The bone-thin branches of the blackened trees scratched at their robes as they left the Great Library behind them. Cinder rolled her eyes at each of Fell's nervous glances over his shoulder. The Ysanna had scared him half to death. He was wracked by a nonsensical paranoia that they would be following hot on their heels in dogged pursuit. Blood for blood, in revenge for Fell's butchery.
But Cinder knew better. The Ysanna were just as afraid of Fell as he was of them. The two of them were doubtless marked for death should they ever return, but it was of no matter. Their work here was done. Much as Cinder would have preferred a tome chronicling Exar Kun's bloody war, Phobos' holocron was mystery enough to unravel. As horrid a creature as she is, there will be much to learn from her. Fell had shown her a lightsaber crystal he found, a jagged translucent shard that caught the gleam of the fading sun. She dismissed it with the wave of a hand.
"Greeting: Ah, you are returned, master." HK-47 welcomed them back to the camp at the barrel of a gun. She thought it only fair.
"HK," she said, paying the slight no mind and taking a seat on a burled log near the firepit. It was nothing more than a black hole, with little fingers of smoke wafting up into the turgid air. "Do the dirty work for us and butcher your birds. Prepare two tonight, and keep the rest in cold storage on the ship. Make the takeoff preparations tonight. We leave first thing on the morrow."
"Confirmation: As you wish, master." The dead birds were still sitting bound in their net where the droid had slung them that morning. His servos whirred as he stooped to lift it over his shoulder, and HK-47 disappeared into the ship after taking them up the cargo ramp.
"So what?" Fell said. "We're just gonna sit here and eat while we're hunted?" He took a seat across from her with a fist curled into a bony cheek.
"Your paranoia is unbecoming," Cinder said. "For anyone, a Sith least of all. What cause do you have to be afraid?"
"You seek to lecture me?"
"No, boy, I seek to understand you." She leaned back and looked to Fell for a response.
He sighed. "I could have killed them all if I just had my blade."
"What one could do is often a far cry from what one does." Cinder smirked. "It may well be true. Had its crystal not drank greedily from the font of flame and your lightsaber still been at your side, you might well have slaughtered them like animals." She paused for a moment and then peered deep into his eyes. "Or you could have been slaughtered like an animal, gutted by twelve spears and tossed down the steps to the Great Library. Who is to say?"
"You were incapacitated." Fell gritted his teeth. "What could you possibly know of it?"
"You saved my life, for one. That was not a lesson you learned from me."
"I learned it from you on Korriban."
Cinder pondered that for a moment. Still so much left to learn. He would have been put down like a mad hound, and learned nothing from it. "So, you admit you need me?"
Fell shook his head. "I know there is still much to learn from you."
He hides the truth from me. "You did not feel it right to leave me to perish in a wooden tomb?"
Fell pounded his fist into the side of the log he was sitting on and rose, heated and flush. "Did you ever leave me to die, master?" he roared, striding towards her. She looked up at him, his skin all red and pink amidst the pale brown, as he jabbed a finger at her throat. "No, never. Not on Ord Mantell, not on Korriban."
"I recall bidding you to leave me to die in the hangar on Korriban," she said. His finger felt awkward against her skin, like a thin bramble. "Yet you defied me." She got to her feet and brushed Fell's hand away. "The Sith have had their methods since long before you were even a lump in your father's loins, and yet you defy them at every turn." Just like I do. She walked around him, pacing in a half circle before stopping at his back. "You need me. A lot more than I need you."
Fell turned to face her, his face contorted in confusion. He tried to speak but could not find the words.
Good, he's taken the bluff. "No, Lord Fell, I would never kill you," Cinder continued, giving him a pitiful little smile with an accompanying pitiful shake of her head. "Your duty is to kill me. If I become weak and feeble and useless, then you shall see me dead. A master is of ill use when the apprentice has nothing left to learn."
He glowered at the ground at that. Cinder resumed her pacing.
"But we're not quite there yet, which you so glibly admit." She stopped behind him again, this time where she had started, and pressed her head up against his. "You will never say it," she whispered in his ear, "and you will deny it with such a fervor to give even the most ardent Jedi pause, but your actions tell me all I need to know. You need me."
"You aren't thankful I saved your life?" Fell said at last. He folded up his arms against his chest and exhaled.
Well yes, of course, but it's not your concern. Cinder stepped away from him and shrugged. "Teachers and masters can be replaced, just like apprentices."
"You're my master," he said, his tone indignant enough to make her cringe. "Who else should there be?"
"A man should have many masters, not just one. This is something you and Ruin alike fail to understand."
She watched as his ears perked up at the Dark Lord's name.
"What does he have to do with this?" Fell turned to face her and stooped down to her level.
HK-47 brought out the freshly butchered birds, one for each of them, and began to light a new fire. The sparks glinted in Cinder's eyes as she bid Fell to sit.
"It is time for you to hear a tale, one of a master and an apprentice." She shifted in her seat and made herself comfortable as she could. "Twenty years ago, there was a Jedi master with a rather unorthodox view of the Force and the galaxy itself. To him, he was the center of it all, and all existed only to serve his will alone. Just so, he made this queer philosophy more palatable by explaining that every individual was the center of their own respective universe. How many put any stock in it, who's to say? Regardless, he earned sycophants and detractors in equal measure.
"His name was Phanius, and he took a knee-high youngling girl by the name of Lysara to apprentice. They had precious little in common, other than their relentless pursuit of knowledge and learning. The two spent countless hours in the Temple Archives together, indulging themselves in heavy research. Years later, Lysara became a Jedi Knight, a sworn protector of the Republic with promises of a gilded estate looming large in her future. Phanius was on the verge of becoming a venerable grandmaster, with a seat on the High Council."
