Year: 24 BBY
Fear always came first.
Not pain.
Not the scream.
Not the moment the body gave up.
Fear.
It did not arrive all at once. It seeped. A thin contamination that slid into the Force unnoticed at first, like a hairline fracture spreading beneath pressure. Jedi Shadow Tein felt it bloom slowly—subtle, insidious—bruising the fabric of awareness rather than tearing it. It wasn't sharp enough to alarm. It wasn't loud enough to announce itself.
That was what made it dangerous.
Fear like this did not demand attention. It assumed it.
It soaked into everything.
Velis Prime never slept, but at this hour the city felt as though it were holding its breath. Miles below the upper habitation bands, the industrial district lay crushed beneath overlapping strata of forgotten infrastructure—transit spires stacked atop one another like exposed ribs, service platforms welded into place and never removed. Rusted skybridges sagged under decades of neglect, their undersides slick with condensation and oil runoff that glistened beneath failing lumens.
Acid rain fell in needling sheets, stinging exposed skin, hissing as it struck hot exhaust vents and half-frozen coolant lines embedded in the walls. The air vibrated faintly with distant machinery that never fully powered down—systems running because stopping them would cost more than letting them rot.
Neon bled into the puddles below, colors trembling and warping with every ripple. Advertisements flickered above empty walkways—smiling faces stuttering through corrupted holofeeds, selling comfort, pleasure, escape.
Promises meant for crowds that no longer came this way.
The district had been abandoned long before tonight.
Tein slowed. Then stopped.
The alley ahead was wrong.
Too narrow for the space it occupied. Too still for a city that never truly rested. Steam hissed from ruptured pipes, rolling out in pale, breathing clouds that bent light and swallowed sound. The air tasted metallic—ozone, rot, old coolant—the sharp bite of a battery held too long on the tongue.
Something nearby had already died.
Tein closed his eyes.
The Force didn't scream.
It pulled.
A slow siphon. A steady draw. Hunger without urgency, because it didn't need to rush. Whatever fed here had learned patience long ago. The surrounding currents of the Force bent toward it almost imperceptibly, like water sliding toward a drain whose mouth could not be seen.
"This isn't random," he murmured, and heard how flat his own voice sounded in the wet dark.
Boots splashed behind him.
El-Je slid to a halt at his shoulder. Fifteen. Too young for this district, too young for this kind of quiet. Rain plastered dark hair to his forehead and traced cold lines down his cheeks. His breathing was controlled—but his hand hovered near his lightsaber, fingers flexing like they needed something solid to anchor to.
"Master," El-Je said, voice tight but steady, "I feel it too."
Good.
That meant the fear hadn't broken him.
Yet.
Tein's gaze fixed down the alley.
A warehouse loomed at the far end—one of hundreds like it, but heavier somehow. Durasteel doors bowed inward as if something had leaned against them from the inside. Floodlights above the entrance buzzed weakly, stuttering between dull yellow and darkness. Each flicker rearranged the shadows, stretching them into unfamiliar shapes that refused to settle.
The air beyond the threshold felt hollow.
Not cold.
Emptied.
Tein ignited his lightsaber. A yellow blade snapped into being—clean, precise, almost surgical. Its light cut through rain and steam, catching El-Je's face in sharp relief: pale, focused, afraid.
"Shadow protocol," Tein said. "Behind me. No heroics."
El-Je nodded once. "Yes, Master."
They crossed the threshold.
The warehouse swallowed them whole.
The ceiling vanished into blackness far above, lost to scale rather than darkness. Cargo cranes hung overhead like frozen skeletons, chains dangling slack and unmoving. Containers were stacked into narrow corridors that forced light to fight its way forward, creating pockets of brightness surrounded by consuming shadow.
Water dripped from somewhere unseen—slow, arrhythmic—each impact loud enough to feel inside the skull.
Bodies lay scattered across the floor.
Dockworkers. Security. Civilians still wearing transit tags clipped to their collars.
No wounds.
No blood.
Just faces frozen mid-plea—mouths stretched wide, eyes blown open, pupils locked on something that was no longer there. Their skin looked wrong.
Not pale.
Not gray.
Drained.
Like fruit left too long beneath a merciless sun.
El-Je swallowed. "They weren't killed," he whispered. "They were… emptied."
Tein knelt beside the nearest corpse. Two fingers hovered just above the brow. He didn't touch. He didn't need to.
The echo slammed into him.
Panic so total it erased thought. The certainty of being seen—known—and then peeled open. The moment before death, when bargaining ends and understanding arrives.
Tein jerked his hand back.
