Azix came to with the taste of ashes and blood in his mouth.
A red light blinked somewhere behind him, and every part of his body was sore and throbbing. He felt dazed, like he couldn't get his eyes to focus, and he took deep breaths as he reached for the calm he'd been taught to find inside.
It was out of reach. Nothing meet his grasp but the panicked flutter of his lungs and heart, caught in a rush of adrenaline. His blood pounded in his temples.
/There is no emotion, there is peace,/ he told himself, struggling to control his breathing despite the spasms in his lungs. /There is no contemplation, there is duty. There is no contemplation. There is only duty./ He threw the words up against the nameless terror in his brain, battered it with them until it subsided and he could think again.
His blurred vision began to resolve. He saw the instrument panel, sparking, shattered, the limp arm of a uniformed pilot flung beyond the dislodged back of her seat. He was hanging sideways from the crash harness, and as he forced his neck to turn, he understood that was because the shuttle was on its side.
His clothing was soaked. He moved numb fingers and dragged them across his armor, only to find a sheen of still-fresh blood. Not his – it was the wrong color. It was Sana's, and when he managed to twist enough to see her, he found her pale, mouth slack and open, eyes staring at nothing as more blood dripped from her shattered skull.
His stomach lurched, and it had nothing to do with the gore. /Sana./ He reached out, trying to find a pulse. His fingers barely responded to his commands - he watched them push, then bend against her throat without actually feeling anything. In the end it didn't matter. She was dead, and he might be dying if he didn't get the hoth out of that harness.
With his hands numb, he couldn't work the buckles, and he yanked at it, panic ramping up slowly as he tried to get the straps free. He reached out in The Force, found something violent and strong, and the metal tore apart with a shriek as he tumbled out of the seat and hit the row of seats below him, pushed into a mercifully padded jumble by the rock that had broken through the shuttle's hull.
A glimpse of gray light spilled across the bloodstained stuffing. Azix crawled toward it. Dragging his body off the pile of seats and corpses, he passed the pilot, who was so thoroughly crushed that he wasn't even tempted to check her for signs of life. The transparisteel window had succumbed to impact with volcanized rock and fragments of it lay scattered across the strange, crumbly ground… ashes, he realized when his hands clawed through them and the dust rose up to clog his airway. The topsoil had been seared and turned to dust laid over sharp, glassy planes. Old weapons, atom-splitters, left damage like this. Was that what had happened? In their desperation to stop the Sith Emperor, had the Republic and the Empire killed Ziost?
If so…. That was one down. A dozen more Imperial worlds waited, but progress was progress.
He pulled himself inch by inch out from under the shuttle's bulk. The ground trembled under him, and he wondered if the destruction was still happening. His head was clear, but that didn't necessarily mean anything - he hadn't been possessed immediately upon arrival on Ziost. Instead, he had watched his friends succumb one by one, then when it was his turn, he watched himself torment Master Surro until the Emperor took her too. He wondered what it was about that squirrelly little SIS agent that let him stay free and clear. His obvious treason couldn't be it - Azix had seen him with the Sith who came, who tore the Emperor's control apart. The Sith who freed him. But other Sith, and of course, hundreds of thousands of Imperial citizens and military had been swept up in the Emperor's grip without regard for their loyalties. Wasn't that their purpose anyway? They had chosen to worship and venerate ultimate evil. They couldn't pretend to be surprised when it devoured them.
Azix finally dragged himself free of the wreck and rolled onto his back, staring up into a flat gray sky. The ground beneath him was unforgiving. To the side, the blasted remains of a tree had been turned to charcoal, but still stood.
The ground rumbled again. Steady. Rhythmic. The side-swept branches of the tree, pointing one direction as if they'd been blown into that configuration by the blast, began to crumble and sift ash to the ground.
Azix felt it, then. The whole world was a black hole of Dark Side energy, but this knot of it was almost on top of him, and its mindless malice hit him hard enough to make him puke bile across the ashen ground. He coughed and forced himself to his feet, sucking in air full of ash particles that clung to his throat and made him hack violently. He spun, looking for the Monolith, and found it - four stories tall and half again as wide, its long-fingered hands crowned with hooked claws nearly dragging on the ground. It blended in with the environment around it, pebbly gray and black, as if it was made of stone. But its eyes burned with balefire, and when it saw him, Azix almost dropped where he stood. Locking eyes with the creature was like a searing wound to his soul, and his lungs closed, refusing to take in the soot-stained air.
