The air crackled with power as Darth Vader's crimson lightsaber clashed against the swirling tempest of elemental force wielded by Avatar Aang. Their duel had already begun—echoes of their first confrontation from the previous chapter still roared in Vader's memory. This was not a skirmish of mere blades or bending, but of destinies converging. The storm above mirrored the tempest below: wind howled, lightning danced, and earth trembled as Aang unleashed his Avatar State, a whirlwind of all four elements harmonized into furious grace.
Vader, undeterred, advanced with mechanical precision. His Force-enhanced strikes battered against Aang's elemental defenses, yet the young Avatar flowed around them, agile as air, solid as stone. Aang's eyes glowed white as he summoned torrents of water from the nearby sea and jagged shards of ice, sending them cascading toward the Sith Lord. Vader batted them away with sweeping arcs of his blade, the heat of the plasma flash-vaporizing the projectiles mid-air.
"Your resistance is futile," Vader intoned, his voice a mechanical growl layered with raw power.
"You're wrong," Aang said, voice echoing in the wind. "Violence doesn't bring balance. You've forgotten who you were."
Vader hesitated—just a beat. And that moment, that spark of humanity, gave Aang the opening to erupt the ground beneath the Sith with a volcanic burst of fire and magma. Vader vaulted back with the Force, his cape singed, his stance unshaken.
But the duel shifted.
A presence stirred beneath the surface of the Force, subtle and serpentine. Tzeentch watched with cosmic amusement from the warp, threads of fate winding tighter. The battle was not merely between two warriors but between ideologies—hope and domination, balance and control.
Vader raised a hand, summoning a wave of Force energy that crushed the terrain around Aang. The Avatar countered with a protective cocoon of wind, spinning like a typhoon, lifting himself into the air. Lightning crackled in the heavens—and then from his fingers, Aang bent a bolt of pure electricity toward Vader, who caught it midair with his mechanical palm and redirected it into the ground.
"You are powerful," Vader admitted, advancing again, "but untrained in true war."
"I fight to protect," Aang shouted, drawing on the Spirit World's memory, the echoes of Roku and Kyoshi, Korra and Wan.
Then the earth exploded—literally. Vader stomped down, using the Force to rupture the ground beneath them. A geyser of flame burst upward, but Aang had already shifted into water, riding the wave and propelling himself behind Vader, landing a punishing blast of air that staggered the Dark Lord.
For the first time, Vader faltered. And the Force trembled.
From the shadows beyond the battlefield, observers watched—Hisoka, perched upon a spire of twisted stone, licking his lips with delighted curiosity. The Witch-king, his form cloaked in necrotic energy, merely observed, calculating. Griffith, astride a daemonic steed, smiled thinly. Tzeentch's champions felt the weave of fate adjusting—Aang, a mortal not of their design, now challenged one of their chosen.
Vader snarled and unleashed a Force scream so violent it shattered the nearby rocks into dust. Aang was flung back, smashing into a cliff wall. Blood trickled from his nose.
"I have destroyed Jedi greater than you," Vader declared, voice rising with rage.
"And yet you couldn't destroy yourself," Aang replied, pulling himself from the rubble.
The words hit deeper than fire. Deeper than lightning.
Vader rushed forward, a blur of black and red. Aang met him, the elements swirling once more. The final clash resounded like thunder across the world.
But in the end, both combatants stood—neither fully victorious.
Aang knelt, exhausted but alive, while Vader stood, damaged and silent. The duel had not ended in death but in revelation.
In the distance, a laugh echoed—a mad, musical thing. The Joker, watching all, scribbled another note in his ledger.
"This galaxy's getting fun."
And far above, Tzeentch weaved a new strand into his ever-changing tapestry.
Balance trembled.
The air on the desolate, nameless moon didn't just lack oxygen; it hummed with a tension that clawed at the spirit. Stone groaned under invisible pressure, and the distant, swirling nebulae twisted with malevolent intent. Here, under a fragmented sky, the clash had reached its apex.
