Beyond - Legends The End of All Light (Post-NJO AU: Anakin Solo, Jacen, Jaina, L/M, H/L, many more) Updated 11/29/14!

I don't think I've ever really posted a teaser from a chapter before, but it seems like a good time to do it. This has not been edited or betaed or spellchecked, so there are probably a lot of mistakes.

Anyway, this is part of chapter 53—not the beginning of the chapter, this is actually a chunk out of the middle, so its a little spoiley. Hope you guys like it. I'll post the whole thing soon

Spoiler

The old Muun called it the Undying: a custom-built star courier outfitted with military-grade cloaking armor, dual ion drives that glowed with green energy when engaged, and a class-1 hyperdrive that could make the journey from Naraka to what the rest of the galaxy called "Known Space" in six days. Six days was what it took. Once they arrived there Darth Malig's training truly began.

Bimmisaari came first. Plagueis landed the Undying in a stone spaceport on the edge of Glastro. There Malig saw towering structures and paved streets, working speeders and starships gliding in all directions, and for the first time trees and grass and life so green it did not seem real. He lurked about the teeming marketplace and the lively bazaars in the square outside the Tower of Law, watching the Bimms and the humans milling in sunlight as gentle as the breeze, and heard many exotic languages in many strange voices and music that rang sweetly beneath the rumble of the crowds. Discoveries were made at every turn. Malig watched the people as he cut seemingly aimless paths amongst them and learned then of other cultures and commerce of which he had only a dim notion, and society more complex and interwoven than nomadic tribes, and families other than his own which he had conceived of only as characters in Dagan's nighttime stories. Mothers and sons, best friends and partners, lovers, traders and travelers from places light years away, peoples of species previously undreamt by him all flowed through those plazas and Malig studied each. The Dark Lord spoke into his ear as they passed. "You cannot rule people until you know them completely, what they truly desire and what they fear utterly."

From there the Undying traveled to Mon Calamari and Ithor, then to Onderon and Boz Pity and thirty other worlds over the next two years. Everywhere Malig donned the bulky antitox breath mask and black eye coverings Plagueis gave him to conceal his identity from others. Most they encountered mistook him for a Kel Dor or some other species unable to breathe in oxygen-rich atmospheres, an illusion buttressed by the distortion the mask generated in his voice, warping it into thin drone that rang like struck metal. And everywhere they traveled Malig's knowledge of the universe grew.

On Taris he was taught to slip through the crowded streets unnoticed. In the markets on Ansion he learned to steal from vendors and patrons alike. He was made to swim in the lakes of Alderran and later Manaan's boundless ocean. He wandered through the fumes on Duro, traversed the calderas on Saleucami, tried his hand at games of chance on Ord Mantell and games of blood on Klatooine.

During the long voyages in the Undying he studied the known sciences and histories and mathematics, and grew to understand the machines around him that had been absent in his life previous and even came to master them. In time there was little that could go wrong on Plagueis's ship that he could not repair and less he could not accomplish behind the yoke of the thing.

He piloted the Undying down the Hydian Way and across the serpentine path of the Perlemian Trade Route, flew through the Kathol Rift, the Marasa Nebula, and the Transitory Mists. He frequented spaceports and cantina populated by the same characters wearing different faces, like masks they swapped amongst themselves, and he listened to their tales and spun his own until he became a gifted trader in lies.

He practiced many trades on many distant worlds. He worked as a starship mechanic on Chandrila, a shuttle pilot on Cato Neimodia, and a smuggler on Nar Shaddaa. On Kothlis he labored at a droid foundry. On Sullust he was a miner.

He was Rasf Na-Dor, Bekkal Dodonna, Sorin Flynt, and a dozen other identities his master had falsified. Each coalesced into something solid from nothingness then faded back into the ether just as quickly, and he moved on.

Malig also became fluent in many languages. He could speak already Galactic Basic and read and write passingly in Aurebesh from his time with Marro. Out of necessity he learned first the trade languages of Huttese and Bocce and later Twi'leki and Muun and Zabraki and Bothese, and even grew to discern Verpine and the speech of Wookiees. In his studies with Plagueis, he learned too older, darker speech.

"You've a clever mind," Plagueis had said to him once. "That's good. You'll need it if you're going to kill him."

Often he thought of this man he was to kill, this Sidious, and wondered at all the effort, when the person he truly wished to kill was standing next to him.

Much of his time in those days was spent with IG-6. The droid was a prototype combat unit assembled by Holowan Laboratories with menacing red photoreceptors and a homicidal personality. How the Muun had come to own the thing Malig never discovered and there existed no record of purchase or contract related to the droid's construction. Duranium plating of white and beaten gray armored his rangy, multi-jointed limbs, making him a tough bodyguard and sparring opponent, programmed and trained to use both blasters and melee weapons, and when set upon his terrible work he seemed a thing forged from the fires of one of Corellia's hells. Protocol functions enhanced the droid's processor and his once limited speech capability had been upgraded by an ultrasonic vocabulator, fashioning IG-6 into a sort of all-purpose servant for Plagueis who could masquerade effectively as a simple protocol droid. It also made him a competent guide for Malig in all the lessons his master did not have time for. Lord Plagueis would leave often for weeks at a time without explanation and abandon his apprentice on whatever world they were training on with only the droid. At times, Malig would come to think of IG-6 as a sort of companion, but always something would occur that destroyed that illusion. The droid was not there to help him—IG-6 was there to watch him.

All these lessons seemed small by any measure when set against those Plagueis taught. Away from the eyes of others the Dark Lord reveal to him another world vaster than all those orbiting the many stars in space. Already Malig could feel himself growing stronger physically. He ran faster and leapt to heights other beings he encountered could not match. He could raise up objects without touching them, even those great in size or weight, and he could draw items from a distance to him in the same fashion or propel them away at tremendous speeds. Over time he learned to bend the minds of beings weaker than him to his will or erase from their thoughts the memory of his presence altogether.

At night he was made to study the teachings of Sith long dead from passages in cracked and ancient scrolls or by snatches of a holocron projection, but his master guarded these secrets fiercely and never allowed him access to relics or knowledge unfettered.

For all their time together, Darth Plagueis remained a mystery to his pupil. During his unexplained absences, Malig would wonder if his master wasn't going to teach him. The Dark Lord seemed to have many secret dealings and a astonishing number of assets, from his impossibly expensive starship to lavish estates on a dozen worlds, all of it under the name of International Banking Clan or one of its subsidiaries. However he'd managed it, Plagueis had at his disposal a vast corporate empire and a seemingly endless supply of credits stocking their coffers. Of these matters, he let Malig in on little.

In spite of his hatred for the Muun, there were times when Malig longed for a relationship with Plagueis that was more than this. He had no one else. The Dark Lord was, after all, the being that had created his very pneuma from nothingness. He was, in fact, Malig's father. Yet he quickly learned that the Sith dynamic was not one of camaraderie, but one of competition. They were rivals seeking an advantage, one over the other. Nothing more.

Sometimes it seemed to Malig his master was more interested in studying him than teaching. The old Muun examined him as though he was an ongoing experiment, and sometimes Plagueis looked at him as though he expected him to come apart. Daily he would take blood samples and cell cultures, he would study Malig's DNA and count his midi-chlorians, then opened the black book of veined leather balanced on his knee and set about filling its pages with old and choppy language of dotted characters and spidering incantations in ink as red as blood.

"What is that?" Malig asked one day as they sat in the Undying's small infirmary.

The old Muun did not look up from his work as he spoke. "My grimoire. It's a chronicle of my research and methods."

"For what?"

"For manipulating life. It recounts how I created life with the Force."

"May I read it?"

"No. In time I will record it all in a holocron for you and those Sith that will follow you."

Eventually Malig realized Plagueis had no plans to record his findings in a holocron because he meant to live forever. Which made Malig wonder why he needed an apprentice at all.

Once he asked his master why he wrote in a book instead of tapping it into a datapad where it could be stored in memory that would live on long after that ink had eroded and the pages had crumbled to ashes.

"There is power in writing a thing by your own hand. It sets the mind and body upon that thing fully and inscribes your determination on it. A being might leave in those words a part of himself."

Darth Plagueis was a hard an unforgiving teacher. Degradation and failure were the instruments of his instruction, and he wielded them well, breaking Malig down daily and shaping the clay that remained into something new.

In the territory controlled by the Hutts, the Dark Lord showed him how beings were subjugated and used at the most basic levels. Many of them were Twi'leks. "The weak are made to serve the powerful," Plagueis said. "It is the signature scrawled into the very fiber of the universe." Malig saw it was so.

They visited the hatcheries on Neimodia where the grubs struggled against one another for food. Those strongest survived and flourished and those gaping and feeble mouths starved. On Ryloth Malig was forced to live for three weeks in the darkness of Kala'uun's caves so that he could learn to live without light.

He was imprisoned on Oovo IV for eight days and became the first prisoner to successfully escape from Desolation Alley in more than three hundred years. He lived as a slave on Tatooine.

On Corellia, Plagueis ordered him to kill a man for the first time. He led him through the streets of Coronet and pointed one crooked finger at the being. When it was done, Malig asked his master who the man was and why he'd been made to kill him. "It matters only that I bid you do it and you obeyed."

Malig would never know.

Soon his master had Malig undertaking more dangerous missions. On Bothawui he spied on spies. He plumbed the data libraries of Obroa-Skai. He joined a clandestine order of assassins called the GenoHaradan and later worked for the Exchange.

When the time came to construct his lightsaber, Darth Plagueis sent Malig into the icy mines of Mygeeto to harvest a focusing crystal. For days Malig searched those dark and glittering vaults for the perfect gem and when he emerged he knelt before his master as stray snowflakes fluttered about them and laid the crystal at his feet. Plagueis nodded, then crushed the crystal beneath his boot, grinding it to powder before Malig's wide eyes.

"A Sith does not use for his weapon a crystal from a natural formation. We forge crystals stronger than any found in nature with our command of these elements."

So they did.

Five days he sweated over furnace and compressor, forming in those fires a synthetic crystal augmented by Sith alchemy and his own dark power in a ritual ancient and terrible. It emerged from the kiln glowing the dark red of blood and humming with harmonic vibrations.

"The secret to alchemy," the Muun said in the hot glow of the brood furnace, "is realizing that everything in this galaxy is the same thing. If one broke it all down past the molecules he would see it is all made of the same matter. And so making one thing into another is no task at all."

Afterward no more was said by Plagueis on the construction of his lightsaber, so Malig placed the freshly forged crystal in a pouch on his belt with the Krayt Dragon pearl and waited for word from his master on the next phase of the process.

For several months his training continued as before in a blur of worlds, occupations, and ancient texts. Then the Undying finally ventured into the Stygian Caldera. Webs of that dark nebula stretched across a scattering of dim stars like dust suspended in a poison cloud and hanging dead in the glowing veins of that miasma were the Sith worlds. The Undying sailed deeper into the gloom along the Dragon Trail and the Nache Bhelfia. Master and apprentice landed on Dromund Kaas and Ashas Ree, entered Ludo Kressh's fortress on Rhelg, scoured Krayiss II's ruinous libraries, and searched the subbasement of Naga Sadow's broken citadel on Khar Delba.

At last they arrived on Ziost. Snow crunched beneath their boots and wind tore at the black cloaks they huddled beneath as they walked down a slopping mountain path. Piles of loose stone that had once been cairns stood toppled at the sides of the winding road, and wild animals had long ago scattered the bones across the hillside, leaving them cracked and frosted over in ice. They passed them without a word. Mountains stood bare in jagged spines across the horizon ridged with shelves of snow. There was no sun.

