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| - The sun did not set on Nylath; it merely faded slowly, light diminishing gradually, first in the west, then in the east, as the planet commenced its slow rotation. High clouds, ruddy orange and resembling nothing so much as riverbed clay, encompassed the totality of the horizon. Life-giving, the clay sky held and dispersed light and heat, rendering the planet habitable, but it made for a barren vista. Plants and the lethargic local fauna might mark time by the slow ebb-and-flow of reddish brightness as Nylath churned weakly through its fifty-two hour day, but the planet’s sentients, immigrants all, largely ignored these patterns. Visitors too paid little attention to the day and night cycle, finding whatever rhythm suited them best. Shakvail had adopted native custom, twenty hours of activity followed by ten of rest, a traditional practice that served well enough. Night was little barrier to her here, on a planet that only dimmed, and never truly fell into darkness. So as the planet’s spin banished the little red dwarf they orbited beyond the curvature of this lonely world, she continued to work. She wound her way among loose stones and boulders, clearing sand, moss, and lichen from fallen poles and benches, wielding a probe in one hand and a portable scanner in the other. Her eyes drifted back and forth, scouting for telltales, the glimmer and sheen of old electronics, anything that might retain a record. It was a low-percentage gambit, but one she relied on, the thrill of the search carried her through the monotony of mapping. She worked alone, moving through the half-buried pieces at her own pace, but she was not alone. A quartet of locals, Vilnare Kano and his three boys, worked to maintain the survey camp, pack up artifacts, and feed everything the Jedi did not deem valuable through a salvage furnace. Shakvail’s stomach tightened every time she saw the sputtering thing bite its way through another chunk of girder or roofing material, but she had little choice. That angry demonstration of recycling technology was the difference between a project on a budget and no project at all. Light caught on the edge of her glowrod’s halo, and the Jedi grasped the reflection of a shiny bit of wiring. Shuffling over she scrapped and brushed at the dust long enough to reveal a small silvery half-moon shape. Gingerly she grasped the piece of aged holodisc, taking a cleaning tool from her belt to brush it off before wrapping it in a sterile flimsy package and placing it among the other recovered items. “Miss Jedi, what’s the use of all this stuff, really?” Kano’s youngest, a boy of twelve, interrupted as she entered the log for this newest artifact. The Kanos were not native to Nylath; Vilnare had arrived with his family ten years earlier, after a tramp liner made an emergency refueling stop when an engine failed. Seeing a world without a Trade Federation presence, the then destitute metals engineer had decided to stay. Now he ran a mobile salvage shop, pulling wealth out of ruins the locals would not touch. “This,” Shakvail held up the piece of holodisc. “And others like it, are all that remains of the legacy of Dark Lord Nevath Jermin, the Sith who once ruled this planet, and who was partially responsible for those who now live here.” Shakvail looked down at the young human, an earnest boy with red hair and bright eyes. “If we don’t recover those pieces we can’t piece together what happened here, and why, so we won’t be prepared the next time someone tries, and the Spri’Leks will never know the truth behind their beginnings.” “Dad says they don’t wanna know,” the boy protested. Shakvail bit back a sigh. This complaint was not without a depressing germ of truth. “Many people flee from hard truths. That transcends place, age, and species, but it is no reason to ignore knowledge. Besides, there is practical value to be gained, medical data, environmental trends, even the potential location of old ordinance.” “Junior, leave the lady alone and help your brothers wrap that fencing!” Vilnare shouted from his post by the furnace. The burly engineer, heavily bearded in reaction to Nylath’s perpetually just-above-freezing temperatures, boomed. With his wild red mane, moss-weave wide-brim hat, and grungy coveralls the man looked as if he’d lived in the backwoods his whole life. Even with Jedi insight Shakvail would never have guessed he’d been born and raised in the urban industrial hive of Eriadu. “Call on the com for you ma’am,” Vilnare added, pointing to their small field transceiver. “It’s that hunter, Wol.” Shakvail tapped her ear immediately, activating the unit there. “This is Shakvail, what’s happening?” Wol Ferinth was not a man to waste words. “Doctor Lamiss’ got some kind of emergency, weird injuries, don’t make sense. He needs help, so maybe you could take a look?” The Jedi knew Lamiss, having met with him several times in the path months. An immigrant like Vilnare, the Sluissi medic refused to believe in the Force, but he was a virtuous sentient who worked hard for Nylath’s betterment. “Where’s the doctor now?” “Ronebridge,” the hunter replied. “I’m headed north myself, and I’ll meet you there.” “Good idea,” Shakvail acknowledged. Wol was no healer, but he was respected locally, and she’d learned a man like that was good to have around. She’d worked hard to win Spri’Lek trust, but having someone to vouch for her never hurt. “I’ll head out right away.” She brought up a map on her datapad, checking route and distance with a single glance. “Master Kano,” she called to the salvager. “I’m heading out. You can use sectors one through three, but leave the fourth