Moments of Truth/Part 20

Jirdo watched Tirien leap into the hole without a pause or a backward glance, and he envied the Jedi his bravery. The mouth of Chaos had opened to consume them, and Tirien volunteered to be the first course. Of course, now Jirdo was on the menu too.

He heard Zaella's lightsaber hum behind his head. "Get g-going."

"I'm…" ''Lost. Terrified. Probably gonna die''. For a moment he thought being executed up here would be preferable to whatever waited down there; he had seen Bras's body falling to ruins. But even if Narasi would grant him the quick death he deserved for how horribly he had let Guudria go wrong, Zaella never would. "Yeah, I'm going."

He crept to the edge of the hole, looking down into the dark; far, far below, there was a light. Freezing and shivering, his knees close to giving out in fear, Jirdo jumped.

The tunnel roared by, and it occurred to him too late that he hadn't begun to slow his descent. He scrambled to grab the Force, but it caught him before he was ready, gentling his descent and setting him on dusty stone. He goggled in wonder until he saw Tirien with a raised hand and a glowrod. "You're welcome."

"Thanks! I completely panicked, I forgot—"

"I understand. Now move, you're in Narasi's way."

Jirdo stepped away from the hole as first Narasi, then Zaella followed him down. Narasi had brought a glowrod too, and between her and Tirien they gave the tunnel some light. It was at least three meters tall and four wide, but somehow no warmer; even out of the wind, Jirdo felt the cold seep through his flesh and into his bones, turning the marrow to ice. Trying to stop stuttering, he said, "It's still cold."

"My Tapas isn't working either," Narasi said.

"It isn't weather," Tirien said. "It's the dark side—the Whisperer's presence."

"W-W-Well, I'm from a desert p-p-planet, we don't d-do cold well," Zaella complained. "Let's kill it and w-warm things up."

Tirien opened his mouth, then just shook his head and led the way into the tomb. Sensing Narasi at his back, Jirdo summoned his courage and followed.

The corridors were some rough stone—floor, ceiling, and walls all the same material. They were not identical, however; murals stretched the lengths of the walls, depicting battles and sacrifices with equal degrees of bloodshed. Chafing her good hand against her thigh and blowing into her cupped palm, Zaella stopped and said, "Hey, gimme the light."

Narasi stepped closer, holding up her glowrod, and Zaella pointed. "These hieroglyphs—this is Sith."

"Can you read it?" Narasi asked.

"Yeah, some of it. I'm not fluent, but…here, itsu is chain.  I think—the word order's weird in Sith, it's not like Basic—I think this is, chained to life.  Or no, itsu is a noun, it's more like, the chains that bind life."

"What a happy thought," Narasi muttered.

"Look at this," Tirien said from farther down the corridor. When they all huddled around him, he raised the glowrod to illuminate a mosaic of spiny, red-skinned humanoids carrying poleaxes that made Maia's guards' weapons look like woodcutter's tools. "These are Massassi warriors."

"How do you know?" Narasi asked.

Tirien pointed with his free hand. Narasi swung her light around and gave a little squeaking gasp that Jirdo thought was a stifled scream; his own heart leapt into his throat and prevented him making any sound at all. Down the corridor was a huge skeleton, taller than Bras even counting his horns. Broader, too—the creature's collarbones showed that in life he had been all of Jirdo and most of him again. Forearm bones thick as Human femurs ended in head-sized hands with three clawlike digits.

"I thought Massassi were monsters," Zaella whispered. "Not just big, but sort of…brutish."

Tirien walked over to the skeleton. "I don't think they were always like that. You can ask our friend Slejux Nissatak when we get home—he's more of a historian than me—but I seem to remember the Massassi originally being a caste, not separate species.  A warrior caste would breed for size and strength, but what they later became…that was Sith magic."

When we get home sounded pleasant; for all the times Jirdo had envisioned being dragged before the High Council if the Guudria experiment failed, and dreaded that reunion, right now he would happily confess every mistake he had made here if it meant a ticket back to the light of Coruscant. But the words Sith magic stirred something in the air, deepening the cold and bringing the darkness so close it was claustrophobic. Narasi and Zaella stepped closer to each other; Jirdo envied them, but he was not foolish enough to try joining the pack.

