=== Anakin ===
Anakin stood at the heart of the SunEater's bridge, his hands clasped behind his back as he watched a star die in slow, terrible silence beyond the armored transparisteel viewport, the titanic machine's gravitational siphons tearing at the stellar surface until rivers of incandescent fire were drawn screaming into the colossal collectors that ringed the station like the jaws of some ancient, mechanical god.
The light of it painted his face in harsh gold and white, throwing the sharp planes of his features into stark relief, and he could feel the deep, resonant hum of the station thrumming through the deck plating beneath his boots as the SunEater drank its fill, every conduit and capacitor within the moon-sized weapon saturating with energy that made the air itself feel thick.
He turned from the dying star toward the bridge crew, his gaze settling on one of the officers hunched over a primary terminal, fingers flying across illuminated controls as readouts scrolled faster than the untrained eye could follow. "Status," Anakin said, his voice carrying easily through the cavernous command deck.
The officer straightened, swallowing as he met the molten intensity of Anakin's stare. "The SunEater's main cannon is fully charged, General Skywalker. All capacitors are at maximum saturation, focusing arrays aligned and stable. We're reading no fluctuations in the containment fields."
Anakin nodded once, then shifted his attention to another terminal where a navigation officer stood, holographic star charts hovering in a shifting lattice of blue light around him. "Is Tatooine within range?" he asked, the name of the desert world feeling strangely distant in his mouth.
"Yes, sir," the officer replied, tapping a sequence that brought several systems into sharp focus. "It's multiple systems out, but the firing solution is clean. The beam will reach the target without deviation. We have a clear line of sight."
For a heartbeat, Anakin was very still, the vastness of what he was about to do stretching out before him, and in that silence, unbidden images flickered through his mind, the endless dunes under twin suns, the brittle wind whispering over the desert at night, the distant glow of Mos Espa's lights against the dark, Padmé's face as she had smiled at him on that world so long ago, unaware that her fate and the fate of everything he had ever known were now bound to the choices he was making. The memories burned, but he fed them to the fire inside him, letting the pain he had suffered there twist into resolve, and when he spoke again, his voice was iron.
"Begin the firing sequence."
The bridge erupted into motion at the order, officers calling out confirmations as massive systems throughout the SunEater came alive in a carefully orchestrated crescendo of power, conduits flaring with blue-white light as the energy drawn from the star was channeled into the colossal focusing chambers of the main cannon, the very bones of the station groaning under the strain of what it was about to unleash.
Warning sigils flared across auxiliary displays, then flickered green one by one as safeguards locked into place, and the deep, omnipresent hum of the station swelled into a thunderous vibration that rattled in Anakin's chest, as though the SunEater itself were drawing a breath.
After long, agonizing minutes, the first officer looked back to him, his face pale but resolute. "General, the weapon is primed. All shutters are prepared. We are ready to fire on your command."
Anakin's eyes never left the void beyond the viewport, where the remnants of the consumed star still shimmered like embers scattered across an endless night.
"Fire." he said, and the word felt like the final toll of a bell ringing across the galaxy.
Armored shutters slammed down over the bridge viewport with a deafening clang, sealing the command deck in darkness broken only by the cold glow of instruments, and a heartbeat later the SunEater's main cannon erupted, the recoil of the discharge shuddering through the entire station as a beam of impossible blue light tore free from the weapon's maw.
The force of it was cataclysmic, a concentrated scream of annihilation that lanced across the void at a velocity that defied comprehension, punching through the dark between stars with the inevitability of a falling guillotine, carrying with it the death of a sun and the fury of everything Anakin had become.
=== Raxor ===
Raxor felt the familiar heat of Tatooine's suns settle over him the moment the ramp of the Imperium lander lowered.
He stepped down onto the landing platform alongside Nira, the polished plates of his armor catching the harsh light of the twin suns as a small honor guard fanned out around them, bolters held at rest, the low thrum of repulsors and generators echoing through the cavernous hangar as distant traffic lanes carried supply craft and patrol ships in streams above the city.
He had only taken a few steps forward when a familiar, smaller shape broke from the waiting figures at the edge of the platform, and before any of the guards could so much as shift their stance, Sienn was there, darting through the space between armored giants with reckless joy.
Her lekku swayed as she ran, her eyes bright with a relief that had been simmering for far too long. She threw her arms around his side as high as she could reach, hugging the unyielding ceramite of his armor with the same ease and trust a daughter might show her father, and Raxor immediately knelt, the massive plates of his armor hissing softly as he lowered himself to one knee so that he could meet her at eye level.
"Sienn," he rumbled, his voice softened in a way few ever heard it, one gauntleted hand coming to rest gently on her shoulder. "You should not run onto a landing pad like that. One day, the ship will not have finished cooling its engines."
She laughed it off, the sound light and unburdened in a place that had known far too much war. "You always say that," she shot back, then her expression brightened with barely contained excitement as she fumbled at the strap of the satchel slung across her shoulder. "I made you something. I wanted it to be ready before you came back."
From the bag she produced what looked, in her hands, like a short sword wrapped in a strip of oiled cloth, though Raxor knew at a glance that to him it would be little more than a long knife, the proportions slightly off for an Astartes weapon but the intent behind it unmistakable.
He took it carefully, unwrapping the cloth and turning the blade so the light could run along its edge, and in that single glance his trained eye caught the tiny imperfections in the tempering, the unevenness in the grind near the spine, the way the balance was just a touch forward of where he would have set it himself, all the small flaws that would mean nothing to anyone but a master smith. He said none of it aloud.
