Author's Note: This is a Halloween special and in the spirit of the season, I tried my hand at a bit of horror. So be warned: dead and undead ahead. The chapter is also based on events, places and characters from Yoda: Dark Rendezvous by Sean Stewart.

The Vjun Haunt

Vjun, Outer Rim Territories

What struck Ro first about the place was the silence.

She'd heard the expression, 'quiet as the grave', before, but this was her first visual demonstration. It wasn't as if someone had turned the vid on silent - that would have been too artificial, which in turn would have made her suspicious. No, animals - mostly unseen birds - still called from the edge of the beaches and the ocean waves lapped continuously at the shore. But there were no airspeeder sounds; no barely-perceptible hum of powerlines. She and Wren were standing in the middle of what had once been a grand chateau, with a town sprawled right at their feet and there was nothing - nothing - that even resembled a sentient presence.

Well, almost nothing.

Ro could only glance at the dead woman from the corners of her eyes. She'd seen plenty of dead bodies in her lifetime, all in various states of decomposition and assembly, but there was something in the manner in which the corpse had been placed...

Wren did another slow circle around the woman, looking her carefully up and down.

Viscountess Whirry Malreaux had died sitting; her hands limp against the ornate roses carved into the wood of the armrests. Her pink ball gown couldn't have resembled anything close to clean for years, but was now little more than a tattered, blood-soaked rag. Her legs stuck out from beneath the dirt and blood-stiffened petticoats like the legs of a badly made doll.

"No obvious signs of a lethal injury," Wren said, finishing his inspection. His voice was unusually solemn and far too loud in the unnatural silence of the ruined mansion. "Plenty of cuts, but she didn't bleed out." He took a step back from the corpse, before glancing at Ro.

It was impossible to make out his face beneath the helmet, but behind the curtain of control that surrounded him in the Force, was a definite shiver of unease. Wren was a veteran of the Wars, but he didn't like Vjun anymore than Ro did.

"You've got something to add, cheeka?"

Ro risked another quick glance at the former viscountess, not turning her head away from the stunning ocean scene below the mansion.

It was her face, Ro decided. Her face and the expression she'd carried into her death rigor.

Whirry Malreaux continued to stare out of a broken window, Vjun's weak sunlight flashing off the glass shards and flickering over her milky eyes, giving them a ghastly semblance of life. Wildlife and the planet's acid rains had already done their work on the body, but enough of her once plump face remained to make out a grimace of total despair.

The last Viscountess of House Malreaux had spent her final moments without even the tiniest glimmer of hope.

Ro shivered from top to toe and turned her back on the corpse.

The broken window before the viscountess, she thought, looked far too much like a mouth rimmed with jagged teeth, their edges still blood-encrusted from where they'd devoured the woman's dreams and desires - however twisted they might have been. According to the report they'd gotten from the Temple, Viscountess Malreaux had been quite mad.

"She killed herself," Ro announced to the still manor.

Wren looked up from his study of the busted computer terminal - the deep slashes in the desk looked suspiciously like lightsaber damage.

"How the gfersh do you figure that?"

Good question. "I don't know," she admitted. "I just..." She swiped some of the rubble off of the floor and found more bloodstains beneath the torn carpeting. But these look old; the blood was black and cracked. Around her, the Force whispered in her ears with voices just at the edge of hearing, promising the path to power - or total madness. "I just know," she breathed out and, suddenly, galvanized, actually leaped towards the study's door. The Force leaped with her, with the hungry intensity of a starved predator.

"C'mon, Cookie. No sense a-dawdling in this spook-manor. Dooku's gone and dusted-off his prints."

"What fekking wine-bee got into your panties?" he growled, once he caught up.

Given the sudden frantic energy of her movements, Ro was almost to the courtyard before Wren was by her side again.

"If you kriffing experimented with my caf again..." He let the threat trail off, but it sounded hollow even to Ro's distracted mind.

She rubbed at her ears, trying to rid them of the whispering that seemed housed deep in her auditory canal.

"I want to go home," she told him, meeting Wren's eyes through the dark T-shaped visor. In the watery light of Vjun's sun, the twin lightning bolts that ran along either side of his helmet seemed to pulse a sullen - and terribly fresh - red. "This planet is breathing poison."

And power. Power. Power. Power.

Ro shook her head violently, her thick mane of hair flying about her slender figure as she tried to shake the thoughts loose from her brain.

