A Semblance of "Normalcy"

[Lux Cautin]

The City of Coronet was a sprawling, bustling, industrial hub of a city on the planet of Corellia. Jedi Master Lux Cautin had spent twenty years helping to build an Order of Jedi he could be proud of. Though he was still the same person he had always been, his brown hair was now peppered with gray and his face had aged from the stress of training and fussing over his students.

Lux sat, legs crossed, on the floor of his bed chamber. The room was not small, nor was it large, and the lone window provided a view of the city that one could only call "breathtaking". It was this window that he faced as he leaned back against the base of his mattress, clearing his mind to meditate.

Pride. It was frowned upon by the Order and he did his best to teach it out of his students. Yet, he felt a firm sense of pride when he thought of all he, and his students, had managed to accomplish over the last two decades. The academy of the Corellian Jedi Order was not large, but it had grown so much from when it was started.

Lux felt a light tremor in the Force, a vibration at the edge of his senses. He focused on it, tried to trace it to it's source as it began to fade. He pondered what the tremor could mean. His thoughts drifted to his old friends, wondering if they felt it too and briefly considering contacting them. No. Too obvious.

He dismissed the idea. He had left them long ago and they had likely forgotten him by now.

His comlink chirped.

Some in the Academy would have felt the tremor. They would probably have questions. Lux rose to his feet, his knees creaking (just a little) as he stood. He crossed the room to where his comlink rested, it chirped again and he picked it up with a childish grin. "You've reached the comlink of Jedi Master Lux, please leave a message." The truth was, he did not know where the tremor originated. It was a mystery he would need more time to solve, so he might as well torment his students just a little.

A youthful male voice responded in a concerned tone and, to Lux's annoyance, ignored his joke. "Did you feel that?"

Lux frowned. "Yes, Heim. Whatever caused it-" the tremor returned, cutting him off mid-sentence. This time it was not a tremor, but a rumble rising to a roar.

"Master?!"

The roar shook Lux to his very core and He felt vulnerable in a way he had not felt in a very long time. His senses were assaulted with rage, hate and unending sorrow. Ultimate regret. The smell of blood. Of smoke and fire. And then: Nothing. The absence of air. His eyes watered and his breath froze in his lungs. Cold. So cold. Lux snarled, trying to force these feelings away. These were feelings he had not felt in a very long time.

Darkness took him and Lux fell to his knees. He threw his hands out to catch himself and they landed in damp, leafy, soil. His nostrils filled with humid, stagnant, rotten air. Something buzzed in his ear. An insect bit his hand. He sighed. He didn't even need to look to know he was in a jungle.

Lux opened his eyes to scenery much different than that of Coronet City. His hands, which were still maintaining his balance, disappeared into a thick mist that hid them from view. He looked up and drank in the sight before him. The underbrush around him was thick and wilted and the trees were massive. Lux had never seen trees like these. Lux had never been to Kashyyyk or it's Shadowlands but he wondered if this is how it felt. Their very presence was oppressive. Thick black trunks oozing a strange sap that seemed to trap any insect that touched them against its bark. He had spent a lot of time around trees, one could even say plants used to be his specialty. Even in the industrial city of Coronet he insisted on having gardens placed throughout the Academy.

Lux stood up on the uneven ground hidden by a thick fog at his feet. He examined the comlink which appeared to still be working. "Heim? Heim, do you read? Are you there?"

No answer. The message had gone out, so he must be out of range. He pocketed the comlink and took a step closer to one of the trees, examining it with his eyes and reaching out to it with the Force. The Force within the tree was as dark as the bark that covered it. It almost seemed to want to pull him in. Wherever he focused his energy, encouraging growth, a strange thin branch would grow, which was what he wanted. Unfortunately, it would grow at him, which was not an experience he had ever had before. Lux noted that the thin branch was covered in small wicked-looking thorny protrusions. The branch and it's thorns appeared to be reaching out for him like a hand trying to pull him into the tree. As if to devour him. Lux took a step backwards, away from the tree, and stumbled.

The transfer from Corellia to wherever he was now had left him somewhat disoriented and off balance. He examined the trees around him with a critical eye.

"I'm sorry to say this to you all but: I don't think we can be friends."

As he turned away from the tree to take in his surroundings, he sensed something moving to his left. In the dense overgrowth, something primitive prowled. It's mind moved in vague patterns that reminded him of a predator.

Hunt.

Kill.

Eat.

With his left hand, Lux brushed his hair back behind his ear and, with his right hand, he casually dropped his hand to his hip. He had one of his lightsabers, at least.

No sudden movements.

Wait.

Almost.

Hunt.

Kill.

Eat.

Lux sighed and turned to face the creature.

"Come on already."

The creature pounced.The snap-hiss of his lightsaber brought the orange blade into being. The blade sang as it separated a scaled, clawed wrist from the creature. The strange animal hissed in pain, tucked it's now clawless arm, and snapped at him. Lux stepped back from the thing, avoiding it's jaws. It charged him, using it's body-weight to rush into its attack. Lux backpedaled again, avoiding the bite but not the creature. He tripped on a dark root, falling backwards as the heavy creature followed him down. Lux reflexively held his lightsaber out in front of him as he fell so he would not land on it himself, a maneuver taught to all Padawans as soon as they are introduced to their first training-saber. The creature's weight and injured claw impaired the creature's ability to stop itself from falling onto the orange blade. As the creature died spasmed above him, Lux noticed it's jaws dripping some sort of thick dark liquid he had originally assumed was drool. He quickly twisted his body, ducking his head out of the way of the dripping ooze and avoiding the droplets as they landed where his head used to be. Thin lines of steam hissed into the air from within the fog where the venomous liquid landed on the undergrowth.

Lux rolled the creature off of him and stood. Using the glowing lightsaber blade as a lantern, he was able to get a better look at the creature. It seemed almost to be a hybrid between a large lizard and a Kath Hound. At least that was what his mind associated the creature with. It was like nothing he had ever seen. Lux noticed a strange pattern of bulges in the creatures neck and silently exulted that he had not been bitten.

Not drool.

He furrowed his brow and pointed his lightsaber at the creature accusingly. "Venom!"

A loud screech and a crash in the distance compelled Lux into motion. Wherever he was, this was not the place to stay. With the canopy above so thick, no compass, and no way to get his bearings, any direction was better than none. Lux picked a direction and hoped to find himself some high ground to get the lay of the land. Lux deactivated his lightsaber, raised the hood of his robe and began his long walk to his destination.

Lux would never openly admit it, but he felt a surge of excitement as he moved through the brush.

[Lux Cautin]

Lux was frustrated.

It is generally understood that moss grows on the darkest side of a tree and that, depending on the hemisphere of the planet, it will grow more on the north or more on the south side of the tree. Unfortunately Lux did not know what hemisphere he was in, much less what planet he was on.

It was a moot point anyway because there was no moss on ANY of these trees.

Sighing, Lux stopped walking. He had been walking for hours. He didn't necessarily care where he ended up. He had been trying to puzzle out what had happened and walking was almost a sort of meditation. So far, he still had absolutely no idea how he had gotten here, much less what had brought him here. What he did know, at least, was that he was not alone.

Well, technically he was alone.

Lux knew, however, that there were beings on this planet other than the creatures that lived here. People. It had to be. He just knew. He could feel them.

