The climb up the ridge was a miserable, calf-burning slog through thick mud and sliding rocks. Ahsoka kept her head low, trusting her montrals and the Force to alert her to any movement in the dense foliage.
The rhythmic, high-pitched beep of the emergency transmitter grew steadily louder as she neared the crest.
She slipped past a massive cluster of hanging vines and finally stepped into a wide, rocky clearing. The distress beacon was sitting completely unguarded on top of a flat stone outcropping, happily broadcasting its signal into the overcast sky.
There was nobody around.
Ahsoka stayed in the shadow of the tree line, scanning the clearing. The muddy ground around the stone was trampled, but the chaotic, sliding boot prints didn't indicate a struggle. It looked more like several people pacing back and forth.
She frowned, studying the layout. If Bail's operative had made it up here, he should have set up a perimeter or found cover to protect his position. The equipment was placed too perfectly, resting entirely exposed in the center of the rock. She guessed the operative had been ambushed, quietly neutralized, and the comms array was left running as bait to draw in whoever came to the rescue.
"We were starting to wonder if anyone was actually going to show up."
The voice echoed from a thick stand of trees to her right.
Ahsoka didn't flinch. She turned slowly as two figures stepped out from the heavy brush. They wore dark, sweeping robes with deep red accents that dragged through the mud. The attire was completely impractical for a swamp environment. They carried themselves with the overwhelming, unearned arrogance of people who were used to being the most dangerous thing in the room.
Dark Prophets. Or at least their acolytes.
"What kept you?" the second one asked. He was a human with pale skin and a shaved head, leaning casually against a tree trunk. "We've been babysitting this stupid transponder for three days. The rain is ruining my boots."
"Traffic was terrible," Ahsoka said flatly. She stepped fully into the clearing, keeping her hands resting loosely near her hips. "Where is the man who set up that beacon?"
The first acolyte grinned, revealing crooked teeth. "Oh, he's around. Or bits of him are. He tried to act tough when we found him, but everyone starts crying once we get the skinning knives out. Took him hours to finally die."
Ahsoka felt a cold, familiar anger tighten her chest. She refused to let it show on her face. If Kael was dead, the rescue mission was down to one target.
"And the boy?" she asked.
Both acolytes paused. It was a microscopic hesitation, but to someone trained to read body language and Force currents, it might as well have been a flashing neon sign.
"The boy," the pale acolyte repeated, recovering his arrogant smirk a second too late. "Right. The kid. We fed him to the Terentateks. He was screaming for his mother the whole time."
"Yeah," the first one chimed in, stepping forward. "After we spent a few hours practicing our interrogation techniques on him, of course. Not much left to bury."
Ahsoka stared at them. They were lying. It wasn't even a subtle, practiced deception. The Force around them practically radiated the empty, hollow confusion of men desperately pretending they knew what she was talking about.
"You're terrible liars," Ahsoka said simply.
The pale acolyte dropped his smirk. His expression twisted into an ugly scowl. "Excuse me?"
"You never saw a boy," she said, taking a slow step forward.
"Listen here, you arrogant little shit," the first acolyte snarled. He reached beneath his robes and pulled out a cylindrical metallic hilt. "We were going to ask nicely what organization you belong to before we gutted you. But since you want to act smart, we'll just skip to the fun part. We're going to thoroughly enjoy peeling you apart to get the information."
Ahsoka sighed, dropping her hands directly onto her own hilts. "Boys... you really don't want to do that."
Both acolytes ignited their weapons. Twin crimson blades snapped into the damp air, humming with that unstable, angry crackle typical of poorly attuned dark side crystals.
"Oh, I think we do," the pale one sneered.
Ahsoka unclipped her sabers and thumbed the ignition switches.
Two brilliant white blades erupted with a sharp hiss, illuminating the clearing in a stark, blinding glare.
The acolytes froze. Their smug confidence completely vanished, replaced by an immediate, wide-eyed shock as they stared at the dual white blades.
"A Jedi?" the first acolyte breathed. His voice suddenly pitched an octave higher, and a greedy, excited glint sparked in his eyes. "The High Prophets will reward us for this."
"If you say so," Ahsoka muttered, dropping into her Jar'Kai stance.
The pale acolyte cursed the High Lords for dispatching him to guard this place.
Capture pirates, my ass!
He knelt in the mud with both hands raised, his scorched shoulder hanging lower than the other. Rain ran over his shaved head and mixed with the tears already streaking down his face. His partner lay several meters away beside a fallen tree, separated from his weapon and any further opportunities to make threats.
Ahsoka stood in front of him with one white blade angled toward his throat.
The entire exchange had lasted perhaps twenty seconds.
Most of that time had been spent giving them opportunities to surrender.
The acolyte stared at the remains of his companion, then at the lightsaber hovering near his neck. His lips moved twice before any sound came out.
