Author's Note: For those who are curious, Jaesa's experience (and Hella's) is related in Rainmaker.

The First Steps

The sands of Tatooine were brighter and hotter than I remembered them being. I could sense the slither of the Force, echoes of a shattered time covering the planet's surface.

Recalled to Dromund Kaas (and fairly certain she knew why—to kill Darth Vengean because there was no way Baras could or would do it himself) Her Lordship made sure I would be out from underfoot. This wasn't the sort of party an apprentice brought her apprentice to, after all. I was disappointed, but there was no point in airing this.

Master Wyellett's death left me in a good place to seek enlightenment, hence my plans to come to Tatooine—by private transport if necessary. Tatooine was also the most diametrically opposed environment to Hoth. I felt it would be good for my mindset. Dromund Kaas is rainy; I didn't think I could handle rain that fell like tears.

Repeating the Demon's Blood ritual was something I felt I had to do, and had for some time, if only to continue breaking away from my old life. I was something new and needed to see where my former self had walked… at least a little. Now, I felt I really needed the comparison.

Her Lordship and I hadn't discussed Wyellett's death with one another, or anything connected to it. It should be noted that I found myself bouncing back from Master Wyellett's death rather more quickly than I expected. The impact had been profound, but like water disturbed by something big and heavy falling into it, I'd begun to settle out.

It turned out that Broonmark saved us some trouble: his hunt for Fetzellen hadn't been as inhibited by that storm as our hunt for Xerender. He'd come upon some of his former clan purchasing a Sith weapon from some salvagers. He'd killed his clansmen, killed the scavengers, and brought the weapon to be gifted to Her Lordship.

It was, after all, a Sith weapon.

So, as it was Baras' lost trinket, we were all off Hoth much faster than anticipated.

Her Lordship seemed to perk up a bit once we were no longer on that world, though she remained silent and somber—to the point of worrying the Captain and alarming poor Vette—for several days afterwards.

The same held true for me, but less than her since she was the one who struck the killing blow. I had the feeling that our whole survival and rescue was a kind of parting gift—an object lesson meant for Her Lordship. I hadn't asked and didn't plan to. I just didn't want to know.

Shaking myself, I regarded the end of the first stage of my journey. It began with a man named Izeebowe Jeef, one of those muddled strange hermits one sometimes comes across. Her Lordship started with him, describing him as remarkably insightful… but not Jedi or Sith. He heard but did not access the Force. A useful trait, to be sure, but a dangerous one… and Her Lordship felt that Jeef's abilities were restricted to Tatooine, if only because of the barriers in and expectations of his mind.

He was a small man, shriveled and desiccated—a trait shared by Tatooine's aged—but his eyes were bright and clear. "Come in, Dark One." His eyes skated over me. "As your master did before you."

"My master bade me give you her greetings and well-wishes. She also wished that I should come to hear your wisdom," I answered formally, kneeling across from him when he indicated I should do so.

"The sands whisper—you seek enlightenment. Be careful, young one: there is such a thing as knowing too much."

"And yet I am not who I was when last I was here. Surely that makes all the difference?"

Jeef studied me, head cocking to one side. "One might say that. What do you seek, Dark One?"

I considered. Enlightenment was the answer, and yet it was so broad, so vague. Arguably I'd found it the last time I was here—it simply wasn't the enlightenment I wanted. He's a hermit of the sands… and the planet speaks to him…

I recognized Her Lordship's style of consideration, rolling around facts and words. "Whatever the sands show me. Enlightenment doesn't necessarily mean something you want to know. "

Jeef nodded sagely. "You know the path to walk—and walk it you must. Skip no step. Perform the journey in earnest and you will find what you seek… though perhaps not in the shape you expect."

"Just as well," I answered. "As I maintain no expectations."

"Wise, on the whole." With this, Jeef's conversation took a turn, meandering and looping about like a dizzy ant. I listened patiently. Much of it sounded like rambling or nonsense… but nonsense doesn't necessarily mean it had no value. It simply meant nothing to me at the moment.

Jeef spoke until nightfall. "The suns have slipped away. Now is the time to make your journey, under the cover of night." Then with uncommon clarity, "For those with your faculties, symbols are important."

