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Queen Morgan le Fay loved Sir Launcelot best, and ever she desired him, and he would never love her nor do nothing at her request, and therefore she held many knights together for to have taken him by strength…
—Le Morte D’Arthur, Book I, Chapter XL
***
When she sees the Star Destroyers ghost over the horizon, their terrible majesty unveiled over the planet she has toiled over, her heart stops a beat. She wonders if it is finally her death she sees written there, her clean erasure in the blue-white fury of turbolasers scouring this forsaken world clean.
But instead of death, she is given benediction.
"They are at your disposal," Admiral Thrawn says, as he, too, contemplates the ships low on the horizon.
And she realizes, wonder dawning bright and fierce, that tonight is not her end. She has been given wings to fly where she may, to create the designs she has labored on, to build what she has always wanted to build.
She doesn't trust herself to speak. The massive ships settle into formation above this world—hers now, her objectives finally given teeth—and she feels something crack open in her chest. Not breaking but opening, stretching wide to encompass all her designs.
In that moment she is enthralled by the man who has gifted her such freedom.
***
Months pass. He visits seldom, to her frustration.
Sometimes he sends Pellaeon, who keeps his word and never steals her designs, only offers improvements. He is not just a capable Naval officer but an exacting engineer, and the TIE Defenders and her capital ship designs are always sharper and deadlier when he departs.
But it is not Pellaeon she wants to discuss her work with.
So she pours herself into the shipyards, into working on the Star Destroyers he has asked her to improve, into applying her thoughts and metrics to a whole new class of ships that will arc gracefully through the sky and bring fear to their enemies. She designs and sends, after some consideration, a minor upgrade to his flagship: new ablative plating reticulated by an under-weave of composite mesh. It yields a stronger surface at reduced mass, and, almost incidentally, renders a pattern in the hull plating, the stylized outline of a chimaera.
She wonders if he will notice. Wonders if he understands her, these gestures, these small signatures stamped beneath the alloys: I made this for you.
Maybe if she builds enough, improves enough, makes herself indispensable enough, he will return.
And one day, some time after the Star Destroyers arrived, a Lambda-class shuttle appears on the landing pad.
He is Grand Admiral Thrawn now. The uniform has changed to set him further apart from lesser beings, though she prefers the olive of his prior rank, the color that seemed to belong to him in a way this pristine white does not. But she would worship whatever he wears.
She waits for him at the base of the ramp, hands braced behind her back, nails pressed so hard into her skin she wonders if they'll draw blood through the gloves. The wind is sharp and carries the chemical tang from the manufacturing yards, scouring her face with dust. She is dust herself at this point, she thinks, nothing but a byproduct of the endless grind.
Then he steps into the light, immaculate in white, and for one instant she thinks her knees will give. She has forgotten his presence, the way all gravity tips toward him and catches as if on some planetary tide.
He approaches as if there is no one else on the tarmac, as if the entire world has been whittled down to this windy strip of permacrete, the shuttle's engines cooling behind him.
She bows her head, a flex of both body and will. "Sir."
He regards her with that slight smile, the one she has decided must be purposeful cultivation, a gesture meant to unsettle. She finds herself caught in it, searching for meaning in the curve of his mouth.
"Magistrate," he says. The word itself is an elevation.
***
The conference room is small and functional. The table is a slab of polished black stone that catches her reflection darkly, threatening to show her all the flaws she's tried to hide. Her palms are faintly clammy as she grips the edge. She hopes it evaporates before he notices.
He settles across from her, fingers steepled, red eyes narrowing to a point of surgical focus as she discusses what he has come to hear.
"The dorsal hangars are weak points," she says, briskly, as if the words are stones she can skip across water. "I've rerouted power through the lateral arcs so that if they're hit, the excess energy shunts back to the reactor instead of venting into the superstructure. That should prevent a repeat of the Folharr incident."
She slides a datachip across the table with the schematics. Her hands are steady, but she can feel the throb behind her temples, the dry-hot pulse of adrenaline.