untouched. If I can’t return by tomorrow I’ll com you with an update.” “Yes, ma’am,” though avaricious in his way, the engineer was an honest man, and Shakvail was certain his word was good. She had no qualms over leaving her small pile of recovered artifacts in his care until she came back. Residue of a Sith occupation they might be, but these ruined remnant outposts had yet to supply anything truly dangerous. Taking less than a minute to insure all her personal gear was stowed in case of rain or an unlikely windstorm, the Jedi strode swiftly to the edge of the camp and vaulted onto the lonely speeder bike tethered there. Carefully goosing the aged unit’s starter, she got in running and ramped up to high speed. Even an old speeder bike with several worn down components was capable of impressive speeds, and the landscape of Nylath shot past as Shakvail opened the throttle fully and slashed her away across the plains. Rounded, low-rolling, and open, they were an unimpressive vista; massive expanses planted in huge fields measurable in square kilometers dominated the landscape. Composed of cerale, rtace, and yei, three unrelated grains of high visual similarity, they were green-tinged expanses varying in little beyond height, as they grew and ripened slowly in this land without seasons. Only the occasional auto-harvester, processing in the distance, or towering grain bin, broke up the monotony. Shakvail’s speeder stirred a variety of animal life as she passed. Beaked, shelled reptilians in various sizes predominated, alongside the occasional furious swarm of ant-like seed harvesting insects. Once she caught a glimpse of a sleek, scaled body with a long tail flashing through the grain as she jumped a small ridge, possibly one of the elusive Kasuchus predators that were the planet’s primary large animals. The Jedi passed no inhabitants, for these dry, chill uplands were largely abandoned. Spri’Leks might rove their crops to monitor, but they did not live among them. Ronebridge, like most towns, was located on a river, one of the slow meandering silt-filled waterways that wound the long journey across the plains to the shallow equatorial seas of the planet. On the old bike it was a journey of almost two hours, probably three times what a new speeder, like one of the 74-Zs, might have managed. Shakvail resolved to have the Order find the money for that expense somehow. The town eventually came into view, a series of long, curving longhouses and Quonsets, placed in a series of concentric, off-center rings; it was a symbolically defensive design, though it provided shelter against the occasional windstorm. Unlike the surroundings, the structures were bright and colorful, painted in loud yellow, red, and green dyes made from insect chitin. The river flowed through the middle, wide and shallow. A heavy bridge, designed to accommodate agricultural equipment and massive tracked grain haulers, arched over this divide, and gave the village a name. Shakvail pulled up at the edge of town, where another speeder bike waited. Recognizing Wol even in the dimness through the insight of the Force, she slowed, passing by him at little more than walking speed. The hunter, observing her approach, quickly fell in by her side. “Good of you to come,” the hunter began. Shakvail simply nodded, no explanation was necessary. She was glad she’d hurried; the grim nature of this emergency could be seen in the hardened cast of Wol’s face. Though only into the early stages of middle age, Wol had a deeply lined face, carved by wind and grass, and marked by claw scars from close battles with Kasuchus. It made his dark yellow skin appear almost brown. Broad-shouldered and powerfully built, he was tall for a Spri’Lek, and had a full ten centimeters on the Jedi. His high, sloped forehead gave way into the brain-tails that protruded from the back of his skull. They hung behind him, meeting near the base of the neck, where the appendages twined around each other until they merged into a single point at their fullest extent. This unusual feature often drew the eyes of other humanoids, but Shakvail had long since become accustomed to the Spri’Lek appearance and kept her focus on Wol’s eyes. “Lamiss is set up in the school,” Wol noted, edging his speeder down one of the roads. “They ran out of room in the clinic.” That was serious news, and the Jedi reached out in the Force, taking in the air, the feel of Ronebridge. It was a town on edge, nervous and filled with angry energy. A wounded sensation pervaded the body of the populace, though they were still far from broken. Confusion was a strong second impression; the menace that hounded this place was shadowy and unknown, leaving the people in growing fear. That silent cloud of trepidation cast a pall over the land, and people retreated from it. It was quiet on the streets, with little activity, and the few who were about huddled and slunk from place to place, conducting their duties and nothing more. It brought a scowl to Shakvail’s face, she pitied this impulse in all people, but especially in the Spri’Leks, who lived under a great debt of terror as a species. Wol, by contrast to the villagers, stood tall. The hunter was a man who had beaten his way past such limited impulses, and was ready to whatever life threw at him. This strength bled over to the Jedi, who was glad of it, for it granted acceptance. Shakvail had worked hard to earn trust locally, but this was a great help. It served her well to be seen as called to provide assistance, rather than imposing a Jedi’s choices upon the people. Ronebridge had perhaps three thousand residents, a modest number by Nylath’s standards. Its school was a single long