"Let's go," Tirien said, and even his voice was more brittle as he led the way on, stepping over and around more Massassi skeletons. Some were heaped in a pile, while others lay alone; some were so preserved they could have been displayed in a museum, while others were missing heads or limbs, or had glaives rammed through broken rib cages or stuck in splintered skulls. All of them had obviously been dead for ages, but the smell of rot intensified as they wandered on. Short flights of stairs bore them deeper and deeper into the hill.

Narasi stopped at a mural of the Massassi laboring with stones in a familiar, hilly setting. "So they built the tomb for this Sith and just…died?"

"Once they entombed their master, they may have sacrificed themselves too," Tirien said. "Either that, or he had a collaborator who trapped the workers inside. Or he did it himself, and got buried later once their deaths had…'consecrated' the tomb, if you will."

"I see why we just burn dead people," Narasi muttered.

Tirien tried to burn Bras, Jirdo thought, look how well that worked.

He had expected traps, and the longer they went without triggering any, the more paranoid Jirdo became. Why would a powerful Sith Lord, capable of whispering into the dreams of Jedi and binding them to his will, in possession of Bras's body (or what was left of it), just let them wander around his sanctum, appreciating the artwork and translating the calligraphy?

Part of that question was answered the next corner they turned. Where Maia had been spread-eagled on her stomach, Bras had clearly been trying to crawl forward, though several of his fingers had burned away from the first or second knuckle down. When Tirien used the Force to flip Bras onto his back, Jirdo saw the hollowed eye sockets, singed nostrils, and blackened teeth and charred lips—he had been burned alive from the inside out. His lethorns had withered, both of his horns were latticed with cracks and fault lines, and his chest had sunken in. Maia's lightsaber hung from his belt.

"It was too much for him," Tirien observed. "The Sith's spirit was more than his body could handle."

Jirdo shuddered. Had it been him, would Tirien have spoken of his mutilated remains the same way—with that cold, pitiless tone, as if finding Bras's body meant no more than the sacrificial victims painted on the walls? Jirdo remembered what Bras had done to Maia and the guards, and he hated Bras for it, but nobody deserved to die like this—the way Bras's jaw stretched almost to breaking showed he had died screaming in agony. Jirdo tried not to picture where the flames had started, and where they had ended.

Narasi looked sick, but Zaella spat on Bras's body. "Scum."

"Zaella!" Narasi exclaimed.

"He was scum," Zaella insisted. "You saw what he did to Maia, didn't you? Not to mention carting the Whisperer around?"

"Whatever his sins, he's dead now," Tirien said. "Don't let emotion cloud your judgment. Bras wasn't the real enemy here."

Jirdo wasn't sure Zaella took the moralistic lesson to heart, but the reminder about the Whisperer got her refocused. They pressed on, but no more corpses greeted them before a spiral staircase that led farther down still. They had to be under ground level, Jirdo thought.

"You," Zaella said. "Fake Jedi. Did the bacta fix my shoulder enough to fight?"

"Uh…" Jirdo tried not to take offense—not because it wasn't offensive, but because he didn't want to push any of them any further. "It's only been a few hours, best not to chance it."

"I wouldn't worry, Zaella," Tirien commented as he following the winding stairs down. "Bras is dead; I don't think lightsabers will be much use anymore."

Being as he was unarmed, Jirdo tried to take some solace in that, but there wasn't much for the taking; if there was to be battle without lightsabers, it could only be with the Force. The Jedi had obviously considered him too weak to be a Padawan and sidelined him into healing; even on Guudria, with years to test out and expand his powers, he had lagged behind Maia and Bras. Watching Tirien battle Bras had been the single most terrifying experience of his life; they were on a completely different level of power than anything he had ever experienced. If Tirien expected a repeat of that clash here, under tons of earth and stone that might collapse under even half the barrage Marekka had sustained, then Jirdo wanted nothing more than to hide in an isolated corridor until it was over.

That's why you never became a Padawan, a voice whispered in his thoughts. It's not just your Force powers that are weak.

Was that just his subconscious, or a new Whisper, capitalizing on his fears? Jirdo shuddered as he followed Tirien off the stairs and into a cruciform hall. Tirien couldn't be that much older than him—certainly he was closer in age to Tirien than Narasi or Zaella—and yet he couldn't help feeling the most vulnerable of the group, lightsaber or not.

A circular door hung open on its hinges; had Bras made his way down here to receive the Whisperer's spirit, or had the doors opened of their own accord? Tirien raised his glowrod to light the hieroglyphs that traced the circular border of the door. "Can you read it, Zaella?"