The tall Jedi took in his surroundings. Deep in thought, he hadn't been paying attention to where he was going. Had he been here before? That tree looked familiar and so did that shrubbery. But how can you tell when all the trees are cruel, puss-ridden, maggot-infested excuses for plant life? And that cursed fog! It hid every tree root and every hole in the ground, large or small.

I've been here before.

Lux stared at the little thorny arm he had convinced to grow from the dark-tree. He ran a hand through his graying hair wondering, and simultaneously not wanting to know the answer to the question of, what had happened to the body of the creature he had killed. He stared at the little arm, still seeming like it wanted to grab him and draw him deep into the tree. Like it knew where he was. Nope. He turned his back on the tree and closed his eyes for a moment.

All around him, all he felt was darkness. He felt evil. He felt oppression, greed and envy. Thoughts of the Valley of the Sith came and went. Its similarities to a Nexus of Dark Side energy weren't really relevant or helpful right now.

He took a couple of steps away, glancing back at the little limb. It seemed like it kept grasping at him no matter where he moved.

"As your father, I want you to know that I regret bringing you into this world."

Lux closed his eyes again and took a deep, cleansing, breath. Or at least as cleansing as you can with putrid and humid air. All around him, oppressive darkness. But far in the distance it was just a little less dark.

He started walking again.

[Lux Cautin]

"Dear Lux..."

Lux stopped walking. All around him insects were chirping and leaves were rustling, yet he heard none of it. His mind was focused on the voice. It was a voice he had not heard in a decade. He gazed around himself in a stupor.

"I was finally in this corner of the Mid Rim and made the time to come to Naboo for a few days..."

The voice came from everywhere and from nowhere. Lux stared unseeing into the distance. He began walking forward again, forcing his legs to move. He came to a stop again, staring at the nearest black tree as memories came rushing back to him. First came happiness, and he laughed at memories so distant he thought lost. Then came sadness as he realized he had not seen her in two decades.

His voice trembled just a little as he searched his surroundings stupidly. "Kaytren?"

"I manage it every few years now. It’s so quiet and different than it was, but you never know who you’ll run into… And honestly it’s Home."

The guilt hit him like an intense wave. He had not only not seen Kaytren in decades, but he had abandoned her. Abandoned them all. Left them to pick up the pieces of the Bakuran Jedi while he started an academy on Corellia. When they had very possibly needed him the most, he had left them to fend for themselves.

Home. I built a new home. I thought I had.

He had not known how much he regretted leaving until now. He had not known how much he had missed his friends. Lux had not known how much he missed his real home.

"You might be proud to know that your oak tree is majestic and still perfect to sit under. There were a few saplings cropped up, but I moved them out to the courtyard this morning."

Laughter from that oak tree. Darkness from that oak tree. Death. Lux was growing tired of this memory, tired of being toyed with."Go away, vision!"

"I hope your work is going well, that you’re finding peace, and that you’re generally healthy and unbroken while you do it."

He knew the Dark Side ruled here. He knew it was searching for his weaknesses.

"Coruscant is coming along. The students are all situated. How is Corellia? I know that you must know from the council, but you are each welcome."

Welcome. He did not feel welcome. He had destroyed his welcome by refusing to respond to these letters. He didn't even know why he never responded. He always told himself he was too busy. He told himself that, when he got around to it, he would visit. That they would understand.

"This isn't real!"

"It’s alright if you don’t though. We matter here, but I certainly understand that it’s different. I think Ashlin misses Bakura as badly as I miss Naboo, and I don’t blame her. But we are each well."

Lux did not so much sit down as collapse, heavily, into the mist. Something nearby screeched as it skittered away. The voice was in his ear. It was in his mind. It surrounded him with guilt, made him unable to move.

"Ashlin is growing beautifully. Keto is well, as am I, and… Oh goodness, when did I write last? Pax, Nomi, and Zhi are chaotic, healthy, and happy. I keep praying that they’ll all manage a better childhood than what some of us had.

Lux forced memories of his own childhood away, wiping a tear away from his stubborn eyes.

"But either way, we’re all where we need to be, and they’re doing fine. I hope that you are too, Lux.

The truth was that Lux had not been fine since before he left the Bakuran Jedi. The stress of helping handle such a large Order of Jedi had been too much for him. The fear of failing so many had driven him away in fear.

Fear.

Fear leads to Anger - The mantra came back to him. Frustrated him. Angered him. "Shut up!"

"I’ll confess that I tried looking you up on the holonets just before this… I couldn’t find much, but it looks like the enclave is doing well."

Lux growled. A low sound from deep in his throat. He had not maintained much of a presence on the holonet since leaving. He had not really wanted to be found. He felt that, should he be found, he would have to confront what he felt was essentially a betrayal of his friends.

More fear.

"Congratulations on the new students. I'm a little jealous of the green robes. Anyway. You are cared about, dear friend. Don't let yourself feel like a stranger."

He looked down at his green, Corellian, robes. He looked back up at the black tree as the feeling of failure overwhelmed him. He stood slowly, as though carrying a great weight.

"Go away vision." he said, this time without conviction. He began a slow trod forward, despairing, knowing the Dark Side had bested him and wary of any other visions that might appear before him to further twist his mind.

[Kaytren Li]

Consciousness brushed past her. She caught it this time, ugly as it was. The shaking Healer ground her forehead against her palms, bracing the backs of her hands against some long-dead tree root. She willed the tension out of her jaw muscles, but breathed slowly and kept her lips pressed together in a thin line to spite her body's latest attempt at retching. She swallowed, ignoring the rawness in her throat... Calm, Kaytren.

She breathed in circular pattern until she'd slowed the worst of her trembling. How long had it been? Her attention flicked to the scabbed-over abrasions on her feet... Five hours maybe? She pushed herself to a sitting position and grasped through the confusion in her mind, trying to remember.

“Boots off, Nomi.” She spoke the mild-mannered reminder to her twelve year old daughter with an amused smile, not even glancing up from the salad vegetables she’d been cutting. Cooking had never been particularly high in Kaytren’s skill set; but salad, she could prepare with the best of them. The Healer chuckled in quiet amusement at it all; at herself, at the mildly heated back and forth discussion her elder son and her husband were having, at her younger son's matter-of-fact commentary, her daughter's exaggerated sigh while she kicked her boots off onto the doormat—

The fanged lizards were dead, still splayed a few feet from her. The smell of rotten leaves and something acrid dominated her senses. A thick scent clung in her nose like burnt vinegar. Psychic and visual Darkness. An oozing 'black' sensation pressed itself into every edge of her senses in the Force; an invasive tar against the quiet outer walls of her mind. She was Jedi—the whispering Dark impressions that gnawed like tricks and telepathy against her shields, she could keep away. Preventing her own mind from synapsing her current sense of reality into whatever memories gave her half a chance at comprehending any of this... was something else completely. The only way she saw past that was through it.

An agonizingly perfect memory of that awful mask resurfaced in her mind—Oil and nightmares seeping into her skin. The sick thing was locked to her face, tight as a hand clamped over her mouth and her nose. She gagged on vomit from fear and the migraine. It smudged her ability to think about anything clearly aside from a sick laugh and the blood-cold chaos she hadn't felt since the days in that other twisted forest... or that hopeless fight on Kashyyyk, or...

