The two blades clashed, luminescent streaks in the darkness of the cave. They swung in intricate patterns, their every move precise and lightning fast.

One of the combatants was immersed in darkness, hatred and anger pulsing in the being's tainted aura. The blade he wielded was a bloody red, seeking vengeance and destruction. The other brandished a green blade, almost emerald in its intensity. This being's aura was calm and it radiated light. The light glowed brilliantly in the Force, warming the imminent chill of the dark cave.

Time did not exist around them, only the Force was there to propel them on. The darkness stretched out its tentacles, saturating everything in its inky depths as it reached for its victim, slithering to the center of the blazing light. It reached into the soul of the light, wrapping its icy tentacles around the core and squeezing, suffocating the intensity of the light, smothering it under the angry prevalence of the darkness.

"You can not win, Jedi. Surrender now and you may be spared." The voice was quiet; a part of the Force much more then it was a part of the concrete reality.

"Never!"

"Then you shall die!" The darkness pounced, smothering the light with all its intensity, crushing the core until in crumbled and began to suffocate. The Sith laughed, watching as the Jedi struggled for air, watching as the Jedi fell to the ground under his crimson blade. "Fool. The Light Side will never win. The Dark is too powerful."

"Curse you," the Jedi chocked out, his vision fading, sounds blending, and the Force beckoning him, enveloping him in a warm wave that would carry him away.

Footsteps echoed in the distance, booted feet pounding on the stone ground as they approached at high speed. The black shape of the Sith Lord paused and then dissolved into the shadows.

They burst into the enclosed area at a Force enhanced speed, drawn there by the sound of clashing 'sabers. Two of the knights rushed toward their comrade while the third lingered at the entrance, cradling a child in her arms.

"Is he...?"

"Yes."

She hugged the child a little closer.

"Well, Gordon, what do we do now?" one of the young knights kneeling by the slain Jedi asked.

"There is nothing we can do. Returning to the Temple is in our best option right now." He turned to his female companion. "Is he the only one, Akel?"

She nodded somberly. "Yes, they must have overlooked him during the evacuation. There were no others. No others that had survived that is." She shuddered.

"Well what do we do with him?"

"We should take him back to the temple."

"The temple? Are you insane, Gordon? He's a Sith."

"A Sith trainee, not even an apprentice. If we put him through rehab—"

"Rehab, bah! He'll always have that darkness in him no matter what."

"Well what do you suggest we do with him, Jag? Just leave him to die? Kill him ourselves? Give him away to some unsuspecting family so that he can cause havoc before the Sith re-take him?"

Jag shook his head. "Do as you wish, but I warn you. This will not end well."

16 YEARS LATER

"Are you two about done down there?" Jesce shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. He didn't like this place. Didn't like it one bit. It was cold and dark. The stench of blood and decay wafted up into the large chamber from all the vaults they had unlocked. The Dark Side feasted and festered here, in this place of worship to the dark powers where souls had been sold and tortured, ripped apart by the crippling cruelness of the Dark Masters.

"We're coming, Jes!" Charly's call came faint and distant, coming from somewhere underground. There was a tugging on the tether and Jesce held onto the line for extra support as the two young Jedi Knights climbed out of the vault. "I think we're about done here," Charly commented, brushing some of the grime off his leggings.

"Good."

"Adam?" Charly turned to look at the third Jedi present. "Are you alright? You haven't said a word for the longest time."

The blonde shook his head. "I'm fine. This place is giving me the creeps."

"Tell me about it," Jesce muttered. "Let's get out of here. "

They turned and made their way toward the ship. Once on board, Adam stalked off to his quarters almost immediately while Charly and Jesce got them off planet.

"Binks has been acting strange," Jesce commented a little bitterly.

"Maybe that's because you intimidate him," Charly remarked lightly, stretching out in the co-pilot's chair.

"Hmph. Well can you blame me for being suspicious?"

"Jes, it's been years. He's a Jedi now, a knight. When will you stop seeing him as a Darksider?"

"Honestly? Probably never."

Charly sighed, a little exasperated. "What about Jedi compassion?"

"Shut up, Charly. I don't need the Code thrown in my face. At any case… this mission was a damn waist of time. We didn't get any closer to the pyramid."

Charly nodded, thoughtfully, staring out the viewport at the spacelanes. "Yes…I was so sure it was there, too." He shuddered involuntarily. "I even thought I had felt it. It's somewhere near by I can feel it…somewhere close but out of reach."

"Yea, well, the Force damn Council should check their sources next time before sending us off on another wild bantha chance. I'm tired of these festering hell holes."

"Calm down, Jes. I'm sure we'll find it soon."

The door made a hollow clicking sound as it locked behind the young Jedi Knight. He sank onto his bunk before taking out his supplies pack and unfastening it. His hands trembled slightly as he reached into the pack, searching for his terrible, newly-acquired treasure. He pulled it out and dropped the pack to the floor with a muted clunk.

