Again, Sifo-Dyas let Tyranus take the initiative, the Jedi's sapphire blade parrying the Sith's quick, precise, rubied Makashi cuts. Slowly, Tyranus backed Sifo-Dyas toward a tree bordering the bog and crawling with the meter-long Force-sensitive lizards. The Jedi Master felt the attention of those lizards directed toward him and the Sith Lord, the violent clashing of their blades drawing the gaze of nearly all the animals with eyes in a twenty-meter radius. Sifo-Dyas also wondered what Tyranus had up his sleeve, even as his back thudded against the bark of the lizard-filled tree.
With a dramatic flourish, Tyranus slashed from left to right, as it to remove Sifo-Dyas's head from his shoulders. Sifo-Dyas anticipated the move and ducked out of the way of the stroke, stepping toward the bog on his right. You missed, he bored into Tyranus's mind. What is it that you've got against the trees of this world, anyway? he added grimly.
"And just what makes you think I missed?" Tyranus vociferously retorted as the top of the tree toppled toward the bog, sending a scurry of lizards into the bog and its banks. Frantically, they scrambled away from the water's edge, desperate to avoid the reach of the predators hidden under the water. Sifo-Dyas momentarily opened his mind to the lizards, joining in their group consciousness to guide them to the safest paths up the bog's shores.
But a handful of the lizards landed too close to the bog for even the Master of the Light's mental ministrations to be of use. The head of the bog monster jetted up from the surface of the waters, jaws gaping as it darted after the lizards, scooping them up in its jaws. The lizards that managed to clamber partway up the shores of the bog soon found themselves immobilized by its dark side Force probes of terror.
And those Force probes also doubled over Sifo-Dyas with fear, who was unable to sever his psychic link with the lizards' Force consciousness in time. Tyranus used the opening into Sifo-Dyas's psyche to force his own thoughts into the Jedi Master's mind. Now, my old friend, you will see just how much I have learned about the wildlife of this planet in my short stay here. Tyranus amplified the terror in Sifo-Dyas's mind, which slowly attracted the bog monster's attention to the Jedi's struggling frame. But once its attention had been captured, the bog monster's neck snapped toward Sifo-Dyas, meaning to make a meal of him.
However, Sifo-Dyas enacted a mental mirror through the Force, reflecting the terror being directed at him by the bog monster and Tyranus back to its sources. The bog monster shrieked in a most hideous and grating manner, its vocalizations assaulting the auditory sense organ of all organisms in a hundred-meter radius. The monster then slunk under the surface of the bog, the quickening waves and ripples lapping heartily at the bog's banks betraying the speed at which the monster fled the scene.
Almost inaudible under this cacophony were Tyranus's own cries of pain. He grabbed at his head, unable to believe that his own mental machinations were being perverted against him even as he reeled in horror at the abominable visions being forced across his mind. Sifo-Dyas staggered up, his gaze fixed on Tyranus's wracked form, continuing to turn the stream of frightening visions back onto the mind that originated it.
Abruptly, Sifo-Dyas shuttered his mind, allowing Tyranus's brain to recover from the waves upon waves of disturbing imagery that had been forced back into it. The Jedi Master regarded the Sith Lord with a measure of pity, though he still taunted Tyranus through the Force. So, what do you think of the terror that the dragonsnake forces into the minds of its prey? Do you still think that monster a worthy pet for a Sith?
Tyranus knew he had been bested, though he would never admit it openly. Far from withering away and decaying in the dank Dagobah climate, Master Sifo-Dyas had adapted to the bestial ways of the planet. The Jedi had come to live in harmony with the varieties of life on the planet, rather than trying to dominate it as a Sith would. He had learned to survive symbiotically instead of striving to remake the land as he saw most fit. Through every privation, the loss of all dignity bestowed by civilization's hallowing of rank and prestige, Sifo-Dyas had clung steadfastly to the light, rather than falling to the dark.
And that light had stood its ground in its battles against the Dark Lord. It had kept the Jedi Master's knowledge of the lightsaber fresh in the utter absence of a suitable dueling partner. It had kept him strong and nimble in the ways of the Force. And no matter what dark strategies Darth Tyranus attempted to break the Master of the Light, the light stood its ground. It overcame the dark, washed it out in a blazing glory. It refused to be extinguished, and its mere presence threatened to extinguish the darkness that had been festering in Tyranus for a year and a half.
But Tyranus felt Sifo-Dyas opening his mind again, creating a psychic breach through his Jedi defenses by his mockeries of the Sith lord. The darkness in him swelled at that opening, made him resolve to blow out the light by the one means that had proven itself successful in taming and dominating that light. Feeding the growing rage inside him, Tyranus attempted to take advantage of that opening in Sifo-Dyas's mind. He used his considerable mental powers to force his way into the Jedi's mind, just as he had done on Coruscant. Tyranus would make the Jedi pay for his insolence. For his unwillingness to be snuffed out so that the Dark Lord could complete his nefarious destiny.
And just as on Coruscant, Sifo-Dyas doubled over in cerebral pain, the waves of disturbing imagery flooding into his mind through the gateway he had opened time and again for Tyranus. However, this time, he had invited the Dark Lord's malign mental machinations, had goaded Tyranus into trying to overwhelm him again with the images that had enslaved him before. Slowly, Sifo-Dyas bore up under the tremendous psychic pain, his posture becoming erect again. Tyranus's eyes widened, unable to believe the resistance the Master of the Light assembled against his onslaught. The Dark Lord redoubled his efforts to dominate Sifo-Dyas's mind, hurling wave after wave of increasingly vicious and tormenting engrams into the Jedi Master's consciousness, designed to terrorize the body as much as the mind.
Yet Sifo-Dyas continued to rise, almost as if strengthened by the vile scenes Tyranus thrust violently into his consciousness. A pity that you didn't learn the first time, Dooku. Those words acted as a tremendous psychic reflector, mirroring the dark images away from Sifo-Dyas's mind and back into Tyranus's. Tyranus found himself unable to break the horrific circuit, held under the thrall of his own mind's baneful imagery as he collapsed to his knees.
For the first time since he levitated himself onto the branches of the tree, Sifo-Dyas spoke with his own voice to Tyranus, even as his face was obviously screwed up with great meditative effort. "You see, Dooku, your precious dragonsnake taught me many lessons about how to defeat your mental manipulations. I will never be your slave again. As you experience for yourself the horrors you forced into my mind, I will tell you how I set myself free from them forever."