Lirka Ka
The
Ziggurat pulsed again. Not in motion—not in the shifting of its stones or the trembling of its halls—but in something
deeper. Something that
saw.
It had tasted
her now.
Lirka Ka.
And in that moment, it
knew.
The specter in front of her
laughed.
A dry, brittle sound, like bone scraping against stone. It did not laugh
with amusement, nor with mockery. It laughed as something
that had seen this before—as something that had lived this before. As if it were caught in the memory of a joke that had played out a thousand times before and still found itself in the punchline.
Its
features melted, contorting into something
half-forgotten, as if the shape it wore had never been its own, had never belonged to the dead woman that Lirka had devoured. The
old flesh was dust now.
She was Lirka Ka.
And yet—
"Do you believe that?"
The voice came from
nowhere.
From
the walls, the floor, the brand on her skull. It vibrated inside her bones, wrapping around her spine like a
clawed hand, pulling at the edges of what she had
built.
It had heard the
mantra before. It had heard the
justifications, the self-declarations, the
foundation of self that Lirka had carved into the galaxy with steel and fire and blood.
And it
wasn't enough.
Not here.
Not where the
dead did not stay buried.
The specter
stepped forward, mirroring her every move. Not as a challenge. Not as an enemy. But as a
truth, walking closer.
"You stole a name. You wear a name. But tell me,
does it fit?"
The words curled, dug deep.
"Do you feel it, the way the pieces of it rub together? The places where it doesn't quite align? The parts that don't belong? That never did?"
The specter smiled, its face shifting
again, a
thousand different faces, flickering between lifetimes that had never been lived—faces that might have been hers, might have been someone else's.
"How many times have you killed yourself to make yourself?"
And the
Ziggurat listened.
It did not need
to convince her. It did not need to argue.
Because it knew the answer.
It simply had to make
her see it.
---
Commodore Helix
There was
no floor beneath
Helix's feet anymore.
Just
void.
Not the blackness of space, nor the whispering dark of the Ziggurat's halls. But
a nothingness that stretched in every direction—a vacuum that pressed against the edges of his
thought, of his
existence.
Not even the
collective hum of his own
hivemind could be heard here.
For the first time since he had
expanded, since he had become something
beyond singularity, there was
only him.
Alone.
Isolated.
It had been a long time since he had felt this
small.
The Otherspace stretched wide, but
this was not his Otherspace. It was an
imitation, yes—but it was
too perfect. Too hungry.
Because Otherspace was
nothing.
And
this place was trying to make him nothing.
The voice did not speak in words. It
shivered, moving through the vacuum, curling inside his
metallic frame, rattling against his
void-forged bones.
The
hounds were gone.
The
droids were gone.
The
Sephi was gone.
Only
Helix remained.
Alone.
And the
void knew it.
It whispered—not in sound, but in
certainty.
"You have outlived your purpose."
The
words were not a taunt.
They were
a fact.
"You do not belong anywhere. You said it yourself."
"Then why do you struggle?"
A great,
hulking thing moved in the dark, its shape only half-seen, half-formed—a being too massive to truly exist in three dimensions, its edges
curling inward, folding over itself in ways that should not be possible.
But
Helix knew it.
He had seen its kind before.
He had seen
what came for the ones who did not belong.
"You are not real."
The
form shifted, becoming
smaller, pressing closer.
Pressing inward.
"And when you stop struggling, neither will we be."
And then—
The
Sephi's voice.
Distant.
Not here. But
somewhere.
And
Helix was not nothing yet.
The
thing in the void hesitated.
And the
Otherspace began to crack.
Darth Strosius
swarmed like ants, alarmed by their Prophet's sudden shift in bearing. 
