The air in my old chambers stinks of sulfur and memory, the kind that sits at the back of the throat and won't wash out. Mustafar's molten heartbeat pulses beyond the obsidian walls, a low rumble I once mistook for Vader's breath when I was a boy, small, scared, and forged into something sharper than fear could dull. I sit cross-legged on the cold floor, hands resting on my knees, eyes closed against the flicker of lava light seeping through the viewport slits. Meditation is the one thing that holds me still when the galaxy spins too fast. These past few days, though, it feels like trying to grip smoke. No liquor bottle weighs my hand now. Three days sober. Here, in this hellhole where Vader broke me into Starkiller, the call is even louder. But I won't buckle. I can't be a drunken wretch when fate knocks at our door. So I breathe, slow and deep, chasing the still point underneath it all.
The space is thinner sober. That's the thing no one ever told me. The bottle didn't just drown the chorus. It padded the walls between me and everything the Force carries. Without it, the nexus hits unfiltered. Every dark thing in this fortress runs through my nervous system like voltage through wet wire, and I feel all of it. The rage Vader poured into these stones. The screaming ghosts of training droids and failed Inquisitors and one small boy who learned to kill before he learned to read.
Footsteps.
Heavy. Deliberate. Every step meant to be heard. I keep my eyes shut and let him come, reaching out through the Force, feeling my way along it like a hand along a black corridor wall. A presence comes into the room, familiar, all hard edges. Vicrul. I know that festering grudge by feel now. It has a texture in the Force, hot and close and personal.
His scythe wakes with a low motorized growl, the phrik edge whining high enough to set my teeth on edge.
"Still hiding in your head, Starkiller?"
The dented helmet warps his voice into a guttural sneer.
"Thought you'd be drowning in rotgut by now, not playing monk."
I exhale slow. Open my eyes.
He looms in the doorway, all matte-black armor and crimson runes, scythe propped on one shoulder. Behind him the corridor stretches empty. No Zeht. No other Knights. Just us.
Good.
"Vicrul."
I rise, joints cracking stiff.
"Didn't hear Revan put you on babysitting duty. Or is this about your pet Zabrak almost getting her neck snapped?"
His grip tightens on the scythe until the gauntlet leather creaks.
"Zeht's worth ten of you, drunk or not."
The venom ferments in real time, each word more poisoned than the last.
"You don't even remember me, do you? Nar Shaddaa, thirty-two ABY, me and my Knights bleedin' in that filthy alley while you stumbled off, laughin'."
I tilt my head and squint. Nothing surfaces but smeared signage light and the taste of cheap liquor.
"If I laughed, you must've been worth the joke."
The smirk pulls at my mouth, deliberate and sharp.
"Refresh me, Vicrul. Did I break your toy scythe back then, too?"
His eyes narrow behind the helmet's slits. The fury cuts through the Force like a hot wire through frost, and beneath it something older. Something that has been waiting for this room and this moment for a very long time.
"Keep talkin', Marek. Let's see if sobriety's made you any less sloppy."
The scythe swings down.
Silver arc, ultrasonic edge screaming through the air. Twin hilts leap from my belt to my hands, muscle memory firing through clean nerves for the first time in years. White-blue blades flare, unstable and spitting sparks. The chamber shrinks as we circle, lava light painting us in blood and shadow, and the difference hits me mid-step. The Force flowing into my arms is faster, unmuddied, a river running clean.
I vault over the scythe's arc, Force propelling me into a spin, sabers slashing down in a crisscross. Vicrul twists. Phrik meets kyber with a shrieking clash that sends sparks raining onto the basalt, hot orange motes dying on the stone. The damn thing holds against lightsabers only to spite them.
I land in a crouch, grinning despite myself.
"Not bad."
I dodge a backswing that grazes the wall, showering sparks into my eyes. Blink through it. The Force maps the room faster than my sight can recover.
"You've been practicing for me. Flattered."
"Practicin' to gut you."
His Force push slams my ribs, knocking my breath flat. I counter with my own, boots skidding back a meter on the stone, the collision shoving a wave of heat through the chamber, hard enough to rattle the viewport slits. The air between us tastes like scorched stone and old grudges.
He doesn't let up. The scythe twirls in a blur, high then low, forcing me to weave between strikes. Each block jolts up my arms into my shoulders. Each parry tests my grip. He fights chaos on a disciplined frame and the Force reads his pattern three moves ahead but my body has to earn each one.
I flip backward, landing atop a cracked plinth.
"Still don't remember you."
I deflect a thrust that carves a gouge into the stone near my boot.
He leaps, scythe arcing overhead. I meet it midair, blades locking with a screech that bounces off the walls and comes back louder. We hit the ground hard, rolling apart. He finds his feet first. Scythe spinning in one hand like a taunt.
"Laugh it off, Starkiller! I'll carve my name into that thick skull yet."
