Knock.
Knock.
The heavy wood reverberated with two quick, sharp raps.
A faint moan caught in his throat as Draqen quickly estimated the cadence.
He suppressed his annoyance, keeping in mind that his master, Master Qarro, was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, in silent concentration.
It was well past midnight.
Thus far, Sidious had not been gracious enough to show so much as the hem of his robes.
Draqen could only pray this late arrival was the elusive man; his previous trips to unbolt the door had yielded nothing but silent servants bearing offerings of wine and meat with rye bread.
He yanked the door inward and threw back the heavy iron bolts.
Draqen’s eyes instinctively lowered.
A youngster with a head that hardly reached the middle of his chest stood in the entrance instead of a man.
For a second, his thoughts wavered, racing through potential outcomes—a boy?
Or a dwarf, maybe?
The heavy cowl covering their face cast deep shadows over the visitor’s upper features.
In the faint light of the hallway, all that could be seen were the firm chin, pale lips, and the sharp, straight line of the nose.
It was a boy.
Just a child.
Draqen’s brow furrowed in immediate irritation; this was not their intended, that was obvious.
Stepping across the threshold, he scanned both lengths of the corridor.
The hallway was empty.
The boy was entirely alone.
“Boy,” Draqen almost barked, his voice a low hiss.
“You had best leave this place. If someone sent you with a message, speak it now and begone.”
He received no response.
The child remained as motionless as a graveyard statue, not even a twitch disturbing the line of his lips.
“Boy!” Draqen called out, sharper this time.
“Are you daft?”
Losing patience, Draqen reached out to roughly shove the intruder aside.
But his hand never made a connection.
Instantly, his entire body locked.
He was frozen in place, paralyzed by an invisible, crushing supernatural force.
Only his eyes could move, rolling wildly in their sockets as terror pierced his sudden immobility.
He strained his gaze downward, looking at the child, and felt his blood turn to ice.
The boy’s lips had curled.
It was a small, mocking smile—incredibly cruel, carrying what he could perceive as malice, and that had no right to belong to a child.
“You should learn to be more careful, Draqen,” the boy said.
His voice was youthful, yet it possessed a terrifyingly calm contradiction.
With a casual lift of his small hand, the boy hoisted Draqen entirely off the floor.
Still paralyzed in that unseen vice, the larger man was effortlessly levitated backwards into the chamber.
Draqen’s eyes widened in sheer panic.
Behind them, the heavy door swung shut on its hinges, the bolts sliding back into place with a definitive thud without the boy ever touching them.
The child strode into the room uninvited, guiding his frozen captive like a piece of drifting luggage before dropping him a few feet from the Master, who was already rising from his meditative posture.
With a negligent flick of his wrist, the boy released his grip.
Draqen collapsed onto the floor, gasping frantically for air, his lungs burning from the temporary deprivation.
“Boy, who are you? Did Sidious send you?” Qarro demanded.
The master did his utmost to suppress the sudden tremor of fear in his voice, but the effort was entirely futile.
Robb felt it all.
The master’s terror wafted off him in thick, delicious waves, saturating the ambient air.
It pleased him immensely; it was the proper tribute.
“I continually forget how blind and lacking in power you force users truly are,” Robb said softly.
He tilted his head back, allowing the cowl to fall away.
Now exposed to the chamber’s light, the two men flinched.
Framing the boy’s face was a shock of dark auburn hair, but it was his eyes that commanded their horror—they were a burning, sulfurous yellow, swirling with the corrupting fire of the dark side.
That face, Qarro thought.
He had seen that face once in his vision, but it could not be the fallen; he was a man well-grown judging by the servant’s story.
Then, Palpatine dropped his shroud.
The Force Stealth that had masked his true nature vanished, and the raw, unmitigated torrent of the dark side flooded the room.
It was an oppressive, suffocating miasma.
Draqen, who had just managed to scramble back to his feet, let out a choked gasp.
His crude, unrefined senses were instantly overloaded by the sheer magnitude of the malice, hatred, and absolute authority washing over him.
His mind fractured under the pressure; he collapsed, his body seizing violently as white froth gathered at his lips.
With a careless gesture of his hand, Robb flipped the seizing man onto his side, ensuring the fool wouldn’t choke to death on his fluids.
He still had uses for him.
Master Qarro fared little better.
The master fell heavily to his knees, the sheer atmospheric pressure of the dark side forcing his head down.
Blood began to trickle from his nose, staining his lip as he desperately tried to draw upon the ambient energies of the world to maintain consciousness.
He capitulated, pinning himself to the floor with one hand just to keep from blacking out entirely.
Robb looked down at the kneeling master, and his young voice carried a chillingly shrewd levity.
As expected.
But tell me, Qarro…
how long can you tolerate and adapt to even this minute flow of my power?”
Qarro let out a strained, erratic cackle, the sound raw and desperate as he fought the crushing atmospheric pressure to force himself back onto his feet.
“Sidious,” the Braovosi breathed.
The realization hit him with the force of a physical blow.
This boy was the fallen; he was the chosen avatar of the aether.
Even now the secret currents of the world appeared to convulse and riot fiercely at the boy’s revelation.
To Qarro’s senses, it seemed as if he were marooned in the very heart of a great ocean while a great storm pounded the surrounding waters.
Such unlimited might.
Such terrible, complete strength.
It was far more than he had calculated before this meeting.
This was a god.
A god descended to this dull world and validated every conspiracy theory and hidden scripture he’s ever believed in.
The prophecy was right.
Still, he never imagined in his wildest, fevered visions that the Fallen would be in the shape of a child.
