Clearly This Was A Mistake

[Ashin Varanin]

TEMPLE OF EXAR KUN
YAVIN IV
CLAN REKALI TERRITORY
MANDALORIAN SPACE

It behooved Ember to check up on his visitors and tenants. People did love to take advantage; the Order of the Grey had proven that. So on a fine spring day, he and his rancor Squint-Eyes -- so named for his use of a TIE Interceptor cockpit as a club -- went for a walk in the jungle. The Temple of Exar Kun, a series of black spires like overlapping teeth, reared out of a lake in the forest. Long ago, Corran Horn had done it some serious damage, and melted the statue of Kun into slag. The ruined spires had been partially rebuilt in the intervening centuries, and the temple had seen its share of transients since Clan Rekali had taken over this territory years ago. Ember had spoken with Safiriel Bane after she'd come here unannounced, and she'd partially convinced him of her enmity toward the One Sith. But their discussion had been cut short before she could satisfy him of her intent.

Of course, then another ship had come, and subsequently there had been a disturbance in the Force, and that required investigation. Ember took with him a staff, one he intended to make a focus for his flow-walking efforts.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Squint-Eyes growled a question. Ember patted his longtime arm-wrestling partner's knee. "No, I don't believe she's here now. I don't believe any of them are. Watch over me while I work?"

The bull rancor assented, fist knotting around the grip of his TIE-cockpit club. Ember took a seat on the temple steps, right where he'd interrogated Safiriel and her student Briga. He placed the staff across his knees. This planet, this place especially, made it easy to sink into the Force. He did so in a very specific way, called flow-walking by some, a speciality of his family. His mind's eye began to drift through the recent past.

The incident, it transpired, had taken place around the same time as his interrogation of Safiriel and her student Briga. Before or after, he couldn't say; flow-walking was an inexact art. He watched as Safiriel set up camp, as one of her associates fought Akk dogs, and as a small shuttle touched down nearby. The shuttle's unannounced arrival had been what triggered Clan Rekali's awareness: hyperspace travel in the entire Gordian Reach, and especially the Yavin System, was heavily monitored in invisible ways.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

A robed man emerged from the shuttle. "Isn't this the planet of Exar Kun?" the interloper said to himself. He approached the temple; Ember followed, in his mind's eye, spectral staff tap-tapping away.

Out came Safiriel. "My friend, it has been many moons since we last spoke."

Their conversation unfolded from there. Quickly, both established that they'd come to root around and rob the place. One was after the holocron of Exar Kun, the other his gauntlet. They took speeders from their base camp to the temple where Ember now sat in the present. Safiriel, it transpired, had cracked open the tomb, disarmed traps, but left the sarcophagus untouched. She and her nameless guest spoke over it, comparing their mastery of the Sith language. The guest stood back while Safiriel used a Sith rune to open the sarcophagus. No -- the first layer of the sarcophagus; it turned out there were three, each more demanding than the last. Ember took not a little pleasure in their pain and irritation.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The second layer was trapped, but they seemed ready for it. Even though he wasn't truly there or then, Ember flinched as a Force bomb went off. This had been the disturbance he'd noticed. The two grave robbers gritted their teeth through the pain and solved a puzzle by using more Sith runes. Clearly they'd come prepared. Even so, the guest was screaming and giving off Force lightning as Safiriel opened the third layer, a phrik layer. They talked some more, and she called her guest 'My Lord'.

But no name. Not yet, at any rate.

And from there, Ember's vision grew cloudy; some peculiarity of the temple's traps and Force disturbances, at a guess. Irritated, he rewound time and went walking back through the landed shuttle, still in his mind's eye. The shuttle was nondescript, and it wasn't as if its owner had put up a big shiny 'property of Darth Evilus' sign on the dashboard. Even so, Ember copied down the telesponder data and kept looking, leaning his spectral staff against a bulkhead. Somewhere around here would be an indicator of the ship's identity, and the owner's too.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

In the end, he had to skip backward in time, using the shuttle as a marker and the temple as a focus for his own power. He followed the shuttle's recent history backward, with intermittent and increasingly hazy skips, noting the route displayed on the little ship's navigational computer. In short order the vision faded, but he'd seen enough: the robed man - 'My Lord', and fluent in Sith - had come from One Sith territory. So much for Safiriel's protestations of enmity.

Somewhere along the line, the name Erebos cropped up. Finally.

He admitted he didn't know the name, but the One Sith were spitting out young pseudo-Masters a decicred a dozen these days. Still, the name and the shuttle's telesponder gave him plenty to work with. Maybe he'd post a bounty; maybe he'd just use this to break that asinine non-aggression pact that had been signed while he'd been deep in the Hard Roil.

There'd been a third interloper, someone who'd arrived with Safiriel on her corvette. Staff in hand, Ember went to go track down that man's past.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Safiriel's servant or guest was a youngish man, hooded and well-armed, with unnaturally green eyes and no taste for conversation. He split off from her ship shortly after landing. The man headed east, and Ember's flow-walking awareness followed.

