Revan and Malak didn't look away from the sight outside their viewport. They didn't so much as blink, or react in any visible way as Malachor V imploded into a cloud darker than the space around it.
Meetra couldn't bring herself to look outside. She could hardly see anything past her tears, anyway. Just faintly, she thought she saw Revan look down at her, and he whispered something, only briefly, before turning back to the orchestrated chaos beyond—
"This is but a taste of the dark side."
Star Wars: Trail of Echoes
Chapter Ten - Stars in Memory
There was a methodology to killing Jedi that could not be partially-embraced or nearly-learned; it required the student to give everything they had, everything they would be, to every move they made in the conflict. It required a balanced mind not tainted by aggression or emotion, cunning that would allow the student to move in tandem with a Jedi warrior, and the willingness to do what had to be done no matter the cost.
And the cost was always high.
Meetra taught her students to approach each fight with subtlety; Jedi often employed the standard rules of engagement, or the "attack when attacked" mantra. This would allow the students to size up each fight, plan their moves, identify their targets, their weaknesses, any obstacles on the field. Sometimes it would even allow them to speak to the Jedi before a fight and prod their mind accordingly.
"Jedi are not gods," she would remind her class. "They all have a weakness. Whether that weakness is physical or mental is for you to determine before the fight."
It was a rarity to find a Jedi Master alone. Jedi almost always traveled in pairs, sometimes with trusted partners, mostly with Padawan learners. "If they are together, assume there is a connection. Teacher and student. Lifelong friends. If you can identify this before blades cross, then you will have already assured your victory."
Going for the Padawan was the standard technique. Seeing their student, the child they had practically raised, in danger was a surefire way to send the Knight or Master into mental turmoil. Without that balance, they had diminished or uncontrolled influence over the Force. They would be as an ordinary being with a laser sword.
"That is your time to strike," Meetra would explain. "If you fail to exploit that window of opportunity, you have lost. A more experienced Jedi will regain their influence over the Force. It might even be amplified. A lesser Jedi will allow that mental turmoil to boil down into anger, rage. The dark side will temporarily be their ally, and such a Jedi is just as dangerous."
The Republic army had given her unit of black ops Jedi-killers the call sign "Hunters." Simple, perhaps, but it stuck until the end of the war, possibly beyond.
The Hunters were forbidden from knowing each other's names or fraternizing outside of the mission. Each agent was assigned a random number to be used in place of a name, though the CO was always "Zero." This would keep the Jedi from exploiting any memories or emotional connections.
"Emotions in this unit are as deadly as any blaster bolt," Zero would often repeat to his squad. His contribution to the instruction was that Hunters should keep their thoughts occupied; playing pazaak mentally, recalling random factoids, counting backwards, counting footsteps. Doing so constructed a mental barrier that even Meetra had to admit was very effective.
In the coming days, Meetra would ensure the Hunters' ability to act autonomously, taking orders only from herself and the few in high command. Primarily Admiral Saul Karath, Revan, and Malak.
The purpose of this unit? Meetra could only grasp at the obvious: that Revan would need Jedi disposed of down the line, and with the "Revanites" already spread thin enough as it was, he'd needed another alternative. A group of Jedi-killers who could employ mental barriers and were well-trained in the echani martial arts certainly fit the bill.
The Mandalorian Wars had been winding down at the time, and Revan already had Malachor V set squarely in his sights. No one in the high command could foresee what shape their probable victory could take, the kinds of power vacuums they'd be forced to deal with. The war would be over with the Mandalorians defeated, but would it be the end of hostilities?
The Neo-Crusaders had taken advantage of the Republic's weakened state after Exar Kun's war. Meetra, Revan, and Malak would often sit around discussing the possibility that another force could conceivably swoop in after the Mandalorians were dealt with. And given the current state of the Republic military, the three of them decided that it wouldn't take much to overthrow what was left.