building, one that curved in a great crescent on the northern edge. A low haze floated about the building in the Force, the sign of suffering. The pair marched inside. Lamiss had set up in the largest classroom, all the stations cleared away. The Sluissi doctor moved slowly along three rows of cots, monitoring close to forty patients. His single assistant, a medical droid older than his advanced years, followed. It administered shots of painkiller or other medication at his instruction. He looked up as they entered, and straightened on his serpentine base. “The Jedi,” Lamiss’ Basic was thickly accented, still bearing the marks of the Alderaanian Medical School where he’d learned the art five decades before. At another time Shakvail might have needled the alien a little, for Lamiss was stubborn to a fault and worth a little verbal sparring, but not with those pained faces staring at her. “What happened to these people?” “I wish I knew,” he shook his head, shoulders slumped. “They were attacked, somehow, but the nature of it is mysterious.” He motioned her to one of the patients, a teenage boy thankfully collapsed into slumber. The doctor pulled back the blanket over the boy to reveal hideous wounds. Circular lacerations walked their way up and down the legs, brutalizing flesh and leaving bloody gouges livid with painful sores and oozing. The marks were sharp-edged and puckered, as if a tiny rasp had been applied to the skin, pressed in, and spun rapidly in many places. Everywhere on the lower extensions of the limbs, they stopped abruptly just below the hips. “Something in the water,” Shakvail looked to the doctor for confirmation. “Yes,” Lamiss didn’t ask how she’d figured it out; the Sluissi had made it clear that he found so-called debunking of the Force to be very tiresome. “Everyone here was in the river earlier today, part of a school activity actually. All this damage was inflicted in just a few minutes.” The Jedi looked closer at the wounds. “These look almost like bites, there’s major tissue loss, but I’ve never seen anything with teeth like that.” “I have,” the doctor demurred. “Jawless predators and parasites, including lampreys, might leave such wounds, but no such animal lives on Nylath.” This was quite true, as Shakvail knew well. Nylath’s limited ecology lacked for any true aquatic vertebrates, its shallow seas had been re-colonized by air-breathing reptilians. “Did you check the river afterwards?” She asked instead. “One of the local fishermen dragged a net under the bridge,” the Sluissi shook his head. “I haven’t had the time to leave my patients.” “I’ll see what I can find then,” Shakvail offered. Leaving the doctor to his charges, the Jedi and the hunter walked down to the river, moods bleak. “Never seen anything that could leave marks like that,” Wol muttered. “Nor hear of it.” This was disheartening to Shakvail. There was little that walked, crawled, or fought on Nylath that the hunter had not at least heard of in stories. Something about the whole situation felt wrong to her, twisted somehow. They went down to the river just below the bridge. The buildings extended nearly to the bank. In a place that lacked seasonality there was little worry for flooding. A small strip of grass lined the side anyway, a gesture to ancient patterns of construction. A portable bioscanner was one of the many pieces of gear Shakvail kept in her speeder’s panniers, and she pulled it free now. Extending the antennae, she plunged them down into the water, trying to localize a better pickup. For roughly a minute she muddled with the unit, taking readings on a variety of frequencies, going through several detection permutations and adjusting certain parameters. To her considerable astonishment, the machine detected nothing at all. “That can’t be right,” Wol, looking over her shoulder, muttered grimly. “No tortas, no kasuchus, not even signs of mud ants, all empty.” Shakvail nodded. “No signs of a toxin spill, drastic temperature change, or anything else that could kill everything in the river either.” Her sense of wrongness grew by leaps and bounds. Taking off the glove on her left hand, the Jedi plunged her hand into the river up to the elbow. The water was cold, like the air it hovered at only a few degrees above freezing, but she ignored that, instead stretching out into the Force, pushing her awareness down further, deeper into the river. Her consciousness drew on the energy field within and sounded for echoes, the evidence of life. Nothing answered. “Something is very wrong here,” Shakvail pulled her hand out, shaking it dry as best she could. “There is no life in this river as far as I can sense.” “That’s impossible,” Wol protested. The hunter, on the surface at least, correct. Nylath’s life was generally boring and lacking in diversity, but it was steady, consistent, and hardy. The planet’s rivers were simply not in the business of randomly going dead for several klicks. “You’re right,” Shakvail noted, feeling tight and worried. There was something dark about this, something that would not stop at a few torn limbs. On that impulse her decision was made. “I’m going to need a closer look.” She looked at the river grimly, and pulled a small boxy object from her belt. Placing it in her mouth, she steeled her nerves, centered her body in the Force, and jumped in. It was, as expected, bitterly cold, her skin screamed and nerves fired rapidly in a sudden, animal panic. Through the Force the Jedi clamped down, and shunted energy to her limbs, warding off the chill. Physical signals calmed then, and she was able to proceed to the bottom. Her eyes provided further confirmation of scans and the Force. The river was