—Her grip on the bowl faltered. Kaytren knew the pottery shattered, but she couldn’t hear the crash over the low-pitch hum rattling every nerve in her body. Her family reacted. Concentrated fear jolted against her senses from all directions, feeling like a desperate shot of ice piped into her veins. She staggered at the sickening intensity of it. Her gaze shot towards her husband's even as her mind raced to take count of their children. Zhi stood in alarm. Nomi was crouched on the doormat. Where was Pax? He’d just said something about—

The dark-haired woman drew her legs up against her torso and pressed her forehead against her knees. Her lightsaber hilt was fixed back to her belt... She'd managed that much.

(What is this?)

A tingling sensation pricked at her. Kaytren's eyes opened in time to dimly perceive something with an excessive number of tiny stingers skittering across one of her bare feet, now turning to climb up her ankle into her clothes. Insects didn’t overly bother her, but this one was... wrong? She flicked it past the dead reptiles with a tight push of telekinesis, then paid for her reaction with a new spike of nausea.

(Why? Ashla. What is this?)

Migraine. Memories. What had become of her? She needed to move. The shaking woman breathed out. She swept a hand through her hair, pulling a few strands loose from her braid and tucking them behind her ear out of old habit.

“Alright... You have my attention.” Kaytren uttered the words so faintly that she gave barely any voice to them, but she spoke them just the same. “Ashla... what do you need?”

[Lux Cautin]

Lux walked. He eyed the plants around him, but he didn't see them. He slapped at an insect that buzzed too close, missed and hit the back of his neck. But he didn't feel it.

Anger leads to hate.

And Lux felt hate. He hated these visions. He hated how they spoke to him. How they brought back memories he wanted desperately to leave in the past. Lux had retreated to Corellia to get away, to hide. He was being forced to face that now. When he looked at his past, he wasn't sure he liked what he saw. A coward who couldn't face his responsibilities.

"Shut. Up. SHUT UP!"

He made a fist and lashed out violently, striking a tree. His hand sunk into the sticky bark, its' rot leaking slime onto his knuckles. He pulled his fist back, clarity hitting him like a brick wall, and he thought he might be sick.

As he tried to catch his breath, the smell of the forest became overwhelming. The acrid stink of rotting foliage and death was thick in the air. Lux forced himself to remember his time as a "hermit", or at least he fancied himself a hermit, living near the grounds of the Jedi Temple on Bakura. He'd used Plant Surge to carve himself a home out of a large tree that he had found deep in the forest. That forest was a place of peace and healing for Lux, and it smelled much better. That smell was what he focused on now, the memory of it calming him. This forest was not the "healing" kind of forest and he had dropped his guard. Again.

Lux forced himself to focus. Something was different here. An awareness of an immense looming shape in the darkness, lurking at the edge of his vision, drew his attention away from his introspection.

The Jedi Temple, a dark and overgrown version of it, jutted out of the forest in front of him. The doors and windows were long since gone and, where they had been, was now engulfed in shadow while vines and brambled overgrowth had claimed the walls. Lux stared at it, knowing that he should feel some sense of shock at it's presence.

But he didn't. Because, obviously the temple would be here. Why wouldn't it be? Lux peered through the open doorway, listening intently for more of the lizard-like predators that called this planet home. He took a step forward and he heard a heavy exhale. He stopped. A faint voice from the darkness. “Alright... You have my attention.”

Lux narrowed his eyes at the darkness. He thought he might have known that voice once. He reached down to his belt and grabbed the hilt of his light saber. He didn't have a flashlight and, frankly, anything that would decide to live in a haunted copy of a Temple might deserve to meet the light saber first anyway. The light saber snapped to life as he passed the threshold where the door used to be, filling the entry way with an orange glow. He held the light saber over his head, away from his eyes to help them adjust to the darkness as best as he could.

"Ashla... What do you need?”

"I need you to stop taunting me. Butcha won't! Because this forest is such an asshole." Lux said aloud to himself as he walked into the obvious Dark-Side-Vision-trap to confront yet another self destructive memory.

One thing he knew: he would either come out of this inner-demon free, or he wouldn't.

[Kaytren Li]

Blackness played tricks against her mind, but she continued listening anyway.

“…’m thirsty, Master…”
“Ow.. that doesn’t…”
“Please stop! I’m sorry, I’msorry, I’msor…”

The croaks shattered her heart, even if she recognized them as figments and fragments from her mind more than anything else. Was there anything real here? Besides poison bugs, lizards, spitting mice… The plants fighting to kill her… And the Darkness so thick and appalling that it was all just… Kaytren choked a laugh through the waves of overload and blinked back the latest tears that sprang into her eyes. Peace. Migraine and hallucinations aside, she still needed to move.

“…hurts…”
“Don’t bother with...”
“It's too late for her.”

The Healer gathered herself once more and pushed herself up. The brambling vines grabbed for her bare feet again, trying to cut new layers across the scars from so many little Sith knives —No you don’t. — She slapped them away with a push of telekinesis from a shaking hand, engaging in a brief contest of wills until the spines gave up and fell away from her ankles.

“STOPITSTOPIT!”
“So thirsty…”

The shaking woman found her footing and walked down the hallway that must have come from her mind’s eye, past the tiny coat closet with her mother’s blood on the floor, past the grief in that hangar on the smuggler’s moon, past the door with the nightmares. What was this space?

She stepped clumsily through another doorway to find herself in an infirmary… Her infirmary? Bakura. It was nearly Bakura, but that wretched bacta contraption in the corner made her wince... and her cherished bay of beds had become a morgue. Kaytren peered through the dimness at the rotted blue sheets. She breathed slowly in through her nose; it was so much better for the body that way, despite the smell of it here… She swallowed and walked toward the first bed, willing her headache and the tight clench in her stomach to stay under control. What was this?

"Shut. Up. SHUT UP!"

The nearest bed was Adrian’s body…. The sixteen year old she’d struggled for more than a decade to get through to, but her history with him was too broken. She’d never managed to undo the harm from his first years. Then Kor'olath.

Snap-Hiss.

Then the students and the friends... Karas... Arphax. Zacharia. Adam. Arina. Linus. Sev.. The list went on and on.

“…please…”

Kaytren turned away from the room, willing herself to keep walking. Her left hand rubbed slowly at her right, as if she could rub the ache away from her bones. But even outside of nightmares (Was this a nightmare? It felt... real?), removing pains and wounds from her own person had never been her gift. She had other gifts, though. She picked a direction. The courtyard.. The gate... There should one thorough the courtyard. She supposed she could find it, and then... She'd made it barely into the hallway when she heard yet another grim mumbling,

"I need you to stop taunting me. Butcha won't! Because this forest is such an..."

Kaytren swallowed, and tried not to laugh at the grim absurdity. She carefully avoided pressing an aching hand to her temple. She called the Force to her fingertips. The orange light was playing with her vision. When had the orange started? She came face to face with the man, with the scowl on his face and stained knuckles as if he'd punched something vile.... But she knew that face. Even through the staggering haze of migraine memories that kept flaring up like a hellish mask. Was he real? He had a lightsaber. Were those robes? Was he real? The quiet sense of firelight in her gaze was exhausted, but she was calm enough and... here. Was he here?

She swallowed and found her voice. “Lux?”

