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Her hand spasmed against her will as she sat down against the wall in the hold at the rear of her new apprentice's ship. She could have taken the pilot's seat, but the ship was unfamiliar to her, and she preferred the hard, uncomfortable floor of the hold at the moment over the comfort of a chair.

Only hours had passed since Darth Bane, Dark Lord of the Sith had perished. And while Zannah was exhausted physically from the duel that had culminated in his death, she was even more exhausted mentally. Calling on so much dark side energy, even on a world ripe with it, had been extremely taxing. And while it had saved her life, it had almost come at the cost of her soul when her former Master had then tried to install his own consciousness in her mind, effectively overwriting her.

But Zannah's will was stronger than Bane had counted on when he'd tried to steal her body from her. Though she had come within barely a hair's breadth from failing to repel him, she had in fact managed it. The Rule of Two was intact. Bane's legacy would live on. She had wrenched the mantle of Dark Lord from his shoulders and proven herself worthy. She only hoped that her apprentice would display as much promise when her time came.

She clenched her hand tightly, her nails digging into her palms and drawing blood. She drew on that small measure of pain, using it to fuel the darkness within her so that she could stop her hand's quivering.

Bane's hand had trembled much as hers now was in his later years. Was it possible that he had somehow damaged her during their fierce battle of wills within her mind? Or could it have been a side-effect of having drawn so heavily and continuously on the dark side to save her life? She had never known for sure what had caused the muscle damage to Bane's hand—whether it was a side-effect of the dark side or from a decade of hosting the parasitic orbalisks that had made him near-invincible at the cost of his sanity.

Now that he was dead, she could never ask him to know for sure.

A stabbing pain just below her ribs tore Zannah from her reflections and she opened her eyes and looked up to see the young Iktotchi female withdrawing a hypodermic from her abdomen to toss it into a disposal unit. She hissed, enraged that her apprentice had violated her personal space without permission.

"The pain might be preferable right now, Master," Cognus started blandly, "but the cracked ribs are going to need to heal properly, or else you will be of no use to me."

She was right, of course. Pain was but one emotion that fuelled the dark side. But there were others—hatred, fear, hopelessness, anger. What Zannah really needed at that moment was to heal. Only the strong survive. That was the creed of the Sith. Zannah would not be fit to rule if she allowed the injuries to her ribs to heal improperly and hamper her abilities as a whole. She had to ensure that Cognus learned everything there was to be taught to her before she challenged her Master. And if there was one thing the dark side was not strong in, it was the healing arts.

"Very well." She allowed the second hypodermic to pierce her lower-left thigh, injecting bacta into her blood stream to aid in the healing process. After the hypo was disposed of, her apprentice left the hold for the cockpit.

After a minute, there was a sudden lurch as the ship took off from the surface. Minutes after that, they were in orbit over desolate Ambria, where Zannah had spent the first decade of her apprenticeship to Bane. There was nothing there for her now. Caleb and his daughter were both dead—both slain on the world that had thought an escape from the horrors of the rest of the galaxy. Bane had met his end there as well, by Zannah's hand. If the world was to have any meaning to the new Sith Lord now, it would be as the place where she had finally taken that which was rightfully hers—that which Bane had promised her for twenty years.

But rather than lingering on those sentiments, Darth Zannah directed her thoughts forward. Now that she had taken Bane's place, it was up to her to continue to lay down the seeds of the Jedi's eventual destruction. She knew that it was unrealistic to believe that the demise of the Jedi's would ever come about in her lifetime. Realism was one of the first lessons Bane had imparted upon her. But that was not to say that she could be expected to have no influence on those future events. Decisions she made now, actions she took, could one day be instrumental in actions taken by countless Sith successors that would directly lead to the elimination of their ancient enemy.

New contacts would need to be forged. New identities for her and her apprentice created and the life that she and Bane had known would need to be concluded. First …

"Set course for Ciutric four," she told her apprentice after getting back to her feet and stumbling into the cockpit. Darth Cognus had been double- and triple-checking system readouts while patiently awaiting further instructions. "We must tie up any loose ends Bane left behind. Any evidence of Sith interest on Ciutric must be purged before you can begin your training."

Without a word, the Iktotchi apprentice entered the coordinates for the Ciutric system into the navigational systems, and the Stalker lurched forward into hyperspace.

Despite her desire for dreamless sleep, Zannah was haunted by the memory of Bane that night.

He was wild; his strikes hammered down against her twin blades with a power that she had never felt from him before, and would likely never feel the likes again. She knew that he had held back in their sparring in the past, but she had never known just how much that he was keeping in reserve, just how much he was hiding.

