Notes: Hi, and welcome to my story! I like to focus a lot on characters, particularly that of The Exile. As such, I feel like it's important to have some idea of who she is before we dive in to the cannon(ish) events of the game. In more practical terms, that means that this story starts a little bit before the events of the game, though what exactly happened immediately prior is still a mystery, at least to The Exile. If you aren't interested by any of that and want to jump straight to Peragus, head to chapter 7, entitled The Lost.
Prologue
Meetra Surik waited, eyes screwed shut, and counted silently in her head while the world burned around her. It helped keep her focused on the warm pool of power deep within her that kept her safe while her men were slaughtered around her.
They'd been on this accursed planet for nearly a week, outgunned and outmanned two to one, holding the line on little more than the promise that this could be, would be, the end. The final battle, the end of the long night. Only she knew the truth of just how dark this night would become.
A fireball landed not six meters away, close enough to feel the heat of chemical flames through her thick brown robe and sending those closer screaming into the night, brilliant torches bright enough to see through her closed eyelids. The chemical fire was too hot to put out, and with her mind Meetra watched dispassionately with the rest of her soldiers as the men and women, with discipline that once had once brought her to tears, ran into the night to spare their fellows the same fate.
A deafening bellow roared to the black sky as the mammoth guns behind her returned fire. To Meetra's heightened senses she could feel the groaning crunch as the roots of the smoldering grass beneath her tore and snapped while the ground itself churned under the titanic strain. Men and women screamed, grunted, sweat, and died, and their blood dripped through the new-formed wounds in the planet itself, or vaporized in a spray of super-heated laser, becoming part of the very air they breathed.
And it went on, and on, and on.
Once she had felt overwhelmed by compassion for those who died, their minds overwhelmed by pain before the end came. But not today. Not now. She couldn't lose focus now. Instead she shivered like the child she hadn't been in years and slid deeper into the warmth of her inner pool, away from the fingers of cold and terror that reached out to her. She couldn't go to them. Not yet. So long as she stayed here in the water she was safe, but the pool was so small here on this accursed planet, a bare puddle to protect her.
So little, but it would be enough.
The timer went off in her head as the mind half a continent away shifted from feverish energy to a curiously resigned sense of completion. Her command had been obeyed, their purpose here accomplished.
In an instant she was on her feet, oblivious to the ragged cheer of the handful of survivors around her at her movement, but consciously ignoring the surge of hope in their hearts as they began to believe they might survive. "Time to leave, boys," she rasped in a dry voice she'd lost days ago. She moved like lightning and a bare few moments later she was in the field, mortars falling all around, and there were only enemies before her.
No more time to plan, to think. Now she need only act, and letting go was like the first desperate gasp of air to the drowning woman. She no longer fought the hands that tugged her from the pool but embraced them, exulted in their touch as they tugged at her body and mind, clasped tight, and pulled her towards her enemies with all the power and haste of beating wings, a violent rush of motion that carried her faster than her pain or thought could follow, and she was free in the mindless pursuit of victory and violence.
Green fire hissed to life in her hands an her face set into a rictus of hatred, her banshee shriek lost in the cacophony of war as she soared towards the distant armored forms of the foes she' fought on a dozen burning worlds. Burning. They were always burning. But now she was the fire, and as they caught sight of her bloodstained, pockmarked armor indistinguishable from the ash-smeared, broken, unstoppable woman who wore them, she could almost hear the shouts that had heralded the death of so many of their fellows.
"Jedi!"
10 years later
The capital ship bridge buzzed with the activity of professionals behind schedule and desperately trying to catch up even as the number of tasks outpaced their capacity to finish them. The tired, not quite desperate urgency permeated the air, and it was epitomized in the form of the commanding admiral. He sat upright in his command chair, his orange and red Republic uniform well-fitted and pressed, yet somehow there was the sense of a man beaten down one too many times, as if his soul slouched on his ramrod straight frame. He watched impassively over his crew as they went about their duties, lost in thought.