Rising out of the tundra where their path twisted to an end was a great temple whose name had been lost in the entropy that had settled upon that frozen wasteland. Ice caked its walls and turrets in fanged sickles and bumpy rime and its towering citadel reached high into the gray sky.

They entered through an arched doorway flanked by heaps of broken statuary and descended a steep spiral of gray stone steps discolored by centuries of unrelenting cold. Pale daylight filtered down the stairwell through the shattered door above and the many fractures stitched in the walls, casting the world below in a dark bluish glow. The stairs ended in a vaulted ossuary that had once been lighted by candles but now was too still even for light to move, and there were many crumbling bones in that place stacked deep in niches and disarranged upon shelves of rock or laying broken on the floor where time had strewn them without regard for aesthetics or ossature. The remains of a broken catafalque lay in shambles on a crude altar at the end of the crypt. There was no body to be seen in its splintered ruin. Plagueis and Malig passed it and went on.

Arched passages pushed deeper into the foundation of the temple and the shafts of sapphire light showed the walls were etched with arcana and ancient pictographs. Above one entrance a warning had been engraved in the rock. Malig touched his master's arm and gestured to the symbols scrawled across the threshold, making sure the Muun saw it.

Plagueis peered out from beneath the cowl of his cloak at Malig. "If something is forbidden, it is likely a thing worth knowing."

Beyond they found more stairs leading up through old libraries where ancient tablets had been shattered upon the floor and alchemist laboratories too long neglected lay in utter disrepair. In one dark hall where the walls were covered in glyphs, a vast tableau had been carved upon the stone. It showed a number of cloaked figures looming above a sea of worshippers.

Malig passed the shadowy statues and nightmarish grotesques standing in the chamber and approached the image as though in a trance. Below the depiction was a single word deeply engraved in the stone and Malig touched it for want of understanding.

"Jen'jidai," he said.

"The Lords of the Sith," Plagueis explained. "These were the first. This is a depiction of their landfall on Korriban. They were exiled by the Jedi Order after the Hundred-Year Darkness for refusing to abstain from using the Force in its true form."

"What are the Jedi, Master?".

"They are our true enemies. Once you've destroyed Sidious, it is the Jedi upon which we must have our revenge."

Looking at the relief, Darth Malig's hatred for the Jedi began.

The Muun gestured with one pale hand at the cloaked man in the center of the picture. "That is Ajunta Pall, their leader. This citadel was his a long, long time ago. There were only twelve of them. Can you imagine? Just twelve exiles against so many, and they started an order that would survive for millennia."

Malig nodded, but his eyes were tracing the lines of the worshippers at the exiles' feet. They were difficult to make out genuflecting as they were, yet they appeared to be a species of red beings with long corded muscles and drooping facial tendrils.

Sculpted upon the wall to the right was another such alien, only darker, decorated in carbon black armor and wielding in each hand an enormous battle ax. Laying in the relief's foreground near the figure's greaves was a black helmet. Bone spurs jutted sharply out beneath his ebon flesh at his cheeks and a pair of long tendrils tumbled down from his upper lip.

Plagueis followed his gaze to the stunning image. "Adas," he said. "The King of the Sith. Yes, he would be of great interest to you, wouldn't he? The Sith were the species the dark Jedi exiles became the lords of."

Malig did not look away from Adas's yellow eyes when he spoke. "What became of them?"

"They are gone now. Their kind was bred out with the human Dark Jedi whom they called lords, and what remained of that bloodline fled into the Unknown Regions after the Great Hyperspace War."

"Were they never seen again?"

"Another Sith Lord called Revan is said to have searched for them, like many of the Sith who had followed him seeking the 'True Sith.' They were never heard from again."

 

. Worth the wait. Can't wait to see where this goes!

 

Palpatine: "There he is! He's still alive!"

 

Tomorrow is my birthday. Want to know what would make it the best birthday...?

 

Happy Birthday!

 

Fine, I'll take you to Chuck E Cheese.

 

That was brilliant!

 

Pssh, everybody knows Showbiz Pizza Place is my favorite.

 

I'm with you. Showbiz was way better. Billy Bob and his robot band rocked my socks.

 

Dude, that is the truth. I don't think I ever even went to a Chuck E. Cheese's as a kid, but man, those Showbiz Pizza birthday parties in the '80s were pretty much the highlight of my life (that and Super Mario Bros. 3).

 

Mario 3 was so cool. Loved flying with the racoon tail.

I went to Chuck E Cheese once or twice after they converted Showbiz into it. It was not the same. Everything I loved was gone and my boy Billy Bob had been replaced by some rat.



I'm done writing chapter 53, btw. Just have to edit it now and make sense of the mess I've made. It's like 12,000 words again.

 

Where I'm from, Chuck E Cheese was always considered lame, even for kids, because we used to have this place called Caesarland, which blew it out of the water. Yup, a Little Caesars with a play place. And not a lame play place like McDonald's have, but a massive, awesome indoor climbing area with tunnels and slides and ball pits, and it also had two huge game areas complete with those little rides. When I was little, they even had a race-track for roller racers. It was the stuff dreams (and apparently lawsuits) were made of, let me tell you. I've never heard of this Showbiz place, but it sounds like maybe it was on par with Caesarland?

Anyways, yay about chapter 53! Glad to have you back, Yobi

 

Thank you very much for resuming the fic. I had since resigned myself with the thought that it was a stellar endeavour, regardless of you actually finishing it.

I'll be glad to have to update the file on Dropbox again. And again. Until the end of all light.

 

Finally caught up and read all of what you have written...really enjoying end of all light and enjoyed bloodlines too! Hope you update soon!

 

Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving!

 

Darn you!
Thank you but
DARN YOU!

Epic double gift of a chapter and a trailer smashed.

 

Darth Malig, is that you?

 

God, that lightsaber

 

KNIGHTsaber.

 

Here's a quick recap of the story to refresh everyone's memory since it's been so long since the last post. I thought about recapping the whole series, but that would have taken hours. Hopefully this will be enough to relight anything that's become foggy:



-One month after the events of The Lands of the Dead, Darth Malig returns to Korriban for Darth Plagueis's "grimoire", a book of Sith spells that Plagueis's spirit has finally told Malig where it was hidden. While there he encounters Darth Sidious's ghost who taunts Malig, telling him of Anakin Solo's visit to Korriban (also in The Lands of the Dead), saying that Anakin will destroy him. Seeming angered by this, Malig destroys Sidious's spirit.

-Malig and Jacen Solo (now "Darth Havok", Malig's Sith apprentice) and the Raithian forces use Admiral Kre'fey and the Bothans to attack Zonama Sekot, then turn on the Kre'fey's forces, demolishing their fleet and seeming to Sekot to have rescued it. Jacen convinces the living planet to help Malig and the Raithians in their mission.

-That mission is to build the Reckoner: a Force-powered space station in Zonama Sekot's orbit whose ultimate purpose is still unclear. It seems to be vaguely modeled after the ancient Star Forge, and Malig and Jacen even journey to Rakata Prime to recover the Star Forge's power core to help in the spacestation's creation, but these similarities may be only aesthetic in nature. Jacen enslaves the Yuuzhan Vong to help in the Reckoner's construction, and even uses Danni Quee and Nen Yim to build its crucial energy conversion system.

-Three months later Luke Skywalker and his order of Jedi Knights, now hiding in their own space station ("Halo") behind one of Tatooine's moons, become aware of the disappearance of Force-sensitive peoples across the galaxy.

-After not hearing from Danni Quee for some time and fearing something might have happened on Zonama Sekot, Luke sends Kyp Durron to the living world to check on things. Kyp finds that the planet has moved.

-A team of Jedi send to Dathomir encounters Malig's Shadow Hand "Faybol" and an army of Raithians sent there to capture the Witches of Dathomir. Faybol is killed by Jaina Solo and the cyborg bounty hunter "Aero Gin," and the Raithian fleet there is repelled by the Jedi's allies, the Chiss.

-While on board the Chiss vessels, Jaina learns that Jagged Fel is designing a biological weapon meant to exterminate the Raithians he calls "Omega Red". The Raithians are believed to be the long-forgotten descendants of the Sith species, and therefor may share common genetic features that can be targeted with such a weapon (Anakin Solo's discovery on Korriban in The Lands of the Dead). Jaina tries to convince Jag to abandon his project, but he refuses, reminding her that this is the Chiss way. Jaina suspects Jag is motivated by grief over his father's death on Apollyon (The Lands of the Dead).

-While journeying back to Tatooine on Jag's warship, Jaina, Anakin, Tahiri Veila, Tenel Ka, and Wrev Caster examine Faybol's captured stealth ship. They find a message waiting for them there from Darth Malig, who seems to know what's become of Faybol. Malig invites them to meet him at a set of coordinates. Fearing a trap, the young Jedi agree to say nothing about this to Luke and the others for now.

-Back at Halo, Faybol's death means the Jedi can stop using a small herd of ysalamiri to hide their presences in the Force (Faybol had the unique ability to sense Force-users across the stars), but when they try to move the creatures off the spacestation, they find someone has released the creatures from their habitat and hundreds of them are now loose throughout Halo, making rounding them up and removing the Force-neutral bubble they create a long and arduous task. The Jedi suspect it was done by one of the Jedi children who has grown attached to the little creatures over the last year and sees them as pets. Buuuut...

-There is a Sith mole on board Halo. Her name is Hala Rozess and she is a Zeltron spy working for Darth Malig. She had been a mole posing as a Jedi prisoner on the Raithian capital "Apollyon" meant to watch real Jedi prisoners captured in Raithian space along with the new Jedi prisoners from the GFFA, including Luke Skywalker (The Lands of the Dead). When Luke and the other Jedi escaped, Hala went with them, fighting by their side, and embedding herself on Halo when they returned to the GFFA as an ally.

-At Luke and Mara's behest, six-year-old Ben Skywalker begins to cultivate his natural gift for the ancient Jedi art of battle meditation under the instruction of a Raithian Jedi named Garrison Shan(also known by the false name "Malachor" he gave Luke originally in tLotD). Shan shares Ben's gift for Battle meditation and met Luke while a prisoner of the Raithians. He was rescued and joined the Jedi in the same way that Hala Rozess did.

-The Imperial Remnant, led by Admiral Pellaeon joins the Jedi and the Chiss and the Empire of the Hand in their alliance against the Raithians, GFFA, and Hapans. Conflict arrises when Grand Admiral Thrawn (really, Thrawn's clone who survived Luke and Mara's attempt to kill him in Visions of the Future), leader of the Empire of the Hand, suggests their alliance begins making strikes against the GFFA forces rather than only targeting the Raithians. Luke is adamant that they do not and the disagreement threatens to fracture their alliance.

-On Coruscant, Chief of State Fyor Rodan is on the verge of cracking. Haunted by his forced murdering of rival Cal Omas (The Age of Heroes), he leads the GFFA as Malig's puppet under constant threat of death and has now begun to aid the Jedi rebels through their allies in the senate and military (as of The Lands of the Dead) who would surely kill him if they knew he had helped the Raithians come to power at the start of the war (tAoH).

