The humid air of mystery didn’t smell like life; it smelled like the rot of a thousand shallow graves. Ahsoka plunged through the undergrowth, her breath coming in ragged, jagged gasps that tore at her throat.
The jungle was a wall of twitching shadows, but the suffocating darkness wasn’t outside. It was in her skull.
“You can’t run away, Ahsoka,” the voice hissed—not a memory, but a cold, oily presence coiling around her brain. “You can’t run away.”
She skidded to a halt, her boots sinking into black, hungry mud. She was lost in a place where the stars were blotted out by weeping canopies. She was searching for an “Author”—a weaver of fates who could cut the strings attached to her soul—but the further she ran, the tighter the noose became.
Was this the right path?
Her mind fractured, dragging her back to the fall from the hilltop. She remembered the wind howling like a dying god as she plummeted toward the portal. But before the darkness took her, she had seen it.
The Shadow.
It hadn’t stayed human. It had stretched and distorted, bones snapping and reforming into the sleek, shimmering scales of a monstrous serpent. It had peered over the ledge, its eyes not blue, not even Sith red, but a piercing, venomous yellow that felt like a needle driven into her heart.
She had called that shadow “Anakin.” She had felt his grief, his obsession. But as she stood shivering in the jungle, a sickening realization crawled up her spine: Was it him, or was it the thing that had eaten him?
Every time he reached out to her from the void, he didn’t bring love. He brought shackles.
In this twisted reality, he was no longer just a fallen hero. He was the King of Winter-Land, a monarch of ice and bone who demanded her return to his side as a Padawan-servant. He wanted her trapped in his “royalty,” a golden cage built on the corpses of their past lives.
“I don’t want your crown!” she screamed into the trees, her voice cracking. “I want the real world! I want the sun!”
The jungle went deathly silent. Even the insects stopped their rhythmic clicking.
Then, the ground beneath her feet began to vibrate. The mud bubbled. From the darkness of a hollowed-out tree, two burning yellow eyes ignited.
“The ‘real world’ is a dream for the dead, Snips,” the voice echoed, now vibrating through her very marrow. “Here, there is only the King. And you are my subject… to the very depth of your soul.”
The shadow of a massive snake began to rise from her own feet, detaching itself from the ground. It didn’t want to kill her; it wanted to own her.
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