Chapter Text
CHAPTER ONE
“The Cell Below the Vault”
The alarms had long since been silenced.
The rebel strike team moved through the final corridor with practiced caution, boots echoing against the durasteel floor. Smoke still lingered in the air from the last explosive charge. The Imperial base had fallen faster than anticipated — not due to poor defenses, but something else. Something wrong. Empty halls, locked terminals. As if the whole place had been left to die.
Captain Marell’s voice cut through the comms.
“No living personnel left. Just auto-turrets and a few old droids. This place wasn’t just abandoned — it was buried.”
But buried with something.
Tera, the slicer, had found it first. A hidden sub-vault, sealed with encryption codes so old and classified even the base command hadn’t known it existed. Multiple lockdowns. Physical and force barriers. Sensors went blind the moment they got near it. It was the kind of place meant to stay hidden — not from enemies, but from everyone.
They cracked through it layer by layer. One false move would’ve triggered a deadman protocol, but they worked fast — methodical. Experienced.
And then they found the last door.
The tomb
its walls plated in force-dampening alloys, its air recycled through internal systems, its lights flickering with age. There was only one occupant. Subject Zero , the identification said
A man. But he was barely a man anymore.
Unconscious. sprawled on the floor,Pale. Thin, but not frail — there was power beneath the surface, coiled like a dormant storm.
limbs locked in force-repression cuffs — thick bands of red-lit metal clamped around his wrists, ankles, and neck each one pulsing faintly with red containment glyphs, like veins of poison running just under the skin. His skin was pale from lack of sun, hair tangled and overgrown. Scarred, but not wounded.
He didn’t move but Even asleep, his presence was wrong. Heavy. Like gravity bent around him.
No one in the Rebel squad dared step too close at first.
Tera after a minute stepped closer, her voice hushed.
“Why lock up one guy like this?”
He wasn’t just behind a cell.
He was behind four.
An isolation unit sealed inside a vault of durasteel.
Inside a Force-dampening chamber, its walls laced with cortosis alloy and suppression emitters.
Behind multiple layers of encryption, dead-man failsafes, and power-draining fields designed to nullify even the strongest Jedi.
This wasn’t a prison.
It was a containment site. A tomb with life inside it.
The medic scanned him.
“He’s alive. Barely. But… these cuffs — they’re only used for high-level force-sensitives. The kind that melt starships with their minds.”
Someone muttered,
“A Sith?”
But that wasn’t right.
So the Rebels stared at him. Silent. Stunned. Terrified.
Not because of what he had done — but because of what it meant that he was here at all.
“You don’t lock up someone like this unless you’re afraid of what happens if they ever wake up.”
And now…
they were going to set him free.
Because his face, underneath the bruises and disuse, was young. Tired. Beautiful, in a way. Familiar.
Captain Marell took a step back.
“Get him out. Carefully. And call in a full evac. If the Empire was hiding him here, we need to know why.”
They got him back to base within hours. He didn’t stir.
Medical scans revealed something strange: his brain patterns, though dulled, didn’t match sedation. They matched force suppression. He wasn’t unconscious — he was trapped. Cut off. Drugged, locked in a cell both physical and spiritual.
The cuffs were removed slowly. Layer by layer. Each one released with a hiss of energy and a surge of static in the Force — a wave that washed over the entire rebel base like a silent scream.
He didn’t wake.