Disclaimer: Darth Malak, Revan, and Carth Onasi are not my inventions. And though I have some responsibility for the persona Aithne Morrigan, I garner no profit from her.
Chapter Forty-Four
Aithne passed into the first factory portion of the Star Forge she supposed she'd seen since she ceased being Revan. She looked around with some curiosity. Bins stood around the room, and she saw Rakatan consoles and generators ranged around in an antiseptic semicircle. Of far more import than these, though, was the tall caped figure standing near the end of the room.
Aithne guessed his "dark presence", as Bastila had termed it, was rather overwhelming. She felt the Dark Side emanating off him in waves almost as overpowering as those from the Star Forge itself. The robes mostly kept that from influencing her, however. The real danger, Aithne thought, lay in her own emotions towards the man.
Aithne was no Sith. She was not in the habit of allowing her emotions to control her. But nor was she a Jedi and in the habit of pretending that emotions did not exist. Most times, she attempted to reign in her emotions and work around them. But as she stared into the face of the man that had ordered the attacks on Telos, Taris, and Dantooine, who had gleefully revealed her dark identity and reveled in her heartbreak, the man that had tortured and turned Bastila, who had tried to kill her nonstop for nearly two years, and who she knew she must have once cared for as an apprentice, Aithne was having a little bit of understandable trouble bridling her confusion, anger, and hatred.
Malak didn't seem too surprised that she had walked through the door instead of Bastila. But he did seem displeased. He sneered and crossed his arms.
Aithne walked up to him. She put her hands on her hips, waiting. Sure enough, he opened the conversation with every bit of his usual charm.
"I tire of this game, Revan. You have been a thorn in my side from the moment I seized the mantle of Dark Lord from your feeble grasp!"
Aithne lifted an eyebrow at him. "Just a thorn? Surely I have done a little better than that."
Malak glowered at her from his lofty height. "You made a mistake coming here, Revan," he informed her. "The Star Forge fuels my command of the Dark Side. You are no match for me here. And this time, you will not escape!"
Aithne glared right back at him. "Malak, I've been all but running towards you since the Endar Spire crashed! There has been no escaping! And there won't be now. For either of us. Care to surrender? You don't have to be the Dark Lord. You must be feeling the burden by now."
"Spare me your preaching!" Malak said loftily. "I will have none of it! You are an insignificant speck beneath my notice."
Aithne sighed and pressed a hand to her heart. "And here you had me thinking that I was a thorn in your side! You've broken my heart, you have."
Malak clenched his fists. For a moment he looked quite petulant. "You never did take me seriously, Revan! You were always so…"
Aithne smirked and interjected, batting her eyelashes. "Charming? Actually in possession of a sense of humor?" The more she could nettle him, the better. Angry people made mistakes. She stood taut, just waiting for him to make a move.
Malak's eyes narrowed. "You are finished, Revan," he said, regaining his composure. "I have surpassed you in every way and accomplished what you never could. I have unleashed the true potential of this Rakatan factory! You had no idea of the power within this place. It's very walls are alive with Dark Side energies! And now, my old Master, I will let the Star Forge itself destroy you!"
With a speed that belied his height, Malak hit a keypad on the wall, darting through the door behind him. It closed after him. Light flashed behind Aithne, and she felt power surge.
She whirled about, and saw the dozens of generators around the room generating droids. The half-formed bodies glared at her from rapidly solidifying green sensors. Aithne made a disgusted noise in her throat and turned to the door Malak had gone through. With a controlled, powerful movement, she cut out the lock with a lightsaber, and willed the door to open.
She passed through into the elevator and punched the button to follow Malak up to the heart of the Star Forge. As the elevator shut, Aithne gave an ironic wave to the droids just coming up.
She found Malak in an enormous room she halfway remembered from her Revan days. The room encompassed two entire levels. What looked like human bodies were suspended in pillars of eerie green light. Aithne disregarded them for the moment. Malak was Lord of the Sith. It was unsurprising that he had grotesque and macabre notions of interior design.
