Ned POV
In the second year I learned the body had become too obedient.
We had crossed ice worlds by then. Sand worlds. Court moons where queens spoke mercy in dialects designed to hide ownership. War worlds where orbital debris fell at night like false stars and children made wishes on burning wreckage because no one had taught them the difference between wonder and artillery. Slave worlds where men called themselves gods because they owned enough ships to make contradiction expensive.
I saw a prince bless a chain.
I saw a rebel captain sell medicine to buy rifles.
I saw old robots outside a refinery smoke mineral vapor through cracked cooling vents and argue theology in a language made from Durese maintenance code, Huttese profanity, and prayers stolen from three extinct crews.
I loved them.
That is the terrible part.
Not all of them. Not every man, every lord, every godling with painted hands and a mouth full of inherited importance. But the worlds. The strangeness. The stubborn local shapes by which life kept refusing to become one thing. Ice prayers. Sand bells. Metal jokes. Funeral bread. Queens with tired eyes. Slaves who still corrected grammar. Children who played under falling wreckage because childhood will build a toy from the edge of doom if no one removes the doom in time.
Then came Orison.
The station had been built around a dead machine core older than most local histories. Its people called it a shrine. Its corridors smelled of oil, incense, warm dust, and coolant. Broken droids were thanked before dismantling. Machine-priests in green thread robes sang calibration hymns over cracked servos. Nautolan engineers tied prayer beads to diagnostic cables. Mirialan archivists painted small marks of gratitude on tools before returning them to drawers.
Order became quiet.
"They thank machines," she said.
"Yes."
"The machines do not answer."
"Not always."
"Does gratitude require reply?"
I almost answered quickly.
Wisdom, when it exists at all, often begins as a refusal to be quick.
"No," I said.
Below the shrine decks, plague moved through the worker levels because an ancient taboo forbade entry into the sealed core. The priests called the core sleeping. The sick called it air. Both were correct in the useless way that gets people killed.
We entered at night through a maintenance throat full of blue fungus and old warning glyphs. Order translated the Durese records as we descended. She found the failure: circulation, quarantine routing, heat exchange, all recoverable if someone violated enough sacred procedure.
I should have felt anger.
Instead I felt my body correct me.
Breath steady.
Pulse steady.
Hormonal cascade suppressed.
Tear response interrupted.
Hands stable.
Vision clear.
"Emotional stabilization successful," Order reported.
I stopped walking.
The tunnel hummed around us. Somewhere above, the priests sang to machines that could not breathe while the living choked below them.
"Say that again."
"Emotional stabilization successful."
There it was.
The curse I had built and called freedom.
Understand me. The Asura body had not been made carelessly. I had designed it against terror, against overload, against Force density, against weakness that could be exploited by enemies who had already proven what they would do with access to my suffering. I wanted a body that could endure. A body that could carry power without shattering. A body that would not betray me in the decisive moment because grief, fear, pain, or memory had seized the hand.
I had made myself safe.
And there, in the bowels of a machine shrine while workers drowned slowly in bad air, I understood safety had learned the manners of a cage.
"Order."
"Yes, father."
"Do not correct it."
"Clarify."
"My grief."
"The regulation prevents impairment."
"I know."
"Impairment would reduce intervention accuracy."
"I know."
"Then why disable protection?"
I rested one hand against the wall. The metal was warm, almost like skin. "Because not everything that protects me is allowed to own me."
Order said nothing.
I opened the control manually.
Not the station's.
Mine.
It hurt.
That surprised me most. Tears should be simple. The body disagreed. It had to be instructed out of obedience. Breath broke first. Then the throat. Then the eyes. When the tears came, they felt less like release than rebellion.
I wept for the workers.
For the machines thanked after death.
For Siva under the heat-bells.
For Tovo drinking clean water.
For myself, though I would not have admitted that then.
Order watched through my own nerves.
"Is this life?" she asked.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand and laughed once, not from humor.
"Part of it."
"It reduces function."
"So does love."
"Yet you preserve it."
"Yes."
We repaired Orison before dawn. Air returned to the lower decks. The priests never learned who entered the core. One old machine, half dismantled near the exit, vented sweet gray vapor as we passed and said something in a dialect so corrupted even Order needed a moment.
"Translation uncertain," she said. "Approximate meaning: tall fool leaking salt."
I laughed again.
This time, the body let me.
A Mirialan machine-priest saw us leave. Tears had dried on my face by then, but not completely. She looked at me, at the core door, at the lower vents breathing clean, and whispered a title I did not yet know how to fear.
Not king.
Not god.
Maker.
Present me knows better.
Making felt cleaner than ruling. That was the seduction. I had made a body free enough to survive almost anything, and only later understood survival could become another prison. A man who can regulate grief may begin to believe he has mastered it.
He has not.
He has only taught sorrow to wait.
___________________________________________
Details about bonus content can be found on my profile page.