Right up until the younger man vanished utterly. Ember paused, then paused time, focusing his efforts through his staff. He hadn't seen any motion that might indicate use of a personal cloak.

"I wonder..."

Still flow-walking, he immersed himself in the White Current, the deep and subtle webs of the Force's underlying layers. The young man faded back into visibility, though only to Ember's perception. Ember watched as the trespasser fought an Akk Dog acrobatically, using melee weapons. Then, still cloaked in the White Current, the trespasser gestured and froze the Akk Dog in place. Clearly, this much Force use was draining him. Even so, he then engaged in combat with another man, the Akk Dog's owner.

They got quite a lot of each other's blood all over the jungle.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Safiriel's assistant, the trespasser, the White Current wielder, ultimately won. His enemy turned out to be another grave robber, wearing a most interesting hand ornament that he called the Shard of Retaliation. It appeared to protect him from physical attacks, but the White Current wielder prevailed and claimed it as his prize. One trespasser eliminating another was of no concern to Ember. Ember watched the surviving man walk away, then nodded to himself and dissipated the flow-walking trance. The real world rushed back in - the hard temple stair under him, the bull rancor standing guard over him.

"Thanks, Squint," he said, and the rancor whuffled. Ember stood, leaning on his staff, and headed into the forest. It would take some time to reach the place where the two men had fought, but the Force was his ally, and physical enhancement his specialty. He set off running, an easy lope through the jungle.

After a good half hour, Force tracking and the scent of death led him to the place where he'd stood as a flow-walker: the site of the fight. The dead Akk Dog and its dead owner lay sprawled among the trees. From inside his robe, Ember pulled a thing like a pocketwatch...

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The first two blood samples, when applied to the tracking talisman, only led back to the bodies. The third, taken from a much-abused tree, led elsewhere. Ember finalized the bond between talisman and blood, then slipped that into his pocket. Unfortunately, so far as his flow-walking could ascertain, the other trespasser hadn't bled at any point. That constituted a distinct pity.

Yavin IV had excellent satellite-based wireless HoloNet access. While he and Squint waited for pickup, deep in the jungle, Ember pulled out his datapad and composed a notice. Three notices, really: two bounties and a declaration of war. He'd save the latter; maybe he wouldn't even use it. But it felt good to write that. The bounties, though, would see some use fairly soon.

In due course, a Clan Rekali speeder truck picked them up, him and the rancor. On the way to Port Shardrock, Ember got a good long look at the Clan archaeology team that was currently scouring the remains of the Exar Kun temple. The grave robbers, naturally, had stripped the place. Even so, lessons could be learned from the inscriptions that they'd exposed, inside the burial chamber and the layers of sarcophagi. One more thing to add to the Clan Rekali vaults.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The speeder truck descended into Port Shardrock, avoiding the Jedi Academy. The Academy had seen better days. Shule Windspeaker was dead, Eyal M'ti was slowing down, other Academies were doing a brisk business, and the Republic's insanity at Roche had made Mandalorian territory unfriendly. Ember had personally guaranteed the Academy's safety, for the sake of his dead daughter Aaralyn and her memory, but even so: the Academy was a ghost town. Not that Ember minded having fewer Jedi around.

Squint went off to his hut in Witchtown, ambling through rancor-sized dirt streets. Ember, staff in hand, ducked into an unassuming hut of his own, a little place wherein to lay his head. Not that he was terribly interested in rest just now, though. Instead, he muttered a chant and enhanced his own short-term memory, then pulled out charcoal and paper and began to draw with a sculptor's care. His statues watched him unblinkingly from the walls. Watchers, they were called, after all: his versions of the old guardian statues one found on Dromund Kaas. They yielded to mind tricks readily enough, but who would think to mind trick a statue?

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The first charcoal sketch was of the man who'd arrived alone, in the single-person shuttle from One Sith territory. Erebos, presumably Darth Erebos. A quick glance at Clan Rekali intel datalinks confirmed that that was a known name: a Darth Erebos sat on the Dark Council. A cruel grin spread over Ember's face as he finished the sketch. He moved to the next one: the archer, the White Current wielder, the green-eyed man in the leather hood, the one who'd left his blood in the forest. The one who now owned this Shard of Retaliation. That name matched nothing in Ember's records; he'd have to check the vaults.

With some pleasure, he plugged the Nightsister tracking talisman into an unassuming, flat pyramid, and let his mind drift. The Mirr focused his Keetael farsight, the talisman aimed it, and in short order he was getting a glimpse of a distant man. Green eyes, compound bow, dead man walking. Though frankly, his sins were far less than those of this Darth Erebos. No, the green-eyed man was more a curiosity than anything. Few people could use the White Current; fewer were men; even fewer had a taste for Sith artifacts.

He scanned both sketches. Facial recognition turned up nothing, but at least now he had digital images to work with. Bounty hunters liked those.