When Mynock dropped out of hyperspace over Sebiris the first thing visible was the planet's sphere of blues, greens, and violets. Then they saw the flash of explosions, small but constant, scattered across the northern continent, and it was clear something had gone very wrong.

This was supposed to have been an uneventful landing and only Cade, Deliah, and Kyra had been in the cockpit. On Cade's call, everybody else crammed inside as well, pushing Kyra tight against the back of Deliah's co-pilot seat.

"Those look like ships in low orbit," Jao squinted as Mynock drew closer to the planet. As yet nobody had started attacking them, but Deliah had warmed up shields and weapons just in case. "Can we get a reading what kind?"

Deliah checked the sensor console. "Looks like Nagai ships. Must be two dozen. None of 'em are very big."

Mynock wasn't a big ship either. Kyra's hand clenched the seat-back tightly as Lowbacca roared. From the far rear of the cockpit, C-3PO's tinny voice said, "Master Lowbcca is quite right, even one ship could do us great damage. I recommend we withdraw immediately."

Cade, though, stared at the planet with hands wrapped tight around the throttle. "Blue, where are they hitting?"

She checked sensors again. "They're pounding the central continent, where the big settlement's supposed to be."

"Isn't the hypergate nearby?" asked Kyra.

"It is," Cade said, and Mynock jumped forward.

"Oh dear," C-3PO quavered, "Master Cade, I strongly recommend against this course of action. The odds of surviving a direct assault against that may Nagai warships is-"

Cade ignored him. "Jariah, Jao, get to the gun turrets and get ready to blow stuff up. Blue, can you man the missile launchers?"

"Will do," the Zeltron nodded, then muttered, "I hope you know what you're doing, Cade."

"Me too, darling," he said, just as low, then told Kyra, "You're gonna wanna strap into something."

She secured herself in the chair behind Deliah's as Lowbacca took the other seat. The planet had swelled to fill the entire viewport, and she could more clearly make out the fight in the upper atmosphere. The Nagai ships- each one a strange patchwork vessel, no two alike- seemed to be firing on the planet's surface, while small local defense craft, mostly Incom starfighters and gunboats, were trying to hold them off. As of yet, none of them had turned attention to Mynock.

Lowbacca roared and C-3PO said, "You are quite right. I had no idea the Nagai had invaded the Kathol sector. This is most distressing."

"Why would they come here?" Deliah muttered. "There's nothing useful here. No industry, no major resources…"

"Maybe they want to put fear into people," Kyra said. They were definitely putting fear into her.

"Maybe," Cade said, still staring dead ahead. "Or maybe they're after what we're after."

"The hypergate? How could that be?"

"Just throwing out ideas," the man shrugged. "We're getting close to the hot zone now. Blue, shields up?"

"Shields up," the Zeltron flicked a switch. "Missiles ready."

Kyra watched over her shoulder as the first Nagai ship changed vector and took notice of them. Cade tapped his comm board and said, "You boys set in the turrets?"

"We're here," Jao reported.

"Then let 'er rip. Any Nagai ship's fair game." Cade turned off the link, grabbed the throttle in both hands, and pushed them forward.

Kyra held tight to her crash webbing as Cade threw Mynock into an impressive set of turns and twists. Sebiris' gravity tugged on them as they twisted through its upper atmosphere, and she felt like her brains were going to be splashed out the side of her head. C-3PO wailed in panic and crashed into a wall, but Lowbacca kept his calm as Cade pulled them out of a fierce maneuver.

Deliah checked her scanners. "They got 'em. Our tail is clear."

"Good. Let's get low and see how bad the damage is," said Cade as he pushed Mynock into a dive. Clouds whipped past the viewport and the northern continent swelled before them. Kyra tracked vast swathes of forest, green tinted violet, with barely anything to interrupt the expanse save pillars of rising smoke that marked areas pounded by Nagai warships. It seemed a random, senseless smattering of destruction, and she wondered if the raiders really had come here just to spread fear.

