290 AC
“It is only a mere fever, my lady. I promise you.” The old master offered, doing as best as he could to reassure the lady of Winterfell.
He stepped closer, the faint clink of his chain breaking the silence as he set down his wooden bowl, filled with herbs, oils, and small vials of medicine.
“Children often fall ill like this,” he continued.
“Their spirits are strong, but their bodies must learn to endure the North. I have seen it many times. It will pass another day or two, no more than that. It never lasts long.”
Catelyn Stark wasn’t convinced.
She had stayed at her son’s bedside for hours, wiping his brow with a damp cloth and whispering prayers to the Seven that went unanswered.
The fever had come quickly, like a falcon’s strike, and held on with the bite of winter.
Robb was only nine strong, yes, but still just a boy.
Her firstborn.
Her whole world.
She wanted to believe the maester.
Truly, she did.
But his words did little to quiet the fear tightening around her heart.
She needed to see it, needed to see Robb wake, and needed to see the fever break with her own eyes.
Not like this… not lying still, breathing shallow, heat clinging to him as though it meant to consume him.
“The herbal tea I prepared will calm his blood,” Maester Luwin said, more firmly this time.
“For now, he needs what you cannot give him by remaining here at rest. And so do you, my lady.”
I pray this works better than the last, she thought.
“I do not like how long this has held him,” she said at last, her voice thin and strained, trembling on the edge of breaking.
Luwin paused, his hands still hovering over the glass vials in his bowl.
“It will pass,” he said again, more gently this time, bowing his head slightly.
“Master Robb is a strong boy, my lady. Stronger than others who have faced this same prelude, and they always recover, strong as ever. He only needs time… a little more time.”
He waited, but Catelyn did not look at him.
She stayed by the bedside, unmoving, her grip tightening on the furs until her knuckles turned pale.
Her eyes never left Robb’s face.
After a moment, she gave a faint nod and lifted her hand in a small, weary gesture enough to dismiss him, though the plea behind it was clear.
‘Leave me with my son.’
Luwin said nothing more.
He gathered his things, the soft clink of his chain the only sound as he stepped out into the hallway.
“Robb, please come back to me!” she pleaded as she rubbed his cheek with the back of her hand.
“Please.” Another whisper came from her.
How had it come to this point?
He had been thrown down a reactor shaft, but he had fallen deeper still into the abyss of his own supreme arrogance.
His undoing was not a lack of power but a fundamental inability to comprehend the nature of love, that erratic, sentimental variable he had spent a lifetime dismissing, as it was a weakness that could be exploited.
A weakness he never possessed.
And the love Vader had for his son had nearly seen him killed.
“Vader!!!”
The name was a snarl in the theater of his mind, a memory of uncontrolled rage and sudden, blinding betrayal.
He had viewed Darth Vader not as a man, but as a broken, obedient “masterpiece,” a tool forged in trauma, shackled by pain, and supposedly incapable of ever looking back towards the light.
The Sith Lord scowled at the memory of his blindness.
He had viewed the universe solely through the lens of power and transactional cruelty, dismissing redemption as a fairy tale for the weak, and at that moment he thought Vader would’ve destroyed Luke in fear of his own survival, but alas.
That spiritual void had rendered his apprentice’s final act a total shock, a surprise born entirely of Palpatine’s failure to foresee a selfless action in a being he believed he had completely broken.
He had assumed that once a soul was sufficiently stained by the Dark Side, it became mathematically impossible for it to return to selflessness.
How wrong he had been.
Now, he paid the price in full.
He felt his spirit being bombarded by psychic energies that clawed at his essence, tearing his very soul in a dozen directions.
He deserved the torment, yet he yearned to be free of it.
This agony, and the burgeoning self-hatred for his failure, fueled a new resolve.
He would not be broken.
Not now.
Not ever.
He needed to survive.
He had accounted for every treachery; he had woven contingencies within contingencies.
His soul was bound to survival by the very fabric of the Dark Side.
Exegol was to be his sanctuary.
The ritual, the vessels, the transfer of consciousness…
His former apprentice had failed to destroy those clones, for he had never known what he had truly planned nor been aware of it.
Vader knew of his obsession with conquering death and had glimpsed the depths of the dark side he pursued, yet the cyborg’s understanding remained…
incomplete.
Vader understood survival through the Force, the crude persistence of will beyond death, but not the greater truth, dominion over death itself.
That knowledge had always been his alone.
And still, as he remembered, the creature had ambition, for that was the way of the Sith, that was the way of the dark side.
Vader’s quiet searches and his fumbling attempts to uncover secrets never meant for him were almost admirable.
Almost.
But ambition without true understanding was nothing more than another chain.
And in the end, like all things that defied him, Vader would remain exactly where he belonged, dead!
While he endured.
Yet, even in his endurance, it did not come without cost.
And he wondered when this pain would end.
It seemed he had spoken too soon.
The darkness that had surrounded him for what felt like an eternity suddenly shattered.
The agonizing psychic pressure vanished, replaced by a sensation both alien and terrifying.
Air filled his lungs once more, thin and piercingly cold.
He felt the boundaries of flesh again.
Had he been wrong about the transfer to the clone on Exegol?
No.
He could feel the success of the transition.
And yet, the atmosphere was wrong.
The presence it held in the force was wrong.
This place felt foreign, not merely another planet, but something else entirely.
How could he describe it?
He felt distant from the very nexus of the galaxy he knew, as though displaced… elsewhere.
This was not Exegol.
No…
His eyelids felt heavy, sealed shut by a crust of fever and exhaustion.
The simple act of prying them open became a monumental struggle, akin to the brutal physical training his master, Darth Plagueis, had forced upon him in his youth.
He inhaled sharply, his body jolting with a physical weakness so profound it felt like a personal insult to the being he had once been.
For a long, agonizing moment, he did not move.
He could not.
His senses were blunted, muffled as if wrapped in layers of thick, damp wool.
The Force…
It felt slightly different here, denser, perhaps, or more raw in power.
It felt wild; how could this be?
The dark side tugged at him again, and he answered.
He immersed himself in it, using its flow to invigorate his body, desperately pulling that jagged flow into his core to revive his failing nerves.
He needed strength, not just for his spirit, but for his limbs.
And slowly and surely his eyes opened.
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