The pyramid was coal black, its surface plates smooth and shiny. It was small, yet, the power it radiated was frightening. The lights in the room flickered ominously, the Force filling with the commanding black presents of the Sith holocron. Adam stared at the pyramid with a disarming awe, his mind beginning to drift. The phantom of the pyramid creped around him, inky tentacles projected through the Force, searching for a way into his mind, his soul.

Adam fell back on his training, his stunned senses resorting to instinct. The young knight drew up his shields, his breath quickened as he tried to regain control of his full thinking ability. A hypnotizing hum began in the Force, beckoning him to come forth and lower his shields. The pyramid seemed to call to him in a searing, hissing tongue that he should not have been able to understand but somehow did. The pyramid was calling to some inner level of his consciousness that he could not determine. The tentacles prodded and poked around his shields. They sought cracks in his defenses.

"What do you want from me?" Adam could hear himself say.

Ahasha…muranu prehashu…onishi hatah hanah harah…mesaha…katah… onishi hatah hanah…

Adam shuddered. The Blood Oath. He was hearing the Blood Oath of the Sith. But how? Why? Where could he have possibly…?

"Adam?" A sharp knock on the door and Charly's voice broke the trance. The voices disappeared and the soft red glow that had started to radiate around the pyramid begun to disappear. "Adam, are you alright?"

With shaking hands the young knight stuffed the pyramid back into his pack. "I'm fine, Charly." He waved his hand and the door slid open. "I was just meditating," he lied, not meeting Charly's eyes.

"Meditating? Adam, you were giving off some disturbing waves within the Force. Are you sure everything is alright? I promise Jesce isn't eavesdropping around the corner; you can tell me."

"I'm fine," Adam snapped.

Charly looked at him for a moment, as though contemplating whether he should sat anything else or not. "Alright," he said finally. "If you say so." The door slid shut.

Adam knew that he should return the pyramid. It was dangerous. His first encounter with it had been anything but pleasant. He never should have hidden it in the first place.

But there was something about the holocrone that drew him to it. Every time he meant to surrender it to the Council some part of him revolted. He wondered, bemusedly, if maybe the Force wanted him to keep it. Maybe the pyramid hid within its dark depths some awesome secrete that he was meant to know.

The feeling that he needed to protect this pyramid came from somewhere deep within him. Some buried part of his soul where he buried all his anger and regrets. That place where emotions smoldered to ashes and grudges festered into abominations. A place that no Jedi should ever access or even posses. But Adam did. It had always been there, from the early days of his childhood. He had little memory of what had happened before he had been brought to the Temple. He knew he had been associated with the Sith – they had been in the process of preparing him for apprenticeship perhaps? There were flashes of memory, so dark and cold that he mainly shied away from them, not wanting to know anymore then he saw in these brief glimpses of his past. But that was years ago. He had been so young, how could anything be left of that past? He barely remembered it.

The pyramid promised answers.

Adam did not wish to admit what lay between him and the pyramid even to himself. He had felt it there after the first trance that he had been forced into by the holocrone's power – a bond. Something like a Force bond with another person, yet different. It was merely a week link but that was all that the pyramid needed. It whispered its urgings to him when the night came, calling to him, seducing him into opening its secrets and absorbing its power into his soul.

Whatever possessed him to actually indulge the whispers would never make sense to him.

The room was half dark; the faint glow of a single glowlamp was the only light in the room. Adam found himself pacing back and forth, torn between the desire to call Charly and to brave the darkness on his own.

The decision was never consciously made. The pyramid was there in his hands without him even realizing that he had gone for it. He stared at it blankly for a long moment before sliding his hand over the front panel and lowering his shields several notches.

The front panel begun to slide open. A red light glowed from the mouth of the pyramid. Adam began to fall...

The chamber was almost completely devoid of light. The gruesome ancient engravings on the walls stared with their blank lifeless faces into the chamber. The red lightsabers glowed around the circumference of the room, streaks of crimson light celebrating the corruption of one more young soul as he was admitted into their midst.

The boy who knelt in the middle of the floor was clothed in black, his cloak pooling around him on the floor. A man stood above him, haunted red eyes gleaming in the darkness, staring out of a hollow shadowed face, cruel and insensitive.

"Ahasha…muranu prehashu…onishi hatah hanah harah…mesaha…katah… onishi hatah hanah harah…" the young trainee recited with great precision, keeping his eyes riveted to the cold stone beneath him.

The man standing in front of the boy turned his head slowly, his eyes burning into Adam. "Come, boy. Do you not remember?"

Adam flinched. Recognition dawned on him, a recognition he didn't think he could ever pull off. It was now all as clear as day. Everything had always been so muddled so muted when it came to his past before the Jedi Temple. But now…now that he was here the memories sprang at him. The ancient monastery where he had grown up, the ceremony that took one from a trainee to an apprentice, the boys in his clan…and the man in front of him. The Dark Master whom he had always desired to impress. The childhood ambition burned with an intense clarity in his heart. He struggled against the torrent of feeling. His eyes swept the chamber to see it anyone else had noticed him. But they hadn't. It was like he was invisible to all but this Dark Master. The figures surrounding the ceremony remained motionless and the boy whom Adam had identified as Seren Migil was still reciting the Blood Oath.

