Prologue: The shadows of Ziost
The coordinates of the planet of Ziost were so classified that only the Jedi High Council on Coruscant was supposed to know the location of the dark system, which once served as a capital for the ancient Sith.
Darth Revan landed her shuttle near the supposedly abandoned fortress on that stood on the night side of Ziost's moon. She would never have suspected that something lived in there if not for sensing the Dark side energy which radiated with an insatiable hunger for death.
Once the Star Forge was destroyed she said goodbye to her loyal companions and began her long hunt against the Sith that provoked the Mandalorians to attack the Republic.
Only Carth took the news harder than Canderous, who silently worshipped her as the ultimate warrior. HK-47 had to be ordered not to follow her, but she was sure that they would meet again. The homicidal assassin droid was just so well constructed that he should propably outlive her.
Bastila understood that she had to do what needed to be done, and Revan felt less and less comfortable with the Jedi Council as more of her memories started returning.
After so many dead ends, her search had succeded at last. Revan drew her ligthsabers as she sneaked into the shadow of the fortress. It was a blocky mountain of concrete without any ornamentation, ugly even by Sith standards.
Revan sticked to the walls as she approached the nearest opening. It was a door once, but over a thousand years it eroded into a man sized hole. She had no intention to warn the Sith to her presence, so she let the optics of her mask scan the area. It was a deserted anthole of tunnels, but it was empty.
The next ten minutes passed without incident as she made her way into the heart of the ancient Sith edifice. Revan was certain that the rival Sith was close, her sense of danger grew with each step she took towards the main chamber. Something was wrong, very wrong here.
Everything became clear as she entered the abandoned command center. A black robed figure stood at the opposite wall and noded his hooded head at her.
Suddenly dozens of white and black armored sith troopers emerged from the corners of the room and started blasting at her.
Revan's foreboding changed to anger as her red blades deflected the blaster shots back at the troopers. These were not the true Sith, only stragglers left from Malak's forces. The troopers were not even the red armored elite, they were only a bait to slow her down. Revan threw bolts of lightning at grenadiers and cut down swordsmen as she made her way towards the Sith.
As she neared him Dark Jedi threw back his hood and revealed a face so ghoulish and rotten that he looked more like a corpse than a human. He did not even tried to defend himself as Revan lashed out at him. The crimson blades run him trough, but he gave no sign of pain and grinned as the dark power drained from the room. „ Lord Nihilus sends his greetings." With that remark the robed man fell on the ground.
Revan did not like being tricked. She opened herself fully to the Force in her useless anger, and expanded her senses. The true source of the darkness resided on a ship that decloaked itself above the Sith fortress. A dark shape manifested itself before her, wearing a white skull mask marked with red lines. The dark lord spoke in the ancient tongue of the Sith „The mantle of the Dark Lord now belongs to me, Revan. Your time is over."
The scavanged Sith warship Ravager opened up with her turbolasers upon the abandoned stronghold of Naga Sadow as soon as Nihilus's image faded before Revan's eyes. The first thing to be incinerated was her shuttle, and soon after the batteries stuck the fortress.
The barrage lasted only for a few seconds to her surprise. After ten minutes of silence Revan climbed the stairs that led to the top of the fortification. Apart from the hangar bays, the building took little damage. Apparently Nihilus tought that being starved to death on an abandoned moon was much worse than being incinerated by a tank-sized bolt of plasma, and Revan knew he was right.
Revan knew that she could not sustain herself indefinitly by the Dark side, but she refused to give admit defeat and started searching the vaults and catacombes for anything that she could use to save herself, no matter the cost.
After thirty hours of fruitless exploration Revan entered a small chamber flooded with red light and dominated by something that looked like an upright metal coffin. The walls were covered in archaic computers and other machinery.
The dark lord's eyes widened as she recognised the Sith runes on the side of the machine. This was an ancient stasis device, an artefact of possible rakatan origin that was rare even at the time of Naga Sadow.
The long-deceased Sith sorcerer had made sure that the reactor systems that powered the generator would last for many millenia, as he no doubt intended to use the stasis coffin as a last resort. Now Revan would benefit from his foresight.
It took her five hours to alter the basic programming of several computer systems, and three more to ensure that the stasis device revives her as soon as anything mechanical approached the outer perimeter of the security system. She could only hope that someone would land on a moon, however unlikely that sounded with its existance kept secret by the all the influence of the Jedi.
When everything was prepared, Revan typed in the final commands for the coffin to actiave in a minute. She stepped into the stasis chamber and tried to use Jedi meditation techniques she tought long forgotten but those helped little to calm her doubts.
The front door of the coffin closed on her as dim red runes lit up on the insides of the machine, sealing her from the ravages of time and space, for good or ill. Her last toughts were about the prospect of being trapped inside stasis fields for all eternity.