"Some of it." She knocked Jirdo aside with her good shoulder and looked up. "Here…I don't know the verb. Probably something like 'lies'—or 'lie', I guess, it's plural.  Here lie… something else…the Sith Lords—"

"'Lords', plural?" Tirien asked sharply. "You're sure?"

"Yeah, definitely. You see the little loop on the bottom of that glyph?  It means…it…"  Her eyes widened as comprehension dawned. "Oh."

Jirdo stepped closer to them—he would risk their annoyance now. Tirien, Zaella, and Narasi together had barely been able to take on the Whisperer, and that had been tag-teaming while Bras got no chance to rest. If there was a whole catacombs of Sith Lords down here, Jirdo doubted adding him to the mix was going to keep the balance in their favor.

Tirien took a deep breath. "Keep reading."

"Yeah…" Zaella shook her head; the ends of her lekku wiggled. "The Sith Lords…gimme a second, I'm gonna have to sound this out…Chel…Chelshgodrû Brokkodd and…Ragathna Brokkodd—"

"Just two?" Narasi asked.

"Two is more than one," Tirien reminded her. "And one is more than enough. Anything else, Zaella?"

She read the whole thing this time, mouthing the words as she worked on her translation, then said, "Here…let's go with 'lie'…the Sith Lords Chelshgodrû Brokkodd and Ragathna Brokkodd, who rest…I think that's 'until'…their time comes to…to…"

Rise.

This time Jirdo had no doubt—the voice was in his mind. Moreover, it was a defined voice—not thoughts shaped into words rather than images, but as it had been aboard the Ardent Guardian so long ago, when the Jedi Masters taught telepathy by projecting their voices into the awestruck Initiates' minds. Even a Guudrian would never take this voice for that of a Jedi Master, though; a single syllable rang with contempt, hate, and a sort of foul amusement.

Jirdo backed the way they had come, but Tirien stepped through the door at once; caught between them, Narasi followed her master, with Zaella right behind her. Jirdo did not want to go to the heart of this horrible place, but even less did he want to be left in it alone, so he thrust himself through the doors just before they thundered closed behind him.

In the circular chamber at the center of the cruciform, two sarcophagi lay side-by-side. Grotesques of monsters and Sithspawn loomed over the chamber from plinths above the corridors; Tirien tossed his glowrod up and nestled it in the crook of a dragon's wing with the Force. Its light fell on the sarcophagi; black stone laced with gold and silver, they were decorated with rubies and other gems, as well as matching silver symbols of an eye ringed with spikes.

Tirien turned a circle before the sarcophagi, looking in all directions, then called, "You've rested here a long time, Lord Brokkodd."

So very long, the voice agreed, acid in the mind that made Jirdo want to wet himself with fear. ''Since Lord Kressh's defeat became inevitable. My consort chose not to wait…''

Jirdo found his head turning without meaning to, his eyes looking without wanting to, toward one of the sarcophagi—as grand as its mate, but smaller.

"How did she leave without a host?" Tirien asked.

''We were visited by an acceptable courier. So young and vain, and yet Ragathna perceived the potential for her greatness, given the proper assistance. And so she departed in service to young Vedya, while I awaited the fruits of our investment. And here you are.''

"Vedya?" Tirien asked. "Vedya Gasald?"

So she has risen to greatness, then. Lord Brokkodd's laughter came from everywhere and nowhere; it might have issued from the mouth of the howling stone hssiss, or from the larger sarcophagus. Narasi looked around wildly, and Zaella pressed her back to Narasi's. ''And repaid her debt. I had thought this pitiful creature and his better companions were Vedya's tribute to me, but now I see they were not the prey, but the trap''.

"It isn't what it seems," Narasi whispered.

''It so rarely is. When the Ritual is complete, I will draw all the life of Guudria and rise again—my puppet queen and her minions have seen to that. And yet I no longer need wait endlessly for my tools to serve their purpose; that foolish Chagrian, so consumed with envy and lust, has given me the power to complete preparations myself.''

"We are not here to serve you," Tirien said.

''You shall serve regardless. All that remains is the choice of the vessel. Let me see…''

The air thickened, cloying on Jirdo's tongue. He patted his belt for the lightsaber he wasn't wearing. Tension flooded the room as they all braced themselves; Jirdo sensed Tirien concentrating hard, sinking himself into the Force, and he saw Narasi take her lightsaber hilt in hand.

