The town on Ossus was really more of a village; there were maybe fifty people who lived there. "This is the largest settlement on Ossus," the mayor said when he led the group of four into his makeshift office. "We all know each other. On top of that, Master Gat-ro was the only Cathar, and he showed up every morning at town roll call without fail – sick or injured, it didn't matter."

"So when he didn't show up yesterday for call, you knew something was wrong?" Theron asked. His hand was gripped tightly around the mask in his left pocket, and he itched to put it on. There was something so... broken about the world.

The mayor twiddled his thumbs and nodded. He was a fifty year old human male with dark skin and hair to match. "And then he didn't show up today. Honestly, I was he'd show up and we'd get fined for wasting your time. Master Gat-ro is an invaluable part of our community. I'm not sure if our settlement will survive without him."

Rhen looked surprised. "Why? Ossus is a pretty... calm world. The wildlife and other settlers should be leaving you alone."

The mayor shook his head. "The animals aren't calm at all. We've had twenty injuries in the past two standard months, and the military keeps denying our requests for weapons and soldiers."

Ana cocked her head to the side. "That makes no sense. The galactic government is deeply invested in this project. If – and when – this one succeeds, the damage dealt by Krayt's sabotage of the Ossus Project should be reversed; settlers will return to countless damaged worlds in earnest."

The mayor shifted uncomfortably. "Yes, that's the hope," the mayor replied.

Theron frowned and considered the man's response. Then he shook his head: they had more important things to deal with. "Where was Master Gat-ro heading?"

The mayor nodded and pulled a paper map out of his desk. "He said he was going to go and check on some things in the Ossus temple that he learned were still there." The mayor pointed at a spot about five miles north west of the compound. "He didn't say what was hidden there, but he did say it was old. I saw a few of his datapad entries, and he said wrote they predated the Empire by at least a thousand years."

Theron nodded. "Thanks. We'll keep you apprised of our progress," he said. He turned around and motioned for his companions to follow him out. "He's hiding something."

Ana snorted. "Wow. You actually saw paid attention to his over-sweating and his wringing of his hands?" she asked.

Theron laughed. "Along those lines. But nothing so specific." he said as he paid for speeder bike rentals. "He looked uncomfortable with every question, and he did something else before he answered any of our questions. He didn't answer anything immediately."

Ana simmered angrily on her bike. "Well, you can't be an idiot all the time," she snapped.

"You'd be surprised," Rhen joked. Theron narrowed his eyes and kicked the starter for the speeder bike; smoke blasted out into Rhen's face. The twi'lek coughed and tried to wave the smoke away from his face. "Hey!"

Theron grinned over his shoulder at his friend. "Sorry?" he joked back. His hand slipped into his pocket and he slammed the mask onto his face. The still unfamiliar start-up of the mask filled Theron's vision. Everything went black as the mask recognized him and scanned the environment. Then it displayed the world around Theron and altered the atmosphere in the mask to be the most comfortable possible. Information on the biology of his party popped up in front of him whenever he looked at them. For instance: Twi'lek – weak spot in lekku containing a portion of the brain.

The others in the group did similar to cover their own faces. Ana zipped her jacket all the way up until it covered the bottom half of her face; she pulled out square, crimson tinted goggles that pulled a few centimeters from her face, blocking the distractions from her periphary. Rhen put on a simple pair of gray, plasteel goggles that wrapped further around his face and gave him full peripharal field. Van covered his eyes with dark black glasses that seemed contoured to his very face.

Theron looked forward and gunned the speeder's throttle; he shot forward and almost got whiplash from the sheer impulse the bike responded with. After a moment, however, the speed of his body and the bike equalized. Theron looked over his shoulder for a brief moment to see the others were following him and then looked back at the huge temple miles away in the distance. The group weaved through rocks and debris from past battles on their path towards their goal. "What do you think we'll find there?" Van asked over communications.

