A/N: Happy December, everybody, sorry for such a long wait.

Padme had never understood how snow could make the world feel so small. Her home in Naboo's capital didn't receive snow but once every few dozen years, and every time she saw it she marveled at how frozen specs of water could carry some sounds over miles and muffle others completely. She only hoped that this snow would choose to muffle the sound of her pounding heart. Once she and Rex were outside the ship, the air felt quiet and close despite howling outside.

Their welcoming party was small, that was good; they didn't suspect foul play. The face of their leader, however, was less good: a glare firm enough to sharpen knives, framed by chalk white hair and underscored by a chapped-lip frown. She stood still and solid as a stone pillar, waiting for the new arrivals to approach.

The threat flipped a switch deep in Padme's subconscious, an instinct her training had superimposed over her fight-or-flight response as a teenager. She relaxed into her swagger, and came to a stop about two meters in front of the welcome wagon. She crossed her arms.

"Two thousand, eighty-six kilos of kyber, as promised." She spoke as Hyla, a jagged and straightforward personality. "Now, about my pay. Ransoming some girl who may or may not still be alive is not going to cut it for me. I'd like something more… real."

The stone woman didn't move. She stared, unblinking, as Padme silently counted. One, two, three, four, five, six-

"Where is Panche?" the woman asked. Her accent was a surprise; a prim core accent, more refined even than Obi-Wan's.

Padme allowed a few seconds' pause in pointed mimicry. "Mister Mooringer ran into some difficulties," she stated, delicate. "I was forced to repossess his ship and its cargo for reparations. However…" She sauntered just a little closer, leaving Rex to hang behind. "I know a good business opportunity when I see one. I've moved a bit of kyber in my time, but imagine my surprise when I opened that hold." She glanced back at Panche's ship without moving her head. "An emperor's ransom. The price he relayed to me—you swindled an idiot, you know."

The bodyguards and associates around the stone woman frowned, but their leader held her ground.

"Nevertheless." Padme spread her hands in an agreeable way. "Swindle or no, I'm here to honor your agreement with Panche, in the understanding that that agreement is now with me, and that unlike our mutual friend, I deal in money, not promises."

The stone woman waited again while the air grew quiet and tense. "What is your name?" she demanded.

"Hyla," Padme replied.

"Hyla what?" the woman rebounded.

"Best just leave it at that." Padme smiled a quick, plastic smile. "I don't think we're on a first name basis quite yet."

For the first time, the woman flicked her eyes off of Padme, and onto Hyla's ship—Panche's ship—and to Rex, and back to Padme.

"Step inside and we'll talk." She waited for Padme to move first, before turning on her heel and leading her retinue at a quick pace. Padme walked with Rex a step behind, armed men flanking them on either side. She resisted the urge to look back at the ship, and instead prayed quietly that the Jedi would be able to sneak away safely while Padme rattled off everything they'd taught her about kyber and it's value on the black market.

"They're gone," Aola announced to the quiet of the hold. She grasped the hilt of one of her sabers and stood. "Let's go."

"No," Ben cut in. "They're not through yet. When they are, Anakin will let me know."

Aola stopped what she was doing, but seemed torn. "Well I highly doubt Padme can talk kyber sales for too long," she pointed out. "Skilled negotiator as she is, these things move quickly. If we don't leave soon, we're not going to be able to get far."

"We certainly won't get far without someone opening doors and cutting cameras for us," Ben reminded. "We must be patient."

Aola huffed and fell back into her seat. She wondered if back at headquarters, Cody was panicking like she was. "Well tell them to hurry up." Aola assumed, like many people did, that Ben and Anakin shared the quasi-telepathic connection that many masters and padawans fostered over their time together. She could not have known that Anakin was a miserable telepath, or than Ben could often read the boy's emotions better than Anakin could himself. Truth was, Anakin wouldn't be able to tell Ben when they broke through the door. But, if things went as things tended to go for Anakin, he wouldn't have to. Skywalkers were not subtle; the feeling would be clear through the Force. Ben closed his eyes and attempted to meditate.

"They're working as fast as they can," he lied. He had no idea how fast they were working; he only knew that Anakin was concentrating harder than Ben had known him to focus in his entire life. Ben tried to have faith in the boy. "Be patient," he repeated. If Aola thought he was talking to her, then so be it.

