Chapter 18: The Iron Ghost
39:6:12 GrS
Ruined Temple, Lettow, The Core Worlds
At any other time I would have stopped and marveled at the will-o-wisps that lit the pathway to the depths of the Temple, eagerly peering at them with the Force to divine the methods of their creation so I could turn them to my own use. At any other time that is.
With a two handed wave, I threw the wisps into disarray, scattering them across the courtyard. Caution was a forgotten word to me, so I threw myself down the staircase blindly. I was entirely driven by the need to kill, to get revenge with whoever or whatever had decided to fuck with my head. And I didn't want to wait any longer than I already had.
So I seized at the Force, commanding it to flow into my muscles. I all but soared down the staircase, which a distant part of me could recognize as being gorgeously decorated with carvings and primitive imagery. I landed at the base of the staircase with a thud, my boots and cloak kicking up thick grey dust that swirled up to my calves before settling back down.
I took in the vast hallway that I had landed in, barely sparing a moment to take in the hundreds of supporting pillars and painted murals obscured by Force knows how many millennia of dirt, before I sprinted off, further into the depths.
Those damn will-o-wisps were still around, illuminating a path through the underground complex. I realized that I was being mocked. Whoever had sent their pet poltergeist believed themselves so untouchable that they could take me -an Inquisitor!- straight to them and they would be victorious! The notion made me plumb beyond the depths of normal rage, I would not be insulted in such a way!
Death would be too good for them, I reckoned as my vision tunneled and my legs pumped even faster. The surroundings that weren't directly in sight blurred to a mess of grey and brown. Yet I did not know exhaustion for the inhuman actions of my body for the Force was with me, my ever present companion. The Dark Side burned my veins with liquid power, urging me to go faster.
Faster so that I can kill this fool quicker. Faster so that he could be subjected to all the torture I knew. Faster so that his miserable existence could be extinguished in pain, terror and fear so great and bright that the Dark Side would wake the ancient Sith lords from death's sleep to behold my greatness!
Then the bright ball of floating flames disappeared altogether as the now narrow hallway abruptly came to an end; A smooth wall of stone blocked the way forward. The Force warned me and I took action. I stopped running, digging in my boot heels to kill my body's momentum and bring me to a sliding halt right up against the mossed encrusted wall that blocked the way forward. My hands came forward and made a cupping motion as I pulled the Force to me, forcing it to gather and gather and gather in my hands until my hands shook and ached like the bones were about to burst into a thousand different pieces. The sulfur scent of power filled my nose. Then my hand pushed outwards.
The wall didn't crumble, it didn't fall, it didn't crumble: it vanished.
One moment it was there, obscuring the way, blocking my righteous vengeance. The next, it had been pulped, dusted, extinguished from form. A structure that had lasted all the ravages of time, instantly reduced to ever so tiny flecks of sand by nothing other than my power.
The Dark Side cheered in jubilation. With the two of us together, what power could withstand us now spoke in my ears. Onwards, it urged me, onwards to greatness.
My lightsaber was freed from its place on my hip and I twirled it in my hand before settling on a side, and thumbing the ignition stud. Snap-hiss sung my weapon as a crimson blade appeared, casting the hole I had created in a garish blood red light. Into the dust cloud I trod.
And emerged into an...empty room?
No! No, not a room, a dome. A dome twenty meters tall, and painted a night blue. A crystal circle at the apex of the dome provided a dim light, making it seem like this room was underwater. The floor was made of stone, just like the rest of the complex above and below ground, but instead of being perfectly flat the floor was shaped in a half circle, a mound. a smaller ten meter tall dome inside a larger dome. Was there a religious meaning to the design?
The only flat parts of the room were two circles, one that went around the edge of the rise and a flat top on.
In front of me was a set of wide, flat steps carved into the raised mound that led all the way up to the flattened top. As the dust settled I was able to make out a metal pillar, shining in the dim light.