"Who knows?" Rhen answered. "Far as I knew, the Jedi decided that the deaths on this planet during the fights against Krayt made the planet a recovering Force Wound, the temples especially. Jedi, save a few, were banned from the planet. And all Jedi were banned from the temples. But I don't sense... emptiness. Feels vibrant, more than anything else."

Theron bit his tongue and thought this through for a moment. "Why would the Jedi lie to everyone, including their own?"

"That's one possibility," Ana pointed out. "There's a few scarier ones."

"Like what?" Theron asked. He darted to the left to dodge a rock and returned his attention to the conversation.

Ana didn't reply for a while. "One's vision in the Force can be... clouded by other Force-users."

Force wounds usually make more Force wounds. If Master Gat-ro was frequenting the temple, it might be too late for him. Revan told Theron. The young man chewed lightly on his tongue again as he considered that.

Finally, the four speeders slowed to a stop near the large, broken temple. The once proud testament to Jedi strength was shattered, with huge gaps in the stone walls and plant life growing around and through the building. "Krayt bombed the whole thing from space," Rhen said of the damage. "Just to kill a few rebels."

"From a military perspective, that was the smart thing to do," Van replied.

"How can you say that?" Ana said. She turned to the pilot in disgust.

He shrugged and then said in reply, "It wasn't his culture he was destroying. Not his people. Your Empire didn't seem to care if it was the 'them' you were killing back when you helped Krayt take over the galaxy."

Ana sputtered. "I – that was different!" she shouted.

Theron walked towards the gap in the wall and pulled up his hood. "No. It really wasn't," he said. He walked between the two huge slabs of rock that had once been one and the feeling hit him immediately. He fell to his knees as something in the air began to drain his energy in the Force.

When Rhen and Ana walked into the temple, they stumbled and groaned as well; the Force was literally being torn from them. "What's wrong with you guys?" Van asked. He walked forward, past Theron, and drew his blaster. "Did you see something?"

"He's not affected?" Ana asked while she and the others struggled to even make it to their feet.

"Affected by what?" Van asked. He turned around and helped Theron up. Van pulled of his glasses and put them in his pocket.

Theron walked over to Ana and held out his hand to help her up. She glared at the offer of help and growled; she forced herself to her feet and pulled the goggles she was wearing to the top of her forehead. Theron rolled his eyes and instead helped up the twi'lek, whose goggles disassembled and folded into their case latched into his headdress. "The Force Wound. It's real," Theron explained. He looked at Van and walked past him. He looked around and the Mask fed him information on the surroundings until it spotted a door. Theron began walking towards the entrance to the Temple. "You don't feel the Force like we do, so it'll hit you a lot slower."

"You'll feel... slower. Weaker, little by little. And it will get worse the closer to the source we get," Rhen explained. He was only a few steps behind Theron, and the others were only a step or two behind Rhen himself. "It'll be the same for us – except by the end we'll be little stronger than normal people."

"Thanks?" Van responded. "Being normal isn't so bad."

Theron, Rhen, and Ana stopped in their tracks. The three looked between each other for a moment before bursting out laughing. "Hey! It's not so bad!"

Theron was able to get himself under control first. "Oh, well... you might think that. But you were born normal. You don't know what it's like to go from..." Theron searched for the right word and twirled his hand in the air.

"It's like losing the ability to see, run, hear... pretty much everything about what we can do is deadened here," Ana finished for him. She turned to Theron and Rhen. "Right?"

Rhen nodded. "That's a good way to simplify it," he replied. "But honestly, you can't really understand unless you feel it yourself."

Van's brow furrowed. "Well, we might as well get going. Master Gat-ro isn't going to find himself."

Theron nodded and he turned back towards the temple entrance fast enough for his black coat to billow out behind him like a cape. "Theatric much?" Ana asked as she caught up with him.

Theron glanced at the woman out of the corner of his eyes. She was looking at him with the sarcastic sneer that he was quickly going to start calling "her face." "What? I don't get to look more Jedi than Jedi usually. Besides, you just miss your cape," Theron shot back. He grinned behind his mask when Ana's cheeks blushed and she began biting the inside of her lip. "Gotcha."