[Lux Cautin]

The hallway's dark silence stretched out in front of him like a dismal eternity, the orange glow of his weapon providing the only light to guide his path. So far, it had attracted more insects to it than he found preferable. Fortunately, they kept flying into the saber and dying so at least they wouldn't be biting him. Lux held the saber high and looked out into the darkness before him, willing his sight to pierce the darkness. Despite his mood, he was curious about this place. What created it? What caused the visions that it brought forth? Why was everything so aggressively hostile? How did it know about Bakura? Everything was dead here, even the foundation of the building was crumbling. A metaphor for his psyche, maybe. He snorted. "Drama queen."

“Lux?”

He froze. A pale shape floated out of the darkness into his inadequate pool of light. It appeared to him a ghostly figure, hand on head, Jedi robes. No shoes. No shoes? A vision with no shoes? Is this place that clever? He stared at the vision. The familiar face with the unfamiliar expression of pain. He knew this face. Had known it for decades. This face was both a reminder of his failures and was also a face that inspired hope. In this face he saw a friendship that had experienced tragedy, death and darkness. But in that friendship had been happiness, hope and light. In that face he saw the possibility of redemption.

Kaytren. This place had brought him Kaytren.

Lux swallowed, staring at someone who his mind told him could not be here. He stared into her eyes and, for the first time since he arrived on this planet, felt a seedling of hope. As he felt his eyes begin to water he reached out to steady himself against the crumbling wall with his free hand.

"You're not going to sprout fangs or spit venom at me are you? Because I don't think I could handle that right now."

[Kaytren Li]

She stared at the man’s face in the orange-cast light. Lux Cautin. She hadn’t even been twenty when they met. They were both barely knighted. He’d been one of first and closest friendships in her grown life. It was good, but they’d both bought and paid dearly for it in so many different ways. Now… here? He was sweaty, tired, muddy, frustrated. He'd done something to the back of his hand, but he was in one piece. And he was in the Corellian robes still. He looked healthy and fit enough; only as if his day had been… about the same as her day had been. How long had it been since she’d seen him? Ten years? More than that. Her youngest children were twelve now. She knew he’d never met them.

“Lux. I... Force's sake.. It's you.”

A small swarm of the gnats buzzed past his face and killed themselves in his lightsaber beam with a series of tiny sizzles. The pale woman laughed helplessly at the absurdity, and then she didn’t succeed very well when she tried to choke back a nauseous, laughing, sob. Or another one after that.

“I won’t bite... or... sting or... spit anything.”

Kaytren crossed the few yards between them and caught his free hand tightly before she ran out of breath. The bones of her fingers and palm popped and creaked a little where they'd been fractured in so many places years ago, but those were as healed as they were ever going to be and she didn't seem to notice. Kaytren held tight onto his hand and sank to sit on the dirty floor in a shaking fit of tears and laughter. Scrunching her eyes closed, she rubbed her temple with her free hand and then pressed her thumb and index finger into the bridge of her nose until she’d weathered through the storm and found her calm again. When she'd caught her breath, she scrubbed the back of her wrist across her eyes and stared at him.

“The ivy is mean, too... More than mine. Are you okay?”

[Lux Cautin]

Lux's breath caught in his throat as his own tears began to find their way down his cheeks. He was surprised to find himself smiling, despite the tears, and then he found himself laughing with her. Kaytren grabbed his free hand and he dropped his lightsaber so he could take her hand in both of his, it deactivated with a hiss and clattered to the ground as the orange light disappeared. As she sank to the floor, he slid down the wall to sit beside her. He took a moment to mentally gather himself, forcing a few shaky breaths and clamping down on emotions that were beginning to spin out of control. Peace. He looked at her face in the now-darkness, the dirt that had been smeared across her face from the blend of tears and... whatever else had been on her hands causing shadows to form interesting patterns. He squeezed her hand and hoped it was reassuring.

I've avoided Ivy for... a while. I'm more of an herb guy now. Easy to control, tasty, tend to smell good, typically not poisonous or thorny.

He squeezed her hand, pushing memories away and focusing on the now.

I'm probably as okay as you are. Nothing is friendly here, even the trees are rotten to the core. Every living thing seems to be designed to eat something else or poison it. It's like the worlds most rotten, evil rain forest minus the rain. How are you holding up?

Something chirped in the distance, but it sounded small. Nevertheless he looked over at his discarded lightsaber hilt and, releasing her hand with one of his, grabbed it and reactivated the orange blade. The snap-hiss and hum was followed by skittering noises as small creatures ran from the glow. He looked her over, eyes coming to rest on her bare feet and their numerous bites with concern.

That cannot be comfortable here. How about we make you some wraps so you don't have to walk around barefoot anymore?

[Kaytren Li]

“Herbs, huh…” Kaytren realized that her voice sounded a little thinner than the mild mannered and amused dry ’Jedi’ teasing she’d been reaching for; but it was a start. She’d find her way through it until her heart was in it.

“They sound safer for you anyway.”

Was that too much? A decades-old memory of the stiffening shaking in his limbs flickered through her mind. Kaytren closed her eyes and clasped Lux's hand back apologetically. She was sorry. She would never stop feeling sorry. She didn't blame him about the ivy, or much of anything else. The wall behind her didn’t appear to be carnivorous or sticky, so she leaned the back of her head against it and breathed slowly for a minute while she took in his descriptions of the terrain outside… It didn’t sound any better out there, unfortunately.

“I’ll manage. The ’landing?’ here hit me more than… anything?.. in recent life. I have a migraine like I just woke up from the worst nightmare I’ve had in ten years, with.. Black... evil.. blackness.. like that.. other place.. Or... the blasted mask. It’s suffocating. I want to vomit again when I push to sense anything. But I can feel some of that is just memory… That's workable; I can deal with those. I don’t know what we’re doing here.. But... Not that it was your idea to come too, but thank you.”

Opening her eyes when his lightsaber blade snapped on, she swallowed and examined his hand one more time. She brushed her thumb against the damaged knuckles. He'd punched something. It was fairly superficial and not much infection had set in yet, but it was a small wrong that she could instinctively put back into balance without needing to think. She took a breath. In the space of a few heartbeats, the swelling broken veins healed upwards from the deeper tissues against the bruised bone and cartilage, until there were only a fading few marks on his skin—and then nothing. Kaytren glanced over her work with a faint satisfaction and let go of Lux's hand. Light and the Ashla were here, too. Awful blackness or not, it was going to be alright.

Her gaze flicked to the scrapes and bites over the lattice of faded old marks on her muddy feet. “I’d say that I’m alright without... but this ground obviously doesn’t like me. You look like you were dressed better. I have a little knife if we need it.”

[Lux Cautin]

The humming orange glow showed them their immediate surroundings. Helpful for their immediate area, but the contrast of light-to-dark caused the darkness surrounding them to be even darker and more oppressive.

His voice was distant, thoughts focused on something else. He may not have even picked up on the difference in her voice. Safer. Yeah.

As she brushed her thumb over his knuckles, the light stinging was replaced by a gentle itch. Then, the itching went away. He looked down at his hand as she let it go, examining it, squeezing it into a fist and then relaxing it. He smiled at her in thanks, his day just a little bit better now, despite what this place was trying to do to them. Lux looked at Kaytren with concern.

Do you need a place to rest before we move on? This place might not be the most comfortable, but at least it seems somewhat defensible compared to out there. I'm still not convinced this isn't just a vision and we're actually surrounded by giant, scaly, weirdly hairy (for a lizard), wolf-lizards dripping venom from way too many teeth.

Lux removed his outer robe with one hand, switching lightsaber from left hand to right so he could shrug the garment off of his other shoulder.

