I stood aboard my flagship, arms crossed, eyes closed behind my mask. To observers, it would appear I was staring out the viewport into space. Or perhaps surveying the battle taking place outside.

We'd set a careful ambush, my fleet acting as bait to draw out the Republic forces in the area. Yet I also sensed dozens of strong Force presences. Jedi. The Republic fools had finally decided to stop dancing around my unstoppable advance and do something about it.

I smiled grimly. Good for them, finally standing up for themselves. It was rather pathetic it had taken so much to force them into it.

Time to show them just how hopeless their precious cause was.

Bring your fleet in, I instructed my apprentice, my friend and ally. Time to crush them between us.

Malak didn't reply with words, but with eager agreement. Malak's ships had been hiding in hyperspace, circling our location until receiving my signal. Within minutes, they'd flash into view and rain destruction on our enemies.

The Jedi fleet turned and tried to run. My flagship was the nearest, the only one capable of maneuvering into their way and blocking them all in. I ordered the move at once. They kept coming, slowly, as though trying to plan a way to get around me without losing half their number to my superior weaponry.

They slid closer, entering the range of my Force sense, and I stiffened sharply as their intent washed through me.

Realization: this was a trap. They'd deliberately brought enough of their strongest Force users together, deliberately staged this 'meeting' and allowed its location to be leaked. A double blind. The meeting, cover for the ambush, cover for the assassination attempt.

Calculation: I couldn't possibly move fast enough. Their smaller ships were closing in, too many, too close. But too far to destroy quickly.

"Launch the fighters," I commanded, sweeping a hand out to indicate the Jedi fleet. "Kill them all."

Good luck, my friend, I whispered mentally. May the Force be with you.

Revan, is something wrong? Malak's mental state immediately flipped from gloating over our impending victory to concern. Mild concern; Malak wasn't one for strong emotional displays. Are you in position?

Yes. But for this victory. . .

I could flee, trust that we could set another trap later, but I had no intention of fleeing before the Jedi. They needed to meet us head-on and realize their own inferiority, not play one clever move and have the chance to say they'd sent Revan and Malak running.

Before Malak could reply, the nearest Jedi Master began his attack. Not with his ship, but with the Force, directed with diamond-clarity straight at me alone.

I staggered under the weight of it. It felt as though he'd flung his entire being at mine, a warping twisting mental assault that left me dizzy and disoriented. I'd heard of high-level mental abilities, like Battle Meditation, but nothing this focused and intense.

Before I could even begin to recover, a second blast of focused mental discord hit me from another direction. Then another. A dozen Jedi; more; all focusing their strongest mental abilities on me from across a distance even I could only sense.

How were they doing this?

My fighters poured out, began to pick off the Jedi ships. Some broke formation and fled. Some were shot down. But enough remained that my grasp on reality was rapidly vanishing. Malak's mental voice faded, blurring, and I reached out toward it with a burst of desperation. For an instant I felt something, a deep web of connection that bound all the Jedi together, that linked me and Malak and my entire fleet.

It was centered around us, Malak and I - no. Three now. Myself and Malak, bound together the strongest of all, and a third reaching through all the Jedi, pulling them along with her, focusing them with her own strength onto me.

And she, with the strength of all those Jedi, reached through me to those I connected with.

I felt the apathy she was pouring through me, pressing outward to all my subordinates, all my soldiers and captains and pilots. Fear, weakness, confusion. Enough to dissolve our assault completely and turn this into a complete Republic victory.

Calculation: this Jedi is far too dangerous.

Her whole attack was focused onto and through me. Without that link, her whole plan would fall apart. All I had to do was block her out. But she was too strong, the conduit for so many Jedi, so much Force power focused onto me with such intensity I could barely breathe.

If I couldn't fight back, that left me only one option.

I tore my mind away, directed my thoughts to memory. Another ambush, another battle, another victory.

Another defeat.

Malachor.

I watched in perfect recollection as the fire of a dying world burned away the bonds within another, as the greatest of my generals was consumed in a single act of sacrifice.