-A Yuuzhan Vong slave's suicide/attempt at sabotage on the Reckoner leads to Danni Quee's death. Jacen takes her body to Malig, pleading to his master to bring her back to life, a power Malig has claimed to possess throughout the series. Malig and Jacen have been butting heads throughout the story, with Jacen increasingly unhappy and distrustful of Malig (they disagree over how to deal with the Jedi, Jacen asked to read Plagueis's grimoire and Malig refused, etc.). When Malig refuses to resurrect Danni just so Jacen can have his friend back, Jacen challenges his master, telling him that he doesn't believe Malig can bring her back. Eventually, Malig agrees to resurrect Danni if Jacen will follow him unquestioningly from here on out. Jacen agrees and Malig appears to return Danni Quee from the dead.

-On Halo, Luke sends a team of Jedi Knights to find Zonama Sekot, fearing the Raithians have done something to the powerful planet. This team is led by Kyle Katarn and Kirana Ti, and includes Alema Rar, Jaden Korr, Tekli, Tesar Sebatyne, Lowbacca, and a Raithian Jedi named Necil Krace (Iktotchi).

-Han and Leia tell Luke they want to try and find Jacen to try and bring him back to the light, even if it means capture and death for them. Luke reveals to them that his contact on Coruscant, Commander Lorra Klorne is being aided by Fyor Rodan, and that he may know where they can find Jacen. Han and Leia ambush Rodan, who agrees to help them, but fearing for his life, betrays them, having them captured but ultimately giving them what they want: sending them to the Raithians and Jacen Solo.

-Luke and Mara journey to Denon hoping to find Malig at his old hideout. They find nothing, but Luke reveals to Mara that it was Malig who instructed Vergere to save Mara's life during the Yuuzhan Vong War, years before the conflict when Malig claims to have had a vision of her. Mara wonders if the reason Malig wanted her to live is so Ben would be born and is afraid Malig wants their child.

-After their parents have left, Anakin and Jaina Solo decide to journey in secret to Malig's coordinates and confront him in hopes of saving their brother Jacen as well. They surrender to Malig on Jacen's flagship "The Exodus" and find little sympathy from their brother.

-Finding that they've vanished and knowing exactly where they've gone, Tahiri and Wrev decide to go after Anakin and Jaina in hopes of stopping them before they surrender to Malig. As a failsafe, they activate a tracking beacon on their own starship and give its receiver signal to Jag Fel, instructing him to follow them in order to save Jaina.

-Mad with anger over Anakin actions in The Lands of the Dead (using Jacen's wife to lure Jacen to Centerpoint where Anakin tried to kill him), Jacen tortures Anakin in a Yuuzhan Vong Embrace of Pain. During his torment, Anakin is questioned by Malig about his visit to Korriban, and we see a flashback of his reunion with Tahiri at the end of The Lands of the Dead, and learn that the dissolution of their relationship that we have seen throughout the story came from the moment tLotD ended, when Tahiri learned that Anakin nearly fell to the Dark Side when he thought Tahiri died (Exodus). Anakin withstands the torture, attempting to bring Jacen back to the light and refusing to join Malig.

-On the Reckoner, Nen Yim sees that Danni Quee is no longer herself. Eventually, she throws herself down an energy shaft, as though she knew she was not supposed to be alive.

-Nen Yim sends a communication to the Exodus to tell Jacen that Danni is dead, and that she was never really alive. Jacen knows now that Malig is a liar. Not trusting Malig with his sister, Jacen maroons Jaina and Wrev (who is now captured too) on Lehon (Rakata Prime) in secret. He keeps Tahiri out of spite, determined to use her to punish Anakin.

-Soon after, Han and Leia are brought to Jacen. They beg him to abandon the Dark Side and come back to them. He refuses but makes them an offer: he will release them and tell them where Jaina is stranded if they promise to hide somewhere for the remainder of the war and take Tenel Ka and Jonah with them, somewhere safe. Initially Han and Leia refuse, but when Jacen reveals that Maichen (aka "Munchin", aka the twelve year old Raithian girl Han rescued in Raithian space back in The Lands of the Dead had stowed away on the Falcon and Jacen now has her prisoner too. Fearing for the little girl's safety and horrified by their son's use of her as leverage, Han and Leia agree and are released without Malig's knowing.

-Jag receives message and informs Thrawn and Pellaeon. Thrawn wants to overwhelm Malig's forces at Lehon even if it's a trap and they launch a huge attack, only to have the Raithian fleet there suddenly jump into hyperspace--and emerge at Tatooine to attack Halo. A team of Empire of the Hand commandos led by Evlyn Tabory managed to board the Exodus but Jacen deals with them, killing all but Evlyn who manages to survive.

-On Halo, the Jedi find their communications have been sabotaged (it was Hala Rozess). Under Malig's orders, Hala made certain Tenel Ka and Jonah Solo were off Halo before the Raithian attack and she tricks Ben into coming with her.

-The Chiss/Empire of the Hand/Imperial Remnant fleet returns to Tatooine to try and stop the Raithians from destroying Halo, realizing now Malig's ruse. During the chaos, the Raithian prisoners Jag has been using to experiment with Omega Red on escape and it leads to the complete destruction of his warship, though Jag is knocked unconscious by one of his troops and jettisoned before it's destroyed, saving his life.

-On Lehon Jaina and Wrev encounter a few surviving Rakata, who tell them how Malig and Jacen and their Sith acolytes (Callista, Raynar Thul, and Zekk) came to the planet's surface for part of the Star Forge that crashed there 4,000 years ago (this would be the power core mentioned earlier). It should also be noted that throughout the story we've seen a few scenes with Callista where she does not appear to be entirely there since Malig healed her from very serious injuries at the end of The Lands of the Dead.

-Han and Leia find Jaina and Wrev on Lehon and jump to Tatooine to join the battle.

-Throughout the story we have seen flashbacks starting roughly 104 years before the start of The End of All Light. They tell the story of someone named "Namtar," born to a barren mother named Aya and a scavanger named Dagan. They are members of a nomadic tribe called the Kasanaan who live on desolate planet called Naraka. For some reason, Aya and Dagan keep young Namtar hidden from everyone on the planet, telling the healer who delivered the boy that he died shortly after birth. They don't want anyone to see him and caution him from making contact with others. Dagan dies from a mysterious illness after a fight with Namtar. Some time later, Namtar's pet whisperkit "Baal" is lost and dies. In his grief, Namtar seems to call on the Force an brings Baal back to life. The whisperkit does not live very long, however, and eventually kills itself much like Danni Quee. Tragedy strikes once more, when Aya is caught in a dust storm and dies. While burying her, Namtar tries to resurrect his mother as he did Baal and succeeds, in a sense. Her reanimated corpse attacks him and Namtar is forced to kill her. Namtar wanders the desert for two years afterward, where Namtar, now a young adult, meets a runaway Twi'lek slaved named Marro. She takes Namtar in to her dwelling and the two fall in love. Marro teaches Namtar Basic and a little about the galaxy beyond Naraka. Despite their efforts, they are unable to have children. The pair devise a plan to escape Naraka by stealing a space ship kept by a tribe of Kasaanan nearby. One day while surreptitiously watching this tribe from a mountain ridge, Namtar meets a pale Muun in a black cloak who leads him into a cave. There, the Muun tells him that his name is Darth Plagueis, a Sith Lord. He tells Namtar of the Force and the Dark Side, of the Sith and the Jedi. Plagueis tells Namtar that he created him with a power called the Force, that he is his true father, and that Namtar possess the power of the Force as well. Plagueis wants Namtar to become his apprentice. He tells Namtar that his existing apprentice, called Darth Sidious, is too focused on personal glory to advance the goals of the Sith Order. He wishes Namtar to kill Sidious and take his place, as Plagueis cannot kill his own apprentice. Eventually Namtar agrees, and Plagueis names him "Darth Malig." The two train over many months with Namtar learning much about his healing abilities and his flawed ability to resurrect the dead. He keeps Plagueis and his training a secret from Marro. He puts off leaving the planet while his training continues. Plagueis wishes Namtar to abandon Marro and come with him to the Known Galaxy, but Namtar refuses. One day Plagueis leads Namtar out to a Krayt Dragon pit and throws him in it. Namtar kills the beast with his ability to manifest disease, and Plagueis reveals to Namtar that Namtar killed his father Dagan in much the same way out of anger. Plagueis then crushes the Kasanaan death mask Aya had made of Dagan's face as a final insult. The ordeal forces a split between Master and apprentice, and Namtar leaves Plagueis there, determined then to escape Naraka with Marro. The pair finally attempt their theft of the starship from the Kasanaan tribe, only to walk into a trap, as though the Kasanaan knew they were coming. Marro is killed. Plagueis arrives then in his own starship and helps Namtar kill the Kasanaan. Afterward, Namtar realizes that Plagueis set him up, that he forced the break between them precisely because he knew Namtar would try to escape with Marro and he warned the Kasanaan so they would be ready and kill Marro. Plagueis knocks Namtar out and drags him aboard his ship, which leaves Naraka forever.

-The Jedi on Halo are rushing around, trying to get the space station anchored to Booster Terrik's Errant Venture (one of their smuggler allies) so it can be towed through hyperspace away from the Raithian attack, not realizing that the real threat is inside the space station already. With Ben, Hala takes explosives from Halo's armory and rigs them around the space station's power core. Then they board an escape pod and jettison themselves from Halo.

-Jacen goes to the Exodus's bridge to confront Malig. When he sees that Malig has led the Raithians to Halo to kill the Jedi, Jacen moves to attack his master. Just as he does however, Jedi Master Tresina Lobi crashes her damaged starfighter into the Exodus's bridge. Jacen is horribly injured and is nearly sucked out into space, but Malig saves him, promising not to let him die. Malig takes Jacen to his personal shuttle, the Death Mask, and they esape the Exodus as the warship tumbles toward Tatooine, coming apart in pieces.

-The damage to the Exodus allows Anakin to escape the Embrace of pain, and on his way to find Tahiri's cell, he comes upon Evlyn Tabory, unconscious and gravely injured. He puts her in the Exodus's las escape pod and activates its emergency beacon so she will be cared for, dooming him and Tahiri to die on the Exodus.

-Anakin finds Tahiri, who has nearly escaped from her own cell by disassembling her cybernetic hand (she lost her hand in their fight with Onimi at the end of The Living Force). Tahiri thinks there may be one more escape pod in the general's quarters. They find it and escape the Exodus.

-In the escape pod, Anakin and Tahiri reconcile.

-Hala Rozess activates the explosives she set on Halo, destroying Halo and most of the Jedi Order (Tionne, Saba Sebatyne, Streen, and many more die, along with none Jedi like Winter).

-Hala and Ben's escape pod is recovered by Malig's Death Mask, which jumps to hyperspace, escaping.

-The rest of the Raithian fleet leaps to hyperspace after Halo's destruction.

-The Chiss, Empire of the Hand, Imperial Remnant, and Smuggler's fleets also leave.

-The surviving Jedi meet on Tatooine. There are only twelve of them left. They are: Luke, Mara, Leia, Jaina, Anakin, Tahiri, Tenel Ka, Kyp, Wrev, Valin Horn, Garrison Shan, and Octa Ramis. Apprentices Jysella Horn and Baliss Phlora are also alive, along with Jedi allies like Han, Lando, C-3PO, R2-D2, Aero Gin, a nightsister called Illandra Grim, Mirax Horn, Maichen, and Wedge and Iella Antilles. Pretty much everyone else is dead. The Jedi are distraught over their losses. Jag arrives and apologizes to Jaina. He is disgraced and without his command. He gives Jaina the last vial of Omega Red and tells her to destroy it. Maichen tells Leia that before she met them she informed Raithian forces of a cloister of Jedi hiding on a Raithian planet whom she got killed for a small reward. It was what led to her own capture later, when she was caught with one of their lightsabers.

