Her amber eyes, usually bright with an unsettling awareness, were shadowed with weariness. The sneers and taunts of Kaius and his sycophantic entourage stung more than any physical blow. Kaius, a privileged son of Serenno, treated the Academy as his personal playground, and Zara, a reluctant initiate brought in under the dubious patronage of the enigmatic Lady Nocturne, was his favorite target. He and his friends, a pack of arrogant young men, saw her as an outsider, a dark stain on their pristine image of the Brotherhood. Their constant harassment, punctuated by pointed remarks and condescending laughter, chipped away at her already fragile resolve.
She'd already endured a humiliating public shaming, a drink sloshing over her head as Kaius and his cronies jeered, calling her a "poor slave" unworthy of the Brotherhood's hallowed halls. The humiliation had fueled a simmering rage within her, a fire she desperately tried to contain. She'd returned to the female barracks, the taste of the spilled drink bitter on her tongue, silently plotting her revenge.
That night, sleep offered no respite. Instead, she was plunged into a vision – a vivid, horrifying premonition of Kaius's death. The details were fragmented, obscured by a swirling vortex of dark energy, but the outcome was undeniable: Kaius would die, violently, long after the events unfolding around her. The vision shattered her carefully constructed plan for a simple, petty revenge. The knowledge that she wouldn't be the instrument of his demise ignited a new, more potent frustration. His death was inevitable but she was not a part of that writing.
Driven by a desperate need for action, some sort of vengeance, she slipped out of the barracks under the cloak of darkness and made her way to the male dormitory. The air hung heavy with the scent of sweat and sleep. She found Kaius, his thick, curly hair splayed across the pillow, his chest rising and falling in the rhythm of peaceful slumber.
She'd planned to use a spell, a dark ritual she'd painstakingly deciphered from one of the Sith texts. It promised a subtle form of retribution, a debilitating hex, but it proved useless. The incantation died on her lips, the dark energy refusing to coalesce. Frustration clawed at her, tightening its grip around her throat. The spell failed, but her anger refused to abide.
"I have seen your death..." she whispered, her voice a venomous hiss in the stillness of the night. She had failed in one approach, so she chose another. The words felt hollow, devoid of the power she craved.
Instead of magic, she resorted to a more mundane act of defiance. From her boot, she drew a slender, sharp knife. With a swift, precise movement, she snipped a thick lock of Kaius's hair, a small, symbolic act of rebellion. Again and again she sliced through his thick head of hair. The soft snip of the blade was the only sound that broke the silence of the barracks that night.
She left the dormitory, the stolen locks of hair that hadn't fallen to the ground clutched in her hand. It wasn't the grand, devastating revenge she had craved, but it was something. A mark of defiance laid upon him, a tiny reminder of her power, her ability to reach him through his vulnerability. But it was a poor substitute for the thrill of true vengeance, the satisfaction of seeing her predictions unfold.
The following days were a tense stalemate. Kaius and his friends, though shaken by the missing hair, remained outwardly defiant, their sneers barely veiled. Zara, however, felt a shift within herself. The fleeting sense of power she'd felt in the barracks was replaced by a growing unease. Her visions, once vivid and clear, were becoming muddled, fragmented. The future, once a readily accessible landscape, was now shrouded in a deceptive mist.
One evening, during a training session, Zara felt a tremor in the Force, a sudden cold wave of dread washing over her. She saw a flicker of Kaius, his face contorted in agony, engulfed by a raging fire. Her vision wasn't of his death, as she'd predicted, but of his agonizing demise. But instead of relief or satisfaction, a chilling realization dawned on her. Her act of petty theft had not been trivial. She had somehow disrupted the natural course of events, inadvertently altering Kaius's fate, a fact that sent a shiver down her spine...