I sneered at my surroundings. Being taken for a fool had worn thin minutes ago. Enough playing this person's game, it was time for us to meet face to face. He would know his killer.
I stepped up to the lip of the first step, and swung my saber back and forth. The scream of plasma skimming along the stone was hair raising. The embers from the blows scattered further up the stairs and across the mound. No sign of my foe. The Dark Side shifted and growled in anger at the cowardice of one of its users.
"You wanted me here." I growled. "I'm here. So show yourself!"
My call echoed off the curved wall of the dome. Yet no voice raised itself to respond. I could feel phantom fire ants biting at my skin.
"I said..Show. Yourself!" I shouted out. "It's poor form to invite a guest and not be present to greet them."
A breeze rustled against my cloak but my senses told me it was nothing more than air moving. I was not in danger, immediate danger at least. I could barely feel the prickingly warning of the Force through my anger but I could dimly recognize it. It told me that I wasn't alone down here and that I wasn't yelling at just the empty air.
"Oh come on now! Surely, surely you didn't go through all the effort of restoring the esoteric defenses of a truly ancient temple! And baiting me with it, directing it to assault me, all of that just to get me right here then not follow through for the punchline?!" I swung my arms out widely. "What's the point of that then?"
My echoes beat back at me. "What's the point of that then?" The words were mocking me, warped and distorted by the ghosts that spat them.
"Perhaps the point was for you to simply be here, for this moment."
"Who said that!" I snarled out, moving back into the doorway I had created. No way to be ambushed from the side here. "I'm not repeating all of that, so let's move onto our mutual attempts to kill each other. Yes?"
The only sound was my harsh breathing for a moment. The haze of anger that gripped my mind lessened enough for me to feel the almost spastic tensing of my hands and legs. At least I wouldn't pull a muscle. But that momentary break in focus, in the red rage, a terrible realization struck me.
What in the nine hells of Corellia was I doing?!
Letting the Dark Side guide my actions like some kind of Jedi, that's what. Did I remember nothing of the Code, the Qotsisajak? Peace is a lie! There is no peace to be found in being dragged along by the dark side, it was just another chain. I had a horrible moment of thinking that maybe this was all a test, a vision, by the Force to see if I was worthy to wield it. One that I had failed to my horror. But I wasn't dreaming, no imagined reality could truly reproduce the feeling of the Dark Side flowing through me.
With freshly focused eyes, I re-examined the chamber. The completely sealed off walls, I could neither feel nor sense any place air could flow in the room. The finely crafted mound with its steps. The altar that I could now see wasn't an altar, but a stele, a metal pillar engraved with the worthy deeds of the deceased in honor of them. I hadn't broken into a religious temple, I had entered a grave!
"Good, good. You've mastered yourself." That voice again! Another scan of the tomb with eyes and Force told me there wasn't a single living creature, not even the smallest bug, other than me within its confines.
"It seems you've proven yourself worthy young one, so now be graced with my presence." The voice had become more distinct now. It was clearly male, and it was coming from the mound.
I felt the Dark Side shift after those words. Before I had been the center of the storm, the driving force that the Dark Side fed into. Now I could feel it circling around the mound, like an akk hound welcoming the return of its master.
Then the world as I knew it changed. Tendrils of blue translucent mist started to seep out of the perfectly smooth stones that the burial mound was constructed of. The tendrils, looking like a ghostly anemone, then separate entirely from the burial mound, converging above the stele. A whirling form was created by the tendrils and the hazy and overstated features of a bipedal sentient appeared. A few times it collapsed and reconstituted itself, each time the opaqueness of the form fading as the right shape was found at last.
The Force was like nothing I had ever felt. The ancient feeling just being on this planet had given my senses was being upped by a large degree. Now I felt like I was at a place of beginning, of origin. The roots of the first tree on Kashyyyk or the first skyscraper built on Imperial Center.