She expects him to ask about efficiency loss, the potential for feedback overload. Instead, he rotates the chip between thumb and forefinger and watches the play of light across the gilded circuitry. She aches for a response, some indication that she has not only anticipated his queries but surpassed them. She wants him to say excellent, or perhaps even—if she were permitted such dreams—impressive.
He regards her in silence.
The air between them thickens, barely disturbed by the ventilators overhead. Her neck prickles with sweat beneath her collar. She hates that her own flesh betrays her nerves, her desires.
He sets the chip down, lets it rest in his palm with consideration. "The incident on Folharr was not a failure of design," he says, "but of anticipation. The Rebels are increasingly adept at improvisation."
She could argue the point, but that would be too bold, so she lets it pass. Instead she offers, "If we route power through the microshield regulators, we can bring the heat signatures down by sixty percent." She smiles, imagining their faces when the ruse is revealed, yearning to see it for herself. "They will never see you coming."
He does not smile, but the corners of his eyes crease, the smallest reward. "A satisfactory solution," he says, and she feels the words settle, heavy as a hand on her shoulder.
He examines her, eyes catching on the shape of her jaw, the triangle of her mouth, as if recalibrating a hypothesis.
She finds herself breathing through her nose, shallow and careful, unwilling to cede him the point of her agitation.
She reaches for the chip again, thinking to reclaim it and present an improved version later. But she mistimes it—or so she tells herself later to excuse her actions—her fingers brushing against his palm.
She freezes.
For a half second, there is nothing but the shared brush skin against skin, the pulse of her own blood amplifying the contact until it seems the only thing in the world. Cool where she is warm, faint textured ridges that the receptors of her fingertips are all too pleased to describe to her brain.
She yanks her hand back, pulls her body rigid until her shoulders threaten to spasm.
Thrawn's expression doesn't change. "Your modifications will be field-tested on the Taris run," he says, voice gliding over the awkwardness.
She spends the rest of the meeting chasing his gaze, undecided between flinching from it and wanting it. The shipyard is a lattice of glass and durasteel visible through the viewport above them, every worklight making his uniform gleam brighter, every shadow pooling blue into the hollows of his face. She cannot stop tracking his movements, like some compulsion on the same frequency as her heartbeat.
He asks after the crew, the new technicians, never raising his voice, never lowering his guard. She answers him frankly, watching the way his hands move across the table, how he sometimes pauses as if weighing her words not just for correctness but for nuance, for that spark he seems to value above all else. Every time she thinks she has lost him he returns, sometimes with a question, sometimes just an unspoken invitation for her to fill the gap.
He keeps her there for almost an hour. She would have stayed a year.
When she stands to leave, he says, "Magistrate."
She turns.
He seems to be choosing his words with unusual care. "Your work is..." A pause, barely perceptible. "Exceptional."
She already knows she will spend sleepless nights at the design tables for another look like that. She would trade the alloys she has perfected, the calculations she has solved in fever dreams. Every small magic of her trade, laid at his feet for the flicker of approval she thinks she sees in his eyes.
Afterward, she cradles the memory of the meeting like a bruise, prodding it in private instants, watching the colors bloom. It was nothing, she knows. Less than nothing: a professional encounter, all data and clipped syllables.
But she replays every second with obsessive fidelity, rearranging the details to find new meanings. His fingers on the chip: was that approval? His eyes, unreadable, but perhaps softer at the end than at the start. The touch of their hands: had he felt it too?
When she dreams, she is restless. She dreams of blue fingers spinning a datachip, of TIE Defenders screaming through atmosphere, of the rack and ruin of Dathomir, of incandescent red eyes.
In the dark there is no shame in admitting what has always lived between devotion and desire. Her hand slips between her legs and she imagines his hands instead, hears his voice saying exceptional and well done.
In those instants, she would die for him.
She knows this with the same certainty she knows the tensile strength of durasteel; the exact firing pattern of ion cannons needed to disrupt the primary bridge shield. It is simply fact.