-Luke gives a speech to rally the remaining Jedi, who are determined to stop Malig and save Ben Skywalker.

-At this moment Kyle Katarn returns half-dead in his ship the Raven's Claw. He tells them that the others who went with him are now dead, and that he found Zonama Sekot, and that the Raithians are building a space station around it. Luke determines based on his description that the space station is the Reckoner, which Luke saw the schematics for on Apollyon during the Council of Lords meeting back in The Lands of the Dead, and he also figures out that the system Zonama Sekot has moved to is Tython, the birthplace of the Jedi Order, located in the Deep Core. Jaina tells Luke what she learned on Lehon about the Star Forge. The Jedi decide they must go to Tython to stop Malig. As their decision is made, they see a sail barge approaching them across the desert.

-After their defeat, Thrawn and Pellaeon decide to attack Coruscant.







Okay, I think that's pretty much all the important points. Hope that helps everyone remember...

 

Chapter 53: The Undying

Cold brought him back to life. He'd died in the desert and was reborn in the cold, delivered from some oblivion between so absolute he would never recall it. That cold was the first thing he felt. It seemed to drag him out of a deep well and cough him back up into the realm of hard edges and pain.

Malig opened his eyes and found himself shivering atop a thin sleeping pallet in a semicircular cavern of metal and sterile light. No sun or moon or stars were visible, nor was there any aperture for such light to shine through. Panels suspended across the low ceiling and mounted in thin dashes down vertical supports in the durasteel walls simply glowed with a lifeless incandescence. He recognized them as glowpanels though most he'd come across in the long abandoned towers thrust up from sand dunes or the jumble of broken starships buried deeper in the dust had been cracked or dead so long their filaments had turned to ash.

He winced beneath their severe light and tried to make sense of his surroundings. The chamber was cleaner than any place his molten yellow eyes had laid upon before, without a trace of dust on the white walls and little grime on the gray metal floor, and no motes dancing in the glow all around him.

And it was cold. Colder than the most bitter night on Naraka.

Malig took a deep breath and coughed for the lack of dust in the air he had been breathing all his previous life. He could not stop shivering. Only his waist on down was clothed in a pair of spotless white pants so loose and comfortable he felt as though he was wearing nothing at all.

It wasn't until he tried to stand for the first time that he noticed the wires trailing from a cluster of white electrodes on his bare torso and the clear tubing driven in the webbed map of veins that ran down his arms, connecting him to the vast array of machines that surrounded him with patiently blinking lights, bright monitors, and the soft and constant hum of energy. Alien symbols and words just as foreign emblazoned the controls and fluxing displays no amount of scrutinizing would decipher.

Malig started to reach for the jiggling tangle of wires when he saw one of those machines move. It was only a small movement—a shift to the left of no more than a centimeter—but it was enough to distinguish the form of the thing from the rest, and in those definitions he could now see clearly the shape of a man.

Malig had never before seen a working droid. Most on his homeworld were sand-scuffed and sun-bleached, broken things strewn across the desert or so eaten away by corrosion as to be unrecognizable. Some though had been entombed in the ancient ruins, where they stood as though frozen, perfectly preserved and forever locked in their final moment of life, walking or reaching or hunching or sitting, their eyes blank and lightless, as though time had stopped for them.

This droid, however, was very much alive. Glossy white coverings armored its lanky body and recessed deep in the sockets of its narrow head-casing were a pair of crimson eyes that glowed like hot coals.

Malig stared at the machine for a moment before asking the only thing that was really in his mind.

"Where is he?"

The droid just stared. Its cold red eyes had no answer.

A rapid series of staccato pops sounded as Malig seized a bundle of wires and ripped off the electrodes clustered on his chest, then yanked out his IV just as carelessly, sending a hot arc of blood to splat against the otherwise immaculate floor. He reached the droid in two swift bounds, slamming its clanking body against the wall by what passed for its slender neck. A few vials, hypos, and gauze packets were jolted from nearby shelves onto the floor.

"Where is he?" Malig demanded again, his voice a rasping snarl.

For a moment, it seemed the droid still would not answer and Malig began to fear the machine could not speak at all. Then a voice like crumpled metal streamed from the triangle of screens where its mouth should have been, rippling with off-key tones and comm static.

"Down the corridor," it said, gesturing with its gleaming head toward the doorway as best it could with Malig's hand around its neck. "He is waiting for you."

Malig stared into the droid's baleful eyes a moment longer, then released the thing. He found a white robe folded neatly atop one of the machines behind him and quickly threw it over his shoulders. The arched door hissed open automatically when he approached it and Malig stepped through the threshold into the darkness beyond. He did not look back. The corridor before him lay in shadow broken only by dim white lights built low into the supports on either side of the passage every two meters, and Malig marched forward without hesitation, passing through darkness and light and darkness again, his eyes shone even then with murder. At the end of the passage, a second door slid away of its own magic once more, revealing a dimly glowing archway.

Malig stepped into the glow, and everything changed forever.

Darth Plagueis was there with his back presented to Malig, a starved shadow in a baggy black cloak. He spoke not a word and if he had at that moment, Malig would not have heard—he was looking past Plagueis at the transparent wall that rose up the end of the chamber, for there loomed a great and profound darkness unlike all others, and slowly wheeling in that darkness were more stars than there were grains of sand on all of Naraka. Stars upon stars. Had he a million lifetimes, he could not have counted them all. Each glowed with an ethereal light, pure and cold and ancient. Great arcs of stars and shocking clusters sparkled in a dazzling cascade immense and deeper than the mind could fathom.

It was then that Malig realized he was in a starship. It was then he realized he was in space.

Malig stared in awe at the starscape, his intentions completely forgotten. The enormity of it made something tremble within him.

He walked forward as though in a dream and placed his hand upon the layer of transparisteel that separated him from the infinite black outside. Plagueis's beady eyes watched him from beneath the cowl of his cloak.

Malig watched only the stars.

"Where is she?"

Plagueis did not answer.

Malig looked down at nothing. "You left her there," he said. When Plagueis still did not respond, his eyes flicked up to the Dark Lord's shadowy face. Only his mouth and the reflection of his pale eyes could be seen. "With the other bodies."

How many had they killed? A dozen? Two? Malig could barely recall the slaughter in anything but a blur of blood and sand. Those men and women they'd butchered had only been protecting themselves, he realized. Malig's eyes grew unfocused again. "You used them too... They were just as innocent as she was."

Plagueis seemed content to let him work it out himself. "The Kasanaan were not your people," he said.

Malig looked back out at the blazing white stars scattered across the abyss. "Who are my people?"

The question was put more to the stars than the being lurking at his side.

"I can show you that, and so much more now," the voice in his ear promised. "I created you, my son. Made you what you are for this moment. This is your destiny, Lord Malig."

He continued to stare out of the viewport.

"Everything you see is yours," Darth Plagueis went on in his cold, pinched voice. "You need only reach out and take it."

He had him now. They both knew it.

Malig did not take his eyes off the hypnotic lights. He remembered nights spent laying in the dust outside his family's cave and staring up at the stars, when he'd longed to see them and dreamed of a day when he would.

And now it was here.

All it had cost him, was everything.

"Someday I will kill you for what you have done," he said finally.

The Dark Lord of the Sith seemed solemn, but in the corner of his eye, Malig thought he saw Plagueis's small mouth twist. "It is the way of the Sith," he allowed, turning his gaze to the viewport and the distant stars that had so enchanted his servant. "But when that day comes, it will not be for revenge that you kill me."

Malig said nothing. There was nothing to say. Because deep down in a place he refused to acknowledge, he knew that Plagueis was right—he had known the moment he saw those stars. He knew that there was something he wanted even more than Plagueis dead. And he needed him alive to attain it.

So they stood side by side in the cockpit of that ship and looked out at the stars.




Eighty years later by the reckoning of sentients and a mere flicker in the lives of stars, Darth Malig watched them again at the helm of his own starship. He sat deep in the slim pilot's chair like a king upon his throne, an almost boneless ease about his limbs and his gloved hands dangling far off the ends of the armrests.

Starlight glinted on the slender visor of his black-and-burgundy mask like quicksilver running down a groove, and his own reflection was caught in the dark glass of the viewport ahead like a future version of himself made thin and faded by time, watching over him with some knowledge known only to him that he wanted to share but didn't, not because it was impossible but because he knew somehow it would do no good to tell.

He sat as unmoving as a stone, so that if someone else had been in the cockpit they might have mistaken his stillness for sleep or even death, and in this way he contemplated what was and what had been.

Eighty long years, it had taken. Darth Malig knew he'd have to be patient: that first time he'd stepped out on the flight deck of the Undying, he'd known it. But now it was done. A thousands years of Sith, from Darth Bane to Plagueis and the false Sith Sidious, and even further, back to the days of Exar Kun, Darth Malak, Naga Sadow, all the way to Ajunta Pall, had culminated in him, lead to this moment, when Malig completed their work.

Victory.

... So why didn't he feel it?

The Jedi were gone. He'd felt their light go out: not as a scream in the Force, but as a great and powerful emptiness. That was the way of death—it was the complete absence of a being, not the fleeting anguish that reverberated. The silence itself was resonant.

And it would never be filled again. That's what Plagueis and Sidious and a hundred other Sith had never understood. There was no coming back—not really. Immortality lay down one path, as old as life itself, and it was the blindest of beings who overlooked it in pursuit of something grander.

Yes, the Jedi were certainly gone.

There would be a handful of stragglers who had survived Halo's destruction, of course, but not in any significant number, not that could threaten him now. In the years that followed, those last embers would be smothered and the galaxy would be purged of them completely.

He hadn't sensed Luke Skywalker's presence in the Force since the blast and there was in Malig a solemn part that wished for the Jedi Master's survival. For Malig both hated the Jedi and loved the Skywalkers.

Tragic as he found it that so many of that bloodline had perished with the death of the Jedi, it was not this that distressed him. In his heart, Malig had known what fate lay ahead for them. Curiosity and his own sentimentality had made him try anyway. He'd wanted the descendants of Vader with him, none so much as Luke; he'd wanted them to know the great falseness of shadow and light, and tried in vain to clear the rust from their eyes so they could see the Force in its primordial and untamed vastness.

A lifetime of Jedi indoctrination was a hard armor to pierce though.

Visions had shown him Jacen at his side, and in the end Jacen Solo was all he was able to persuade. Blurred as the vessel was in his dream, Malig had not really seen the being's face, but there could be no doubt now. Zonama Sekot was what Malig had needed and only Jacen could have brought it to him.

Unfortunate that it had ended as it did. Jacen, though, had served his purpose.

At least Malig now had the boy.

The Dark Lord looked out of the Death Mask's viewport and tried to appreciate this moment of triumph, the revenge of seven thousands years of the Sith.

Yet something troubled him. Something he had overlooked in the sprawling machinations that had led him to this moment, slowly wearing on him like a stone in a traveler's boot. Knowing it was nothing of importance and that it was in fact the work of his own imagining while they were idle, he tried to ignore it. The thing, though, was persistent.

The nav computer beeped as it finished its complex calculations and a string of coordinates filled its screen. Malig did not react. He should have entered their new destination into the ship's computer and put the Death Mask back into hyperspace. Instead, the Dark Lord just sat and stared at the stars like a droid whose primary circuit breaker had been tripped.

Solo will kill you.