I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant… but the words stalled in my throat. It made sense. While a Jedi, I traveled under the sun. I made certain choices according to philosophy. And, I suspected, those events shaped what I brought to the Chamber of Visions.

Now was the time to bring new experiences as well as my new self. "Thank you, Master Jeef," I answered, bowing my head respectfully. "Your wisdom has proved beyond price."

The old man preened himself over this, then got up and went to his sleeping mat. "It is good for you to absorb wisdom when it is presented."

I withdrew into the darkness, aware of how fast the temperature was dropping.

Absorbing wisdom.

The words clarified something I'd been puzzling over for some time. I felt like I was advancing in my training, that my abilities were advancing, by leaps and bounds in ways they hadn't while I was a Padawan. It came to me, in the wake of Jeef's words, why this was: I wanted to learn, I was desperate to learn—not to match up to some ideal the Order preferred, but to absorb all the skills and lessons I could and turn them into something useful to me, something tailored to my strengths rather than trying to tailor myself into being something else.

I found myself smiling as I set off into the darkness. Already enlightenment has come to me. It's a promising start.

Journey to the Chamber of Vision

Although Her Lordship admitted to having killed the Sand Demon—regretfully, but with operational security in mind—I had no trouble believing another one would have moved in. How else could the Jedi of old have kept repeating the ritual? Even a Sand Demon has a set lifespan, regardless of a 'kill it, don't kill it' choice on the part of those undergoing the ritual.

Well, she certainly had killed it and another one had certainly moved back in. I remembered how to subdue it from my first visit… and found the exercise far less harrowing. The knowledge that I could have done it even without knowing the answer was bolstering. I felt my own strength of will as I looked into the thing's alien eyes, seeing only animal intellect behind them.

But for all my stature, I was a nastier predator than it was. In many ways I was its equal as much as its overmatch. The ideas had very primal undertones, the kind one finds in the truly old rituals (although I mostly drew this conclusion from things I'd heard about or studied, rather than actually performed). Symbols, as Jeef said, were important. It was for this reason that I ensured my arrival at the Sand People's complex would also take place during the hours of darkness.

Things happened exactly as they had the first time—though I thought they seemed a bit more agitated, as if they remembered me from before and sensed the change. Or maybe it was just upsetting to have three (actually two) ritual participants show up when the number of supplicants has been lower in previous years.

The characteristic of the map chamber had changed as well. The things I remembered most were how bright the chamber was during the day and the way the crystal marking my destination threw rainbows… even though it shouldn't have been able to.

Now, the chamber was full of an uncanny luminescence; the crystal marking my destination glowed faintly, as if slowly giving up the light it soaked up during the day. I could also feel the Force, because I knew what to look for. It hung in the chamber like cobwebs and dust, giving the place the sense of a forgotten room left to its own devices. Flat and tired, shivering, the Force moved in the chamber in a way it did not in the Sand People's complex.

The Force-users who'd come here over the centuries, millennia, left traces of themselves. They'd brought their weariness, the tiredness, the flat sense of being filthy and only getting filthier as time progressed. I reached out. To my surprise, I found a trace that could only be Master Yonlach… but the impression was of a much younger man. There was, also a trace of Her Lordship and a shadow that struck me as being the Captain.

I knew that there were others here, echoes and imprints… but they remained obscured to me because I didn't know them, or didn't know how to see them properly. It was enough that the experience in the map chamber was different from my first; I'd have liked to see the remembered masses, though. Just to see how many people have been here since the ritual's inception.

I turned and caught the ghostly echo of Nomen Karr, felt my lip curl.

…then I found the echo of myself, a frightened girl anticipatory of some great secret at the end of the journey. I reached out to touch the echo, but found that nothing happened. She was little more than a shadow, a sunbeam, something in existence but not something one could interact with.

I knew, even if I wouldn't be able to see it, that I would leave an imprint of what I was now to mingle with the rest.

Part of me wanted to rush, to hurry along to the end of the journey, eager to see what else—aside from myself—had changed.

I pushed the urge back, forcing myself to meditate for a time until I could feel the dust clogging my nose, the cobwebs gumming up my lungs, awareness of the countless echoes pressing close to me like people waiting at a transit hub. I soaked up the experience with patience and discipline, letting it mark me as I had marked it—something I hadn't done the last time I was here.