When Mynock levelled out over the jungle she spotted the method to this madness. The greatest cluster of smoke was on the horizon, dead ahead. Even now turbolaser fire was pouring down from above and adding to the devastation. As they grew closer she saw the first gnarled, blown-out towers and realized this was what remained of Sebiris' largest city.

"You got coordinates for the hypergate?" asked Deliah.

"Yeah, I got it," Cade said, and twisted Mynock to the side before it flew right into the path of devastation. Kyra strained her crash webbing to get a better look at the charred, blackened cityscape. From this height she could only imagine the horror on the ground but they came to her as vividly as old memory: choking ash, blinding smoke, the reek of charred flesh and the shuddering knowledge that nothing would be the same again.

Mynock veered over a scorched patch of jungle. Cade added elevation to get a better view, and Kyra spotted more smoke pouring from a clearing up ahead. There was no laserfire raining down at the moment, so Cade slowed for them to get a better look. A great hexagonal dome rose in the middle of the clearing; its surface had been partially cut away, but the structure still stood despite the black scorch-marks on its shell. Whatever the thing had been made from, it was durable. Nonetheless, more impact craters ringed the clearing, and there was no telling if anyone had survived.

"What do we do now?" Kyra asked.

Cade hesitated, then he pulled Mynock into a climb and said, "Can't do anything until we clear the bad guys off. Shields and guns still ready, Blue?"

"That they are," she said tensely.

"Good." He tapped the comm button and told the men in the gun turrets, "Get ready for more dancing!"

Mynock plied straight upward. Kyra was slammed into the back of her seat and poor C-3PO was sent sliding out of the cockpit and down the access corridor. As they pushed through the atmosphere the sky's faint blue peeled away, revealing starlight scarred by combat. One larger Nagai frigate was in low orbit, firing away at the settlement while Sebiris' gunships tried vainly to fend it off.

"Get ready," Cade called, and punched them toward the Nagai.

The frigate shifted a few turbolaser cannons to fire on the approaching freighter, but the big bolts were easy for Cade to move around. At the same time Jao and Jariah began firing forward with the gun turrets, and Kyra watched their first shots splatter against the frigate's shields, right beneath the shield cluster. Cade flew them straight until they got close enough to Deliah to punch out a set of concussion missiles, after which Mynock veered nimbly away.

Lowbacca gave a happy roar as their missiles slipped through the shields and scored a hit on the engine section. The frigate continued to fire and Nagai starfighters finally took notice of them, but Cade nimbly wound them around pillars of superheated plasma. At the same time Jao and Jariah pumped return fire out of the turrets and picked off the enemy snubfighters one at a time.

As they weaved in and out of the frenzied fight, Kyra's attention stayed on Skywalker. The man clenched the throttle with both hands as he pulled them through the crazy maneuvers and his face was bunched tight in concentration, lips curled and teeth bared in an angry scowl. Despite that, there was a strange calmness to him, a stability. Even when explosions battered the shields and rocked them in the cockpit, Cade's attention was always dead ahead. Every second he acted and reacted and never showed the stress or primal fear that was pumping through Kyra.

She wondered if the Force was guiding his hand, or if he was guiding it. When she'd first met Skywalker back in Rav's treasure cave on Socorro, she'd struck him as a ferocious, almost animalistic fighter, but she realized now that when the Force guided him, he attained a savage grace.

Realization made her heart swell and fear recede. With the Force protecting them, they could survive even this. She was in awe of his mastery and craved to one day wield that power herself.

Cade swung them around for another pass at the Nagai frigate. This time some of the local gunboats joined in for a run on the command section, and together they managed to overwhelm the shields and tear through parts of the superstructure. At the same time Jao and Jariah kept picking off starfighters, winnowing down the frigate's defenders. By this point the ship had stopped firing on the planet altogether and was using its turbolasers entirely for defense.

And then, suddenly, the frigate pushed away from the planet. It pivoted its nose toward black space, gunned sputtering engines, and pushed out of Sebiris' gravity well on a pillar of blazing thrust.

Lowbacca roared triumphantly and Kyra said, "They're running!"

"Looks like," Cade said with just a hint of satisfaction. "What about the rest of 'em?"

Deliah checked her sensor board. "They'll pulling out. Looks like they're making a run for it."