Released with the fullness of his rage now, he was whittling away at her defences almost faster than she could keep up with him. Form III was an excellent defensive form of lightsaber combat, and Zannah had spent twenty years mastering it, perfecting it, making it her own. On Tython, she had proved just how impenetrable it could be with the right person using the perfect weapon. She'd held off two Jedi—three blades—at once as her then-Master barrelled his way back and forth across two more.

But though Bane's fighting style since that day on Tython had become more reserved in response to the absence of the orbalisks that made him invulnerable to lightsabers, he still fought intensely aggressively. She could never have hoped to match him in brute strength if she had lived a thousand years trying. His strikes drove her to a knee more than once, overpowering her attempts to block them. Even when she tried to parry or redirect his blade, it left her shoulders and arms complaining with the effort.

But Zannah had other talents—talents that Bane himself could never use.

She began to call on the dark side, slowly; dividing her attentions so that Bane would not expect it coming. With enough forewarning, he could prepare an adequate defence against the coming assault, rendering her efforts useless. She had to keep him forcussed on her blades until the very last nanosecond so she could catch him unawares.

She fed the growing fire with anger and hatred, fuelling it, feeling it grow into an inferno in her mind.

The back of her foot caught against something—packed dirt—and she toppled backwards, sprawling across the two fresh graves Bane had driven her toward. If his plan had been to throw her off-balance—literally—he had succeeded. Zannah's concentration slipped and the fire within her mind began to wither, die.

Bane was on her in a heartbeat, taking advantage of her misfortune. His blade rained down on her hard and fast in stabbing and sweeping motions. His feet joined in the fray, stomping and kicking whatever the enraged Sith Lord could reach. Tough her position was ungainly, even hazardous to her health if maintained, Zannah fought back as fiercely as she could. She twisted and turned away from blade and foot alike, flailing with her own twin blades to keep most of the danger at bay.

She felt and heard the crack of bone as Bane's foot connected with her ribs. Pain spiked into her brain like a blade and her vision clouded over in bright starbursts. She funnelled the pain into her inner power, feeding it to the dark side and giving herself over to the Force. She swatted away his blades and escaped certain death by rolling backwards into a handspring. Bane came after her as she vaulted away again and again, but on her third landing as she placed her feet, she widened her stance and struck straight out with one of her blades. She hit only air: Bane, expecting the move, had stopped short to avoid being impaled.

The pain in her broken rib was great. She felt the bones grind against each other with every laboured breath she took. Exhaustion was creeping upon her rapidly. She knew that she had to do something to quickly negate the advantage that Bane had that was growing with each passing second. But she couldn't hold him off for long with her lightsaber anymore. Her damaged ribs made twisting and vaulting almost painfully debilitating. She had hoped to catch him off-balance with her sorcery, but now it was literally the only thing she had between surviving this encounter … and not.

Gathering the full force of the dark side, Zannah flung her will into her former Master's mind. There, she slithered amongst the neurons and probed the darkest crevices, searching for nightmares that every being possessed. She was almost surprised to find that Bane was indeed haunted by images, and unleashed them upon him. She could feel him resisting her. He was prepared. But after a moment, he screamed, and the sound almost brought Zannah to a halt. Though she could not see them, she knew that whatever Bane was seeing would have to have been beyond any form of terror she could imagine. But she held on, maintaining the spell. And somehow, so did Bane.

Slashing with his lightsaber at a nightmare only he could see, Bane seemed at all nothing like the great Sith Lord that Zannah had admired for so many years. Were it anyone else, she might have even driven them mad with those visions. But such was the respect she had for him, she felt that he deserved more. So she took a step towards him, maintaining the assault on his mind so that she could strike the final, deadly blow without hindrance.

Suddenly, Bane let out a primal bellow, and the dark side erupted around him. Zannah felt her spell's hold on his mind snap and the visions were thrust from him. Immediately, she checked her advance, holding her lightsaber out defensively. She gathered the dark side around her once more, drawing, this time, from the energy that had lain trapped beneath the surface of Ambria for centuries.

So strong, so present was her command of the darkness she summoned that it made manifest in dark, violet tendrils of crackling energy that snaked up from the ground around the two Sith. Almost smiling to herself, Zannah lashed out with the dark side tendrils. One of them passed across Darth Bane's shoulder. Cloth and flesh melted away as one, dissolving into nothingness.

Fear gripped her former Master, fear the likes she had never felt from him before, and he howled in pain. His body went into a momentary shock and he convulsed briefly, until he was able to push through the pain and make it serve him.

