Ned POV
By the twentieth year, we had broken thirty-seven worlds, moons, stations, schools, fleets, and hidden houses.
Only thirty percent of the high Sith power was dead or kneeling.
Remember that.
History likes clean arcs. It likes to say the Red King rose and the Sith trembled. No. Most of them did not tremble. Most of them did not yet care. The great powers closer to Korriban heard rumor and dismissed it as border disease, slave revolt, Varis's shame, machine heresy, Outer Rim exaggeration.
The Sith were too vast to fear quickly.
That arrogance saved us for twenty years.
Then Korriban began to dream.
The first sign came through assassins who did not know they were assassins. Children carrying prayers that became knives. Traders whose shadows moved wrong. A captured envoy who bit through his tongue and released a vision into the room.
I saw red sand.
Old statues bleeding dust.
Varis walking alone beneath a sun that hated mercy.
Lana touching blood in a chamber where my name was carved backward.
Armor not yet made standing at a gate: Noct, Varesh, Kelryn, names like oaths waiting for bodies.
Elliot, though I did not know him yet, reading forbidden records with the expression of a man discovering history had teeth.
Then Korriban looked back.
The Force pressure struck hard enough to put me on one knee.
My soldiers saw.
Lana saw.
Varis saw and went pale in a way I had not known he could.
"They know," he said.
"Good."
"No," he said. "Not good. Not yet."
He was right.
Our army had grown. It had not grown enough. We had ships, worlds, routes, soldiers who believed, acolytes who fought as units, Order's war-song, Omega's mercy made myth, Varis's harvest, my own body becoming more godlike with every tale told by frightened mouths.
But the deep Sith powers were still mountains.
We had been cutting forests.
That night I walked alone through the flagship's lower shrine deck. I had not ordered a shrine. Soldiers had made it from broken chains, burned Sith banners, pieces of destroyed collars, names of dead, and the blackened casing of one of the first robot hands from Maruun.
They prayed there.
Not always to me.
Often near me, which may be worse.
Order spoke softly. "There are now seventeen conquered holdings using your law code without direct oversight."
"How many worlds?"
"If including moons, stations, and dependent settlements: forty-six under stable Seresh command or influence."
"Stable."
"Comparative term."
I almost smiled.
"And Sith high power?"
"Approximately thirty percent broken, dead, or absorbed."
"So we have only begun."
"Yes."
The word sat between us like a future body.
Renn arrived three days later.
Not by message.
In person.
His city had not released him easily. I could see it in the faces of the people who came with him: Jones, Mira, engineers, guards, record keepers, wounded volunteers, men and women who had decided that preservation could no longer remain behind walls built by someone else's war.
Renn wore armor.
Plain. Dark. Practical. No crown. No ornament. A record cylinder hung at his side where a noble might carry a jeweled knife.
Omega met him first.
They stood together without speaking for a long time.
Then he came to me.
"You should have stayed," I said.
"I did."
"Renn."
"I stayed until staying became another way of letting others pay."
He looked past me to the ships preparing beyond the viewport. More than I had ever commanded before. Still too few. Red lights blinking along hulls patched by hands that had become symbols before becoming doctrine.
"Mira?" I asked.
"Angry."
"Good."
"Alive," he said. "Better."
He fastened one gauntlet, then the other. His hands did not shake. That hurt me strangely. I remembered him writing names until paper bent. I remembered the man who could not sleep because the dead kept arriving faster than ink. Now he stood ready to march because the living city had taught him what walls cost.
"I am not joining your conquest," he said.
"No?"
"I am joining the part that has to survive it."
That was the most Renn answer possible.
Korriban's priesthood sent one more vision before we jumped.
This time the statues did not bleed.
They opened their eyes.
Across the hidden Outer Rim, worlds spoke my name as god, tyrant, liberator, machine king, butcher, father, monster, law.
On Korriban, for the first time, priests spoke it correctly enough to fear the sound.
Red King.
The dream had ended.
The waking war was coming.
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