Lord Vader stood, a monolith of obsidian armor against the bruised, ochre landscape. His presence choked the vacuum, a palpable wave of dread and potent, dark energy. Before him, Aang, the last Avatar, glowed with a fierce, desperate light, elements swirling around him—earth cracking, air screaming past, fire burning cold in the vacuum, and water held in a psychic sphere, shimmering unnaturally.
Their physical battle had devolved into something far more primal. Bending met Force push, seismic shocks met crushing telekinesis, but the true conflict now raged in the psychic ether—a war fought not with limbs and weapons, but with will, memory, and the fundamental forces of reality.
Vader's consciousness, a storm of pain, rage, and calculated darkness, ripped into Aang's mind. It wasn't a subtle intrusion; it was a violation, a tearing away of mental defenses. Aang fought back, his spiritual focus a shield of pure, unyielding light, drawing on the myriad lives that flowed through him—a river of past and future.
They tumbled together through a shared vision, a landscape born of their colliding psyches. It wasn't the ravaged moon. It was a serene, ancient world, untouched by the Empire's sprawl or the Warp's decay. Grass swayed on rolling hills, crystal rivers flowed, and the air was clean. In this vision, Aang saw himself not as he was, but as a past life—an elderly, serene monk meditating atop a mountain peak, his face etched with wisdom and peace, deeply connected to the gentle energy of this world.
Vader appeared in this idyll not as the armored figure, but as a shadow given form, a creature of gnawing emptiness and destructive intent. He moved with terrifying speed, his psychic manifestation wielding a blade of pure, condensed psychic nullity. Aang, trapped in the perspective of the ancient monk, felt a profound sense of calm acceptance—but also a deep, spiritual dread.
The shadow-Vader struck. The blade didn't cut flesh; it severed roots. It sliced through the shimmering threads that connected the monk to the vibrant world, to the very cycle of life and energy. Aang felt it as a tearing in his spirit, a sudden, horrific isolation. The serene landscape in the vision flickered, colors leaching away, the air growing thin.
"You are severed," Vader's psychic voice echoed, hollow and cold, a sound like dying stars. "This world, this past, is dead. Your links weaken. You are alone."
Aang recoiled, thrown back into the brutal reality of the moonscape, but the feeling of severance lingered. A crucial line had been cut—a connection to a deep well of ancient strength and perspective fractured. Panic, cold and sharp, pricked at the edges of his focus. He was vulnerable, his spiritual tapestry frayed.
And Vader pressed his advantage. The psychic assault intensified, lashing like whips of pure agony and despair. The vacuum screamed with silent voices, whispers of doubt and corruption that clawed at Aang's mind. He felt the foul touch of energies older and viler than the Sith—energies that seeped from the very fabric of the cosmos's underbelly: the raw, unadulterated chaos of the Warp.
Normally, such power was a poison, reserved for daemons and the utterly depraved, warping form and mind into monstrous parodies of life. No mortal being, not even the most powerful Force-user or Avatar, could touch it without succumbing to madness and corruption.
But Aang was desperate. Wounded, his connection to the past severed, he faced an enemy who embodied the antithesis of balance and life. The raw, tearing feeling of the psychic wound flared into a terrible resolve. The Warp energy was there, bleeding through the thinned veil between dimensions—a chaotic, terrible potential.
Drawing on the absolute core of his being—the unblemished spirit forged by countless lives and mastery over energy itself, honed over centuries—Aang did the impossible. He didn't embrace the Warp; he seized it.
He became a conduit, a living filter. It was agony. The raw, unmaking power screamed as it was forced through the pure, ordering pathways of his spirit. Impossible colors flashed behind his eyes—viridian so vivid it tasted of poison, cerise that shrieked with forbidden joys, indigo that plunged into infinite despair. His form trembled, the very molecules protesting this violation of cosmic law.
But he held. His will, absolute and pure in its desperation to survive and resist, forced the chaotic energy into a semblance of order, bending the Un-form into a weapon.
Around him, the moon wept stone and dust. The sheer, uncontrolled power unleashed by Aang's act, coupled with the instability from the psychic battle and the bleeding Warp, tore at the lunar crust. Cracks like glowing, ethereal lightning spiderwebbed across the surface. Mountains shuddered and collapsed, avalanches tumbling into vacuum-filled valleys. Chunks larger than cities ripped free, tumbling into the void, bathed in the sickening, shifting hues of the Warp energy Aang now wielded.