Then Zaella shrieked, her good hand flying to her forehead, clasping it between her lekku. As Narasi lurched away, whirling around, Zaella wrenched her head left, then right, eyes squeezed shut.

"So MU ch pr I de," she said in two voices, only one her own. "So m UC h an GER ! B ut so MUC h f E a R !  Co WAR dl Y !  We AK !  Us ELE ss!"

Zaella convulsed, then fell to her knees, catching herself with her good hand, shaking and staring a thousand meters with a look of profound horror and violation. Even as Jirdo half-reached for her, unsure how to help, Tirien jerked sideways, collapsing onto Ragathna's sarcophagus. His eyes closed, and he gritted his teeth. Jirdo felt his blood freeze. The Whisperer—Chelshgodru—had been a force of nature even when possessing a thug like Bras. What could he be with Tirien's powers at his command?

Narasi reached for her master, but Tirien thrust out a hand to stop her. Jirdo sensed a terrible clash in the Force, a tornado meeting an earthquake, threatening to obliterate each other and everything around them. A stone Massassi's jaw cracked and dropped off, crushed to powder on the floor.

"Nooo OO o O ooOOO!" Tirien roared, and a blast of discorporeal rage wracked Jirdo's mind. Tirien's eyes shot open, yellow and livid, but very much his own. "OUT!"

He pushed off the sarcophagus, gasping like he had run fifty kilometers; the confrontation had taken only seconds, though it felt like hours to Jirdo. Narasi demanded, "Master, are you all right?!"

"I'm fine!" he panted. "Shield your mind! Remember—"

Jirdo missed what he was supposed to remember, because his turn had come. It was like someone had ripped his muscles free from his skeleton and inserted a layer of jagged-edged cybernetics between—agonizing injury he could not see, along with the sensation that something else was working his body. He heard a scream that sounded like his voice, but from so far away. He tried to claw at his arms with his own hands, but they rose to clasp his head instead as the invasion reached his mind and memory, calling up every humiliation he had suffered at the hands of Tirien and his cohorts; every time Maia and Bras had sidelined him; watching comrades die and unable to heal their wounds; trying his hardest at the Initiate Trials and being told, with such awful gentleness, that he was not ready, and never would be…

"Wea LKI n G !" his mouth was forced to say, the Sith Lord's voice overlapping his own and dragging razors along his tongue to do it. Then, as if he had spat out the infection, he coughed and fell to the ground, and the pain vanished, leaving his nerves tingling from head-to-toe. He understood Zaella's devastated expression now; he knew if he could see whatever was on his own face, he would run screaming in revulsion.

Zaella looked little better than she had, but as she saw Jirdo fall, she turned a terrified gaze on Narasi. The Zygerrian backed up until she bumped into the stone wall and started. Tirien reached for her. "Calm, Narasi…"

"Help me," she whispered.

"Focus. Remember who you are.  Feel the Force—"

Narasi doubled over, clenching her chest. She did not scream, but a low whine like a wounded animal's whistled through her teeth. Zaella got up to her knees and reached, but Tirien said, "Zaella wait!"

Narasi spun into a backhand Jirdo saw coming a kilometer away. Tirien obviously saw it too and snapped up his arm to block, but he had either forgotten or never known how strong Zygerrians were, because he only checked some of Narasi's speed before her hand smashed into the side of his head and knocked him down three meters away. As he groaned, Narasi flipped her lightsaber hilt to herself, grinned wide enough to show her fangs, and opened her red and yellow eyes. She ignited her lightsaber, and the blue light showed the shadows spreading from her eyes and down her face.

She swung at Zaella, still on the ground, who fell more than threw herself backwards. Jirdo caught Zaella by the collar and helped tug her out of range of Narasi's backswing. By the time Narasi came for a third stroke Zaella had her own lightsaber out, but she was obviously unused to fighting with just her off hand, and she gave ground immediately. Jirdo scrambled to get out of the way; he tried to find the courage to volunteer to take the saber and carry on the battle, but when he got the moisture to his lips, he realized there might not be much difference between Zaella with one hand and him with two.

Narasi smashed Zaella into a wall and wound up for a killing stroke, but then jerked, hunched her shoulders, and screamed, "Get out, get OUT!"

She staggered back a step, but pitched forward again and wound up into a Form V ready stance. " N o! M IN e!"