He had his back to her when she entered. She strode in and yelled, "Hey! Meatbag!"
It was delicious just how quickly he turned. Malak's lightsaber came out and his brow wrinkled ominously.
Though Aithne was not a short woman, Malak towered over her. Aithne glared at him anyway, undaunted. "I have chased you all over the galaxy," she said. "You fired on my ship. You have blown up planets to kill me. You have sent assassins and Dark Jedi after me by the legion. But every single time it looks like it's just you and me, you run for the hills. I cannot believe someone so cowardly was once my apprentice! But now there's nowhere left to run."
"Revan," Malak said, smoothly controlled now that she was losing it. "I was certain the defenses of the Star Forge would destroy you, but I see there is more of your old self within you than I expected."
Aithne made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat. "It was a stupid plan," she informed him. "Any idiot with a lightsaber can cut out a lock, and your droids are slow."
Malak tensed in anger. "You did that then, too," he reminisced. "You cut down my every plan, insulted me at every turn. You are stronger now, though. Stronger than you ever were during your reign as the Dark Lord. I did not think that was possible."
"Did you not? By all accounts you were always unimaginative."
Malak shook his head, his anger gone. "I am tempted to try and capture you alive, Revan," he said in as much of a tone of admiration as his artificial larynx could manufacture. "Then I could break your will and bind you to me as my apprentice, as I did Bastila. You would be a far greater asset to me than even Bastila and her Battle Meditation, if I could control you."
Aithne scoffed. Malak nodded in acknowledgement.
"Perhaps you are too powerful to be my apprentice," he agreed. "I betrayed you when I realized my own strength was greater than yours; in time you might try to do the same to me."
"I'm not going back over to the Dark Side," Aithne said. "And I'd never serve you."
Malak's eyes narrowed. "Foolish words," he said mildly. "The Darkness and the Light wage a constant war within you. The balance is tipped one way now, but it can easily be tipped back. Savior, conqueror, hero, villain. You are all things, Revan, and yet you are nothing. In the end you belong neither to the Light nor the Darkness. You will forever stand alone."
Aithne froze. Malak's words struck a chord within her. A sort of deep-down pain she hadn't even acknowledged before throbbed. It was true, she realized. She was no Sith, just as she was no Jedi. Even if she succeeded in killing Malak now, even if she saved the galaxy for the second time in her messed up life, could the Republic ever trust her again? Could the Sith? It was as Malak said: she had no real place. Not anymore.
She stopped herself there. It was true that the Republic might never accept her. The Sith definitely wouldn't. But still she had a place. Aithne thought of Jolee, and recalled that at least one other Jedi ascribed to her view of the Force. She thought of Canderous and Zaalbar and Juhani, and knew that even now there were those that considered her worth following. She thought of Bastila, just a floor and a room away. Aithne had a friend that understood. And Aithne thought of Carth, and Mission, and even Dustil, and dared to hope that one day she might have a family. She licked her lips nervously.
"You may be right," she admitted, forced into seriousness. "Nevertheless, I believe in hope, and the power of redemption."
Malak looked amused. "Of course. What else do you have? Fate and destiny have conspired to keep you alive despite my best efforts; they have thrust you into the role of savior. We have been inexorably pushed to this final confrontation, Revan. I see now that this can only be settled when one of us destroys the other. Once again we will face each other in single combat…and the winner will decide the fate of the galaxy!"
Aithne was tired. Physically, she had been fighting nonstop for hours. She couldn't exactly check her chrono with Malak rushing her, but she suspected that it was a few hours into the night by now. But she was emotionally exhausted, too. For months she had been planet hopping, dodging assassins and chasing after Star Maps and going on wild goose chases trying to get here. Just weeks ago she had discovered her entire life was a lie and she was the ex-Lord of the Sith with the war and thousands of murders and tortures on her conscience. Three days ago she had found out that her best friend was a traitor and exchanged professions of love with Carth Onasi. Today, she had realized for the first time that the Republic might not welcome her back after everything. She had fought through legions of Sith, and had no clue how her companions fared. She had expended nearly all her remaining energy in the confrontation with Bastila. Her eyes burned now, and her muscles ached.
