The sky over Mustafar-147, a broken fragment of a forgotten system, boiled with red mist and fractured lightning. The Force was thick—twisted, like a symphony played backward. At its center stood Anakin Skywalker, or what remained of him.
Gone was the Jedi Knight. In his place, a vessel of rage and clarity stood cloaked in black, eyes glowing like twin suns. The System had fused with his essence not just his body, but his destiny. He now bent the Force as if it were code.
He didn't just feel the Force. He commanded it.
He had no master.No council.No balance.
Only purpose.
Far beyond the charred moons, within a cloaked Evolto deployment vessel, two figures stood side by side in silence.
Zalthorion observed the world through a scrying window. Its core burned with instability, reflecting the unstable mind below.
"His system is calling itself the Path of Dominion," murmured one of the attendants. "It's rewriting Jedi and Sith philosophies into something… brutal."
Zalthorion didn't blink. "He's becoming an idea. Not a man. Ideas are harder to kill."
Beside him stood the agent chosen for the mission Cassian Vael, a Jedi-turned-Operative, cloaked in white-void armor lined with anti-system glyphs. He was not sent to kill Anakin.
He was sent to reach him.
"You're sure he can be saved?" Cassian asked, adjusting the hilt of his blade neither lightsaber nor sword, but something shaped by Evolto's finest.
Zalthorion gave a rare pause.
"I don't know. But I once saw a boy turn the tide of war with compassion alone. He deserves a chance… before we're forced to erase his existence."
Cassian nodded, accepting the weight of the task. His armor locked in with a hiss, and the drop chamber began to hum.
"Give him my message," Zalthorion said as the door closed. "Tell him: Balance was never about the Light or Dark… it was always about choice."
Mustafar-147 Surface
Anakin stood at the edge of a newly risen obsidian tower his cape fluttering in the ashstorm. Beneath him, machines powered by Force-attuned kyber crystals forged monstrous starships, each etched with Jedi and Sith symbols now fused into one.
He turned suddenly, feeling the arrival.
A shockwave tore the sky.
Cassian descended like a falling star, crashing to the earth in a shock of white-blue energy. He emerged through the dust slowly, not raising his blade.
"Anakin," he said gently, "you're not beyond redemption."
Anakin tilted his head.
"You speak like the others. Afraid of what I've become."
"No," Cassian replied. "Afraid of what you're losing."
Anakin's eyes blazed with fury. "I have lost nothing. I have become the Force."
Cassian sighed.
"Then prove it. Show me your will without killing me."
Anakin raised his hand.
Cassian didn't move.
And the fight… began.
The wind screamed with heat as Cassian took slow, deliberate steps toward the obsidian tower. Molten stone cracked beneath his boots. He stared at the figure at its summit.
Anakin.
He stood still, not yet ignited. The system flickered behind his eyes like lightning trapped in glass.
Then it came.
[NEW DIRECTIVE: Eliminate the Jedi]
The words appeared before his vision, etched in red, pulsing with authority that wasn't his own. He blinked, and they vanished, replaced by clarity.
His hand moved.
Cassian barely had time to react.
A burst of raw pressure detonated outward not a push, but a gravitational crush. The ground imploded, trees cracked in half from the sheer density. Cassian bent at the knee, dropping into a slide beneath the blast, his cloak carving a trench through dirt and ash.
Anakin landed in front of him mid-slide, his cape catching flame from friction. The heat shimmered. His blade flared to life: unstable, pulsing, roaring like a furnace barely contained.
Cassian's saber answered with a sharp hiss, its smooth cobalt hum steady in defiance.
They clashed.
Shockwaves erupted from each impact, the air screaming as their weapons met. Anakin came forward like a storm each swing a meteor, every step dragging the weight of inevitability. Cassian weaved through it. His blocks curved inward, redirecting instead of stopping, every movement a calculation.
Steel rang. Air split. The battlefield bent.
Cassian dropped low, pivoted, swept in a circle sand and ash exploded upward, a spiraling distraction. Anakin's foot skidded. He recovered fast, but it was enough.
Cassian blurred backward, feet light, sliding into a stance foreign to Jedi or Sith. His grip loosened, his saber moved like water, unpredictable formless but fluid. Movement shaped by foresight.
Anakin didn't chase. He countered before Cassian even moved, thrusting out his hand. A ripple of unseen pressure burst from his core, forming a perfect sphere that flattened the battlefield.
Cassian flew back. His body cracked into a jagged obsidian spike, dust shivering from the impact.
Anakin stalked forward, blade humming wild.
"You're still pretending," he spat. "Clinging to rules. To Jedi delusions. But you never understood what the Force is."
Cassian coughed blood, his voice raw. "I don't need to understand it…"
He rose, one knee steadying him, saber held behind like a knife. "I just need to remind you."
They collided again.
Blades screamed in protest. Cassian's strikes became layered traps sweeps at the knees flowed into upward spirals, feints reversed into pinpoint kicks to the ribs. His stance constantly shifted, never the same twice, always one step ahead.
Anakin's strength was overwhelming, but imprecise. Rage frayed the edge of his focus.
Cassian ducked beneath a vertical cleave, twisted behind him, and struck at the emitter knocking Anakin's blade wide. His free hand struck Anakin's shoulder, not with strength, but with a pulse of precision: a low hum of energy, directed not to wound, but to disrupt.
Anakin faltered, just for a breath.
"You…" he breathed, sweat cutting lines through ash on his face. "You're holding back."
