Fortress Vader

Prologue - Her

When one door closes, take control of the entire system.
Year 0

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My dreams that night were not of the normal sort, nor could they be classified as nightmares. In them, I was full of rage and grief, so crushing that I wondered if my heart would fail. They did not feel like my emotions; nothing about the dream felt like it was me experiencing it. There was lava from the planet's surface, shouts of anger and devastation, flashes of bright colors.

When I awoke, my body was drenched in cold sweats and ached as if I had been tense for far too long. What little understanding I had of the dreams while sleeping was quickly draining away. I was left with those two undeniable emotions—that is, rage and grief—and the impression of Mustafar's stormy surface.

It is odd how people come to awareness too slowly in an emergency. I did not hear the alarms at first, or at least, I did not comprehend them. Looking back, the alarms were probably what jerked me from my restless sleep. But before they registered in my mind, I was only aware of the turmoil inside me, the wild ocean of betrayal and hate. An instant later, the haziness evaporated to full-blown panic as the screeching sirens caught my attention.

I launched out of bed, confident something was very wrong. There were two...maybe three alarms blaring. I'd lived within the complex walls for half my life and never heard more than one at a time.

My footsteps were muffled as I walked into the bright halls and then out of the living quarters to the center, the hub of activity on any given day.

"Father!" I called into the large open space. The few people closest looked at me, but they were moving fast. I was forgotten as quickly as I had been remembered.

I pushed through the crowd, my only goal was to find Father. If he would be anywhere, he'd be in his lab across the compound. Even the lights felt too bright, and I belatedly labeled my overwhelming emotions as panic.

"Wat Tambor is dead," someone in the crowd shouted. My discomfort began to grow, the proof in the chaotic thrumming of my heart. I felt no sympathy if it was true, but rumors had a way of bending and stretching by the time they reached this far in the Outer Rim. If he was dead, I wondered if we had finally reached the end of the war.

Either way, something wasn't sitting right with me. I moved into the complex when I was ten years old and hadn't ever seen it in chaos before. With the long days on Mustafar, there were tons of employees, but they weren't usually all out at once. Actually, they never were. But at the moment, it seemed the entire place was awake and moving fast.

I called out for my father as I ran, accidentally knocking into no less than four people. My anxiety was rising, and again, the gut feeling of something being terribly wrong gripped my mind. The alarms meant something, but I didn't think it mattered what. Father would have come to get me. I was always by his side, always. There was more happening.

I don't know how long it took me to reach the work wing, but when I found Father's lab, I found him.

"Father!" He was on his hands and knees, but at my voice, he jumped up.

"Angel," he spun around, looking like I'd caught him doing something he wasn't supposed to be doing. Another red flag. "Get back to our unit, now."

"But Father, what's happening?" An unfamiliar feeling was building in my throat, restrictive and heavy.

"Now, Angel! I will come get you, but stay, there."

Father did not yell. He did not show anger; he possessed more patience than a Jedi. Red flag.