I was well into my day when this happened. He frowned, at least his Corellian Jedi weren't reliant on him. They'd be concerned but operating mostly normally. He handed the robe to Kaytren.Take what you need from it. We can keep the rest for a blanket or bandages or something. He paused a beat, glancing at his recently healed hand. Hopefully we won't be needing bandages.

Lux looked at Kaytren, smiled, and hoped it looked reassuring. If we're here. Others must be here too.

[Kaytren Li]

Kaytren took the robe when the man shrugged it off.

“My instinct is to just reassure you that I’m fine, but... I might take that few minutes if you’re alright...”

First things first, though. The Healer glanced down at the armful of Corellian green fabric that she used to joke about being envious of. It was functional; not too heavy, but she recognized it as useful for a number of temperatures and conditions. Whoever the Jedi equipment personnel responsible for the choice of material was, Kaytren mentally wrote out a brief thank-you note regarding them to the Force while she cut two long strips from the full width of bottom hem of the robe and folded each over into a sort of simple double-thick length of fabric that was about the width of her palm. When she'd dealt with the scatter of bites and scratches on her feet as much as her talents and present situation allowed for, she wrapped each foot and ankle with deftness that came second nature by now. They weren't quite the gear she'd have chosen, but it would do fine.

She cut four more useful strips of cloth for good measure, shorter but still long enough for various wounds, a tourniquet, or whatever non-medical applications might be needed in the coming hours. Kaytren handed the remaining robe back to Lux along with two bandage strips whatever he would with. She rolled each of the other two into one of her pockets.

Then she took a breath. She glanced at Lux to make sure that he was, in fact, still reasonably alright, and spent a little while taking care of herself. She didn't sleep exactly, but there was something healing about feeling safe enough to close her eyes and just... stop... keeping up her guard for... just a few minutes. A half an hour maybe. Kaytren calmed her breathing and consciously untensed her mind for the first time since arriving here. The migraine was a world worse for a moment or two, but then better. She acknowledged that the dull headache likely wasn't going anywhere for now, but that was nothing she couldn’t work with. Peace and the Force were still here. Apparently she and Lux had a purpose here, too. But for this moment in time, the Healer curled up in a ball and trusted that her oldest friend would watch over things for just a little while.

“That’s much better... Thank you.” She told him after not that much time. “We can go find the others now.”

Or find whatever the next task was. Either way, she was steadier on her feet and kept better pace with Lux when he was ready. Direction didn't feel very meaningful here, but going back the same way he’d come didn’t sound beneficial so she suggested the south gate. Theoretically it might lead to more of a valley route... Maybe.

[Erril Winterhold]

Certain things were just better when enjoyed while hot and dirty. Cold water, hot food, cool breeze, cold beer; Erril grinned to himself as the water from the showerhead washed over him – there was certainly a consistent theme among those things. But above them all, the best thing to enjoy when hot and dirty – or perhaps covered in sewer grime and alien gore – was a hot shower. The Jedi had certainly had a chance to dump a bucket over his head a few times in the last couple of weeks, and whether it was the Force manifesting grace or just a sense of humor, he’d certainly been rained on a few times as well. The rains on Metellos weren’t particularly cleansing, though, and the water in the buckets wasn’t much better. The water from the vast reserve tanks in the Weatherstone’s Eye didn’t really smell like anything, but smelling of nothing was a pleasant change after smelling like… fetid bug juice, for so long.

Steam was still rolling off Erril’s skin when he pulled on his light grey tunic and trousers, wandered into the modest living quarter that he claimed when traveling with Jedi Defense Force – he’d long since convinced the flagship’s commander that the captain’s quarters were no place for a drifting visitor like himself – and glanced around to take stock of his surroundings again. There were undoubtedly ales of some variety in the coldie, though for a single moment he was tempted to make his way to the officers’ club and find something stronger. The idea of going out around people revolted him, and suddenly he didn’t care about the contents of the coldie. He wanted a hot cup of tea, and a good book, and to be left alone for awhile.

With those motives in mind, it quite naturally occurred that within a matter of minutes, Erril was settling onto the edge of the small couch available to him with a hot cup of orange blossom tea in one hand, and in the other a much-loved but carefully maintained copy of a black hardback volume with a silver emblem embossed on its front cover. He blew gently on the beverage in the naval standard issue white porcelain cup, but didn’t take his eyes off the cover of the book. Already he was savoring the words he knew so well, enclosed in the book he’d rescued so, so very long ago. It was a precious treasure, and he took it with him anywhere he could afford the risk. The slim marker was currently on page 124, and the fingers of his right hand gently prized it open at that place where he picked up at the paragraph he’d left on two weeks ago. The tea was tart, and rich, and deliciously emboldening as he sipped it, and the words of the page carried him off.

Of course the competitive nature of the relationship shared by she and her master was often frowned on by their contemporary master-padawan dyads. In the closing days of the Old Republic Order, the relationships between most padawans and their masters had grown, by rite of tradition, to be a generally very proper and upstanding arrangement. The Clone Wars taxed those traditions even among the most noble and proper of Jedi, as war often does, but the blatant disregard with which Ahs–

Erril’s steel-colored eyes jumped away from the page and off into the nebulous distance, instantly alert. For a single moment, he’d perceived a sense of unbridled terror.

The room was quiet, and so was the Force, but even so Erril’s ears roved through the decks of the ship searching for anything untoward. A minute… two minutes… nothing.

Sighing quietly, Erril took a cursory sip of his tea and relaxed his posture. Those creatures on Metellos had sports some nasty psychic properties, and he’d had to grapple with more than a few of them at full force. It was possible he’d just felt some sort of aftershock – it was also possible one had gotten aboard the ship, but he’d heard nothing, and the creatures were more easily tracked by their sound than anything else. He shook head and glanced back toward his book.

Another surge crashed against his mind even as his eyes registered the words on the page – fear, terror, inescapable exhaustion, primal desperation like an animal cornered and bleeding. The sensation had no source, it was coming down to his senses seemingly from everywhere at once. The sensation was so strong – so primal in its essence – that Erril could almost smell his own blood for a moment. He could certainly hear his heart pounding in his ears.

The Jedi stood up, shifting his right foot outward in the mechanical motion of turning to go and approach his comm terminal, when everything went black.

A single heartbeat.

Blinding brilliance – a hundred thousand stars across a hundred thousand years burning through the cosmos of his inner eye in a single moment.
And then that moment faded… The brilliance faded, almost as if it had been forcefully quenched by something else. Something that couldn’t possibly have been powerful enough to do so, but had done so nonetheless.

A single heartbeat.

Darkness slowly resolved into a new scene before Erril’s wide-open eyes. A forest? No, a swamp, with unimpressive sunlight attempting to filter in through the canopy of tree bows overhead. That was all the hyper-vigilant Jedi was able to perceive of his surroundings before he perceived that his bare feet were not ideally planted on the surface beneath them, and then he was falling straight back, toward whatever fate lay below him.

SPLASH!

It was muck. The fate that lay below Erril in his clean grey cabin linens was lukewarm swamp water, and thick muck. His cringing face smoothed slightly under the water, and his heart slowed as he perceived no immediate threat. In fact, he perceived nothing unusual in the world around him or in the Force – which was very unusual given the circumstances!

