Good day all,

The signs of change are heavy in this chapter as the paths of chaos prepare to cross. Born into the light is shadow, and it manifests itself in its own way. I hope you enjoy the chapter.

Happy Writing,

Eliana

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The sharp cry of the heron-hawk sounded again as it led them on, gliding ahead of the men who came thundering through the pass. This bird had been following them (well… it was more like leading them) since Djibourdi had split the legions into four separate units a standard hour ago, and the thing that stuck out in Sam's mind was that he could see through it. It had color, as clear as day he could tell it had blue feathers and white wings, yet the clone's eyes could easily discern the clouded night skies on the other side of its body.

His commander, worn as he was, had clearly not lost any of his trickery. After leaving their camp and their allies that had their orders, Red had marched them all down the sloping valley toward their destination. It was miles out and well beyond their eyes.

At the foot of Mount Argent, he had pulled them all together and explained exactly why he would make the call that he would: the legions together were far too big of a draw and far too producing of sound to have any chance of catching the enemy by surprise, so he split them all into their marks. All the paths would convene on the other side of the pass, miles later, and would enter the valley through the space that he had chosen.

If any of the marks fell, it was better to lose one than all four. The goal was to slow their approach, to cut it as close as possible while throwing any trackers off their scent… it would be a daring attempt to get to the valley just before the Palisades fell, as close to the cut off as possible to make it into contention without the Outsiders realizing it.

Djibourdi was banking on intention, putting all his cards on the gamble that he could outwit them - that's why he had asked Ahsoka to do what she did, to give their enemies something to focus on in front of them and not behind. If they failed… the thought had died as soon as Djibourdi started to canter his group down the open divert in the ground.

That's when this bird had first appeared, Sam recalled. As soon as Djibourdi had led him and their brothers into the most exposed leg of the canyon it had come screeching down on them, the beating of its massive wings enough to startle some of the men who cantered along in Sam's shadow. The padawan hadn't reacted to it other than a short trill and a quick puff of breath as he picked out his path. It was as if, the clone had thought, that he knew this animal. Or hallucination. Or spirit. Or ghost. Or whatever it was.

They were moving quick enough to jog their hearts and open their lungs, enough to get them ready for the run ahead without pulling their spare reserves of energy… for most of them, anyway. This was what he and his brothers had been modified to do, trained to execute on, drilled to perform with every day of their lives since they had begun to walk. Moving in a massive group like this in the darkness would have shaken any living creature heartily, most especially when they would realize that the clones had energy to spare despite the rate at which they moved.

He and his brothers moved together as a group, their unit stampeding over the land as though they were a river of bodies ready to pulverize any foolish enemy that chose to try their luck. Alone they were more exposed than a clone in any other unit, their armor designed to give them traction and weight with freedom of movement more than protection – but as a group like this, they performed their job well.

They were designed for this.

Djibourdi was not.

His kind was not meant for these distances and these fights, but since the day general Tombur had brought the kid to train with them he hadn't given any reason for doubt. In any trial or battle or race before today the Togruta would have put them all to shame. He had some Force-given ability to seem to outrun life itself, most especially when he chose to use the Force on his own body instead of the world around him.

Tonight, he had decidedly and obviously chosen not to do that as the clone could hear his breath raking the air with every stride he took, the armor and weapons that weighed him down clearly affecting his ability to move. Sam could only theorize he was holding that energy for something more dire. That was his hope, at least.

All thought rattled from his mind when the silver-armored head in front of him suddenly jerked up with a grunt and Djibourdi's right arm raised itself in a sign to halt, the pebbles and loose stones shifting under him when the force of his sliding boots knocked them free. Sam mirrored his motion and came to a rapid stop himself, turning his head to watch the bodies behind him do the same.

Why had they stopped?

The heron-hawk swooped to the branch of a dead tree snag, landing in silence. It watched them.

Sam looked at his friend as the Reapers crept closer, and all of them well familiar with the rhythm of this disruption. Their commander had heard something that posed a threat, and when he made it clear to them where it was, they would handle it quickly.