dead, empty, and lifeless; nothing moved, the water was still. The dark feeling Shakvail had seen earlier persisted. She felt a strange presence, an unrecognizable, displaced energy. It was vapid, dull, not the vibrant presence of a living being, or even the harsh edged wrath of a dark side fouled monster. Instead the sensation crept along the base of her skin, counter-current to the chill of the water, tingling and lurking. It felt of hunger. “Shakvail, anything down there?” Wol’s voice came into her ear through the comlink. “Nothing,” she muttered, words garbled by liquid. There was a quick grunt. “Check the banks, look for something hiding there.” It was hard to see detail even two meters down, but Shakvail acted on this impulse. She slid along the bank, feeling in the rough mud and leveled stone there. The sense of hunger increased. After some time, drifting downstream a little, perhaps ten meters from the bridge, she found a hole. It was a rough thing, elliptical rather than circular, and crumbling. She pressed down close to it. Hunger spiked in the water. Movement betrayed the thing, which barely registered in the Force. It shot free of the hole, twisting and screeching with great speed. Jedi training and reflexes proved barely enough there in the water, as Shakvail’s hand closed on the back of the thing as it lurched toward her face. She surged to the surface, breaching the plane in the next moment and launching a Force-enhanced jump to blast onto shore. Wol was already running, as the Safol struggled to hold the thing in her hand. It was vaguely worm-like, but flattened and ovular, not round. Not soft, its surface was hard, a smooth brown coating that felt slick and shiny. It was ridged on both edges, and only by grasping those could the Jedi hold the thrashing thing. As long as her arm and almost as thick, the front end was capped by a shielded head, topped with a radial mouth that held a series of whorls, sharpened layers of jagged-edged teeth. Locked in an impenetrable circle, this rasping keratin shot forward again and again as the creature tried to make contact with exposed skin. Though that vicious maw, powered by hunger and energy to lash out with surprising strength, was shockingly alien and brutal to look upon, it was less frightening to the Jedi than the creature’s image in the Force. It had nothing like the presence of a living creature, instead it exuded the miasma of death, a pile of rotting debris hungry to add more to itself, to consume and consume until everything was gone. The dark side emanated from it in every direction. Locked in a desperate struggle to keep her hold on the worm-thing and prevent it from raking her face with those ragged tooth-whorls, Shakvail found she was oddly stuck. Both hands were required to maintain that shifting, contorted wrestling match as the creature thrashed and twisted, and all her focus as well. Then Wol arrived. The hunter reacted with great speed. Wisely selecting his belt knife over the heavy slugthrower he wore as his weapon of choice, he brought the wickedly sharp edge down in an overhand cross designed to take the monstrosity’s head clean off. The knife, laser sharpened and capable of scoring a mark in transparisteel, struck the creature with a solid thuck-sound. The hardened cuticle chipped and cracked, but did not break. Shakvail’s eyes widened. Then they rose even further as the creature shifted, shook, and began to fracture. It slid apart in her hands, calving into long, slender pieces as if it was being fed through a separator machine. Difficult to sense in the Force as the thing was, and as disturbing as it was to have it come apart in her hands, it took several seconds for the Jedi to realize that it was not breaking into pieces, but dissolving into many tiny copies of itself, each roughly the size of an earthworm. When they plummeted to the ground at her feet, they continued to squirm. Immediately Shakvail threw the thing to the earth of the riverbank, jumping in surprise. “Get back!” she shouted at Wol. The Spri’Lek’s eyes stared at the tableau, captured by this horrific disintegration. The earthworm-sized versions began to slink back toward the river. Shakvail refused to allow it to escape, but her mind blanked regarding a method to retain several hundred squirming worms. In an expression of very human instinct she charged forward and stomped on the nearest with her boot. It compressed beneath her weight, but failed to crush. Seeking any option, she turned to her principle weapon. The Jedi’s lightsaber burst brightly in the dimness, and she made two quick slashes along the ground. Worms ignited at the touch of the transparent green blade, curling and smoldering, but the weapon destroyed only those it physically contacted, and Shakvail’s snap assessment was clear; she’d never get more than a handful that way. She needed another solution. Curling flames sprouted from a tuft of sedges clipped by the lightsaber during her strike, and as the edge of her wide vision slid across them, the answer became clear. She reached down and pulled up several grassy clumps. Holding them in her left hand, she applied her lightsaber to the far end, setting them aflame. Then she tossed her burning brands atop the dispersing pile of worm-like monsters. The only sound as they burned was the crackle and spark of torching grass, but Shakvail felt a dark cloud, a concentration of distorted energy, pull apart and melt away as the fire claimed them. “What in the stars was that?” Wol blurted when it was done. “I’m not sure,” Shakvail did not like those words, it made her feel vulnerable. Something was abroad on Nylath she didn’t understand. Touched by the dark side it had