I surge forward, sabers whirling in an underhand flurry, left blade high, right sweeping low. Vicrul parries the first, ducks the second, answers with a scythe hook that nearly takes my head off.
Nearly.
I twist and the Force-lightning comes before I decide to call it.
It crackles from my fingertips in a forking white-blue arc, a surgical snap, a single bolt thrown from the wrist. The dark side surges up through the dark well beneath the fortress to feed it and for one bright ugly second the power feels like home, the kind that fits because I was broken to match its shape.
"Yes. Let your anger flow."
Vader's rasp bleeding through from his grave.
Vicrul rolls aside. The bolt scorches his armor's edge and he comes up swinging, his own dark influence reaching through the Force. Juno's face flickers, Sera's scream echoes throughout my entire awareness, but I snarl and shove it back. Not today.
The chamber rings with our clash, lightsabers against vibro-scythe, Force against Force.
We lock. His scythe braced against both my blades, arms shaking, the phrik screaming against kyber in a sound that lives somewhere between music and murder. His eyes burn behind the helmet. Mine burn back. Neither yielding.
The words come out clipped, fewer than I think. Always fewer.
"Still standing."
Vicrul's snarl vibrates through the lock. The scythe twists. I disengage. We circle. The chamber rings with the commotion, and the lava light paints us both the same color.
I lean over the holo-table, its glitchy blue light flickering across my N7 plating, picking at a data chip one of Revan's scouts had dragged in.
Some half-dead kid who had barely made it back from a region they call the Core Worlds. The intel is a mess. Garbled audio, static-smeared holos, and cryptic chatter raising the skin on my arms with the exact wrongness encrypted Cerberus traffic used to put across the Normandy's comm board, too deliberate to be noise, too fragmented to be useful. Revan stands across from me, mask catching the blue glow like a scope catching light, arms folded as he stares down the mess with that quiet intensity that means he is running it through more possible scenarios than this galaxy has names for.
I zoom in on a distorted signal, harsh syllables I cannot place, maybe Sith, maybe nonsense.
"Word of a 'remnant' stirring up trouble. Scout caught wind of a meet on this Coruscant place, lower levels, real deep. Talk of a 'rebirth.' That's all I've got. Sounds like a fight waiting to happen."
Revan tilts his head, slow and deliberate.
"A remnant?"
His voice rolls deep and steady, the kind that makes me listen even when I don't want to.
"Vicrul's accounts of Exegol point to that cult's grand folly aligning with this. Galen has spoken of this Palpatine too, a dead emperor they attempted to resurrect. If they move again, it is not for sentiment. They hunt a new power."
I grunt, scratching my jaw.
"Palpatine's a name I've heard tossed around, Galen's half-drunk stories mostly. But Coruscant?"
I pull up the scout's fragmented star charts, crude cartography that would have made Joker laugh until he cried. A planet-sized city. Thousands of levels. Population in the trillions. Sounds like the Citadel if somebody had let Omega's gangs take over the lower Wards and then stacked a thousand more Wards on top, each one darker and meaner than the last. Urban sprawl deep enough that an insurgent cell could operate for decades without seeing sunlight. I had hunted Cerberus through stations like that. I had tracked batarian terror networks through the Terminus Systems with less intel than this. The geography is alien but the pattern is not.
"More than a city. A hive of steel and secrets. The galactic heart turned rotten after the Empire's fall. If they gather there, it is a calculated risk, not desperation."
Revan almost pulls a short laugh out of me.
"Still, this intel's thin. 'Remnant,' 'rebirth.' Could be anything from a cult prayer circle to a full mobilization. We need boots on the ground to figure out what's brewing."
A tremor shakes the floor. Not much, just enough to rattle the holo-table's projectors and make my hand twitch toward my Predator. Revan goes still, mask snapping toward the corridor with the suddenness of a sensor array locking onto a contact it wasn't calibrated to find. His shoulders tense, a tell I had learned means something is pinging that Force-radar of his, close, personal.
"Galen and Vicrul."
His voice stays flat, carrying that knowing tone he gets when those two are at it again.
"Their conflict serves neither purpose nor progress."
I sigh, falling in step as we head toward the sounds of combat.
"Yeah, well, can't say I blame him. Galen's not exactly a ray of sunshine."
We get to Galen's chambers fast. The room is trashed. Scorched black on the floor, a stone slab split clean through by what I guess was a Force-push collision. They've been at it long enough to work the grudge into a fight that will leave marks.
Neither has landed a killing blow, which means either they're holding back or they're too evenly matched to finish it. I had seen Garrus and Wrex go at it in the Normandy's cargo bay with less intensity than this, and those two had actually liked each other.
Revan steps in, and the room bends toward him. Not loud, nothing raised, just his presence rearranging everything it touches. The temperature of the fight changes. The angle of the aggression shifts. Both combatants feel it, I can see it in the half-second hesitation before their next swings, the involuntary orientation toward the man in the mask, filings turning to a magnet.