Djibourdi waited until the halt made its way down the river of men. After their steps quieted and they went silent he could focus… and it wasn't hard to pinpoint the sleemo and his droids hiding up and behind the ledge to their left. Without a word he turned to look at them, his twinging left arm raised to focus his pull of the Force on their bodies and send them, yelping and whirring, out of their hiding place and into the ditch underneath them.

That landed all of them out of sight, but that was hardly of concern to his fourteen Reapers who were up and over the sandy incline after them with practiced ease. Djibourdi waited. Sam unconsciously placed himself between the padawan and where his brothers had gone.

Those men were his elite, those that his master and his grandmaster had trained and developed to be the front guard of their legions. It would be a far cry to imagine that they would hesitate to act or understand what was required of them, so of course when the sounds of scuffle began Djibourdi paid it no mind – his eyes were focused on the 'friend' that Kore and Cable brought hollering back with them as they climbed the hill.

"Let me go, you brutes," the Twi'lek hissed at them, an indignant yelp flying free from his blue lips when they did as he requested.

He tumbled down the incline with them walking down behind him, and when he pulled himself up to sit on his rump his bravado was suddenly gone. One of the clones behind him held a vibrosword close enough to his neck that he could feel its cold through his skin (a clear enough message if there was one) while the other held up his items supply bag, speaking to the two figures at the head of this massive group of clones that had turned to stare him down.

"Mark of Gardulla the Hutt," Kore stated simply to describe the image on the bag, and suddenly Dinek forgot his own name and how to speak.

It was the almost silent chuckle of the red-skinned Togruta that cut through the sounds of ongoing conflict behind him that made his blood run cold, and it was the clanking of the weapons and armor that he wore as he hopped down from the small boulder he had stood on that stopped Dinek's heart. Djibourdi's steps were slow and calculated, his eyes reflecting the scarce moonlight that snuck through the clouded sky. The refracted light in those irises was only made more intense by the black paint he had articulated around his eyes.

When Dinek spotted the three lightsabers clipped to his belt, he knew he was in trouble.

"Jedi…" his voice whispered in worry – worry not because of the title, worry because of what this one had caught him doing. The Jedi were not friends of his.

Djibourdi finally ranged to stand a couple feet from him, pulling a large stone closer with a gesture through the Force before allowing himself to sit on it. In all his actions his eyes never moved from Dinek's face. This did not bode well for him, the Twi'lek noted with a gulp. Those eyes were… feral, yet disturbingly clear at the same time.

Kore placed the bag next to the Togruta without a word, and the Twi'lek nearly leapt out of himself when the teenager in front of him gave another humorless, low chuckle.

"I am sure Gardulla will be quite pleased with your work, slaver," the voice left lowly from his lips, and then they twinged upward in a sarcastic smile as a hand gestured to himself, "You have found a lone Togruta."

Laughter, grave and laden with pitiless joy, rippled over the clones behind him. Dinek found his tongue loosely.

"This – look, this ain't what it looks like. I swear, I was just passin' through… ya gotta be merciful."

Djibourdi flashed him a fang-filled smile.

"Merciful, you say? You must mean like how merciful you planned to be to any of my kin who happened to run through here on their flight from terror."

"It isn't like that – I was just passin' through!"

Dinek thought he was going to vomit and suddenly he was falling over himself to talk his way out of this mess. It was short lived as a control collar found its way from his bag to the hand of the Jedi who held it in front of his face with a quirked eyebrow ridge. One of the clones behind him spoke:

"I think that he's either calling you dumb or blind, Red."

"I dare say you're right. Such a shame, I thought we were friends," Djibourdi answered tossing the collar without a glance to its fate before he leaned, ever so slightly, forward, "I don't take kindly to liars… most especially slaving liars. You and your masters venerate savagery, so you shall meet your fate savagely."

His voice was calm, clear as still water in a rock pool, yet it was abundantly clear what lay beneath. Dinek counted his eternal blessings when the sounds of conflict behind them went suddenly silent, and without his will a relieved chuckle left his lips. He had bought enough time to see that his droids handled the clones behind him, and now he had a ticket to freedom. A grin filled with hubris lit his face. Djibourdi's didn't change.