What did she want with power? All she wanted was to be back on the Mockingbird with a dozen boxes of igatli cookies and enough hot chocolate to drown herself in. Not too much to ask, in the greater scheme of things.

Wren put a hand on her shoulder and Ro jumped almost a good twenty centimetres into the air.

"Fierfek!" He snatched his hand away, the other dropping to his blaster. "You trying to slag me with a karking heart attack, cheeka?"

Ro clutched her shoulder where his hand had been. His touch had been jolting, as if his entire body were supercharged. In that one instance of physical contact, she'd been bombarded with so many emotions that they'd all jumbled together in a meaningless snarl of colors.

The Force was strong - very strong - on Vjun.

As her own heart pounded itself towards a cardiac arrest, Ro was, for one of the few times in her life, sincerely glad she was relatively weak in the Force. Since coming to Vjun in search of clues for Count Dooku's newest whereabouts, Ro'd felt as if every drop of her blood had been replaced by Dantari fire ants. She prickled on the inside and not in the fun way. In stark contrast, her lungs felt as if they couldn't pull in enough oxygen.

"You feel it, too?" she asked.

"Fekking feel what?" he asked, exasperated.

She gave him a look and for once, Wren subsided. That alone was answer enough. Wren might not be Force-sensitive himself, but on Vjun that didn't matter. The wrongness poured out of every grain and stem from this planet.

But Wren was as contrary as a vine cat, even when it came to his own instincts.

"We have to at least eyefek the damn town," he told her, gesturing with the muzzle of his blaster down towards the cove. Part of the ground had recently disappeared into a deep depression, water pouring up out of underground springs and spreading, before being swallowed by the ever-reaching ocean.

Bitter End was just a short walk away from that beach. Had Vjun been one of the pleasure and vacation worlds, no doubt the inhabitants of Bitter End could have asked top price for room and board with an ocean view like that available to them. But this was Vjun and Ro thought anyone trying to take a long walk on those sandy shores was more likely to sear the skin off his feet than get a tan.

As if to concur, the wind blew over her face, heavy with the smell of ocean and a promise of rain - and Ro leaned back, sneezing violently as her sinuses began to burn.

"We..." another sneeze, "...should leave."

"Zey's not going to karking accept you getting the vaping whingeing jimmies on the report. Stanging General Yoda wants to effing know if Dooku left a useful trail." He slashed his hand through the air, giving voice to his contempt for that feeble hope. "So we do this freq job right, because I'm in no crinking mood to bloody explain myself before effing Zey and that flimsi-pushing pet ARC of his."

"Cookie," Ro rubbed at her left temple, where a light headache was throbbing away to the slurping of the surf, "did yousa just sayeth whingeing jimmies?"

He had, but she could already tell that he would tongue-tango with a Hutt before admitting as much.

It was eerie, the ease with which she could read him on Vjun - with which she could read the entire planet.

Oh, yes. The Force was strong. But it was all in a syncopated tune that amplified the negative to the point where she could barely catch a glimmer of the positive. Ro could feel this planet dying in the Force; getting eaten alive by the poisonous rain. What she couldn't feel were the sparks of life that remained. She could see the pirate gulls circling above the bluffs falling into the dark, slurring ocean, but the colors that were generally her perception of their feelings were muted to the point of invisibility.

She thought if she concentrated harder - put more of herself into the Force - she might be able to distinguish the gulls' very thoughts. But if she did that, would she wind up drowning in the jarring waves of Vjun's life-force?

Yes, the voices deep in her ears whispered. Yes, you'd drown. But. What. POWER.

Ro closed her eyes and exhaled and without knowing they did so, her hands began to skate across her body, as if making sure the darkness wasn't already clinging to her clothes.

"Fine. We take a quick gander around the Bitter End." And hope we don't meet one ourselves. She tapped the comlink on her wrist. "Artee?"

Her astromech answered immediately, asking how long it would take for them to get back. The sensors reported a growing storm-front over the ocean and a downpour of acid rain would wear the protective plating of the ship's outer hull down to a 65.3% efficiency rating. If, she was tartly informed, they left within the first five minutes of the storm.

"Another few tick-tocks." Wren was already across the courtyard, but to Ro, it was as if he were moving in slow motion. Her heart beat so fast, that in comparison to the thundering rhythm, Wren's own footsteps were restrained in the fabric of time and space.