"Who... who are you?"
Ahsoka said nothing.
"You're a Jedi." His voice cracked around the word. "You have to be. That stance, those blades... Are you a Master?"
"I asked you a question first."
His eyes darted toward the trees, searching for an escape route that did not exist.
"The Empire killed all of you," he whispered. "The Prophets said the Jedi were gone."
"They've been saying that for years."
"How many more are there?"
Ahsoka lowered the tip of her blade until its glow filled his vision.
"Where is the man who activated the beacon?"
The acolyte swallowed.
"Dead."
"How?"
"He... he killed himself." The words rushed out of him. "Lord Jedgar followed his tracks from the wreck. He cornered the man before he could escape, but the man had a thermal detonator. He activated it rather than surrender."
Ahsoka watched his face and listened through the Force.
Fear. Pain. Shame.
No obvious deception.
"Jedgar survived?"
"Yes. He was... injured."
"And then?"
"The High Prophets ordered us to bring the transmitter here and keep it running. We were supposed to capture whoever answered."
That explained the beacon's strangely exposed placement. The equipment had been moved after Kael's death, which meant any conclusions Ahsoka had drawn from the clearing itself were useless.
She disliked investigations where the evidence had been rearranged by idiots.
"Was there another survivor?"
The acolyte hesitated.
Ahsoka moved the blade a fraction closer.
"Yes! Yes, there were two trails leaving the crash site. Lord Garkis followed the second one."
"Who was he tracking?"
"I don't know."
"A child?"
"I never heard about a child." He shook his head quickly, spraying rainwater. "Nobody told us who was aboard the ship. We thought they were Imperials at first. An Inquisitor, maybe. The vessel belonged to them."
"Did Garkis return?"
The acolyte's mouth tightened.
"I don't know."
"You do know something."
"There were rumors," he said, almost pleading. "Only rumors. People said Lord Garkis had not reported back, but that happens. Patrols disappear in the forest all the time now."
Ahsoka studied him for another moment.
He believed what he was saying, though belief among dark side cultists had never been a reliable measure of accuracy.
"Was Jedgar sent after him?"
"I... I think so. Lord Jedgar left the sanctuary again after reporting to the High Prophets. Nobody told us why."
That was enough to establish a direction, though precious little else.
Garkis had followed Ezra's trail. Jedgar had gone after Garkis. Whether either man found the boy remained unknown.
"Tell me about the Prophets."
The acolyte blinked.
"We're... scholars."
Ahsoka looked at the body of his companion.
The dead scholar had tried to remove her head with a red lightsaber while promising to skin her alive.
"Of course."
"We study the old ways," he continued quickly. "Ancient traditions. Forgotten knowledge. The Empire mostly leaves us alone."
"There are several permanent Imperial garrisons on this planet."
His jaw worked.
Ahsoka continued, "There are patrol stations, military landing fields, encrypted communication towers, and enough troops in this region to occupy a populated moon. That is considerable support for a harmless group of scholars."
"We have an arrangement."
"With whom?"
"I don't know."
His gaze slipped away from hers.
"You're lying again."
"I swear, I don't know names."
"What does the Empire receive from your arrangement?"
The acolyte's breathing changed.
His eyes widened slightly, and the fear around him sharpened into something much stranger. He pressed one hand against his temple.
"I... can't..."
Ahsoka felt the disturbance in his mind before she saw the first thread of blood run from his nose.
Something had been buried inside him. A command, perhaps, woven beneath conscious memory and waiting for specific questions.
"What does the Empire receive?" she repeated carefully.
The acolyte convulsed.
"N-nothing. We serve no..." He gritted his teeth hard enough to make his jaw tremble. "We serve the..."
Blood gathered along the lower rims of his eyes.
Ahsoka immediately eased her pressure through the Force.
"Stop. Don't fight it."
"I don't know what..." His pupils expanded until his irises almost disappeared. "I don't know what you did to me."
"I didn't do this."
"You're inside my head!"
His terror turned sideways, folding into sudden rage as the conditioning seized whatever remained of his judgment.
The dead acolyte's lightsaber jerked out of the puddle behind Ahsoka.
Snap-hiss.
The crimson blade ignited in flight.
Ahsoka turned with it, her own saber rising before conscious thought had time to catch up. White plasma passed across the kneeling man's chest as the stolen red blade swept toward her back.
He remained upright for a moment, his outstretched hand trembling as though he still expected the weapon to obey.
Then he collapsed beside his companion.
The red lightsaber landed in the mud and extinguished with a wet hiss.
Ahsoka stood motionless, listening to the rain.
Whatever controlled the Prophets' secrets had preferred killing one of its own followers over allowing him to answer a basic question.
That told her more than his lies had.
