Barriss Offee: Shadowed Grace by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Barriss-Offee-Shadowed-Grace-1249602007

Barriss Offee: Shadowed Grace ANIMATION

The Pulse in the Hollow Stones

The twin moons of Derrah Prime hung like glimmering eyes above the broken ruins, casting light across the vast terraces and collapsed corridors of a civilization long gone. Vines hung from shattered arches. Pools of stagnant water glimmered like pieces of glass. Every sound in this place—every drip, every scrape—seemed amplified, as if the stones themselves remembered voices and whispered them back.

Barriss Offee pressed her back to the curve of a broken pillar. Her breath trembled, shallow and deliberate. Her lightsaber was unlit, the hilt pressed against her chest like a promise she dared not keep.

The creature was near again.

She could hear it. Or perhaps feel it—the faint vibration through the ground, like the rumble of something vast breathing just beneath the surface. It did not track by scent or sight. It hunted by heartbeat.

And her own was betraying her.

She closed her eyes. The Force came as a thin thread, frayed and weak here, as though the planet itself had once been drowned in silence. She reached along that thread, trying to steady her pulse, to make herself a part of the ruin, to vanish.

But the stones pulsed with her rhythm.

From somewhere beyond the courtyard came a slow dragging sound—stone across stone. Then, a deep inhalation, as though the very air were drawn into something cavernous and unseen.

“Barriss…”

The voice was soft, lilting, almost kind. It was her own.

Her eyes snapped open.

No. Not her. Not anymore. The creature had learned her voice.

It was a mockery, a trick the mist inside the ruins played upon intruders. The scavengers who once came here called it the Listener.

Barriss remembered the whisper she’d overheard in the last settlement before entering the Vale:
“Don’t let it hear your heart. It listens through stone. It waits for the tremor under your ribs.”

Now she was alone in the temple’s corpse, and the Listener knew she lived.

She slipped between two fallen columns into what had once been a gallery. The air was thick and old, full of dust motes swirling like dying stars. Frescoes covered the walls—depictions of robed figures lifting their hands toward a sun carved in gold leaf, the paint peeling but still magnificent.

She felt the history pressing down, heavy and sorrowful. This had been a place of worship once. Then something came, and all hearts within had ceased at once.

Her hand brushed the wall, feeling faint tremors.

“Why are you here, Jedi?” the voice whispered again, closer now.

“I am not a Jedi,” Barriss murmured, more to herself than to it. “Not anymore.”

“Not anymore,” the creature echoed, with faint amusement. “So what are you?”

She swallowed. “Alive.”

The answer came with a purr of satisfaction, like silk on stone. “Alive… that is enough.”

Something slithered through the far archway—too swift for sight, but she caught the sound of damp flesh sliding over marble. The ground vibrated softly as it moved.

She dared not ignite her saber. The hum would draw it like a beacon.

Instead, she turned and ran silently down the hall, bare feet gliding over dust. The hall curved downward into darkness, where air grew colder.

The heartbeat was loud now—her own, traitorous and wild.

She stopped, pressing her palm against her chest, whispering an old meditative chant under her breath. “The heart is the drum. Silence the drum.”

It slowed. For a moment.

Then came another sound, quieter yet infinitely worse—the echo of another heartbeat, outside her body, matching hers.

Barriss entered a circular chamber lit by a pale shaft of moonlight falling from a rent in the ceiling. The floor was cracked mosaic, its pattern shaped like interlocking circles. In the center lay an ancient altar, its edges carved with flowing script.

She stepped closer. The writing shimmered faintly, as if wet. Her fingers traced it, and words formed in her mind:

The gods of this place desired hearts that remembered.

A faint smile touched her lips. “Then they would adore mine.”

The floor trembled.

She spun—too late. From the shadows poured a dense, liquid mist that took on the suggestion of form—something tall and narrow, its edges wavering as if underwater. Eyes? No. Not eyes, but hollows that gave the illusion of attention.

It stood
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