"No, not there," Obi-Wan said, voice shaking with concentration and cold. "Behind it."

"Force damnit," Anakin breathed, also shivering. His eyes were closed, as were Obi-Wan's. They were both sitting cross-legged by the door, facing each other, Anakin's right hand and Obi-Wan's left pressed against the door hidden in the mountain's face, minds stretched to their limits. Ignoring the snow drift that had accumulated by his left thigh and the searing numbness that had overtaken his hand against the frozen mountain, Anakin tried again to follow the web of electronic blips that Obi-Wan had shown him through the Force. It was overwhelming, the sheer Force of this place. It was like trying to untie a knot while staring into the sun. The power that sustained these circuits was not electricity or plasma or anything Anakin had used in his droids. It was kyber, the Force itself. It was suffocating.

Beneath Anakin's robe, RB-1 was jabbing at his ribs to complain of the cold, but Anakin could not have paid the droid attention even if he'd had the time. His senses were utterly overwhelmed by the raw power hiding in the mountain. It was intoxicating, it was maddening. It made his eyes water and his throat dry, but he thought that maybe, maybe, he was beginning to get used to it, like irises adjusting to the light. Once he wrapped his mind around what he was looking at, the power was… to Anakin's utter surprise, not entirely uncomfortable. His fingers felt warmer than before, his nose less like an icicle.

"This seems to be the master relay," Obi-Wan sniffled, sounding tired. Anakin did not doubt that the knight was affected by the overwhelming presence of kyber as well, to say nothing of the cold. "But it has auxiliaries - probably fail safes that will fire an emergency alarm if the main signal dies suddenly. We'll have to shut them all off simultaneously."

"How?"

"I'll take the relay, you take the auxiliaries," Obi-Wan decided.

It didn't feel right. "No," Anakin told him. "No, that'll set it off for sure. We'd have to have perfect timing."

"And we will."

"Will we? In this?" Obi-Wan had to know what he was talking about, the mental deluge. It'd be like the two of them swimming up a waterfall and reaching out for the same handhold at the exact same time. It wasn't just improbable, it was destined failure. "It has to be just one of us, all of it, or it won't be simultaneous."

"I can't do all of that," Obi-Wan told him incredulously. "This is one of the most complicated locks I've seen in years, and it's powered by kyber— it's not as though I can just… pinch off all of these circuits at once." Manipulating circuits with the Force was difficult enough as it was. But this many at once? Perish the thought.

"Why not?" Anakin asked, petulant and feeling more confident the longer he thought about it. His hand felt warm against the stone.

"Why not…? Anakin, there have to be near a hundred here-"

"Well however we many there are, we have to do it." Anakin was tired of sitting here and thinking. They needed to get through that door. Ben and Aola needed them through that door. Rex and Padme needed them through that damn door. "I'll do it," he decided. His hand was hot.

"Anakin, no, you can't,"

There were too many circuits to consider individually. I don't have time for this. He ignored the tangled mess and instead directed his attention to the power source itself: the kyber. Kyber wasn't like electricity. It was a vessel of the Force, and that meant that, much like his lightsaber, Anakin could just... tell it what to do. Right? It was too cold out to second guess such logic. Just continue doing whatever you were doing before, Anakin told it, except for all of this, he mentally gestured to the entire door.

Without any noise or hullabaloo, the door creaked, the cloaking device fell and Obi-Wan found his hand touching not rock, but solid, familiar durasteel. He opened shocked eyes upon the door, and then looked to Anakin. Anakin opened his eyes and looked back.

"What did you do?" Obi-Wan demanded, looking between the boy and the door, waiting for an emergency alarm that never came.

"I told it to stop," Anakin said, shaking out his right hand, which felt as though it'd been burned. He smacked it against his robe a few times, and wondered if the cloud rising from it was steam or smoke.

"Told it to…" Obi-Wan was nonplussed. Even the puckered skin around his blind eye was pulled wide in bemusement. "Is it open?" He looked to the door as he stood, shaking snow off of his cloak and boots.

Anakin touched the control pad, and the door slid sluggishly open, not a single beep or signal to accompany it.

"I guess so," the padawan said.

Obi-Wan waited to go in, staring at Anakin with a look the teenager didn't appreciate.