Inwardly, the Jedi wanted to take a deep breath and sigh in frustration and this bizarrely powerful and yet unsettlingly benign phenomenon that had befallen him. All around him the swamp teamed with life, and he had a sense that the Darkness had encroached on the area, but there was nothing that should have drawn him here. Unless something had shunted him here to get him away from something else? Or maybe he was just disoriented; after all, he was laying on his back in two feet of swamp water with his hands instinctively protruding upward to protect a book and a cup of tea.

Erril sat up, and pleaded a small favor of the Force to brush the water and grime from his face. When he opened his eyes again, the world immediately struck him with grandiose relief and supreme disappointment in the same heartbeat. His book was safe – thank the Force his book was safe – but the cup of tea which he’d reflexively held aloft from the swamp water had broken against something on the way down, and he appeared to be holding only a large shard connected to the small handle in his fingers. He glanced down and as though by design of some cruel joke, immediately spotted the carefully composed teabag floating in the brine near his chest. The grimace upon Erril’s face at the sight was true and heartfelt.

“Well enjoy the tea,” he spat at the swamp in general, and dropped the tea cup in the water before standing up.

Erril shook himself then, and commanded the rest of the mud and water to vacate his person from about the knees up. It was a shabby excuse for the hot shower he’d enjoyed only minutes ago, but it was better than going back to smelling like fetid bug juice again. Once clean, he tucked the treasured volume tight against his chest and crossed his arms over it as he took in the environment again from arguably more stable footing.

“What have you gotten yourself into now young man,” whispered the Jedi. As far as he could tell, he had somehow been instantaneously transported from his quarters on the Weatherstone’s Eye into Swamp X on Planet Unknown with nothing to his name but a pair of decent pajamas and some good reading material. The tea cup no longer counted to his list of assets, and he glared at the unworthy tree root in front of his face that was responsible for the loss.

Erril was in trouble, and he didn’t know why.

[Erril Winterhold]

Swamp X had turned out to be a rather trepidatious place for barefooted individuals. Erril sat on a twisted tree bough some 8 feet over the boggy floor of the swamp – sitting in fact right where he’d landed when for the third time in the last two hours, something sharp in the ankle-deep bogwater had stabbed his foot and prompted an instinctive upward leap to safety. He sat in frustrated silence, cleansing the wound as meticulously as possible and then prompting the flesh to heal itself more quickly. He was done with the ground for now. The trees in this region appeared coated with some resinous ichor toward their bases – enough so that they felt soft and rotten to the touch, though that was somehow not the case – but at this height they appeared only dry and malnourished. Erril reasoned that traveling through the tree branches would probably be less hazardous for his feet in the long run.

Not for the first time, Erril lamented not having been wearing at least a pair of deck slippers when this strange relocation had occurred, but there was nothing for it. Standing back up, the snowy-haired Jedi glanced back along his arbitrary path, and then checked for another tree along the path he’d chosen based on a quick peek above the tree canopy earlier that day, and set off again. He’d seen mountains in the distance earlier when he’d climbed up into the treetops, and in situations like this, the only thing better than height was more height. He’d climb the mountains and see what he could see from there, and then make his next choice from there.

Moving through the tree-branches necessitated a swifter pace – one didn’t simply walk from one bough to another – but fortunately for Erril, the trees in the area had a growth structure similar to banyans, and he could move at a sensible jogging pace for several steps at a time between leaps and lunges. He’d seen several small creatures so far along the way as well, but they had mostly scattered at his approach. The creatures didn’t concern him just then, but he had a nagging sense that his luck wouldn’t hold forever. The further he traveled – the closer he got to the mountains up ahead – the darker the world around him became. By his best estimate, the region was in its early afternoon spin, but the physical light wasn’t the issue. The forest itself – the life all around him – was growing more and more noticeably tainted by the Darkness. He was moving toward something, and whatever it was had taken a strong hold over the area.

At a couple of points, when Erril paused to check his bearings or catch his breath, he found that the ichorous quality of the trees was rising higher and higher up their various trunks and boughs. This concerned him, because it seemed to correspond to the growing sense of darkness he felt, but it didn’t loom large in his mind until he landed on a branch and barely lost any downward momentum as it broke off at the trunk in mulchy splinters. This wasn’t his first fall of the day, and this time he could see where he was falling, but when he came trampling to a stop on the ground, he discovered that things had gotten a lot more grim around him than he’d realized.

With his bare feet on the damp earth, Erril could feel to a much greater extent the degree to which the Darkness had spread its insidious influence. Having cultivated his talent for psychometry, rather than coming by it naturally, Erril sometimes forgot how much its extra-sensory effects could be magnified by physical touch; he closed his eyes and squirmed his toes down into the waterlogged soil for a moment, then slowly moved over to place a hand on one of the ichor-scabbed trees as he smelled the subtler notes in the air. The surface of the bark was slick, and beneath that very fibrous, as the already spindly quality of it was exacerbated by the corrupting pseudo-rot that had taken hold – Erril mused idly that the bark would probably make very good cordage in its natural state.

A gruesome impulse took hold suddenly as Erril’s hand rested on the tree trunk. The Jedi shifted his arm and shoulder, straightening his fingers and palm into a rigid knife shape, and then slowly pressed his whole hand into side of the tree. Resistance slowly grew stronger as his hand pushed deeper and deeper into the trunk, until at least, just as his wrist sank into the almost spongy wood, he could go no further. Thusly connected to the many growth rings of the tree, Erril turned his inner eye to the history of it. His skin prickled as the abhorrent darkness, laid bare over the course of time, suddenly revealed itself to him in full. This was no mere circumstantial spreading of darkness; no amalgamation of natural misfortunes than had caused the Darkness to become heavier here. Something was festering here, something that caused the Darkness to coalesce readily, and spread hungrily, and it had been doing so for hundreds – no, thousands – of years already.

As Erril’s psychometric awareness reached further into the tree, down through its roots, and up into other trees (were the they actually other trees? The closer he looked, the more Erril suspected he’s apparated into some manner of banyan grove), the more he came to understand how profoundly the Darkness had saturated the land around him. Seeing the memory the trees, Erril became aware of how much even the soil had been tainted. And the creatures in the swamp had grown more misshapen as well… hungrier, angrier, more thrilled by the hunt – the accumulation of impressions was so strong it made Erril’s mouth water despite the acrid smell of the swamp. A wet scraping and peeling sound summoned the Jedi marginally closer to his sense of self, and then closer still as his situational awareness kicked in. Not just lingering impressions of hunger-crazed thrill; actively forming. With a start, Erril jerked his hand out of the tree trunk and looked up, in the direction of peeling tree-bark fibers. A split second later he dove backward, and the space he’d occupied was sundered by greedy claws and hungry fangs.

Erril leaned into a summersault so he could watch his landing and still keep an eye on the tree – or rather what had come racing down the tree at him. He hit the ground some thirty paces away an regarded his latest obstacle in frustration. At the base of the tree, a huge reptilian creature, apparently composed entirely of rippling muscle and miscellaneous pointy bits, was collecting itself from a near miss, and preparing to charge at him again.

The snowy-haired Jedi growled in frustration. ”And here I thought I was done hunting monsters for the week.”

[Erril Winterhold]

There were few things more primally intimidating that facing down an angry beast. There was however a spot on that list reserved for facing down the same beast without a weapon. For just a second – one single second – when Erril brushed his hands across his thighs and found nothing, he felt that primal fear. It passed before the beast could even get riled up into enough rage to make another move, but it was enough to make his nostrils flare, and drive home just how unprepared he was right then. By now they probably hadn’t even noticed his absence on the Weatherstone’s Eye, which meant his lightsabers were probably sitting quietly on the coffee table where he’d left them, right next to the saucer on which he’d carried his tea to the couch.

