Luminara glanced over at Barriss. They had brought a squad of clones with them on a mission assigned personally by the Chancellor, and the mission itself seemed simple enough. Investigate an ancient ruin, recover an artifact rumored to be there, bring it back to Coruscant before a potential Separatist expedition could do the same. Simple. Easy. Yet, the Chancellor had failed to inform them that they were breaking into an ancient Sith Temple; perhaps Chancellor Palpatine was simply unaware? "Or perhaps he simply doesn't care," she thought bitterly before biting the traitorous thoughts back. Regardless, the Force was still screaming at her that something was wrong. It was clear she wasn't the only one receiving such a warning.
"Master?" Barriss asked her, "Do you sense that?"
"I do," Luminara confirmed, "I'm not sure if it is a true warning or simply the corruption of this place in the Dark Side. Be mindful."
Approaching the entrance to the ruin, it is beyond obvious the state of disrepair the place has been in, walls collapsed and gaping holes in the pyramidal structure, but unfortunately none close enough to the ground to be of any use. Inspecting what should be a door, only to find a huge, blank slab. Reaching out into the Force, the Jedi Master began to lift the massive stone block, only to reveal another behind it. "Barriss!" she called, straining under the weight of the block.
"Already on it!" the Padawan replied, reaching out similarly as the group moved underneath one block, then the other, seeing a third. Dropping the first of the doors, Luminara reached out to lift the third, after which the Jedi and clones moved in, Master and Padawan immediately dropping the heavy loads, the latter nearly collapsing in exhaustion from the effort. "How heavy do you think those were?"
"Heavy enough that we may need to rest before trying that again," Luminara panted. "Gree, is anything showing up on the scanners?"
The clone commander looked down to study the readouts, shaking his head, "Nothing so far. Broken machinery, some remnants of organic matter that's long decayed."
A shiny was looking at one of the statues, one of the only ones not broken or crumbling, and shuddered, "This place gives me the creeps."
Barriss gave a half-smile in sympathy, "Us too." She looked at something glistening in the corner of her eye before walking over to it, wiping away dozens of centuries' worth of dust and cobwebs to reveal an ancient lightsaber. Igniting the weapon, it shot out a blood red blade quickly followed by two angrily crackling crossguard blades. She shuddered, sensing the amount of death and fear this weapon had caused while its owner still lived. Not for the first time she was happy that she was not gifted with psychometry, for those were memories she was perfectly happy never experiencing. "Master?" she called, "do you think this could be put somewhere in the archives?"
Luminara considers this for a moment, opting to ignore the mini-heart attack of seeing her padawan with a red lightsaber, "I don't see why not. It would certainly be preferable to having someone come later with intent to use it."
Barriss nodded and deactivated the blade. She almost hooked it to her own belt out of habit before reconsidering whether she wanted a blade that bled agony suffering death murder torture to be on her actual person, handing it off to another trooper, what was his name again? Yark? He took it with a nod and clipped it to his belt, totally unphased by its screaming into the Force. An artifact though it may have been, it was hardly what they had come for, and thus it was time to move deeper into the ruined temple.
Room by room, hall by hall, carefully looking to not set off any traps or ancient Sith curses, but any mechanisms for pressure plates, tripwires, and the like had all long since decayed. Monsters left to guard the building long since cannibalized until the last one starved. What used to be a spike trap being filled with still jagged stones, but mostly broken and crumbled as opposed to the perfect conical death traps they were intended to be. Luminara bit back a comment on how this had proven much simpler than they had expected it to be before entering the central room of the pyramid, which stood totally empty save for two things: a block of carbonite and a weathered plaque bolted to the wall with a few barely noticeable scraps of cloth attached to the two bolts on the top half of the plaque. The writing was ancient, and had it not been gold then it would have likely rusted away centuries ago, and even then the tarnishing of time and scratches from the wind left it barely legible, and that was without the words being an archaic form of Basic. As the Jedi Master furrowed her brow, she worked to translate it to phrasing she could understand intuitively.
Hither stands Flayseno the Daw,
A Dreamer, an Idealist,
A Pitiable Fetch of a Darth,
Forevermore trapp'd in his Weakness,
May his Torment Eternal Serveth as a Lesson to all who is't enter.