"Don't everybody thank me at once," he grumbled, stepping ahead of his friend to hide the florid blush on his cheeks. "Come on. We need to find a plug-in so Arbie can figure out how on earth this place works."

"Or you could just hack it yourself," Obi-Wan commented under his breath, looking back at the door as though it would at any moment spring back to life and lock itself. It stood silent and dead, the only sound the howling of the mountain gales outside. Obi-Wan watched it with a feeling in his gut that he couldn't classify. "Apparently."

They walked into the mountain together, wary of everything, smothered by the inaudible hum of kyber.

They'd been brought into a conference room, if you could call it that, where the women could talk business. It had stone walls and boring furniture, and echoed something awful. There were a few holodiscs on the table, and while they were older models, they were perhaps the only valuable items in the room. It was also freezing.

Rex stood at ease by the door, an armed guard on either side. For his part, his eyes never strayed from their chosen spot on the wall, but his ears were wide open. For the last several long moments, there had been nothing to hear but growing tension in the silence.

Padme had her head tilted at a casual angle as she stared disinterestedly back across the table, trying to blink as little as she could. She had made her case, stated her price, and was waiting for a response. But this statue of a woman—they still hadn't gotten her name—seemed completely unbothered by long silences.

"You understand," she finally spoke. Her voice was naturally low in pitch and cut an authoritative tone in the echoing room. "I'm not used to paying for what I want."

"Is that so?" Padme knew she was trying to intimidate her.

"I find that once you talk to them, most people are susceptible to... alternative motivation." Perhaps it was Padme's imagination, but she thought that was the hint of a smile. She chose to smile back.

"My favorite kind of people," Hyla said. "I know Panche at least had a, uh… what you might call a soft spot for that stuff. Unfortunately, I don't really care about much but cash." She stared.

Silence.

"So," Hyla stretched back from the table, wincing to emphasize the discomfort of their accommodations, "if you're looking for someone to manipulate, I'll just be going. I'm sure someone else around here is in the market for a few thousand kilos of kyber." She moved as though to stand. "If I see another Panche crawling around somewhere, I'll send him to you."

The armed guards by the door readied their weapons.

"Does anyone else know you're here?" the woman asked, as her guards blocked the doors.

Padme, still mid-stand, looked theatrically to her left, to her right, and jammed a thumb back at Rex. "He does," she joked. "But you might've noticed, he doesn't really talk much."

The women looked as one to Rex, who made a show of not noticing. The stone woman looked back to Padme, eyes like ice. Padme slowly, self-assuredly, sat back down.

"No one else?"

"Panche is past blabbing," Hyla assured, crossing her arms and giving a shrug. "So... no."

The woman stared for a long, frozen moment. Even Padme's conditioning for this kind of torture was wearing thin. Just when she felt as though her resolve might crack, the woman stood. "I will discuss this with my superiors," she announced. Her shoes clacked loudly against the duracrete floor. The door hissed open. "Don't go anywhere," she commanded leaving her new business partners behind with the two guards. As the door slid shut, Padme caught Rex's eye. She could tell that he was thinking the same thing:

If she's not in charge, who is?

They'd been sitting in dead silence for over half an hour when Ben stood wordlessly and made for the door.

"Now?" Aola asked.

"They're inside, at least," he said. "We'll run out of time to clear the landing bay if we don't go soon. We'll just have to move quickly and pray we can hide long enough for them to unlock some doors."

"Brilliant," Aola grumbled to the air. "Down to the wire, as per karking usual."

"Now Aola, my young friend." Ben smiled back at her as he prepared to open the landing gear access port. "Whatever happened to your sense of adventure?" The knight was unaffected by his charm.

"This is why Anakin is the way that he is," she accused. Ben laughed in reply, wrinkles showing around his smile. He undid the hatch. Smile still in place, his eyes sobered to a battle-hardened steel. He motioned her through, and they forsook their banter for silence as they slunk from the ship at a crouched run.

The bay was full of crates, carts, and bales to hide behind. Aola would have loved to know if they were allfull of kyber, or if some of them held mundane things like food, but it was impossible to tell amid the omnipresent hum of the crystals that powered everything around them. How did they manage to harness such power? It didn't bear thinking about.

Unfortunately, despite the ample cover, both Jedi found it slow going from the ship to the bay's exit. Without assurances that security cameras weren't watching them, Aola and Ben split up, staggering their sprints between cover, the stationary party watching for cameras and signaling when the other was clear to move or hide.

