Lit Abeloth: Did we miss a body?

I think the Beyond Shadows spirit was tied to the Callista body, so when she "died" Beyond Shadows it destroyed the Callista body, too.

 

It's probably just an error. However, could the release of Callista's essence somehow destroy her body as well? Or make it impossible for Abeloth to use it?

 

Abeloth's story was fascinating. Loved the expansion of the Mortis mythology.

 

I figured that when Callista died, her body died too. Abeloth was already in other bodies, so she remained corporeal. But she absorbed people, fused with them, so she wouldn’t be able to continue inhabiting a body if it died. She wouldn’t possess Callista’s lifeless body.

 

That’s true about Callista being unique. Unfortunately I can’t access my copies of the books right now. But you are right, Callista’s body does seem to disappear when we get to the last book(s). It wasn’t present when her spirit was freed. But we never saw it again afterward, did we?

And Callista’s body itself was somewhat unique by virtue of being originally Cray Mingla’s body. When Callista took over, the body itself changed to some degree. So cutting off its connection to her spirit could, conceivably, leave the body even more removed from any true animating spirit.

Because I don’t think Abeloth can be that for a body. My impression when I read the books years ago was that she possessed both the spirit and the body of her victims. She was like the dark side personified, twisting her victim’s soul itself so that it became a dark version of the original. To me that’s what her absorbing them was, a fusion of spirits.

Callista, being special, was able to maintain some independence. But to my mind, Abeloth still needed the body’s original spirit to tether her to that body. So when she lost Callista’s spirit, her hold on that body would have started to slip. Meaning that yeah, she would have had to do something closer to essence transfer and fully moved from Callista’s body to Rokari Kem’s.

Or perhaps it’s even simpler than that, and there really is a sort of original or prime Abeloth essence (outside of the netherworld) that originally moved into Callista back in Abeloth’s world, then into Kem, then into the Temple computer. This essence can create new avatars, but is itself different in quality from them, being more of an actual core presence for Abeloth in the material world. That would mean that Callista’s death could’ve made her body uninhabitable, forcing Abeloth’s main essence to find a new prime host.

This would be similar to the Spanish horror movie series Rec. It’s ostensibly a zombie horror film, but it’s revealed the “zombies” are actually all possessed people who are linked to an original, demonically possessed body. The demon itself can move to a new host if it needs to, but it can create new “zombies” via infection and they stay under the main body’s power throughout and are all connected. I’d imagine something similar could’ve been the case with Abeloth.

Also, slightly unrelated, but while we’re on the seldom-discussed subject of Abeloth, I’d been wondering recently if Denning was inspired by some of McCaig’s concept art for the Sith who would become Maul when he came up with Abeloth’s description. These two pieces come to mind:





She’s got quite a unique look, so I’m endlessly curious about what led to those decisions on the authors’ part. Perhaps they were inspired by this and other concept artwork, besides, of course, the general Lovecraftian inspiration.

 

I haven't read the last couple FOTJ books in a few years, but I thought Callista's body was basically destroyed beyond Shadows. The first time Luke goes beyond shadows the only serious danger was to his physical body. But in his fight with Abeloth it seems he's in danger just as real. So to me that implies that being destroyed beyond shadows is just as bad as being destroyed in the physical world.

 

Perhaps. I was doing some re-reading, and I think the last time we see Callista’s body is in Ascension. Abeloth arrives on Kesh using that body. By the end of the book she’s moved on to Rokari Kem, and in Apocalypse it is Kem and other avatars produced by her that we follow. But I do think it’s open-ended when it comes to Callista’s actual body.

The other three avatars mentioned in Apocalypse were part of the final battles one way or another. Their destruction weakened Abeloth in the netherworld enough that she could be defeated. But I don’t think that would mean anything would have happened to the bodies otherwise. So if the Callista body’s out there, it may have been a mistake by the writers or a way to leave an opening for the follow-up stories that would deal with the Dagger of Mortis.