Luminara shook her head in disapproval, as if they needed any more evidence the ancient Sith were savages. With nothing else of note in the temple ruins save for a handful of lightsabers of varying functionality, she glanced at the carbonite slab with, presumably, an ancient Sith Lord trapped inside. Was he the artifact they were sent to collect? It would make sense, the kind of horrors a resurrected ancient Sith could cause to a galaxy wholly unprepared for his return would be immeasurable, and if Dooku were to seek this ancient Lord's guidance. She shuddered imagining the consequences. "This must be it. Gree, Drod, do another sweep of the ruins. Everyone else, prep the slab for removal to the shuttle.
"Yes sir!" the clones replied in unison as Barriss gave a small bow, and all went to work.
Grievous entered the atmosphere of the planet below, a jungle world, Lord Sidious had instructed him to enter the ancient temple, kill the Jedi who would be there, and seize the weapon the Jedi would have collected for them to use. A simple plan, a new weapon against the Republic, and two new trophies for his collection. Flying high over the temple ruins he made a note of several holes in the roof and the sides of the pyramid. Swooping his starfighter lower he prepared to eject and allow the droid to take control and not crash it. There! That was the perfect spot in the crumbling wall to come careening through. Opening the cockpit he leapt from the fighter and through the hole, landing in a perfect crouch attained through months of practice surprise attacking Jedi and clones alike before standing to his full height and igniting his lightsabers, "Jedi."
Luminara and Barriss immediately ignited their lightsabers with the remaining seven clones raising their blasters and opening fire. Grievous spun his blades to form a shield, deflecting the bolts while the two Jedi went to strike at opposite sides of him, being caught in a blade lock with two of his sabers. Grievous took the other two and made a quick swipe at Unduli's neck, with the Jedi Master only barley dodging it. Barriss broke the lock, only to have to immediately be thrown into the defensive as Grievous lunged a stab towards her heart, successfully parrying but only just. The troopers went in for another volley, with the cyborg general batting Unduli and Offee aside, to leap at the clones, bisecting two and stabbing through a third. The two Jedi leapt towards his back only to be blocked by two of his blades. Roaring with fury, the cyborg unleashed a flurry of blows on the two, killing Yark with a deflected blaster bolt to the face.
Barriss felt each blow against her blade shake her very bones. She parried another stab but left herself open to be grabbed by the throat and chucked across the room, leaving Grievous's focus solely on Luminara. She crashed into the carbonite slab that was now supported by repulsors, knocking the entombed Sith Lord to the side. She shook her head to try and recuperate from her dazed state, reaching to where her lightsaber should have been, and then looking around in a panic to try and find it. Seeing Yark's body, che instead reached out and called the ancient Sith blade to her hand, "I can find it later," she promised herself, "I just need to make sure we live now!" Igniting the blade she charged back into the battle, failing to notice the carbonite beginning to warm.
The furious roars of the Barriss' commandeered Sith weapon complimented eerily well with the song of Luminara's own Jedi blade, but there was no time to denote the musical tones of the kyber crystals as the pair fought for their lives and those of the surviving troopers, of whom another had been cut down. Gree and Drod, who had heard fighting, ran into the room guns blazing to drive back the Separatist commander and, in all hopes, kill him. The pair launched grappling hooks to hold his legs in place, but to no avail. Grievous sliced through the cords in a second and was dedicating two of his blades to form a defensive wall to prevent any more shots from coming close to hitting him.
Flayseno fell to the ground, overcome with nausea from the carbon sickness. He was simply glad he wasn't blinded by it too. As soon as he found Kaelon, that rat bastard, he was going to kill him. No mercy this time. Still, bleary-eyed and shaking, he tried to purge his body of the toxins used to freeze him and release the weakness into the Force as he had after many a sleepless night. Was Elara still pregnant? Had he missed the birth of his child? His head began spinning with calculations, trying to figure out how long he had been frozen. For every milestone he missed of his family, he was going to torture Kaelon another month before finally ending him. His breath hitched, and a thought he dared not consider entered his mind unbidden, "What if they were dead?" He shook that line of thinking out of his head immediately. Elara couldn't be dead, she just couldn't. Maybe he had missed the pregnancy, maybe he had missed the birth, maybe he had even missed the first few years of their child's life, but she was not dead!