In the end, Revan had decided to take all threats seriously; sending special forces to discreetly terminate any signs of organized rebellion against the Republic, listeners to keep track of allied and sovereign systems that could possibly go turncoat, and even planting spies inside the Jedi Order and the Galactic Senate.
His thinking that the Jedi Order might eventually become involved is what prompted the creation of Meetra's Hunters. During that initial conversation with Revan, Meetra had been willing, completely willing, to follow Revan's every line of thought and will it into reality.
Revan knew his enemy, knew the galaxy, in ways that astounded even the best and brightest of the Republic's Military Intelligence division. That knowledge is what had enabled the Republic to not only put a stop to the Mandalorian onslaught, but push them back, star by star, until Malachor was all they had left.
Meetra followed Revan, obeyed his every order, because she knew something that the Republic, the Order, and Military Intelligence didn't. She knew that Revan had looked into the dark, had become intimate with something that the galaxy at large had no knowledge of, no name for.
She knew that Revan was able to stay two steps ahead of the Mandalorians, beat them at every turn, because he could see the hand that guided them—a hand that tore at the living from somewhere in the Unknown Regions.
Meetra had never bothered to accompany Revan and Malak to the worlds and ruins they insisted on visiting in secret. On Dantooine, Manaan, Kashyyyk, Tatooine. After they would return, always looking worse for the wear, she would ask them what they found.
Revan would reply, in his teasingly cryptic way, "A path of light and shadow."
Meetra followed Revan down that path until Malachor V blinded her to it. Presently, she could hear his voice in memory, as she sat leaned up against the wall of the krayt dragon's cave, watching stars dance in gentle orbits. This was the looking glass through which Revan had come to know the dark and see, in full view, the path of light and shadow that he followed until he returned empowered.
Meetra stared, paled and unblinking, hoping to see it for herself.
–
The stars that hovered above the ancient device were fairly unrecognizable to Meetra, though she admitted to herself that it'd been years since she had any use for an astrochart. Symbols throughout the hologram appeared and disappeared, perhaps labeling different star systems and worlds, but she couldn't make sense of any of it. None of the "letters" seemed even remotely close to galactic basic.
But there was something there: a formation of stars that appeared in the hologram every other minute or so. She recognized it, but she couldn't remember the system. Her mind was swimming from lack of food and water.
Meetra sifted through the corpses, keeping her thoughts firmly on the star formation. It was a helpful distraction as she pulled a small cloth pack from the stripped ribcage of a dead Human female. She gagged and turned back toward the hologram before it got further than that.
Inside the pack was a collection of maps, a magnetic compass, and a plug of chewstim. Without thinking about the quality, she crammed the whole plug into her mouth and started chewing. Reacting to the taste, her mouth managed to salivate for the first time in hours. Her eyelids fluttered at the sensation.
With a small bit of energy returning to her, she opened the maps and looked at them under the gentle, sky blue light of the hologram. The first one seemed to be a stratigraphic map of the surrounding area, which was entirely useless to her. Judging by the magnetic compass that accompanied it—which was equally useless to her, espeically on a planet like Tatooine—she guessed the woman had been a prospector of some kind, possibly for Czerka Corp.
Not that it mattered now.
The second map confirmed her suspicion, when the first thing she noticed was the Czerka logo in the bottom-right corner. The map was actually a grid, with a scattering of locations marked upon it, places the woman had already prospected.
Meetra set the maps aside and continued sifting through the bones, but there was little else. The dragon likely devoured anything that wasn't bone, and had apparently been doing so for a very long time, judging by the dense piles of decay. She wondered who'd finally taken the beast down, quietly hoping the monster hadn't been provided a quick death.
Pushed into the dirt, beneath the body of a Rodian, was a flask of what smelled like pulkay. Any kind of liquid sounded wonderful, but liquor would only make things worse for her. She didn't need to be dehydrated any more than she already was.