In comparison, Malak was fresh as a daisy, and that was not even accounting for the Star Forge that would back his every move now. But Aithne suspected that even had they been in the middle of the Coruscant Jedi complex with Malak as tired as she was now, he would still be one of the hardest opponents she had ever fought.
From their previous skirmish on the Leviathan, and from his stance as he circled her now testing her defenses, Aithne knew that she was the better technical fighter. But Malak was just so strong. He had over a foot in height on her, and several kilograms, too, it looked like. He attacked with a single-minded brutality that in all her fabricated or imagined actual life Aithne couldn't remember facing before. His every blow set her bones to ringing, and he oozed the Dark Side like a toxin.
Still, his bulk made him clumsy, and Aithne utilized that to the best of her ability. She'd always moved through melee like a dancer, and now she knew it was saving her life. She was quicker than him, for all of her exhaustion.
Malak finally grew tired of the preliminaries and attacked in earnest, as much with the Force as with his lightsaber. The Force crackled around Aithne as he tried to send Lightning through her body, break her bones, and make her will submit to the fear that lurked within her. Now Aithne called upon her Jedi training, both recent and forgotten, and her own considerable ingenuity. She pushed his every attack aside rapidly, attacking his brain in her turn.
He faltered in his lightsaber sequence. Aithne smiled grimly, and added something else to her favor. She was quicker than him, and she had always been cleverer. Both as Revan and now. She kicked up with her left leg and connected to Malak's stomach, beneath his guard. He staggered back, winded. Aithne railed away at his brain with the Force, searching for an opening to send her own push through.
Something flickered in Malak's dark eyes, gone before Aithne could tell what it had been. He lashed out wildly with his saber, equipped by his height to have a longer than usual reach. Aithne darted in, stabbing down with her right lightsaber into Malak's leg.
He cried out metallically as Aithne burned a hole through his leg. His saber curved back around instinctively, and Aithne dodged under it, backing away.
Malak winced. But then, unaccountably, he laughed. He staggered back to one of the obscene floating bodies. "You continue to amaze me, Revan," he panted. "If only you had been the one to uncover the true power of the Star Forge: you might have been truly invincible. But you were a fool. All you saw was an enormous factory; all you ever imagined was an infinite fleet rolling forth to crush the Republic. You were blind, Revan- blind and stupid."
Aithne felt a slight mental touch, the equivalent to being tapped on the shoulder. Hurry, Aithne, said Bastila, inside her head. The Republic has started to break through. You won't have much time.
She shook her head, returning to Malak. "Is there some reason you stopped our 'single combat to decide the fate of the galaxy'?" she asked acidly. "Because I've no interest in hearing your drivel."
Malak looked as smug as a tattooed jawless giant could look. "The Star Forge is more than just a space station," he informed her. "In some ways, it is like a living creature. It hungers. And it can feed on the Dark Side that is within all of us! Look around you, Revan," he instructed, gesturing at his unspeakable décor. "See the bodies? You should recognize them from the Academy."
Now that he mentioned it, on the second level, Aithne thought she saw a Padawan Sentinel who used to talk to her about History in the Archives. She looked back at Malak, horror-struck.
"These are the Jedi who fell when I attacked Dantooine," Malak confirmed gleefully. "For all intents and purposes dead, except for one difference. I have not allowed them to become one with the Force. Instead, I have brought them here. The Star Forge corrupts what remains of their power and transfers the Dark taint to me!"
Aithne's jaw set. Taris flashed before her eyes, the women and children screaming for cover even as their husbands and fathers were incinerated trying to protect them from the bombs. She saw Carth's eyes, haunted by the unjust death of his wife. She saw Dustil, warped and angry. She saw the Sith she had killed on the way, some as evil as the man in front of her, but most just warped by his teachings. And she saw these men and women from the Academy now, hopelessly trapped in service to the one they died fighting, their souls permitted no peace, not even in death.
This man was evil, and she'd come here to stop him. She'd kill him.
