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The doors to the Eternal Throne Room slid open with a heavy thud, the sound echoing off the transparisteel encasing of the domed top of the Spire. Vaylin approached Arcann, the only other person in the room. He was standing next to the Throne, his back turned as he gazed out into the distance, at the latticed arrangement of Eternal Fleet ships positioned along the horizon of Zakuul.
As she ascended the steps leading to the Throne, Vaylin noticed the tension in Arcann’s shoulders, the arms crossed across his chest. He made no indication that he heard her entrance. Apparently, she had caught her brother during one of his brooding sessions. From where she stood, she could see the haunted look in his one exposed eye. He was not in fact gazing into the distance, but intently at Thexan’s lightsaber floating above his right hand as he levitated it.
Vaylin narrowed her eyes as she stifled her grief. She deeply missed her oldest brother. Her early childhood memories had become very faint once she was under Nathema’s and Valkorion’s control, but she still fondly remembered Thexan’s visits. They were brief moments of freedom from her cage, with his stories and gifts from worlds that she couldn’t go conquer herself. Once Arcann had taken her out of there, it had been an all too brief period of time when the three of them were together again after a decade. Her eyes drifted to their dead brother’s lightsaber. Arcann kept it close all the time, of course. It was the last piece he had of his twin. Up until recently, she was still able to feel Thexan’s calm, steady presence around it. But it was now an empty piece of metal, its wielder dead for a year.
Since Arcann did her the courtesy of not asking about what she went through in Nathema, she never asked him what happened in the Throne Room the day Thexan died. And he never deliberately mentioned it, other than “I...Thexan is dead because of me.”
“Father must have been so proud of you,” she had wryly said to him that day. But by that night, Vaylin had learned every detail of Thexan’s death. Because every night since then, Arcann’s nightmares bled into the Force. Even after she purposefully moved to the opposite end of the palace, she was always wrenched to consciousness by his terrors, in addition to her own. The ice-cold tendrils of Nathema eternally chipped away at her willpower, sharpened by red sand that tore up the inside of her lungs. Fire burned away her flesh down to the bone, while metal froze it. The stinging stench of smoke and blood suffocated her as she felt Thexan’s lifeforce slip away from her. Whenever she awoke from that last one, she found great satisfaction in smashing the nearest Knight’s head against the wall.
A boiling mixture of despair, guilt, and anger emanated from Arcann in the Force, interrupting her thoughts and causing her skin to crawl. Vaylin decided she didn’t want herself or him to dwell on this for any longer. She pushed Thexan’s lightsaber back into Arcann's palm, sandwiching it between their hands. His eye flicked to hers, still unsettled. She toned down her typical casual remarks into something more solemn. “Arcann. What’s done is done.”
Arcann seemed to heed her words, the glaze in his eye reducing and refocusing on the present. “What’s done is done,” he echoed bitterly, taking Thexan’s lightsaber from her extended hand and re-attaching it to his belt. “What matters is what we do next.”
Vaylin positioned herself next to the Eternal Throne as Arcann activated its holomaps, and the two siblings resumed their conquest of the galaxy.