"It is incredible," he told her instead, and the sincerity in his voice was not a lie, even if the blade itself was imperfect. "Truly. I have seen only a handful of blades forged with this much care and heart behind them. You should be proud of this work."
Sienn's eyes went wide, the praise hitting her hard. She straightened as if she had suddenly grown an inch taller. "You mean it? You really like it?"
"I would not speak falsehoods about a gift such as this," Raxor said, and with deliberate care he engaged the mag-lock at his hip, securing the blade there so that it rested alongside his own weapons, the small, Twi'lek-forged piece looking almost fragile against the brutal nature of his wargear but no less precious for it. "It will go with me wherever I go."
The effect that had on her was immediate and overwhelming, her earlier excitement bubbling over into something near giddy pride as she clasped her hands together and let out a breathless laugh, glancing back toward the city as if she wanted the entire world to see that something she had made now rested at the side of one of the Imperium's Lords.
They had only just begun to walk toward the wide causeway that led into the heart of Invictum Aeternum, the city's towering bastions casting long, angular shadows across the landing fields, when the light changed. It was sudden and wrong, a harsh blue glare that flooded the sky with a brilliance that drowned out the twin suns themselves, and for a heartbeat the entire city seemed to freeze beneath it, shadows snapping into stark relief as the air itself seemed to tremble with a distant, unnatural resonance.
Raxor's head snapped up at once, instincts honed by centuries of war screaming that this was not any ordinary phenomenon, and around him the honor guard shifted, bolters rising in unison as their auspex arrays began to whine with warning tones, while Sienn tightened her grip on the edge of his armor, her earlier laughter dying in her throat as the impossible light washed over them all.
The moment the impossible blue glare tore across the sky, Nira moved without hesitation as she planted her feet against the vibrating stone of the landing platform and drew upon the Warp with a desperation that bordered on self-destruction.
Sickly green and bruised violet energy coiled around her left arm like living smoke while the softer, luminous blue of healing light flooded her right, the two powers clashing and warping the air around her until the very space between her fingers seemed to ripple and scream in protest.
Blood began to spill from her nose almost at once, dark and wet against her pale skin, her breath hitching as the strain tore through her mortal frame, but she did not falter, not even when her vision swam and her knees threatened to give way.
She raised her left hand toward the heavens, fingers splayed as if she meant to seize the beam itself, the air between her and the descending death thickening into a vast, invisible barrier that shuddered as the blue energy struck it, the impact rippling across the sky like a stone cast into a cosmic ocean.
The beam sheared off the planet, skidding along the surface of the barrier in a blinding arc, its path warping and curving as it was forced to spill away from the city and wrap around the planet's horizon instead of punching straight through it.
The effort of holding that impossible deflection tore a raw, broken gasp from Nira's throat as her body began to fail her. The power she was drawing was too much, far too much, and her heartbeat stuttered, her vision narrowing to a tunnel of white-hot pain as the Warp clawed at her soul in payment for what she demanded of it.
Sanguinius was there in the next instant, his presence like a blazing sun against the suffocating pressure that threatened to crush her spirit, the Great Angel's hands coming to rest at her shoulders as he poured his own strength into her failing form, a radiant surge that steadied her soul even as her body continued to break beneath the strain.
Her strength finally gave out as the last of her borrowed power slipped from her grasp, and she collapsed forward into darkness, the barrier shattering in a soundless implosion as her consciousness fled. The beam, tore away from the planet on its warped path and speared into one of Tatooine's twin suns instead, and for a fraction of a second the world seemed to hold its breath as the star flared with a terrible, swelling brilliance, its surface boiling outward in a violent corona that began to tear itself apart under the impossible energy forced into its heart.
Raxor saw it all in that single, frozen instant, and his warrior's instincts screamed that there was no more time, no room left for hesitation. He surged forward, scooping Nira up from the ground with one arm while the other swept Sienn up against his massive shoulder, her small hands clutching at his armor as the ground beneath them trembled with the first distant shockwaves of stellar death.
His voice boomed across the landing platform, carrying over the rising howl of alarms and the panicked shouts of civilians and soldiers alike. "All forces, evacuate now! Abandon the city! Get to your ships, move!"
He broke into a sprint that shook the ferrocrete beneath his boots, the honor guard forming around him in a moving wall of ceramite as klaxons wailed and the sky burned brighter by the second. The pilot of their transport was already scrambling back into the cockpit as Raxor barked the order to bring the engines up to full power, the whine of the repulsors and thrusters rising into a desperate scream as the ship fought to lift off while the horizon began to glow with the terrible, expanding fury of a dying star.
They slammed into the troop bay as the ramp began to rise, the last of the guards diving in behind them, and the transport tore itself free of the landing platform just as the first waves of stellar fire rolled across the atmosphere, the world below already beginning to tear itself apart under the onslaught.
From the viewport, as the ship punched into hyperspace in a last, desperate leap, Raxor watched the impossible spectacle of Tatooine's destruction unfold in the space of a heartbeat, the twin suns collapsing into a single, catastrophic bloom of light that swallowed the planet in a storm of fire and debris, the proud spires of Invictum Aeternum vanishing into a white-blue inferno that left nothing behind but a fading scar in the void.
He did not look away as the stars stretched and the familiar lines of hyperspace engulfed them, his grip tightening around the unconscious Nira and the trembling Sienn.
===
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