"HK, punch in the coordinates for Malastare," Cinder said. Both the droid and Fell were in there, but she had little and less to say to them. Fell still frustrated her given what transpired in the Hutt's palace, though it did bring her a faint pang of joy to see he had done what she asked. "Get us there quickly."

She watched the Ashen One cut through Nar Shaddaa's night sky before turning to head towards her chambers. Three days flight from here if you stick to the lanes. She remembered Kregg's words well. As long as the Mandalorians continue burning the jungle, we should have plenty of time to get there.

The door to her quarters slipped open with a hiss. She shrugged out of her robe and knelt upon the cold metal floor. When she closed her eyes to try and meditate, they snapped open again, flitting straight towards Phobos' holocron.

I do not wish to speak with you, witch.

Yet her body betrayed the wishes of her mind. Before she even realized what she was doing, she had the holocron in her hands, her fingers working to activate it. She set it upon the floor when she was done. It sprang to life, bringing out the Sith within in a wash of red light.

"The girl wakes me again," Phobos said. Her voice was indignant, yet Cinder could tell she was playing coy. "Night after night, you come before me. Do you enjoy having your mind broken, again and again?"

"You have not broken me yet," Cinder said, keeping her thoughts clear. She set her hands upon her knees as she looked up at the projection. Each time Phobos appeared, she had more color to her. When Cinder had first cracked open the holocron on Ossus, the Dark Lady was little more than a red hologram; now, she color had returned to her skin in the form of a sallow green. The tricks of the mind, Cinder told herself.

"No?" Phobos let out a shrill giggle. "I sowed seeds of terror within your mind on Ossus. With each passing moment, I haunt every fiber within your head." She licked her lips. "You are bound to me, like an apprentice to her master. You come to me for advice. It disgusts me."

"And yet you answer the call. Begone if you think this beneath you."

"One woman to another, what would your master think of these rendezvous?"

"You ask as if I care what the old man in his tower thinks. He sends his dregs to kill me." She set a hand on her side where Kaos had wounded her. The pain had mostly gone, yet its vestiges still lingered like phantoms. "It is clear to me he is in the throes of madness."

"I warned you before, and you did not listen." Phobos bared her teeth. "What good is my advice if you will not heed it?"

Supplicating myself before a ghost. "I admit it. You were right."

"My work is to sow the seeds to doubt and reap their crop of fear, not play soothsayer for a naive girl." The witch laughed that shrill harpy's caw of hers. "What do you wish to know?"

"What do you know of wounds in the Force?" A soothsayer you are not, but an invaluable resource you could be. "I know ought and all of the folly of Darth Traya and her mad quest to exploit them."

"Myths," Phobos said with a wave of her hand. "And if they were real, they were already sealed millennia ago. Disturbances are vestigial and fleeting; that is what you feel now. A disturbance in the Force does not a wound make." She twitched and paced with every word, her eyes flitting between Cinder and her holocron. She yearns to be free.

"They are horrors exploited by Jedi wet nurses to keep the younglings in line," Phobos continued. "Do you truly think entire planets can be consumed? The desolation of Katarr is nothing more than a fable, one that scares children into submission, lest all they love be destroyed." Her brow furrowed. "Yet..."

"Yet?"

"The stories of old are one thing. I feel it too, even beyond the walls of death." Her face twisted into a scowl and she lifted a hand to a horned temple. "Something twists and writhes elsewhere." She bared her teeth for a moment; Cinder thought she saw them grinding together. "And whatever it is, it does not want me to know.

"I spoke in haste." Phobos groaned. "There is a wound, gangrenous and rotten, festering even here in the void. It will not break for you."

"I do not wish to follow in Traya's footsteps, if that's what you're asking." Cinder closed her eyes. She is a Dark Lady of the Sith. It is silly to take her words at face value. "What would the cause be of this one, then?"

Phobos' lips wormed into a smile, as if something inside her clicked. "A worthy opponent shows his face." With that, she vanished, her holocron dragging the last wisps of red light back into its confines.

A dull throbbing seized Cinder's temple, alongside the dull pangs of irritation. Little and less in the way of answers. It did not matter. If the witch would not provide the answers Cinder sought, then she would find them herself, just as she always had.

She returned the holocron to the table on the other side of the room before returning to the floor for her meditation. This time, it came easily.

Her mind drifted at once to Ruin. It had been a long while since she had been able to ruminate on her master, not since Ossus. She came to terms with his ineptitude there, just as she convinced Fell, but the act of his betrayal was a harder draught to choke down.

He sent Kaos to capture me. Yet Kaos was the most reviled of the Dark Council; this she knew well. If Ruin had wanted success, he would have sent Darth Hopel, with all his years of experience, or even Darth Bestia, the runt of the litter. But Kaos? Trying to find the reason behind it threatened to drive her mad. The old tuk'ata remains coy as ever. Had he anticipated Kaos' defiance? If Kaos spoke true, Ruin had ordered him to bring her back alive, yet somewhere along his quest to locate her, he had succumbed to a bout of ambition that he never before had.

Hopel would have soothed me with honeyed words before ramming a saber through my chest, if that is what he wished. Bestia would have lulled me into a false sense of safety before slashing my throat. Kaos was a silly choice. Ruin had to have understood this. For all his recent blunders, the man was not stupid. At least, he never was before. His actions, no matter how misguided, always were deliberate. It raised questions about his motivations. Does he merely miss me? Does he regret his decision to leave me behind? Or did he want the brute to bring me before him so he could take my head himself?

None of it mattered. Kaos was dead by her hand, as intended by Ruin's will or no. No amount of thought on the matter would draw a clear answer. All she knew was that Phobos' first portent had been correct. They will hunt you and they will take everything if you let them. With Kaos fallen, she did not doubt Ruin would waste much time sending Hopel or Bestia to pick up where the brute had failed. Even then, she was not sure if she would go with them willingly, no matter how much she told herself otherwise.