The Chamber of Vision

The Chamber of Vision looked different at night, just as the map chamber had. The oasis was exactly as I remembered it, reeds edging it with determination. The water of the oasis and the life in the reeds both sustained by the accumulation of Force energy which did, as Her Lordship said, account for the heavy 'wetness' in the air. There were countless echoes here, too. Having picked echoes out at the map chamber, it was easier to see them now—in fact, they seemed strangely more real, each accompanied by his or her reflection.

Her Lordship, swathed in the Dark Side, stood next to a Jedi radiating the clearest light. I was reminded of something one of the other Padawans once pointed out—that the better the Jedi, the stronger the Sith if that Jedi fell. The Law of Opposites, she called it. Of course, she'd been a bit unorthodox to begin with, but she seemed to have hit the nail on the head, if what I saw here was any indication.

Nomen Karr stood next to a kind of doppelganger, the fine line he'd been walking at the time represented by the near-duplicate. It was hard to tell which was the original and which was the Reflection.

That, I thought sourly, ought to have given him a big clue.

Master Yonlach—much younger than I ever knew him, but still recognizable—wreathed in light, stood beside a ravaged, pale, hard-featured creature with etched lines in his face and around his eyes, the Dark Side boiling around him.

My reflection, who bore a strong resemblance to me as I was now, and my imprint with her, stood elsewhere. Light hung around my imprint, but like it was huddling close to her, unable to burn brightly. The Reflection did not have that problem, radiating darkness as easily as the sand outside lets go of its warmth after sundown.

I rubbed my throat, remembering the feeling of being forced underwater by too-solid hands, then gritted my teeth. I would not be bested like that again. Not by myself. I felt more confident, though: I wasn't a scared little girl being hustled from place to place. I wasn't only stronger in the Force, I felt stronger as a person—a tree with roots.

And the Captain, standing back-to-back instead of side-to-side with an image of him as he might look had he been Sith. Pale and austere with red eyes, something in his reflection's posture, in the way he seemed to coldly survey the room, reminded me of Her Lordship, some indefinable aspect… and I realized just how much his being Sith would have poisoned any relationship the natural pull between them would have ended with. It was better that only one of them was Force sensitive.

Of course, the images vanished as soon as I tried to scrutinize them, my will being what drew them into existence but only to a degree. They weren't for me to investigate, merely to take note of. I could only assume that there was something in particular about the Captain that left his imprint and his reflection here. He is, after all, not Force sensitive.

The cavern was dim, lit by veins of crystal that had, when I was here last time, sent light dancing everywhere, like the crystal in the map chamber. Now, at night, they glowed softly, giving back the light they'd taken in during the day, allowing darkness to creep in. Watery patterns danced on the ceiling, each drip of water a sigh of relief—nighttime granted a reprieve from blinding sunlight and insane heat.

Which was when I noticed the room was much warmer than it should have been at this time; deserts get very cold very quickly once the sun goes down.

The Force was truly strong in this place. How had I missed it before? It's so ridiculously, painfully obvious.

I reached out with my awareness to check that I was very much alone—which I was—before stripping off my armor and leaving my lightsaber on the edge of the waters. I felt confident I could pull it to me before trouble happened. More to the point, that thought extended to any physical visitors I might receive while undergoing the ritual.

More the fool they if someone decided now was the time to attack and gummed this up for me.

Waist-deep, I knelt, letting the water close over my head, filling my ears. I let the breath run out before I stood up, shaking off water droplets as the sand and muck of my journey sheeted off unnaturally quickly, as if the oasis-bottom greedily pulled at it, like iron fillings drawn to a magnet.

"You came back."

The words were almost drowned by a shrill demand of, "How could you!?"

I wiped the water out of my eyes to find myself faced by two reflections—the one I'd spoken to last time and the one conjured by this visit.

The Sith Reflection smirked at me wickedly. "I told you so."

The Jedi Reflection looked heartbroken. "You gave me up! For her!" She pointed accusingly at the Sith who, crossing her arms, stuck her tongue out at the Jedi before smirking again. "Why? Why would you do that?"

