Kreia's eyes had stopped working decades ago. But it didn't stop her from seeing.
Her sightless sight had lead her on a journey through months lost in hyperspace. Months spent doing little more than sitting at the controls of her shop, the Ebon Hawk, weaving through subspace corridors like a small child trying to untangle a rope tied into a mess of knots. She had traversed aimlessly, trusting the thing she hated most in the universe to lead her to this strange nexus in the Force. This conduit the force seemed to flow both from, and through.
Kreia gripped the controls, and slowly pulled a lever. The Ebon Hawk lurched, and pushed Kreia back into her seat as the world around her slowed to a crawl, and the luminous glow of hyperspace faded.
Kreia's sightless sight scanned the display of the navicomputer that her only current companion, that contemptible little astromech droid. Small, grey, and barely coming up to her waist at it's full height, the machine was oddly insistent on being sociable.
As it was right now, whistling at her.
"Put some text on the viewport, if you have anything useful to say," Kreia said, not bothering to hide her irritation. It was, after all, only a droid.
Speculative charting records suggest we are in a system called Chrelythiumn.
"Chrelythiumn? I've come across the name before. Deep in the archives, in old legends about Force Weilders," Kreia said. "Interesting."
"Now, the thing we need to see most, isn't the world itself," Kreia said, pointing out the window to something in the distance. Her sight through the force could see a strange object, a sort of monolith that looked like a pair of pyramids glued together by a haze of light.
There's nothing over there
"No, little droid. You can see nothing. It exists regardless," Kreia said, as she engaged the engines and took the Ebon Hawk towards the monolith.
The Ebon Hawk approached the monolith with unnatural speed, and it only took Kreia a moment to realize that her ship was being pulled onward. Kreia took her hand off the controls, and set her fingers on the lightsaber at her belt.
"Well," Kreia said, as the light between the pyramids grew so bright that even her sight could perceive nothing else. "Shall we see what we find?"
******
Between blinks of her sightless eyes, the light faded to the point where Kreia could see the world around her again.
And surprisingly, there was indeed a world around her. The Ebon Hawk rested on a small, grassy alcove on the side of a mountain. Kreia could see at least two moons in the sky, but the stars were utterly foreign to here.
She wasn't even sure they were stars.
Kreia got out of her seat, and made her way past the unmoving astromech droid to the controls for the ramp leading off the ship. The readings on the sensors beside the bay doors registered a breathable atmosphere, but Kreia wasn't surprised to discover that. She hit the button, and started her way down the ramp while it descended.
Her sight saw something appear at the bottom of the ramp. Some creature, tall, and surrounded in an aura of red haze and black smoke, of passion and rage. Kreia's hand twitched beside her lightsaber, and she felt the old rage begin to rise up again. But she took that rage, grasped it, and set it aside. Instead, she walked down the ramp, and decided to meet whoever it was.
The man standing at the bottom of the ramp was tall, fully a head and more taller than her. He stood at the bottom of the ramp with his arms crossed, an amused sneer on his unnaturally pale face, and his eyes held a dark red glow.
A moment longer spent observing, and Kreia realized she made a mistake. His sneer was a mixture of disappointment and haughty, untested confidence. His stance was too relaxed to defend himself from a sudden attack, he would trip over his own boots if she surprised him. His gaze was unfocused, his mind unengaged, and the surface of his thoughts were entirely too easy to read.
Kreia had misjudged him, by thinking of him as a man. This was a boy.
"You're blind," the tall stranger said, as Kreia stepped off the Ebon Hawk.
"Yet I see more than you," Kreia replied, stepping past him. Whoever the boy was, Kreia suspected he was on an errand for someone else. She took the moment to gaze out at the horizon, at this world that seemed both more and less real than anything she had ever seen.
And permeating all of it, was the Force. So much stronger than anything Kreia had ever seen before, even the heart of places like Malachor, the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, Ossus, or Korriban. To call such places nexuses of power, after looking at this world, was to try and call fog water.
"What do you call this place?" Kreia asked.
"Prison," the boy replied, his glib response failing to mask the bitterness in his voice. He turned away, and started walking. "I suppose I should take you to Father."
"Father?" Kreia asked.
"Yes. I don't think you're the one he's expecting, but in a way, that makes you more interesting," the boy said. He looked her up and down once, and sighed. "Well, a little interesting."
"Perhaps you're here to judge us?" the boy wondered aloud, as he started to walk down a path. "Like you, justice is blind. But I don't know how you'll hold the scales and the sword with only one hand."
Kreia scowled, and her fingers twitched again as she held her hand near her lightsaber. "Is this really all there is to you, boy?" She asked.
The boy flinched as if she had slapped him. Giving him a sneer of her own, Kreia continued. "I see the Force in you. It swirls like the accretion disk of a black hole, hate and rage, passion and fury, and so much raw power that you could humble the greatest Sith, and bring low the mightiest Jedi. Who you are reaches far beyond this world, and this simpering man-child is all you're capable of being?"
Kreia glanced back at him, and pointed her finger at him. "For your sake, hope I am not here to judge you."
The boy sputtered angrily and stalked towards her, pointing his finger inches from her face. "You don't know a thing about me, blind crone!
Kreia stared ahead, at a tall tower beyond the next valley. A single, massive crystal shone from just above it. "If that's where this Father of yours is? If it is, I can make it there on my own."
The boy scowled, and turned away. "Find shelter before nightfall. The storms can be deadly." The boy then took two steps, and in a flash of swirling black mist, turned into a nightmarish winged creature and took to the sky.