"Did more help arrive?" asked Kyra.

The Zeltron shook her head. "Nope. My guess this was a lighting raid, maybe a feint. They're not here to occupy the planet, just make it hurt."

"Right," said Cade. "They'll force the Federation to spread its fleets thinner too, and put plenty more systems on edge."

Knowledge that they had not, in fact, singularly turned the tide sobered Kyra and reminded her of the devastation smoldering on the planet below. "What now?"

"Now we go where we were supposed to go in the first place," Cade said as he pushed Mynock back toward the planet. "Just pray there's something left for us to see."

-{}-

There was nothing more grim than the aftermath of a battle, especially one as one-sided as the Nagai strike at Sebiris. Rescue crews began swarming over the main settlement, and while they'd need plenty of help, Mynock first went for the clearing forty kilometers northwest, where the ancient hypergate still sat, shielded from the brunt of the attack by the huge hexagonal dome made of unknown substance.

The hypergate had fared better than anything else during the attack. After Mynock set down in a scorched-clear patch beyond the excavation pit, her crew got out and delivered what first aid they could. The archaeologist encampment had been almost totally burned away, and while some researchers had found shelter beneath the ancient dome, many had been vaporized in the initial blast.

Even the survivors were wounded, every one of them. With relief operations focused on the city, Mynock was the only one bringing aid to the archaeologists for the first few hours after the attack.

When more help finally arrived, it was a relief. The wounded- essentially the entire surviving excavation team- was laid out on pallets at the clearing's edge, and Cade began asking whether the person in charge had made it through the attacks. Several of the more lucid researchers pointed him to the group's sole Cerean. Akk-Morr-Baun had luckily avoided damage to his cone-topped cranium, but one arm had been badly torn up by shrapnel and he'd been put under sedation until the newly-arrived medics could fit him with a bacta cast. He wasn't going to be waking up anytime soon, and Cade started mentally calculating how long they should stay. Daylight was waning, and shadow were falling over the battle-scarred clearing.

As he thought, the researcher whose pallet he was squatting beside reached up to touch his forearm. The woman- middle-aged, short-haired, with bandages over burns on the right side of her face, said, "You… I know you, don't I?"

Cade hated being recognizable. "I doubt that, darling. You've had a rough day. Messed with your head."

"No… I heard you were alive… Cade Skywalker, isn't it?"

He exhaled. "And what if I am?"

The woman's lips curved into a dry smile. "I knew it… They say you can still use the Force… That you're still a Jedi."

"I've heard about this 'they' person. They're usually full of poodoo."

"They also say you have… an attitude."

He allowed a small grin. "Is that a problem?"

"I just… I've always wanted… to meet a Jedi…" She rolled her eyes to look around the remains of the camp. "I was the team's Jedi expert, you know?"

"What do you mean, expert? You mean Jedi artifacts and stuff? Couldn't have been much of a market for those when the Sith were in charge."

"No. I thought things were getting better." She coughed. "I'm Doctor Relno. But please… call me Mayen."

It wasn't often people offered Cade help, so he decided to take it. Leaning in close he said, "What's a lady like you doing out here, digging up hypergates?"

"Ancient xenoarchaeology is my specialty," she said. "Akk-Morr-Baum… He was my advisor on Mrlsst once… He brought me aboard."

"Well, he'll be okay. Just give him time."

"I know." She squeezed his arm harder. "But… something strange has been happening here. A year ago, a little over, a man came to Sebiris. He wasn't an accredited researcher anywhere but he knew all about the hypergate. And he brought us Jedi relics, ancient ones. He said they were from Tython."

Cade was familiar with that name. Best he knew, no Jedi had stepped foot on their supposed ancestral homeworld in centuries. The planet was in the Deep Core somewhere, almost entirely locked away by twisting hyperlanes and gasses left by dead stars.

"Tython," he said, "Are you sure?"

"I know my Jedi artifacts," Mayen said. "They were either authentic pre-Republic from Tython… or damned good forgeries." She coughed again. "I saw those… Thought we could trust him. It's my fault what happened next. That's where… it all went wrong."