I remembered the feeling of wrongness in the moment our bond snapped, leaving me without a general. And my general without anyone.

Mirror that within myself.

Tear myself free, let the galaxy move on without me.

The Jedi could only destroy my fleet by flooding her power down the connections that held my followers to me. Without those connections, she'd have to take them out one by one.

The entirety of their plan hinged on surprise. Malak would arrive any moment, and their attack would be forced to flee. If my ships didn't break under this assault, we'd have them trapped.

Goodbye, my friend.

Malachor burned within me, echoes of emptiness filling my soul.

I ignored the brief burst of genuine fear from Malak. I pushed away the faint relief and uncertainty of my troops as the pressure against them faded along with my presence. Most of them wouldn't even realize what had happened, what they'd lost.

Bonds snapped and flailed free, every tie within the Force that held me to another living being, disconnecting me from everyone I'd ever known and cared for.

A wave of physical Force energy rippled out from me, a crushing backlash of power revolting against the unnaturalness of my action. The viewscreen cracked, the Vanquisher shuddered, and my subordinates screamed and fled. Atmosphere hissed away through myriad small gaps and the bridge lay on the verge of collapse, but my attention was far from the physical.

At the moment my disconnect was complete, something at the core of myself shifted. So sharply and drastically that no thought, no plan, nothing but confusion survived.

The broken connections within me found a new conduit. The only one I'd been unable to break.

Malak betrayed you. The thought carried certainty, pressing it into memory with the force of inevitable truth. He attacked your ship during a Jedi ambush, hoping to do away with his master and enemies both. You couldn't have expected better of a Sith. The apprentices always turn on the master in the end.

Before I could begin to think how to refute this foreign belief, something vast and malicious surrounded me, intent on my destruction. As if to smother me it pressed in closer and tighter, reached through the empty connections that once belonged to everyone I'd ever known and taking them for itself.

The foreign emptiness advanced, insinuating itself into my mind at a level so deep and intimate that I fled, retreated away deeper and deeper into myself.

Away from the world, away from my life. Away from my destruction.

If my ship collapsed, if my crew fled, if the Jedi survived or were crushed, I didn't know. I hid, compressed within my deepest self, as that malicious force tore through what I'd been in search of me.

I hid, as memory fragmented around me and Revan as he was ceased to exist forever. I hid, and survived, as everything I'd been was torn apart and rebuilt by my enemies, a constructed identity to channel my power and genius into their designs.

Days or weeks or months may have passed while I hid, blind to what happened outside the tight coil that was my core self.

But whatever they did wasn't enough. When I finally relaxed and opened myself back to reality, their illusion clung, yet did not constrain. I remembered enough of myself to fight back.

They had stolen much, but not all.

Not until now.

Emptiness ate away at the edges of my core self, and this time there was no fury or desperation to fuel me, to hide me. I was tired, so tired and so alone. Bastila's mind lay dim and distant, as empty as myself.

I was connected to her. She was connected to them. They used that connection to strike at me, but this time I had no chance of severing the bond. This time, I had nowhere to hide.

I ran my hand along the row of symbols, carved deep in the stone of an ancient ruin. Malak paced behind me, impatient as ever with our slow progress.

"How long will this take?"

I calculated for a moment. "No more than an hour."

Malak stopped pacing. "I'm going to kill something."

"Hungry?"

"Yes. Any requests?"

I shrugged. "Just don't grab anything too big. The kath hound you brought last time was just wasteful."

"There is no emotion, there is peace."

"What?"

She sat before me, legs crossed, hands held calmly beside her.

"There is no ignorance, there is knowledge."

The stone beside me shifted, re-forming into words I could read.

MELAR SERAV

"Who are you?"

She stood behind me now, and her voice echoed over and over again through the stone chamber.

Who are you? Who are you?

"I'm. . ."

Revan

Melar

Conqueror

Soldier

Leader

Follower.

"Who are you?"

Not what they made you.

"I'm. . ."

Emptiness drew itself around me. Someone was hungry. Weren't they? Who was it?

No one.

Just me.