For a heartbeat he tasted iron, sharp and hot, as if the fear had bled into him.
Ancient.
Deliberate.
Patient.
"This is Sith work," Tein said quietly. "But not like anything I've seen in the holocrons I've recovered."
The lights flickered.
Dimmed.
Then—
Silence fell like a physical weight.
The doors slammed shut behind them. Metal boomed through the frame, vibrations crawling into Tein's teeth. El-Je flinched. Chains overhead swayed once, then settled.
The Force shifted.
Something unfolded from the dark.
Not a body.
A suggestion of one—tall, vaguely humanoid—stitched together from shadow that peeled itself free from corners and seams. Darkness didn't occupy space around it.
It claimed it.
Angles bent. Depth collapsed. Light thinned and vanished as though swallowed.
The shadow moved without stepping.
It slid forward, unraveling and reforming, as if the dark itself were remembering how to wear a shape.
El-Je staggered, clutching his head. "Master—"
The temperature dropped—not cold, not absence of heat, but wrong. Sound dulled further, heartbeat booming loud in the skull. The Force around the thing wasn't aggressive.
It was intimate.
A voice slid into their minds without passing through air.
Jedi…
The word was gentle. Fond. Like a lover tasting a name after a long separation.
Tein stepped in front of El-Je. Yellow blade raised. Stance anchored. Every instinct screaming restraint rather than attack.
"How long it has been," the voice murmured, velvet-smooth, almost amused, "since I tasted fear like yours."
The shadow leaned closer. Its outline softened. Elongated. The suggestion of a face formed—eyes implied, never seen. A mouth curved not in hunger, but delight.
El-Je gasped. "It's in my head— it's looking at me—"
"Oh, child," the voice crooned, sweetness sharpening, "I see you far more clearly than that."
Pressure bloomed behind Tein's eyes.
Not pain.
Attention.
It wasn't scanning them.
It was savoring.
"You will not touch him," Tein said, forcing calm into his throat as something cold tightened around his ribs.
The shadow laughed.
At first it was soft. Musical.
Then it shattered.
The sound tore through the warehouse like broken glass through bone—high, manic, echoing where sound should not exist. It pierced Tein's skull, drove knives of pressure down his spine. El-Je screamed, hands clamped over his ears as blood traced thin lines from his nose.
The laughter went on too long.
Then stopped.
"You hide in shadow now," it whispered, intimate again. Breathless with amusement. "But you cannot escape what you are."
The darkness surged—but did not strike.
It pressed.
Not forward.
Inward.
The shadows along the walls stretched, peeling away from their anchors. Tein felt the Force buckle as invisible weight settled across the floor, as if the room itself were being lowered into something deeper. His blade flickered—not dimming, but straining, light pulled thin around its edges.
Tein shifted his stance, micro-adjustments only. No advance. No retreat.
A test.
The shadow responded.
A ripple passed through its shape, and the pressure sharpened—focused now, intent threading through fear. Tein felt it brush the edge of his guard, not attacking, not committing. Just… learning where resistance lived.
El-Je cried out behind him, dropped to one knee as the weight intensified.
Tein reached back without looking, one hand snapping out to anchor El-Je by the shoulder—grounding, steady, real.
"Breathe," he ordered. "Stay with me."
The shadow recoiled a fraction.
Amused.
Then the pressure collapsed inward all at once, snapping like a drawn cord released.
The darkness surged.
Tein reached deep.
Force Speed detonated through him—mind and muscle snapping into brutal clarity. The world slowed to a crawl. Rain beyond the shattered skylights hung like beads of glass. Steam thickened into ribbons. Even El-Je's blink felt suspended.
Tein moved.
He crossed the distance in a heartbeat that barely existed, yellow blade carving a decisive arc meant to end the threat before it could fully become real.
The blade passed through—
Nothing.
No resistance.
No impact.
The darkness caught the light.
It clung to the blade like tar colored smoke, crawling up the hilt, swallowing brightness inch by inch. It slid over Tein's hand.
Then it was inside his arm.
Heat.
Cold.
Then neither.
Just a quiet, invasive corruption.
His vision ruptured.
Fire. Screams. Ash. Drowning with lungs full of air. Faces he didn't know, begging him anyway. Places collapsing into him. Fear that wasn't his—and then fear that was, torn from somewhere deep and private.
Tein staggered.
The warehouse vanished.
For one terrible heartbeat, he hung suspended inside a fear with no beginning and no end.
El-Je screamed his name—distant, distorted, as though shouted through layers of water.
And the presence whispered, pleased and unhurried, directly against the inside of Tein's mind—
Yes… you will feed me well.