A crackle of power signaled the final contraction of the midst before its blue mass completely vanished, producing a shockwave that slammed against the curved walls of the tombs. Dust was shaken loose and I could faintly hear the earth above me shift. I was going to haunt someone if this all ended up being an elaborate trap for grave robbers.
"No trick, I can assure you. Forgive the wait but it does take effort to pull one's self from the aether of death. Especially after, what did the yortak tell me it had been? Ah yes, twenty-five, maybe twenty-six, millennia." The figure hovering about his stele sharpened into focus, the faint blue glow around the edge of him telling me that he was an honest force ghost.
He cut a disturbing figure, with a body armored in metal bands that twisted and turned in an organic manner. His face was something else: the skin of his jaw up to his cheekbones had been removed, leaving fat and sinew bare and three deep furrows, deep enough to see the white of bone, ran up from his eyebrows to the back of his head. The head wounds had made his hair a gory mess that stuck out in every which way.
Wait, did he just say TWENTY-FIVE MILLENNIA?!
"Minions of Xendor." I breathed out the old smugglers curse in awe. This was unreal, an actual impossibility unlike Sidious's death. No Force ghost, Jedi or Sith or what-have-you, could possibly be this old. And to be one that hailed from the primeval age of Force use, when the first traditions following the Rakata reached into the wider galaxy and when lightsabers didn't even exist! How could this be real? None of my knowledge supported what I was seeing!
But seeing is believing, and I was seeing a genuine Force Ghost, twenty five millennia old, with my own two eyes.
Sithspit.
"Minion of Xendor." The flensed man chided, but I could sense that my use of 'minion' had irked him. "But yes, I marched under his banner. Third to Xendor, then Second to Lyn. Ignato of Lettow I am, both in life and the unlife. Great I was in my time, two and thirty Jedi Masters did I kill in personal combat. I was chosen by Xendor to be a part of his cadre that struck against the Jedi High Council on Ossus, such were the bonds of brotherhood between us. Great are the battles I fought too. My victories on Coruscant, Axum, Metellos and Exodeen were the cause of much feasting and celebration here on Lettow."
I could hear the ringing of metal swords against each other as the Dark Side, reacting by Ignato's words, recalled ancient victories over the hated Jedi.
"I was near Xendor when he fell and I knew the deepest pain possible, the loss of a true brother. When Lyn proposed a retreat into space known only to us, I stayed behind to lead the defense." Ignato continued to pontificate. "And when I fell in the shadow of the lion gate of the academy, my body was rescued from Jedi desecration and interred in this chamber so that one day I might rise again."
I would never admit it out loud but as the last words of Ignato of Lettow, a leader of the Legions of Lettow, I fought the desire to genuflect before him. My memories of what exactly the Legions had been were just flickers of thought and subconscious recognition, but I remembered that they had fought the First Great Schism with the Jedi. I was standing in the presence of one of the people that had started it all. What honors did all wielders of the Dark Side owe this man!
But I had my pride and my caution.
"Why would one such as you summon me here?" I asked the ghost, my lightsaber blade still bare.
"Because I needed help to awaken from the world of death." Ignato intoned. "Help you provided, Andorak Lokar. A reward is demanded for such help at the very least."
"And what help could I possibly acquire from you?" I asked. The conversation squarely in the ghost's hands to take where he willed.
The flensed man clad in twisting iron smiled, and through that smile I could perceive that this man knew me, intimately. He knew my hopes and desires, somehow. Then I remembered the poltergeist whose actions had driven me down here in the terrible rage of earlier.
"Knowledge, of course."
A/N: So here it is, a moment I first thought of in the earliest chapters of this story and it's finally here! A Legionnaire of Lettow, who were the first challengers to Jedi supremacy, are going to be Andorak's teacher. I had thought of using a Sith character but narratively it didn't jive in my mind and it seemed far-fetched that Andorak would remember that there even was a Sith ghost, Darth Andeddu, on Prakith when he was such a very very minor character in the comics. That's about all I have for the note, and comments and thoughts are appreciated as always. Hope you all enjoyed it.