Barriss Offee: Shattered Serenity by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Barriss-Offee-Shattered-Serenity-1249601456

BarissOffee210-10-ezgif.com-video-to-gif-converter

The Sorrow-Eater

The air in the deep trenches of the abandoned Separatist orbital refinery wasn’t just cold; it was necrotic. It drank the warmth of Barriss Offee’s breath and gave back nothing. Her boots, soft-soled for stealth, crunched on a rime of frozen atmosphere that wept from fractured conduits. Glow-rods, clipped to her grey pilgrim’s robes, cast jittering pools of light that seemed only to deepen the surrounding darkness. She was not here as a Jedi Knight, not anymore. She was a seeker in the shadows, a surgeon of the Force, drawn to this carcass of a station by a tremor in the fabric of things—a silent, sucking scream.

It was a mystery. Crews vanished, not in violence, but in a gradual, eerie quieting. Final transmissions spoke not of panic, but of a profound, welcome melancholy. Then, silence.

Her first clue was the sound. Not a scream, but a… hum. A lullaby woven from the sigh of depressurization and the groan of dying metal. It resonated in the hollow of her chest. She followed it, a melody of exquisite sadness, into the heart of the refinery’s processing core—a vast cathedral of machinery now still and glittering with frost.

In the center, on a dais of fused circuitry, it waited.

It wore the form of a man, or had once. Tall, gaunt, draped in robes that were not cloth, but solidified shadow, threads of abyssal silk that drank her light. His face was elongated, pale as a grub, devoid of hair or brows. But his eyes… his eyes were deep wells of reflective black, mirrors that showed Barriss her own face, small and afraid.

“A visitor,” the thing said. Its voice was the sound of a perfectly tuned crystal glass vibrating at the edge of shattering. “A Jedi. No… something more. Something… conflicted.”

Barriss ignited her lightsaber. The blue plasma hummed, a defiant sun in that light-starved place. “What are you?”

“A connoisseur,” it replied, tilting its head. It did not draw a weapon. “I am Savras. And you, Barriss Offee, are a vintage I have long wished to sample. Your emotional bouquet is… legendary. Confusion. Faith shattered. Righteous anger buried under layers of dutiful penitence. A vintage of exquisite complexity.”

“You feed on emotion.”

“I curate it,” Savras corrected, taking a slow step forward. His shadow stretched, wrong, independent of the light. “Fear is crude, a sparkling wine—effervescent but shallow. Rage is a harsh spirits, burning the palate. But sorrow… despair… guilt… these are rich, aged wines. Full-bodied. They sustain. The crews here… their loneliness, their longing for home… I gave them peace. I drank their melancholy and left them empty, serene. A kindness, really.”

“A predation,” Barriss spat, yet she did not advance. The horror was not in a threat of violence, but in his calm, his terrible appreciation.

“Is it? You Jedi fence with lightsabers, a violence of the body. I duel with symphonies of the soul. Let us duel, Barriss. Let me taste what you hide. The galaxy believes you a redeemed penitent. But I sense the storm beneath the ice.”

He raised a hand, not to attack, but as a conductor summoning the first note. The hum in the station deepened, becoming a physical pressure.

It began not with pain, but with memory. Not her own, but the echo of emotion within the chamber. The despair of a mechanic watching his homeworld burn on the news feed. The guilty relief of a survivor. These ghosts of feeling stirred, amplified, and then pulled from the very walls, streaming into Savras. He grew subtly more substantial, his shadow denser.

Then he turned the lens on her.

The first pull was gentle. A seduction. The crushing guilt from the bombing of the Jedi Temple Hangar—not the act itself, but the profound loneliness of the decision—rose unbidden. It was a bitter tang on her soul’s tongue. Savras inhaled, a slow, rapturous breath.

“Ah… yes. The isolation of the principled betrayer. Divine.”

Barriss clenched her jaw, focusing on her training. Serenity. Empty mind. But her path was not the pure Jedi path anymore. Her serenity was a practiced facade, a lake with turbulent depths.

Savras smiled, a crack in the pale mask. “You cannot give me peace, Jedi, because you do not possess it. You have only buried the tempest. Give me the tempest.”

The pull intensified. It was not an attack she could parry with a blade. It was an intimate violation. The terror of her trial,
...(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 :)