already seriously injured many, and she could feel that this was only the faintest expression of what might be unleashed. “Something vile, unnatural, a creation of Sith alchemy perhaps.” “That explains the splitting,” Wol nodded, his head-tails shaking, revealing rattled nerves. “But that form, I’ve never seen anything like it.” “I wonder,” Shakvail felt as if she had. The thing stirred old memories, things learned long ago and rarely touched upon later. She pulled out her datapad. Its internal database was limited, but she had access to a better one. While the Jedi Archives were separated by the vast gulf of half a galaxy and the considerably greater restriction that was Nylath’s lack of a private Holocom network, this wasn’t Shakvail’s first field assignment, and she’d made provisions for the next best thing. A short com transmission to her field camp put her in touch with a reasonable condensed facsimile. “Maybe Krare has the answer,” she muttered, inputting search terms. “Who’s Krare?” Wol questioned, with confusion written on his weathered face. “Droid brain,” Shakvail had purchased a second hand analysis droid to accompany her on her first field op to Radrack, only to discover that, unlike Jedi Padawans, droids were slow, cumbersome, and had a troubling tendency to get shot, stolen, and chopped. So, after recovering the remains of the unit, she’d decided to keep only the important parts, the high-powered processors and sorting software, and store it in a box. That she no longer had to listen to the thing natter incessantly was also a plus. The Jedi quickly called up a search of the zoological database. ‘Elongate body structure, ovular, not tube, hardened cuticle, no external organs, jawless mouth, return images only.’ She suspected text would be of little use in matching up a creation of Sith Alchemy to natural life. Several pictures popped up on the small screen immediately. The first was almost a perfect match for what she’d observed, save for one small discrepancy, it was a false color electron micrograph. That filled in the missing gap in memory all on its own. “Nematode,” Shakvail hissed. “Nema-what?” Wol looked over her shoulder at the picture. “That’s the Sithspawn, for sure.” “Soil-dwelling worms,” Shakvail pulled up the text file beneath, paraphrasing what came back now from old lectures. “Mostly detrivores, but some parasites, some predators; the biology is simplistic, a sort of no-frills approach, but it works, the things are massively abundant.” “Never seen anything like it before,” the hunter scowled. “That’s because they’re more or less microscopic,” Shakvail’s mind was racing, following twining paths of intellectual speculation and Force-based intuition, shooting forward like a rocket to seek answers. “The thing broke apart when struck, they must be somehow conglomerating, massing together to meld into a creature orders of magnitude larger.” “Can they do that?” “No, they can’t,” the Jedi pressed her lips together tightly, her eyes racing back and forth, staring at nothing as she sought a solution. What had happened earlier was, so far as she knew, biologically impossible. Shakvail would be the first to concede that many secrets of galactic zoology were outside her knowledge, but on a planet with a Sith legacy, no matter how limited it had supposedly been, she was far more inclined to bet on the dark side. “There must be some source, some power that enabled this.” She turned to Wol. “Have there been any new off-world arrivals recently?” “Not out here,” the hunter was part of an informal network of backcountry operators who helped maintain the law, such as it was, beyond the riverside villages. “Things have been mostly quiet lately.” This was not sufficient for the Safol. “Mostly?” she pressed. “Well, there was that rockslide up by Lake Vulon,” the hunter shrugged. “Rockslide?” Wol looked uncomfortable. “An accident,” he conceded. “Some buddies got in on a dare, went up to the ruins there, by the lake. They found something live and it went off. Two dead and the whole side of the hill caved in.” Forgotten ordinance was among the few truly practical reasons to avoid Nylath’s fifteen hundred year old ruins, though it was a rare outpost that contained anything substantial. The Jedi knew a leftover missile powerful enough to collapse a hillside meant the location had been comparatively important. “Where’s Lake Vulon?” Asking Wol was quicker than consulting her map. “Hundred-fifty klicks upriver.” “Upriver,” the Force thrummed through that word, filling it with portent. Shakvail seized upon the impulse, thinking hard. “Upriver, upriver…” Her eyes closed as she focused, trying to put the pieces together, to grasp the problem. Fortress collapse, alchemically-altered microbial predators, attacks in the water…there was a connection, she was sure of it. “Kriff!” She spat as her eyes snapped open. “What is it?” Shocked by the profanity from the Jedi, Wol stepped back almost a full meter. “It’s upriver,” she answered. “The source of this, there has to be something, some kind of artifact that changed the nematodes. It must have fallen into the lake in the collapse. What happened here, what hurt the villagers, that was just a piece of it, swept downstream, broken off like it did after you hit it with your knife.” “Broken off,” Wol’s eyes widened in comprehension. “But the pieces were so much smaller...” “I know,” Shakvail snapped, worry making her unusually terse. “You with me on this Wol?” She asked, hating that she had too, but for all his stoic strength, Wol was a Spri'Lek, and they were not a valorous people. When he nodded, she knew her corresponding smile was written all over her face. It faded