Zaella dodged a cut and ran, but as Narasi pursued, Tirien threw himself into her path. Narasi—no, Jirdo told himself, the Whisperer, Chelshgodru—met Tirien's blade without breaking stride, and Tirien retreated, parrying too quickly for Jirdo to follow. He did not lunge, and Jirdo realized he did not want to harm her, even with himself in mortal danger.

"Zaella, do something!" he cried. Narasi half-turned, but Tirien cut for her lightsaber hilt, and she roared and turned back to defend.

Shock rooted Zaella in place for only a second before she whirled on Jirdo. "How do we stop it?!"

"What?! You're asking me?!"

"You were working for this thing!"

"I didn't even know what he was until today! He was using us, he wasn't gonna give us an emergency shutdown!"

Zaella looked at the sarcophagi, then around at the walls; out of options, Jirdo retrieved Narasi's fallen glowrod and did the same. The murals were just as lavish as those upstairs. The nearest depicted two Sith Lords—the Brokkodds, Jirdo assumed—in battle against beings that had to be Jedi, followed by an army of Massassi warriors. The cater-cornered curves of wall showed the sarcophagi and legions of Massassi worshipping before an altar; across the atrium, the mural depicted the two Sith haloed by rays of black light and encircled by Sith glyphs.

"Look at this!" Zaella said when Jirdo lit the last mural. Vaulting Lady Brokkodd's sarcophagus, she glanced once at the flashes of plasma down the corridor, blue on green, then pointed. "Look, their bodies are coming out of the tombs, aren't they?"

Jirdo ran toward her, slipped and fell, and lurched back to his feet at her side. "Yeah…hey! These symbols around it!  These are the ones we were supposed to carve in the shrines."

He raced to count them all. "…fifty, fifty-one! That's how many shrines there are!  The ritual's tied to this!  It's supposed to bring them back to life!"

"That's the opposite of what we want!"

"I know that!" Jirdo snapped, exasperated. Wracking his brains and trying to ignore the snaps and pops from meters away, he said, "Maybe…maybe if we destroy his body? Something must've held him to reality all this time, right?"

"Good enough," Zaella said. "You get the head, I'll get the feet."

She ran for one end of the sarcophagus, but when she touched it she yelped and sucked her fingers; a second too late to catch on, Jirdo touched the head end and cried out as it burned his palms. Zaella said, "Dammit, he's protecting it!"

"Yeah, like on the mural!" Jirdo pointed to the wall mural, where the two sarcophagi glowed with heat.

"Wh AT do y O u t HI n K yo U'R e d OIN g?!" Chelshgodru roared through Narasi's voice, and the Force slammed Jirdo into the wall so hard he blacked out. Whether seconds or minutes later, he woke on the stone floor with a terrific pain in the back of his head; Zaella lay prone. While Tirien dueled his possessed Padawan away, Jirdo grabbed Zaella, ignoring healing for the simplest form of rehabilitation—resuscitation. WAKE UP!

Zaella gasped and sat up, then winced and clutched her head. "What?"

"The mural," Jirdo said. "He's protecting the body with the sarcophagus."

Zaella looked up at it, and her eyes widened. "No he's not…"

She sprang to her feet and raised a hand, and Tirien's glowrod jumped down. Holding it up, she said, "Look!"

Jirdo followed what he had taken for a trail of heat mirage up from the sarcophagi…but it ended at two Sith faces carved into the stone, with rubies for eyes; they had been hidden in shadow by the angle of Tirien's glowrod. The wavy lines, glimmering with inlaid silver in the light, were not heat trails going up, he realized; they were souls going down.

"It's not the bodies in the sarcophagi, it is the sarcophagi!" Zaella hissed. She raced back around the circle, flipped her saber hilt to a reverse grip, and ignited the crimson blade down into the ruby at the center of Chelshgodru's sarcophagus.

Down the corridor, Narasi shrieked. When she whirled, Jirdo could see the glow of her eyes from ten meters away. " NO ! Yo U w IL l s UF f ER for TH a T !"

She raised a hand and Zaella screamed as her lekku twisted, winding tighter and tighter. But Tirien seized the moment of distraction and disarmed Narasi. She turned back, but even as the Force redirected itself, Tirien grabbed her forehead with his free hand, and three screams rippled through the tunnels and the Force.

Jirdo caught Zaella as she started to fall. "C'mon, it's not done yet!"