Malak seemed to read her thoughts. "You cannot beat me, Revan," he said. "Not here on the Star Forge. Not when I can draw upon the power of all these Jedi! And once you are beaten I will do the same to you. You will be trapped in a terrible existence between life and death, your power feeding me as I conquer the galaxy!"
With that, he turned to the Jedi behind him. He pulled on it, a simple Force Drain, but the Jedi floating inside the column shriveled up like a raisin, his power gone, his soul departed. Aithne felt new strength surge into Malak, and before her eyes the wound she had inflicted herself not two minutes ago closed over.
Aithne bit her lip, thinking rapidly. "You've always been a bully Malak," she said. Her mouth was dry. "And as a taunt aimed to cause me to despair, that was well done." Then she smirked, unable to resist. "Except now, you've told me your plan, haven't you?"
Malak's eyes lost their smugness in a millisecond, focusing on Aithne with alarming intensity. She winked at him, already applying the Force Speed. In a nanosecond she'd jumped across the room, to more Jedi trapped in Malak's dreadful Limbo.
She didn't exactly have time to consider it, but instinctively she knew that she had to disrupt the Star Forge's pull on the Jedi's contact with the Force without corrupting herself. Frowning, she held out her hands and sent a storm of Lightning through the two nearest corpses.
It worked like a charm. The Jedi crumpled up, finally looking at peace, and fell to the floor as the receptacles floating them sizzled and went dark.
Aithne didn't have time to celebrate her cleverness, because she heard a grunt, and sensed Malak flying over her head. She dodged right, sending out another stream of Lightning and bringing down another Jedi. Then she was jumping again.
"Revan!" Malak cried from across the room as she took out another two of his spare batteries. A stream of his own Lightning, directed at her, just missed. Aithne kept part of her attention focused on her nemesis, dodging his attacks usually a hairsbreadth early. She attempted to vary her pattern of attack on the Jedi corpses, to make it harder for Malak to attack her as she destroyed his backup system.
She noted grimly that her Force levels were depleting rapidly. She was dealing death, and the life available to draw on in the room was dwindling. Even the life available in the system was diminishing as the battle raged on outside of the Star Forge. She considered draining one of the corpses to replenish herself. She knew how. But as the thought crossed her mind the Dark Side pulsed around her eagerly. Aithne grimaced, and rejected the notion.
She sent Lightning pulsing through the last corpse in the room with fierce satisfaction. She hoped the Jedi Malak had abused were at peace now. She turned, saw an arc of blazing red light, and dodged, but this time she was just a breath too late.
The very tip of Malak's lightsaber hit her just under where her white vest stopped. It burned up and through her robes and into her skin.
Aithne gasped as the searing heat carved up her side. The lightsaber had been thrown; she fell as it returned to Malak. Three cries sounded in her head. Bastila's rang out loud and clear. But more faintly, she also heard Jolee and Juhani react to her wound. Her vision went gray and her head swam. Her burn throbbed with pain.
From a distance she heard Malak laughing angrily in his metallic monotone. "Oh, well done, Revan. Really, for you, quite careless. You are dangerous and powerful, true. But I always knew I was stronger than you. And in the end, you are merely a very large nuisance, a hurdle in my path to taking over the galaxy."
Aithne's mind stirred. He thought she was dying, she realized. Am I? she wondered hazily. It would be so frightfully anticlimactic to come all this way, nearly foil Malak's plot, and then die of a lightsaber to the side. She laughed weakly and opened her eyes. Her hand went to her side, and her nerves screamed as she brushed the wound.
Her brows rose, though. The graze had missed any vital organs. A large chunk of flesh was missing from her hip, true, but the lightsaber had cauterized the wound, so she wasn't losing any blood. Still, it hurt like a viper kinrath sting. She heard the sound of a lightsaber being reactivated. She raised her head and saw Malak gazing down at her worriedly. She hadn't died yet, and he couldn't tell from his position that she wasn't going to.
