Savage Opress had nearly killed Zuna when he'd reemerged from Maul's cavern, dragging his unconscious, spider-legged brother behind him.
She'd gone back to look for Morley and instead found herself held aloft by her neck, feet dangling. She would've been dead if she hadn't forced as much tolerance through the physical connection as she could.
Along with sensing emotions, Zeltrons can alter them to a certain extent—and although the ability was often weak, what she did was just enough to make Savage drop her. With a little bit of begging (and every meager credit she'd saved up for five years), he allowed her passage on his ship.
She'd stayed away, mostly. She didn't have to be empathic to know Savage was dangerous.
Was it weird that she missed Morley?
He was the closest thing Zuna had to a friend for five years, and suddenly, he was gone. Sure, they didn't exactly have a great relationship—professional at best, symbiotic at worst—but he still made better conversation than Junkers.
They'd needed each other to survive back on Lotho Minor; she was better at luring prey to Maul, and he gave her a reluctant companionship in return.
But it didn't matter now. She'd finally gotten off of that kriffing junk planet and Morley was dead.
The atmosphere of the planet she was on now tied knots in her stomach. She'd refused to step off of the ship because of it.
It was strange; a Zeltron's empathic abilities weren't usually incredibly strong, but on Dathomir, something was so seriously wrong that the planet itself gave off something she was able to sense.
The stack of crates she was sitting on shifted slightly, and she gasped. "Hey, no. Stop that."
A mix between a whimper and a growl erupted from Maul's throat as his spidery legs scrabbled on the metal walls and floor.
The best way to describe the emotions wafting from the partial Zabrak was agony; an awful combination of fear, confusion, pain, and rage.
Over everything, rage.
The crates shifted again, hard enough to almost knock her off the top, and she yelped. "Cut it out!"
He let out a growl, and she sensed another emotion arise under the others—a cruel amusement.
Zuna glared, but before she could do anything, the air in the ship became electrified, charged in a way that made the hair stick up along her arms and on the back of her neck. Startled, she jumped down from her crates and slipped into a shadow. This wasn't an emotion. It was something else entirely.
Maul felt it too, and his breath came quicker.
"Come, let us fix what has been broken," an accented voice hissed.
It slithered up Zuna's spine. Something was very wrong here. She could feel Maul's brother there, the constant hate radiating off of him. And then an emotionless, empty blip next to him.
A green ball of energy crackled as it brushed past her, and she tensed.
"Come to me," the voice came again. "Come to me. Follow us, son of Dathomir."
Maul cowered from the light for a moment, then was almost frantic to catch it as it drifted back towards the blip. He wobbled on his unsteady, unnatural legs.
The three creatures—Savage, Maul, and whatever the third entity was—retreated from the ship along with the charged energy that made Zuna's hair stand on end.
She slumped against the wall with a relieved sigh. She searched for a word to describe the energy, and it came to her with some difficulty: Bogan.
Oh, stars. The Dark Side of the Force.
What in kriff had she gotten herself into?
Growing up in the lower levels of Coruscant left her no stranger to the influences of the Force, even from gangsters and vagrants who had hints of Bogan floating around them. But this was something else entirely. The very dirt the planet was made of seemed to be held together by Bogan.
She needed to get off this planet.