Theron reached the metal door and placed his hand on it. "It should have opened by itself," he said. He gestured at a motion sensor above the door. He looked to his right and smiled. There was a power box for the door. "Give me a second, I'll get it open."

Theron ignited his saber and sliced through the cover of the box and kneeled down to inspect the wiring. "What can you do?" Van asked. "The door's shut tight."

Rhen smiled. "My buddy here had a lot of free time. Upgrading that saber of his took every credit – and along the way he learned a few things about software and hardware. The saber he has – it has a micro-AI dedicated to altering saber intensity depending on the material it's cutting through."

"So you could say I'm good at this," Theron said. He reached into the panel and pulled out an orange wire; the door flew open to reveal a staircase descending into the pitch black. He looked over at Van. "Doubters first."

The pilot narrowed his eyes and sighed. The man mumbled to himself while he passed through the doorway and into the darkness. "Don't forget to turn on your lights," Theron said. He pressed a button on the side of the mask and activated one of his personal additions to the mask – a pair of high-intensity lights that were bright even in the light of the outdoors. Theron walked into the dark temple after Van and altered the intensity of the lights until it was no longer uncomfortably bright in the darkness.

"This is... wow," Rhen said when the four had walked all the way down the first staircase. The Mhallway had opened into a large, dimly lit alcove full of withered trees and the smell of death.

"I bet it looked beautiful, once," Ana said. She walked over to one of the trees and delicately felt one of the leaves. The dead tree was bathed yellow by the light that was hanging from the sash of her pack. "What could have done this?"

"It must have been the Force wound," Rhen said. He was looking around at the rest of the dead things. "Most of these are sentients. Not many are Jedi, from the looks of it. That's weird."

"This can't be good," Theron said. He crouched down by one of the bodies and gingerly examined the husk as if worried it would get up and attack at any moment. On the body, he found a datapad. With a frown, he pulled it free of the hand that held it, and the once sturdy flesh crumbled to dust.

"Their rates of decay are exponentially past where they should be," Ana noted. Theron looked over his shoulder at her and nodded in agreement. "What does it say?"

Theron stood up and powered up the datapad. The screen lit up and began flickering. "Just a sec," Theron said. He looked around the computer for a charging station and, with a grin, shot a few sparks of Force Lightning into the port. He felt substantially more drained than normal, but the datapad's screen began to glow brightly. "There we go." Theron flipped through the pages of the report that had been up on startup.

He stopped immediately at the mention of a mask. His fingers glanced across his own Mandalorian iron covered face. Could it have meant..?

You need to leave now. This mask, I know what it is, Revan begged. Do not stay here. If Gat-ro came here, of all places... he's either dead or – or worse.

Theron shook the warnings of the imaginary voice off and returned to the datapad. He shook his head. "It looks like a science report. They found a really old artifact – referenced as the mask. Report stopped there." Ana grabbed the pad from his hands. "Hey!"

"He's right. This artifact, this mask..." the woman shrugged and handed the information to Rhen. "Do you understand any of the references made in here, Jedi?"

Rhen took the datapad and flipped through the pages with an increasingly quizzical face. "Not much else in here besides some personal journals. I – Wait!" Rhen put his finger in the corner of the page and dragged to the top. "There was a hidden window. It – it references Darth Nihl."

"What!?" Theron shouted. He turned around with his friend and stared at where Rhen was pointing. "na na na... the mask summoned someone claiming to be Darth Nihl -"

"What?" Van asked. "Nihl was here? He did this?"

Theron shook his head. "I don't know – it doesn't make any sense. How would Nihl have come here when he's trying to hide out; it would have been too difficult to land here unnoticed. This entry is dated three months ago – Van, check the system's entry scanners."

The pilot shrugged off his pack and pulled another datapad out. He swiped through a few screens. "No ships entered the system in that timeframe. The scanners would have picked them up even in hyperspace."

Rhen shook his head. "It must have made a mistake. Nihl had to have landed here."

"These systems don't make mistakes. Nihl didn't land here in any ship I know of," Van retorted. "The tech's flawless."