Cassian stepped closer, his voice quiet but sharp as obsidian.
"I'm showing you what you used to be."
Anakin's eyes flared, but Cassian didn't stop.
"You were more than this. You were hope. A brother. A protector. A friend."
They clashed again faster now. Blade to blade, elbow to jaw, knee to thigh, fists breaking the air between every slash. Sparks leapt from scorched stone. Their shadows flickered in the hellfire.
Cassian screamed voice cracking under pressure.
"You were the one we believed in! Not some monster choking galaxies because he couldn't face himself!"
He ducked under a high arc, twisted behind, and locked Anakin's wrist. Sabers flared between their faces.
"You were Anakin!"
Anakin roared, breaking free with an eruption of pressure, flames lashing from his aura. The battlefield cracked.
Cassian slid back, chest heaving.
"I'm not here to beat you," he said, eyes locked on him. "I'm here to remind you of what you lost."
Suddenly, the heat stopped. The world froze for Anakin.
A voice echoed within.
[DIRECTIVE COMPROMISED. ACTIVATING OVERRIDE.][CORE ACCESS: MIDICHLORIAN SATURATION PROTOCOL ENGAGED.]
He screamed as his body convulsed then changed.
His veins lit up like circuits. His blood boiled with power as the system force-fed life into his cells. The Force screamed around him not bending to his will, but moving through him uncontrollably.
Cassian stepped back, suddenly uneasy.
Anakin looked up. His eyes were no longer his. They were tunnels into a coreless void. His mouth opened, and with a single wordless gesture reality warped.
Cassian's body was yanked sideways by an invisible storm. The ground beneath his feet liquefied. A shuttle in orbit began to shake violently, its gravity manipulated from the planet below.
The Force bent like a black hole was born within this man.
Cassian landed hard, gasping. Anakin floated now, arms low, fingers spread.
He wasn't flying.He wasn't levitating.The world simply refused to touch him.
Anakin hovered, suspended in the storm of power his body no longer his own, his voice stolen by the force that had overtaken him. Cassian was down, eyes wide not in fear, but in confusion. Something was wrong.
Something else was coming.
From behind the veil of heat and distortion, a crooked shadow stepped forward. Human in shape, but bent in ways no skeleton should allow, its limbs dragging unnaturally behind like marionette strings gone slack.
Its surface shimmered not with light, but the absence of it. An anti-form.
Anakin sensed it far too late.
It didn't speak. It existed with purpose. And then it lunged.
Its hand, tipped with claws shaped like fractured dimensions, pierced through Anakin's back without resistance. Not blood, but light poured from the wound gold, silver, and something darker, older.
The figure gripped something inside him not flesh. Not Force. Something deeper.
Cassian gasped as he saw it.
The figure yanked, and tore the System free.
It didn't resemble code it was a twisted knot of void-wrought tendrils and spectral gears, pulsing and resisting, like a living program made of bone and madness.
The figure pulled it toward its face a space of absence where a mouth might be, and spoke in a voice like time collapsing:
"A fine meal… forged of eldritch strain and voidborn purity."
The System writhed.
It screamed in a language that infected thought.
And then it was eaten.
Devoured.
Gone.
But the shadow was not finished.
Its fingers slid once more into Anakin's chest, now limp and hovering. This time, it grasped something smaller. Brighter. A light Anakin's soul.
The boy's eyes widened in mute terror. His mouth tried to scream but there was no air left in him.
The soul was torn out.
Held up like a pearl in a storm and then swallowed whole.
Anakin's body dropped like a discarded puppet. Empty. Lifeless.
Cassian slowly pulled himself up, trembling. Not from exhaustion. But from the feeling of a lawless hunger being briefly, terribly satisfied.
Cassian stood frozen not in fear, but in pure instinctual denial. The Force churned inside him, warning him, screaming at him to flee, to fight, to survive. But the air was thick with wrongness, like trying to breathe through oil.
The shadow moved toward him. Gliding, not walking its joints cracking sideways, neck twitching like a marionette strung on barbed wire. It ignored the waves of Force Cassian hurled at it. They vanished, consumed, as if the power never existed.
The creature drank the Force itself.
A clawed hand reached forward, lifted Cassian effortlessly into the air, his limbs paralyzed by more than just strength by an ancient authority. As Cassian struggled, the creature tilted its broken head, its voice a multilayered echo that rattled reality like a broken speaker pressed against the soul.
"Ah… an Evolto City agent…"
It said the name like it had licked a memory made of ash and bile, gagging on the taste. A growl rippled through it, like a thousand unseen mouths baring teeth beneath its skin.
Then, the voice became deeper, more warped not just heard, but remembered by the body, like trauma etched into DNA.
"They may have forgotten me…""But you remember me, don't you, Zalthorion?"
Cassian gasped, eyes wide in agony not just his own, but some terrible, shared knowing.
The shadow's body swelled, as if fed by some ancient hunger long denied.
"I was the shadow behind every trembling heart…""…the black breath in their final prayers.""The darkness that never sleeps…""…always consuming… always growing…"
Its voice shifted with every word sometimes a scream, sometimes a whisper from inside Cassian's own skull.
Then it spoke once more, softly, lovingly just before the end.
"…and now, I remember you too, little spark."
It crushed Cassian's form as if made of parchment. A twisted bloom of Force-light burst, sucked immediately into the creature's frame. Then it pulled Cassian's soul brilliant, defiant, thrashing from the shreds of flesh and swallowed it whole.
Cassian was gone.
Utterly.