"Cease this squabble at once."
His voice comes low and certain, not loud but carved from a lifetime of bending millions to his will.
"You waste your efforts on petty grudges when our foes conspire beyond these walls. Stand as warriors, or fall as fools."
Vicrul drops to a knee, scythe clanging to the ground, head bowed. Loyalty pours off him, thick and real, the absolute commitment I had seen in soldiers who had found the one commander worth dying for and stopped looking. Then he stands, gaze flicking from Revan to Galen, a silent we're not done carried in the tilt of his jaw and the way his hand lingers near the scythe's grip as he picks it up. Galen extinguishes his sabers with a hiss, chest heaving, eyes darting, counting the exits. I give him a nod, soldier to soldier, a quiet understanding we'd built over talks in the courtyard late at night when neither of us could sleep.
"Vicrul, perimeter duty." Revan, sharp and final. "Keep your eyes sharp."
Vicrul salutes then stalks out, scythe slung over his shoulder, leaving a wake of simmering heat I can feel against my plating as he passes. Revan turns to us.
"Command center. Now. The scout's intel can wait no longer."
Galen trails us back, quiet, the fight still loaded in him, the energy still live in his muscles, the leftover adrenaline a marine carries off a hot extraction. Quiet that isn't calm but compressed. The holo-table flares up again as we file in, that same garbled signal looping its eerie tone. I punch it up, letting the static fill the quiet.
"Scout didn't get much."
I keep my tone even, the briefing voice I had used in a thousand war rooms on a thousand stations to bring Galen up to speed.
"Rumors from Coruscant's underbelly. A 'Remnant' rallying, talk of a 'lost lord' and a 'rebirth.' Points to Level 1313, whatever that is. Could be a wild goose chase, could be the war we're looking for."
Revan's fingers tap the table once, a rare crack in his calm.
"The Sith Eternal, perhaps. We know Vicrul's accounts of their Exegol collapse align with these patterns. They are not finished chasing the dead."
Galen leans against the wall, arms crossed, voice rough.
"Sith Eternal? What's this 'lost lord' nonsense?"
"Not sure. Intel's a hint at best. It could end up being some lunatic with a glowstick and a messiah complex. I hear there have been a few of those before."
I tap Level 1313's coordinates on the holo-table, the projection straining as the old tech struggles to render it.
"1313 sounds like the perfect hole to hide in too. Deep, dark, messy. My kind of spot."
Revan's mask dips, decisive.
"Then we move on this. Shepard, you take lead. Galen, you and PROXY accompany him. Coruscant might be the key. Find what they are building and waking up before it finds us."
I look at Galen. Really look at him. Sober now, still carrying the fight in his shoulders, eyes sharp but haunted, the tremor in his hands visible if you know where to look. The man is a weapon. I've seen enough of his combat to know that. Raw Force-power that sets my teeth on edge from across the room, saber work that combines controlled fury with a precision I hadn't expected from someone who'd spent seventeen years pickling his nervous system with whiskey. But a weapon is only as reliable as the hand that holds it, and his hand still shakes. I'm about to walk into an unknown mega-city with a recovering alcoholic whose combat instincts are razor-sharp and whose judgment is an open question.
Galen nods, short and sharp, still vibrating with compressed energy but game. I clap his shoulder, old habit from the Normandy days, the gesture that says I've got your six without needing the words.
"Let's roll, Marek."
We split off, leaving Revan behind as we make our way to the hangar. Galen's ship sits there, a thirty-meter stealth craft, its scorched gray durasteel hull patched but solid. PROXY stands by the ramp, yellow eyes blinking, holo-emitters twitching the way they do when he's cycling through stored combat profiles, a nervous habit or a combat prep routine, I can never tell which.
"Commander Shepard, Master Marek."
The mech's voice drips with that dry bite of his.
"Off to poke another galactic wasp's nest, I presume?"
"Wouldn't be us if we didn't."
I climb aboard following Galen's lead.
He takes the pilot's seat, his hands finding the controls with the muscle memory of a man who had flown this ship through worse than any storm we could encounter. I strap into the copilot's chair and feel the hull shudder as the engines growl to life, grit shaking loose from the joints we had sealed three days ago. The vibration runs through the seat and into my spine, a familiar sensation, the moment before a mission when the planning stops and the doing starts and all you have is the team beside you and the training in your bones.
I look out the viewport as the fortress shrinks below us, its spire catching the magma glow, the turrets and sensor arrays I had installed glinting in the firelight, the defensive net I had built with my own hands over days of sweat and arguments with Revan over firing arcs. The Knights are down there, drilling. Then I spot Vicrul prowling the perimeter as Mustafar's lava plains shrink below, swallowed up by the black as Galen punches us skyward.