**for previous chapters, please refer to the Table of Contents**
With time in this place being so ephemeral, Rey could not have said how long they'd been fighting. With both ground and weather shifting all around them, often seemingly at random, both had had to resort to every fighting and physical skill they'd mastered just to keep even. As the Mortis continued to shift in faster and faster cycles around them, from day to night to day and back again to night, Rey and Sidereas struck and parried, attacked and defended. Rey could no longer see or sense the old Masters, but Sidereas' attacks were too intense, too rapid, for her to dwell on her sense of utter isolation. Her twin blades whirled around her like wavering shields, her arms jerking back and forth to hold back any strike Sidereas attempted. However, his own guardrail blades allowed him extra time to react to every effort she made to pass his defenses, and every attempt forced her to retreat once again, least one of his energy blades find flesh.
For all the increased rage and power she'd sensed in Ben as soon as he'd appeared, their blows had, at first, carried equal strength between them. Slowly, though, she could feel her strength ebbing. Force nexus or no, she couldn't remember the last time she'd ate, or slept, or had a moment of peace to simply close her eyes and breathe. Everything had gone by so fast, and she realized she was now approaching her limit.
Almost as if the Mortis itself was reacting to her detiorating mental state, a rip appeared beneath them, fissuring up beneath Rey's left foot. She finished a deflection of another attack in time to shift her feet beneath her to avoid falling, but this was just one things too many. She simply couldn't react quickly enough to the lightsaber and her opponent and the very land around them; this time, she couldn't turn her body quickly enough to avoid the impact of a hard kick following Sidereas' lightsaber sweep that felt as hard and sharp as a metal blade. The breath was forced out of her lungs and she felt herself crumble backwards, landing hard on her side against a rocky outcropping rising up out of the ground that she'd apparently been backing into. All at once, her body felt as if it were made of stone, and it was all she could to remain standing upright and keep her saber lit in her hand.
Immediately, the Force around her was filled with a sense of menacing triumph. Grimacing, drawing on the Force to pull air into her lungs, Rey looked at the shadow before her. The figure that was once Ben Solo raise its glowing blade in a salute, and its angry voice spoke; "Now, finally, it all ends."
Before he could approach, though, before Rey could even try to summon the strength to go on, the world was once more brought to a halt by the sound of something Rey would never have expected here.
Leia's voice, calm yet filled with strength, filled the air around them.
"Ben. My son."
Sidereas seemed to be as caught off guard as Rey. Pausing for a moment, he turned to the side, and both he and Rey say Leia, standing before them with the gentlest of smiles on her face.
Rey, gasping through the pain that still ached in her stomach, tried to find something to say. "Leia, you....are you....how...."
Was she dead? Or was she alive and physically there, like her and Ben? She appeared more solid than the Masters had, but there was still something faint about her appearance, though Rey was still not sure that couldn't just be her exhaustion.
Sidereas merely contemplating her for a moment in silence before speaking, turning more of his body away from Rey and towards this new figure.
"First Father, then you. Are you also a phantom? Or are you here so I can kill you too?"
Leia's voice remained soft, but the pain in her eyes was all too apparent. "Ben, please. Just leave all this. You are still my child and I've already forgiven you. Just leave it, and let's be a family again."
Rey felt her heart break at hearing this, but Sidereas merely snorted with contempt. "I guess I can say it as often as I want, none of you sentimental idiots will ever get it. Alright then." With this, he settled back into a fighting stance, "If you are real, then this is just another test. I can kill you too, and finally be at peace."
Leia merely looked at him another moment before responding. "If that's what you truly want, Ben, then I won't fight you."
Though the rocky ground underneath her didn't move this time, Rey felt as if all matter around her had been blasted away, leaving her trapped inside a cold, deathly void. No. Leia, no.
Her vision began to blur with tears, but she could still identify the shadow-that-was-Ben as it began to move towards Leia. And this sight, somehow, lit a fire that banished all the pain, all the exhaustion, all the worry, that Rey had felt pulling her down. No. Absolutely not. She wasn't about to lose another teacher. Another friend. Her family. Not this time.
Rey felt her body move like lightning through the air, flipping up and over Sidereas just as he began a horizontal swing that would have cut Leia apart at the waist. Instead, Rey's downward-facing first blade halted him in his tracks, her fury and determination to end this now making the Force around them seem to glow with renewed purpose. Her strength returning, Rey was now defining the terms of the fight, striking and parrying and attacking again and again, forcing Sidereas back on his heels. Using the same tactic she'd fallen prey to, she rapidly followed one attack with a spinning side kick that avoided the guards and connected with Sidereas' knuckles. With an audible crunch and a repressed grunt of pained surprise, Sidereas' lightsaber deactivated as it was sent spinning away. Now, it was the wannabe Sith Lord backed against a rocky outcropping, Rey standing above him with her blade poised for another strike.
Now, now, do it now. Rey could feel the Force burn within and around her. Her thoughts and motions slowed, as if she had sunk into deep water. Strike him down, bring balance, bring peace, end it. Her vision blurred around the edges, a swirling gray around the still-solid image before her. He's hurt me, he's hurt us, he killed Han, he killed Luke, he'll kill Leia. She had been alone, so alone, for so many years, until she found Poe and Finn and Han and Leia and Luke, and this man had tried to hard to take it all away, and now I can end all this and save the Jedi, save the galaxy...
Rey. Leia's voice, again, still so gentle and loving and calm. Somehow, just hearing her name like that silenced her thoughts, pulled her out of the tunnel she hadn't realized she was burrowing into, brought her back to herself.