Let the sorceress keep her riddles. I have my own to unravel. If Phobos would not elucidate her on the nature of this wound in the Force, then Cinder would have to turn to her own studies for answers.

When she was trained as a Jedi, Cinder had been taught to understand the Force as the giver of life, a boundless energy that flowed through all living things. The Jedi were taught they could call upon it, peer into it, and call upon it for aid in their darkest hours. But never could they break it, bend it to their will, control it. The staunch grandmasters had discouraged their pupils from manipulating the Force even in self-defense. They were disgusted when Phanius taught me how to make barriers, she recalled, though nonetheless they gave their approval. "The lightsaber is your means of defense," High Consular Marvis had said once in a lecture. "Not the Force. Trying to bend it to your will, even for the protection of others, is a path to darkness."

Perhaps that was what had made the Dark Side so alluring to her. Phanius had fostered that interest; his words would decry the dark as a tool of evil, a corrupting cancer which destroyed all it touched. Yet he doggedly pursued any and all knowledge of its teachings he could find.

In those days, the Sith were scattered to the winds in lost tribes deemed unworthy of being put to the sword. Their teachings were thought lost forever, and the Jedi masters thought the Force would remain in balance. The few Sith relics they kept on Coruscant, however, proved more than potent enough. When she peered into the holocron of Tulak Hord, against her master's wishes, she had been given a glimpse of the Dark Side's power alongside a macabre curtain of horror and death.

It was said that the Dark Side brought out all of one's worst traits. It was no small wonder that when Phanius had become Darth Ruin, the transformation was total. Cinder saw the signs of madness early on in his reign as Dark Lord. He spoke of voices that haunted him day and night. He wanted her by his side to temper him as, in his words, "only a woman could do." He sat in his chambers, on his throne, and clutched his head, complaining of frequent aches and throbbing. "As if a leviathan were to break free at any moment," he had put it.

The night before she and Fell had their duel in the Valley of the Dark Lords, Ruin had sought her counsel. She recalled the scene clear as day in her mind. They were in the central tower of Korriban's citadel, in the great hall where Ruin's throne sat flanked by great tartan banners. Four each of his Black Guards stood at each exit, twelve in all. Cinder and the Dark Lord stood together at the end of a long table that projected a galaxy-spanning starmap in deep burgundy light.

"Lady Cinder, do you think it time for us to declare our intentions?" he had said.

"We are not ready for war," she told him, leaning against the table. "Our order is little more than untrained boys and girls, still taking their first steps into feeling the Force, let alone the Dark Side." So little progress had been made in ten years.

"I trust your wisdom, Lady Cinder," he said, pacing around the length of the table before coming up behind her. "Only, my other counsel seems intent on taking action."

He had wrapped his arms around her neck and chest, as he was wont to do. She grimaced but said nothing of it. "Who is your other counsel?" She was the only one who could ever get away with failing to address him as 'Dark Lord'. "Lord Hopel would echo my sentiments, and I am sure Lady Bestia would as well. Lord Kaos... well, my thoughts on him are best left unsaid."

"No, do tell me."

"Perhaps he might be brazen enough to declare open war." She shrugged herself free of Ruin and turned to face him. He had pouted at that. "But you would never heed him, I hope."

Ruin turned and craned over the table, his eyes wandering over the sector where Korriban lay. He sighed. "Never. My counsel is that abominable creature that has deemed it fit to live in my head."

What is he looking for? She wondered just as much now as she had back then. "'Creature'? I believe that's called a conscience."

"Lysara," Ruin said, rising. "You temper me. Ordinarily, I would think it best to heed your advice." He sighed. "I will sleep on this, but I shall ready my ship nonetheless." He grabbed one of her hands and gave it a kiss. Her face scrunched in disgust, but she could tell he didn't care.

"Then there's nothing more to discuss," she said, making her way to the door. "Until tomorrow. Thy will be done."

She stopped just short of walking into the Black Guards' pikes when they dropped into an 'x' before her.

"I've always wondered, Lady Cinder," she heard Ruin say, his voice hardly even above a whisper. He was still at the table, pondering over that same spot on the map. "Why do you say it like that? Does your will not matter too?"

"When I take your place, only then shall it matter," she said.

Ruin chuckled. "You are the only one who ever understood. I give the others too long a rope."

"I have had my whole life to understand your teachings." Hopel had come into their fold first, nine and a half years past; Kaos turned up just before she departed for Ord Mantell, two years later; and Bestia had appeared at the foot of the tower six months prior to Korriban's fall. "The others have not had enough time for the lessons to sink in. Our successes here are because of your efforts, master."

He laughed. "You sell yourself short, Lady Cinder. You have been at my side through it all. Your contributions have never gone unnoticed. We will have a place in the histories together." He looked up from the map towards her. "'There is nothing, only me.' The words should apply to you, too, when you speak them."

"If everyone is the center of their own galaxy, then they must all orbit something greater."

"I never denied being the center." He smiled and bared his twisted teeth. Both age and the corruption of the Dark Side had been equal in their damage.

The Black Guards opened the path out. "We are ultimately just pawns in your game, master. I implore you, heed my advice, but thy will be done." She stepped out into the hall, and found herself assaulted by the glow of white light.

Cinder snapped back to reality, drenched in cold sweat. That taught me nothing. He had been primed to listen to her, to take her advice to heart despite his nonsensical solipsism, and yet, he defied her. Maybe she had taken too long in the valley with Fell. Perhaps he had meant for her to die and replace her with Lady Bestia.

No. The solution was right there, and she did not want to see it. It was too obvious, too easy.