Crying in pain, her whole body shaking, Zaella thrust her sword arm out of her sling for a two-handed grip and just hacked at the sarcophagus, slashing without rhyme, reason, or technique, cursing between sobs and screams of rage. Jirdo pulled Narasi's fallen lightsaber into his hand with the Force and added to the destruction, sending chips of silver and gold, precious jewels, and hunks of stone flying. Zaella tried to impale her saber down in the center of the silver eye symbol; when it resisted, Jirdo grabbed her hilt too and added his weight to hers, slowly forcing the blade in. Narasi's screams rebounded off the walls so loudly Jirdo wanted to cover his ears, and the agony and sudden terror in the Force set every cell in his body to burning. In unison, Tirien and Narasi roared, "GET OUT!"

Together Jirdo and Zaella forced the lightsaber down to the hilt in the sarcophagus, and at last the seal broke, rank dust and nauseating fumes spewing from every seam. As Jirdo fell back, gagging, Zaella grabbed the lid with the Force and ripped it off, smashing it against the mural showing the resurrection ritual. The lid burst to shards and, down the hall, Narasi's wail reached a fever pitch. Dazed by the horrible odor, half-blind from the fumes, Jirdo scrabbled for a hold on the Force and, just for a second, saw the contest. Tirien glowed with light so bright it hurt; he had thrust his hand into a humanoid pillar of flame, and the flames clawed at him, seeking purchase. But they were growing weaker, and a different, brighter light shone from within them. All at once that light exploded with power and the flames flickered away through the air, a comet trail losing fire with every meter—a comet whose tail would catch its head. The flames wobbled toward Zaella, jinked toward Jirdo, and finally thrust their last sparks into the sarcophagus.

How much was real and how much the dazed hallucination of corpse gas, Jirdo could never say. He sank to his knees, wheezing, then toppled sideways, his body gasping for the purer air at floor level. He sucked in cleaner breaths for a long time, rolled over to be sick, then turned back to keep breathing.

"Jirdo."

Still nauseated, Jirdo grabbed the remains of Chelshgordu's sarcophagus and hauled himself to his knees. Tirien stood across the atrium, holding Narasi's twitching body in his arms. Dragging himself along the length of the sarcophagus, Jirdo gathered enough strength to walk at some point and staggered over.

Tirien was staring at his Padawan's face. "Does she have any internal injuries?"

It was strange hearing emotion in that voice. Cupping Narasi's chest below her throat and her back between her shoulders, Jirdo tried to focus on her, thinking back to Jedi training from what felt like a lifetime ago. "I don't…no, I don't think so. Not anything like Bras, if that's what you mean.  Not like anything's burning her."

Some of the tension on Tirien's face relaxed, although there was plenty left. "Help Zaella."

"Zaella's fine," Zaella grumbled. Jirdo turned to find her coated in debris and sarcophagal slime.

"You should put your sling back on," Jirdo suggested, but she glared at him so intensely that he offered no more advice.

Holding up her lightsaber, she told Tirien, "Turns out it was a little useful."

"I stand corrected," Tirien said, then shook Narasi. "Narasi, wake up."

She gasped and opened her eyes wide, wriggling in his arms, fighting to be free. He set her on her feet, but when he touched her shoulder, she cried out, whirled, and punched him so hard that he spun almost a full circle, slumped against the corridor wall, and slid to sit on the floor. As Narasi tented her hands over her mouth, her eyes showing all her horror, Tirien groaned, "Please stop hitting me, you're very strong…"

She threw herself down beside, clutching his shoulders. "Master, I'm so sorry!"

"Oh, that's okay…" he said, though he looked a little cross-eyed.

Pushing Jirdo out of her way, Zaella knelt a meter from the two and said, "Narasi."

When Narasi spun to her, still frantic, Zaella said, "It's not your fault. You fought—you fought enough that I'm still alive because of you.  That's twice now." She half-smiled for a moment. "You're still you—you're all you. And you're still a Jedi."

Some of the frenzy left Narasi's wide eyes; Zaella hesitated, then held out her arms. Narasi looked surprised, but deeply touched, and she slid over to hug Zaella. Tirien rose behind them, rubbing his jaw were she'd punched him with a wince, then walked around them and tipped his head for Jirdo to follow.

"Tell me what happened," he breathed when they were a few meters away.