Zannah lashed out again with the darkness, revelling in the power she could feel building up within her. Bane spun around the tendril of dark energy that speared toward him. More tendrils lashed out, but the older Sith Lord dashed over, under and around them. He struck one with a powerful, violet cascade of Force lightning, but the tendril absorbed the deadly energy and kept on going.

When Bane reached her, Zannah thrust her lightsaber up to defend herself. But without the Force behind her parries, they were clumsy, amateurish. Bane hammered down again and again. With a complicated twisting motion, he hooked his lightsaber around hers and thrust it off to the side. She felt the handle of her weapon leave her hand, felt with the Force the blades being sucked back into the energy converters. Then she watched, fearful, as Bane, atop her prone form, raised his deadly blade to deliver the coup de grace. She reacted in the only way she could.

A dark tendril looped around Bane's arm at the elbow, vaporising flesh. The severed limb fell to the ground at his side; his lightsaber rolled free from the slackened grip and the blade sucked back into the hilt. She expected him to scream, to bellow. But he seemed struck dumb with shock. Zannah seized on that instantly. Another tendril looped around and darted toward the powerful Sith, aimed precisely to take his head from his shoulders.

Whether he sensed the incoming attack, or he was merely reacting to something else, Bane's remaining hand closed tight around her wrist. Power swirled around them, centring on Bane himself. Not knowing what he was planning, Zannah did the only thing she could—she dropped her command of the dark tendrils and pumped all of her power into her protective bubble of Force energy. There was a bright flash, and she looked away and shielded her eyes with her free hand temporarily to stop from being blinded. But when she looked up once more, Bane was gone. His body was no more than ash on the wind, sifting down around her. His arm was the only evidence that he had been there at all.

Zannah blinked. What was going on?

And then she felt it. Bane. His essence was still there, but—NO! He was inside her now! Zannah froze for but an instant when she realised exactly what was happening. Only now did she truly realise how right she had been. Not content to die so that his apprentice could ascend to his place, Darth Bane was trying to steal her body from her so that he could live on, perpetuating a bastardisation of his own, inviolate, Rule of Two; one to embody the power of the dark side and one to crave it, so long as Darth Bane was the eternal embodiment.

NO! The word was but a mental expression of her will to fight him. She felt him push back against her mind, trying to force her out of her own head. But he gravely underestimated her powers. Already, Zannah could feel him weakening. Each assault on his consciousness made him a little more diminished, and each thrust back against hers accomplished less than Bane intended.

Though there was no sound of it in the physical world, Zannah felt and heard her former Master's impotent scream of rage, defeat. She drew on the emotions coming from that one thing, using them to fuel the last shoves she needed to excise his essence from her mind completely.

The sound of footsteps approaching alerted her to the possibility of danger, and, though exhausted from the effort of destroying the last remnants of Darth Bane, Zannah opened her eyes.

Zannah woke with a start and a gasp for breath. She was back on the floor in the hold of the Stalker, and, she sensed, her apprentice was still in the cockpit behind the controls. For a moment, she felt the cold grip of fear; how could she have been so careless as to fall asleep with her new apprentice so close by and so untested in her loyalty? She did not really know the young Iktotchi. How could she know if Cognus would betray her prematurely?

The fact that she hadn't seemed to speak volumes to her commitment to the Sith, to her new Master. Zannah took some small comfort in that, but not enough to pacify her raging thoughts and suspicions.

Peace is a lie, there is only passion.

The nightmare of Bane's final act would haunt her for years—possibly the rest of her life. He had tried to cheat death at her expense. He had tried to circumvent that which he had set into place and drilled the importance of into his apprentice.

Perhaps he had been right on Doan. Maybe Zannah had waited too long to challenge him. Maybe she'd been so set on finding her own apprentice first that she had fallen into the trap of making Bane think she had no intentions on becoming the next Sith Lord. Certainly, she had waited long enough that Bane had found himself facing the possibility of a slow death of age and infirm and had been genuinely frightened enough of it to try and escape it.

And yet, for some reason the Sith could not fathom, she felt a small sense of loss at Bane's death. It went beyond her own sake. Bane had been the only constant companion she'd had for twenty years. He alone had understood the pain of a frightened ten-year-old girl on Ruusan. He had sensed her power moments after, in a fit of rage and grief, she had snapped the necks of the two Jedi Knights that had killed her Bouncer companion.

No, she thought to herself. Admit it: Laa was your friend. But it wasn't so. Laa had been the friend of Rain, the girl Zannah had been. She was a Sith Lord now, and she understood that Bane had sacrificed so much to get to where he had, and more to take her as his apprentice. The founder of the Rule of Two was dead, and his replacement vowed that his final sacrifice would not go in vain.

The Sith would grow stronger.

They would have their revenge.