The cruel voice spoke to him from memory, its deliberate rhythms and dark timbre a constant whisper worrying at the back of his skull like a suckling mynock. Knowing it to be meaningless didn't stop it from burrowing into his mind, planted like some dark seed that was sprouting into doubts, and would branch and tangle into possibilities more terrible still. It was the parting taunt of a desperate creature whom had no other weapon to wield, nothing more.

Solo will kill you.

No mystery was contained in those words except that which Malig's own mind would invent. Sidious had spoken them for just that purpose, hoping to fill Malig with doubts because he had nothing else left. And doubt could be a powerful weapon. No affliction known to sentients could grow so fast or devastating as doubt; no disease found in nature nor any Malig cast by his own hand would consume a person from the inside so completely.

Not Jacen. The other one—Anakin Solo. The damned spirit had said on Korriban. Malig hadn't believed then and didn't believe now, but he could recall the words as clearly as if they were being whispered to him in the cockpit of his ship at that moment. He came to me, you know, only days ago, and I told him all about you. He knows everything now. He's going to stop you, boy—and then he's going to destroy you both.

Anger had welled up in him like blood in a fresh wound, and he'd destroyed Sidious where he stood in the sand. It was the desperation of the ploy that had incensed him so, not fear that his old rival might possess some knowledge of the days to come. What Malig was supposed to mistake as prophecy or some secret known now to his enemies that would be the end of him was nothing more than the bravado of a sabacc player with no hand to speak of whose only futile hope lay in bluffing. It was the lie of a condemned man stalling for time.

Yet the seed had been planted, and before Malig had left the Valley of the Dark Lords with Plagueis's grimoire, his mind had begun to sift through the ghost's words for any trace of truth.

Malig could not feel Anakin Solo in the Force or any of the other Jedi, but he was not attuned enough to their unique signatures to identify them across the stars, especially if they did not want to be found. He was not Faybol.

On reflection, it was unfortunate his Hand had died when he did. His unique ability had always made him useful.

Malig's hands lay unmoving from the armrests of his chair and he continued to stare into the void, and it was as though the void itself was transposed onto him.

Had Anakin Solo died on the Exodus? It seemed he must have. Even if the young Jedi had somehow managed to free himself from the Embrace of Pain where he'd been strung up in a sealed chamber, there was no way he could have escaped before the Raithian flagship had plunged into Tatooine's atmosphere. Still, the uncertainty of it troubled Darth Malig. It left the possibility, however slim, and that was enough nourishment for the shadow forming in his mind.

Days ago it had remained a curiosity only. Then he'd spoken to Anakin. What the young Jedi had to say was the most disquieting aspect of all. For three days they tortured him and for three days he resisted. Malig worked at him in his way, whispering to him in the long hours of torment a hundred sweet promises, some true and some untrue, for Malig was a great liar as all are who understand the falseness of words, but the boy would not turn, and the boy would not break. Even when the lives of his sister and the Veila girl were threatened, he refused to betray his friends or his faith in the Order of Light.

After a time, it became clear Anakin Solo was too stubborn and narrow of thought, and that he was not meant to see the feral days of the future. Malig waited until Lord Havok was occupied with other matters to go to Anakin and ask him what he longed to know, not wanting his apprentice to see. Questions of why Anakin had traveled to Korriban and what was sought in those dark and crumbling tombs coaxed little from their prisoner, but when Malig asked him what Darth Sidious told him there, the boy spoke. And what he said froze Malig's blood.

He told me how to destroy you.

The hatchway behind him retracted and Hala Rozess slipped into the cockpit as quiet as a shadow. Malig began to key their new destination into the nav computer, finding it easy then to push these peculiar thoughts from his mind. He could feel her standing at his right shoulder.

"How much longer, my lord?"

Malig finished entering the sequence and drew his gloved hand away from the keypad. "Five jumps remain," he said. "It shouldn't take more than a day now."

Roughly a day had passed already since the Death Mask fled from the Tatoo system amid the disarray that followed Halo's destruction. Most of that day had been spent making decoy jumps through hyperspace meant to baffle any survivors determined to pursue them and tending to what lay aft of the cockpit in their starship's infirmary.

By now the remainder of the fleet would have returned to Tython. Malig was certain to be the last to arrive. It mattered little. Callista had made her way back days ago, and if she'd managed to install the ancient power core they'd exhumed on Lehon, the Reckoner's construction would increase exponentially. Once the Death Mask reached Tython, it would be nearly complete.

"Is he conscious yet?" Malig did not turn around when he spoke.

In the transparisteel he could see the Zeltron's violet hair shimmer as her head gave the smallest of shakes. "No, he sleeps still."

"And the boy."

"He is with him."

Nothing at Tatooine had transpired according to design. The confrontation forced with Havok had become as necessary as it was unavoidable, so that his apprentice learned at last his place in the architecture and understood the true consequences of their bargain. Even before Danni Quee's demise thrust up between them like some calamitous groundquake, master and apprentice had been set upon a collision course whose terrible point of impact would be Halo, with or without the knowledge that Havok attained too late: that the dead did not return to live again, not as they were before.

Malig had been ready for it when Havok stormed onto the Exodus's flight deck with blood in his eye. What could not be anticipated was the starfighter that crashed through the warship's command superstructure and unleashed some seismic thunderclap upon the Exodus, collapsing through its decks in a fury of buckled durasteel and burst viewports. Chaos followed, and there was much blood and glass and a thunderous vortex of decompression that threatened to hurl Malig and his apprentice out into the starry void. Whoever that pilot had been had taken the Dark Lord's plan and shoved a thermal detonator in its mouth. Malig dragged his apprentice from the wreck half-dead, and instead of recovering Hala Rozess's escape pod with the Exodus's tractor beam, Malig sailed through the carnage to retrieve it in his own starship.

The costs had been great. The Raithian flagship was gone and Malig had been forced to heal Jacen Solo for a second time. They'd stretched him out in the Death Mask's small infirmary beneath a bank of severe white lights, and there Malig laid his hands upon Jacen and again put into him a part of himself. His apprentice's wounds were graver than the lightsaber damage Malig had mended nearly a year ago when first making the young man his servant, so more was required. Shards of embedded transparisteel were plucked from Jacen's chest by a whirring med droid, and the Dark Lord filled the emptiness left behind with his own dark power. Many hours passed before the work was done, but the wounds were healed and Jacen Solo had survived. He would recover soon, in a fashion.

After all that happened, everything had worked out as it was meant to: the Jedi were gone. There was no one else left in the galaxy who could stop him now.

Could there be more profound proof of his destiny than that? Even when everything went wrong, the ends he sought were still achieved.

Stars wheeled outside against the gentle yaw of the starship where they drifted, panning across a wild scrawl of constellations that blazed and flickered in the endless dark. Nearer the very core where the galaxy was just beginning to spiral out in its fiery wheel, the stars grew more numerous and tightly packed, huddling around the black hole at its heart like shivering beings gathered about a fire for warmth. Malig did not take his eyes off them.

"You did well, acolyte."

"I do as you command, Dark One," Hala demurred.

"More than that, I think."

Only twice before had Malig met the Zeltron; her molding had been the craft of Faybol and another Dark Jedi named Vula Hyk-Zull, who'd been the master of Malig's Sith spies before her death two years ago. Yet there was in Malig little doubt that Hala Rozess had proven herself to be an exceedingly resourceful and cunning operative. Five months ago she'd been a spy in the Jedi prisons below the Temple of the Conductors on Apollyon, one of many such moles posing as captive Jedi Knights in order to observe the prisoners, forge confidences, gather intelligence, and thwart any conspiracies or efforts to escape. When Skywalker launched his uprising in those ancient subbasements, Rozess was the only such spy who survived the bloodletting that followed and was shrewd enough to stay with Skywalker and his friends all the way to Alliance space—far from any territory known to her. Without any orders or existing protocol to obey in such an event, Rozess maintained her cover as a Jedi prisoner, gaining the trust of Skywalker's order whereby she had the opportunity to contact Malig over an encrypted comm channel scorched into the memory of all his acolytes. Once safely embedded at Halo, she watched over the Jedi without interfering unnecessarily, reporting to Malig their progress and schemes and foiling all movement of the Order that deviated from the path Malig charted for them: when Faybol died and the Jedi were finally able to unburden themselves of the ysalamiri, Rozess set the creatures loose throughout their space station; when the Raithian attack loomed, she sabotaged Halo's communications; she found a way to remove the Queen Mother and her child from Halo at Malig's request, and captured Skywalker's son and brought him to the Dark Lord. She utilized what could be found on site to vaporize the Jedi sanctuary from within. She even detonated the thing herself.

Hala Rozess was a dangerous and adaptive creature indeed, and she would be a capable Sith Hand.

"Where are we going, Master?" she prompted. Stars burned through her dark reflection on the transparisteel.

"Its called the Reckoner."

"Another space station?"

"A means to an end. And that end is very near now, my Hand."

Hala grinned.

"And what is it we're going to do there?"

Malig reached for the bank of levers jutting up from the flight controls like reeds on a pond. "Put something right that was lost and forgotten a long time ago."

"I don't understand," she said.

"You will. Very soon, everything will become clear to you." Gloved fingers closed around the chrome lever that controlled the ship's hyperdrive and pulled it down its arc. "It's time you saw my true face."

Space outside distorted as though the darkness was being pulled away from them and the stars stretched into bright starlines surrounding the viewport in a great tunnel of cosmic light, and for an instant Malig's reflection changed from Revan's mask to a warped specter of his own face in the dark glass. Then the starship vanished in a flash of white.




The old Muun called it the Undying: a custom-built star courier outfitted with military-grade cloaking armor, dual ion drives that glowed with green energy when engaged, and a class-1 hyperdrive that could make the journey from Naraka to what the rest of the galaxy called "Known Space" in six days. Six days was what it took. Once they arrived there Darth Malig's training truly began.

Bimmisaari came first. Plagueis landed the Undying in a stone spaceport on the edge of Glastro. There Malig saw towering structures and paved streets, working speeders and starships gliding in all directions, and for the first time trees and grass and life so green it did not seem real. He lurked about the teeming marketplace and the lively bazaars in the square outside the Tower of Law, watching the Bimms and the humans milling in sunlight as gentle as the breeze, and heard many exotic languages in many strange voices and music that rang sweetly beneath the rumble of the crowds. Discoveries were made at every turn. Malig watched the people as he cut seemingly aimless paths amongst them and learned then of other cultures and commerce of which he had only a dim notion, and society more complex and interwoven than nomadic tribes, and families other than his own which he had conceived of only as characters in Dagan's nighttime stories. Mothers and sons, best friends and partners, lovers, traders and travelers from places light years away, peoples of species previously undreamt by him all flowed through those plazas and Malig studied each. The Dark Lord spoke into his ear as they passed. "You cannot rule people until you know them completely, what they truly desire and what they fear utterly."

From there the Undying traveled to Mon Calamari and Ithor, then to Onderon and Boz Pity and thirty other worlds over the next six years. Everywhere Malig donned the bulky antitox breath mask and black eye coverings Plagueis gave him to conceal his identity from others. Most they encountered mistook him for a Kel Dor or some other species unable to breathe in oxygen-rich atmospheres, an illusion buttressed by the distortion the mask generated in his voice, warping it into thin drone that rang like struck metal. And everywhere they traveled Malig's knowledge of the universe grew.

