Another Quick Note (yeah, you'd better get used to these...)
:Okay, so I finally found out how to change the chapter titles, and what you're about to read now SHOULD say Prologue in the little chapter drop-menu-box thing. And if it doesn't...well, then that just really, really sucks...
Anyway, I'm sorry if the end to this chapter is cut a little short, but I might not be able to write much over these next few days, and that kinda starts in a few minutes for me. :/ So, hope you guys enjoy this! Please read and review if you can!
Prologue
From the depths of mediation came a memory
"It would be a mercy to leave him..."
Bastila tensed. She had watched a number of the dead die. It was an inevitable of these dark times––to regard the deaths of those around you with caution, to remove them from the surface of your conscious after they're gone, and then to simply move on.
It wasn't always so simple.
Even now, ten standard years into the war, it was the memory of those who had passed, the sound of their voices, that was still nestled snug in some deep pocket of her heart. During her meditations they resurfaced, and she could never quite find the strength to submerge them again, to force them back to their frozen, dormant states.
But this voice...
The voice she heard now belonged only to a cold memory––cold in a sense longer than dormancy; cold as in lack of love; cold in a whispering corner of her soul that, even now, tried to reach for her conscience in the dead of the night, when only the silence was there to listen.
Indeed, it would have been a mercy to leave him, Revan, and yet she hadn't. She constantly wondered, had saving him been the right thing to do? She knew her acts had been out of some pitiful tug at morality; at her bonds to humanity. It was a Jedi's sworn oath to preserve all of life. But she remembered kneeling before him in the red-washed light of the blast-shielded bridge, staring upon his bashed lips and his bruised face and his sallow cheeks––
staring upon the maw of the dragon, gazing between its fluttering eyelids to its heinous bronze chasms––
–-and then feeling the cold, icy rush of energy as she willed it out the tips of her spirit, melding it into his crystallizing frays of strength; stabilizing him; salvaging him; sustaining him.
Saving him
Her breathing hitched. Struggling to stay anchored to the present, Bastila withdrew from meditation, peeling away the bonds of introspection as she opened her eyes and was once more immersed in the caliginous cancer of the darkside and its plaguing cloud on the Force.
From the view panels that flanked the narrow portside of the Endar Spire's command cabin, a monotonous silver sheen threw shadows over the creases in her mattress––she stared at these for several moments, feeling lost. Outside, the frosty cobalt vortex of hyperspace spiraled on and on...
Minutes on end could have passed by the time she felt the disturbance.
It came on a cresting wave of the darkside, staining black the white of her mind, and her efforts to center her emotions. Her body stiffened, and more by instinct than urge she came to her feet. Not even a minute later, the superstructures of the ship around her began to groan.
In a whipcrack of hypersonic velocity, the Endar Spire closed its reversion to realspace. Outside the viewport, the spiraling tunnel of hyperspace evaporated to a boundless black abyss strewn with mottled white. Bastila frowned, and a chill clattered up her spine.
Had the Spire actually just been pulled from hyperspace?
Her confusion was answered as a brush of the darkside billowed like greasy smoke into the present, just a whisper at first, then erupting into a roar that echoed the thunder of recoiling turbocannons. The deck gave a tremor beneath her boots, and she slipped out of the cabin, lightsaber in hand.
The Dark Lord was here.
d
Carth Onasi, Republic war hero and––as was often quoted––the greatest starpilot in the galaxy, was not a Jedi.
There was not a modicum of midichlorian Jedi-genes...or whatever those things were called...that ran through his veins, and if there ever had been but one, you would likely find him in need of an emergency blood transfusion.
Onasi was a mundane, to say the least, with not a fray of connection to the Force: and yet the Dark Lord had a presence that could make any one mundane's hackles rise, even from kilometers away.
In a CRACK of white-washed light, the Sith cruiser blinked into existence. Carth didn't have to look outside to know which one it was-he knew the sound of those engines...
The Leviathan...
Carth shuddered in his skin, meanwhile his ship––the Endar Spire––shuddered in her elite, plastisteel armor as garrotes of fire chewed relentlessly at her defense shields, splintering into prismatic bursts of light that flashed like silent lightning through the shadows on the command bridge.
The ship lurched, and Carth slammed hard into the catwalk rails. His eyes flashed violently and his chest pounded, and to a young officer in the crew pit below him, he hissed through a gritted wall of teeth––
"Status report..."
"Sith fighters!" the officer responded diligently; frantically. Sweat was collecting on the young man's brow, glistening in the light of outside explosions. "Their numbers...it's hard to say. They're just––they just keep multiplying..."
Carth threw a glance out the viewport, scanning for the soft blue light of the deflectors. They seemed to be holding off well, but he knew they wouldn't sustain that way for long.
The Spire was new––brand new, not even two months out of the hyperworks factories on Arda II's gleaming industrialized surface. But a captain always knows his ship, in and out, even long before he takes it away from the wharf: the Spire's heat sinks were her biggest fault. While the shields absorbed round upon round of turbofire, the heat sinks just couldn't work fast enough to nullify the overloading heat capacity. Even now, Carth could spot the drams of superheated plasma reactions starting to pock the surface of the rayshields.
He cursed. Sure, a captain accepts the flaws of his ship. But it sure was nice to have less of them...
The officer below spoke up. "Sir––?"
"What's our position?"
"We're...just outside the Ojoster Sector." The officer flicked his stare out the viewport, "And just above the planet Taris."
A Sith world. Wonderful.
"Where's the bloody Jedi?" Carth growled, catching himself on the railing as the ship bucked again. The officer jolted in his crash-webbing, and from the end of the bridge the turbolift doors cycled open––
And in stepped the bloody Jedi.
"Return fire and prepare for hyperjump!" she barked out in her tight Talravin accent, not once meeting Carth's fuming stare as she strode down the catwalk.
Carth's jaw clenched. "They just pulled us out of hyperspace. Do you honestly think––"
"What I think goes. We're in the dead of space outside the Hydian Way, and we need to make the jump to the next planet possible. At least there we'll have someplace of refuge."
"Refuge?" echoed the officer nervously.
Carth ignored the boy. He turned and jerked one thumb over his shoulder, pointing to the dusty orb of Taris that orbited among the stars outside. "I won't make a blind jump with all these men on board. We can find refuge on the planet below."
The Jedi––Bastila Shan, so she was called––looked skeptical. "Taris? It's practically under Sith control! The jump is the only––"
The officer's next shout cut Bastila's words short, his voice quivering with shock.
"The hyperdrive is down... They've blasted it!"
Color drained from Bastila's angelic face. Had the circumstances not been so dire, Carth just might have allowed his own face a little smirk. "We can find refuge on the planet below." he said again, then caught sight of the lightsaber in Bastila's hand. "You're expecting a boarding party this soon?"
As Bastila started to speak, the officer interrupted...again. "Incoming vessel..." Now his face drained. "Advanced boarding party, inbound!"
Bastila looked at Carth darkly. "I really wish you hadn't said that..." She continued before he could even retort, "Fine––to the planet below it is. Evacuate everyone to the escape pods––"
"No. You go first."
She looked at the rugged starpilot incredulously. "Carth, I won't abandon––"
"You're too important to the war effort." he said dryly, And if you weren't the goddamned tide-turning key to a galactic-scale war, I would just turn you over to Malak and be on my way...
For a moment Bastila's features drew tight like a kinrath pup, and behind her misting grey eyes was a storm of guilt. Carth almost regretted his earlier thought.
Then she straightened. "You're right." she said, nodding distantly. "Find the crew safely to the planet once I'm gone. Understood?"
"Understood." Carth had to brace himself to spit out that word.
d