"How so?"

"That man and his friends… they held us captive and pillaged the hypergate. Stole all the critical parts we might have used to get it running again… Then they ran off."

"Back to Tython?"

"I… don't know. He showed us charts… He said they were surveys of a ruined hypergate on Tython… at the bottom of a huge chasm… Maybe they were forgeries. Or real, I don't know."

Cade didn't have to ask the last part, but he did anyway. "Did this guy call himself Reikar Horn?"

Mayen's response was a tired smirk. "I knew you couldn't be out here… by coincidence. Had to be the will of the Force."

"What do you know about the Force?"

"Nothing." Her smile turned sad. "I always wanted to touch it, to feel it. I wanted it so badly… but I couldn't. So I became… archaeologist instead. Hunting their artifacts. Never thought… it would lead me here."

Cade, who'd spent a good part of his life trying to escape the Force, still felt strange around people who'd spent all of theirs wishing they had it. "I'm sorry about the rest of your team. I really am."

"Horn…. This attack… That young man the other day…. Do you think they're connected?"

"What young man?"

"He said… Ah… Orath. Orath Panelis. Do you know him?"

Cade shook his head. He had no idea what she was talking about.

"This young man… He looked like a student. He said he was one, and he knew all these things a researcher would know… He showed up at the camp a few days ago. He said his professor on Mrlsst had sent him to help. Akk-Morr-Baun spent all day showing him around. Then he got on his speeder… said he was going back to town to get his things. He vanished. He didn't steal anything like Horn, but he vanished. What does that mean?"

"I really don't know," Cade said. "I'll look into it, I promise."

Truthfully, he had no idea where to start. He only knew that Khat Lah had been to Tython, which meant they'd be going there too.

The woman shifted her hand on top of his and squeezed it. "You… Jedi… You'll get to the bottom of this. I know you will."

Cade felt uncomfortable with the faith of strangers. "I'll see what I can do. You gotta rest now."

Mayen squeezed his hand again, then released. He gave her a nod, stood up, and walked, glad to be away from her admiring eyes.

-{}-

Kyra's first clear memories were of war. She could barely recall her mother and father, but the bombing on Svivren that had killed them remained painfully vivid, when she dared to summon them. She remembered the smoke and ash, the smell of scorched bodies, the horrible crack of falling ferrocrete buildings and engine-flares of bombers overhead. All those visceral memories recalled the deeper helplessness of wartime. Death could come at any moment, stealing the ones you loved and the life you lived, and those lucky enough to survive would spend the rest of their days reckoning with the memory of crushing helplessness.

Sebiris brought back all the things she'd hoped were gone forever. Kyra did her best to repress them as she and the rest of Mynock's crew tended to the wounded at the excavation site, but once that was done they moved the ship to the outskirts of the settlement, where the devastation was so much worse. Entire city blocks had been vaporized by suborbital turbolaser fire. Towers had been gutted by superheated plasma and still furled smoke into the night-black sky. Broad boulevards were lined with bodies, some wounded and some dead; it was impossible to tell which was which.

It was too much for Kyra. She tried to hide her nausea from her companions, but the sickening stench overcame her and she ended up pitched on the ground, vomiting up an empty stomach.

Jao took her back to the ship. As he set her down in the crew longue and fetched her cold water he said gently, protectively, "We won't be here long. They're going to see if they can scrounge up a few supplies, I think… Then we're going to be heading for the Core."

"Coruscant?" she asked after swallowing.

"Not even close. You've heard of Tython?"

She shook her head.

"It's supposedly the birthplace of the Jedi Order, a planet in the Deep Core. I'd always thought it was a myth… But it's real, and according to Lowbacca, the Jedi know a route there."

"So we're going to the birthplace of the Jedi."

"Maybe. There's signs Khat Lah's been there." He was as dazed and tired as her, but enthusiasm showed through too. He thought they'd finally found a worthy lead.

Kyra couldn't share his vigor. "I hope we find something. I really do. I'll just be glad to get away from here."

"We all will." Jao grew sober. "This new war… It's a lot smaller than the last few the galaxy's seen, but it's still nasty. It has to be stopped."