The communications officer caught her commander's attention as she stepped up to his command chair. She offered a sharp salute which he acknowledged with a nod. "Commander, I have a message passed over from intelligence for you."
"Put it up on the board, Lieutenant."
The officer hesitated for a moment. "Forgive me, sir, but it was marked as private."
"Very well, I'll take it in my quarters." With a barely discernible sigh he pulled himself upright, accepted the sealed classified file on his datapad, and marched with measured, strong strides into the turbolift. He stood with perfect parade-ground rest position until the lift door shut, then slid sideways to lean against the wall and closed his eyes. The lines on his face seemed to deepen as his grim expression relaxed, and transformed from marks of hard-earned experience to the scars of a man surprised he could still go on.
The turbolift slid to a halt and the admiral stepped into his private quarters. They were cramped by an terrestrial standards outside of Coruscant, but the word "private" made them luxurious by definition on a warship. He passed the file from his datapad to his secure terminal with a few deft commands and in a moment was listening to a recorded message in a garbled voice.
The message concluded and the admiral sat stock still. After a few moments he gave himself a little shake and leaned back in his chair, thinking aloud. "It's not her. It won't be her – she's left you, like you always knew would happen. It's got to be another. But still, the Republic can't just ignore this." He leaned forward and tapped the intercom.
::Yes, sir?::
"Liutenant, is the Harbinger still en-route to Onderon?"
::I believe so, sir.::
"Hail her, Lieutenant. Onderon will have to wait, we have another priority."
There were no lights on in the abandoned warehouse, noted the droid's sensors. That condition was debilitating to most organic beings, yet this was definitely the meeting place it had come so far to find. With a low "dwooooo" it gathered its courage and slipped inside. Though the darkness did not inconvenience the astromech, it did give it pause, and it rolled forward cautiously on its three legs. The droid had escaped enough danger to know when it was about. A voice, female and hard, spoke out and froze the droid in place. "You have sought me out, machine. Why?"
The droid wasted no time replying in the beeps and boops of its machine language, conscious as it was to the impatience of the woman, and instead played a hologram. The faint light of the hologram dimly illuminated the space around the droid and revealed to its optic sensors an old woman heavily swathed in a brown coat so dark it looked black in the low light. She watched the hologram silently until it fell quiet. The darkness seemed even deeper as the pale light faded away. The little droid forced himself to wait patiently while the woman contemplated. It was nearly five minutes later when at last she spoke. "Come, machine. The battle is rejoined, and it would not do to be left on the sidelines when the most important piece is yet to be claimed."
Deep in a cavernous meditation chamber a man sat meditating by the red light of holocrons. He was of indeterminate race, despite wearing only thick black pants and heavily worn combat boots. His skin was an unnatural iron gray and fractured, hundreds of minute cracks running across him, growing their widest on the right side of his face where they framed his dead eye which had no pupil.
A distant rumble echoed through the chamber as the weakened planet shivered, a pale echo of the violence the planet had experienced. The man shivered in unison, filling his very essence with the pain the planet felt, each crack in his skin a perfect reflection of a gaping chasm on the planet's surface. A new crack had opened, he could feel it. The comforting grip of his combat knife hovered over his left arm while he contemplated where exactly this new depth of pain belonged.
His meditation was interrupted by a soft tap on the chamber door. Despite not moving a muscle, the intruder was hauled bodily before the meditator and hung, feet held an inch off the ground, clutching at his neck.
"Why have you interrupted me?" The man's voice was deep and gravelly, as torn as his skin.
"My... my lord... we have found... we've found another!"
With that the servant collapsed to the ground, released by his master.
"Prepare my ship."
The servant hurried out of sight, trying not to gasp too loudly, and soon quiet settled over the meditation chamber again. Though this time communion with the planet was hard to achieve. Instead, he whispered his thoughts into the dark.
"Where I hear a whisper, you hear roar, my former master. It made you strong. But it also makes you predictable. I underestimated you once in letting you live. It will not happen again."