"You shall see, Jedi," this time Dinek spat the words, "My droids ain't like any other – they're hand-designed by Gardulla's master mechanics for work like this. They got armor made of hybridized metal, ain't nothing in the galaxy strong enough to break it. Droids will always be better than anything living for this job, they got no ability to feel pain or thoughts to distract – they think only of their orders to kill. Your clones learned that the hard way just now, and I hope you're ready to feel it too!"

He grew irked when Djibourdi quirked an eyebrow ridge with a huff.

"Alright you tin cans, come kill this Jedi too!"

Silence was the only response. The Twi'lek turned just a bit to glance behind him anxiously.

"What's wrong with you scrapheaps?! I said kill him!"

Djibourdi was the one who answered him, having leaned back to fix him with a blank glance.

"You are woefully misinformed on two counts, my friend."

"'Misinformed'? What does that mean?!" Dinek's voice raised with a tone of alarm.

A new sound, one of shredding steel against steel mixed with the movement of gravel lit all the alarm bells in his mind.

"Even the hardest substances in the galaxy can be broken if they are crashed into themselves," the Togruta told him as if it were basic information, "And the ability of us living things to feel pain," he raised his left arm into the Twi'lek's view, and Dinek's eyes immediately found the tiny dribbling of blood that had started to free itself from the skin that was reopened by the pulling of the mechanical weapon, "is not a weakness. It is a strength. Pain is our advantage over droids; it tells us our vulnerabilities, what areas of our bodies to not expose to attack."

Djibourdi's arm lowered back down to rest on his knee, and he gave a nod to something that approached them from behind Dinek's head. A horrified glance back froze the Twi'lek's blood again. With hardly any grace those twelve other clones rolled over the cusp of the dusty hill, each depositing a piece of what was their enemy in a sparking heap a few feet to his right. The weapons his droids had carried, the ones forged of the same materials they had been, had ended their existence and were now in the hands of the Reapers.

Without warning the blade at Dinek's throat was gone and the man who had once stood behind his shoulder wandered back with the rest of the clones. As he watched them go, those sharp golden eyes in front of him blinked and drew his attention.

"Your droids are dead," Djibourdi told him bluntly, his head tilting just slightly with a pitiless expression painting his features, "And so, I'm afraid, are you."

He didn't offer anything else. All he did was stand, calmly gesture with the Force to move the stone back to where he had retrieved it and turn his back to begin to make his way back to the front of the never-ending line of men whose gazes pinned down the one still sitting. Dregs such as this always showed their true colors in time.

"You are JEDI!"

The screeched statement made Djibourdi stop and glance back over his shoulder to the Twi'lek that had drawn himself into a crouch. His right arm had reached behind him, his decision made.

"You believe in mercy, don't you?"

Djibourdi didn't blink, nor did he stutter.

"No."

All he had to do was turn around and continue walking, and before Dinek could pull the trigger on the blaster he had pulled from his hip a blue bolt whizzed past Djibourdi's lekku and found its target. Not only had he chosen to try and kill the padawan, but he had also chosen to try when his back was turned. So, Sam corrected in his head, this fool had been woefully misinformed on four counts.

"I believe in intention and nature," Djibourdi told no one in particular, finding his way back to Sam's side as the clone returned his side arm to its holster, "I am Togruta long before I am Jedi."

He didn't have a care for the carnage left behind, simply turning to eye his Reapers who were admiring their new weapons with unmasked appeal. They spared him a grin.

"Ready to go?" the Togruta asked them, and at their affirmative he gestured to Sam, "Off we go then."

When they all began to thunder along again the heron-hawk flew over their heads, its screeching call piercing the dark.

That wasn't the sound that rumbled over the valley hours later as Ahsoka flew by a group of sprinting Togruta to attack their pursuer – the sound that echoed here was absolute, unmitigated, unyielding, ever-growing chaos. It was a mix of screams and yells and thundering feet as the Togruta shot, their numbers exploding by the second, out of the line of the trees and into the open expanse of the valley.

A well-placed swing of her lightsaber felled this Outsider, but more were trickling in to take his place as quickly as her heart pounded in her chest. The exodus was nearing its end. These were the drivers, the ones tasked with haranguing and terrorizing the innocent enough to herd them into the culvert. Their presence meant that the hoard wasn't far behind.

