brightening for a moment, then dimming. The smell of cooked flesh and scorched alloy rolls back over us.
Two more flank us, a whip-wielder and a spear-bearer, weaving through the grit and firelight with coordinated precision. I snare the whip with the Force, the leather going taut in midair as my will locks it, and in the same motion drive my violet saber through the spear-wielder's guard. The blade parts armor and the meat under it, the wound left gaping and dry, and he folds without a sound, the spear clattering to the stone. Shepard's shotgun thunders beside me, the blast shredding the whip-user's torso into a charred ruin that hits the ground before the whip does. The violet crystal sings true in my grip, guiding each strike with war I learned and relearned across a hundred battlefields, honed anew on this world that feeds the Force in me as surely as it starves whatever fuels the man beside me.
A Zabrak charges from the courtyard's far edge, dual vibro-axes whirling with fierce will, her horned silhouette cutting through the firelight. Shepard meets her, blue light blazing to life around him, gathering to hurl him forward, then dying mid-flight. The surge that should have carried him through her and burst outward in a second blast just drops him on momentum alone, and he stumbles into the empty space where the rest of the motion should be, the gap nearly costing him his footing.
"Not again!"
His omni-blade flashes to catch her descending axe. Sparks fly, the hard-light edge trembling under her blows but holding. He slashes her thigh in the exchange, deep enough that she buckles a step, and she reels, baring her teeth through the pain, but doesn't fall. Unbroken. I move to aid him, but a darker presence surges from the citadel's heart, unyielding, a pressure breaking through the courtyard's threshold. The violet crystal steadies me. The red one stirs at my hip, a whisper I still with a breath.
"Enough!"
I turn toward the voice and feel the magma shift under the courtyard floor, a deep beat picking up speed as the Knight's leader strides from the citadel's shadowed maw, a grizzled warlord. His face is a record of battles carved in hate, sneer twisting across features broken and reassembled by fury rather than healing. His vibro-scythe glows red in his grip, phrik blade etched with runes that gutter in the volcanic light, its ultrasonic hum a low growl splitting the sulfurous air. My mask dangles from his belt, silver-gray and cracked, swaying with each step, a stolen fragment of my soul. Its faint Force hum claws at my senses, a call from Cathar's killing fields now profaned in his grasp. Cinder swirls around his boots, the blistering wind stinging my face through the breath mask, sweat beading as the planet's deep roar rumbles through the stone beneath us both.
"I am Vicrul!"
His voice is a guttural storm, amplified by the dark side's surge, stronger than the others.
"Lord of this sanctum! Kneel, or your souls will be the next I reap!"
He unhooks my mask, dangling it before me with a sneer that could curdle blood, then tears off his own dented helm, and slides mine onto his face. The fit is a grotesque parody, its silver visage clashing with his aura, rage erupts within me, sudden and total, igniting deep in my core. The red saber's kyber crystal pulses at my hip, louder now, its fierce whisper urging me to strike, to rend my past from this dark-side wretch who wears my identity as a trophy. I silence it. My fingers brush the violet hilt instead, and the calm in it anchors my resolve.
"You claim what you cannot comprehend."
The words cut through the wind with weight earned the hard way.
"Hand over the mask or I shall reclaim it with the will that sundered fleets and raised legions from despair."
The violet saber flares brighter, its pitch climbing, a shield of purpose against the gloom, my robes snapping in the scalding gusts as cinder stings my eyes.
Vicrul's laugh is a gutted sound, swallowed by the planet's roar.
"Your legacy's a corpse overdue, and I'm death's hand, come to take its toll!"
He lunges, scythe slashing a lethal arc, crimson runes flaring as the blade tears the air. I meet it with violet, the clash a thunderclap that shakes the courtyard, sparks showering down. The Force surges through me, a wall of will flinging him back, his boots skidding across volcanic glass. He rolls, snarling, my mask glinting on his face as he rises, scythe spinning with renewed fury.
