Khat Lah had been right when he'd said time was different on the other side of the gate. Dilation was one thing- they'd learn the full truth of that when they returned to Rohakalla- but simply being on this world was strange. Day was only slightly brighter than night, and less welcome for the eerie, blood-colored glow of the dying sun. Cycles passed quickly but they never seemed to pass at the same rate; it was impossible for their bodies to gather and rhythm and they simply trekked until they were tired and lay down to sleep in the middle of the path, under bloody sun or myriad stars, it made no difference.

At least, they tried to sleep. Cade didn't know what dreams had afflicted Eli and Kyra. They refused to say. The dreams- or nightmares, or Force-visions- had come to them their second time sleeping in this place, and they'd both woken up violently trembling with remembered pain. Kyra had woken up first and Cade had rushed on her, ready to heal any way he could, only to discover the damage was to her mind, not her body. Khat Lah had done what he could to calm her with the Force and soothe the phantom pain away. When Eli had awoken hours later, he'd done the same.

The Force had returned to them both. Cade could feel them more clearly than ever. But as to what had awakened them, they wouldn't say. The two young people had become lost in the echoes of their dreams. Yet the march toward the distant pillar of light continued. They strung a long, loose line, with Khat Lah and Cade in lead, Kyra and Eli trailing behind them and distant from each other.

As they trekked Cade kept pace with the Yuuzhan Vong and asked, "Was it like this with the others?"

"Yes." Khat Lah spoke softly, though Eli and Kyra were out of earshot. "Through the Force they were dropped into visions as vivid as life. My companions were also reluctant to speak about what had happened. From what they eventually told me, I gathered the Force took them all to a moment, perhaps the moment, that defined the person they'd become. For many that was a moment of pain."

"I gathered that." If this was true, it wasn't hard to guess what Eli's pivotal moment had been. He had an idea what Kyra's was too. "So it drudged up old memories. That's rough… But when they woke up they were hurting bad. Physically."

"I suspect the Force made them relive those moments… from a different perspective."

"What does that mean?"

"It means the Force knows all life." Khat Lah lowered his voice further. "One of my warriors told me- in strictest confidence- that as a youth, one of his creche-mates on Zonama Sekot joined a radical cult that worshipped Yun-Yammka and sought to bring back our warlike ways. He was forced to kill that friend. The Force made him relive that incident… though the eyes of the one he killed."

That explained a lot. Cade knew Eli's father had died in agony. He imagined Kyra's parent hadn't died well either. For just a second he tried to imagine feeling his own father's death, fatally stabbed by Darth Nihl's blade then burned from the inside by his dark lightning. Nobody deserved to experience that kind of death and live with the aftershocks.

"The Force isn't usually so… intrusive. Or cruel."

Khat Lah cast his eyes on the distant light. "The Force is different here."

He could say that again. The strange miasma seemed to grow gradually thicker as they approached the light. The power still felt raw, neither light nor dark. Its omnipresence and unknown quality made Cade feel claustrophobic, and he refrained from touching the Force except in the lightest ways. He was afraid that if he used it here, he might not be able to control it.

Trying for optimism, Cade said, "Well, I'm glad we didn't have to go through poodoo like that."

"You understand what I meant when I was worried about them more than you."

"Yeah, I get that now." He glanced over his shoulder. Kyra lagged behind, and Eli lagged further, but they kept plodding. "Is this why you brought the Horn kid along? You thought his weird Force-vision would scare the Sith out of him?"

"It was my hope," Khat Lah admitted.

"Tough lessons."

"Yes."

They walked a little more in silence. A thought came to Cade. "You said the Force showed your guy his friend's death, through his eyes. That was before either of them could touch the Force."

"Clearly the Force still touched them, in ways none of us knew at the time."

"I guess so." Another thought came. "The Force awoke in your guys the same way it did in Eli and Kyra. You see the difference in them, right? They have midi-chlorians and your guys don't."

"In practical terms there is no difference. Darth Maladi's virus rendered their midi-chlorians inert. I imagine they still are. They are touching it directly, without intermediaries, the same way I am." Khat Lah tilted his head in thought. "The Jedi have always held that the Force embraces all life, even the kind that has passed through death into the Force. This planet demonstrates that tenant in full."

"Yeah, I get that now."

"No. You do not."