"You think the Force will help you stop it?"

"I know it will," he said, and she was surprised by his conviction. "That's what the Force is for. Bringing order, peace, and stability."

"What about the Sith?"

"They twist it for their own ends. They use the Force to bring out the worst in themselves, just like war brings out the worst in people. But used correctly, the Force is the greatest healer."

She wanted to believe that, badly. Sebiris had left her shaken like nothing else on this mission. It had recalled all the helplessness of Svivren and, worse, reminded her that despite everything that had happened since, a part of her was still a child trapped amidst the death and ruin of her parents' home. Kyra prayed Jao was right; that they could yet recover the Force, that she could learn its power, that she would never feel this helpless and the galaxy would never see such devastation again.

More than anything, she wished she had the strength to make it so.

-{}-

The voyage to Tython was a slow and careful crawl into the heart of the galaxy. In the Deep Core, stars were packed so tight that prolonged hyperspace jumps were impossible. This close to the great singularity around which the rest of the galaxy spun, ancient suns and drifting stellar gas shifted position constantly and safe passage was only possible through precise maps and computer predictions.

As they were drawn further into the dangerous center, Eli felt like he was being swallowed by something greater than himself. Every time they ended a short jump, entered realspace, and reoriented themselves for another flash into hyperspace, the stars seemed packed tighter around them, the blackness between them more scarce. Space became a panorama of ancient red stars half-veiled by gold and crimson stardust. There was something almost mystical about it, a feeling fueled by the knowledge that so many of the galaxy's secrets lay within these ancient solar systems.

Darth Talon described some of this to him on the long journey. She explained how Wyyrlok, the traitor, had once undertaken a mission to Prakith, former throneworld of the ancient Darth Andeddu, who some claimed had found a way to defeat death. Darth Sidious had made his own base on the world of Byss, a world already drenched in the dark side from its time as a base for the Rakatan empire.

That was all long ago. Byss had been turned to rubble and Prakith was an abandoned world. So, supposedly, was Tython. According to Talon, the planet had been home to Force-users long before either the Jedi or Sith existed as defined schools. That alone was a strange concept to Eli, whose life had been defined by vacillation between the two but was more curious as to whether this Tython represented a world he'd seen mentioned repeatedly in the Gree archives. According to those translation of ancient tomes, the Gree had observed members of younger races being taken away to a planet in the Deep Core- the method was never explained- and on this world they were taught to 'breathe the breath of the gods.' The texts were vague, but they hinted these god-powered beings had resisted an invasion from the Rakatan Empire at its height.

Rumor, legend, supposition. The only way to find the truth would be to see it with his own eyes.

When they finally arrived at their destination, they found an unprepossessing planet that gave no outward sign of its historic importance. From the cockpit viewport, it was simply a sphere of mixed greys, greens, and whites set against dense stellar backdrop. Two smaller spheres swung in orbit, one colored light, the other dark.

Eli immediately checked his scanners for signs of any ships in orbit. Nothing. Talon took the controls and edged them closer. She released several small probes that would circle the planet and alert them if any new ships entered the system. After a full rotation around the planet's orbit, Eli confirmed, "There's no other vessels in the area."

"Do you scan around the moons?"

"I did. There was nothing there either."

Talon twisted the controls as they rounded the planet's ecliptic. "Begin a deep-level scan of the planet's surface."

"What are we looking for?"

Talon didn't respond right away; she knew as little of what to expect as Eli. Finally she said, "Look for landed spacecraft. Visible structures, especially ones that look recent. Anything that does not look as though it's been here for millennia."

That was vague, but Eli said, "All right. This could take a long time."

"We have no place else to be," said Talon, and he caught a little bitterness in her voice.

She was right, though. This was their mission, and Tython was the best lead they'd yet found. He was right too: it took hours and hours to scan the planet's surface. Talon dropped them lower so he could search more thoroughly, and it took seven complete counter-spin circuits around the planet to fully map the surface.

"No ships that I can see," Eli summarized, not bothering to hide disappointment. "No settlements. There are some ruins, but they're very scattered."