Shepard flanks me, slugs from his shotgun hammering Vicrul's phrik plating, the impacts denting but not breaking, each shot a percussion that staggers him half a step. His biotic field flares blue, then sputters again, and a curse slips from him under the helmet's seal as he pivots.
The Zabrak charges from the shadows behind him, dual axes whirling, the wound on her thigh seeping beneath her snarl, pain fueling the fury in her dark eyes that blaze with defiance. Shepard meets her, omni-blade flashing to life, its hard-light edge catching her steel in a shower of sparks.
"Not now, damn it!"
He forces himself to weave and parry through her relentless assault on reflex.
Vicrul seizes the opening. His scythe slashes a vicious crescent toward my chest. I twist, violet saber parrying with Makashi's precision, but the tip grazes my ribs, a hot line through fabric, the pain a bright line drawn across my concentration. The dark within surges. The red crystal roars at my hip, no longer a whisper but a heartbeat unwavering in its call.
I listen.
Crimson ignites with a hiss that rends the air, its wild song a counterpoint to violet's calm, the two voices rising together. Dual blades spin in my hands, light and dark driven into one brutal motion, the Force surging through me with a completeness that cracks the careful walls I've maintained since my rebirth. I unleash it. A shockwave erupts through the Force, splintering the volcanic glass beneath Vicrul's feet, hurling him back as magma flares higher from the fissures, cinder whipping into a frenzied storm. The planet trembles under my power, a harmony of opposites I mastered.
He staggers, scythe slashing wildly. I advance. Violet parries his thrust with surgical grace, redirecting the phrik blade past my hip, and crimson carves a brutal arc across his weapon arm. The phrik meets crimson, sparks ignite, and his armor splits, the arm sagging wrong at the joint where the blade passed through bone. Vicrul grunts, pain fueling his rage, and lunges again, scythe arcing low, aiming to sever my legs. I leap, Force-enhanced, the volcanic air rushing past me, and land behind him. Violet slashes his flank in the same motion. Red hammers his shoulder in a relentless flurry that drives him forward and down. Each strike the sum of my will, centuries of war distilled into this moment, light tempering dark, dark fueling light, a balance he can't fathom.
Across the courtyard, Shepard ducks the Zabrak's axes, his shotgun thundering, slugs tearing into her arm. She snarls, the wounds smoking as blood boils where the heat cauterizes on impact, and presses on, forcing him back toward a glowing fissure.
"Tough bastard!"
His omni-blade flickers as Mustafar's interference throttles his tech.
She roars back through the heat.
"For the Knights of Ren!"
She swings, driving him toward the edge, their duel a mirror to my own.
Vicrul circles, breath ragged, my mask trembling on his face as he grips the scythe with both hands.
"I defied death at Exegol where our master's betrayal almost cast us into the abyss."
His voice cracks, venom giving way to a buried wound.
"I rose from those ashes and claimed the mantle that is Ren. You're nothing but a story they tell to entertain children. Zeht, kill the other one!"
Vicrul lunges, scythe spinning hard, and I catch it between crossed sabers, violet and crimson locking the blade in a cage of light, the Force surging through my arms as I twist, wrenching the weapon from his grasp. It clatters across the stone, runes dimming. I drive forward, violet slashing his chest plate, crimson hammering his thigh, phrik armor peeling open, smoke curling from each cut as crimson drags through it.
He stumbles. Crashes to his knees. His eyes go wide beneath my mask as awe shatters his scorn.
"Both... as one."
The dark fire in his aura gutters against the weight of my presence.
The Zabrak freezes mid-strike, axes stilled as Shepard's shotgun presses to her back. She turns, staring, her defiance wavering. The courtyard holds its breath. I tower over Vicrul, sabers weaving trails through the murk, the Force alive in me, raw, unbowed, whole.
"Knights of Ren."
The clarion forged in war's furnace carries through the heat with the weight of four thousand years of choosing wrong and choosing right and learning to tell the difference.
