Hyperspace was never meant to be comfortable.
It pressed in on the ship from every direction—not violently, but persistently—like pressure equalizing through bone. The engines' hum drifted below hearing and into structure, a vibration that traveled through deck plating and seat frame, settling into Tein's spine. Outside the viewport there was no sky, no motion, no horizon.
Only a smeared, lightless pallor that refused to resolve into distance.
Direction without landmarks.
Movement without travel.
Tein preferred it this way.
He remained seated in the cockpit, posture unchanged, hands resting lightly on the controls more out of habit than necessity. The ship flew itself through hyperspace corridors calculated down to fractions of a degree, but he stayed present anyway.
Attentive.
Grounded.
The Jedi Temple already felt distant.
Not physically—hyperspace made distance meaningless—but philosophically. Doctrine thinned quickly once removed from ritual halls and consensus voices. Out here, certainty felt smaller. More fragile.
More honest.
The Force felt different in hyperspace. Not weaker—just constrained. Stretched thin like a current forced through a narrowing channel, stripped of texture and nuance until only pressure remained.
It reminded him of Rhen Var.
Ice-bound. Silent.
A world frozen so completely that even echoes felt buried beneath its surface.
The tomb rose in his memory with unwelcome clarity—not because it had been grand, but because it had been deliberate. Its corridors were narrow and uneven, sloping just enough to throw off balance. No symmetry. No reverence. Sith tombs usually proclaimed themselves.
This one hid.
The walls had been wrong in a subtler way. Not defaced. Not eroded.
Broken on purpose.
Inscriptions shattered mid-phrase. Sigils interrupted before completion. Gaps left where meaning had been removed rather than erased.
Someone had not wanted it remembered.
Tein had felt the artifact long before he saw it.
Not as a pull.
As an absence.
A place where the Force folded inward on itself, slipping past awareness the way cold slipped through armor seams. He followed that absence through collapsed chambers and pressure-sealed vaults until he reached a room so plain it bordered on contempt.
No ornamentation.
No guardians.
No warning.
Just a plinth.
And resting atop it, the crystal.
Black—not reflective, not absorptive—simply… unacknowledged. Light did not bend around it or vanish into it. It merely behaved as though the object were not there at all. The air had been unnaturally still, dense enough that even breath felt intrusive.
There had been no traps.
That, more than anything, had frightened him.
The tomb had already served its purpose.
Tein stood there longer than necessary, boots planted in frost-dusted stone, the Force moving strangely around the object without ever touching it. He weighed the simplest solution.
A single, controlled burst of Force energy.
No spectacle.
No trace.
The crystal would shatter. Its fragments would sink into ice and silence once more.
Forgotten.
He did not do it.
Nor did he leave it behind.
If I don't understand this, someone worse will.
The thought had arrived without emotion. Without justification.
He accepted it the way he accepted gravity—not as permission, but as burden.
Now, light-years away, that same absence lingered.
Tein let his awareness widen—not probing, not testing—simply settling into the familiar stillness cultivated over years of solitary missions. The ship responded first: mass contained, systems aligned, trajectory unbroken. Hyperspace pressed in around them, featureless and indifferent.
Beyond that—
Nothing.
Except one place where the Force refused to behave as expected.
The artifact.
His perception slid past it again, skidding like water off polished stone. No resistance. No invitation. No echo.
Just a gap.
And that gap moved with him.
He had told the Council the truth. Or the version that fit their language. The artifact did not tempt. It did not burn. It did not radiate corruption.
What he had not told them—what he could not yet articulate—was how intentional the silence felt.
Sith relics announced themselves.
This one withheld.
Tein shifted slightly as hyperspace pressure adjusted—a minor compression the instruments ignored but the Force did not. The sensation passed through him like a held breath.
Then released.
The ship continued on course.
Tein did not.
For a single heartbeat, alignment occurred.
Not around him.
Through him.
As if something very far away had adjusted its attention—and discovered he was already standing where it expected him to be.
Not searching.
Waiting.
Tein remained still.
Fear did not rise.
That absence—that lack of reaction—unsettled him more than any whisper ever had.
He knew fear. He had studied it. Mapped it. Survived it. He understood how it sharpened, how it fractured, how it could be endured.
Whatever this was, it did not challenge him.
It did not need to.
It fed on fear—
—and found none worth taking.
Dathomir lay ahead—distant, inevitable. A world where the Force was not divided into doctrine and denial, but shaped through ritual and belief. Where fear was not hidden, but used.
If something ancient was stirring, it made sense it would surface there.
Tein made no adjustments. Course remained locked. Speed unchanged.
Behind him, sealed away in layered containment, the artifact remained inert.
Yet the emptiness around it felt narrower now.
As if the space it occupied had become aware it was no longer alone.
Tein exhaled slowly.
For the first time since leaving Coruscant, he did not feel watched.
He felt—
Recognized.
And that, more than any scream or shadow, told him this mission had already begun.