Rey, her saber still lit and poised above her her, looked with new eyes at the person before her, and Ben, at Sidereas, at the Supreme Leader of the First Order. And she knew, with a finality that she found oddly comforting, that she could not be the one to strike down Ben Solo. Her lightsaber deactivated as if of its own accord. Her arms fell to her sides.
For a split moment, after Rey's blades faded away, Sideareas stood completely still, hardly daring believe that he was still alive. But he was, no matter how, and that meant he still could- would- triumph. A stray thought of his, searching through the Force, located the feel of his lightsaber, lying a dozen meters away where it had stopped rolling. Keeping his injured hand behind his back as if to protect it, he twitched a finger. In his mind, he felt his blade slowly rise into the air and begin to slowly circle around behind Rey, far out of her line of sight. Now, to just keep her attention on him long enough.
Rey thought she'd been tired before, but now it was as if the weight of the entire universe had settled into every fibre of her being. She fought the tendrils of unconsciousness that began to grasp at the edges of her thoughts, working to speak, to try once more to see if Ben was still there.
"...I'm sorry, Ben," every word was a struggle, "I'm sorry it came to this. But I can't be the one to kill you."
Somehow, even now, the look of hatred and determination remained, and the voice was as dismissive and contempt-filled as ever. "Because you're weak. Like my uncle and my parents. That's why the Jedi were destroyed. That's why you'll fail."
Rey could only slowly shake her head at this. How could he not understand?
"I can't kill you Ben...." and here her voice became sadder than she'd ever thought possible, "...you've destroyed yourself already."
His opponent's words mere chatter in his ears, Sidereas continued to twist his finger ever so slowly, until he could feel that his unlit saber was in place, aimed directly at Rey's back. It trembled in midair, almost as if it was anticipating his strike, his victory, as much as he was. Rey still seemed no closer to resuming the attack, but he'd felt her rage earlier and knew that could change at any time. Now. Now was his chance. He made the smallest of motions with his index finger, and his blade picked up speed, pressure building on the activation plate.
This time, there was no voice. No actual warning. Rey could barely think at this point, could barely stand. It had all been too much, and she was only one person, barely a Jedi. All she could feel was a nudge, deep within herself- or, perhaps, from the Force- to just....let it go. To take this weight off her own shoulders. To accept her own limitations, her own weaknesses, that no amount of Jedi training would ever perfect or magic away. Rey couldn't save Ben, or the universe, all on her own, because no one person could bear that sort of power. No one person could ever encompass the whole galaxy. The Sith kept trying, and they kept breaking themselves in the process. If Rey wanted to be different, to actually change something, she would first have to learn to let go.
And she did. Rey took a breath, the deepest she'd taken in what felt like ages, and felt the weight dissipate in her shoulders and legs. Suddenly filled with a profound peace and only semi-conscious of her own body, Rey felt herself crumble to her knees...
......the instant his blade was at bullet-speed, the whirring snap-hiss of its three-pronged activation casting the deepening shadows around them in a red hue. Sidereas had no time to react. No time to move or even make a sound. There was only the split-second realization, as Rey collapsed before him, leaving his own body in the direct path of the fire-red lightsaber he'd deliberately thrown with all his telekinetic strength. Even as it tore through his chest, burying itself to the hilt in his lung, he stood, so entirely in shock that at first he didn't even register any pain.
Rey hadn't heard the unmistakable sound until she was on her knees, having just barely thrown her arms out to stop her falling completely onto the bare ground. Once it registered, and her nostrils filled with the stench of burning flesh, she snapped her head up to see Sidereas standing there, still stone-solid as if frozen, his blade buried in his chest and protruding like some hellish fin from his back, with the front part of his robe beginning to smoke from the proximity of the lightguards. Her senses fully returning to her, she jumped up and grabbed the hilt, immediately deactivating the blade and tossing it aside. Only then did it appear to register in Sidereas' eyes what had happened.
"Oh..." came out in a small voice, and he then began to crumple backwards. Rey instinctively used the Force to slow his body, settling him gently on his back. The waves of light and weather around them began to shift more slowly now, almost sluggish, as if the Mortis itself was exhausted from the battle that it had born witness to.
"Ben...Ben..." Rey's brain kept telling her to face facts, that there was no way he could possibly survive this with no medic or gear of any sort on hand, but her heart still refused to believe it. "Ben, you'll be ok. Please. Say something."
He saw her lips moving, but couldn't hear anything. He could barely feel the ground beneath him, nor could he smell or taste the air. Only his eyes remained active, it seemed, as he saw Rey's face contort with emotion as she continued to try to speak with him. He could feel himself fading.
Suddenly, it wasn't just Rey before him. All the apparitions from before, all the old, dead Jedi, Luke foremost among them, were once again there. And, curiously, when Luke Skywalker spoke, he heard him loud and clear.
"It's over, Ben," he said, his voice both resigned and regretful at the same time. "But you can still join us. Reach out to us, and we can still draw you in to the light."
For a moment, Sidereas didn't respond. He saw, as if viewing a holovid, the moments from his life flash by that had led him here. Led him to his failure. To his death.
And he knew it had all meant....nothing. He was now...had always been....would always be....nothing.
His eyes focused one last time on the face of Luke Skywalker, and he spoke. "Now. Now it's dead and buried."
Ben Solo fell into darkness, forever.
Rey had barely had a moment to try and register what Ben had just said when his body began to fade into nothingness, his clothes and gear simply falling limp and empty to the ground below, like some stragen apparition.
"No...NO! BEN!" she cried out, but it was too late. Even within the Force, she felt it as certain as anything.
Ben Solo- Kylo Ren- Darth Sidereas- was gone forever.
