It was the worst storm she had ever been in the middle of in her entire life. Lightning split the skies overhead, causing her to almost jump out of her skin. Freezing cold rain came down in sheets and all but blinded her. She had fallen numerous times because the mud was very slippery and cuts and bruises stung her legs and hands. She pushed herself harder, determined to get this over with. Maul was just up ahead of her, a dark blur amidst the silvery-red smears of color that filmed her vision. She had been reluctant to run in the storm, but he refused to give in to her fear.

It's only noise, he had pressed, only distractions that you must learn to block out.

At least, she thought, he had run with her.

A few minutes later, they arrived back at the mouth of the Nightsister cave. Maul, of course, was not breathing hard at all, though he was every bit as soaked to the skin as she was. Melody dropped to her knees, her chest burning. Her heart felt like it was going to explode, but at least she was away from that accursed lightning. She shivered violently, wondering how she could feel this cold when she'd sprinted nonstop the entire time.

"Go and dry off," Maul told her, "then we can move on to other things."

They met again downstairs; Maul had also changed into dry clothes. She followed him deeper into the cave. The ever-present green mist swirled around them; Mother Talzin was likely around here somewhere. She often wondered where she and the other Nightsister spirits went when they weren't hanging around her and Maul. There were a couple of times that they passed through near-total darkness, but Melody was no longer fearful of it. She breathed slowly and deeply, the sound sometimes changing according to their surroundings. There were times she could almost "see" with her mind. They passed numerous doorways into natural chambers that had created "rooms". Some were inaccessible because they'd either collapsed or rubble was blocking the door. Others could only be accessed in a certain order because one room led to another. She had meant to do some more exploring down here, but Maul had kept her so busy with training during the day that she never had time to come and look at everything.

They came to a small room somewhere in the middle. At first, Melody didn't even realize it was there, as there was a huge stone blocking it. Maul Force-lifted the rock out of the way, revealing the door.

"Do not touch anything," he warned her before going in first.

There was a sulfuric waft and a spurt; a little flame ignited one of the candles that had long since gone out. It splashed the room in a weak burnt-orange light and Melody was finally able to see her surroundings better. Various random items were placed on rocks and stacks of crates like pieces in a museum collection. She wandered around examining them. There was a beat-up looking helmet that was decorated in red and black chipped paint. There was a portrait of a beautiful blonde woman though the face was scratched out with a scribble of charcoal. Beneath it were two lightsabers: one was an ordinary one that closely resembled Maul's except that it only had one end instead of two and the other was completely pitch black. As she gazed at them, the dim light seemed to dim even more. She backed away, but something strange seemed to be happening to her. Both hands stretched out seemingly of their own accord to the lightsaber blades. As her palm made contact with the first one (the regular one), she heard a voice in the back of her mind:

Forgive me, Brother…I was not worthy of being your apprentice…

She saw the memory from the perspective of the person who had last held the lightsaber, so she couldn't see his face. She could, however, see Maul's—and he looked visibly upset. The memory went dark and she let go of the hilt, feeling an overpowering sadness.

He had a brother…he mentioned him once, but he never talks about him…I wonder if it's because he misses him…

The other blade, the black one, had a very different presence to it. When Melody's other hand made contact with it, the smells of blood and explosives filled her nostrils. Thousands of dying screams echoed in her mind. The hilt went warm beneath her palm and seemed to pulse with a life of its own. The blade, black and rippling like a serpent, leapt from the hilt as if it had been waiting for someone to pick it up again. It shimmered, giving off a faint aura of glow despite its blackness. Utterly transfixed by it, she felt a strange dark euphoria blanket her mind.

Then, without even knowing what happened, she found herself laying on her back on the damp, cold stone. The back of her head throbbed; she must have hit it on the way down. The blade had gone out and the hilt was laying a few feet away. The crimson blade of Maul's lightsaber was inches away from her chest—she realize he had struck her, disarming her instantly.

"I told you not to touch anything," he snapped. Melody's head bowed contritely. She realized that there was a dark scorch mark along the wall—she had swung the black blade without realizing it and had almost hit him. He switched his lightsaber off and she scrambled to her feet, her knees shaking. She moved away from him and from the fallen lightsaber as fast as she could. How was it that he seemed to tower over her so much when he was that angry?