On Taris he was taught to slip through the crowded streets unnoticed. In the markets on Ansion he learned to steal from vendors and patrons alike. He was made to swim in the lakes of Alderaan and later Manaan's boundless ocean. He wandered through the fumes on Duro, traversed the calderas on Saleucami, tried his hand at games of chance on Ord Mantell and games of blood on Klatooine.

During the long voyages in the Undying he studied the known sciences and histories and mathematics, and grew to understand the machines around him that had been absent in his life previous and even came to master them. In time there was little that could go wrong on Plagueis's ship that he could not repair and less he could not accomplish behind the yoke of the thing.

He piloted the Undying down the Hydian Way and across the serpentine path of the Perlemian Trade Route, flew through the Kathol Rift, the Marasa Nebula, and the Transitory Mists. He frequented spaceports and cantina populated by the same characters wearing different faces, like masks they swapped amongst themselves, and he listened to their tales and spun his own until he became a gifted trader in lies.

He practiced many trades on many distant worlds. He worked as a starship mechanic on Chandrila, a shuttle pilot on Cato Neimodia, and a smuggler on Nar Shaddaa. On Kothlis he labored at a droid foundry. On Sullust he was a miner.

He was Rasf Na-Dor, Bekkan Dodonna, Sorin Flynt, and a dozen other identities his master had falsified. Each coalesced into something solid from nothingness then faded back into the ether just as quickly, and he moved on.

Malig also became fluent in many languages. He could speak already Galactic Basic and read and write passingly in Aurebesh from his time with Marro. Out of necessity he learned first the trade languages of Huttese and Bocce and later Twi'leki and Muun and Zabraki and Bothese, and even grew to discern Verpine and the speech of Wookiees. In his studies with Plagueis, he learned too older, darker speech.

"You've a clever mind," Plagueis had said to him once. "That's good. You'll need it if you're going to kill him."

Often he thought of this man he was to kill, this Sidious, and wondered at all the effort, when the person he truly wished to kill was standing next to him.

Much of his time in those days was spent with IG-6. The droid was a prototype combat unit assembled by Holowan Laboratories with menacing red photoreceptors and a homicidal personality. How the Muun had come to own the thing Malig never discovered and there existed no record of purchase or contract related to the droid's construction. Duranium plating of white and beaten gray armored his rangy, multi-jointed limbs, making him a tough bodyguard and sparring opponent, programmed and trained to use both blasters and melee weapons, and when set upon his terrible work he seemed a thing forged from the fires of one of Corellia's hells. Protocol functions enhanced the droid's processor and his once limited speech capability had been upgraded by an ultrasonic vocabulator, fashioning IG-6 into a sort of all-purpose servant for Plagueis who could masquerade effectively as a simple protocol droid. It also made him a competent guide for Malig in all the lessons his master did not have time for. Lord Plagueis would leave often for weeks at a time without explanation and abandon his apprentice on whatever world they were training on with only the droid. At times, Malig would come to think of IG-6 as a sort of companion, but always something would occur that destroyed that illusion. The droid was not there to help him—IG-6 was there to watch him.

All these lessons seemed small by any measure when set against those Plagueis taught. Away from the eyes of others the Dark Lord revealed to him another world vaster than all those orbiting the many stars in space. Already Malig could feel himself growing stronger physically. He ran faster and leapt to heights other beings he encountered could not match. He could raise up objects without touching them, even those great in size or weight, and he could draw items from a distance to him in the same fashion or propel them away at tremendous speeds. Over time he learned to bend the minds of beings weaker than him to his will or erase from their thoughts the memory of his presence altogether.

At night he was made to study the teachings of Sith long dead from passages in cracked and ancient scrolls or by snatches of a holocron projection, but his master guarded these secrets fiercely and never allowed him access to relics or knowledge unfettered.

For all their time together, Darth Plagueis remained a mystery to his pupil. During his unexplained absences, Malig would wonder if his master wasn't going to teach him. The Dark Lord seemed to have many secret dealings and an astonishing number of assets, from his impossibly expensive starship to lavish estates on a dozen worlds, all of it under the name of International Banking Clan or one of its subsidiaries. However he'd managed it, Plagueis had at his disposal a vast corporate empire and a seemingly endless supply of credits stocking their coffers. Of these matters, he let Malig in on little.

In spite of his hatred for the Muun, there were times when Malig longed for a relationship with Plagueis that was more than this. He had no one else. The Dark Lord was, after all, the being that had created his very pneuma from nothingness. He was, in fact, Malig's father. Yet he quickly learned that the Sith dynamic was not one of camaraderie, but one of competition. They were rivals seeking an advantage, one over the other. Nothing more.

Sometimes it seemed to Malig his master was more interested in studying him than teaching. The old Muun examined him as though he was an ongoing experiment, and sometimes Plagueis looked at him as though he expected him to come apart. Daily he would take blood samples and cell cultures, he would study Malig's DNA and count his midi-chlorians, then opened the black book of veined leather balanced on his knee and set about filling its pages with an old and choppy language of dotted characters and spidering incantations in ink as red as blood.

"What is that?" Malig asked one day as they sat in the Undying's small infirmary.

The old Muun did not look up from his work as he spoke. "My grimoire. It's a chronicle of my research and methods."

"For what?"

"For manipulating life. It recounts how I created life with the Force."

"May I read it?"

"No. In time I will record it all in a holocron for you and those Sith that will follow you."

Eventually Malig realized Plagueis had no plans to record his findings in a holocron because he meant to live forever. Which made Malig wonder why he needed an apprentice at all.

Once he asked his master why he wrote in a book instead of tapping it into a datapad where it could be stored in memory that would live on long after that ink had eroded and the pages had crumbled to ashes.

"There is power in writing a thing by your own hand. It sets the mind and body upon that thing fully and inscribes your determination on it. A being might leave in those words a part of himself."

Darth Plagueis was a hard an unforgiving teacher. Degradation and failure were the instruments of his instruction, and he wielded them well, breaking Malig down daily and shaping the clay that remained into something new.

In the territory controlled by the Hutts, the Dark Lord showed him how beings were subjugated and used at the most basic levels. Many of them were Twi'leks. "The weak are made to serve the powerful," Plagueis said. "It is the signature scrawled into the very fiber of the universe." Malig saw it was so.

They visited the hatcheries on Neimodia where the grubs struggled against one another for food. Those strongest survived and flourished and those gaping and feeble mouths starved. On Ryloth Malig was forced to live for three weeks in the darkness of Kala'uun's caves so that he could learn to live without light.

He was imprisoned on Oovo IV for eight days and became the first prisoner to successfully escape from Desolation Alley in more than three hundred years. He lived as a slave on Tatooine.

On Corellia, Plagueis ordered him to kill a man for the first time. He led him through the streets of Coronet and pointed one crooked finger at the being. When it was done, Maig asked his master who the man was and why he'd been made to kill him. "It matters only that I bid you do it and you obeyed."

Malig would never know.

Soon his master had Malig undertaking more dangerous missions. On Bothawui he spied on spies. He plumbed the data libraries of Obroa-Skai. He joined a clandestine order of assassins called the GenoHaradan and later worked for the Exchange.

When the time came to construct his lightsaber, Darth Plagueis sent Malig into the icy mines of Mygeeto to harvest a focusing crystal. For days Malig searched those dark and glittering vaults for the perfect gem and when he emerged he knelt before his master as sparse snowflakes flickered on the wind about them and laid the crystal at his feet. Plagueis nodded, then crushed the crystal beneath his boot, grinding it to powder before Malig's wide eyes.

"A Sith does not use for his weapon a crystal from a natural formation. We forge crystals stronger than any found in nature with our command of these elements."

So they did.

Five days he sweated over furnace and compressor, forming in those fires a synthetic crystal augmented by Sith alchemy and his own dark power in a ritual ancient and terrible. It emerged from the kiln glowing the dark red of blood and humming with harmonic vibrations.

"The secret to alchemy," the Muun said in the hot glow of the brood furnace, "is realizing that everything in this galaxy is the same thing. If one broke it all down past the molecules he would see it is all made of the same matter. And so making one thing into another is no task at all."

Afterward no more was said by Plagueis on the construction of his lightsaber, so Malig placed the freshly forged crystal in a pouch on his belt with the Krayt Dragon pearl and waited for word from his master on the next phase of the process.

For several months his training continued as before in a blur of worlds, occupations, and ancient texts. Then the Undying finally ventured into the Stygian Caldera. Webs of that dark nebula stretched across a scattering of dim stars like dust suspended in a poison cloud and hanging dead in the glowing veins of that miasma were the Sith worlds. The Undying sailed deeper into the gloom along the Dragon Trail and the Nache Bhelfia. Master and apprentice landed on Dromund Kaas and Ashas Ree, entered Ludo Kressh's fortress on Rhelg, scoured Krayiss II's ruinous libraries, and searched the subbasement of Naga Sadow's broken citadel on Khar Delba.

At last they arrived on Ziost. Snow crunched beneath their boots and wind tore at the black cloaks they huddled beneath as they walked down a slopping mountain path. Piles of loose stone that had once been cairns stood toppled at the sides of the winding road, and wild animals had long ago scattered the bones across the hillside, leaving them cracked and frosted over in ice. They passed them without a word. Mountains stood bare in jagged spines across the horizon ridged with shelves of snow. There was no sun.

Rising out of the tundra where their path twisted to an end was a great temple whose name had been lost in the entropy that had settled upon that frozen wasteland. Ice caked its walls and turrets in fanged sickles and bumpy rime and its towering citadel reached high into the gray sky.

They entered through an arched doorway flanked by heaps of broken statuary and descended a steep spiral of gray stone steps discolored by centuries of unrelenting cold. Pale daylight filtered down the stairwell through the shattered door above and the many fractures stitched in the walls, casting the world below in a dark bluish glow. The stairs ended in a vaulted ossuary that had once been illuminated by candles but now was too still even for light to move, and there were many crumbling bones in that place stacked deep in niches and disarranged upon shelves of rock or laying broken on the floor where time had strewn them without regard for aesthetics or ossature. The remains of a broken catafalque lay in shambles on a crude altar at the end of the crypt. There was no body to be seen in its splintered ruin. Plagueis and Malig passed it and went on.

Arched passages pushed deeper into the foundation of the temple and the shafts of sapphire light showed the walls were etched with arcana and ancient pictographs. Above one entrance a warning had been engraved in the rock. Malig touched his master's arm and gestured to the symbols scratched across the threshold, making sure the Muun saw it.

Plagueis peered out from beneath the cowl of his cloak at Malig. "If something is forbidden, it is likely a thing worth knowing."

Beyond they found more stairs leading up through old libraries where ancient tablets had been shattered upon the floor and alchemist laboratories too long neglected lay in utter disrepair. In one dark hall where the walls were covered in glyphs, a vast tableau had been carved upon the stone. It showed a number of cloaked figures looming above a sea of worshippers.

Malig passed the shadowy statues and nightmarish grotesques standing in the chamber and approached the image as though in a trance. Below the depiction was a single word deeply engraved in the stone and Malig touched it for want of understanding.

"Jen'jidai," he said.

"The Lords of the Sith," Plagueis explained. "These were the first. This is a depiction of their landfall on Korriban. They were exiled by the Jedi Order after the Hundred-Year Darkness for refusing to abstain from using the Force in its true form."

"What are the Jedi, Master?".

"They are our true enemies. Once you've destroyed Sidious, it is the Jedi upon whom we must have our revenge."

Looking at the relief, Darth Malig's hatred for the Jedi began.