"Is there anything worth investigating?" Talon did a better job of hiding frustration, but it was still there.

"Maybe," he allowed.

He tapped the controls and brought up a two-dimensional image taken by the visual sensors. It displayed an orbital view of the landscape, showing treeless ridges and snow-pale plains that spanned for hundreds of square miles. He tapped the controls again and zoomed in to show what appeared to be round-rimmed crater spread around an object that was clearly not naturally formed. It looked to be a four-sided pyramid. At least from this view, it was far more intact than the other ruins he'd seen from orbit.

"Interesting," Talon said. "How large is the object?"

Eli checked the sensors. "Each side seems to be over four hundred meters long."

Talon checked the spatial coordinates on the display image and grabbed the controls. "This is worth investigating."

She fired their engines and nudged them out of orbit. They fell smoothly through Tython's atmosphere, burning past thin cloud-drifts as they made their way to the surface. The areas around the object was a vast spread of ridgeland dusted white by a faint layer of snow. The pyramid was visible from a distance, a black triangle jutting high above the horizon. Eli vaguely hoped to see some signs of current habitation, but the most life they saw on approach was a flock of avians giving their ship wide berth.

When they reached the pyramid, Talon flew them in a slow circuit to survey the area better. Eli saw now that the crater in which the pyramid sat wasn't a crater at all, but an excavation pit similar to the far smaller one he'd seen at Sebiris. Thousands of tons of soil and stone must have accumulated atop the pyramid, then been removed. The remnants had been piled around the pit's rim to form a raised cusp.

The object itself was made of some rough black stone, and as they drew close they saw it was more than a mere pyramid. The excavation had revealed an entire underside section that seemed to mirror the top. Though much of the lower half was still buried, Eli could tell this structure was shaped like two massive pyramids joined together at the thickest point to create an eight-sided monolith. Visible on all four top-facing sides was a carved symbol, vaguely reminiscent of the Imperial roundel but distinct, with an outer circle and an inner one marked by eight jutting spokes.

Talon brought them in to land at the edge of excavation pit. They threw on layered clothes, then stepped out into the cold. Standing on the pit's rim, the object was impressively huge. A dusting of snow obscured the surface of the pit itself, but very little was clustered on the black stone surface of the object, which suggested either internal heat or an exterior that warmed easily in the sun. Talon and Eli approached the thing carefully; the young man felt a strange reverence come over him. Talon had said Tython had flourished before the Jedi and Sith evolved into separate orders. Whatever purpose this construction had served, it could contain knowledge more arcane and deep than anything he'd been taught.

In a low voice he asked, "Do you think Khat Lah did this? Someone must have excavated the pyramid. It was probably buried under a hill for ages…"

"I don't know," Talon said simply.

They walked carefully downslope until they entered the object's shadow. Stepping beneath the broad midsection, they went all the way to the place where carved black material plunged into sediment and soil. Eli looked closely at the material before touching. It looked like stone, and despite a slightly uneven surface there was a sheen to it not unlike what he'd seen in volcanic rock. Eli felt the sudden compulsion to touch the thing, bare skin against ancient stone. Without saying a word to Talon he pulled the glove off his hand. She didn't stop him as he reached out. Irrational anticipation seized him. His heart pounded hard and his breath caught in his chest. He pressed all five fingertips against the black surface.

Nothing happened. Heartbeat slowed. Breathing returned to normal. Cold bit into his fingertips until he withdrew them.

Talon was looking at him. Eli sheepishly avoided her gaze. "I didn't feel any…. any heat. Or anything else."

She took his meaning in full. "I do believe this is what Khat Lah uncovered when he came here."

"I was expecting a hypergate."

"As was I." She stepped back, out of the object's shadow so she could peer toward the top of the black pyramid. "But to uncover this must have been a massive undertaking. It would have taken many months. It was important to Khat Lah somehow. We must find out why."

Eli nodded, though as he stared at the same black point, gleaming very faintly in the milky sunlight, he wondered whether the secrets of this object, or Tython itself, could ever be accessible to those deaf to the Force. Though Talon didn't say it, he was sure she thought the same.