/Run,/ he whispered to himself, feeling like even his thoughts were coming from far away as the creature took one ground-shaking step toward him, then another, keeping him pinned in place with his gaze. /Run./
/SURRENDER/, it thrummed at him, and he saw oblivion in the pale flames of its eyes.
In slow motion, like he was caught in a dream, he reached for his lightsaber. The holster was empty - the crash must have jarred it free.
/Okay, you have no weapon. Now you really have to run,/ he pleaded with himself. /One foot. MOVE. Go!/ He managed a shuffling step, but real progress didn't come until he managed to tear his gaze away from the towering monster's. He could still FEEL it, and he was breathless, his muscles turned to water, but he forced himself into a stumbling run. He didn't care that his limbs were flailing, or that he was sobbing breathlessly… looking cool was not a priority. What Ziost had been before, now it was a thousand times worse, the pressure of unimaginable death bearing down on him, choking him, blotting out the sky and the Light. He had to get somewhere sheltered, and then he could deal with it. He could collect himself, find the flame inside, something to beat the terror and the darkness back… if he could just get a moment's reprieve.
He ran blindly. Here and there, shriveled plant life turned to dried leather by the desiccation grabbed at his feet. He fell on his face when he put his foot on a ridge and it crumbled into black ash, and only when he was on the same level could he see that it was a corpse, the body of a person turned black, a faint dent in the mound of its head still suggesting its death scream. He felt the Monolith bearing down on him, right behind him, breathing down his neck, and he prayed, pleaded for something to give him strength.
The Light didn't answer. On this blasted wasteland of a world, there was none to be found.
His head was pounding and warping his vision with dizzy exhaustion by the time he spotted a cleft in the rock face. The Monolith's arms were so long, but he had to try… he plunged into the crack and cried out between his teeth as shards of volcanic rock tore at his arms and scraped across his armor. Ignoring the pain, he wiggled deeper, groping, dragging himself along until he found the end of the narrow cave and fell on the ground in a heap, sobbing.
The gray light outside was still. The ground was still.
Azix didn't know how long it took him to come back to himself. He only knew that he came back like he was coming out of a dream, or delirium, eyes locked on that meandering crack of gray light. There was no sound - the silence was the most terrible oppression. No living world sounded so utterly still, save the soft howl of wind threading between pillars of blasted rock.
Cuts on his arms and hands were scabbing over. Azix wiped his palms on his pants and tried to wipe his face, but every inch of him was drenched in filth and there was no relief for his burning eyes or his acid-raw throat.
He made it to his feet and stumbled to the entrance. He navigated more carefully this time. Looking out, he saw cliffs and upthrusts of rock, dead plant remains, and shattered ground. There was no sign of the Monolith. It was as if he'd imagined it.
He emerged slowly and tried to get his bearings. How far had he run? Which direction had he come from? The shuttle would have a few basic supplies, and he would need them if he was going to trek across this desert. There'd be a distress beacon too, and he could pull that out along with a couple of power cells and bring them somewhere less exposed. Maybe there was still someone out there who could rescue him.
He tore his sleeves from the elbows down and wrapped his hands. Then he began to scale a promontory. From higher ground, he would doubtless be able to spot the shuttle and make sure the area was clear of monsters before he went back. While he climbed, he reached inside. Every Jedi carried the flame, the light that could push back the darkness. Even in a place like this, a Dark Side Nexus that had been further poisoned by such total obliteration, HIS light had not gone out. He reached, and he coaxed, and he tried to fan the flicker into a glow that would burn away his fear.
What he got was shaky at best, and when he tried to guide it into his lungs and his muscles, it faltered. He climbed the rock under his own power, pausing at intervals to breathe and hack up blackened spit.
When he reached the top, he saw the shuttle. He also saw the Monolith, apparently NOT a figment of his imagination. The creature, however, seemed disinterested in the wreck and was slowly making its way into a nearby canyon. He watched its hulking form disappear behind towering rock walls and allowed himself a shred of relief.
On the way back, he learned how to walk in a way that kicked up the minimum amount of ash, so he wasn't constantly surrounded by a gritty cloud. Now that the panic was gone, he felt weak, like someone had pulled the plug on his strength. His knee was swollen to twice its size and stiff, but he wasn't sure if that happened in the crash or after, during his mad dash across the perilous ground. He passed a fissure in the rock leaking wisps of blue gas, and gave it a wide berth.