quickly, as she imagined what might be happening even as they stood there. “Speeders, now!” She decided. They ran for the parked bikes, and kicked them into motion immediately when they reached them. Staring upriver, one hundred and fifty kilometers suddenly seemed an insurmountable distance. Heedless of the damage she was about to do to her vehicle, Shakvail gunned the little repulsorcraft for everything the engine had. Wol, his speeder in slightly better shape than the Jedi's, took the lead. They did not bother with Nylath's limited road network, but charged upriver directly, blasting across the water leaving sweeping fountains behind them. Her concentration split, trusting the Force to warn her of dangers, Shakvail pulled her wrist com up to her mouth, shouting against the wind and spray. “Doctor Lamiss, come in, I repeat, come in Doctor Lamiss.” The doctor answered in his own good time, and added a serpentine hiss of irritation when he connected. “Yes, Jedi?” “We found the problem,” Shakvail bit back any barbs that came to mind and stuck to the facts, lives were at stake now. “The wounds were caused by attacks from massively enlarged nematodes, produced by some kind of Sith alchemy.” “Alchemy, that's absurd-” “Save it doc,” the Jedi cut him off, in no mood for the alien's obstinacy. “Check the injuries against you image files, they match nematode teeth perfectly.” She grabbed a deep breath as the river passed below. “I need you to get the authorities to move, quarantine the river, have it treated with some kind of nematode-killing pesticide,” Shakvail's memory held vague recollections of nematodes as agricultural pests, which meant there was some form of killing agent available. “Make sure they get the whole river, source to sea, leave nothing untouched.” There was a pause, and the Jedi felt the weight of the moment, the decision of the Sluissi doctor holding the fate of thousands in his hands, yet she did not doubt the outcome. “I will send the word out, I can have a quarantine declared within the hour.” Lamiss sighed. “Thanks doctor,” Shakvail managed a weak smile. Always bet on a caution with the Sluissi. “I owe you one. Gotta go, there's worse upriver.” As she cut off the transmission she knifed in toward the riverbank, cutting hard turns as rushes scrapped the bottom of her chassis, moving to catch up to the hunter in front. They had to hurry. Winding and weaving, screaming past oxbows, jumping waterfalls, and bouncing through rapids, they strove the way upstream, spawning fish on speeders, the first Nylath had known. It was a difficult journey, but Wol was a skilled rider, and Shakvail had the Force. They suffered no mishaps, but the speeders guttered and sparked, and both were on the verge of failure by the time they crossed the last distance, streaking out onto the flat surface of Lake Vulon. The rock-slide was obvious, and the Jedi angled for it immediately. A massive pile of scree gouged a path through the eastern bank of the lake, a high wall rising a full thirty meters above the waterline. At the top of that pile the ruined stony spires of the ancient Sith outpost could still be seen, broken and smashed, crushed in the one great Spri'Lek military success. Shakvail made for that side. They reached the stony shore beside the debris, shattered rocks from pebbles to boulders, a chaotic collection born from the anarchy of high explosives. Looking at the blast, the Jedi thought it odd. It did not seem accidental, random. No, what she was looking at, even with her limited understanding of explosives, was different, it was channeled...directed. “Trap!” she announced, just as the Force cried a warning. “Wol, get to high ground!” Shakvail had only time enough to shout this warning before she was inexorably turned toward the water, her every sense filled with that horrible half-dead hunger from the nematode creations. A creature the size of her arm had been bad enough; this was unbelievably worse. The Jedi stood on the shore, her lightsaber took life in her hands. A massive pillar of liquid rose high into the air as something immense burst free. Water fell aside, compelled by gravity, and in its absence revealed a monster. “Kriff...” Shakvail muttered. It was a true giant, fifty meters in length if it was one, and five meters around. Its interlaced whorls of tooth plates scraped and scythed together, a jagged grater ready to shear anything that it contacted. It was a foul ocher color, and reeked of rot. The monstrosity shown in the Force, an inverted star of darkness. Having risen from the depths of the lake, it proceeded to surge forward, crashing down in a lunge to smother and dice the Jedi. Shakvail jumped back in time, forewarned, but the creature struck the stones below. The horrendous impact produced a massive shock wave, and she was thrown through the air, spinning. Drawing on the Force, the Jedi took control of her motions, landing on her feet some ways upwards. Eyeless though it was, the monster somehow sensed her, Shakvail would have bet it was through smell, and thrashed its way upwards to attack again. Using its momentum against it, the Safol drew on the Force, powering into a great leap. Controlling her motion she flashed through the air, and her lightsaber turned in her hands, directed in a massive overhand strike down behind the head. The glowing green blade struck that brownish surface, waxy and shining and sank deep. In the next moment, the creature thrashed and whipped its body in rage, throwing this stinging interloper free, but the Force made it clear it was unharmed. Shakvail's eyes went wide, and she landed unbalanced, rolling and sliding to hit hard next to the thing, stymied. “Only a