Ro swallowed and acidity coated the back of her throat. "And Artee? Get the engines purring."

The air coming through his helmet filters was wrong.

Wren had fought in jungles, deserts, forests and mountains and knew the smell of each well. But Vjun had a stink to it that was utterly unique in his experience.

The verdant growths of moss - carnivorous moss, for fek's sake - scented the air with a wet, rotting smell that had little to do with growth, yet was overpoweringly green in its intensity. Added to that was the chemical-salt tang of an ocean that was largely sour and devoid of life.

Overall, it was breathable air, but only barely. Give it another two or three decades and the acid rains would make life on Vjun unthinkable.

Makes you kriffing wonder about the kind of shiks who'd settle this rot-begotten fek-pit of a planet in the first place. According to the Temple archives, the Vjunites had all gone barvy before slagging each other. Wren couldn't blame them. He thought if he had to breathe in that oppressive, ropy aroma of moss and dead ocean for much longer - let alone the rest of his life - he'd go fekking barvy, too.

"This was a bombad bad idea."

They rounded another empty house, Wren in the lead. He swept the street with his blaster, still in a half-crouch, then waved Ro forward.

"You've already vaping said that," he snapped. "A-kriffing-lot."

"Proof positive of a point well-made."

This street, like all the others, was completely deserted. Vjun moss had eaten - quite literally - through the ferrocrete and was running riot, even creeping up house walls and roofs. It gave the buildings around them a diseased look, as if they were infected with the same sickness that had wiped out the locals.

"There is no stanging point to kriffing make."

Wren didn't like walking on the stuff and noted Ro studiously avoided the moss as well, even jumping over thicker patches. The things actually ate into exposed skin, leaving it red, welted and oozing. Even plastoid wasn't much protection. Wren's armor sported a few new blisters where he'd come up against the notorious Vjun moss and part of Ro's sleeve had actually started smoking before she'd torn it off. And judging by the brittle feel of his soles, they'd have to chuck their boots as well, once they were back aboard the ship.

"If that be so, then how comes you're whispering?"

Good point. He had no fekking idea.

No, that wasn't true. Wren knew damn well why he was keeping his voice low, no matter that the little nuisance was practically pressed up tighter against him than his own karking bodyglove.

He was waiting for the trap to spring.

Bitter End had all the makings of an ambush: former Sep stronghold; supposed desertion. The empty houses were bloody perfect for booby-traps and there were enough crooked alleys and blind corners to hide a dozen droid patrols. The finger on the trigger of his Deece was tight with coiled tension. The hairs on the nape of his neck stood on end.

The HUD sensors assured him they were the only living targets in the town, but Wren didn't trust the readouts. Electronics could be fooled; instinct couldn't. And his instincts were telling him that Ro was right - Fierfek, now there's a stanging frightful thought - and they should exfil ASAP.

"Wren..."

"Don't fekking start," he snapped, half-turning his head to glare at her...There! Movement at the corner of his eye.

Wren's eyes snapped back forward, his Deece already trailing the possible trajectory of his target. For a moment - just the blink of an eye, really - he thought he saw a white blur that might have been a face pass behind the window of one of the nearby houses. He couldn't be sure, but it didn't matter. As soon as his mind had registered the movement, his finger convulsed on the trigger. Blue plasma cut through the rancid, buttery light. The window in which the - face? - target had appeared was blown inward. In the silence of the dead town, the sound of shattering glass was as loud as an explosion.

"Krisping sprinkles!" The little nuisance almost jumped him. "What was that about?"

"You didn't fekking see that?"

"I see a tall order of poor impulse control who nearly gave me a heart-stopping arrest. For the second time."

"There's some shik hiding here."

Ro stared at him, hard, for just a moment, as if weighing the odds of him being the barvy one in this team. Then she glanced towards the house with the shot-out window, eyes narrowing. Something in the air shifted. It wasn't like Ro's usual application of the Force, which generally felt warm and not altogether unpleasant. But it was close enough for sabacc.

The air around Wren shifted from cool to a hot humidity that pressed itself against the insides of his eyeballs like a Felucian gelagrub trying to burrow. The thick greenness that hung like a mist over the town intensified, until it clung to his tongue.

"Stop it," he snapped out, his free hand tightening into a fist - ready to punch her in order to get her to stop. Red began to creep into his vision. "Crinking stop it."

