LEILANI SERENNO bridged the past and the present, born into a family of cruelty and then groomed to fulfil a role in the grand scheme of things. She was a puppet manipulated by her brother, ensnared in a larger narrative orchestrated by the Force. Y...
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It was almost as if another being controlled her body—her movements were no longer her own, her limbs carried forward by something beyond instinct, beyond thought. The weight of her exhaustion, of her grief, should have rooted her to the ground, should have made each step feel like wading through the wreckage of everything she had lost, but instead, she moved with the certainty of something ancient. Something eternal. Every fibre of her being was fractured, split open in ways she could not name, and yet she was more whole than she had ever been. It was as if she had peeled away the skin of her former self, shed the weight of everything she had carried, and what remained was something lighter, sharper, something that had always been there beneath it all.
For so long, she had clung to the past, gripping it with desperate fingers as if she could hold it together by sheer will alone. She had lived in the memory of Serenno, in the shape of her father's legacy, in the echoes of Dooku's choices that had stretched like a shadow across her life. She had anchored herself in the present too, in the immediacy of war, in the sharp clarity of a battlefield where the past no longer mattered and the future could not yet touch her. She had never looked beyond the moment, never dared to reach for something ahead of her. But Obi-Wan had. He had always walked with one eye turned toward the horizon, toward the path yet unwritten. She had watched him do it, and had marvelled at the way he could step forward even as the ground crumbled beneath him. And now, now she understood. She had been their past, carrying the weight of their history through Dooku's name. She had been their present, fighting alongside them, standing unshaken as the galaxy burned. And she would be their future. Not as an echo of what had been, not as a ghost bound to memory, but as something more.
But not alone. Never alone.
Dooku had always understood the shape of power. He had wielded it, shaped it, let it carve its way through history with the same precision as a blade through flesh. He had been raised to rule, sculpted into a leader by forces far older than himself, shaped by the doctrine of the Jedi, the expectations of Serenno, the quiet, insidious whispers of fate that had wound themselves around his name long before he had even spoken it.
And yet—here, now, he felt something unfamiliar, something foreign pressing against the edges of his consciousness. It was not fear. He had abandoned fear long ago, stripped it from his bones as one might shed an old, tattered cloak. It was not doubt, either. Dooku had never doubted the choices he had made, never allowed himself the weakness of regret. No, this was something else entirely.
It was inevitability.
He had felt it creeping toward him for some time now, lingering at the edges of his awareness like a storm on the horizon. The war was reaching its final movement, its grand crescendo, the final act of a story that had been written long before the first shot had been fired. He had spent decades watching, waiting, and moving pieces across a board that spanned the galaxy itself, and yet—this was the first time he had truly felt it slip from his grasp. Not because his enemies had outmanoeuvred him, not because the Republic had suddenly found its strength, but because the shape of power was changing. And he could not stop it.