Unless the crossing from the greater aether to the world required a fresh vessel, he would never have imagined the Fallen taking the shape of a child.
“In the flesh,” Palpatine murmured, cutting through the master’s frantic internal monologue.
The ancient Sith stepped closer, his tiny boots making no sound against the stone floor.
As he moved, his consciousness expanded, effortlessly breaching Qarro’s mental defenses.
He began sifting through the man’s entire existence, reducing decades of memories, secrets, and trauma into readable pages within a matter of seconds.
“Such a grand, ambitious life you have engineered for yourself, Qarro,” Palpatine spoke softly, his voice a chilling contrast to the pressure radiating from his small frame.
“I admire your hunger. I admire your relentless search for the esoteric. But I must wonder—how far is that ambition prepared to carry you? To those who possess true authority, to those who harbor a far greater desire to serve at my hand, you are but a speck of cosmic dust.”
A practiced scowl marred the boy’s noble features, a flawless performance designed to test the limits of the Braovosi’s resolve.
In truth, Palpatine already knew the exact contours of the man’s psyche; he knew precisely what would be offered and exactly how this petty drama would play out.
“What can you possibly offer me in exchange for the dark gifts you seek?” Palpatine demanded, his tone dropping into a cold, transactional register.
“What can you surrender that would make you worth my patronage?”
“Everything…” Qarro wheezed.
The word left his lips like a dying breath, torn from the very depths of his soul.
He dug his fingers into the stone floor, his vision blurring, yet his gaze remained locked onto the burning yellow eyes of the child before him.
The boy chuckled quietly, with a vibration on his lips.
It was a dark, insidious sound, wholly incongruous with his youthful frame, sending a violent shudder straight through Qarro’s spine.
“Your everything is not enough,” the Dark Lord of the Sith whispered, his voice lowering into a frightfully aloof hum.
“I’ll show you.”
Slowly, Palpatine came forward.
His small hand moved with steady grace until his palm was flat against the old master’s brow.
The floodgates of the mind burst open.
Palpatine didn’t just give Qarro information.
He ripped open the man’s psyche and poured out a carefully controlled and horrific torrent of his own memories into Qarro’s consciousness.
Qarro saw a hidden world of obsidian and thunderstorm, where a cult of tens of thousands knelt in the blind, ecstatic worship of a single throne.
The vision shifted, expanding exponentially.
He was shown Coruscant—a staggering city-covered world of trillions, a planet entirely encased in glittering steel and towering spires, with a vast galaxy brought to its heel.
He beheld the devastating armada of this “Galactic Empire”: thousands of mile-long ships, “Star Destroyers” that blotted out the stars, and vessels capable of shattering entire worlds and reducing thriving ecosystems to molten infernos.
Then, the veil of the flesh was stripped away.
Qarro saw the entity’s true visage.
This was no boy.
Behind the youthful eyes of Robb Stark hid a sovereign far older than himself, a master of cosmic manipulation who held absolute dominion over millions of colonized worlds.
He was shown the true apex of the dark side’s geometry—the unnatural arts of essence transfer, alchemy, and absolute subjugation.
He saw the apex servants of the regime, culminating in the towering, armored specter of Darth Vader.
A cybernetic behemoth of immense, devastating power, Vader stood capable of slaughtering armies, yet he remained faithfully at his master’s heel, completely humbled before Palpatine’s supreme might.
In a matter of heartbeats, Qarro’s entire worldview shattered.
He realized with absolute, horrifying clarity how utterly inconsequential his planet truly was.
There were millions of worlds spinning in the black void, systems that made the fabled lands of Essos and Westeros look like primitive dirt plots.
He witnessed millions of alien species—bizarre, terrifying sentient beings he had believed non-existent, creatures whose raw physical strength easily surpassed the apex dragons of Old Valyria.
He looked into anomalies and dark sectors of space far worse than the toxic ruins of the Fourteen Flames or the uncharted, maddening depths of Sothoryos.
When Palpatine finally withdrew his hand, the psychic connection severed like a snapping whip.
Qarro collapsed forward, his face pressing hard against the cold floor.
He gasped frantically for oxygen, his chest heaving as his brain reeled from a profound sensory and existential overload.
He had seen too much.
The structural reality of the cosmos had been violently unveiled.
Sheev Palpatine.
That was the name etched into the fabric of that infinite empire.
Emperor of a galaxy.
Even as he lay shivering, Qarro’s mind fractured trying to comprehend the sheer vastness of a single star system containing multiple inhabited worlds, let alone a galaxy holding billions of souls.
The truth was a painful burden to a man who had commanded stellar systems; his knowledge, his wealth, his very existence was little.
But in the midst of Qarro’s terror, a cool, analytical thought began to dawn.
Darth Sidious had been here, trapped on this medieval backwater world.
Something terrible must have happened to put the soul of a cosmic emperor into the flesh of a northern child.
More essentially, the Emperor could not leave.
There were no mile-long ships here.
No hyperlanes.
There was no escape.
“Careful with your thoughts, priest,” Palpatine warned, his voice dropping an octave into a low, predatory purr.
Qarro flinched, the mental reprimand striking him with physical force, as if he received a backhand.
Even amidst the catastrophic ruin of his worldview, his stray thoughts had not escaped the Emperor’s notice.
The boy-emperor was reading his mind as easily as a book, tracking the exact moment Qarro’s intellect had pivoted to analyze his exile.
“My Emperor,” the Braovosi stammered, the title tasting foreign yet entirely correct on his tongue.
“Forgive me.”
Without a second thought, Qarro shifted his weight and fully prostrated himself, pressing his forehead against the cold, unyielding stone.
Every ounce of his former academic arrogance had evaporated.