Kreia scowled in disgust, and followed the path.
*****
The path down the mountain was steep and treacherous, almost needlessly so. Kreia suspected the trail was a metaphor of some kind, but Kreia suspected this entire world was just a metaphor for the relationship between the various aspects of the Force.
At the bottom of the path, before a clearing, another figure waited. A woman, reserved and patient, she hardly fidgeted as she waited the long minutes it took Kreia to finally descend. As Kreia approached, the woman nodded politely, and said, "Jedi. The Father is curious about how you found your way to this realm, and has asked me to escort you to him."
"The Father," Kreia remarked. She was taken aback slightly at being addressed as a Jedi. Being a Jedi was something that had betrayed her, and something she had betrayed in kind. "Is that some sort of title?"
"It is who he is. I will take you to him," the woman said, leading Kreia away from the hill and towards the temple.
"And you are you supposed to be, then?" Kreia asked.
"I am the Daughter."
"And the simpering fool I met on the mountaintop, I suppose he's the Son?"
"He is."
"Fools, the lot of you," Kreia said. "I can see the Force inside of you. You burn so brightly stars might envy your power, but it is too pure and too clean. To my eyes, you look as if you have never desired anything in your entire life."
"I..." the Daughter said. "It is my nature to be selfless."
And like seeing the Son, Kreia realized she misjudged the Daughter. This was a girl, not a woman.
"I see, I see now," Kreia said. "You are a nexus. A resonance with the Force. This entire world is. Torn between the light and the dark, the entire universe influenced by how the force is shaped right here. And right here I find a boy too self-indulgent to treat a guest with anything other than contempt, and a girl too timid to believe in her own judgement."
Kreia laughed, and shook her head. "The light and the dark side of the force. The thing that has torn the galaxy apart for thousands of years, and this is it? A boy who would probably torture small animals just to let himself feel, and a girl too obsessed with selflessness to actually get her hands dirty and do some good? If this is some sort of cosmic joke, I don't find it funny."
The Daughter shook her head, and pointed up to the temple. "The Father can explain it better. I will take you to him."
"Well, at least you possess self-restraint. I will follow," Kreia said, following the Daughter across the plain, towards the entrance of the temple.
******
The temple was a massive, ostentatious ornament to the concept of balance. White and black shapes hung in symmetry along the walls, in murals laid on the ground, along the spires rising high above Kreia's head, and most garishly of all, between the Son and the Daughter as they stood between a tall, elderly, frail looking man who could only be the Father.
"Kreia, or at least the lastest name you have given yourself," the Father said, as he rose from his chair and strode towards her. "I believe you once called yourself Darth."
Kreia nodded in acknowledgment. "I was once Darth Traya, Lord of Betrayal. I suspect I will be again, before my end."
"Darth Traya, why have you sought us out?" The Father asked. "What grand purpose has lead you to uncover the way into a place that you should not be able to find?" The father asked.
Kreia held up her hand. "I see a way to kill the Force."
Her announcement stunned the trio in front of her. The Daughter flinched and stepped backward. The Son clenched his fists and looked like he might advance on Kreia. And even the Father sputtered in rage, and advanced on Kreia.
"Kill the Force?" The Father asked. "What gives you the right to judge us?"
"I have every right!" Kreia bellowed back. "This family feud of yours, I can see it's resonance on the Galaxy. In that Son of yours I see a legion of Sith and other dark lords, seduced by quick and easy power, ruled by passion and unconcerned about the lives they trample over as they seek thrones and glory. Every one of them were seduced and twisted by the Dark Side. And I know it, far better than you. I was one."
"If it is balanced, is it so bad?" The Farher asked.
"Balanced by what? This sad doe, too caring to act on her compassion and restrain her brother? Too selfless to genuinely care about the worlds she doesn't raise a finger to aid? No, she is almost as bad, and I see in her the Jedi masters who sat on their council seats and tried to hide their ears from the screams of innocents as the Mandalorians burned worlds and made refugees of billions."
"Then surely you see the need for balance," the Father insisted.
"Your balance? Of the three of them, you old fool, you are the worst! Balance is the least permanent thing in existence! A breath, a feather, an hour even, and the scales tip one way and Sith are massacring a world with lasers from the sky made with the crystals of Jedi lightsabers! Tilt them another, and Jedi are propping up that decaying corpse we call the Old Republic! You, even more so than your children, disappoint me completely and utterly."
"Believe me, I would kill you all if I had the power."
"It is good you do not, then," The Father said, as he stood up. "But having seen all of this, and knowing that you are here for a reason, I have a favour to ask of you."
The father glanced at the Daughter, then the Son. "Leave us."
The Daughter, unsurprisingly, complied immediately. The Son fixed Kreia with a single hard stare, then followed his sister out of the temple.
"I am dying," the Father admitted. "And I have searched the eons for a chosen one, someone with the power to contain my children. But even if I do find him, there is no guarantee the transition will be a smooth one. I brought you here because of everyone who has ever, and will ever wield the force, only you hate it."
"I want you to make a weapon. A weapon of the Force made real, one that can kill either of my children, should it come to that."
And for the first time since she arrived on this strange world, Kreia was shocked by something she heard. "I will help you," she said, unable to stop the words from slipping past her lips. "What do you call this world?"
"We have no name for it," the Father admitted.
"Then I name this place your grave. Mortis. And I will make a dagger to take any of your lives. But don't you dare forget who's heart I truly wish this dagger would strike," Kreia warned him, as she began to gather the Force.