"Then how did he get a starship here?" Rhen asked.

Theron grinned. "Haven't you ever heard the stories?" he asked the group. They all stopped their arguing and turned to the gray jedi. "Some really powerful Force-users don't need Starships. The Force is everywhere, right?"

Ana nodded as she began to understand what Theron was getting at. "So it stands to reason that some Force-users, masters, have learned how to flow with the Force. With enough concentration, one could appear... anywhere, in the blink of an eye. No one would be able to tell that they had done with technology. But do you think Nihl's that powerful?"

Listen to me, please... harder to … t through. Nihl... draining the... ce. Ru-

Theron played the message from his internal voice over in his head. "Theron? Theron!"

"What!?" he asked. He looked around, surprised. "What is it?"

Ana looked at him with "her face." "Do you think Nihl's that powerful?"

"Rhen's grandpa would always say that the Force could surprise you. And Nihl being that strong would not be the most surprising thing I've heard of," Theron replied. He looked over at Rhen. "Where do you sense we should head?"

"Do it yourself," Ana demanded.

"He can't," Rhen told her. "Sensing things has... well, he can barely do it at full strength."

Theron nodded. He was glad he was wearing the mask, because he was blushing and biting his lip in terrible embarrassment. "Oh," Ana said. She rubbed her arm. "I didn't know."

"Well now you do," Theron said gruffly. "Where to?"

Rhen took a few deep breaths and sighed them out. A few moments later: "There's a staircase further down over there. It'll lead us to whatever is causing... this."

"Our orders are to look for Master Gat-ro," Van pointed out. "The Force Wound isn't our problem."

"Except that it's hiding everything else here," Theron retorted. "It's like we're being jammed as long as this disturbance keeps... disturbing." He crossed his arms and stared the pilot down. "Come on." Theron motioned for the others to follow and walked towards where Rhen had said to go.

The group walked in silence for a while as they scanned their surroundings. Theron barely registered what he was looking at though. The voice had told him to run, multiple times. It never warned him to run, and that worried Theron. If the voice was his own common sense, it was bad. If it really was, as it claimed, Revan's Force Ghost... well, if he was scared then Theron had no doubt the Force Wound would most likely be beyond the abilities of this four person crew. Yet they had to keep trying; Nihl was a danger to not only them but the galaxy as well.

"Hey – what do you really think's down there?" Ana asked. Theron shook his head to clear his mind and looked at her. She was walking right next to him and looking directly into his eyes.

Theron blushed again. Her violet eyes were softer than he had seen them in a... well ever, actually. He blinked an image of her shirtless, her lips on his. He stammered and slapped the side of his head. "Sorry. Um... ha... What's down there? I'm not sure. But even I can feel it's... I've felt Force Wounds before. Gang massacres, stuff like that. They fade pretty fast, they're a lot weaker than this even at their peak. This has been around for Force knows how long and it still feels like we're walking into the death of the Force itself."

Ana nodded slowly. She took a deep breath to steady her emotions and responded, "Well, then I hope that the trust Gann and the others placed in you was well placed."

"Wait! Gann knows about me?" Theron stopped dead in his tracks and Rhen walked into his back. "Why?"

"Do we really have to talk about this now?" Rhen asked. "There's a Force Wound capable of draining the life out of people down there; I'd rather not be here longer than I need to."

"Me neither," Van piped up. "I'm 'only' normal after all."

"Do we have to start that again, too!?" Rhen asked the pilot angrily. "Come on, man!"

Theron turned to watch the two argue, to stop them. "H-" Theron's eyes tracked a shadow that darted across his field of vision. "Guys shut up."

The two continued arguing. "Get off my back!" Rhen shouted at the other, arrogant man.

"Shut the hell up!" Theron shouted. The two men froze and looked towards Theron. "Did you see that?"

"See what?" Van asked.

"Aah!" Ana screamed in surprise. The others turned to her. She pointed past Van's shoulder. "What was that?"