She deactivated her blade and crouched beside the bodies. The acolytes carried no proper identification, though she recovered a coded Imperial access cylinder, two local map chips, and a small communicator whose stored channels had been carefully scrubbed.
The map chips were more useful.
One showed the surrounding patrol zones and several marked routes leading into the forest's central region. Another displayed a rough boundary around an area labeled only as the Old Sanctuary.
Ahsoka returned to the dead acolyte's partial explanation while examining the map.
Before his conditioning activated, he had mentioned patrols disappearing and unusual activity in the forest.
"What changed?" she murmured.
The answer would not be coming from either man.
She searched their packs and found sealed ration blocks, replacement power cells, and a folded assignment sheet bearing orders from an Imperial wildlife suppression office. The language was bland enough to qualify as an accomplishment.
Multiple native predators had abandoned established nesting territories over the previous several days. Terentateks were attacking perimeter outposts, supply convoys, and even smaller temple installations. Joint Imperial and Prophet patrols had been deployed toward the central forest to locate the source of the migration.
She had already encountered enough terentateks to understand that something unusual was happening deeper inside the region. Whether the creatures were fleeing the ruins, gathering around them, or reacting to some unrelated disturbance remained impossible to determine from scattered patrol notes.
Ezra's trail had also led in that direction.
Perhaps Garkis had captured him and taken him to the Prophets. Perhaps the boy had escaped and continued into the forest. Perhaps he had found shelter inside the ruins because every other option had been worse.
Each possibility carried its own collection of unpleasant consequences.
Ahsoka slipped the map chips into her belt pouch and looked toward the thick forest beyond the clearing.
The Old Sanctuary lay northeast.
The ancient temple stood farther south, somewhere inside the central patrol zone.
She still lacked enough information to choose between them.
The acolytes had been waiting here for several days, and their assignment sheet included the coordinates of the outpost responsible for their resupply.
The choice should have been clearer per her usual modulas operandi.
Infiltrate the temple, find out this Jedgar or records of that night.
Yet, for some reason, her mind kept wandering to the south.
Ahsoka picked up the cleaner of the two red lightsabers, examined its crude construction, then clipped it beside the stolen access cylinder.
Well, one thing she had learned over years was to trust the Force.
The deeper Ahsoka pushed into the central forest, the stranger the atmosphere became.
Since her arrival on the planet, the dark side had felt like a physical weight pressing against her lungs. It was a constant, suffocating colonization of the local environment. As she followed the rough heading south, that oppressive pressure began to steadily recede.
The thinning of the dark side should have been a relief. Instead, the sensation felt deeply unnatural.
The energy was not returning to any sort of natural balance. The Force was simply fading, leaving behind a cold, hollow emptiness that made her montrals ache.
She found the first carcass a mile past the patrol boundary.
It was a Terentatek, massive and heavily armored, lying half-submerged in a shallow trench of mud. Ahsoka approached cautiously with her sabers deactivated. The beast had not been killed by blaster fire or plasma blades. Deep, jagged claw marks tore through its thick hide, exposing shattered ribs and torn muscle tissue.
The long trail of disturbed earth and broken roots behind the creature clearly indicated it had been trying to drag itself away from whatever attacked it.
She found another corpse three hundred yards later. This one was missing its lower jaw and both forelimbs, surrounded by a massive pool of coagulating black blood. It had also been crawling north, desperately fleeing the deeper swamp.
Apex predators did not flee unless they encountered something significantly higher on the food chain.
Ahsoka kept her hand resting loosely on her hilts and moved silently from tree to tree, strictly observing the environment.
The trees eventually began to thin out, their massive rot-wood trunks giving way to a strange, ambient grey light. The dense, overlapping canopy abruptly vanished entirely, revealing a massive, open expanse.
Ahsoka stepped up to the edge of the tree line and stopped completely.
The ground in front of her was violently cracked, split into deep, jagged fissures that resembled a dried riverbed. The fractured earth was thoroughly soaked in blood and covered in a fine layer of pale ash.
Scattered across the massive clearing were the remains of dozens of Terentateks.
These carcasses looked entirely different from the ones in the surrounding forest. They were completely desiccated husks, their massive bodies shriveled and sucked dry of all moisture and vitality. Their alchemically hardened bones protruded at unnatural angles through leathery, sunken skin, leaving them looking like deflated shells.
The Force itself felt physically broken here.
The natural flow of energy was completely disturbed, behaving in a chaotic, haphazard manner that made Ahsoka dizzy just trying to sense it. It felt as though a jagged hole had been ripped directly through the living fabric of the environment, leaving the remaining energy to bleed out into nothing.
Ahsoka stared at the field of mummified apex predators and the violently scarred earth.
"What in the name of the Force happened here?" she whispered.
----
A/N: Tell me if pacing feels slow. Mystery is a hard genre so I kinda have bad sense in that regards.