The sky was burning.
Eli stood in the corridor outside the dormitories, shoulders tense, heart thrumming like a war drum in his chest. He could feel the pulse of it in the floor — a deep, tremoring hum. Not the Force. Not intuition.
Turbolifts crashing. Blaster fire.
The Siege had begun.
This time however, he was ready.
The doors at the far end of the hall exploded inward, spewing durasteel fragments across the floor. The clone troopers stormed through in formation, their visors blank, weapons raised.
No warnings. No hesitation.
Eli didn't wait to see who they were aiming for.
He ran.
The familiar pain of leaving Tavi and Niyala behind twisted in his gut, but he didn't stop. He couldn't. He'd done that before — tried to gather them, lead them, protect them.
They always died.
This time, he would live.
He sprinted down the side passage near the archives — a servant's maintenance route. It was sealed in most loops, but he'd studied the circuits in this one, used his access during the morning drills to override the locks.
The panel hissed open. He dove inside.
Behind him, the Temple screamed.
---
Eli tore through the cramped conduit paths, his hands scraping against cold durasteel as he crawled, ducked, slid. The air was thick with smoke now — from the fires above — and faint tremors rattled through the ancient foundations as if the Temple itself was in mourning.
At junctions, he turned with purpose.
Down. Always down.
That was the key. After fifteen lives, he'd learned the safe spots, the clone patrol patterns, the structural weaknesses. Most Jedi fled upward — to the towers, to the landing platforms. He would go the opposite direction.
Into the depths.
Toward the foundations.
Toward the city.
---
He emerged into the Hall of the Seers — or what was left of it. Smoke curled around the toppled statues of long-dead Masters, their serene stone faces shattered by the concussive blast that had ripped through the upper floors. A young Knight lay nearby, chest still, saber extinguished at her side.
Eli's stomach twisted.
He didn't hesitate.
He slid forward, fingers wrapping around the smooth hilt of her saber — heavier than a training model, finely crafted, still warm from her hand. He pressed the activation stud. The blade snapped to life, its blue glow bathing him in pale light.
He had a real saber now.
He turned it off and clipped it to his belt, every movement deliberate, hands steady even as the roar of conflict drew closer.
Revenge isn't survival, he told himself. But the thought felt hollow. Thin.
Because part of him didn't just want to live anymore.
Part of him wanted them to pay.
---
By the time he reached the Temple's base level, the fighting above had become a distant storm. Clone patrols roved the deeper halls now — not many, but enough. Their white armor gleamed under flickering lights, their orders absolute.
"Execute Order 66."
Eli dropped behind a pillar, breath sharp in his lungs.
He watched two troopers sweep the corridor ahead. He could hear their boots on the tile. Hear the static in their comms. One paused near a wall recess — almost spotted him — but then turned, distracted by movement on a nearby screen.
Go.
He ran low, fast.
Took a side hall.
Made for the ancient substructure.
The final threshold was sealed — a vault door built centuries ago, meant to guard against seismic collapse.
But Eli had been here before. In life eight, he'd found the failover code etched into the base schematics during a stolen hour in the Archives. He pressed his fingers to the access node, recalled the sequence, and fed it through.
The door groaned.
Opened.
And there it was.
The undercity.
---
Coruscant sprawled before him like a wound.
Eli stood at the edge of the Temple's forgotten maintenance causeway, overlooking the dizzying vertical descent into the city's lower levels — tangled spires of metal, rotting duracrete, and endless streams of speeders far below.
It was alive in a way the Temple never was. Chaotic. Loud. Dangerous.
And free.
Behind him, the Temple burned.
He gripped the lightsaber on his belt, fingers white with pressure.
Every loop he'd died in that place. With honor. With fear. With hope.
And every time, it ended the same.
But now…
Now he stood outside it.
In the real city.
He was no longer a youngling of the Jedi Temple.
He was a survivor.
But the cost...
Tavi's laughter, gone. Niyala's steady hand in sparring, gone. Their faces burned behind his eyes. Their deaths fresh, still echoing in his soul.
No one had mourned them.
No one ever would.
Because the Republic — the clones — had erased them like they were nothing.
Something inside him cracked. Just a hairline fracture.
But it was there.
He looked out at the city again.
Coruscant.
So many lives, stacked atop one another like forgotten truths. So many blind to what had just happened.
Eli Kaen was out.
Alive.
But peace no longer felt like a destination.
It felt like a lie.
---
He turned and walked into the shadows of the undercity, saber at his hip, the fire of the Temple glowing dim behind him.
This was the beginning of something else.
Not a loop.
Not a lesson.
A reckoning.