"You stole my mask from my tomb, fleeing as Yavin 8 crumbled. A specter drives you, a name on the Force's whispers, Kylo Ren. His echo is a wound I feel, dark, broken, lost. Hear me now for I am Revan. Jedi and Sith tempered into one, reborn from dust to flesh. You clutch my legacy, chasing your own ruin, yet within you burns a spark unclaimed by light or dark. I have walked both paths, forged both of them into fire, and it has led me here. Rise with me. Wield the Force as it truly is, whole, unbound. Or fade into the obscurity of the oblivion that you have sown."
The silence that follows isn't empty. It's full of the planet's breath, the creak of cooling stone, the distant groan of magma finding new channels beneath us. Vicrul's hands shake as he tears my mask free from his face, staring into its cracked visage, and then extends it toward me, head bowed.
"Kylo was a false prophet."
His voice ragged with rage and revelation, the volcanic air scraping his breath down to a rasp.
"Slaughtering my kin at Exegol, too weak to wield the Force's storm. You prove now that you are no myth. You are the Legend whispered of in those stories of old. And now here, made into flesh."
Reverence slices through the venom as he holds the mask out, his fingers trembling not with weakness but with effort, unmaking everything he'd built his survival on.
Beside him, Zeht drops to one knee, her axes clattering to the stone, the sound ringing sharp and final. Then, at the courtyard's edge, the rubble starts to move. Stone grinds against stone, and a hand claws up through the wreckage of the collapsed spire, the sniper, the one I marked dead, dragging himself out of the grave that should have held him. His armor is fissured, one shoulder hanging wrong, pale dust sheeting off him as he forces himself to his feet. Grit hardens his ragged breath. But he doesn't reach for a weapon. He lurches forward, toward Vicrul, toward me, and lowers himself to join them. In unison with Vicrul's lead, Zeht and this survivor strike their knees against the volcanic glass, the surface almost cracking beneath their combined surrender. Not a trinity bound by defeat. A trinity bound by a spark rekindled in this ruin.
"We are Ren no longer."
The citadel's spires quake as if the planet itself bore witness to the oath being forged.
His eyes meet mine through the murk.
"We rise anew. Sworn to you. Not as echoes of a broken past, but acolytes of what's to come."
I step forward, the Force flowing through me with the quiet depth of a river finding its true bed after centuries of flood. My mask settles into my palms. Its warm scars press against my skin, a promise reborn, not a trophy of conquest but a promise of what these Knights could become. Sliding it on, the silver-gray visage fuses with my will, its ancient song amplifying my voice as I speak.
"This is no end, but a beginning."
The weight of destiny rides the words, tempered by every year I spent walking shadow and light both.
"You have cast off a fractured chain. Now forge a purpose whole and unbound. The ember kindled here will blaze beyond this burning world."
As one they rise. Vicrul first, then Zeht, then the wounded Knight following, their knees lifting from the shattered stone in a silent vow.
"We stand as The Knights of Revan."
The magma flares behind them, casting their silhouettes against the citadel's spires, a nascent order stepping from the cinder into a future I've heard in the Force's quiet song but not yet its form.
Shepard steps forward, helmet retracting with a hiss, green eyes narrowing through the fallout with a skeptic's edge.
"Hell of a fight."
His shotgun lowers.
"You sure they're on our side now?"
"They are."
I stand tall, mask aglow, the Knights' oath a heavy mantle, a new order born in fire.
The shotgun's barrel scalds my glove as I ease it down, heat seeping through my N7 plating in a slow persistent burn that's been building since we hit atmo and shows no sign of easing. Cinder chokes the air, clawing my throat raw with every breath, the sulfur-and-scorched-steel reek hitting with a physicality that makes me miss the recycled nothing of a ship's life support. I stand firm, boots grinding grit into the volcanic glass of the courtyard, watching Revan cradle that mask, its cracked silver scars slicing through the murk. Three figures rise before him. Vicrul, Zeht, and that battered third Knight, their armor catching the planet's glow, dented and fissured but unbroken. Their eyes burn with a resolve I've seen in turian holdouts on Palaven, staring down Reaper husks with nothing left but the decision to keep standing. Revan flipped their allegiance from chaos with a speech that hit like a hull breach, shattering their defiance from the inside out, and damn if it didn't rattle me too. A grin tugs at my lips, cinder gritting my teeth with a sharp bitter bite. I almost snapped a salute myself, and I don't bow. Not to Cerberus. Not to the Council. Not even when the galaxy was burning down around me.