When a door hissed open, both of them dropped to the ground where they were, frantically tucking their robes behind crates and shielding themselves with the Force and every ounce of adrenaline their bodies could spare.

"-line directly to my office," a deep, sharp feminine voice said, shoes and words echoing loudly off the hangar floor. "Do not let them leave, and answer no questions until I've received the Master's final word on the matter." The footsteps came to an abrupt halt less than a meter away from Ben's hiding place, and he closed his eyes and swallowed, willing with every fiber of his being that she would not see him.

"And scan her ship," the woman said, causing Ben's heart to jump, "I don't trust her as far as I can throw her." After a heart-stopping moment. she resumed her warpath, and allowed Ben to breathe again.

A door hissed open, and a door hissed shut. The two Jedi waited in silence for several heart-pounding moments until they both deduced they were alone. They resumed their trek to the nearest door in silence, and reunited meters away from their target to hide together behind a stack of fuel crates.

"Clear," Aola whispered, darting back around the crates to huddle against them alongside her older companion. "Now what?"

Carefully, Ben pulled out his comm. "Anakin, come in," he whispered into it. "We're in position. Is this door open, or would you like me to trip some alarms?"

"Anakin, come in." Anakin fumbled for the device at his belt, but it was difficult to do with one hand. "We're in position. Is this door open, or would you like me to trip some alarms?"

RB-1's tarnished hull was growing warmer by the second as it strained every last one of its circuits to communicate with the computer that ran the mountain base, which was alarmingly larger and more complicated than they'd anticipated. Arbee beeped a series of complaints to its creator, who was doing his best to hold the droid and its port arm steady with his left hand while holding the comm with his right.

"Don't try to open anything," he said, "we're working on it." Arbee beeped indignantly, and Anakin sighed. "Arbee is, anyway. Are you compromised?"

"Not yet," Ben said, and Anakin knew his master's tones well enough to know it was probably higher stakes than Ben wanted to admit. "But the chances of that will drop significantly if you could get this door open."

"We're trying, we're trying," Anakin repeated. It was a desperate situation. RB-1 had helped him hack dozens of ships and entire bases in the past, but this place was unreal. Kyber or not, when they'd approached this place Anakin's worst fear was that they'd find a military outpost, a moderately-sized battery or bunker of some kind, but this… whatever it was, was infinitely worse than what he'd expected. If what the droid was telling them was to be believed, the mountain base was a labyrinth of doors, hallways, and indecipherable chasms hat escaped definition by electronic records. Once he'd finally accessed the computer's maps, RB-1 had counted levels travelling down into the mountain, reaching well into double digits.

"Ben, do you know what level you're on?" Obi-Wan spoke over Anakin's shoulder.

There was a pause on the other end. It was Aola who answered: "There's a lift across the way, I think it says two. Or maybe five, it's hard to see."

"Well which is it?" Anakin asked, desperate for an object of focus. RB-1 had begun smoking lightly.

"Two would make more sense, if the numbers rise as they go deeper into the mountain," Obi-Wan pointed out sensibly. "Start there."

"If I unlock all the doors on that level, and someone else is on that level, someone is bound to notice," Anakin warned.

"Just the exterior doors, the ones leading into the hangar," Ben said, "is that possible?"

Anakin sighed. He'd never seen a droid struggle so much. "I guess we'll find out."

"Can I help?" Obi-Wan asked Anakin quietly. The padawan looked up at him, grateful but helpless.

"I don't see how." He watched with growing fear as Arbee struggled. "He's doing his best." The seconds ticked by. After a moment, without preamble, Obi-Wan took Arbee from Anakin's cradling grasp and held the droid steady in the padawan's place. Hands occupied, the knight gestured at the computer's interface with a nod of his head.

"Help him."

"What?" Anakin was nonplussed.

"You seem to know how to trick this computer into doing what you want," the knight explained, not sure if they were dealing with a computer, or kyber, or something higher than both. Whatever it was, it was beyond Obi-Wan's skill. "Help him," he repeated.