His head cleared, his hands no longer shaking to a debilitating degree, his hearing began to unstop, and he heard a raging battle beside him. Snapping his head towards the sound he saw four troopers firing blasters at a… cyborg? Yes, a cyborg, a huge cyborg, with four lightsabers. Jedi lightsabers. And he was batting aside the tiniest Sith he had ever seen in the field, with another, slightly larger woman crumpled beneath his feet, struggling to pry his metal claws off her throat. Flayseno's lips pulled back in fury. Who was this thing to attack such a small expedition so brazenly? Who was this coward to beat around such small, nearly defenseless women? Clearly that Sith was barely even starting her apprenticeship! What Jedi would commit such a blatant act of cowardice and hypocrisy? Actually, most of them now that he thought about it. He had probably fought hundreds of Jedi at this point and none were exactly paragons of the Order's ideals. He stood slowly, ensuring his footing, before grabbing his own lightsaber from his hip and igniting it, bathing himself in the bloodshine of its crimson blade. "Jedi!" he growled, causing all heads to snap towards him. "Thou dareth defile this lodging with thy filth?! Coward! Come hither and square a real warrior!"
Confusion flowed through the Force, swiftly followed by terror. Clearly, they had not been expecting him to be battle ready so soon after being thawed from the carbonite. The cyborg Jedi picked up the woman he had pinned under his metal clutches and threw her at him, with the Sith reaching out to stop her flight and rest her gently upon her laurels. Pointing at her with his free hand, he ordered "Stay thither!" before marching towards the Jedi. With a growl of pure rage, he laid into the Jedi, unleashing countless rapid strikes against him, nothing but rage burning in his eyes. The machine began to spin its blades in a defensive position, possibly an attempt to intimidate him. Flayseno merely stabbed in the middle to catch the blades mid-rotation, before throwing his opponent against the wall with a Force Push. Leaping as his opponent was still disoriented, he cut off three of the cyborg's arms and both of his legs. Pointing the blade at what he approximated was the Jedi's throat, it certainly looked like one anyway. "Thou art beaten. 'Tis useless to resist. Get thee to thy Council, Jedi, and tell them of thy failure here."
Grievous was beyond confused as to why this person thought he was a Jedi, but still growled in indignation and pulled out a rifle of his own to hook on to his ship, pulling himself to safety. The Jedi could deal with this and die, he needed repairs.
Flayseno watched him rise out of the chamber, hoping that hole was blasted into the ceiling recently before turning to the injured Sith and her… Master? Mother? Both? He wasn't sure. Extinguishing his blade, he extended his hand to them, "I am Darth Flayseno, Empire's Wroth and member of the Dark Council. Thy name, Apprentice? And who is the Dark Lady? Thy Master?"
Luminara scrambled to her feet, tossing Barris her lightsaber and calling her own, both igniting the instant they hit their respective hands. "Stand down Sith!" she hissed. If she was being at all honest with herself, the battle against Grievous had left the both of them totally exhausted. She barely felt up for sparring against a youngling at the moment, there was no way they could have a hope against a Dark Lord, but she was absolutely not going to allow this Sith to go terrorize the galaxy without a fight, even if it would be her last.
The Sith, for his part, just stood there, hand still outstretched in greeting, but his brow furrowed. "Wait," he said, looking back and forth between the two Jedi and the hole in the ceiling which Grievous had escaped from, "ye art Jedi? But, wast that gent not a Jedi? Wherefore wouldst a Jedi attacketh a Jedi?"
Luminara glanced at Barriss, who glanced back at her seemingly just as confused as the Sith. She read confusion curiosity pity from her Padawan before turning to the Dark Lord and returning, with less bite in her tone, "Your Empire has fallen! The Sith are no more."
"Nay."
"What?"
"I hath said nay. Verily, I wouldst certes sens'd such a thing."
Barriss looked between her Master and the Dark Lord, "Is he… is he not going to attack us?"
"Wherefore wouldst I attack ye?! Eke, learn proper Basic! Thou speak akin to a slow child!"
A surviving clone interjected, "Every time he opens his mouth my head hurts."
Another answered, "He sounds like he's from one of those old plays Gree makes us watch."
"They're venerated ancient classics!" Gree protested.
"I hast no time for this! Get me to Korriban at once!" Flayseno ordered, turning around and marching out the doorframe into the halls beyond.
The survivors of the battle watched him leave, and Gree looked at his general, "Sir, should we try to apprehend him?"
Luminara considered it for a moment. "No."
"Master?" Barriss inquired.
"If he was going to kill us, now would have been the perfect opportunity. He seems dazed, disoriented, and he is absolutely out of his element. It could prove even more dangerous to corner him now." She paused and let loose what was almost a chuckle, "Besides, I want him to see what became of the ancient Sith. He may be easier to apprehend if his spirit is broken." She looked at the corpses of the fallen clones and picked one up over her shoulders, "Collect the fallen. We're leaving."
Barriss and the clones followed her lead, with Drod commenting, "Mission failed successfully."