goofycaffeinatedguru: Thank you so much for your kind words. I'm glad that this story interests you, and I'm sorry that I've taken so long between updates; I had to finish my dissertation. Hopefully, I can capture your interest once more!

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Darth Tyranus's boots sloshed across the sodden ground of the bog, water spraying up with each step. His saber's crimson blade crackled intermittently as drops of condensation fell onto it from the trees or the very air itself. As he sought his quarry, his measured pace meshed itself into the deliberate but deadly cadence of life in the swamp world.

Almost imperceptibly, a bright and shimmering point appeared in the mist. Softly it crackled as it lengthened into a bar of blue light, approaching Tyranus's position slowly. Tyranus regarded the blue bar of light and the features it revealed carefully. A man with long, black, matted hair, with an accompanying scraggly black beard, slightly longer around his mouth and caked with grime drew closer. The man's ripped and tattered cloak was coated with twigs, leaves, and dirt; both it and the clothes underneath it sported singed holes. Finally, the man stopped five meters away from Tyranus.

At last, Master Sifo-Dyas had revealed himself.

"You came back for me. How touching." The bedraggled Jedi Master's sarcasm surprised Tyranus.

"Indeed. You appear to have healed well." Tyranus's dry response failed to elicit any detectable response from Sifo-Dyas.

"No thanks to you. You could have at least left me with a medkit, a change of clothes – even a ration bar!"

"Ah, but that would have taken the fun out of it, wouldn't it?" Tyranus's blade whirled around in a menacing flourish.

Sifo-Dyas ignored the older man's taunts. "Instead, you left me for dead. You didn't even have the decency to finish the job; instead, you left me for any one of these creatures to eat me alive."

"It would seem that they failed, then."

"No. You failed. You couldn't bring yourself to kill me before because you had a modicum of Jedi morality left in you. And the Chancellor still hasn't driven it from you fully. You still can't murder someone you called friend."

Tyranus simply sneered at Sifo-Dyas. "You will soon know how incorrect you are about that foolish assumption."

As soon as Tyranus hissed those last words, he used the Force to speed toward Sifo-Dyas, crimson blade extended as a lance. However, Sifo-Dyas read the direction of Tyranus's charge and leaped deftly out of the way, twisting in the air and landing five meters away from Tyranus.

"Such tired tricks. I would have expected better from a Sith Lord." Sifo-Dyas glared defiantly at Tyranus, his voice hardened by a year and a half of privation.

Tyranus's eyebrow arched. He was not accustomed to being spoken to in such a disdainful manner from anyone, let alone his former puppet. Without uttering a word, he advanced slowly on Sifo-Dyas's position, his lightsaber whirling through the fog in brilliant, precise Makashi arcs.

Sifo-Dyas sneered at Tyranus's plodding progress, watching the rhythmic flight of his blade intently. The moment Tyranus drew within striking range, Sifo-Dyas jutted his blue blade abruptly out and down, catching Tyranus off guard and driving the Sith's crimson blade toward the marshy ground. "You always ensnared yourself in patterned movements, Dooku...or should I call you Tyranus, that silly name you let echo around in my head?"

As the Jedi Master's blade streaked up toward Tyranus's chest, the Sith jumped backward abruptly and beat his lightsaber roughly against his opponent's, sending the blue blade careening away from his torso. Sparks arced through the air as the water vapor between them turned to ionized plasma and ozone.

Tyranus exhaled quickly before speaking again. "Apparently, your time in this...miasma...has not completely diminished your skills with a lightsaber. Nevertheless, I sense great fear in you, my old friend." Tyranus punctuated that ironical last word with a determined thrust at Sifo-Dyas's seemingly unprotected belly.

But the Jedi Master was ready for the Sith's attempt at a killing stab, barely flicking his wrist to bring his blue shaft of light across his body, neatly parrying the glowing crimson column. "All too predictable, Tyranus. The fear you sense is your own – your technique has grown stale, complacen..."

Before Sifo-Dyas could finish his sentence, Tyranus brought his lightsaber to bear again with a preternaturally accelerated swoop at the other man's neck. The Jedi Master simply ducked, locking his blade against his former friend's before sweeping his foot behind Tyranus's ankles, sending the Sith Lord crashing down, back first, into the slimy ground.

Instead of bringing his saber down for a crushing blow to press his ostensible advantage, Sifo-Dyas leaped backward into the top branches of a white tree, five meters above the ground. He deactivated his lightsaber, held it in front of him, closed his eyes, and bowed his head slightly. He used the Force to assume a standing meditative stance, perceiving Tyranus's slow rise from the marsh as ripples in the web of the Force surrounding the entire planet.

Sodden earth alternately clung to and dripped from the Sith Lord's cape as he drew up to his full height. He wore an indignant expression at the disregard – and disrespect – his opponent was displaying toward him. He snarled, "You are unwise to lower your defenses!" as he tossed his saber viciously at Sifo-Dyas's legs, intending to cut his support out from under him.

Rather than cutting the Jedi Master off at the knees, however, Tyranus's blade cut uselessly through the tree limb from which Sifo-Dyas seemingly levitated the instant the saber was thrown. The Jedi Master effortlessly positioned himself on a branch of similar height on the opposite side of the tree, still meditating, still with his eyes closed tightly.

You'll have to be less obvious than that, the almost aerial Jedi bored into his sinister counterpart's mind. Besides, the trees don't appreciate being violated like that. For your own sake, don't do that again.

Enraged, Tyranus retrieved his saber's hilt from the mire and cleaned it with the inner surface of his cape. With an evil glint in his eye, he activated the lightsaber and brutally cut through half of the trunk of the tree, threatening to destabilize the entire organism and send Sifo-Dyas thudding back to ground.

But the tree's voluminous, sticky sap quickly broke through the cauterization of the wound, gluing the edges together immediately. And even more curiously, a landspeeder-sized, eight-legged, vertically oriented, bulbous root detached from the tree, blinking a ring of mud-encrusted eyes near the bottom of the root for the first time at Tyranus. Slowly he stepped back as the root peeled away from its parent tree, pincers suspended half a meter off the ground starting to grind back and forth. I warned you, Sifo-Dyas grimly imparted to the Sith Lord's mind.