Cade shot him a glare. He was hoping they were done with the cryptic evasions, but apparently they weren't. He resisted the urge to call Khat Lah on it. He knew it wouldn't do any good.

After a little more walking, the Yuuzhan Vong said, "One more thing about these visions. I believe Eli Horn is still having them."

Cade resisted the urge to look over his shoulder. "You sure?"

"He wakes suddenly from sleep, shuddering from pain. He uses the Force to soothe himself. Sometimes he even falls back asleep."

Cade felt ashamed for missing it. "What about Kyra?"

"She sleeps restlessly, but she doesn't seem to be haunted by dreams, at least not painful ones."

"So those are just Eli, then."

"Apparently, the Force is not done speaking to him."

"Is that a good thing or a bad thing? You wanted him to get scared straight, right?"

"I did, and whatever happens, he will not go back through the gate the same being he was when he entered."

Cade had a feeling that held true for all of them. "That's not necessarily a good thing."

"I know. That is why we must watch them both closely."

He sighed. "I never wanted to be caretaker for some messed-up kids. I didn't exactly have the most stable upbringing myself, you know."

"I do. That is another reason why I wanted you to come with us through the gate. Besides the obvious."

He lifted his eyes toward the light-pillar, still far off. It was a nice reminder that the real challenges lay ahead of them, not behind. For now, Cade thought, keep an eye on the kids. He'd deal with the bright unknown when he got there.

-{}-

He didn't understand what was happening. One moment he was hunched over his desk, processing the latest shipment reports his boss wanted. Then, suddenly, Qordis had stepped into the room. The paunched, bearded man looked down on his clerk and said, "I have to step out. If anyone comes, stall them."

He blinked eyes gone fuzzy from staring at the datapad. "What do you mean?"

"I mean keep them busy here, as long as you can." Just like that, Qordis spun on his heel and made for the office foyer. He got up from his desk and followed his boss. The man was throwing on a light jacket and stuffing datacards in a case.

"Can I ask where you're going?"

"I just have to be so someplace. They'll help you mind the fort."

Qordis snapped his fingers at a pair of very old YVH battle droids that stood like metal mannequins on the far wall by the window. He couldn't tell if his boss was joking; it was hard to tell a lot of things with Qordis, like why a civilian freight company had started shipping war materiel, or why he'd seen fit to keep two droids in his office for the past few weeks.

(At the sight of those droids Eli knew exactly what this vision was and the kind of pain he'll feel this time.)

He knew going in that Qordis' operations might not be entirely on the level. There were rumors. But he'd climbed aboard anyway because he needed a job after his last one, and there weren't many companies on Orannessen willing to hire a man at who'd been knocked out of manual labor by chronic back pains and had no special skills. His age was also a detriment: forty-six standard years and approaching fifty dreadfully fast. To his relief, nothing Qordis had made him do looked any way illegal. If he had that side to his business he was letting other people handle that.

Qordis shrugged on his coat, grabbed his case, and headed for the door. As it opened he called to his boss, "How long do you think you'll be gone for?"

"Several days, I imagine. When you're done with those reports, send the copies via HoloNet." That meant he was going offworld, to one of his company's other offices. It must have been something special, maybe something bad, that had drawn him away so fast.

Qordis slipped out the door. It shut behind him.

(Eli realized that time, he'd never even get the name of the man he was trapped inside. In his dreams the past few nights- or what counted as night in this strange place- he'd been shown the final minutes of other beings before he'd killed them. In his dreams he'd felt their pain and known their thoughts and understood the petty details of their lives. Last time he'd been one of Governor Salk's security guards on Vorzyd V, privately fretting about a gift for his girlfriend he wouldn't survive to give.)

He sighed, turned around, and looked at the two battle droids. They were totally unmoving buy the photoreceptors in their faces glowed faint yellow, indicating they were operational. Combined with the skull-like faces it was an unnerving sight. He didn't even know if the battle droids could fight anymore; Qordis claimed they could, but he'd also had them decorating his office for weeks instead of shipping them to a buyer.

"Just you and me, boys," he muttered faintly. They didn't respond.

He sighed, went back to his desk, and tried to put his mind off of all of it. It was steady work with decent pay. He was lucky to have it. After his injury he'd been unemployed and despondent for months, gaining weight and drinking a lot more than he should have. Those empty days had forced him to take a look at his life, the decisions he'd made and not made, and it wasn't a pleasant picture. No wife or children, no career, no friends good for anything except rounds at the cantina. At that time, no job and no money.