Ro reared back, as if already seeing that clenched fist descend on her. A wild, startled look flashed through her teal eyes. It was the look of a cornered animal, ready for fight or flight.

They stayed that way for a full two breaths, frozen in a tableau as the air began to crackle with readiness around them.

Perhaps he would have hit her.

Perhaps she would have used the Force to bring him to his knees.

On Vjun, every dark thought and impulse was possible.

Then they heard the footsteps.

They both flinched and instinctively drew together; Wren raising his blaster once more and Ro drawing her twin lightsabers. The blades came to life with a dual snap-hiss and Wren could have sworn the buildings around them cringed at the sound.

"What was that?" Ro asked, head whipping about this way and that in an effort to pinpoint the source of the sound.

"Kriffing who was that?" Wren corrected. He stepped in front of her, then paused, glancing back down at the smaller Jedi. "Anything on that frag of a Force-radar of yours?"

"No." Her voice had dropped back to a whisper. "Yes." She grimaced. "Maybe for the third. This whole place is a giant whingeing jimmies."

He snorted at her choice of words and the air seemed to shiver a bit at the sound and give way before it.

"There is someone on this fek-forsaken planet." He thought it over for a moment, looking the empty streets up and down. "We need better kriffing cover. You'll fraggin' stay here and I'll take a spot on the roof, make an area-sweep..."

"No winding way." Ro grabbed awkwardly at his vambrace, jerking his gun-arm closer despite the glowing lightsaber in her hand. The crinking little nuisance was strong and the muzzle of his blaster dipped down to point straight at his foot.

"Fierfek," he pulled the arm out of her grasp. "Ro..."

"I've seen this holovid," she hissed up at him. "We split and mutant zombie nunas peck your brains and I ain't getting stuck with cleaning up the stains."

"I get my stanging brains pecked?" he asked, incredulous.

Ro rolled her eyes. "A-course. I'm the cute blond. I gotta be on the surviver listing for the sequel."

"Tell me something. What krinking color is the sky in that barvy head of yours?"

But Ro didn't answer. She was, in fact, starting right past him, her mouth hanging slightly open. Lit by her lightsabers, the usual teal of her eyes had darkened to the leaden grey of Vjun's clouds and they were huge in her small, oval face. The tip of her tongue peeked out, touched her upper lip and withdrew, as if it were a squall, retreating back into its burrow after scenting a hunting anooba.

"W-Wren." Her voice was nothing but a breathless whisper.

Slowly, deliberately, Wren followed her line of sight.

The source of the footsteps was a man.

He stood with his back to the sun, so that he was nothing but a shadowy outline until Vjun's thick cloud cover pulled back together again.

He was tall and rail-thin. A cloak of crimson and ivory was draped across his shoulders. Dark hair fell to his shoulders.

As the glare was cut away, Wren realized that the cloak was stained and the clothes beneath were torn and filthy. The hair was matted and hung in tangled, greasy clumps around the man's thin face. Dark circles ringed eyes that were deep-set and bloodshot.

And he was dead.

If the pallor of the face and the man's blue lips hadn't clued Wren in, the jagged hole that was all that remained of the man's throat would have. Wren swallowed, sweat beginning to trickle down his brow and cheeks. He could fraggin' see glimmers of a vertebra - whitish-yellow against pinkish red, a ghoulish imitation of the man's cloak - through the shredded remains of tissue and muscle.

The dead man took a step forward, the edge of his cloak swaying slightly with the motion.

Ambition

Lust

Greed

Fear

Hope

Wrath

Hate

The Force wrapped itself in and around the corpse like the broken strands of a well-spider's attack, caught in the wind and seeking to snatch at any semblance of life - moving the corpse along as they did so. Whatever the man had been in life, he was now nothing but a bottomless vessel with a hunger for the Living Force.

Bloodshot eyes turned to fix on her and the senseless whispering that had been plaguing her since coming to Vjun exploded into a shrieking hurricane.

Ro wanted to shriek with them, but her throat was locked, her gaze caught by the dead man's eyes.

The Force, she thought, nearly nonsensical by what she was seeing and feeling. That's the Force and I can hear it.

Her mind began to tilt dangerously as the edges of her vision blurred.

Wren was a cold statue next to her, his blaster as limp in his hands as her lightsabers.

She could feel him, almost sense his very thoughts. Her partner had gone right past fear and full-tilt into paralyzing disbelief, slithering perilously close to an abyss he wouldn't be able to climb back out of.

