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A pair of electrocuffs—not the pair she wore, but similar enough to elicit pain every time she looks at them. One of Theron’s datapads. Orgus’ lightsaber. One of Kira’s robes, left crumpled and dusty in the cockpit of the Defender. A vial of ash. Next to it, a chain, missing a clasp. A slip of paper, littered with scores, rows upon rows of scratch marks.
Lives she’s taken. Lives he—by virtue of manipulation, existence, living in her head—forced her to take. A rough estimate. Soon she’ll start a new page, bind a leaflet together with fraying thread. It’s a small comfort, though hardly one at all, that she’s slower in recording loss these days. That is, the loss harder to quantify, death tolls irrelevant outside of war.
A shrine for Vitiate, though she is tempted to call it a ruin. In any case, something to remember him by. A reminder of the cost. Everything he took from her, continues to take, will take until she dies.
The first time he appeared, she threw her shoe at him, tried to pretend she did not exist. The second time he appeared, shimmering like a Force ghost, she vaguely considered pleading insanity. The third time he appeared…
You’re not real, she tells him, the words a ritual. Sometimes she wonders if she invokes him. If, in the absence of stimulation, this is what her mind dregs up, or if this is her curse. To carry him with her. To never be free of him.
Oh?
I killed you.
Indeed?
You’re not real, she says again. Get out of my head.
Sometimes he leaves. Sometimes they sit in silence—Caldis curling in on herself, Vitiate’s eyes a dying golden ember. Sometimes he tells her stories of Zakuul, his time as emperor, that long year of captivity. What she did. Who she killed, the delight she took in drawing it out.
It is a strange thing, she thinks, to be told who you are. She focuses inward, reaching out with the Force, and finds truth in it. There is a darkness in her. An absence of light, deep in her core.
“You’re not real,” she says now, fingers curling against her palm, hard enough to draw blood. The words fall flat. The shoe passed through him, but that does not negate the reaction of her body, how everything in her shies away. She can feel him. Somehow. Impossible, but he is there, red at the edges of her awareness. “Get out of my head.”
“Perhaps, dear knight,” rumbles Vitiate, “instead of lamenting my presence, you should be seeking revelation in it.”
“Perhaps, dear psychopath, you should go and fuck yourself.”
“There is anger in you.” He appears in front of her, tall, unmarred. Sometimes he wears the face of a dead man. Tonight he is made new. “Rage. You lash out at—” He pauses, head listing, eyes focused on something beyond her. “Everything. The Galaxy. Avatars of pain.”
There is no emotion, Caldis thinks. There is peace.
“Did I mention you’re dead?”
She should really just destroy the shrine. Her eyes flick to the vial of ash, and Vitiate turns.
“Ah,” he says, peering down at it. “You wore this on a chain around your neck. I remember now. Profoundly grotesque, but in the end it served its purpose.” He lifts a hand, and the vial levitates, rotating in the air. “The weight of a world, and a dead one at that. A miracle your spine did not snap.”
Last night he analyzed the electrocuffs. The night before that, Kira’s robes, and the night before that—
“I don’t know what you’re aiming for,” she snaps, and it comes out… seething. He saw anger in her, and there is truth to that as well. The shrine brings out the worst in her. These artifacts of remembrance, relics of loss. “I’m not going to go all Dark Side on everyone. Back when you had power, sure, I might’ve considered it—” the only reason she admits that, she tells herself, is because of his unreality— “but now you’re nothing more than a score on my ledger, so I’m pretty much the opposite of tempted.”
“What is it to me if you turn?” Still the vial turns, ash tumbling against curved glass. “I’m one with the Force. The dark and the light—they mean nothing to me.”
“Which is bullshit, by the way. If it were up to me, the Force would’ve spat you out.”
“You assume the Force is anything but apathetic. That the Force cares.” A pause. “We are getting… off track.” The vial settles atop the tables, ashes roiling like grains of sand. “Have you considered your part in conjuring me?”
“My part?” She snorts. “You brainwashed me, only to hijack my body for the better part of two years. It’s big, not to mention uncharacteristic, of you to assume I play a part at all.”
“As you said,” he intones, “I am dead.”
“Exactly.”
“So I am incapable of assumption.”
She groans, yanking the covers over her head—and yet his voice echoes, the hot plasma melt of a lightsaber against her skull.
“Without me, you are nothing. We both know this to be true. If I had not chosen you all those years ago, forged you through trial and fire, you would not be commanding the Alliance. Theron Shan would not have sought your help. Kira Carsen would not have been your padawan. Your astromech would have been destroyed by Flesh Raiders, consumed for parts. And you—” He laughs. “I knew you were the one. Trekking halfway across Alderaan, snow in your boots, the Force a sun you swallowed. Brighter than star death. I was drawn to you. But without me?
“A small thing. Timid. Cowering behind that Mirialan—Rhyss, is it? Always fighting your battles, out of love, obsession, a combination of the two. Does it matter? You would have died there, unfulfilled, darkness a root in you. An aborted fetus. A waste of space.
“And now I am dead. My evil vanquished. Yet these things—” A clattering sound. The vial? “You sustain them. You keep my memory alive, and so the darkness grows in you, fed by anger, rage. Without me, there is no one to blame. No enemy to fight. A soldier in peacetime, lost without a war.” A distant shout. She recognizes it as Orgus’ voice, then Theron’s, then Lana’s. “You cannot fill the pit in you. It will always want more.
“The time for grief is over. You must kill the past, or the past will kill you.”