Maul replaced the darksaber in its holder under the woman's portrait. When he turned back around, Melody sensed that the worst was past. Trying to inconspicuously rub the spot where she'd hit her head, she asked:

Are they alive? Not in the same way we are, but…alive somehow…

A moment of silence passed between them before Maul replied:

"That is a matter of perspective. The crystals that power them are Force-attuned, but the hands that hold them ultimately control them."

She nodded, realizing that he was holding the lightsaber hilt that they had taken from the pirate Dolos. She had often wondered where it was—he had hidden the blade in here along with the Derelithian holocron. He tossed the hilt to her now and she just barely caught it with her surprised hands.

"Since you seem so intent on having a lightsaber," he explained, "it is time for you to learn how to use one properly."

She stared, open-mouthed.

It's mine? Really?

"I have no use for it."

She mentally squealed, making him flinch. Kneeling beside her, he corrected her grip on the hilt.

"You will need to be more careful than you were just a moment ago," he warned her, "this is not a toy like that segment of pipe you found laying outside. One wrong move and you'll lose a limb before you know what's happened. The blade is pure plasma and burns at several thousand degrees. That's why most of the switches are on the inside."

She felt around mentally, seeing the guts of the hilt in her imagination. Once she knew where to apply the pressure, the blade jumped to life at once. A brilliant jet of lavender raced out of the end. The light was almost blinding after being here in the dim orange candlelight. The hilt warmed instantly against her palm and something very strange happened. Memories raced up in her mind's eye, but they didn't feel intrusive and forceful this time. She could see a number of different people in a circular room. Many of them were friends. She saw that almost everyone was of a different race—one was a small green man with large pointed ears and an encouraging smile. One was an orange-skinned woman with white tattoos on her face and striped…not exactly pigtails, but similar…and one was a blue-skinned man. There were others, but they went by too fast to get a good look at. The memory appeared to belong to a dark-skinned man with eyes so dark brown that they appeared black at first. He had a deep, quiet voice, but a fierce, strong presence. His gaze locked onto hers, but she didn't feel afraid. There was a slight butterfly in her stomach when he looked at her—it was as though he were sizing her up, trying to see if she was worth holding what had once belonged to him. The memory faded, but the lingering sense of peace and strength remained, settling in her subconscious. The Flame reacted to this presence and caused her palms to glow. The lightsaber blade itself seemed to brighten slightly in response to it. Odd…it was like picking up a stray kitten that had been squirming around and resisting until it decided to trust you and be still—it was the only good analogy she could think of for that feeling.

Now what? She wondered.

"Do as I do," Maul instructed. He showed her a few basic blocking moves—it wouldn't matter how well she could fight if she couldn't ward off her opponent's blows. He made sure to adjust his own lightsaber to its lowest setting where it wouldn't injure her badly if he did land a hit. Then, he had her practice blocking with it. Melody lost track of the number of times she ended up being disarmed—half the time, she didn't even see him move before she ended up being ragdolled. The other half of the time, she would see where he was going, but was too slow to stop him in time. They moved out of the small room to avoid damaging any of the other things in there. Even with more room to move around, though, it took her a long time to finally fend him off. The lightsabers crackled loudly when the blades clashed and the stench of something burning filled her nose. The first hints of a smile—a real smile—were visible on his face.

"Good."

Though Melody was slower to get good at this than he would have liked, she seemed determined to get better. Though she had red burn marks all over her from that first day, she didn't complain about them. She didn't complain about how she ached all over either. No matter how tired she was from everything else, she looked forward to practicing with the lightsaber. When she could successfully block him nearly all the time, he started to teach her some offensive moves. It was more fun, but infinitely more dangerous and Maul stopped going easy on her very quickly. She was forced to learn how to heal more complex injuries in order to recover faster—bigger gashes, sprained wrists and ankles, more severe burns. He didn't have to press her to study the holocron, as she was doing that on her own.

Then, something happened that neither of them expected.

One day after a particularly intense sparring match, they were resting outside the hidden room. Glowing moths were fluttering around inside the caverns—it was mating season for them, so the air was thick with bluish-green luminescent wings. Melody noticed one that had fallen to the ground. Frowning, she crawled across the damp floor towards it. She carefully lifted it in her sweaty palms, seeing that its light was flickering with instability.

It's dying, she realized. Some kind of predator had torn off part of its wing. Though it had held on this long, its efforts were seemingly in vain. Even as she cradled it in her hands, its light went out.

Maul watched from the background.