The Muun gestured with one pale hand at the cloaked man in the center of the picture. "That is Ajunta Pall, their leader. This citadel was his a long, long time ago. There were only twelve of them. Can you imagine? Just twelve exiles against so many, and they started an order that would survive for millennia."

Malig nodded, but his eyes were tracing the lines of the worshippers at the exiles' feet. They were difficult to make out genuflecting as they were, yet they appeared to be a species of red beings with long corded muscles and drooping facial tendrils.

Sculpted upon the wall to the right was another such alien, only darker, decorated in carbon black armor and wielding in each hand an enormous battle ax. Laying in the relief's foreground near the figure's greaves was a black helmet. Bone spurs jutted sharply out beneath his ebon flesh at his cheeks and a pair of long tendrils tumbled down from his upper lip.

Plagueis followed his gaze to the stunning image. "Adas," he said. "The King of the Sith. Yes, he would be of great interest to you, wouldn't he? The Sith were the species the dark Jedi exiles became the lords of."

Malig did not look away from Adas's yellow eyes when he spoke. "What became of them?"

"They are gone now. Their kind was bred out with the human Dark Jedi whom they called lords, and what remained of that bloodline fled into the Unknown Regions after the Great Hyperspace War."

"Were they never seen again?"

"Another Sith Lord called Revan is said to have searched for them, like many of the Sith who had followed him seeking the 'True Sith.' They were never heard from again."


***


Now come the others. They arrive one by one in a procession austere and seemingly interminable in ships armored in gunmetal gray and obsidian. Most are shuttles deployed from the fleet that has arrived this day from stars many light years beyond the reckonings of chart makers but some are outfitted with hyperdrives. Each drifts through the shimmer of the hangar's magnetic field, pivots gracefully in the air, and floats soundlessly into their berthings with droid-pilot precision.

She stands tall at the front of the party waiting to receive these strange newcomers and watches as the landing ramps lower in jets of steam that pour from their exhaust vents.

First the soldiers descend in their gleaming silver armor and faceless helmets that are unique to their legion. They make a grim and daunting host as they fan out in ranks on the hangar deck so perfect they might have been welded there by the space station's builders.

Then come the priests, seers and magicians and keepers of lore, many stooped by age beneath homespun brown robes or purple silk habits trimmed with scrawls of gold thread. Masks hide many of their faces and amulets swing about their chests. They bear scepters, glowing orbs, and all manner of talisman as they file slowly into two rows for the head of that caste to pass through. He comes now, the Prophet of the Dark Side, and he is tall and twisted, and wrapped around his bent form is a dazzling cloak of stars. Upon his head he wears an elaborate helm so immense it does not seem he could possibly balance it.

Last emerge the warriors. An army of Dark Jedi glide down those landing ramps in flowing black cloaks and stride across the Reckoner's polished deck. They were trained by Malig or those trained by Malig. Most were sought out by Faybol during the five decades when he served as the Dark Lord's Shadow Hand, and recruiting this hellish horde was his primary duty. Some were actually hunted. Among them were those broken in the prisons of the Conductors and seduced by the call of the dark power that dwells on Apollyon.

They are from many planets and many different species are represented in their number—violet haired Balosars and melted-looking Givin; tall Chagrians and cone-headed Cereans; slimy Koorivars and gurgling Quarrens; Umbarans and Zabraks and striped Togruta; there is even a Kaleesh armored in jangling bones. Most are human.

From their belts dangle lightsabers in every imaginable form of construction. Many wear ornate masks to hide their true faces and terrify their enemies. Others have painted their visages in fearsome simulacra or marked them with tattoos that run in wild scrawls like the arcane writing of those long dead creatures from whom they have stolen their heritage. Dark armor shows beneath the cloaks of some.

They form a frightful crowd on the deck as their order swells. They continue to climb down the ramps in a black flood. There is a lanky and powerful Cathar male half-singed by burns named Voolfe but he is known as "Black Fang"; a white Twi'lek male with quick hands and blazing red eyes named Flay; a large brute of a Besalisk with a guileless expression and four lightsabers attached to his belt called Cludgeon.

More emerge still: the human twins with dark hair named Ozar and Cazar; Sannadda Hex, a scaly magenta Koorivar with scarves wrapped around her horns and rheumy yellow eyes; a woman with raven black hair and skin as pale as milk called Quay Darkwater; a male Togruta named Hoskchaaka who carries both lightsaber and shoto.

Then comes the Devaronian female Vana Angier, whose family is a powerful house in the aristocracy of Saela. She is slim and slight and has small horns barely visible from a distance. She never speaks. She is called "Lady Anger."

After her comes a handsome blonde man with a dashing grin named Kaden Moondancer. On his heels strides a woman with red hair and a small scar beneath one blue eye like a crescent moon. Lyra Slayne carries on her belt a coil of crystal strands and studded leather that is called a lightwhip and it is obvious from her movements that the weapon is no ceremonial decoration.

Out of the last shuttle strides a tall figure whose face is hidden beneath a mask of tangled gray and burgundy tear drops. When he does speak, which is rare, he speaks with a metallic rasp with the help of the machines inside him where one lung was destroyed, and he is known only as "Shade." Near him is a violet Twi'lek female with a chain of dark purple tattoos shuddering down her elegant Lekku beneath the crisscrossing bindings of an elaborate leather headdress named Reama Oji-Anda.

The Kaleesh was named at birth Baneskil qii Deem but is called "Flume" for the river of blood he once left dripping in his wake down a mountain in the contarii range on Amor. He wears on his face another creature's skull as a mask. The Givin beside him wears his own skull on his face and is called Coda Helrot.

There is a Wookiee there too with black patches of fur that cover almost the entire half of the right side of his face and he is known only as "The Madclaw."

Perhaps the deadliest amongst these travelers comes now. She is one of the Nagai and she paints the pale gray flesh of her face daily in the pattern of nightmares. Brood Nightbinder is long and lean and she wears armor like black rock crust and at her hip dangles the long twisted hilt of a double-bladed lightsaber.

When all have finished disembarking they count close to one thousand souls. Last to emerge is the highest ranking among them and he glides easily through their numbers toward the party gathered there to greet them.

He is tall and powerful and human only in technical measures. Dwelling within his bloodless face are eyes like black glass that drink in light without reflecting it and that ghostly countenance is made up of layers of dark emotion. Pride and scorn and wrath all lurk there beneath a network tracery of blue veins.

There is no good in him.

If there ever was, it vanished long ago, beyond even the grasp of his own memory.

Morgus Render marches toward the Reckoner's welcoming party as though he intends to walk over them. Callista does not flinch. Does not move. She watches this specimen behind gray eyes that no longer fear. At her back she feels Raynar and Zekk shift as though they think they might have to step forward.

It does not escape Morgus's notice. A grin like a crooked fence forms beneath his patchy beard that does not grow on his cheeks.

"Where is Lord Malig?" he says without greeting. Brood and the Lyra Slayne have detached themselves from the field of black cloaks and stand at the Dark Jedi Master's side.

"He has not returned yet," Callista answers. "We expect him here soon."

He says nothing to that. Black eyes travel over her shoulder, past Zekk and Raynar Thul to the rows standing there. Morgus smiles again. It is the smile of a man who finds nothing amusing pretending to be amused.

"Are these our new initiates?"

Callista Ming glances over her shoulder at the acolytes she has been training these past three months. They are Ysanna and Jensaarai, Baran Do and Fallanassi and Dathomiri. The Nightsisters had been the most receptive to coercion but had also held most stubbornly to their own faith. In all they'd succeeded in seducing only a hundred odd Force-sensitives to their cause from the entire populations they'd been harvesting across the galaxy. The rest are being prepared for the Reckoner's completion, when they will serve the Sith in a different manner.

Of those who they've culled from the ranks of the weak and intransigent, the twenty-seven behind Callista show the most promise. Others whom she had not brought along to greet the new Sith arrivals can barely hold a lightsaber.

She turns back to the pale man towering over her. "Yes."

A sneer curls Morgus's lip. "I can see why Lord Malig sent for us when he did."

Callista knows she should be angered by the insult but she cannot summon the will to be. There is much these days she does not possess the will for.

"Don't worry, Callista," Morgus says. "We will protect this space station now."


***


Dust swirled up around the ship as it set down upon the ridge behind jagged outcroppings of tan rock. Before the cloud its repulsors had kicked up had quite drifted off beyond the ledge, the star courier's landing ramp lowered and two beings draped heavy in black cloaks floated down its treads amid the haze.

Malig drew in a deep breath and tasted the decay of the place on his tongue. It reminded him of a world far from there, like some half-remembered nightmare. Beneath his feet, the parched ground was cragged by deep fissures that seemed to breathe dust and the top layer peeled away in flakes of dried clay. He did not bother with the breath mask on this world; he wanted to see it with his own eyes. There was on this planet no other living soul to bear witness to his coming anyway.

IG-6 peered out from the gloom of the Undying's open hatch. Shadow and dust made little more than a silhouette of him beaconed by two red eyes that glowed dully with a question in the murk.

"Stay with the ship," Plagueis told him and started off.

Malig followed.

They traveled through a narrow defile in the rock that wound itself first about the rim of the escarpment and then sloped down the canyon wall in a ragged trail of dead earth. Wind howled through the valley below like an animal cry warning others of their trespass on that hollowed ground and there was no other sound except that of their own boots on the sunbaked rock. Currents of pale dust rippled over that cracked terrain like the thin exhale that comes at death, and it was as though the planet was lingering in that moment and the wisps seeping up from the smoking fissures were its perpetual death rattle. When Malig looked away, it seemed the ground was flowing beneath his feet. Tumbleweed cartwheeled down the slope and spun in pale streams of wind beyond his vision.

Ahead a pale orange sun called Horuset sat low in the murky sky where it had begun to bleed into the horizon.

The ground leveled out in a dry riverbed and master and apprentice followed it among scattered rocks and crawling dust and watched the diminishing sunlight crawl down the sides of the ravine.

After less than a kilometer they reached the canyon mouth and a desolate valley where vast tombs and grim statues had been carved into the sheer canyon walls hundreds of stories above the fractured earth. Toppled columns lay shattered across the ground amid the rubble of crumbling edifices and bits of fallen masonry, and sagging obelisks whose ancient sand-crusted surfaces still bore the maze of arcana that had been chiseled upon them by hands that had no doubt been reduced to dust long ago.

Malig pulled off his hood and stared out across that valley as though if he stared hard enough he would see through the shambles of it to the true world, like a death shroud being lifted.

The Valley of the Dark Lords looked as it had in brittle tomes and flickering holocron projections but there was a feeling in this place that no artisan or loremaster could capture. Malig could feel it in his blood. In his bones.

Plagueis floated down the slope into the valley and Malig strode after him, ignoring the nettling of his flesh and the vibrations he felt in his teeth.

"You must be careful here, Lord Malig," cautioned the Dark Lord.

"Why?" Malig squinted beneath the dying sun. "I don't think there's another living soul in this place."

Plagueis kept walking. "You are mistaken, I promise. There are things that still dwell on this world left behind by the Sith of old—creatures unknown to nature or the Force."

Malig watched his master's back and wondered if he was lying. He didn't think so.

"Creations of those long dead were not what I was cautioning you of," the old Muun said. "I was warning you of the dead themselves."

"How do you mean?"

"Certain worlds strong in the Force become windows by which the dead can more easily commune with those of the corporeal world, windows into the realm beyond this plane of existence."

