The smoke of war still lingered in the void.
Wreckage from the Resistance fleet drifted silently through space, twisted metal and broken hulls floating as tombstones to the final rebellion. The Death Star loomed overhead, untouched and triumphant, its modified superlaser having annihilated the last sanctuary of those who dared oppose the Empire.
Within its core, Emperor Palpatine stood alone, cloaked in crimson and black, staring into the infinite tapestry of stars. The bodies of Vader, Luke, Leia, and Padmé were gone turned to ash, consumed by power. Their memory erased from history. Their legacy twisted into fuel for his final ascension.
The Force was silent now unnaturally so.
Palpatine closed his eyes. For the first time in decades, he felt something else… not resistance, but emptiness. The balance had shifted. The Jedi were gone. The Sith were ascendant. And now, at the apex of his rule, he prepared for the true enemy.
The Yuuzhan Vong.
In the secret halls of Exegol, where shadows moved like living things, Palpatine walked among laboratories of heretical science. Clones floated in vats of fluid. War beasts, mutated from Sithspawn and Vong tissue alike, howled in agony behind containment fields. His scientists, acolytes of blood and pain, worked feverishly.
The Emperor had known of the Vong long before the galaxy did. Whispers from the Unknown Regions. Suffering across the edge systems. The Force itself had recoiled from their presence and that was what had drawn him.
They were immune to the Force, wielding technology grown rather than built. They despised machines. Despised the order of the galaxy. To Palpatine, they were not a threat alone… they were an opportunity.
If he could defeat them, consume them, reshape their weapons and culture into tools for his dominion, there would never be another enemy capable of challenging him again.
He turned to his chief geneticist a woman once trained in Kamino, now loyal only to him.
"Progress on the Vong armor grafting?" he asked, his voice low.
She bowed. "Success with three subjects, my lord. The implants are integrating. Their pain is… useful."
Palpatine nodded. "Good. We will need more warriors. Unnatural ones."
Securing the Galaxy
In the wake of the Resistance's destruction, Palpatine turned his gaze to the galaxy's fractured regions. Systems that had offered quiet support to the Rebellion were now laid bare. He deployed his Inquisitors, loyal Sith remnants, and newly risen "Hands of the Emperor" to root out sedition and enforce order.
Fleet after fleet was launched from Exegol and Coruscant. Planets that once dared resist were brought to heel. Corellia, Alderaan's remnants, Mon Cala, even Hapes — all fell under the tightening grip of Palpatine's regime.
Aid was offered to the compliant: food, medical care, fuel for trade. Refugees were "resettled" in fortified zones, under close Imperial surveillance. For every world that resisted, two submitted. Entire sectors were restructured into militarized zones, overseen by Sith-aligned governors.
The Empire was no longer just a political entity. It was a war machine, grinding toward a single future: domination or annihilation.
The Death Star Reforged
At the center of it all stood the Death Star - no longer a flawed prototype, but a perfected instrument of terror.
Gone was the vulnerable exhaust vent that had nearly doomed its predecessor. In its place were layered shielding fields, adaptive armor plating, and a core reactor capable of sustained planetary annihilation. Palpatine had poured the resources of a hundred worlds into its reconstruction.
Even now, orbital drydocks around Exegol birthed a second and third station the Nemesis-class battle moons, smaller but more agile, each capable of system-wide strikes.
The Emperor did not merely want to win wars. He wanted the fear of resistance itself erased from the minds of all living beings.
The Prophets and the Dead
In the deepest vaults of the Jedi Archives now relocated to Exegol Palpatine meditated among tomes and forbidden holocrons. He had found the truth of the Mortis gods. He had killed the Ones, taken their dagger, and now bent the Force itself to his will. But something lingered.
Not the Jedi.
Not the Sith.
The absence.
The Force had gone unnaturally quiet. Not gone, but subdued - watching. Waiting.
It was the calm before a galactic storm.
And through meditation, he had begun to see. A fleet of ships not forged by man, but grown in agony. Worlds stripped bare and sacrificed in holy wars. A god-emperor among the Vong, whose blood could unravel worlds.
Palpatine opened his eyes and whispered:
"The gods have fallen. I will stand in their place."
To meet the oncoming Vong threat, Palpatine unveiled Project Citadel — a classified initiative to build ten massive superdreadnoughts, each larger than any known vessel, fueled by Star Forge energy and enhanced by Sith rituals. These vessels would not just wage war they would terraform, mutate, and enslave.
Each ship would carry regiments of Sithspawn shock troops, cybernetically-enhanced dark side warriors, clone legions bearing Vong hybrid tech, and Sith lords trained in both pain and prophecy.
Deep in the Maw, where the laws of physics bent to the Emperor's will, construction had already begun.
Unbeknownst to Palpatine, not all resistance had been extinguished.
On Dagobah, Yoda still lived frail but wise. He had taken in Force-sensitive children scattered across the stars. Among them, a quiet girl from Lothal. A stubborn boy from Kashyyyk. And others.
He trained them in silence. Not to fight, not yet but to endure. To listen. To wait.
Leia and Luke's sacrifice had not been in vain. Their souls had not vanished entirely. In rare moments of deep meditation, Yoda sensed their presence in the Living Force flickers of sorrow and hope.
Elsewhere, the shattered remains of the Rebellion whispered in encrypted comms, buried beneath layers of Imperial surveillance. Corellian engineers plotted to sabotage shipyards. Twi'lek freedom fighters on Ryloth prepared a new resistance cell. And General Hera Syndulla's ghost fleet, long thought destroyed, quietly maneuvered along the edge of Wild Space.
On the bridge of the Death Star, Palpatine stood beside Grand Admiral Thrawn.
"The scouts from the Unknown Regions have not returned," Thrawn said. "Whatever is coming… it is patient."
Palpatine did not flinch. "Let them come. I have broken gods. I have crushed the future. The galaxy belongs to me."
He turned his gaze toward the stars beyond the edge of the known galaxy.
"I will burn their worlds and plant my banners in their ashes. The Yuuzhan Vong will know the name Palpatine… as the god who conquered them."
Thrawn inclined his head slightly. "Then the final war has begun."