glance!” she barked, loosing her composure for a moment as pain came over her. It was visible behind her eyes at a thought, a small narrow hole, the only evidence that she had cut into that skin whatsoever. The nematode rolled. Scrambling, Shakvail ran back in a crab walk, jumping for the upper bank. She landed awkwardly, sending a spike of pain through her feet. Shaken, she struggled to evade as the thing shifted to bowl her under its great bulk. Bang! A loud rapport, followed by two more in swift succession, split the air. Little fountains of pulverized wax sprayed away from the creature's head. Wol had fired. The Jedi's head bent, and her eyes sought to observe the damage the hunter's high-caliber slugthrower had wrought. Durasteel slugs, thick as a thumb, the weapon was powerful enough to bring down any game on Nylath, and the dark side creature was pierced deep, metal chunks penetrating meters inward. Yet it was unharmed. “No blood,” Shakvail realized, truly grasping the utter simplicity of the thing now. “No organs, and that cuticle so thick...” Her perception fixated on that thing, and she saw for the first time in her life a creature without a weakness. It was armored in simplicity. Only massive damage could destroy it. Hefting her lightsaber, she thought there might be a way. The monster had turned toward Wol, slithering up the rock-slide in an attempt to devour the rapidly retreating hunter. Aided by the Force, the Jedi charged in, easily cutting across that pathway. Her hand snapped back, and she threw. Shakvail's lightsaber whipped through the air in a curled arc, striking straight up the jagged teeth of the thing's maw. The glowing green blade scrapped across the surface of one of the teeth, but failed to penetrate. “Stang!” she jumped back, extending a hand to call her weapon back as she dodged away again. “I need an opening.” The giant nematode gave chase. “Need to...penetrate...the...mouth,” Shakvail's words spilled free of her consciousness as she ran, the ground rumbling beneath her as the thing pursued. Only by the aid of the Force did she stay one step ahead, but a single stumble would doom her now. The lightsaber had failed, but another weapon had struck deep, and it was that Shakvail needed now. To do so, however, was to jeopardize Wol as well. She could not fail then. Knowing this, she straightened, and drew strength. She would succeed, for it was the only way to save him. “Shoot it!” she called to the hunter. “Shoot its mouth!” “Where?” Wol yelled back, running as he tried to make an escape of his own. There was no time to find a good method to signal, so Shakvail improvised. She slashed down in her own path, cutting free a portion of her own robe. Taking it in her left hand, she let it free, embracing the rush of nerve impulses that wanted to overwhelm her as she did so. Focus shifted as the Breaker Trance overcame her, and all fell into place, seizing on the insight she had already developed. The scrap of fabric left her outstretched hand, caught on the wind, and pressed down again on the outer edge of a monstrous tooth. “There!” Wol, meters beyond, dropped to one knee, took aim, and fired. A heavy slug pierced through that tooth, breaking open a crack. The Jedi's left hand whipped down to her belt, yanking forth a small grapple and line. She spun the device in rapid circles, before snapping it forward. It struck a ridge of cuticle atop the creature. The pull of the mighty thing's incredible strength and vast momentum ripped her around in a wide curve, torque dominating. As she drew parallel with the creature's maw Shakvail threw. Her lightsaber passed across the thing's path even as it's wielder was carried up and behind to land atop the monster's back. The hilt of the blade flashed in front of the monster, passing over the gap opened by a heavy slug only moments ago just as it was about to be swallowed up. The green blade glanced off the tooth on the other side, and in striking was pushed aside so the hilt flipped perpendicular and the lightsaber fell through that gap, descending into the bowels of the nematode. Shakvail, riding the back of the monster, ran forward, charging to the front even as it rolled to crush this middling interloper. Flicking her grapple free, she vaulted out into the open, somersaulting through the air. In that moment, she reached out into the Force, and took hold of her lightsaber once again. As she wove a three-dimensional spinning dance through the sky in front of the monster, her blade mirrored her motion even as it fell back the opposite way. There was no sound, but the air rent with expectation. Shakvail dropped to her feet at the base of the Sith ruins, the nematode creation slithering behind. With every meter its thrashing grew more labored, weaker, and distraught. Tears and scrapes appeared on the cuticle. It grew slower and slower. Then the mouth crashed to the ground a single step behind Shakvail. One final time the nematode squirmed, each end standing high, reaching desperately for the sky. Then they slammed down to the broken earth once more. The dark side energy faded almost instantly. Jedi and hunter turned to watch the massive thing begin to melt away, breaking into smaller and smaller versions of itself before each liquified and began to slowly flow back down toward the lake. “Stang,” Wol muttered, coming up beside Shakvail. “It's dead, right?” “In a sense, it already was,” the Jedi answered, her own body quivering from all she had put through it recently. She could barely manage to stand up straight. “But this particular threat is ended, yes.” After a moment, when she had managed to gather a little strength together, she walked down through