Once he started talking, Jirdo found he couldn't stop; the whole macabre horror just fell out of his mouth. When he was done, Tirien walked around the atrium, examining each mural in turn, and Jirdo took the opportunity to study him by the light of a fallen glowrod. Up close, he could see Tirien had taken quite a beating; he was still wearing the lightning-burned, rain-washed clothes he had worn to fight Bras, the cut around his hairline had reopened, and he had a few lightsaber burns through his tunic, one or two of which had seared the blue flesh visible below. Pointing to the wounds, Jirdo asked, "Did…did Narasi…?"

Tirien gave him a stern look, eyes narrowed, and Jirdo swallowed and stopped talking. Tirien asked, "Was the sarcophagus itself what bound him to existence, or was that binding sealed inside?"

Jirdo remembered the way the sarcophagus had spat all around its seam at once, and Narasi screaming. "I…don't know. It could've been either one."

Tirien circled back to Chelshgodru's sarcophagus, Force-pulling the glowrod into his hand and looking down. Giving the stone coffin a wide berth, Jirdo looked inside and saw a sunken, eyeless, mummified face wrapped in black burial cloths. A sword lay beside the corpse, razor-keen and gleaming as if it had been honed and polished days rather than millennia before. Various other tokens and treasures were wedged in around Chelshgodru's remains.

Tirien was silent so long that Jirdo said, "Well, at least…at least he's gone, right?"

The Jedi Knight leaned over the sarcophagus, patting its rim a few times before laying a hand on it. He passed his other hand over the body; Jirdo's innards clenched as his mind conjured a horrid vision of a withered, paper-fleshed hand seizing Tirien and wrenching him in while well-preserved teeth tore out his throat and drew life-giving blood down a dessicated throat…but nothing so macabre happened. Tirien moved his hand back and forth a few times, eyes closed, focusing on the Force. He glanced up at the murals, looked back down at the corpse, meditated for a moment, then rose and walked to the other sarcophagus. Without any ceremony, he lifted his hands, and the lid of Ragathna's sarcophagus sprang free as Chelshgodru's hadn't. Letting the lid crash to the floor where it broke into several pieces, Tirien examined Ragathna's withered remains, studied the murals again, and walked back to Chelshgodru's side.

"No, he's not."

"WHAT?!" Zaella and Narasi demanded. Before Jirdo quite understood how it had happened, they were around the atrium and on either side of Tirien. Narasi stared at her master while Zaella glared into the sarcophagus with hate and revulsion all over her face; in the dim light, her scarlet features looked demonic in their rage.

To Jirdo's utter bafflement, Tirien didn't seem to share their upset; he could have sworn the Pantoran's lips hinted at a smile. "He's not gone. He's very much still here."

"What do we do?!" Narasi took her lightsaber off her belt, while Zaella hefted a piece of sarcophagus lid, looking ready to bash the mummified remains to powder.

Tirien raised a hand. "Oh, that won't be necessary. He's no threat to us now."

Zaella's arm was trembling from the weight of the stone, so she let it slump. "What do you mean?"

"I think I understand what happened. It's only a theory—I've heard about Force ghosts and possession from holocrons, but most of the holocrons with really detailed information are restricted to Jedi Masters, so it's only a guess.  But I flatter myself that it's an educated one."

Jirdo couldn't understand his casual tone, as if they were chatting at a symposium on possession by Sith Lords rather than standing in the ruins of a tomb where all of their minds had been harrowed by the wakeful dead. He even seemed less tired. Zaella stared at him too, but Narasi asked, "What's your guess?"

"As I understand it, Sith who cling to this world after they should've died bind their souls to locations, or objects—some tangible thing. They could've used the whole tomb, like the Dark Lords on Korriban, but you heard him—their plan was to be resurrected." Tirien pointed at the mural of the revived Sith and the ring of sigils. "So they picked a more discrete object."

He gestured then to the depiction of the ensoulment. "At first I thought it would've been the corpses themselves, but that didn't seem right—why bind yourself to the decaying husk you're hoping to resurrect and rejuvenate later? Then I really looked at this.  You see the faces and the eyes?"

Jirdo looked up at the rubies set in the carved Sith likenesses. Tirien said, "Faces, not skulls, and ruby eyes, like a Sith's in rage. It could've been artistic license, but I think it was more deliberate.  I think they were buried alive here, and somehow transferred their souls out of their living bodies—whether into the interior of the sarcophagi or into the sarcophagi's stone itself I don't know, but I'm not certain it matters, either."