At least he'd gotten the last two. It was something, he told himself. It filled the empty days and made it a little easier to ignore the dumb wreck he'd made of his life.

(Just minutes left, Eli thought. Twisting in his bedroll he braced himself for new pain.)

He sighed to himself once more, then got to work. He processed two reports and prepped them to send to Qordis' ship. He'd just started the third when he heard a faint sound from the foyer: metal grinding on metal. Then he heard a faint hum as the battle droids powered on. He rose from his desk and looked into the foyer to find both machines had stepped into the middle of the room and raised their weapon-mounted arms toward the door.

"What the hell?" he bleated. "What's going on?"

"Please stand back, sir," a tinny droid voice said. "We will do everything to ensure your safety."

"What do you mean? Is someone-"

He got out nothing else before the office exploded in violence. The door was torn open as though by an invisible hand and the droids opened fire immediately. A figure rushed into the room like black wind. The body was wrapped in a whirling dark cloak, instant holed through by the hail of laserfire, but none of the blasts stopped it. Then a blazing red-white light appeared in its fist and stretched to a half-meter.

Standing in the side doorway he froze in dumb shock. A lightsaber. He'd never thought he'd see one with his own eyes.

(Seeing through another's eyes, Eli felt primal terror at the sight of himself. He was a nightmare in black and red, a promise of death some to end another life without barely a thought.)

The black-robed figure stopped in the center of the foyer and threw out a hand palm-forward. The droids tipped, as though struck by a powerful wind, but their metal legs staggered to keep from falling and their laserfire didn't relent. Next one desk bracing the wall tipped toward the closest droid, forcing it to sidestep to avoid. The black figure- Jedi? Sith?- charged through the doorway at the right droid and bisected it with a horizontal swipe through the hip. The droid's upper half kept pumping out laserfire, scorching the ceiling as the torso fell, and the attacker barely sidestepped them before severing both arms from the body with a pair of low swipes.

This thing- Jedi or Sith- was a killing machine. Terrified, he ran back into his office and ducked behind the desk. He dared look over the edge and saw the figure charge the second droid, duck beneath two blasts, then rear up with a vertical swing that severed the machine from groin to head. The droid fell in two tall halves and was still. The monster looked down on the broken droid, perhaps in satisfaction. Its back was turned.

Instinct grabbed him. Qordis insisted they keep a blaster in the office; he had one tucked in his desk. He'd never thought he'd had to use it. With shaking hands he pulled open the bottom drawer, clasped the hold-out pistol between his palms, then braced his elbows on the desktop and opened fire at the black-cloaked back.

His gun shook and his shots went wide, but the monster seemed to sense them coming even before they left his pistol. The black-cloaked figure spun and deflects three shots with deft twitched of its lightsaber. The figure stalked toward him with intent and as it got close he could see the face of the being who'd kill him.

It was just a teenager. A smooth pale face framed by messy black hair. Dark eyes that for a second seemed to flash gold. The lightsaber held high and vertical, ready for a downward blow.

(And Eli remembered sight of the man peeking over his desk, blaster aimed but shaking. Just some old, fat, pointless man. The moment he'd seen that man, Eli'd known he was going to kill him.)

Terror froze him; he couldn't even pull the trigger before the boy flicked his wrist, wrested the pistol from his hand and threw him into the wall behind him. He boy bounded the desk, then dropped in front of him, ragged cloak flaring like a preybird's wings as it came in for the kill. Black-gloved hands took his chin in a vice-grip and the red-white lightsaber hummed warmth inches from his eyes.

He was going to die here, like this, killed by a Sith.

His pointless empty life was going to end and he had no idea why.

He didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

(Neither did Eli as he writhed in bed. If he'd known the Force was going to subject him to this- experiencing his every murder through the eyes of those he'd killed- he'd have never come. He'd have never sought to regain the Force at all. He'd have fled far away and lived another life and tried to forget he'd even thought the way of the Sith would bring him liberation.)

"Are you Nial Qorlis?" the boy said in a low growl.

He tried to wag his head. The boy loosened his grip enough for him to say, "N-Not him… He just left... S-s-said to stall anyone who came…"

Please please please, he thought, don't kill me please I don't want to die.

"Where did Qorlis go?"