The padawan floundered. "But- I can't- how do- why don't you help him, you're the expert with Force-controlling circuits and stuff–"

"This isn't about circuits, Anakin, and we don't have time for this," Obi-Wan met Anakin's gaze and held it, and for a split second it had the effect of Ben staring him down. Blue eyes to blue, Obi-Wan said, "I didn't help you open that door." Anakin felt horrifically unequipped. "Now, help him."

Anakin realized what Obi-Wan was really trying to say, but didn't let himself dwell on it long enough to get scared. After a moment's hesitation, he put his hand to the panel of the computer's console where Arbee's port arm was docked, closed his eyes, and thought of how he'd accessed the door outside. It'd been a matter of finding the electric circuits and following them to their source, finding that outlet where electricity stopped and mixed like a freshwater river into the salty ocean of raw, unadulterated energy that surged from an unthinkable amount of kyber.

Anakin tried to suck in a breath to steady himself when the mental wave washed over him, but it was like a tsunami. Force damn, Force damn it was overwhelming. At the door, yes, and here, kriffing Force even more so, he felt fit to drown. He scrambled to find mental purchase against the onslaught, reminding his body to breathe so he could adjust his mind. He found the mental gymnastics more intuitive this time around, but the sheer power revolving all around them was dazzling in the worst way, a thousand times what they'd experienced at the door. This place was huge, and unmapped in the common kyber was like a city of interconnected specks, a living, sentient architecture that did not speak in terms of levels, floors, hangars, or bunkers. It mapped itself in terms of life, and lack thereof, and what it held secret in each room, each hall. Anakin did not speak whatever strange language the crystal had invented for itself, so he willed it to translate for him, and willed harder when it resisted. When it finally complied, he was too stressed to feel surprised.

"You're on the fifth level," he told Ben and Aola.

"Are you sure?" Ben asked. Anakin didn't seem to hear it.

"He's sure," Obi-Wan answered for him, unblinking and still as he watched Anakin's face.

Eyes closed, Anakin's mind was entrenched deep in some other world. "Door's open," he announced curtly. "Least, should be. You're both just to the left of the door, right?"

"How did you…?" Aola began.

"That's the one," Ben cut in. "We'll try it now."

Anakin did not have the mental real estate for worry while they waited for the others to report back. Obi-Wan continued watching Anakin's face, not sure if he was witnessing something young or ancient.

"We're through," Ben announced. "Now you need to lead us through to their power source. Where is the rest of the kyber?" It was why they were there, after all.

Silence. Obi-Wan watched his young companion with mounting concern as blood began to run from one of Anakin's nostrils.

"Anakin?" he asked quietly.

"It's..." Anakin had to swallow around a lump in his throat. His voice cracked when he said, "Force, it's everywhere. It's not just... There is no central source. It's like a web. But… there is a gap down there. A sort of… chunk of this place where there doesn't seem to be any kyber at all." Anakin was frowning deeply, struggling to make sense of it.

"So, stay clear of that, then?" Aola was trying to be optimistic. "That's one way to start, I guess."

"No, that's the most important place," Anakin snapped. "That's the heart of this place. You have to go there. It's important." Anakin was almost nauseous from the certainty he felt, the urgency. "You have to go there first."

"If they've managed to cloak themselves so completely, they may have found a way to cloak the presence of kyber as well," Ben hypothesized on the other end of the line. Obi-Wan thought it was a decent explanation, but privately thought that neither his older self nor Aola understood Anakin as he did in that moment. Watching the boy connect with this place—not the computer, not the kyber, the whole place—was unlike anything Obi-Wan had ever seen. He wasn't sure what exactly Anakin was doing or how, but he sensed more than he understood that it was a delicate, thunderously powerful task.

"How do you know it's important?" Obi-Wan asked the apprentice, not mentioning to him that the blood from his nose was running across his lips and onto his chin.

Anakin shook his head, fixated and confused. "There doesn't seem to be anything there," he admitted, "but it's all the kyber cares about."

"The kyber cares about?" Obi-Wan raised his eyebrows.

"Lead us there." Ben was beginning to pick up on Anakin's overwhelmed emotions. He tried to speak with an authority that would give his apprentice's confused senses outside resolution. "If there's something there to be found, we'll find it."

As Ben and Aola trekked deeper and deeper into the mountain, they'd only spotted two guards along the way. Two. It was an absurd number. If this was indeed a Sith stronghold, the place should have absolutely been crawling with guards or droids or something. But just two guards, who hadn't even seemed to be patrolling when Ben and Aola slipped past their watch.