There are a couple more things I can’t recall at the moment:

1. Was her Callista body always described as blond and gray-eyes? I can’t recall if Callista had brown hair specifically, unlike Cray Mingla who was blond. Because Abeloth is described as blond and gray-eyed when she arrives on Kesh, and I wasn’t sure if that meant Callista’s body had started to revert to looking more like Cray Mingla’s. But I seem to recall Abeloth shifting a bit between the blond and brown hair even before the Sith helped her escape her homeworld.

2. In Apocalypse, what exactly was it that came out of the Jedi Temple computer and was killed by Saba Sebatyne? Was it more than a spirit, since it could engage in physical combat?​

 

OK, I finally got ahold of my FOTJ books and the answer is essentially what @Sinrebirth theorized.

At the start of Ascension, Abeloth arrives at Kesh after having had Callista’s spirit taken from her by Luke in Nam Chorios. She changes shape multiple times when she arrives at Kesh, but she mainly switches between three female forms while in the same body:

“She cycled through them as the need arose, judging her audience well: pretty but natural-featured Girl with Brown Hair, cultured and lovely Fair-Haired Woman, and a Keshiri who took even Lord Vol's breath away….”​

A few books earlier, in Allies, Luke realized that two of Abeloth’s forms, the blond and the brown-haired one, were the result of her inhabiting Callista’s body:

“Sometimes she had dark, thick, curly hair, such as Callista had had in her first life; sometimes she appeared with the short, honey-gold, stylish locks that Cray Mingla had worn”
​

Being Abeloth, she could make other alterations to her body. But this suggests she did still have Callista’s body at the beginning of Ascension. Not long after, though, she has a psychic battle with Sith Grand Lord Darish Vol, who detects a specific weakness in her, a result of Luke having uprooted Callista’s spirit not long before, and uses the same technique on Abeloth once more.

“There was a wound, visible as something black and bloody and infected, in what passed for a soul or a heart of this monster. And he went right for it.”
​

This attack leaves Abeloth severely weakened.

“Abeloth sat huddled in Ship's interior. She had not revealed to Khai or anyone just how badly wounded she had been by the attack on Kesh. Vol had much of the power of Skywalker, combined with experience, and it had been a devastating encounter.”
​

Later on, while she’s still recovering from the attack, the narration actually shows us how bad things got for this body.

“On the ‘floor’ of Ship’s interior was a collection of pulsing, half-formed body parts, attached in a way that no student of any kind of anatomy would recognize. It shifted and writhed, a human foot popping out here, a tentacle there, then subsiding back to a no-shape thing that undulated for a moment, before a face formed with gray eyes to see. It was a human face, peering out from the otherwise formless, undulating mass that was Abeloth.”
​

It is in this same scene, when Abeloth’s Callista body has completely come apart, that she first sees Rokari Kem on the holonet. She’s noticeably interested in her and in the love she garners from the galaxy at large. This is the last we see of Abeloth for a while.

She then presumably abandons her rebel Sith armada, leaving Tola Annax behind infused with dark-side energy to serve as a decoy and trap for the Jedi. The next time we see her it’s already as Rokari Kem on her arrival at Coruscant, where she begins to take power over the Lost Tribe as well as the Galactic Alliance.

So it seems to me that Abeloth lost Callista’s body after both the assaults on it by Luke and Vol, becoming a disturbing unformed mass before eventually taking over Rokari Kem’s body. Is it this protoplasmic mass that later moves into the Jedi Temple computer? Is this the form that Abeloth had when Callista first encountered her in her planet?

By the way, the description of her protoplasmic form reminded me both of John Carpenter’s The Thing and of the villain Naraku from the anime Inuyasha when he’s in between incarnations. I had forgotten this until I reread this portions recently.

 

Sounds like Abeloth's return could be an event that kickstarts the old EU (if ever continued). Except that's not a good thing.

 

I just am glad she never took a Killik body and maximised her Joiner output becoming legion... instead of only having one body she controlled actively and others mere mindless tools until she directly influenced or controled them whenever needed be.

 

That's actually a terrifying yet logical idea.