Barriss Offee: Shadows Remember by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Barriss-Offee-Shadows-Remember-1249601949

Barriss Offee: Shadows Remember ANIMATION

The Hollow Star

The stars had gone silent.

Barriss Offee sat in the lotus of meditation aboard her transport, the Vigilant Seed, listening to that silence through the Force — an endless hush that spread across the dark between suns like a wound. The hum of hyperspace barely stirred her mind. Somewhere, in the static of her thoughts, a whisper began.

Barriss…

It was not the Force. It was not her imagination. It was something else — something vast, intimate, and deeply wrong.

She opened her eyes.

The cockpit lights flickered once, twice, and then stabilized. Through the viewport, the streaks of hyperspace warped, collapsing into a whirl of shadowed energy. An impossible thing glimmered at the edge of vision: a dead star, pulsing faintly red against the black.

Her navicomputer hissed static.
“Coordinates recalculating,” said the ship’s droid co-pilot, a skeletal RA-7 unit. “Master Offee, we appear to have deviated from hyperspace lane G-12.”

“I didn’t order a deviation.”

“Then something else did.”

The whisper came again, closer now, sliding between the droid’s syllables. You sought silence, Barriss Offee. Come find it.

She stood, her brown robes gathering shadows. The darkness outside seemed to ripple as if aware of her gaze. Somewhere in that gloom, a single pale moon shimmered like a reflection on water. It wasn’t on any chart.

Barriss hesitated, then spoke: “Plot descent.”

“Unknown system,” replied the droid, uncertain. “Atmospheric readings—unstable. Recommend—”

“Do it.”

The Vigilant Seed obeyed.

The moon’s surface was a wasteland of glass dunes and fractured obsidian. The air hissed faintly, metallic. Barriss stepped down the ramp, the Force pressing like cold fingers against her heart. The silence here was not absence; it was presence—thick, deliberate.

She drew her hood over her blue-black hair. Her olive skin felt the heat radiating from the ground.

The whisper came again, not as sound but as vibration in her bones.

You carry light, but you’ve hidden it. You are perfect food.

Her hand found her lightsaber. “Show yourself.”

A sound, low and velvet: laughter, distant and echoing through the canyons of crystal.

Then the dunes moved.

They did not crumble or slide, but breathed. Something immense shifted beneath the translucent crust of the desert. Glass plates lifted like scales. A tremor rippled outward.

The droid’s voice crackled over her commlink. “Master Offee, seismic—”

The signal died in a scream of static.

And from beneath the dunes, it came forth.

The creature was neither beast nor machine, neither alive nor dead. It crawled forth like a tide of shadows wearing the imitation of a body. Its form was uncertain — sometimes serpent, sometimes spider, sometimes nothing at all but darkness with a thousand eyes.

Barriss ignited her saber, the green blade burning like a defiant thought in the emptiness.

The thing recoiled slightly, as though tasting her light.

Then it spoke, in a dozen voices layered like chords:
Beautiful, isn’t it, the sound of your own fear?

“I’ve fought worse.”

You fought the Jedi, it purred. You betrayed your temple. You turned from light because you understood its hunger. You are not here by chance, Barriss Offee. You are here because you are like me.

The green blade trembled. She had not heard her name spoken like that — not since the war, not since the trial, not since the long years of exile.

“I came because something called me,” she said. “What are you?”

The thing smiled — she could feel it smile though it had no face. I am what remains when the Force looks away. I am the silence between stars. I am the hunger that cleanses light.

“Then you are nothing.”

Then so are you.

It lunged.

Barriss spun, her saber cutting arcs of green flame through the black. Each strike landed on smoke and memory. The creature scattered, reforming behind her, whispering through her mind like oil through cloth.

The Force abandoned you. Let me fill that silence. I can give you peace.

“You don’t understand peace,” she said, teeth clenched.

It circled her, its mass spiraling upward into a colu
...(more at https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai).
For more supergirl, chun li, batgirl, tifa, lara croft, wonder woman, rogue and much more, please visit my page at www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai - Thanks for your support :)