that fading ooze. While the nematode was dissipating as if it had never been, two things remained. One was her lightsaber, unmarked by its ordeal, jade scroll work shining in the dim light as always. The second was similar in size, but otherwise bore no resemblance at all. A hexagonal prism, it was elongate, columnar, and jet black with strange marking glyphs in a silver shade. It gave off a strange, shadowy echo of power, and misuse. The dark side energy so recently gathered to it was dissipated now, lost into the background radiation of reality itself, no longer a threat. Even so, Shakvail took care. She held out an arm to hold Wol back, even as the hunter's curiosity drew him forward. Wrapping a sheath of the Force about her hand, she reached down and picked up the thing, gingerly, careful to minimize contact even through her gloves. There was a flash of...something...some misty vision of ancient origins as she touched the object. It swirled through her, reaching into the depths of her cells, to a memory carried not in the brain, but deeper, in the living record of her existence that was genetic material. Eyes reaching to the edges of her sockets, her twisted, fractured vision looked down upon the object and saw those glyphs again, the wrapped silver markings now revealed to her, a distinctive shape know everywhere in the galaxy. A double helix form. DNA. Her perception journeyed deeper, spiraling down the branches of a vast and luminous tree, across generations and ages, planets and sectors, tunneling through hyperspace on the way back to a single, essential point. Tall towers and ziggurats rose on the back of a damaged world, enslaved to the city that crawled over its surface. Battles raged and beings toiled in the shadows of ancient overlords whose mastery was born of darkness twisted through the honeycomb of all life. Yet this legacy was imperfect, flawed, slaved to dark powers that eroded its core strength and knowledge. It would be another, broader, adaptable, tenacious in its flexibility, that would rise high and break free, and come to dominate all before it. Shakvail looked upon the world where it was forged, and knew it, and as her mind fled the crumbling vision as the ruptured afterimage of the Force energy unleashed in death gave way, she acquired a unique, necessary label, one the gifts of the Jedi allowed her to interpret across the gulf of time. “Denon,” she whispered, as she dropped the artifact to the ground. “What about Denon?” Wol, voiced worried, questioned. “This came from there,” Shakvail's body shook once, then was sound again, the momentary disassociation past. “It is not Sith, no, much older, no doubt passed down through various lords of the dark ways through time. It was part of some kind of machinery, some method to manipulate living things.” “To make monsters?” the memory of the nematode creation was fresh in both minds. “Maybe, but I don't think so,” the Jedi answered. It was a cruel artifact, of this she had no doubt, but it had a greater purpose than the use the Sith had found for it. “Regardless, it's dead now, all the power in it is lost. It could be shattered with a hammer.” “Then destroy it,” Wol urged. A simple suggestion, but Shakvail made a deliberate effort to consider it, though it would not have been her choice. “No,” she decided a moment later. “That is not my decision to make, the Council must learn of this, and it shall be their choice.” She stood, and wrapped the artifact carefully within a loose bandage. “It seems I shall be returning sooner than I anticipated.” “Leave Nylath?” Wol was crestfallen. “It is time,” the Jedi offered him a smile. “We must report this incident, and I will wrap up my research, but I must head back to Coruscant very soon. This overshadows everything else I have found here, and it must be reported in person.” “It will be a shame too lose you,” Wol spoke sourly. “We had welcomed a Jedi champion, it has made us feel stronger.” “Build on that then, Wol,” she told him, hopeful at the sentiment. “The Spri'Lek people must find their own steel, if they are to rise up and hold their own. Remember today; I could not have defeated it without your help.” “I will remember,” the hunter acknowledged. It was a heartening sign, that this man was willing to fight. The Spri'Lek were too willing to embrace weakness, to suffer whatever they must in order to insure survival. It had insured their existence in a callous galaxy for now, but it would not last. Nylath needed its own heroes, and she believed Wol could well be one. Yet her mind was not fully dedicated to that problem now, for a vision pulled at her perception, her first tantalizing glimpse of origins, one guided now by a single name: Denon. Her mind was made up, and she knew where her journey must take her now. The interlude was over, and it was time for her to face the mystery she had become a Jedi to master. Anticipation fought with fear in her, and she felt poised on a precipice. Two years in the field had forged a devotion to practicality that soon won out over the allure of the ethereal, however, and Shakvail's focus returned to the present moment. “Now then, I think we need to call the doctor,” she reached for her comlink. One monster fallen, revealing a connection between ancient and present. It had a meaning for the galaxy, surely. The answer beckoned on a distant world, a place of both power and neglect, buried deep beneath many layers of concealment and time. Only a Jedi, with the Force as her ally, would be able to plunge through that landscape and succeed. Shakvail turned toward the stars, hidden behind ruddy clouds. She was ready.
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