The deck shook suddenly. Aithne had a flashback to Taris, when Malak had fired on the planet and the entire world had shaken. She realized that the Republic must have broken through the Sith lines. Back on Taris, a looming evil had taken out the entire world. Now, she felt the Darkness around her tremble as Light shot through it in a dozen places, like pinpricks in an enormous black shroud.
Malak felt it too. "What…" he began, looking away from Aithne's crouched form for a moment.
Aithne, gritting her teeth, took the opportunity to stand. "Bastila," she muttered.
"But you…you killed her, did you not?"
Aithne's laugh came out a hiss through her teeth. She winced as the mirth shook her side. "No," she managed, igniting her lightsabers once more.
Malak's face set. Aithne saw no doubts in his mind of his victory in this, their final battle. Privately, she agreed with him. She was in no condition to fight. But she also saw, amidst all the anger and arrogance in Malak's pale, tattooed, and disfigured face, a flicker of desperation. He was wondering if he could win in time to escape the Star Forge before it fell out of orbit and burned in the atmosphere of the Rakatan world below.
Aithne smiled fiercely, though sadness for Carth and her dear friends pulled at the corners of her eyes. "No," she whispered again. "You won't be able to get away in time." Then, shutting off her brain's cries of pain and drawing on her last vestiges of strength, she attacked.
Republic fire shook the Star Forge as Aithne, sometimes known as Revan, battled her former apprentice, the brutal and power-mad Lord of the Sith. All finesse was forgotten on both parts of the battle. Malak fought for his own preservation, fighting towards the door to escape the oncoming Republic Fleet. Aithne fought to destroy this banner of evil. She fought to end it.
Strange. Aithne had no doubt that one way or another she would end up dead before the sun rose behind the Temple of the Ancients on the Rakatan homeworld. But though she could regret a future lost, she could not repent of her path. Carth would be proud of me, she thought. Her strokes fell into a peaceful rhythm as she relentlessly blocked Malak's path to the door. She was beyond exhaustion now, beyond life. She faced Malak calmly, moving in some pattern from the heart of the Force. Pain throbbed in her side, but it was unimportant. There was just her and Malak. Aithne straddled the edge where Light met Dark, gazing into her former pupil's yellow eyes. You've gone too far, Alek, said a forgotten voice at the back of her mind from before a lifetime ago. You are warped and full of hate. You are lost, and now your time is up.
As Aithne calmed, Malak grew steadily more desperate. As she fell into rhythm, he fell out of it. His strokes grew wilder and wilder. Aithne felt something slimy in him retreating with every passing moment, leaving him twisted and Dark, but vulnerable.
He was panicking, she realized. Fear rolled off him in waves. Aithne wasn't sure if it was the impending collapse of the Star Forge he'd thought invincible, or his perpetual failure to kill her. Finally, one of his sweeps went ridiculously wide. Aithne brought her right saber around in a smooth upswing and took his right hand off at the wrist. With the left, in a move Carth had once reminded her of on Kashyyyk, she cut into his side. Her lightsaber did not stop at the hip. She felt her blade meet Malak's organs, and she twisted, slightly surprised. Malak exhaled and fell to his knees, clutching his right arm with his left.
"Impossible," he said. His voice was already beginning to fade. "I…I cannot be beaten. I am the Dark Lord of the Sith!"
Aithne switched off her lightsabers. She reattached them to her belt with a wince. "Still you are a mortal man," she said quietly. "The Dark Side is no stronger than the Light." She closed her eyes, recalling Malak's earlier words. "Or…no stronger than me, whatever I am."
Malak coughed a little. Blood tried to come up out of his nonexistent mouth, and his voice box crackled. "Still…still spouting the wisdom of the Jedi, I see. Of a sort, anyway." He sat back heavily on his feet, and Aithne knelt beside him.
"Maybe there is truth in what you say," he admitted, as his eyes dimmed. Aithne helped him lay back, cradling his shoulders. She supposed once upon a time she had been fond of the monster before her. And certainly now, in his last moments, she felt sorry for him. She did not begrudge him her company as he died.