"G-gone… Getting off this r-rock…"

The boy's face screwed up in anger. He glanced over his shoulder, at the carnage in the foyer, then back to his captive.

(As he lay dreaming Eli couldn't even remember how he'd killed this man. A lightsaber thrust? A blow to the head or neck? He'd dealt so much death, casually and coldly but also proudly, because he's thought the way of the Sith was the only way to power.)

The boy considered him for a moment, then drew the lightsaber away. He took a deep breath and felt relief flood through him. Then, his vision jerked to the right, too hard. He heard and felt something crack in his neck; his windpipe twisted too, so tight it closed out breath. He was staring into the wall but his body faced the opposite direction. Dully, he realized his neck had been snapped.

(A painless death. So much better than the other dream-deaths Eli had suffered, but also worse. The dream lingered and held him and wouldn't let him go.)

They said you could get your head cut straight off and live for another minute. Oxygen and electric impulses still in the brain. That minute lasted forever. He couldn't twitch his head back or move the dead meat of the body below his broken neck. He couldn't even cry, though he wanted to. After all his life's accident and mistakes and dead ends, all its droning pointlessness, he'd sometimes thought there was no point in going forward.

Now death was coming for him. Darkness crowded the edges of his vision and would take him soon, but not soon enough. In the silence of his mind he screamed and wept and wailed. He didn't want to die. He didn't want to die. He didn't want the emptiness of his life to end in the final emptiness of death. There was so much he wanted to fix. So much he'd do over if he could.

(If I could do it all over, Eli thought, I'd die with the other Jedi apprentices after their capture. I'd stand bravely before Darth Nihl and let the Sith cut him down. Then I'd be spared this for sure.)

There was nothing for it. Darkness took forever to enclose him but it finally did. His mind howled vain protest until the end. In a bleak, sad, stupid way, it was a fitting death.

The dream released him. Eli opened his eyes and saw the star-packed sky overhead. His body didn't tremble with echoed knife-wounds, punches, or broken bones. All he felt was an aching hollow inside, as if part of him had died with the man he'd murdered. Probably it had. He wondered if the Force was going to make him relieve every death he'd caused. If so, that meant he still had around a half-dozen to go. He wasn't even sure of the precise number. And once the Force had shown him all that, what then? He wasn't naïve enough to think the Force would leave him alone. It had descended on him and was hounding him and he didn't think he'd escape it until he left this world. Maybe not even then.

Eli wanted to turn back and march back to the gate, but he doubted he'd have the power to reopen it on his own. He needed these other three for that. He was trapped here in more ways than one.

So when they broke camp and continued their trek, now across a landscape grown jagged and hilly, thankfully with no more scars from a cosmic war. The sun was low in the sky and strange shadows stretched over the rocky earth. As Eli packed his things he thought he saw something in the corner of his eye. He rose and looked at the closest ridgetop and his breath caught in his chest. Three figures were standing there, shadows sides facing him, but in their dark shapes he could make out humanoid bodies, flat noseless faces, and large eyes.

He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them. The Duros were still there. He groped out with the Force, an unfamiliar and awkward effort after missing it for so long. He felt something atop the ridge, something different.

"Khat Lah!" he called. "Skywalker!"

"What is it?" the latter said, moving a hand to his lightsaber.

Eli turned back to the ridge. Its crest was empty. He reached out with the Force this time and felt nothing besides the weird aura that hung over this entire planet.

"Nothing," he muttered. "I just… though I saw something."

Skywalker shrugged and went back to packing. Khat Lah looked at him for a moment more, leathery face unreadable. Then he looked away. Last was Kyra, standing most distant, pack already on her back. She held Eli's stare for a good ten seconds before turning.

He hoped it had been a hallucination brought on by stress and sleeplessness. He didn't want to think his nightmares were following him into waking.

Tired, frightened, perhaps a little mad, Eli marched with his companions beneath a sun the color of blood.

-{}-

Kyra's experience with the Force had been next to nothing until now. Jao said she'd been using it unconsciously all her life, but her only deliberate connection with it had been in one meditation session right before she'd lost her powers. It had opened her to feeling she'd never known before, and after a year had ceased to remember.

What came to her on this world was something different. She almost felt submerged under water, pressed on all sides by something thick yet fluid that subtly distorted her surroundings. The difference was that this thing all around her didn't warp reality but sharpened it somehow. Insight came to her naturally, without effort. Since regaining the Force she had more energy and felt like she was marching longer every day.