"Are there any cameras along this passage?" Ben whispered into his comm.

"No," was Anakin's quick reply. It'd been much the same for their journey thus far. Ben couldn't help it when the answer made him feel more paranoid rather than less. In a place this secret and secure, the absence of any obstacles or threats could only mean one of three things. One: the Sith already knew they were here, and where waiting to see where'd they go—but that wasn't really Palpatine's style, not after all the setbacks he'd faced. Two: Anakin's advice about cameras and guards was incorrect—and Ben knew the boy and his abilities well enough to know that it wasn't. Finally, three: the caretakers of this place didn't think they'd ever be found, and hadn't bothered with security in the first place, allowing intruders to slip by under their noses. This last possibility sounded to Ben like wishful thinking—but in light of the other options, he hoped it was their reality.

"You're almost there," Anakin told them. Ben could feel the boy's excitement, but it felt more like fear. "Go to the end of that hall, turn left, it's through the door dead ahead."

"Got it." Aola was leading the way. Ben cast a look over each shoulder, but as before, there was no one to see them, follow them, find them.

As they neared the door, a cold feeling washed over Ben, causing the master to slow, now gazing at the door with apprehension. Aola seemed to feel it too, and stopped several feet ahead.

"What is that?" she asked, eyeing Ben with the kind of questioning look that adults give their parents in times of doubt. For a moment, Ben said nothing, and stepped around Aola to go to the door. The closer he got, the colder he felt. It wasn't a physical cold. It wasn't an evil cold. It wasn't darkness or hate or ice or anything; it was the fringes of absence, a particular kind of abyss that Ben had only ever experienced once before, long ago in a former life, in a dark part of the Jedi Temple that most liked to forget existed.

"Master Ben?" Aola asked, still at a loss. Ben only stared at the door, wondering what in the galaxy they would find on the other side.

"You said there was no kyber through this door?" he asked.

"None that I can sense."

"I think there might be something else," Ben said. "Not kyber; the opposite of kyber. I haven't the slightest idea why they have it all the way out here, or what they're using it for.

"The opposite of kyber?" Aola repeated. She'd never heard of such a thing.

"Sort of." Ben hovered his hand over the door's control panel. "It goes by a variety of names and comes in many forms. I was taught to call it thanatosine." His fingers twitched above the controls. "Keep your sabers close. This will be less than pleasant."

In a darkened room not far from where Ben and Aola were sneaking down hallways under Anakin's uncanny guidance, the white-haired woman sat ramrod straight in front of a holodisc. Her guards had been banished from the room, and she had no company except for the holographic figure that loomed over her. She hoped he could not read her face, just as she couldn't not read his.

"A new courier?" he said.

"Yes, my lord. A bounty hunter; she seems to have pursued Panche for unpaid debts, and thought that his unfinished business with us may be… lucrative."

"Who is she?"

"She calls herself Hyla. She refuses to give me more information than that. She seems competent. If we pay her for this first shipment, I'm confident I can find a way to persuade her to start working for far less."

The figure did not immediately reply. She had not expected such hesitation. In place of acquiesce, there was only a hooded frown.

"No," he said. "Show her to me."

In a moment of weakness, the woman's stony eyebrows flickered toward a frown, but she corrected them sternly.

"Of course, my lord." With a few flicks of her wrist, she redirected the holofeed from herself to the holding room where her hopeful purveyor stewed under careful watch.

She could not see what her master saw, and she could not read the expression on his cowled face. But she could feel the silence in the room stretch and mold into tentacles of rage, a viscous tendril that infected the kyber cells in the walls and made their meeting space suffocating and furious.

"That is no bounty hunter," he broke the quiet and the lights seemed to flicker. "Search her. Search her ship. Find out how she came to know of our presence here." The audio feed itself was growing distorted with the wall of anger, the blue feed fizzing with static. "Padme Amidala does not act alone—take all that she knows, and destroy her."

A halo lamp behind her head burst into a shower of sparks, and the woman could not control her jump any more than she could stop the fear in the eyes she hid behind a stoic mask. She bowed from her seat.

"Yes, master."

A/N: Eagle-eyed readers may recognize "Thanatosine" as a callback and homage to Ruth Baulding's masterful world.