Ned POV
Darth Serevax did not attack my ships.
He attacked my memory of where ships should be.
By the fourth decade of the Reaper Wars, Order and I had grown arrogant in the private way of systems that work too often. We did not call it arrogance. We called it convergence, confidence, historical patterning, route logic, Sith behavior analysis. Civilized words for the old sin of trusting a map because the last hundred maps had bled obediently.
Serevax gave us three victories.
That was his art.
Three Sith fronts appeared vulnerable at once: a depot moon, a blade monastery, and a noble relay world whose archives suggested old rivalry with Korriban. Order drew the lines. Foresight pressed in agreement. Varis hesitated, but not enough. I split the war-host.
The trap closed on the second day.
False suns ignited above all three fronts, archive engines hidden in orbital debris, each one spilling corrupted history through comms, sensors, and Force pressure. They did not merely lie to machines. They taught the field a false shape. Order's models began repeating battles that had never happened. My foresight showed reinforcements arriving from routes no ship could take. Lana's unit marched into a monastery courtyard that did not exist on any living map and found guns where statues should have stood.
"Father," Order said, and there was fear in the precision, "my records disagree with themselves."
On the relay world, seven hundred of my soldiers died because I trusted a dead document.
I remember the number because numbers are the grave markers empires prefer when they have no time to build stone.
Varis found the flaw.
Not in data.
In vanity.
"Extinct sect," he said, standing over a captured archive shard while the bridge shook under fire. "The grammar is wrong."
"Wrong how?"
"Too humble."
Renn looked at him as if he had lost patience with the entire Sith species. "That is your evidence?"
"For Sith? Yes."
Varis showed us then: honorific gaps, false defeat records, a lineage admitting failure in a way no actual Sith house would have preserved without poisoning the scribe. Serevax had forged humility because he thought I would trust what looked wounded.
He had understood me well enough to kill my people.
We found him inside a library orbiting a dead star, surrounded by shelves that reflected suns no longer burning. He was thin, masked in gold, fingers stained black from archive ink and blood.
"You built an empire on records," he said when I entered.
"No. I built it on what records could not hide."
He smiled. "And yet you came."
The fight was not long, but it was dangerous because everything around us lied. Distances lengthened. Floors repeated. Dead soldiers spoke from shelves in voices taken from our channels. Order sealed herself away from half the library to avoid contamination. I fought nearly alone, which is to say with only body, blade, Force, and the old human fury I pretended had become philosophy.
Serevax used no great saber form. He used doors. Angles. False openings. Once he made me see Omega dying three steps to my left, and I turned before White State caught the lie. His blade entered beneath my ribs.
Not deep enough.
Enough.
Pain cleared the room.
I took his wrist, broke it, and drove him through one of his false suns. The light shattered. Behind it was only a machine full of stolen screams.
"History will not know you cleanly," he whispered.
"History rarely deserves clean things."
I killed him.
Afterward, Order asked permission before reintegrating the recovered archives.
That hurt more than the wound.
"No model is sovereign over judgment," I told her.
"Is that law?"
I thought of the seven hundred.
"It is now."
___________________________________________
Details about bonus content can be found on my profile page.