The Warp was no longer content to whisper. It bled into realspace like a gaping, infected wound. The sky above didn't just show nebulae—it showed glimpses of other places: swirling storms of impossible light, fleeting horrors that defied description, the silent, vast emptiness between realities. The vacuum filled with a tangible wrongness, a psychic static that clung like viscous oil.
Aang screamed—a silent scream that echoed in psychic space, a sound of profound strain. The bent Warp energy didn't manifest as a standard element. It was a wave of pure, directed Un-creation—a blast of fundamental chaos targeted at Vader.
The Dark Lord, for the first time since his rebirth, felt something alien stab through his iron will. This wasn't the Force—light or dark. This was unfiltered reality, twisted and weaponized by a spirit that refused to break, even when channeling corruption itself. The raw power was immense, but worse was its nature—chaotic, yet controlled by purity. A paradox that ripped at the very fabric of his Dark Side-infused existence.
Vader met it with a shield of Force energy, but the Warp-light, howling through Aang's filter, tore through it like tissue paper. It didn't just impact his physical form; it blasted into his mind, his soul. It was like being struck by a concept he could not comprehend, a truth that contradicted everything he was.
The blast didn't vaporize him, but it hammered him back, carving furrows in the moon dust. His armor creaked, systems flared, but the true damage was internal—psychic. The raw energy filtered through Aang's spirit left an indelible mark.
It wasn't pain, not precisely. It was a vision. Forced upon him by contact with Aang's weaponized purity. Visions flooded his mind, unsought and unwelcome. Not of the Emperor, not of the Sith, not of predictable darkness or the Force. He saw glimpses of the Light.
But not the Light Side he had once rejected. This was deeper. It was balance. It was order. Life vibrant and untainted. Harmony between forces, not suppression or domination. He saw a forest bathed in golden light, a calm sea under a clear sky, a child's unburdened joy, the quiet wisdom in an elder's eyes. Alien images, but not repulsive—terrifying in their unfamiliar beauty.
The vision was brief, shattering under the weight of his darkness, but the scar remained. A psychic phantom—a persistent echo of purity and order in the core of his corrupted being. A foreign concept he could not purge.
Aang, pushed beyond his limit, felt the surge of filtered Warp power fade, leaving him hollowed out, trembling. The moon was tearing itself apart, the Warp bleeding freely around them. He had won a moment, but at the cost of reality beginning to fray.
Escape. The immediate, desperate thought. He could use the chaotic energy, the fragmented bonds of spirit and dimension, to flee.
He focused every ounce of his remaining will, every shred of his mastery over energy—not for destruction this time, but for transition.
He gathered the chaotic forces around him, weaving them with his depleted essence. It was unstable, dangerous, and utterly unpredictable. The air twisted and warped, colors rippling like heat haze. He felt himself pulled in a dozen directions, the possibility of being scattered across the cosmos—or worse, lost in the Warp forever—chillingly real.
With a final, desperate surge, pouring his very life force into the act, Aang vanished.
He didn't appear instantly elsewhere. For a terrifying moment, he was nowhere—adrift in a void of screaming colors and impossible geometries. Reality was a fragile, distant memory. The edges of corruption licked at him, the madness of the Warp trying to claim the spent vessel. He barely held on, forcing the transition to complete.
He reappeared, crashing to the ground on a world lightyears away, scarred by the journey, body aching, spirit raw—but alive. He had escaped.
Behind him, on the moon now actively disintegrating, Lord Vader slowly rose from the dust. His physical form remained intact. His power, vast. But the psychic scar pulsed—a painful reminder of the impossible energy and the alien vision forced upon him. He stood alone amid escalating cataclysm, the Warp pouring into realspace in earnest, the shattered moon crumbling—and a seed of incomprehensible Light planted deep within the heart of his eternal darkness. The boy had escaped, but not without cost. Not without leaving behind a cosmic wound.