"I wouldn't be used," I answered. "I was tired of being weak."

"You're tired of being used," the Jedi sneered. "Do you really think your new master isn't using you?"

"Don't be stupid. She doesn't care about my gift."

"Are you so blind? She doesn't have to ask you to use it! You throw it at her head every chance you get!" the Jedi said. "She's got you brought so firmly to heel you'll never get out of lock step! Can't you see that?"

"Even if that rubbish were true, it's my choice one way or the other," I answered calmly, watching the Jedi's agitation and somewhat perplexed by it. Jedi are supposed to be calm, passionless, but this girl looked pushed to the brink, like she might break into agonized sobs at any moment. "And if it was true… well. It's more fun being in lock step with her than it was with Karr."

"That's definitely true," the Sith remarked with a giggle.

The Jedi cast her a disgusted look, her cheeks turning faintly pink.

"You're not a reflection…" I breathed, studying her as the new idea dawned on me. "You're… myimprint… sort of."

"It doesn't make sense for you to have a new Reflection when both of us are already here," the Reflection observed. "So she gets recycled."

"That makes sense," I agreed, looking at the Imprint.

"She killed me," the Imprint lamented, though she shot the Reflection another baleful look. "She killed me and you let her."

'She' had to be Her Lordship. "Was I truly that pathetic?"

"She's your Imprint. You tell me," the Reflection answered with a twitch of her shoulders. "But on to more important matters. You're coming along well—no expectations for this meeting. No need to fight, since you're not worried about who you are."

"You should be," the Imprint said morosely. "She's turning you into a monster."

"One cannot make another being a monster without that being's consent—implicit or otherwise," I answered promptly, throwing something I'd heard with the Jedi back at her.

The Imprint winced.

"Here's a question for you," the Reflection said. "Why haven't you had a good look at that tin-faced twin-faced Darth? You know he's ready to turn on your master. Or the Captain? He's Baras' man."

"I didn't like the Captain when he was here," the Imprint said, shivering. "Too much doesn't show on the surface. You never know where you stand with a man like that. He could slip a stiletto between your precious master's ribs and she wouldn't know it until it was too late. Then what?"

"I don't know. I kind of liked him. He's none too fond of Baras… and good looking." The Reflection whistled her appreciation.

"Hey," I pointed warning at her. "Keep your mental mitts to yourself."

"Just saying," she responded with another shrug. "Her Lordship set us free," the Reflection indicated me and herself. "She's probably setting up something like that for him."

"That does sound likely," I agreed. "She's quite attached to him."

"One wouldn't think someone like her could feel something that complicated," the Imprint said snidely.

"I'm starting to understand why we fell—or jumped, as the case really is," I noted dryly.

The Imprint opened her mouth to argue, then flushed and looked away, crossing her arms as though to protect herself.

"So I should keep an eye on the Captain and see what I can see about Baras when opportunity presents itself," I said briskly, aware that the air—which had taken on a sense of being 'dry' during this conversation, was beginning to grow 'damp' again, which meant the conclave was nearly over.

"You're entering a time of treachery. Let's see if you serve this master better than the last one," the Reflection observed somberly.

"Or you could save yourself," the Imprint noted. "Yours is the last hand she would suspect. You could free yourself—"

"Because the Jedi would be so happy to have us back," the Reflection sneered. "Your arguments get weaker and weaker. And now you're advocating treachery. What does that tell you, dummy?"

"I owe Her Lordship everything," I said firmly. "Better I keep an eye on her Captain… although I hope you're both being pessimistic."

I blinked, found myself looking at nothing. When my eyes dropped to the water, I saw them there, the Imprint and the Reflection.

"It's a small comfort to know you aren't ready for treachery," the Imprint lamented.

"Be watchful. Baras' campaign to destroy your master has to start soon," the Reflection warned.

Then they were gone, the air was wet, the cavern dim, and I was alone except for the imprints and reflections of countless supplicants past.

I chose not to go straight back to Mos Ila—not that there was much to go back to. Rather, I mediated there, in the feeling of moist air and with the countless Reflections and Imprints, turning over and over the conversation I'd had, wringing out of it every last drop of meaning… as far as I could tell.