Malig watched his master closely for Plagueis's bearing had grown distant and his steps hesitant, but he kept moving deeper into the valley. "Powerful beings form a bond between spirit and bone and might loom about their remains long after nature has severed the two. A wise and far-seeing Sith can in life anchor his spirit to a physical object so that as long as the thing exists so then will his essence, and in time then he might conceive by cunning or trickery some means by which to live again."

Malig thought of the white plaster mask Plagueis had crushed beneath his boot in the Krayt Dragon's den but said nothing.

"There are stories of spirits that lingered in these tombs, waiting for pilgrims to come to these tombs seeking knowledge."

"Are they still here?"

"Perhaps."

"Have you ever seen one?"

Plagueis did not answer. After they traveled farther, he spoke again.

"You will want to be careful in this place. If any still dwell here they will be especially interested in you. Some will seek to guide you in your quest—others will do great harm upon you. Do not trust any of them."

"Why should any of the old Sith wish to harm me?"

"Because you have what they want more than any other thing. Life, boy. Your life. They are waiting here all this time so that they can take it and live your life without you. They will steal your body and the spark that animates it, and you will be lost to a fate even worse than that these wretches have been damned to."

Malig squinted at Plagueis. The Muun kept moving.

By now the great tombs honeycombed throughout the valley loomed over them on either side and Malig felt that the entrances to those silent crypts watched them as they traveled. He passed his tongue over his teeth.

Once Plagueis neared the oblique jumble of monoliths that stood in the dust, he stopped and turned towards his pupil. Scrawled upon his gray countenance was an expression severe and utterly unreadable.

"Give me your blaster."

Malig stared at him. Then he drew from the thigh holster he wore beneath his cloak his DL-22 pistol and handed it to his master grip-first. The Muun took the weapon and it disappeared inside his cloak.

"And your blade."

Malig removed the vibrodagger sheathed at his back and surrendered that too. Again he remembered the day his master had led him across the wastes and dumped him into the dragon's pit.

"You will want to find shelter before dark," Plagueis said. Then he turned and started back up the slope.

"You're leaving me here?"

Plagueis stopped and looked back at him like some pale demigod interrupted in returning to the mountain he ruled from after pronouncements had been already made. "I am."

"With no weapons?"

"With no weapons."

Malig glanced down the dusty valley then looked back at his master. "What am I supposed to do here?" he asked.

"Survive," Lord Plagueis said. Then he left.

Some time later Malig saw the Undying rise from the ridge above and shoot off into the murky sky, shrinking to a speck in the gloom and then becoming even less. Malig turned back to the Valley of the Dark Lords.

Korriban's sun was now a vague red fan spreading across the rim of the world and had turned the ragged scraps of cloud strung above blood red. Silence filled the canyon and in it was the sound Malig could feel in his teeth: a low buzz below the spectrum of his hearing that thrummed in his sternum. Calling to him.

Malig listened to it for a time. Then he stepped through the field of obelisks and started toward it.


***


Jacen was still sleeping. He had been asleep a long time. It seemed like about the longest time Ben could remember.

He made himself be very still and held in his own breath and watched his cousin close without blinking to see if his chest moved. If it moved it meant Jacen was still sleeping and not dead. Whenever he saw his chest move Ben felt better. But then Jacen still wouldn't wake and Ben would start to wonder again if Jacen had died now and check again to see that he still breathed.

Sometimes Ben would shake him. He'd climbed up on the bed where Jacen lay and opened up his eyelids to make Jacen awake but his eyes were rolled up in his head and they wouldn't look at Ben even when he touched them.

Jacen's breath made his chest move again and Ben stopped looking at him and looked around the room they were in. It was a small healer's room on the stranger's ship with white lights and a lot of blinking MD machines. Ben hadn't checked to see if the door was locked but he thought it probably was. He hoped it was, like it kept them away from him, even though he knew they could get in if they wanted so that was dumb. They were all alone except for the droid and it had not said anything since Jacen had his operation. He looked at the droid to see if it was watching him. He didn't think it was. Ben had never seen a droid like it before. It had black coverings and skinny arms.

Ben didn't like looking at it. He looked at Jacen. He'd been sleeping like that since they fixed him.

When Ben had first come out of the escape pod onto the ship, Jacen had been hurt and all bloody and he sometimes made hurt noises. The droid was trying to fix him. It pushed needles into him that Ben didn't like and it pulled big pieces of glass out of Jacen where his shirt was tore.

Then the stranger with the mask had come in with her and he had put his hands on Jacen where he was hurt and his hands started to get all glowy blue and Ben didn't like that and yelled at him to stop while she held him and tried to make him be quiet but the stranger wasn't hurting Jacen he was helping him. When his hands had stopped glowing he took them away and Jacen's cuts looked like scabs. Now they'd faded more like Ben's scabs did when he stopped picking them.

They'd left Ben alone with his cousin and the stranger had only come back once but she came back six times to look at Jacen and she even tried to smile at Ben which he hated. He hoped she wouldn't come back again. Once Jacen woke up, Ben was going to tell him what she did and then Jacen was going to kill her and then they could get out of there and find his mom and dad.

Ben tried not to think about it. When he did it made him cry even though he didn't want to.

He'd seen her though. He knew what happened when she pushed it.

Tears started to come in his eyes and they burned when he wouldn't let them out. He pushed his fists against his eyes and tried to make them go away.

His eyes were all smeary when he pulled them away. It made it look like Jacen was moving on the bed. He rubbed his eyes again and tried to make it go away but when he looked again Jacen was sitting up and he made a weird sound like Ben's mom did sometimes when Ben made her wake up. He was holding his head and his legs hung over the edge of the bed.

Ben jumped out of the chair he was sitting in and ran over to Jacen and grabbed the leg of his trousers in his little hand and shook it. "Jacen! Jacen!"

His cousin took his hand off his forehead and looked down at Ben. His eyes looked funny.

"Ben?"

"Jacen!"

"Ben? What..." Jacen looked confused. "Where are we?"

"On a ship!" Ben was still shaking Jacen's leg though he didn't know why.

"A ship?"

"They stole us, Jacen."

Ben wanted to tell him everything but now that Jacen was awake Ben was too excited and he felt himself mixing up his words in his head so he just kept shaking Jacen's leg.

Jacen reached down and placed his hand on Ben's to make him stop. "Ben—what ship? What happened?"

Ben made himself take a deep breath so he could think things in order. Jacen was still holding his head and looking down at him.

"She did it, Jacen. She stole me here. She did everything!"

"Who?"

"The pink lady. The voltron."

"Zeltron?"

"Yeah. Hala."

Jacen shook his head. "I've never heard of her, Ben."

"Jacen, you gotta stop her. She had this button and she pushed it and she blowed up Halo," Ben said. "She killed everybody!"

Ben tried to say more but his throat closed up so tight that he couldn't and he started to cry again and he jammed his fists in his eyes. He hated crying. He wanted to tell so bad.

"Ben?" Jacen put his hand on his shoulder. "She destroyed Halo?"

Ben tried to nod. "She killed everybody." His voice sounded squeaky.

"Everybody? Ben... were your parents on board?"

Ben made himself take his hands away from his face and breathe. Tears ran hot on his cheeks. He shook his head. "No, they were gone."

"Gone where?"

"I don't know. I don't know."

Ben's voice sounded less shaky the second time.

"Ben—"

"She killed everybody, Jacen. Tionne and Valin and Jysella and Cilghal and Kyp and old Streen and Maichen and Tenel Ka and the baby and all my friends—"

He started to cry again. He didn't want to think about the baby. That one hurt the worst.

"I'm sorry, Ben."

"You gotta stop her, Jacen."

Jacen didn't say anything to that. He seemed to be thinking.

"You gotta."

His hand rubbed Ben's shoulder but he wasn't looking at Ben anymore. He was staring at nothing.

"Jacen?"

"How did I get here?"

"Huh?"

"Ben." He looked at him now. "How did I get here?"

"I don't know. You were here when I got here. You don't remember?"

"No."

"You were asleep. You were all bleeding and messed up."

Jacen looked down at his ripped shirt. Blood crusted it and made it stiff. Jacen stuck his fingers in the holes and traced the places where the wounds had been but were now just black.

"I was hurt," he said. He said it like he remembered it now. Like he was telling Ben about it.

"Yeah."

"Ben..." His hand dropped and he looked at Ben again. "Who healed me?"

"A stranger. I couldn't see his face. He wears a mask."

Jacen's face went strange and he looked paler than before.

"Jacen—"

"I remember now, Ben. Everything's going to be okay."

"It's really not. We gotta get out of here."

Jacen patted his shoulder again. "We will. Don't worry."

Ben wanted to say more but just as he was going to the door behind him hissed open and he turned around with his mouth open. The stranger was there. And he was with her.

"Jacen..." He wanted to scream that it was her but they were moving toward him and Ben couldn't make the words come.

The stranger was looking at Jacen, Ben thought. It was hard to tell for sure because of his mask.

"Lord Havok," he said, like that was his cousin's name.

Jacen just sat on the bed and looked at him.

"It's her!" Ben shouted. He pointed at Hala wanting Jacen to look. Jacen glanced at the Zeltron for just a second and then looked at the stranger again like he didn't even care.

"Jacen!"

"Quiet now," Hala said. She grabbed his arm and pulled him away from his cousin.

"Get your hands off me! I'll—"

"Shhhh."

"Let me go—"

She covered his mouth and held him against herself so that Ben couldn't wiggle away, and she watched Jacen and the stranger and Ben couldn't do anything other than watch them too. The stranger was standing beside Jacen's bed now facing him and the two were just staring at each other.

"Do you remember what happened?" the stranger finally asked.

Jacen stared at him still.

"You were badly wounded. A Jedi fighter crashed into the superstructure of the Exodus and nearly killed us both. Do you remember it?"

Jacen did not say.

"I pulled you from the wreckage and brought you to this ship."

The stranger's voice scared Ben. He sounded like he was metal talking. Like he had two voices and one was a droid's voice.

"Your injuries were quite severe. You were dying, Lord Havok. I had to heal you again to save your life."

"Yes," Jacen said finally.

"You remember."

"Yes. You saved me."

They both looked at each other. Ben couldn't tell if they were happy or mad. He squirmed and Hala held him tighter. "Stop," she whispered in his ear.

"You were attacking Halo," Jacen said to the stranger.

"It's gone now."

"You killed them all."

"I did."

Ben tried to yell but Hala's stupid hand stopped it.

"Tenel Ka," Jacen said.

"Your wife and your son are safe," the stranger said. He waved toward Hala. "Hala Rozess made certain they were not on board the space station during the attack."

Ben wondered if he was lying. He hoped it was true. He stopped moving while he thought about it.

Jacen didn't say it was good. Jacen didn't say anything.

"You were very angry when you saw Halo." The stranger was still talking to Jacen. "You wanted to kill me. And you wanted to kill me when you learned the truth about Danni Quee."

"Yes," Jacen said.

The stranger looked at him a long time. "And how do you feel about it now?"

Jacen didn't say and his forehead got wrinkled like he was thinking hard about it or trying to remember something.

"I..." Jacen said. "I don't feel anything."

Ben wanted to scream.

 

Oh boy. Wow. That was a great chapter! Are you going to update the TEOAL PDF thing after every chapter that you do from now on? Very helpful.
Also what was the list of remaining chapters? I'll skim the last couple pages as well but thought I'd ask.

 

Fantastic imagery. I could see it all happening. Oh, and welcome back! You haven't lost your touch.

 

And we're back! This was much worth the wait, old friend, AMAZING chapter! Can't wait for more!