Ned POV
Darth Synda Korr waited until Akrul's body cooled.
Priests understand timing because they spend their lives lying to fear in ritual sequence. She did not meet me with fleet or blade. She opened the tomb suns.
They rose beneath Korriban's red horizon as three black-gold lights, impossible spheres drawn from dead temples and old star-memory. The battlefield darkened around them. My soldiers staggered. Sith who had nearly broken ran toward the glow and began to chant with blood in their mouths.
Then my foresight turned against me.
I saw Nereth burning again.
I saw Omega dead in white halls.
I saw Renn's city emptied.
I saw Varis kneeling, then rebelling, then dying, then not dying, then a desert woman pouring water into hands that had held too many knives.
I saw Lana touching my blood.
I saw Elliot reading a record of me and closing his eyes as if the truth had entered too deeply to be removed without killing something cleaner than knowledge.
Every branch contradicted the next and all of them hurt.
Order's voice was distant. "External rite interfering with prediction pathways. Father, do not follow the images."
"I know."
But knowing is not immunity.
Synda stood on the tomb stair, thin and terrible, her robes moving in a wind that touched no one else.
"The Sith are not a council," she said. "Not fleets. Not schools. Not bloodlines. We are memory sharpened by hunger. You cannot simplify what the dead keep dreaming."
Varis walked up beside me.
He looked older there.
Korriban had that effect on him, as if the planet remembered every compromise he had made in its language and recited them under its breath.
"She is binding the rite through the burial names," he said.
"Can you break it?"
"No."
Honest. Rare.
"Can you help me find where to strike?"
He closed his eyes.
When he spoke, it was not Basic. The old Sith words came from him like stones pulled from a wound. Synda's face changed. The chant around us faltered. Varis was not breaking the rite. He was making it remember a version of itself before she owned it.
White State opened.
Not over fear. Through it.
The tomb suns pressed down, trying to make my mind into an archive of every failure that could justify surrender. I let the images pass without kneeling to them. Nereth. Omega. Renn. Varis. Lana. Elliot. Nile-shadow. Golden empire. Fracture. Blood. Peace. War again.
I walked up the tomb stair.
Synda raised both hands and the dead answered.
They came as pressure, not bodies. Old Sith imprints, half-persons, names that had outlived their ethics. My armor buckled under invisible weight. Blood ran from my nose again. The Force wanted to become storm.
I refused storm.
I became line.
One line through the rite.
One step.
Then another.
Synda's eyes widened because priests often mistake complexity for depth. The tomb suns were vast, but their hunger moved through a single want: continue. All dead empires want that.
My blade entered the first anchor stone.
The sky screamed.
Second.
Varis shouted the old names louder, voice breaking.
Third.
The tomb suns went out.
Synda fell to her knees before I touched her.
"You will make the Sith smaller than death," she said.
"No."
I lifted the blade.
"I will make them smaller than law."
Her death was quiet.
Korriban did not become silent afterward.
It became available.
That was worse.
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