***
She is on Corellia when she hears he has vanished, and her heart stutters, cells squeezing out of sync with the sheer inconceivability of the news.
And then, an instant that feels like prophecy, like the Nightsisters' visions she has always half-believed in: I will find him.
She never doubts she will.
It is easy enough for her to assemble the pieces. The New Republic only sees what it wants to see, and it fails to see the loyalty of the workers she has fed and sheltered for years, the ones who remember her generosity. The New Republic did not imagine that her old credits still bought information, or that her engineers would bake ident chips and sector logistics into droids and send it to her. Or that ships still loyal to her would ferry her work, piece by piece, past the inspections. As long as the quotas are fulfilled, no eyes turn to her.
The search takes months, then years. She pulls threads from a dozen worlds, follows breadcrumbs through Imperial records and whispered rumors in shipyards and cantinas. She burns resources, calls in favors, threatens when necessary. She sets fire to her own pyre time and time again, immolating herself and rising anew as she works towards the only goal that matters.
When she finally touches the star map and realizes she has not just the lock but the key—the path through the hyperspace corridor, the way to him—the instant sends a frisson down her spine, a rush of relief so profound it nearly unmakes her.
***
She brings no fleets, no army. Only herself, the offering at the altar.
And when she passes through the barrier in the Eye of Sion, she feels in her bones that something old and long-buried is awakening within her. The space between galaxies is vast and strange and wrong, but she does not falter.
She will find him. She has always been going to find him.
***
The hangar on the other side is wrong in subtle ways, the architecture strange, the materials unfamiliar. She barely notices.
There, across the deck, she sees him. Her lips part, her breath catches. For a moment they might be standing on the battlements of Corvus, meeting for the first time. The hue of his skin seems deeper, his presence more absolute, as if the emptiness of crossing galaxies has distilled him into a purer form of himself.
He approaches. She bows her head, waiting for his recognition as his good and faithful servant.
"Magistrate," he says, as if they have only been separated for a handful of meetings rather than the pitiless attrition of years.
***
Later, in private, his hand touches her shoulder.
"Only you could have found me here."
In that moment her knees nearly buckle, a sizzle of heat starting in her chest and radiating outward, as if the vector of all her yearning has finally found its mark. Her tongue feels thick, clumsy. All the rehearsed words in her head crumble to dust.
It should feel triumphant, the culmination of years of single-minded devotion. And yet all she can think about is the trembling in her own limbs, the shameful possibility that it has never been about the Empire, about vision, about building something that would triumph over her enemies and outlast her.
It has always been about this. About his approval. About breathing the same air and being seen—truly seen—by him.
She had told him once that she brought her anger to the Empire. But she brought more than that, didn't she?
She brought her longing too, bundled in with the anger, all of it burning, all of it pointed at him. He stands before her now, taller than she remembers, the white uniform pristine despite everything, eyes as searing as she dared remember. She knows he sees the calculation in her, the competence. But she aches, desperately, for him to see something else: her loyalty, her hunger, her fidelity to his vision as much as to any throne.
She glimpses it all in a sudden flash. Perhaps a vision from the Great Mothers, perhaps only her own feverish certainty: not ships or power or the conquest of worlds, but an ending. She sees herself standing between him and the blade and the fire. She sees her body falling and his hand still outstretched, empty.
And beneath it all, a thread of darkness within the weave, the knowledge that none of it has ever truly originated with her. All of it has been shaped by him, by her devotion to him, by the way his voice sounds when he says exceptional.
It is beautiful in an annihilating way, like watching an electrical system arcing with overload, knowing it may burn out soon but powerless not to seek that moment of catharsis.
She realizes she is smiling, a fierce curve that hurts the muscles of her cheeks.
It is not the smile of a woman who has won, or even of a woman who has lost. It is the smile of a woman who already knows the ending, who has seen it behind her eyelids so many times that the shock has gone out of it.
She will never say it aloud. Not to any soul, not even to the silent void between the stars.
But she knows, with a clarity so perfect it is almost cruel, that she would die for him.
And when she does, it is glorious.