Heal…

Her palms glowed around the moth. Its wings fluttered, but that seemed to be more of a reflex than anything as the nerves were stimulated. When Melody's palms went dark again, so did the moth. Maul inched closer soundlessly. Frowning, Melody closed her hands over the still insect's body. A spark of stubbornness was starting to well up inside her.

HEAL! She insisted.

There was an odd squelching sound—for a moment, Maul wondered if she had accidentally crushed the moth. White light shone between the cracks in her fingers. White fire exploded between her palms and rushed upward, forming a tapered sphere. A rush of heat exploded outward, rippling violently. The moths, frightened, scattered away from both of them in order to continue their courtship in a safer place. Melody's eyes had closed, her focus becoming laser-sharp. She could see all the moth's damaged innards in her mind's eye and she felt a very strong second presence inside her own body.

The Force…the Flame…that's what I'm feeling… she realized in wonderment. Swirls of color streamed through her mind's eye and rushed into a swirling vortex around the moth. She heard her own heartbeat in her ears. She felt sick and dizzy and hot quite suddenly and toppled backwards.

The light faded.

Maul reached her side just as her hands weakly opened. The moth crawled onto Melody's index finger, lingering there for a moment. Its damaged wing was whole again. Though its glow was still weaker than all the others that were flying around, it was steady. Melody gazed at it, her own faint smile growing stronger.

You're…alive…

She carefully eased her hand closer to her face so that she could see her handiwork better. The moth's wings moved gently in and out as though it were breathing through them. Though its primitive insect brain didn't comprehend what had just happened, it didn't seem the least bit afraid of her.

Look, Master, I did it! It's alive!

Maul's first conscious reaction was one of disbelief and understandably so. This thing hadn't really been all the way dead, had it? He had seen plenty of death in his time and knew just how hard it was to snatch something out of its grave once it was really there. He had seen the difficulty Mother Talzin had when she had been trying to construct a new body for herself, and even she hadn't succeeded in spite of her power. With a lot of experience, maybe…but he hadn't expected for Melody to make such a leap in such a short time.

But his intuition told him otherwise. He had seen that moth die. He had watched as its life force had gone out. He had sensed it was dead. And yet here it was…it was hard to tell if the moth would be different or lessened somehow by its death the way the Nightsisters had been when Mother Talzin had resurrected them to continue fighting Grievous and his droids during the invasion. Though he had not been present for that, she had shown him her memories of it later on when he'd returned to Dathomir. But this…

He mentally touched the moth's primitive consciousness, studying it. It didn't seem any different other than being alive now, but it was only an insect. A more complex being might be another matter. As depleted as Melody was now, he could only imagine what a person might do to her.

When the moth was able to, it flew away. Melody watched it through heavy eyelids, more exhausted than she had ever been in her entire life, but also happier.

I can't wait until I'm strong enough to bring them back, she thought, her gaze tracing the green mist that threaded through the swirl of twinkling lights, then I'll have an entire family again…

Her eyes closed then. Without thinking about it, Maul picked her up and took her inside. She was in such a deep sleep already that she didn't stir when he spread her blanket over her. He noticed the marks that she had been making on a sheet of paper that she'd tacked to the wall—there was one for each day they had been here together. When he counted them up, it amounted to one standard year.

He began to notice other things, too. There were drawings—a lot of them. Melody often added a few details here and there before she went to sleep. Most of the drawings were of the two of them and some of their shared experiences. The latest one was of the lightsaber training where they had clashed blades. She had even put a bunch of dots to represent the sparks. As her coordination had gotten better over time, so had the drawings. In the older ones, he was only identifiable by the colors—he could make out some of his tattoos and the short, stubby lines that were supposed to be his horns, but other than that, it was an abstracted mess of scribbles. In the later ones, she'd managed to make him look at least recognizable. Her own short figure beside him was distinguished by the scribble of messy curls on her head and the polygon-shaped red cape that she now never went anywhere without. She had also illustrated a few of the stories he had told her—what she thought Mother Talzin looked like (the only big difference being that her eyes were actually silver instead of green), what she thought Savage and Feral looked like, and even Ventress, the former Sith apprentice turned bounty hunter when Dooku had betrayed her in typical Sith fashion. She had an oddly accurate memory for detail even if her artistic ability didn't yet convey it.

The last picture he noticed was one that was tacked over a small dresser. She had placed her music box there. In clumsy Basic, she had written at the bottom "MY FAMILY". Both her parents were there with her in between them…

…and standing directly behind her was himself.