The people she had talked to in the very early hours of the morning had told her tales of their travels, of the things that they witnessed and what it was that pursued them. She didn't want to believe them. Some from the plains on the extreme side of the mountains spoke of black Threshers, those massive creatures Eddy had told her were so rare they were a myth, shackled and driven to attack any who didn't flee fast enough.

Others whispered of the Outsiders that she knew well by now… though not the extent of the carnage they had spread across the land in recent days. But the most disturbing of the tales, the one that Ahsoka couldn't get herself past, was of the Algol.

They had painted a very dark picture for her of an Outsider that was pieced together like some science experiment gone horribly wrong. He had, as they told her as clearly as they could, this horrific ability to fly with wings that didn't belong to him and could summon bolts of energy that destroyed anything they touched. She had tried to get them to explain it more clearly, but that was futile.

He sounded like something straight from Sith-spitting hell, and according to her kin he also sounded like it. He had some screeching call that pulled the souls from those he hunted and froze those that ran.

That, fortunately, was not what Ahsoka and her master were currently contending with. Instead, their task was to take care of these drivers, these herders that snarled and snapped and chased after the Togruta who ran with all they had to get away from them.

Rex and a few of his team were burying charges as best as they could far behind her at the halfway point while directing the civilians around them. The hoard was coming, and to get them sealed into the valley they would need to slow their approach as much as they could so that they didn't reach the civilians before the palisades fell. On the same token, they had to draw them into the valley first.

Ahsoka had kept her promise to her friend before the sun rose: the small electric charges he had asked her to plant were in place. The speakers in the distance reverberated the call. Eddy, Tocarra, Don, Kachina, the Queen, and Aarent were all safely out of play, harbored on one of the ridges a distance behind what was left of the hospital. She herself wore the one softly humming band around her wrist, the other two on Kachina and Aarent, and the blinking discs were safely tucked into the pockets of the combat bags she had strapped to her thighs. The bag he had left her was hidden safely with their friends, the rest of the material inside.

As much faith as she had in Djibourdi… she really hoped he had thought this through.

Now, she was left to her task.

Both Jedi had noticed when the Outsiders first started trickling in from the forest that their armor was different than those they had contended with before – and one of their allies had illustrated, right before Ahsoka watched his chest get caved in with one of the hunter's weapons, that this armor had durability enough to endure the shots from blasters.

That had immediately split their task in two: Anakin was doing his best to take out hunters that were emerging still from the woods and Ahsoka moved to cover the retreat of the Togruta that they had ordered to fall back. Her people couldn't stand against these enemies, and the best the Jedi could do was stem the flow of Outsiders that drove the innocents further into the valley and give them time to run.

A grunt left Ahsoka's lips when she drew her bike next to another, stabbing her lightsaber straight through an exposed armpit and ending his life. Their armor was weak, she and Anakin had quickly learned, at the small junctions where it joined together. Their necks, their armpits, their thighs, and their knees were all targets that were the hardest to hit but were the ones of the most benefit, and reaching them without taking a blow was turning into quite the task. Not long ago, she would have destroyed herself for ending so many lives… but these were not innocent.

"Reit!" she screamed to those that had frozen under the gaze of the hunter.

Run, she urged them. They scrambled to obey.

Her montrals were humming and buzzing and thumping as she searched the field for more of these men. Ever since she had learned to listen, she could hear them – never feel them, but hear them. They sounded like the rattling of a treluti viper, a rattling hiss that marked their breath and made them easy to pick out among the stampeding steps and frightened calls of her people.

Those sounds all collected and drew her attention to the defenders she was covering. They had made it as far as the cusp of the hill, only about an eight of the way into the run back and had garnered attention from a group of six hunters that were all hot on their trail. She made it to the group before they even realized the danger.

The shock of her appearance gained their eyes and, when they finally noticed the six that were coming at them, they tried to recover themselves from their fear and ready their weapons. Ahsoka had other plans. She left her bike where it was placed between the Togruta and the approaching men, holding an arm out in a signal to halt her kin.

"Reit," she told them over her shoulder. A twitch of her lips exposed her teeth and her eyes flashed, "They're mine."

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The signs of shadow have begun to show. To the future, my friends.

Happy writing,

Eliana