Theron looked towards where the Imperial Knight was pointing. A shadow ran across his field of vision. "I saw it too," he said. He drew the white blade of his lightsaber and pointed it in the direction of the movement. "What is it?"

The movement dashed through Theron's field of vision again and the mask attempted to scan it, but the creature passed through too quickly. "There's gotta be a way for us to draw it out," Rhen said. "It's obviously interested in us."

"You assume there's only one?" Ana asked.

"Oh, great, now I'm nth times more scared," Van snapped. "Can't we assume the best?"

Theron, Rhen, and Ana looked at each other and began laughing. "Not again!" Van shouted while the three laughed at him.

"Thanks, we needed something crazy to break the tension!" Theron said. He continued laughing, but only half-heartedly. The creature was still running around them. Or the creatures. A shadow ran through the area between Theron and Ana's angles of defense. Ana pulled her saber from her hip and the silver blade customary of all Imperial Knights ran along her forearm in a jar'kai backhand grip. She held her finger against a trigger on the bottom of the saber hilt and squeezed it. A blast of silvery-gray energy flew through the air and burned through stone on the ground.

"That's a pretty personalized saber," Theron remarked.

"You have your micro-AI, I have by blaster sword," Ana responded. She took aim at the creature again, and a silvery bolt sliced through the shadow's leg. The being let out a hideous shrieking noise and tripped down to its face. The monster skidded across the ground and shrieked again. Ana rushed over to check whatever it was, and Theron bounded over to keep her covered in case there was another creature.

What they saw surprised them. "Is that... a Cathar?" Ana asked. Theron glanced down at the creature and the mask scanned it. He nodded down at Ana. "So this is... Gat-ro."

Theron looked down at the Cathar Jedi Master in utter surprise. "Sithspit!"

Van looked down at the lone creature. "Wait – this is what happened to a Jedi Master after one night in here? We should get the kriff out of here!"

Theron stared at the creature that was once a powerful Jedi. Gat-ro's fur was ragged and patchwork; beneath the fur cold be seen electric burns and exposed bone. "What the kark happened to him?"

Ana shrugged. "My guess? Whatever's at the center of this Force wound. Nihl -"

"Nihilus!? You were going to say Nihilus!?" the Jedi screamed. The Cathar's claw rushed upward and latched into Ana's shoulder

"Agh! That hurts!"

"Get your grubby claws out of her, Cathar!" Theron ordered. He leaned forward and grabbed the cat man's wrist.

"Nihilus. He's here. He – Nihilus. Darth Nihilus, the Hunger. He's here. We have to run. RUN! RUUUN!"

Theron backed up, a little afraid. "W-who's Nihilus. What are you talking about?"

"Lord of Hunger. He needs... he begs for... He needs the power. The Force here... He... Nihilus... Feeds... on the Force. On sanity. You need to leave... before he gets his claws in you. Before -" the Cathar couldn't finish, as he began seizing. Foam erupted from his mouth and his eyes rolled into the back of his head.

"What's happening?" Theron reached down to the Jedi.

The seizures stopped suddenly. The jedi grabbed Theron's wrist and pulled him close so that only he could hear. "You're Revan, aren't you? I see the mask, I see your soul. There is much darkness in your future," the Cathar whispered. Theron listened, wide eyed and terrified. "Trust no one – they're lying. At the end this, you won't even be able to trust the past." The Jedi began seizing again, and his body faded away. He had become one with the Force.

"W-what was that all about?" Van asked. He stared at the ragged robes on the ground. "He was karking feral!"

Theron stood up and looked down the hall. Suddenly, even he could sense the source of the Force Wound. "Gat-ro was hiding the Force Wound. Keeping it contained."

"So we should definitely leave then!" Van shouted.

"I hate to agree, but..." Rhen said. "We'll need more Jedi to fight this thing."

"No. It feeds on the Force, didn't you hear him? Jedi'll make this... Nihilus stronger." Theron sighed heavily and held his blade out in front of him. "And we have to stop it from doing what it did here to everyone on the planet. We have to stop this."