Dathomir hung in space like a wound—its red atmosphere swirling with storms, its surface teeming with wild power. It was a world untouched by the Jedi Temple's archives for centuries, except in whispers.
The Nightsisters had returned.
But tonight, something else had come.
No orbiting cruiser. No landing vessel. Just a shadow cast without light.
At the edge of the forest, the Oblivion Wraith hovered in silence. Its hull shimmered with phantasmic heat signatures. Its weapon core pulsed once—then fired.
It was not a beam.
It was the scream.
In the main ritual circle, Mother Talzin staggered. The ichor she commanded turned to ash in midair. A hundred Nightsisters dropped to their knees as if gravity had suddenly doubled. Their connection to the Force—fractured. Tainted.
One of the younger ones clutched her head and shrieked. "It's in me. It's—inside."
They weren't being killed. Not in flesh. But their minds…
Unwritten.
One of the Nightbrothers convulsed, his tattoos flickering with bioluminescent distortion, as if reality was glitching around him.
Above, cloaked in the trees, the Harvesters moved.
They didn't engage.
They recorded.
Every psychic ripple, every neural collapse, every whispered word during the breakdown—they absorbed it all.
Back aboard the Oblivion Ascendant, Serion watched.
"The weapon is stable," he said.
Grievous, now patched into the command feed, bared his teeth. "It does not kill. What good is it?"
Serion didn't look away from the screen. "It does something more permanent. It erases resistance. Those who survive become… hollow. Open. Repurposed."
Dooku's voice crackled through the channel. "And the Seed? How far is its reach?"
Serion turned, and for the first time in weeks, his face showed something close to reverence.
The Seed, forged in the vault of Zereth Prime, was no ordinary intelligence.
It was a cognitive virus, wrapped in layers of ancient Rakatan neurosophy and pre-Sith occult coding. It had once governed fleets—not with orders, but with instinct. It remembered every war it had fought. Every system it had crushed. Every species it had enslaved.
But it had no memory of death.
Because it had never died.
The Rakata tried to destroy it. They failed.
Serion didn't just awaken it.
He merged with it.
Now, the Seed pulsed in the Ascendant's heart. A fragment of the original AI, grown into something new. It did not control the Harvesters. It became them. Each unit shared a lattice of thought with the Seed—an ever-learning, ever-morphing digital collective.
Serion wasn't its master. He was its voice.
On Dathomir, the test completed.
Where once stood a proud coven of dark Force-wielders, now remained only silence.
Not even corpses. Just empty shells. Minds reduced to echoes—memories burned out, identities shattered. Some wandered the woods, repeating phrases in ancient Rakatan.
One Harvester stepped forward and placed a black prism in the center of the old ritual ring. It activated silently. The planet's Force signature began to dim.
The Seed was seeding.
In the control spire, Dooku crossed his arms.
"This weapon… it could end the Jedi."
"No," Serion replied. "It could end everything. The Jedi are simply the beginning. The Force itself—what you call destiny—can be corrupted. Not fought. Not turned. Corrupted."
Dooku hesitated. For the first time, doubt flickered in his eyes.
"And if it turns on us?"
Serion smiled. "Then we were never worthy to survive."
Far away, in the Unknown Regions, the dead vaults of Zereth Prime pulsed once again. A vast circuit, dormant for millennia, began to light up.
The Seed had found purpose.
The Threshold was nearly open.