Chapter 16
Part 1: Ash in the Turning
The war echoes.
In the Jedi Temple — Lera moved silently across the polished stone floor, eyes closed, breath steady. Around her, four younglings mimicked her stance, learning not speed or strikes, but stillness. Each movement, a breath. Each pause, a listening.
Sorn watched from the shadows of the doorway. He did not correct them. He only listened — not to them, but to the galaxy.
Behind him, Marbs' projector hummed and flickered to life.
"Intercepted from the outer rim," Marbs murmured.
"Umbara. Approximately seven rotations past."
The image was dim — clone troopers moving through darkened terrain, light flashing from behind cover. But it wasn't the blasterfire that drew Sorn's eyes. It was the confusion. The hesitation. Clones firing on clones, each believing the other was the enemy.
A Jedi name surfaced: Pong Krell.
Marbs shifted frequencies. Voices crackled through static:
"General Krell's orders are madness—"
"He turned on us—"
"It's not a mistake. It's betrayal."
Sorn's hand tightened on the edge of the doorway. His eyes narrowed. The Force rippled around him, not like wind, but like heat from a flame — a flame that did not warm.
He closed his eyes and breathed in.
There was no guidance in the Force. Only… quiet.
Too quiet.
Months passed. The war did not relent. It expanded.
Marbs compiled and decrypted more feeds, slow pieces of a galaxy unspooling.
"Movement on the outer systems."
"Mandalore... disturbance in the throne line."
The holofeed struggled, skipping and cutting. But through the distortion, the silhouette was unmistakable — a figure with crimson skin, horns like a crown, yellow eyes burning with memory.
Darth Maul as Marbs informed you of his history.
Alive. Reborn in hate. And somehow… unreadable.
Sorn stared at the image. The Force did not move. Not even a whisper of recognition, no shadow of warning. It was like looking into a void. The kind that did not echo.
He murmured to himself:
"To feel nothing… is worse than the darkest cry."
Lera stepped in, sensing the shift in the air.
"Who is that?" she asked softly, eyes flicking to the red figure.
Sorn didn't answer at first. He studied the flickering images as Maul knelt before a gathering of underworld factions — building his own empire from ash and silence.
"A ghost," Sorn finally said. "But not the kind that haunts. The kind that builds."
Weeks passed. More fragments filtered in.
"Duchess Satine overthrown. Puppet regime installed. Mandalore is lost."
Sorn sat down slowly, fingers interlaced.
"Everything falls into place," he said. "But the shape is not what the Jedi think it is."
---
That night, Sorn walked alone. The children were asleep. Lera meditated near where the Stillpoint Veil resonated strongest.
He knelt in the darkness, hands resting on his knees.
He tried to feel the shape of the galaxy.
He felt… nothing.
No path. No voice. Not even the pain that usually hummed beneath war.
It was as if something deeper had changed. As if the Force itself had been muted — not by violence, but by meaning lost.
It was not pain that echoed now.
It was dislocation.
Disconnection.
Memory being unraveled.
Sorn opened his eyes and spoke to the silence:
"The wound is not in flesh or battle."
"It's in memory. In identity."
"They do not know who they are anymore."
The Jedi fight as generals. The clones follow like machines. And the Force — the very breath of life — watches in stillness. Or refuses to speak at all.
Sorn looked at his hand — calloused, scarred, quiet. Once he thought he could close the wound. Stand against war and let it break itself against him.
But now…
He wasn't sure the wound wanted to be closed.
He felt himself slipping. Not into darkness, but into distance.
Not a fighter. Not a healer. Something quieter.
A still presence. A breath that endures. A witness to ash.
Chapter 16
Part 2: The Silent Puzzle
Marbs had no voice filter for dread, but the sound in the vault felt heavier than usual.
"Encrypted signals again," the droid said. "Corrupted. Deep-sliced. Origin — Kamino, relayed through medical channels to Coruscant."
The holoprojector lit the chamber in sickly blue pulses. Static crawled across the surface like insects.
Sorn approached silently. The transmission burst into fragments:
"…CT-5555… deviation from programmed behavior…"
"…subject CT-5385 — 'Tup' — neural anomaly triggered during engagement…"
"…Jedi casualties… investigation suppressed…"
Marbs slowed the playback. Frame by frame.
The voices came back in pieces. A name: Fives. A location: Kamino. Then: Coruscant.
Sorn frowned. There was no tremor in the Force. No shift. Just a stillness — cold and wrong.
"I've seen this before," he murmured.
Not the transmissions. The pattern.
There were no screams in the Force. No ripples. Only silence.
He watched the data unwind — a trail from one clone's unexpected breakdown to another's desperate pursuit of truth.
"Fives," Marbs confirmed. "He traced the anomaly to a chip. Something biological. Engineered."
Another fragment loaded — footage from Kamino's restricted medical archive: Fives arguing. Being sedated. Cut off.
Then another: Internal Coruscant transport logs. Unofficial detainment orders.
Then nothing.
"He disappeared after questioning. Resurfaced days later. Alone."
The Force whispered nothing.
Sorn stood frozen. But inside — the moment cracked.
He stepped back from the projection.
And moved.
---
There was no warning.
One moment, he stood beside Marbs. The next — nothing but dust.