There was no question of moving the shuttle. On a good day he might have been able to summon the Force, but this was not a good day. He was reduced to circling the wreck, looking for a way in. He found the airlock and pried open the rescue panel to unseal it, climbing on top of the overturned craft and carefully sliding down into the belly of it.
It smelled like blood and death inside. Someone had voided their bowels, either during the crash or during their expiration. He tried to reach out and sense any signs of life, but there was nothing but the pounding, migraine-inducing headache of the Dark. Abandoning that effort, he started digging for the emergency supplies. In the aft section of the shuttle the cabinets had been bent shut, but he managed to pry them open. He found a set of crash packs and dropped them carefully outside the shuttle, then pulled the floor open and began to work a power cell loose.
Azix lost track of time while he was struggling with the power cells. They were reluctant to yield, even though they were supposed to pop right out for easy replacement. He gave up on the third one and resigned himself to having only two. No chance of solar while the sky remained so overcast, so he'd have to reserve the cells for the beacon. Speaking of…
The instrument panel was wrecked enough that he could reach the beacon, as long as he didn't mind practically lying in the smeared brains of the pilot. He got a grip on his stomach and tried to ignore it as he wedged himself into the cramped space and worked at exhaustingly difficult angles. His sweat, black with soot, dripped into his eyes and he cursed everything, from The Force to the Sith, to Theron Shan, to his own parents for ever bringing him into this crapsack universe, to Ziost for existing, to the Emperor for deciding to personally ruin HIS day in particular. And that particular Sith, the one who'd come along at the last minute to throw a wrench into the Emperor's plans, who'd freed Azix and Sana and Druum so they could be evacuated, only for them to get knocked out of the sky by… whatever had done this. Whatever the Emperor had unleashed, in the end, his Ultimate Plan.
/Something's happening,/ Sana had said, just before the turbulence hit. Her eyes had gone large and wet, tears spilling over her cheeks. /No….He's coming. We can't.../ And then the pilot had shouted for them to brace for impact, and everything went dark and Azix was knocked around like a dried legume in a can.
Now Sana was stiffening in her restraints, rigor mortis turning her wooden. Druum had been seated on the side of the shuttle that hit the ground, and trying to identify specific parts of him wasn't a healthy use of Azix's time.
Good Jedi, both of them. Strong, committed to the Republic's cause. Like him, they had laid their doubts on the altar of sacrifice and made themselves into weapons of freedom.
"We submit our wills so that others can be free," Master Surro had said. "We accept total sublimation in the name of justice, in the name of peace."
/There is no contemplation,/ Azix told himself as he carefully turned the bracket at an angle that made his wrist spasm with pain. /There is duty. There is duty. There is duty./
The mantra calmed and focused him. Over and over, he thought he felt the ground rumble and he froze, but after a long silence, he went back to working.
The pulse beacon finally dropped out of its casing. Azix held it above his head and scooted, inching on his back out from under the instrument panel. He dragged some wiring out with him. The temptation to just stay put and rest all his screaming muscles was strong, but the smell dissuaded him. He climbed out, dropped to the ground with his hands full, and fell over in a heap when his bad knee gave out.
He lay there instead, and got his breath.
It really wasn't that far from the shuttle that he'd found the cave, maybe half a mile. That treck, hauling the two packs, the power cells, wrapped loops of wiring and the beacon, was hellish. Azix had nothing left and nothing to draw on. Only years of instilled discipline kept him walking, plodding, putting one foot in front of the other and kicking up clouds of dust as he trekked across the barrens. He let the landscape guide him, stumbling into ditches and gulleys, taking the smoothest ground he could find. The darkened crack of the cave called to him like the fabled sirens of Bespin.
He had to strip the packs off to get them into the narrow cave, tossing them ahead of him. Once inside, he unpacked everything, taking all the hard bits out and laying them along the ground. He took off the most uncomfortable bits of armor, wrapped himself in both emergency blankets, rolled up the empty packs to pad his head, and collapsed into an exhausted sleep.
He'd barely closed his eyes before sinking into nightmares. He saw Master Surro. He saw the Emperor. He saw Sana, her tearstained face turned toward him, sharing the nameless horror she saw in the instant before it hit. He had no control over his body, and someone used him to kill and rape and wreak destruction.
In his dreams, he screamed and screamed.
