In the end, his words provoked only one image that mattered. Her own face reflected in a mirror as she fitted the mask of the Dark Lord of the Sith to it, obscuring it behind iconography, becoming Darth Revan. This image, repeated a hundred times, a thousand times, ever since the Mandalorian Wars began, when she cut off the head of one of Mandalore's finest and made a mockery of it.

Revan stared at the disfigured man before her, as he laughed himself sick at the irony of Revan helping the Jedi. Behind her, Bastila tried to explain, tried to stutter something out, but Revan didn't hear her. The only one in her vision was Malak.

"So I'm Revan," she said, a twisted smile creeping across her face. "And you're Malak. And Malak never faced Revan in battle. Malak fired on her ship from miles away." She unclipped her saber from her belt. "Because Malak is an incompetent fool."

Malak's laughter stopped in its tracks. "You dare," he seethed through his vocoder. "You should've seen the betrayal coming. There is more to weakness than physical skill. You were always weak of heart."

"Excuses." Revan ignited one end of her saber, then the other, filling the room with its violet glow. "Excuses from a dead man."

Malak barely had time to freeze Carth and Bastila before a whirlwind of purple descended on him. Revan was a storm of violent energy, her lightsaber twirling and driving at Malak with a ferocity he never expected from a Jedi puppet. It was all he could do to light his own weapon and deflect the blows, even as she drove him back further and further into the network of pressure doors.

Revan saw the fear in his eyes as she backed him into a corner. He crouched beneath the fury of her blows, beneath the lightning in her eyes, and every parry drove him closer and closer to the ground and to decapitation and a final ending to this absurd tale of student and master. She grinned wildly, until he managed to pull up on the next parry and send her saber spinning from her grasp, clattering to the floor twenty feet away as it turned itself off.

He had no time to gloat, even as he tried to - his laughter was interrupted by Revan simply throwing both her hands in his direction and channeling a torrent of lightning into his flesh. And he screamed, a terrible sound through the vocoder, his jaw flashing and sparking, cords popping out from where it attached to the stump she'd left him with.

"I tore off that prattling overconfident jaw of yours after you destroyed Telos," she sneered as he collapsed. "You dare to mock me with that thing I built for you?"

Malak could feel the lightning eating into his eyes, through his veins, even leaving his body through his fingertips as he came closer and closer to the floor. Revan's eyes flashed in the glow of her assault, her black hair flying wildly in the force of the storm she was unleashing. Malak choked as he realized he was going to die.

Until someone called her name. Her fake name.

The woman torturing Malak couldn't be her. Bastila hadn't been able to see the Dark Lord since Taris. Malae could be dangerous, could be angry, could go too far when an enemy hurt her friends, but this was something else. This was Revan.

It was Revan standing over Malak and cackling, lightning spewing from her fingers. Her veins stood out from her face as the glow of lightning flashed across it, and all Bastila could see as she rounded the corner was the face that had stared at her after she'd struck the mask from Revan's head, the face that had called her pathetic, the face that had cursed her for giving Malak the opportunity, the face that had said, before all its memories were gone, you could never have killed me on your own. Their bond was gone, and all Bastila could feel coming from the woman torturing the Dark Lord were waves of anger and hate and hurt blooming off of her in black and red waves, like a great supernova in the Force.

It was not Malae. It was not the woman she had shared nights with on Kashyyk, staring out into the forest together and talking about what had transpired below. It was not the woman who'd convinced her to reconnect with her mother. It was not the woman who had risked everything just to spare the life of a giant shark. It was not the woman she had kissed in a moment of weakness in the cargo bay as they left Manaan and headed straight into the Leviathan's jaws.

Yet that was the name she called out. The name she had picked for the false history the Jedi gave her. And when she called, the lightning stopped.

Malae's eyes turned back to blue, and her hair fell back to her shoulders, and Malak stopped his screaming. Her arms dropped to her sides as she looked at Bastila. "You knew," she whispered. And then Malak struck.

He ignited his lightsaber and flailed wildly at Malae as she tried to back away. Her arm dropped to the steel floor, and she screamed, staring at Bastila all the while.

Bastila acted in an instant, drawing her own weapon and throwing it at Malak as it ignited, slicing his mechanical jaw clean off. As the weapon returned to her, she thrust herself between Malak and Malae, blocking a fatal blow from cutting Malae in two. As Malae crumpled to the floor behind her, Bastila pressed the attack, sending Malak and herself behind another of the bulkheads, leaving Malae's mutilated body on the ground behind her, praying that she could stop the Dark Lord from finishing his betrayal at long last.

Carth found her saber first, sitting on the floor just in front of the door he'd managed to finally hack open. His eyes moved up from there to see her, and her arm, lying on the ground ahead. "No," he whispered, despite himself, as he snatched up her weapon and ran to her side. "No," he said again, even though he should be happy to see Revan lying on the ground, at his mercy. He could pull his blaster and fire right into her head. He could take revenge for all of the Republic. But as he looked at her face, with tear streaks running down it, all he could see was Malae, the woman who had brought him halfway across the galaxy, by her side, always by her side.

Canderous' gruff tones interrupted his thoughts. "Flyboy, get your ass down to the Hawk before I leave without you. We can't stay here," his pocket said.

Carth clipped her lightsaber onto her belt and hoisted her up with both arms. "Where's Bastila?" he asked, and her eyes struggled to open.

"Alek," she murmured.

"Can we get to her?"

"Let me down. I can-I'll kill him-" She squirmed in his grasp.

"You've lost an arm, you're in shock, you're in no condition to fight," Carth told her, and she seemed to really look at her stump for the first time, and went limp again.

"Onasi! Hawk! Now!" Canderous shouted, and Carth ran.

As the hangar opened up wide before him, Carth could feel the woman in his arms stirring. "Where..." she asked, but he was already pounding up the Ebon Hawk's rising ramp, nearly bowling over Zaalbar as he headed straight for the medical bay.

"Get Jolee!" he shouted to Zaalbar as he laid Malae on the cot. "And tell Canderous to get up to the gun turret, now!" He ran into the cockpit and switched seats with Canderous just as another Interdictor ship flared into existence in front of him - he only had a moment to spare before he'd be caught in another tractor beam. He gunned the Ebon Hawk out of the hangar and down between the ships, and hit light speed as soon as the computer told him it wouldn't kill him.

He laid back in the seat and sighed. There was too much to tell the crew.