The stars near the Graveglass Rift shimmered strangely.
To most, it would seem like background distortion, random radiation from a shattered debris field. But to Alor, whose instincts had been honed by countless campaigns and the crucible of survival, it felt like watching a sleeping beast shift in its slumber.
It was time to press deeper.
Rift Protocol
Within Outpost Thorn, Alor stood before a freshly constructed Tactical Operations Core, its surface mapped with an updated holosweep of the system. The Rift blinked red.
Sira tapped several glyphs on the console. "Scout drones sent three days ago haven't returned. No telemetry. No black box pings. Nothing."
"Something's jamming them," Rook said, arms folded.
Garak, leaning against a bulkhead, grunted. "Or something's eating them."
Alor studied the map. "We need eyes inside. Not machines."
He tapped the hull of the Iron Promise on the map. "We go ourselves."
Into the Rift
The Iron Promise launched with two accompanying gunships and a Mandalorian infiltration wing. Alor sat in the captain's seat, armored, helmet resting on his lap. Rook and Sira stood behind him.
"Graveglass isn't just radiation and metal," Rook said as the ship pierced the Rift's edge. "There are ruins in there. Ancient stations. Maybe war wrecks."
"Maybe more than that," Alor murmured.
The Rift swallowed the light. Nebulae of fractured ice and irradiated rock spun in slow dance with the husks of forgotten warships.
On the third orbit pass, Sira's voice cut through the stillness.
"Signal."
Alor's head snapped up. "Source?"
Sira tapped fast. "It's low frequency. Buried in background static. Encrypted. Old… ancient. It's Sith."
The bridge dimmed as the signal was cleaned up—revealing a pulse. Not language. Not coordinates.
A countdown.
The Echo Ship
Following the signal's origin, they found it: a Sith carrier, half-cracked open like a split egg, embedded into the spine of an asteroid. Its hull was scorched and ancient—but still powered.
Alor led the breach team himself, accompanied by Garak, three commandos, and two engineers.
The inside was... wrong.
Darkness shifted unnaturally. Walls hummed with a pulsing black energy. Ancient Sith glyphs crawled over every surface, some still flickering with dying power.
Bodies lay entombed in sealed alcoves—humanoid, red-skinned, clearly pureblood Sith. Preserved. Some missing limbs. Some wired directly into the walls.
In the central chamber, they found what remained of a command throne—and a crystalline orb pulsing with barely-contained fury.
Sira studied the device from behind her visor. "It's a relay. Quantum-linked. Someone on the outside is watching through this."
"Watching who?" Garak asked.
Alor exhaled. "Us."
He smashed the orb with his beskad. It screamed when it died.
Return to the Light
Back aboard the Iron Promise, Alor watched as containment teams sealed the data cores and relics recovered from the Sith ship.
In the medbay, one of the commandos who'd been exposed to the dark pulses collapsed into seizures. Black veins pulsed across his neck. He muttered in tongues no one understood.
Sira sedated him. But Alor knew: they had stirred something beneath the Rift.
Not a faction.
A presence.
Something that had slept through cycles, waiting for war to wake it.
A New Mandate
Alor returned to Outpost Thorn at dawn-cycle, standing beneath the banners that now hung above the plaza—each bearing the sigil of united clans.
He looked over the crowd of warriors, artisans, and smiths. His voice rang over loudspeakers.
"The void is not empty.
It is full of ghosts."
He stepped forward, visor lowered, the weight of their discovery behind him.
"But Mandalore fears no ghosts. We hunt them."
Cheers followed—but quieter. The clan knew war had just taken a darker turn.
Quiet Preparations
In the days that followed, Alor ordered:
The construction of Void Sensor Arrays across the outer perimeter.
A new Research Nexus, focused solely on ancient signal decryption and Sith-tech analysis.
Upgrades to Mandalorian encryption protocols, in case further signal interception occurred.
He also ordered a memorial built outside the Rift—tall, carved from asteroid stone, with the names of the drone crews lost in the first probe missions.
The Mandalorians were not only warriors. They were people. A growing people.
Chapter Close
Later that cycle, alone in his command chamber, Alor stared at the Rift again.
It blinked on the screen, inert, like before.
Except… just before he turned away, a signal flickered on the screen.
Not Mandalorian. Not Sith.
But watching.
And waiting.