He looked up at her, struggling to focus on her face. Aithne's arm still cradled his back, and she felt his heartbeat slowing. "I…I cannot help but wonder, Revan," he whispered. "What would have happened had our positions been reversed? What if fate had decreed I would be captured by the Jedi? Could I have abandoned the Dark, as you did? If you had not led me down the Dark path in the first place, what destiny would I have found?"
Aithne's jaw tightened. Even now, Malak radiated Darkness. He seemed to be regretting something, but he still blamed her and fate for the path he had taken. There was no repentance in his mind: only despair. "Malak," she said quietly, "I don't know what I did to tempt you a lifetime ago. I regret it, whatever it was. But I know myself, and you would have had a choice. You made your choice to follow me at all, and it definitely was your decision to continue on as you have."
Malak's eyes lost their focus. He stared up at the ceiling. "I suppose you are right," he said. Aithne had to strain to hear him. "I suppose you speak the truth. I alone must accept responsibility for my fate. I wanted to be Master of the Sith and ruler of the galaxy. But that destiny was not mine, Revan. It might have been yours, Revan, but never mine. And in the end, as the darkness takes me, I am nothing…" his words trailed off and the light on his artificial jaw went dim. His heartbeat had stopped. There was no malice or animation left in his gaze: only emptiness. He was dead.
Aithne swept a hand over his face to close his eyes. She stood then, and looked around at the bodies of the fallen Jedi, at her own former apprentice. The Star Forge shook beneath her. Let this be their tomb.
Vaguely surprised she was still alive, Aithne headed for the elevator, not entirely sure what to do now. She walked slowly. Her mind was one big blank. An enormous weight had lifted off her shoulders, but an even larger vacuum stretched in front of her. The elevator reopened.
Aithne had directed it to the opening level, where the Ebon Hawk was docked. She stumbled out, into solid, armored arms. She looked up into concerned caramel eyes in confusion.
"Carth?" she managed in a whisper.
"You're alive!" he said, equally stunned. "What happened?"
Aithne's eyes flickered back to the elevator. "I am alive," she repeated, still processing the fact. She looked back at Carth and clutched his arms. "I…I killed him. It's over."
A/N: Yeah, yeah, so you're all wondering exactly how this differs from canon. I mean, I made Revan a girl, but she still sided with the Republic. Bastila still wound up redeemed, and Malak still died, and the Star Forge still went down.
In my opinion, though, the story doesn't end there. The war's over, but there are still loose ends to tie up. There are things to clean up and rebuild.
Does anyone else ever wonder exactly how much the Republic knew about Revan? I mean, the Jedi knew, obviously. But did the Republic? I have a hard time believing that they would just grant this manifestly dangerous woman who'd wreaked all kinds of havoc and started the war total amnesty just because she happened to lose her memory and step in to hand them a way to defeat the Sith. At this point, readers, we go completely AU.
This novelization of Knights of the Old Republic makes it a point to actually deal with the clean-up and confrontations that realistically would have happened after Revan showed up at the end of the war she caused. I decided against killing off a character, but someone does end up maimed. And after a lot of explanations and fighting, I plan on giving Aithne the retirement she's wanted from the beginning.
See, the whole True Sith thing? I must admit I have never liked it. I happen to think that someone, particularly a Jedi, can go horrendously wrong without there being some sort of ulterior motive or reasoning behind it. Moreover, this is all the more likely to occur after the Jedi in question has triumphed in a vicious, bloody war by use of incredible power and superior intellect and had to deal with amazing numbers of very corrupted, slow, and otherwise stupid personages.
So I figure, whatever! She fell. She came back. Can't it just stop there? The main problem I have with the extended Star Wars universe is that no one ever gets a break. Revan has saved the galaxy twice and nearly taken over. She's done enough. It may be anticlimactic for her to more or less retire, help clean up some of the mess she created, live out her days in peace, and eventually fade into obscurity, but I think it's pretty realistic. Furthermore, she deserves it.
If you're interested, keep reading to find out how it all unfolds. And remember to let me know what you think! (Oh, and I apologize for this ridiculously long Author's Note)
May the Force Be With You,
LMSharp