Despite that, she wasn't happy. This place was too strange, and the experience of her mother's death lingered with her instead of fading like a dream should. Sometimes phantom pains- echoes of a cracked rib or twisted arm- would come on her and she'd struggle not to cry out. Skywalker and Khat Lah had used the Force to calm her pain that first night. Several nights later, she's quietly asked Skywalker if he could show her how. She was learning, gradually, to use this power. To swim in the strange waters that submerged her.

The Force came to her in other ways. Insight told her that Eli had been having more painful dreams. She didn't know what any of them entailed, not even his first one, and she didn't know enough about the young man to guess. She knew that, as a Sith apprentice, he must have done terrible things, and a part of her thought he deserved all the agonized nights he got. But when they marched toward the distant light she watched him and felt him in the Force, and she took no joy in his pain.

She wanted to talk to him about their experiences, to understand her own as much as his, but she always balked. Whatever he was now, Eli had been a Sith apprentice. He'd nearly killed Jao. He was dangerous and she kept her distance.

Their long march had taken them over dusty plains, through ruined cities and around massive craters carved by ancient superweapons. They were passing over a spine of low mountains now, and as they began to gradual downhill climb Kyra could see the path ahead was different. Instead of an open plain it appeared to be a forest. The land ahead seemed darkened and dense with barren trees. That surprised her, as they'd seen no life at all on their trek, not even a slip of dry scrub. Khat Lah had said that life flourished near the Force-eruptions, and while they were getting closer to that light-pillar in the sky they weren't there yet, and the forest hardly looked flourishing.

As they got to the bottom of the slope and descended into the forest, things became clearer yet more confusing. The trees were mostly stout growths less than four meters high, with narrow trunks and crooked spread-out branches. Their trunks looked curiously smooth, not like bark at all. When they got close enough to touch, Kyra's hand confirmed what her eyes told her. The trees were made of stone. Every branch and every twig was hard rock, surface slightly worn by thousands or millions of years of light breeze.

"I don't understand," Kyra whispered as her fingers ran across a low branch. "How is this possible?"

"I do not know," Khat Lah admitted. "I have discovered other stone forests on this world. When this planet ascended to become a Whill, the trees must have been instantly petrified."

"And we have to pass through this to get where we want to go?" asked Eli.

"Unless we add local days to our voyage, yes."

"Then we go ahead," Cade said. "You know the best way through?"

"Of course."

The red sun was falling toward the far horizon. It cast long gnarled shadows through the stone forest. Though she knew there was no one else on this planet except them, the jagged darkness still filled Kyra with dread. As they entered the forest, she felt the same primal fear emanating from Eli, Cade, and even Khat Lah.

Every so often a tiny breeze blew. It whistled very faintly through the stone forest but failed to move even the tiniest twig. It was a small thing, but it felt so wrong. Kyra found herself looking left and right as they moved through the stone, sometimes ducking to pass beneath low branches. With every step the complex tangle of dark shadow and red sunlight shifted, creating a new and menacing geography.

Sometimes she thought she saw movement among the shadows. Sometimes she stopped in her tracks and stared. Once she saw what looked like a human body moving through the forest.

"Did you see something?"

Eli's voice, soft and right behind her, made her jump. "Dammit," she snapped, "Don't do that!"

"Did you see something?" he repeated, very serious.

"No," she snapped, then corrected herself. "I don't know. It was just… a trick of the light."

She glanced fearfully at the place where she'd been movement. Nothing except the static tangle of black and red.

"Hey," Skywalker called from up ahead, "You two all right?"

"We're fine," Kyra said after short hesitation. Eli said nothing at all. They continued walking.

As the march drew on, weariness warred with fear. Nobody said it, but nobody wanted to stop and sleep in the forest, at least not unless they found a clearing where the stone branches weren't hanging like cage bars overhead. As she became tired Kyra stopped searching shadows for imagined movement, but she could feel Eli still paranoid behind.

The two of them started to lag a little further behind Skywalker and Khat Lah. She kept her eyes ahead to track them as they passed through shadow and red light. That was when she saw, unmistakably, a humanoid figure dash through the forest and cross onto the middle of the narrow path.

Kyra froze. The figure stopped and stared at her. In the darkness and distance she couldn't tell much, but the face looked flat and large-eyed, like a Duros.