She went to toss it into the pile with the maps, nonetheless, and on the way accidentally kicked a round canteen out of the dust. In a frenzy, she unscrewed the cap and poured its contents into her mouth. She was grateful it was water that came spilling out, since she hadn't checked it at all. Some beings required something added to their water to absorb it properly, chemicals that were sometimes deadly to other beings.
But thankfully, it was just plain water, cooled by the earth.
Meetra drank until she bounced with hiccups. About half of the canteen was left when she was done, and she was glad that she still retained the good sense to ration it. Though a plug of chewstim and a canteen of water wouldn't be enough to survive off of, it was enough to bring her back from the brink.
Her body relaxed. Her eyes took one more look at the hologram. The tiny bit of nourishment was enough to allow her mind to connect the dots in the smallest way. A star cluster appeared briefly, flanked by a series of those strange symbols. The image brought back a memory: as she sat in a briefing room with Revan and Malak, discussing the next batch of strategies they'd be deploying to the rest of the Republic forces.
A hologram of the Gordian Reach Sector had come to life before them.
"We've spotted Cassus Fett's forces in orbit around Yavin Four," Malak said, grinning. "It's no scouting party, at least judging from the size of the fleet that dropped in."
Revan shared a look of excitement with his friends. "This could be his first mistake of many," he said. "Attacking a long-abandoned Republic forward operating base isn't going to do much for his rank—or his life, depending how Mandalore reacts."
Malak shrugged. "One less thing to worry about. Fett was growing to be more of an annoyance than a 'worthy adversary.' The way to Malachor Five just became a lot less treacherous."
Meetra heard herself say, "Lieutenant Bao Dur's device is nearly completed, from what I understand. It should be ready to deploy by the time we're planetside."
"Excellent! Yet another thing we no longer have to worry about."
"There always seems to be one less thing these days," Revan said, lowly enough that it might have been to himself. He pressed a button on his console—
And there it was.
"As soon as an opportunity presents itself, we need to get there. Aside from winning this war, nothing else matters." Revan pointed to a formation of stars cradled in a green nebulosity, a dark blue line leading out of it to mark the Daragon Trail. At the end of the Trail, and at the entrance of the nebulosity, was the star system that at once, across time, Revan and Meetra labeled: "Korriban."
In Meetra's cave hovered that same star system.
"Korriban," she said again, emphatically this time.
It was the next step Revan and Malak had taken after the destruction of Malachor V. She had always known that's where they would've gone, but now she was beginning to understand why. They had followed it, and became wielders of a new kind of power. A dark one, but power nonetheless.
Meetra scrambled over to the dead prospector's maps, her recovered memory granting her another boon. On the grid of possible resource locations, she saw that each were marked with a timestamp. It was conceivable, then, that the earliest timestamp had been marked near a camp or settlement the prospector had departed.
All she had to do was follow the markings backward in time. It wasn't much, but it was all she had left to cling to. That, and a star map of the Horuset System—where Korriban whispered her name.
–
Meetra waited out the long minutes until the sandstorm had died down, and then she left. Her sense of direction was keen enough, following sun and shadow, and was able to find the first marker near the rusted husk of an abandoned speeder. By the time she reached the second marker, she was exhausted again, sipping at her canteen only when she felt herself passing out.
She found another marker, driven into a dry lake bed. Seeing it relieved her of a little too much of her strength. She collapsed, her limbs were jelly, her skin was on fire.
Before she passed out, she wrenched the canteen up to her lips and poured the last of the water into her mouth. The rest of the nearly-dissolved chewstim was washed into her stomach. The map showed one last marker and the suns were beginning to set.
One last marker, and she wasn't sure if she'd be able to make it. There was simply nothing left. Not even thoughts of Zand could spur her on; the divide between her will and body was growing exponentially.
Meetra lay down on the dry lake bed, terrified at how little she could do now. The suns sank away, drawing out the darkness in the sky. As the horizon faded away, the stars appeared... but no, they weren't stars, were they?
She lifted her head up an inch or two, and saw the lights of a city.