Though nearly three meters away, the dead man raised one arm, hand extended towards them and grasping, as if he could already feel their beating hearts bursting in his fingers.

They were white, those fingers. As white as fish bellies, with bones poking through where the flaccid skin had peeled back like the rind of an overly ripe muja fruit.

Those twisted tendrils of the Force reached towards Ro, clinging to her mind, pulling...crushing...warping

The pounding of her heart was lost to the dark storm of the Force.

All of Vjun went down the deep end of madness and we're about to participate in a live performance. She knew this and was helpless to stop it. Her lightsabers shut off of their own accord, as if to confirm the death approaching them on shuffling feet.

Hearing her thoughts and agreeing with them, the dead man smiled.

It was a wide smile; so wide, in fact, that it split the skin around his mouth. It was the sound of wet flimsi tearing. Reddish-yellow puss began oozing out from between the flaps of broken skin, dripping slowly down his chin and torn cheeks. One drop ran along the curve of his ruined lips, giving them a misshapen approximation of color and life.

It matches his cloak. A clown with color-coordination style. The irrelevant thought dropped into her stunned mind and despite the growing horror, the active rebellion of her insides, the screaming in her mind and heart, a startled laugh burst out from Ro.

In the silence of the dead town, the sound was like the ratter of a blaster cannon.

The dead man stopped cold, his red eyes fixing on her in what might have been astonishment and...hurt?

Beside her, Wren jerked violently, like a man woken from a dream - or a nightmare.

Caught in the momentary eye of the storm that had been closing in on them, Ro fancied she could hear the click as his mind switched from man to the finely-trained soldier that he was.

And that soldier didn't hesitate when confronted with an enemy - no matter its face.

Wren started firing even as he was bringing his arm back up to position.

Ferrocrete splintered and melted under a barrage of plasma as the Deece's muzzle completed its arc and came to bear on the walking horror.

There was no time for the dead man to react.

Blue blaster bolts tore into the decrepit flesh, filling the air with the stink of charcoaled meat.

The dead man jerked wildly, like a marionette whose strings are caught in a tossing tide; arms flailing and legs jittering as dead nerves were seared and bones cracked under the hot plasma.

His face disappeared, melted away as Wren shot bolt after bolt into that sweet-spot between the eyes with a sniper's deadly precision. Wren didn't scream, but the Force screamed for him as his rage - his offence - at the undead thing boiled and lashed.

The barrage might have continue until the Deece's clip was emptied, if Ro hadn't grabbed Wren's other hand.

"Cookie!"

He half-turned on her, snarling like a rabid akk dog, but still unwilling to fully turn his back on the smoking, shredded remains of the corpse - which, even as she ducked her partner's swing, was twitching and trying to rise onto its ruined legs.

"We've gotta exit quick-tick," she said, practically yelling into his faceplate and gave his hand another hard tug.

That seemed to break whatever trance he'd been in.

Shaking like a canine trying to rid his fur of muddied water, Wren cast a last glance at the...thing he'd massacred. The corpse was trying to lift its right arm again, the hand flopping uselessly, held in place by a last bit of grizzle.

"Right." The word sounded as if it came from deep in his throat. "Move your ass, cheeka. We're fekking leaving."

The Force pounded in time with their footsteps as Wren grabbed her wrist in turn and pulled her along, through the winding streets of ruined Bitter End.

Long before they reached the ship, Ro's lungs were burning and even Wren was panting beside her. It was as if the planet had increased its gravity in a last-ditch effort to keep them trapped long enough for its undead haunt to catch up.

"Cookie," Ro gasped as the sweet sound of Mockingbird's engines cut through the thunder growing over the acid ocean.

"What?" he snapped irritably.

"I was so totally mono right."

CT-20-4371 ("WREN"), LIEUTENANT TO SPECOPS HQ: TARGET PLANET VJUN SEARCHED. RESULT: NO INDICATION OF CONTINUED SEPARATIST ACTIVITY OR CURRENT WHEREABOUTS OF COUNT DOOKU. RECOMMENDATION: ABANDON VJUN SYSTEM AS IT POSSESSES NO STRATEGIC VALUE OR RESOURCES. RECOMMENDATION SECONDED BY JEDI COMMANDER ROWEENA ARHEN. SEE ATTACHED REPORT: CLASSIFIED.