"Do you see it?" Eli asked behind her.

She didn't jump or look back at him. She stared ahead as the Duros- if that was what it was- broke her stare and darted off the track, into the shadowy stone tangle.

"Did you see it?" Eli repeated.

"I… I saw it…" She finally turned around. His tired eyes were wide in fear.

"Hey!" Skywalker called from up the path. "Something wrong back there?"

Something was very wrong. Kyra and Eli hurried forward, as though they'd be safer close to Cade and Khat Lah.

"I saw someone in the forest," Kyra said. "Eli saw it too. A Duros ran right through the center of the path." She gestured at the shadows into which it had disappeared.

"What the hells?" Cade's face crinkled.

"I saw three of them in the mountains when we woke up," Eli added. "I… I didn't think anyone else could see them."

Kyra understood. "If you've seen Duros in your… your dreams… what are they doing here?"

Cade turned to Khat Lah. Eli and Kyra did too. The Yuuzhan Vong sighed heavily. "It is happening already. Strange. Usually we must draw closer to the eruption before they manifest."

"Before what manifests?" asked Eli. "What are they? Some kind of Force-vision?"

"Nothing so simple." He glanced at Cade. "You know that on Zonama Sekot, the living world can summon the spirits of those dead. It can also, on rare occasion, bind spirit to matter and give them form."

"I've heard about it. But…" Cade trailed off as he tried to wrap his mind around this.

"What this world was, was like Sekot except exponentially more powerful. Even the echoes of its life-force do more than Sekot can, but lacking a collective consciousness the power has no form or direction save what our conscious minds give it."

"You're saying this world is… pulling them out of my dreams?" asked Eli.

"The Force is raw and on this world, and very powerful. One could do things here unthinkable in the rest of the galaxy. I thought, because you are young and not fully trained, you would not draw on the Force like this, at least not so soon."

Kyra looked around the jagged forest. The red sun was finally disappearing but silver starlight fell straight through the crooked stone branches, creating a new pattern of fear. "Can we get out of here? Please?"

"The nearest way out is to return the way he came. That will take hours. There is a clearing and a ridge not far ahead. We can set there for tonight."

Kyra didn't think she could sleep with the forest encroaching on all sides, but she didn't see any other way. This place had to be passed through.

When nobody replied right away, Khat Lah said, "Come. I will lead the way."

He turned and began walking forward again. Cade sent Kyra and Eli what encouragement he could through the Force, then followed. Together, Kyra and Eli did the same. The group huddled close as they passed through the forest. The things that had kept them separate no longer seemed to matter. Whatever this was, dream or nightmare or something else, they were in it together now.

-{}-

Darth Talon sat on the canyon floor, legs crossed, back straight, head lifted high to stare at the hypergate arch. She'd watched the gate for hours and would watch it for hours more, just as she had yesterday. When she wasn't watching the gate she sulked in her cave. Her Yuuzhan Vong warders still followed her like lagging shadows, but even they were getting bored of the task.

That was the point, of course. When the catastrophic news had come down she'd wanted to grab her ship, fly clear of Rohalla, and blast a comm signal to any Sith she could find. She was that desperate not to be alone. Eli should have helped her, but instead he'd taken Khat Lah's offer to travel through the gate. She'd been angry at him, bitterly so, but once he left her anger cooled and she admitted that, were she in his place, she'd have done the same thing. All her life she'd had two constants: the Force gave her strength and the Sith gave her purpose. Now, when the Sith might be truly gone, it felt even more imperative to regain the Force.

But she wasn't ready to give up on her kind yet. She waited. She repeated patterns and spent hours gazing at the arch in apparent contemplation, and she didn't need the Force to tell her that her captors were getting bored. Soon they would leave their guard down, and then she could make her escape. Eli had given her his lightsaber as a parting gift, and she'd thought of how to use it.

Talon didn't know what she could get when she escaped this place and broadcast her message to the Sith. Expectation was a distraction she couldn't afford. She'd decided the steps needed to get out of here and assumed them into her being until she didn't need to think about them, which would risk giving her plans away in the Force.

So she waited. When the blue and white suns fell away she would act, and then she'd be free of this place. After that the Sith- her purpose- would find her, or they would not. That part was out of her hands.

Talon waited and watched the arch. Soon, she thought. Soon there'd be the chance for everything.