Chapter Text
Serra Vey died in fire.
That was what it felt like at least—one white-hot breath that wasn't a breath at all, light knifing through every nerve, heat roaring under her skin.
She'd thought she understood pain. But this was not pain. This was unmaking. Every cell in her body pulled apart and reassembled wrong, her bones liquefying and reforming, her muscles writhing beneath skin that no longer fit. She tried to scream but her throat was changing, her vocal cords stretching into shapes that had never been designed for human speech. The world went red, then black, then—
Then the smell hit her.
Burning stone. Metal. Something like molten glass. The air was thick and dry, your-throat's-on-a-grill hot.
Serra's first thought was that the Sith artifact had exploded.
Her second was that she couldn't feel the Force.
Her third was that her face was in the dirt.
She didn't open her eyes right away. Every instinct said lie still, assess. She tried to reach for that familiar hum in her chest, that quiet, constant presence that had been there since she was a toddler in the crèche.
There was nothing.
Her heart kicked hard against her ribs. She dragged in a breath and choked, because it was more like inhaling off the back end of a furnace.
Okay. That's new.
She forced her eyes open.
The first thing she saw was rock, inches from her face. Basalt black and gently glowing along thin seams, like someone had folded embers into stone. It took her a beat too long to realize it wasn't the rock that was glowing.
It was her.
The artifact had been beautiful.
That was the thought Serra kept circling back to as she picked her way through the rubble of the excavation site, her new body moving in ways that felt fundamentally wrong.
The artifact had been beautiful, a small obsidian disc etched with silver filigree, no larger than her palm. It had been sitting in the dirt like it was waiting for her, half-buried in the collapsed tunnel where Intelligence suspected the Separatists had been digging for something. She'd reached down to examine it, felt the dark side pulse against her awareness like a heartbeat, and then—
She'd been unmade, and remade into this.
This being: approximately one meter tall at the shoulder. Covered in short, black-gray fur with rivulets of molten light pulsing under the skin. Possessed of four legs; a whip-thin tail she couldn't stop from expressing her emotions; a long narrow head full of extremely sharp teeth; and, as she'd discovered during her first panicked moment of consciousness, the ability to breathe fire.
A charhound. She was a karking charhound.
The artifact was gone. Crumbled to dust, maybe, or absorbed into... whatever this was. The dark side still lingered in the collapsed chamber like a bad smell, but when Serra reached for the Force—
Nothing.
Just the hollow echo of where it should have been, like pressing on a bruise that went all the way down to the bone.
She'd tried to scream. What emerged was a sound somewhere between a bark and a howl that echoed off the stone walls and made her new ears flatten against her skull in distress.
That had been three hours ago.
The thing about being a charhound, Serra was discovering, was that it came with instincts.
Bad ones.
She'd nearly bolted after a rock-rat that scurried across her path, her new body dropping into a hunting crouch before her human mind caught up with what was happening. She'd bitten her own tongue trying to form words, which had hurt. Her mouth wasn't shaped for Basic anymore, her tongue was too long and her teeth were too sharp and every time she tried to say something it came out as a series of yips and growls that meant absolutely nothing.
The 212th's base was a two-day walk from here. Maybe less, if she could figure out how fast this body could run.
Assuming she didn't get shot on sight.
"Charhounds are native to Elphrona," she remembered from some briefing or another, the memory surfacing with irritating clarity. "Aggressive, territorial, capable of projecting flames at temperatures exceeding—"
She didn't remember the exact number. She remembered it was high.
She also remembered that standard protocol for encountering an aggressive charhound was to shoot first and not bother with questions at all, because charhounds couldn't answer them anyway.
Fantastic.
Serra sat back on her haunches in the shadow of a collapsed pillar and tried very hard not to have a breakdown. The body she was wearing didn't seem built for crying—her eyes were designed for hunting, for tracking movement across vast distances, for seeing heat signatures in the dark. Not for expressing human grief and terror.
Her tail, apparently, was built for expressing everything else. It was currently curled tight against her back legs, the canine equivalent of hugging herself.
Right, she thought, trying to rally. Okay. You're a Jedi. You've survived worse than this. You survived the Harvester of Sorrow. You survived the Siege of Ryloth. You survived that dinner party Bail Organa threw where you had to make small talk with seventeen senators for four hours.
You can survive being a dog.
The pep talk wasn't working.
She pushed herself to her feet—all four of them, Force help her—and started walking. The sooner she got back to base, the sooner someone could figure out how to fix this.
If it could be fixed.
Don't think about that. She told herself firmly. Just walk.