Jirdo saw all his own horror on Narasi's face, and even Zaella looked disturbed. Narasi asked, "So if the sarcophagus is broken—or open, whatever—why isn't he gone?"

"I'm getting there. So as long as it was…for convenience, let's say sealed…Chelshgodru had a repository for his soul.  That's why it was still here after he burned out Bras; that particular vessel was destroyed, but the actual container for his soul was still intact.  When he possessed you, he abandoned a lot of his ability to protect the sarcophagus; I'm not sure what would've happened if we had tried to destroy it while he was fully within, but I don't think it would've gone nearly as well."

"Why expose himself?" Jirdo asked.

Tirien shrugged. "Maybe he felt he had to take the risk, since we were here; his protections might have been more powerful than all of us together, but if they've never been tested by Jedi before, he couldn't have been sure of that. Or perhaps he was just arrogant.  Bras was willingly possessed, so perhaps Lord Brokkodd thought possessing someone who wasn't willing would be just as easy.  More fool him; he didn't realize what he'd gotten himself into tangling with Narasi."

Tirien smiled, and Narasi gave him a shaky smile back while Zaella grinned and bumped her shoulder. Nodding to the sarcophagus, Tirien said, "So he left himself vulnerable, and Zaella and Jirdo dealt him a mortal wound. With the sarcophagus unsealed, his soul had nothing to bind it to existence.  Once Narasi and I expelled him from her mind, his soul would have started fading—Jirdo saw that in the Force.  He couldn't just return to the sarcophagus, and without it, he didn't have enough strength left to possess any of us.  Faced with oblivion, there was only one vessel to which his soul could turn—the original one."

Narasi's eyes filled her face as she looked into the coffin. "So he's…he's back in his body? Isn't that what he wanted all along?"

"Well, yes and no." Again, Tirien had that queer almost-smile; his lips twitched, but there was something much too hard in his eyes. "He wanted to return to his revitalized body, but I'm afraid he only got half of that."

This time they all stared at the withered remains—immobile, powerless, and decayed. Zaella asked, "So he's…what, possessing his own body? Can he move it?"

"Oh no, I think not; he's been dead for ages. And he can't project himself outward, either; only the soul's original container could allow him to do that.  In possessing Bras, and trying to possess each of us, he was using our senses, our bodies and capabilities.  He didn't turn his corpse into a new receptacle for his soul; he didn't have time.  He just possessed it."

Zaella looked up. "So…he's only got his body's capabilities?"

Tirien turned his eyes down to the mummy, and cold judgment hardened his face. "No sight through disintegrated eyes, no hearing through withered ears, no touch with dead flesh…conscious eternally, but all that spite and greed directed inward, unable to perceive anything but his own hate and the consequences of his failure. Forever."

Jirdo shivered, and not just at the contemplation of such a gruesome fate. Narasi's face was hard to read, too many strong emotions at war with each other. "Should…can we do anything?"

"Like what?" Zaella asked. "Leave a glowrod so he has a nightlight and doesn't get scared in the dark?"

She snickered, but Narasi looked at Tirien. "Is there a way to cut his soul loose from his body? Send it on completely?"

"Please tell me that's just because you think Chaos would be worse, not some Jedi mercy thing for this slime," Zaella complained.

Narasi's face twisted, but Tirien spared her having to answer. "There might be, or there might not, but if the Jedi possess the knowledge, that's another thing in those restricted holocrons. I could try, I suppose, but I won't.  Meddling with Sith magic is far beyond me, and I don't wish to give him a path back.  Avoiding this fate would be a mercy, but he brought it on himself with no help from me."

Tirien looked up at her. "And after the day we've had—the day Guudria has had—I'm not feeling merciful. Let's go."

And pausing only to smash to ruins the mural with the formula for Chelshgodru's resurrection, Tirien led the way back to the tunnel. Narasi followed; Zaella put her right arm back in its sling and trailed after them. Jirdo brought up the rear, but he as he tried to smooth away some of his exhaustion by immersing himself in the Force, he stopped.

Zaella glanced back. "You coming, or are we leaving all the bad guys here and wrapping it up nice and neat?"

"I…no, yeah, I'm coming." Jirdo followed her out, running a hand over his face; the brutal day was getting to him. Besides, if…no, it didn't bear thinking about.

Deep in the Force, for just a second, he thought he had heard someone screaming.