"See, Adam. When you had left with the Jedi you abandoned your training and this is what happened – Migil took your place."

Hot anger burned in him as he watched his rival take his place by the man who should have been his master.

"You could have had power, Adam. You could have been great. Now…you are a Jedi. A traitor to your training. Pity that I had thought so highly of you."

"The Jedi are my friends," Adam protested weekly. "They aren't bad…it doesn't have to be this way." Memories of his early training rushed at him, overwhelming his mind with long overcome habits and instincts, denouncing the Jedi even as he defended them.

"So they want you to believe. But have the Jedi ever accepted you even though you have accepted them? When they took you from your home and threw you into a pack of their own did they ever consider your feelings on the matter?"

Adam shivered. He remembered those first few weeks, months even, in the initiate's wing. No one would even speak to him. Except for Charly.

"Charly…" he murmured, as though the name could banish all the demons that were demanding entry into his mind and soul. "Charly…"

"…Despises you," the Dark Master finished. "He despises you because you are a burden for him with all your need to be defended."

Adam felt his world beginning to slowly shatter. "No…" he whispered helplessly. The darkness fed off of his despair, becoming stronger, beckoning him to step into its murky realm.

"Come, Adam. Take the oath. Take the Blood Oath and be rid of all this pain and confusion. Be with those who admire and respect you. Become my apprentice. It is not too late. The Dark Side welcomes you."

He didn't want to do it. But some force pulled Adam to his knees before the Dark Master. The ceremony surrounding them faded away, leaving him alone with the Dark Master, cloaked in shadows, guided and empowered by dark energies. Words spilled from Adam's lips, words in a tongue that he though he had long forgotten. The words of an oath that should have been erased by years and the partial mind wipe the Jedi had administered. The darkness embedded in his soul by his early training mixed with the dark energies swirling around him, forming a phantom shadow that snatched control of his body and mind. The words came easily, damning him more and more with every completed vow.

"…Ahasha shadaha torehe fghete demisheh hovsha onishi hatah hanah harah…"

…I pledge myself to the darkness mind, body, heart, and soul…

"I will beat you one of these days, Charly," Jesce proclaimed, brandishing his lightsaber hilt at his friend.

"We'll see about that," Charly replied with a grin.

The two knights stepped out of the training room and headed toward the housing wing of the temple. Their conversation died away and Charly lost himself in contemplation. "Have you ever had a feeling that something was off ever since we returned from our last mission?" he asked suddenly.

"There's a war going on, Charly. Something's always off."

"No…no, this is different. Maybe I'm going crazy but I've been thinking about the pyramid a lot lately. Something's off Jes and I don't know what it is. The Dark Side seems to be closer now…almost like…almost like there's a source of it somewhere here in the temple."

Jesce considered his words carefully. "Hm, I don't know, maybe you're right. You think Binks knows something?"

"Why would Adam know anything?" They turned into the housing complex.

"You know how intimately the Dark Side would be able to speak to him."

"Point taken. However—Ah!"

"Charly? Charly, what's wrong?" Jesce stepped in front of his friend, placing both hands on the other Jedi's shoulders as Charly wavered slightly, putting a hand to his temple. Jesce reached into the Force and recoiled. Waves of disturbance were flowing through its usually tranquil current. "What the—"

"The pyramid…it's here. Its somewhere in the temple…" The memory flash sent him reeling. The way Adam had looked after they met back after separating during the search of another vault. The way Adam wouldn't meet his eyes when he answered his questions with a quite, "No, I found nothing." The desperate, protective way he clung to his supplies pack… "Oh, dear Force, Adam!"

They raced toward Adam's quarters. The closer the two Jedi got to their destination the thicker the darkness grew. Charly slid to a stop in front of Adam's quarters. "Adam!" he called, knocking sharply.

"You're kidding me right?" Jesce asked incredulously. He reached into the Force and the door crashed to the floor. They sprinted inside.

The only light in the room was a flickering glow lamp and a red glow coming from the center of the room where the ominous pyramid presided over Adam, who stood as though in a trance. He was muttering something in a tongue that nether Charly nor Jesce could understand.

Jesce shot forward, activating his 'saber as he ran.

"Jes, no!"

Jesce ignored the call, swinging his lightsaber at the Sith holocrone. A ray of blue light pierced the pyramid and it crumbled, shacking violently.

"Shields!" Charly cried out. Both knights drew up their mental shields to their highest extent. Charly created a Light bubble around Adam. The bubble was faulty as it was made in haste but it would have to do.

The pyramid exploded in a black cloud of smoke and dark energy. The windows of the apartment shattered. Adam, the more vulnerable of the three, passed out and fell to the floor unconscious.

In seconds that seemed to last hours it was over.

"Jesce, get Knight Bonray on the comm," Charly called over his shoulder as he hurried to Adam's side, kneeling by his friend to make sure he was alright.

Jesce was already punching in the frequency.

It took Gordon Bonray only a few minutes to get to Adam's quarters. He took one look at the scene – at the warped remains of the pyramid – and the truth was only too apparent. It stared him straight in the face.

"Do as you wish, but I warn you. This will not end well."