Fell yawned. "Is this going somewhere?"
Cinder reached forward and slapped him. "Let me speak, you imbecile." She shook her head. Insolent child. She continued. "One day, Phanius asked his apprentice to fetch for him a special holocron tucked away in the deepest reaches of the Temple Archives. What the girl thought would be another Jedi holocron turned out to be a Sith relic, very similar to the one we found here in the Great Library.
"So Lysara asked of him, 'Master, are you sure you want this?', to which Phanius replied, 'Why yes, for I need it for my research.' He asked her only one favor: 'Do not open it, for the secrets within are wicked and baleful beyond measure. I do not wish to see you hurt.'
"So she crept into the dark cloisters behind the archive walls and found the ancient device sitting on a pedestal all by its lonesome. She succumbed to her curiosity and cracked it open." Cinder paused for a moment. She ill-liked the memories she was about to dredge up. "The Sith device engraved countless images on her mind's eye, fixtures of wanton cruelty, sadistic slaughter, and harrowing despair that dated back twenty thousand years. When she brought it back, Phanius knew at once she had opened it. He only praised her for her curiosity."
"Then what?" Fell looked at her intently. It's like reading a child a bedtime story.
Cinder rolled her eyes. "It's a very simple conclusion. They dove headfirst into the secrets of the Dark Side together. The other Grandmasters exiled Phanius from the order after he lashed out at them. He rallied others to his cause and set off for Korriban. And despite all reason telling her not to go, Lysara chose to go with him, forsaking her title, promised lands, and even a lover.
"When they reached Korriban, Phanius reestablished the Sith Order of old. He and his supplicants went to the edges of the galaxy, rounded up the Sith clans, and made the order whole again. Then, they waited on Korriban for their time to strike. And you know very well how that went, Lord Fell."
"Don't remind me," he laughed. "What of Lysara?"
Cinder looked up at him and said nothing. The birds crackled and popped on the fire as HK-47 fashioned a spit out of several splintered twigs, impaling them head to tail. She turned to the droid for a moment, watching him. When her gaze returned to Fell, the boy was still scrunched up in thought.
"So Phanius is Darth Ruin, obviously," Fell said. "So he wasn't always just 'dark lord'?"
"Of course not." Cinder scoffed. "I hope you see the bitter irony in his chosen title."
"The man truly ruins everything he touches," Fell said. Cinder groaned at the pun. "But the girl? He lost her and took you in later on, right?"
Well, in a way, she thought, and she hoped her body language would not betray her. Is he truly oblivious, or just pretending? "Say what you mean."
"I mean, there's no way a Jedi would butcher those bastards on Ord Mantell the way you did," Fell continued. The smell of the roasting birds caught him and he licked his lips. "They're too soft for it. They would've tried to talk them down first, and if they were pushed to blood, then they would've been quicker about it."
You don't know the Jedi like I do. Cinder did not feel like pointing out the holes in his logic or the foolishness of his conclusion. It took all her effort to muster a dry "Certainly" and smile. She knew of his hatred of Jedi; she had fostered it, though it had been there before she even entered his life. They would come to Ord Mantell and treat him as the manservant they saw before them. A shipwright's apprentice, whose affinity to the Force had gone unnoticed for thirteen miserable years. By then, it was too late for the Jedi to take him into their order, leaving Cinder to claim him herself.
"Wait a minute," Fell said, his mouth agape. His expression changed to one of disgust and contempt. "What's to say Ruin won't betray us as he did the Jedi?"
Cinder gave him a slow nod as her only answer. Best to let him draw his own conclusions, was a lesson she had learned in response to Fell's often all-too-unwarranted confidence. He looked to her for any word at all, and for a moment they sat in silence.
"He already did," she obliged him at last. "He is fled to the unknown reaches of space. He left us all for dead. Now do you understand, apprentice?"
"Understand what? Why we're going to kill him?"
"We're not going to kill him," Cinder said. Not yet at least. "I want to learn why he did what he did."
"Treason is treason," Fell said, his voice flat. "A man of wisdom does not revive a phoenix only to scatter the ashes once again."
She had said that to him, once. It always relieved her to see that sometimes Fell did remember her words.
"There's a chance you're right, Lord Fell. Darth Ruin could have assembled all the Sith, formed a new order from nothing, established his own philosophy and fathered a new dynasty of the dark side where one had not stood for a thousand years all in some grandiose attempt to snuff us out once and for all. Were it all so simple, indeed."
HK-47 interrupted them momentarily, bringing them their roasted birds atop massive stones. He appeared to have cleaned them off the best he bid them to enjoy before striding off back towards The Ashen One to prepare it for departure.
"Or he has a different design," Cinder continued, paying no mind to the fowl as she set it in her lap. "I don't doubt for a moment he's gone mad. Perhaps he's got a voice in his dead, directing him to and fro." She looked over at Fell, who nodded in agreement as he tore into his food. She saw shiny grease glint on his fingers and smother his lips. "What is clear is we must learn why he's done what he has." With that, she tore a chunk of meat off of her own bird and popped it in her mouth.
"Right," Fell said. "So we talk to him, find out his motives, then we run him through. Surely this isn't a slight we're letting go? He did leave us all for dead."
Dusk was beginning to fall. A dark burgundy hue enveloped the two of them, and the glisten of their birds and the dying flames provided the only bits of light within the coming dark. They sat in silence, picking the small fowls to the bone and resting for a moment before the first moonbeams pierced the veil of dusk. They would sleep in the metal confines of the ship tonight. She had one last lesson planned tomorrow.
"You're right," Cinder said as they climbed up the cargo ramp.