"Well, shit."
My voice gone gravel from the planet's air, the shotgun slings over my shoulder, its weight settling against my back, thermal clip still warm enough to feel through the armor's weave.
"You've got yourself a squad, mask man. Didn't peg you for the 'rally the troops' type."
He's half-cocked, no question, but the man bends wills the way I bend gravity, and they're hooked on it with a devotion that goes past fear into something I recognize from my own best squads. Belief. The real kind, the kind that makes people take bullets they don't have to take.
I eye the Knights. Vicrul's rough edge, still smoldering from where Revan's sabers carved his surrender. Zeht's horns piercing her shredded hood, her stare cutting through the fallout with a ferocity that tells me the axes might be on the ground but the fight is still living in her muscles. The third, the one I'd buried under that spire, quiet, battered, holding himself upright through will alone, his resolve a thing I respect because I've been that soldier, the one too stubborn to fall down when the math says he should. Three left from seven we faced. Two against those odds isn't shabby, but it still feels like we skated a razor's edge, one misstep from a collapse that would've left us both cooling on the volcanic glass.
The citadel hulks around us, its fractured spires and blackened walls etched with the fight's scars, split from Revan's Force blast, scorched by my slugs where they found purchase in stone instead of armor. Magma simmers below the courtyard's edge, veins of fire threading the floor, its heat baking my plating until the gel layer beneath feels like it's cooking. My biotics failed me in there. Three times the field had failed. Charge stuttering. Barrier guttering. Surge late and wrong. The eezo nodes in my nervous system fired and found nothing to push against, or found too much, the sensation wrong in a way I can't describe except to say it felt like trying to run through water that was pushing back. I don't have a name for what this world did to me, only the certainty that it did. The not-knowing sits heavy. If every fight in this galaxy happens on ground like this, I'm a soldier with a jammed rifle.
But I still have my shotgun.
That thing from Yavin 4 won't let me be, the colossal shadow that smashed Yavin 8 and vanished into the rift. Revan feels it too, I can tell by the way his silences have grown heavier since we left Kaelis, the way he stares out at the dark during transit with the focus of a man tracking a signal only he can feel. My omni-tool has nothing on it. No scans, no signatures, no classification. Just the gut-level certainty that it's still out there, the same instinct that screamed at me when the Reapers first dropped through the Charon Relay and the sky over Earth turned red. Something that big doesn't vanish.
This wasn't about a mask grab anymore. Whatever we stirred, three Knights and two beat-up veterans aren't enough to face it.
"An army, huh?"
I step up, nodding at his mask, its scars catching the planet's glow.
"Looks like we're recruiters now. Hope they're as nuts as you."
Revan turns, his scarred face steady beneath the mask, its presence buzzing the air. He tilts his head, and I catch that look again, the one that says he's seeing something I'm not built to see.
"The ember ignites the flame. We begin here."
"Yeah, as long as we're the ones not getting burned."
It almost pulls a laugh out of me despite the unease coiling in my spine.
My omni-tool whirrs low, scanning the citadel's walls, pulling nothing but heat signatures from the magma flows and the settling stone. No life beyond us. The fight left its scars, shattered courtyard, shotgun scoring, cauterized bodies that the planet's heat is already reclaiming.
My gut tightens, a soldier's hunch I can't shake, and I shift my grip on my pistol, its thermal clip a solid weight in my hand as I check it. Three Knights at our backs, a citadel with its own secrets, and a threat lingering out there. Revan's calm is a lifeline, but that mask feels like a loaded charge, and I can't tell if we're lighting a signal fire or priming a detonation.