Thoughts of the tea, which had ultimately been drunk by the swamp rather than himself, filled Erril with enough righteous indignation that he made the next move before the fanged lizard could. Three steps carried him nearly twenty paces before his foe moved to meet him, but he had no intention of clashing head on with that much reptile – not in his cabin linens anyway. As they neared each other, Erril executed his signature wide-step dodge; his left foot drove him almost ninety degrees sideways instead of forward, and he pivoted in the air so that he faced the direction that had been left of him only a heartbeat ago. The Jedi’s right foot made contact with the ground and completely reversed his momentum, so that in the very moment the snarling lizard entered the space which had been his only a moment ago, he was bearing down on its exposed left side. Erril wrapped a thick envelop of telekinetic energy around his fist as he punched the beast in the ribs, causing its angry snarling to squelch into a surprised hiss as it blasted off its feet at an angle somewhere between where it was going, and where Erril was facing.

The Jedi grinned, allowing the kinetic energy to disperse from around his hand. It was a style of Projected Fighting he’d picked up from a Nelvaanian he’d known some years ago. It wasn’t really his style, but it worked well in a pinch. Glancing around for something to wield, Erril spotted the bough that had given way under his weight a few moments ago. Despite the seeping corruption that had caused it to disintegrate so easily at the trunk, the rest of the bow was still lively enough – yet another fact in favor of his banyan grove theory. He summoned the bough to his hands and broke the end off, leaving himself with about six feet of log that he could fit his fingers just more than halfway around. It was a non-issue; wielding its bulk with telekinetic strength, Erril spun the wooden log around once as he planted his feet, and then brought it around in a smooth arc that connected with the beast at it tried once more to make a meal of him. Its head wrenched to one side with the force of the impact, and it tumbled headlong past him as he danced out of the way. Two more steps after it, and Erril brought the log down like a fence post, crushing the reptilian skull beneath its weight.

Taking a deep breath, Erril left the log to topple to the ground next to the beast’s carcass. There was nothing else around for him to contend with anymore.

Returning to the tree that he’d dug his hand into, Erril placed a hand over the hole and sampled the darkness soaking into it again. It was in everything, and he’d sensed its profundity after only a moment of examination. Something had caused this darkness to fall over the swamp, something specific. And he doubted the corruption was reserved for the swamp either. There was no telling how far this Darkness might have spread, given how long it at been infecting the banyan grove. Glancing up, Erril chose a new bough in the tree canopy – higher up this time – and launched himself onward toward whatever lay ahead.

Whatever it was, it was being more and more heavily influenced by unnatural corruption, and he got the sense that he was drawing nearer to it as he neared the mountains.

[Erril Winterhold]

Whatever the reptilian creature was, they appeared to be a slightly more frequent occurrence closer to the mountains. Which wasn’t to say that they become a wholly common occurrence, merely than over the next hour, Erril saw two more of them fighting over the carcass of some other wretched looking creature, and narrowly avoided an encounter with a third. He had so many questions about this strange biome that begged for answers, but he didn’t have time to indulge in his curiosity habits right now. The further he traveled, the more he felt he was being pulled; the more he felt he was being guided. The Force was moving frantically all about him, and he couldn’t think of a time in his life when he’d felt it moving so frantically. He knew that it was life and connection, and that it had a will far beyond his own comprehension… but something felt especially animated about the way The Force rose and fell and wavered at the edge of his conscious in this place. It wasn’t just the Darkness which loomed ever larger as he traveled – in a west-northwesterly direction, best as he could tell – there was something else… something more that churned the soul of the world.

The tree-stride Erril employed had begun to form a degree of muscle memory, and his mind began to muse broader across the scheme of his circumstance, paying less and less attention to the nature of his surroundings apart from the small sounds of the forest, until a movement to his left caught his eye, and caused him to pause in the crook of a tree bough. That hadn’t been a creature that had moved; whatever it was, it had been white and blue.

Erril pressed of in that direction with his ears, but heard nothing – sensed nothing living in that direction. And yet, The Force shifted and shaped around something that he couldn’t perceive with his customary means.

“Hello?” He crouched on the bough and looked closer. A glimpse – someone was there; he’d seen a figure in blue and white pass between two trees further off. Glancing down, he found that the ground was not so boggy anymore. He dropped down to the dirt and jogged off after the figure he’d seen.

“Hello?”

Still uncertain of whom or what he might be dealing with, Erril didn’t race after the figure as it retreated, but he did follow. Given the two options available to him, following a visible figure with no discernable presence in The Force was just about as concrete of a plan as running through the treetops toward and arbitrary landmark. Still, he saw no footprints in the dirt, felt no distinct impressions, and he had already concluded that there was nothing to hear. Erril strode through the swampy forest for a couple of minutes before irritation got the better of him and caused him to pause in his path. Even if it did make more sense, there was nothing for him to go on – no mark of passage for him to discern or miniscule sound for him to pick out from the nature around him, and no individually unique movement in The Force whatsoever.

Resolved to continue on toward the mountains, Erril turned around, and immediately felt an internal jolt not unlike whereupon he’d discovered the fanged lizard bearing down on him. They were standing behind him – two of them. Two women stood silently on the forest floor with him, regarding with identical, emotionless faces. Their presence was so intangible, and yet so very unassumingly real, that no words found their way immediately to Erril’s lips. The women were mirror images of each other, with the same ash blonde hair, and white robes with mirrored versions of an asymmetrical design.

The three of them stared each other down for a quiet moment, and then finally Erril’s lips parted, needing to break the silence for some reason.

“…who are you?”

The mirrored women glanced at each other in perfect unison, and then back at him.

“Of course you don’t know who we are,” said the one on his left, in a fairly derisive tone.

Not mirror images, just identical. This made the asymmetrical images on their robes even more vexing, but not as much as the one’s tone.

“I’m sorry. Should I know you?”

“I guess not.” Said the one on the left again.

“I don’t think you’ve ever really tried to know any of us.” This time it was the one on the right.

“Why would you say that?” Why do I care?

The two of them shrugged in an identical gesture that frustrated his sensibilities with familiarity.

“Only because it’s true. The one who notices everything, but never really pays attention.”

Erril glared at the two women. Who were they, that they should appear out of nowhere and make such accusations? He wasn’t even sure why he cared what they thought about him, but he couldn’t shake it. He looked them up and down in frustration, wishing he knew even the first thing to say that might remove him from the spotlight, or cause them to reveal themselves. His eyes settled on their robes again, and that bizarre pattern that… it wasn’t mirrored. Was it two halves of…?

A sudden ruckus of screeching and flailing caused Erril’s gaze to dart behind him. He just barely saw two birds fly over his head, but when he turned to follow their path, he immediately forgot about them. The women were gone. His eyes caught the birds again as they exited the tree canopy, bewildered by the entire even that had just transpired. Those were the first birds he’d seen since arriving.