"He was there," Lera whispered, stunned, "then he wasn't."
The Force-Step had become second nature. Not movement, but absence. A flash of pressure. A blink of wind. Then silence.
But this time, he wove it with Paper Drift — every bound light as breath, silent as ash. He rode currents of stillness through underground rails, through half-mapped maintenance corridors, through the ancient marrow of Coruscant's hidden systems.
He was already halfway to the upper districts before Marbs' voice called through the comm:
"Republic medical facility. Sector G-18. He's surfaced."
The Force-Sense surged around him. He saw doors before they opened. Felt wind bending off tower corners. He rode the pulses of intent and alarm — emotions blooming far above.
Fives was running.
Sorn burst from a concealed rail tunnel and stepped through an open access vent into the medical district. His feet never struck the floor — he glided in through momentum alone.
But too late.
---
A corridor.
Fives stumbled from a stairwell — no armor, blood on his side, hands raised.
"Listen to me! I know what's happening — I can prove it!"
Clone troopers encircled him. Blasters drawn.
He never reached for a weapon.
Sorn moved — so close now — but slowed by civilians in the way. Security scans. A delay he hadn't foreseen.
He couldn't strike them down. Not here. Not with eyes everywhere. Not without making the wound worse.
He activated the Stillpoint Veil.
He vanished — not from sight, but from presence.
No signature. No ripple. No light in the current.
Stone. Wind. Tree.
He stood ten meters away as Fives took one step forward.
"It's not malfunction! It's a plan — it's all of us, the whole army, we've been—"
Blasterfire echoed in the sterile air.
Three stun rounds.
Fives dropped, arms wide, eyes open.
Alone.
"No…"
Sorn watched. A phantom. An observer with no place in the moment.
No shadow cast.
No sound made.
---
He stayed hidden until they lifted the body.
Then he turned and walked away.
---
Back in the temple, the holoprojection glowed faint in the dark. Marbs had looped the surveillance footage, though even he no longer watched it.
Lera stood to the side, motionless, watching Sorn return through the arched entrance.
He didn't speak.
He didn't remove his cloak.
Marbs powered down the feed.
Still, Lera stepped forward.
"Why didn't the Force speak?"
Sorn didn't answer.
He walked to the edge of the chamber, where the carved rock met the spring, and sat with his back to them.
"He died chasing truth no one wished to hear."
No anger in his voice. No grief. Just… weight.
Lera knelt beside him, still waiting. Searching his face for some answer the Force wouldn't give.
He only closed his eyes.
The silence of the Force stretched on.
Chapter 16
Part 3: Beneath the Wound
A chapter of silence, recognition, and transformation.
---
The stone vault breathed with age.
No footsteps echoed. No voices stirred. Just dust, coiled in the corners of ancient meaning — glyphs etched into walls no Jedi had read in a thousand years, and none had written in ten thousand more.
Here, beneath Coruscant's city-heart, forgotten by time and untouched by light, Sorn returned alone.
Where even the Force seemed unsure of its path.
He sat.
Knees folded. Palms open. Eyes closed.
And he waited.
---
At first, the meditation was familiar.
Breath in.
Breath out.
The rhythm of all things.
He reached, as he always had, not outward, but within — to that deep seam in the cosmos where meaning and matter touched.
He searched for the whisper that had guided him since the day he vanished from the surface. The one that rose in silence, moved through pain, and hummed between shadow and wind.
He waited.
He listened.
But the whisper did not come.
---
Stillness deepened.
Hours passed.
No sound. No surge. Not even resistance.
Only quiet.
And within that quiet — the shape of a truth began to rise.
A shape without name. Without comfort. Only presence.
---
Fives was gone.
The Jedi were at war.
The galaxy turned like a wheel with broken spokes.
And the Force — the Force did not resist it.
That was the truth.
This wound… could not be closed.
Not by healing. Not by warning.
Not even by enduring.
It was not a cut. It was a fire.
And fire does not listen.
Fire does not wait to be mended.
Fire consumes.
---
Sorn's breath slowed.
He no longer searched for answers.
He let the silence be the answer.
He no longer asked what he should do.
He simply became what remained.
Not the scar.
Not the healer.
But the thing left after —
The ash that still draws breath.
---
And then the presence stirred.
Not words.
Not vision.
But knowing — whole and weightless, like fog around a mountain.
The mantra did not return as memory.
It returned as truth fully formed.
---
There is breath in all things.
There is stillness in the turning.
Life feeds death. Death births life.
This is the cycle. This is the rhythm.
I do not resist it. I do not command it.
I walk within it. I listen. I endure. I remain.
But fire has entered the rhythm.
War walks among the turning.
And I cannot close the wound —
I must become what survives it.
Not the scar.
Not the healer.
The witness.
The memory.
The breath that remains when all else is ash.
---
When Sorn rose, the vault was colder.
The glyphs no longer whispered.
Even silence had become familiar.
---
He returned to the temple.
Lera looked up from her seated form — eyes wide but calm.
She did not ask what he had seen.
He did not speak of Fives.
Did not name the Sith.
Did not condemn the Jedi.
He only looked at her, gaze steady. Older.
And said, quietly:
"There are no sides in fire. Only survivors.
We will be among them."