Breathing a deeply troubled sigh, Erril fiddled idly with the trinket bracelet on his left wrist, and then held it up in front of his face at about eye level. In his mind, he took the symbol on the bracelet and superimposed it over the memory of the identical women. Understanding brought no satisfaction to his mind, and he let his arm fall back to his side, trudging off back in the direction he’d been moving before his little detour.
Identical women in the middle of a Darkness-corrupted forest, of whom he had no memory whatsoever, accusing him with shockingly poignant words, and each of them wearing one half of the Clan Koht sigil on their person.

The forest was preying on him, and that thought made Erril vastly more uncomfortable than any number of tainted creatures that might have tried to do so. What was worse, he didn’t even understand what part of himself it was targeting, only that it had somehow worked. Erril didn’t bother climbing back into the tree canopy again. The ground was firmer here, and he could see his footing. Anyway, he needed time to try and understand why he’d been so unsettled by the strange encounter. The sudden sense of vulnerability didn’t sit well with him.

Perhaps, he thought, the Darkness might expose itself more clearly as he drew nearer to the heart of the corruption.

[Lux Cautin]

Lux accepted the bandages with a nod and tucked them into a pocket, then he deactivated the lightsaber, cloaking them in shadows once again. Lux took back the robe and tied it crosswise - from his shoulder to his opposite hip - wearing it as though it were a sash. After, he pretended not to notice Kaytren's glance of concern as he sat down to keep watch while she rested for a bit.

While Kaytren rested, he wondered at the nature of this place. It shouldn't be here and he wasn't sure it was real. Nothing here seemed to make sense, not unless it was some sort of dark side manifestation. But is that even a thing? People can manifest if they are strong enough so why not a place? But why this place? Why here? He idly swatted at a biting insect and wiped his hand on the wall behind him. He felt stone flake from the wall and crumble to the ground with a soft patter. The wall felt real enough. The ground beneath his feet was firm, the wall behind his back was crumbling and he might have to worry about it falling down but he didn't have to worry about it seeping some weird ooze on him from it's branches or fading from existence. He shook his head and decided that he would let someone smarter than him figure all of that out. Right now, he was more concerned about their continued survival. They had no food and they had no water. They had his robe,

When Kaytren was ready, Lux stood and offered her a helping hand to her feet. The shadows seemed to be growing smaller, it was possible that what passed for daytime was approaching out amongst the dark trees. Together, they walked through the slightly-less-dark passageway towards where he thought he remembered the south gate being. Any time they came to a door, Lux would stop and peer inside, exerting what one might consider an excess of caution.

"You know. I've been thinking about this "temple" for a bit and, honestly, I'm not sure it's real." He shook his head as though he weren't quite sure what he was trying to say. "It's real, okay?" Lux tapped a wall with the hilt of his lightsaber and flakes of stone crumbled to the ground. "Insofar as: we're inside of it, right? But what if this" He hit the wall again, slightly harder this time. "Isn't real and we're walking through a forested maze in the dark like idiots?" He shook his head again, this time in frustration. They approached another intersection of the hallway. Lux felt coiled tight, like a spring. He moved away from the wall to the center of the hallway and carefully peeked around the corner, looking both ways. He let out a breath and seemed to relax a bit before they continued down the left fork of the long hallway. "Or we're in a Sarlacc or something. People have to pass the years doing something. Why not hallucinate?"

As they approached another intersection and he paused before a door. "This ought to be the way out towards the south gate."

He hesitated. Lux felt something in the periphery, something he'd been to distracted to notice. Something distant. It didn't feel like the rest of this place, isolated and devoid of hope. It felt alive, though not wild - like the native animals. He wondered how long it had been there and if his near-despair had blinded him to it.

There is no emotion.

He wondered what it was. People, maybe? There was only one way they were going to find out. This door lead to a courtyard and, on the other side of that courtyard, the south gate.

There is peace.

He pushed the door open.

[Kaytren Li]

The evil was so thick in this place that it felt like walking through stickiness. The Healer hadn’t dared to completely stretch her senses out through it again lest that Force-awful migraine come back, but she had the sense that somehow there was at least a little less of it wherever they were heading. It felt like being underground and moving towards clearer air.

Hallucinating. Caught in a mental trap. Being digested in a sarlaac….

“What a horrible thought.” Kaytren commented with a frown, as if shaming the universe for whatever it had done to make those the most reasonable suggestions. Lux was only the messenger; it was the Force that she was in the mood to lecture. Still, she considered the idea while they cleared the last two hallways to what would normally be the southern courtyard. He had a point. Her experience had felt sharply personalized, whether the driving centers of energy here were actively reading her mind or not. But she couldn’t dismiss the certainty that this was something else.

“I don’t think so. I was with Keto and our three. We had a meal at home for the first time in two months, and it hit all of us. Nomi was grabbing for her gear. I was reeling too hard to do much, but I can see all their faces and responses…. There’s too much clarity for a hallucinogen. I can do all the math and sense checks. And no slight to… whatever’s causing all this… but we’re both past mind games that extreme.”

Kaytren shifted in a small shrug of her shoulders. She met Lux’s eyes and nodded when they came to the door. Even though she had recovered herself enough, and they’d both found whatever steadiness they seemed to need most, the weight in her heart had grown while she steeled herself for the responsibility of whatever was outside.

Breathe.

Lux opened the door. Her eyes adjusted to the mottled brightness and dim of hard light slanting through a canopy of broken trees down to barren rock-strewn ground with irregular piles of fallen branches and exposed tangles of dried-out roots.

A brief whoosh of the dank air sucked out from the doorway behind them as the air pressures regulated. It was much less damp out here. Kaytren scanned the area in a moment of calm caution, but found nothing. She stepped out onto the firm forest ground with Lux.

The stone ’temple’ walls stretched from the doorway to further on their right and left than she cared to walk. The drier forest terrain in front of them seemed to move only downhill; not steeply but noticeably. She glanced at Lux in case he had any objections, but what would there have been to object to? So down into the shaded trees it was. The terrain was disconcertingly calm for a few minutes, aside for a single mouse-sized animal that ran away.

Then there was death.

“Oh, Ashla.”

Kaytren had been cautious of yet more insects, and anything else here, but there seemed something tangibly less…. sickly… about the large gathering of not-quite palm sized pale gray moths that fluttered about like wispy guardians keeping vigil. All but two of the soft flying insects dispersed with an instinctive wave of her hand, as she stepped to the fallen pair who had been less fortunate in this place than she or Lux had.

The two bodies lay crumpled near each other among the oversize roots at the base of one of the largest trees. Neither was fully dressed for it, but there was no need to wonder if the fallen pair were both Jedi. The younger was a Pantoran adolescent in simple brown with a student’s braid behind her ear; the elder was a human male who looked to be two decades older, dressed in just a base layer shirt and trousers similar to Lux’s shades of green. Like Kaytren, the man had no shoes. There looked to be no weapons or other possessions between either of them.

There were multiple fang marks on them both, but very few disfiguring injuries, and no particular signs that either had been consumed for food.

“We can... bury them. A fire seems unwise... But this was Caileh,” Kaytren told Lux as she crouched beside the padawan, gently closing the girl’s eyes with a brush of the Force. The closer of the two moths fluttered close by with attentiveness, like a smaller wild cousin of the glowing New Holstice moths at the rebuilt memorial on Bakura.

Kaytren looked at the small creature for a moment and repeated the girl’s name. “Caileh Saldis.”

Caileh..Saldis..Caileh.. The soft wings rustled back.

It gently fluttered a yard or two away, but was clearly waiting for its companion, who had yet to abandon the side of the fallen man.